“On What Matters: Volume 2” by Derek Parfit

Parfit begins his second volume by giving ample space to his critics. In fact, he publishes four response commentaries to the philosophical system he outlined in Volume 1, by Susan Wolf, Allen Wood, Barbara Herman, and T.M. Scanlon. Parfit comments on each essay in detail before proceeding with his own intellectual project, two hundred and fifty odd pages in. His project was to unite the moral frameworks of deontology, contractualism, and consequentialism in an overarching objective moral system. He comments, “If there is no single supreme principle, that, I agree, would not be a tragedy. But it would be a tragedy if there was no single true morality. And conflicting moralities could not all be true. In trying to combine these different kinds of moral theory, my main aim was not to find a supreme principle, but to find out whether we can resolve some deep disagreements…. If we cannot resolve our disagreements, that would give us reasons to doubt that there are any true principles.”

In the rest of the volume, Parfit fleshes out and wrestles with various aspects of his moral system. He discusses the distribution of the pie. “In assessing the goodness of outcomes, I have claimed, we can plausibly give weight to some distributive principles. We can believe that one of two outcomes would be better, despite giving people a smaller sum of total benefits, if these benefits would be more equally shared, or if more of the benefits would come to people who were worse off. We can also believe that it would be better if people were given equal chances to receive some benefit.” Further on, Parfit discusses retributional justice. “Though there are some normative truths, some of which are moral truths, no punishment could ever be deserved in the retributive sense, or be retributively unjust.”

Most of this book deals with morality and norms within an objective lens. “As realist Objectivists, our maxim isn’t to satisfy our desires. We respond to the facts that give us reasons to have our desires. Our maxim might be: I will make it my end to achieve whatever I have most reason to try to achieve, because these are the ends that are most worth achieving.” Parfit titled these volumes “On What Matters” so one might suspect that Parfit does care deeply that things do, in fact, matter. He is fighting nihilism at every turn of the page. “It matters whether people believe that some things matter.” Parfit believes we must reorient philosophy. “It was philosophers who first claimed that reasons are given only by desires, that all rationality is instrumental, and that no values are facts, because there are no normative truths. Given our increasing powers to destroy or damage the conditions of life on Earth, we need to lose these beliefs. It is not wealth that matters, or mere preference-fulfillment, but happiness, justice, and the other things that can make our lives worth living.”

Parfit passionately believes that there are some objective normative truths that humans can eventually come to agree on. “There are some claims that are irreducibly normative in the reason-involving sense, and are in the strongest sense true. But these truths have no ontological implications. For such claims to be true, these reason-involving properties need not exist either as natural properties in the spatio-temporal world, or in some non-spatio-temporal part of reality…. On our view, since these beliefs are irreducibly normative, they are not about entities or properties that are a part of the causal fabric of the world. Since such normative truths could not have any observable effects, or help to explain what we can observe, we could not have any empirical evidence supporting our belief in these truths…. Since our fundamental normative beliefs are not about contingent features of the world, we don’t need to have empirical evidence for their truths. Nor do we need to be causally affected by these normative truths…. These various beliefs are about what must be true, in the strong sense that applies to every possible world…. I shall call these our modal beliefs…. There cannot be any non-normative facts, such as physical or psychological facts, that directly conflict with our beliefs about practical and moral reasons.”

Parfit settles on his Convergence Claim (CC): “If everyone knew all of the relevant non-normative facts, used the same normative concepts, understood and carefully reflected on the relevant arguments, and was not affected by any distorting influence, we and others would have similar normative beliefs…. CC is an empirical claim…. When we think about cases that involve imprecise cardinal comparisons, we should deliberately avoid thinking in either spatial or numerical terms—except as a form of shorthand that we should remember to be seriously misleading…. The truth would often be that (1) neither of two outcomes would be better, and that (2) these outcomes would be very far from being precisely equally good. Though we can call such outcomes equally good, it is clearer to say that neither would be better…. Similar claims apply to questions about the wrongness of acts, and about what we ought to do, or have most reason to do…. When different people have conflicting beliefs about which of two outcomes would be better, or which of two acts would be wrong, that is often because these people mistakenly assume that such normative truths are more precise than they really are. If these people realized that many such truths are very imprecise, they would often cease to disagree.” Parfit realizes that we are nowhere close to such a reconciliation. “Our normative thinking is still in its childhood.”

Parfit, once again, concludes this volume with a look towards humanity’s future. “After many thousands of years of responding to reasons in ways that helped them survive and reproduce, human beings can now respond to other reasons. We are a part of the Universe that is starting to understand itself…. What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history. If there are no rational beings elsewhere, it may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it, because the existence of the Universe will have been on the whole good.”

“The Cure for Psychoanalysis” by Adam Phillips

This is a collection from a gathering at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis billed as, ‘A Day with Adam Phillips’. The book contains the essay he delivered that day, “Winnicott’s Magic: Playing and Reality and Reality”, along with some commentaries, the transcripts of an interview, conducted by Edward Corrigan, and of a couple Q&A sessions from fellow practicing psychoanalysts, before concluding with a final essay by Phillips. It is all typical Phillips, in the best of ways.

In his lead essay, Phillips quotes Winnicott, “We have yet to tackle the question of what life itself is about. Our psychotic patients force us to give attention to this sort of basic problem. We now see that it is not instinctual satisfaction that makes a baby begin to be, to feel that life is real, to find life worth living. In fact, instinctual gratifications start off as part-functions and they become seductions unless based on a well-established capacity in the individual person for total experience, and for experience in the area of transitional phenomena.” Phillips expands, “For Winnicott the question psychoanalysis addresses is how, if at all, developmentally the individual finds life worth living…. Winnicott is saying that it is not a consensual fact that life is worth living; indeed, finding it worth living is a basic problem…. But we can’t agree about what life is about, or that if we could that it would be worth living; yet each individual given the chance — the chance provided by an early environment, the chance provided by the psychoanalytic setting — can find out for themselves what they feel and think about this…. The individual makes his own original answers to the question out of the cultural traditions he or she has access to.”

Phillips next poses a tangential question. “What would it be like to live in the world less compliantly, or to live in a less compliant world? All the many versions of psychoanalysis, it seems to me — unsurprisingly perhaps, given its historical moment — organise themselves around this question. A question we might think of, historically, as in part the legacy of the reformation.” Phillips pivots to discuss Winnicott’s expertise, play. “Winnicott is saying in Playing and Reality that instinctual gratification is an insufficient substantive belief, norm and value promoted by traditional psychoanalysis. And that what he wants to offer in its place, or additionally, is play.” Winnicott, himself, states, “Psychoanalysts who have rightly emphasised the significance of instinctual experience and of reactions to frustration have failed to state with comparable clearness or conviction the tremendous intensity of these non-climactic experiences that are called playing.” Phillips posits, “Playing was the medium for the true self — the self that could be, feel real, and could find out whether potentially their life was worth living and reality was not merely or solely something demanding compliance…. For Winnicott, playing and reality make each other work, bring out the best in each other like a good couple.”

During the Q&A period, Phillips, in an aside, discusses his overarching project. “My project, so to speak, if I have one, is to work out what it would be to be kind to the patient from the patient’s point of view…. We should be much more curious, in a sense much more curious about what people think they’re coming for and what else they might be coming for apart from what they already know…. This project is about not knowing what you’re talking about and having to work this out collaboratively.” Phillips comments on the superego, “I think it is striking, and it’s what prompted the paper [on Winnicott], how incredibly unimaginative and vicious the superego is. And how much the superego pretends it knows who we really are. So, the superego is an essentialist and a bully and extremely narrow-minded and therefore very stupid…. One of the main things that’s going on in psychoanalysis is an understanding of what this superego’s a self-cure for…. The superego seems to operate as a kind of organiser of one’s life…. And the problem with this part of oneself is that it is omniscient. It really believes that it knows who we are, and it keeps telling us who we really are.” On suicide, Phillips ponders, “What always amazes me is how few people kill themselves, and how much people can put up with, and why they are willing to put up with what they put up with…. Masochism is our greatest device for survival. If you can turn pain into pleasure, you’re ahead…. I’m always wondering what keeps people going. Why they keep at it. Because I mean, I know I want to keep at it, as far as I know, but it’s still, it seems to me an interesting mystery.”

Finally, in the eponymous essay, “The Cure for Psychoanalysis”, Phillips discusses psychoanalysis’ ambivalent relationship with the notion of a cure. “A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.” What does psychoanalysis have to offer? “Psychoanalytic treatment is an antidote to indoctrination; it is an enquiry into how people influence each other, into the individual’s history of living in other people’s regimes…. When we become aware of what we are not, as yet, aware of, we do not know what will happen, we cannot know what we might do or become. This is the essential, the defining risk of psychoanalysis that concepts of cure attempt to allay or appease: making conscious has unpredictable effects…. Freud’s fiction of the unconscious left him and some of his followers with an abiding and unsettling question: what could the unconscious have to do with the concept of cure?”

“Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism” by James Simpson

Simpson is a Professor of English at Harvard College, specializing in the late Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. He makes the contention that the Reformation fomented a state of permanent revolution within England between 1517 and 1688, in which each successive generation of puritans sought to purge and purify their predecessors, in what was, more often than not, an illiberal process of righteous certainty. Simpson claims “(i) that dissident, repressive, non-conservative sixteenth-century evangelical religious culture was revolutionary; (ii) that revolutionary evangelical culture was simultaneously a culture of permanent revolution, repeatedly and compulsively repudiating its own prior forms; and (iii) that permanent revolution was, as it always is, punishingly violent, fissiparous, and unsustainable, so much so that it needed to invent self-stabilizing mechanisms.”

The evangelical puritans were crippled by doubt and despair about their own predestination. Thus, they had a complicated relationship with the idea of works on earth. “Magisterial and Reformed Protestants worked hard precisely because they did not value works as currency that can satisfy God and change the future…. Works, that is, did not produce meritoriously deserved election. Early modern Protestants worked hard, instead, because works were understood as the fruit of election; works, that is, were signs of the divine decision already taken.”

Hypocrisy was a charge that Puritans threw around with greater and greater scope and scale as the revolution progressed. “Whereas late medieval hypocrisy discourse had singled out one religious order (especially friars, and the different order of friars) as ecclesiastical hypocrites, by the 1520s the charge was being applied globally to the entire Catholic Church. There was no safe place within that Church, since the entire institution, from its Antichrist papal head down, was thought to be committed to the destruction of Christian souls…. As with individual hypocrites, so too with a hypocritical institution—there was no way of reforming it; revolutionary eradication of the entire corrupt edifice (and not just one corrupt order of the Church) was the only way forward.” Almost from their inception, intra-Protestant charges of hypocrisy overwhelmed the Catholic. Soon, every puritan looked first inward, the most the sincere the most sincerely. The charge and the self-doubt could be crippling. Simpson expands, “The puritan saint’s subjectivity sits on the edge of time, straining for eternity, inevitably vulnerable to the trigger switch of hypocrisy.”

For the Puritans, scripture reigned supreme. “If one believes that Scripture determines the Church, as Luther and the entire evangelical tradition after him did, then Scripture’s authority must eject everything without scripture; authorization—mere human “traditions”—from the Church.” William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible into English, who was burned at the stake for that crime, claimed, “For the whole scripture and all believing hearts testify that we are begotten through the Word.” Luther, himself, before the Emperor at Worms in April of 1521, is purported to have spoken, “I am defeated, the scriptures having been adduced by me, and, with my conscience captured by the words of God, I am unable to retreat.”

Much of Simpson’s argument rests on a deep textual analysis of the fiction of the period. He delves into Marlowe, Shakespeare, and, particularly, Milton. “The word “liberty” is used twelve times within Paradise Lost…. In a poem whose stated theme is disobedience, there are two great disobeyers, Satan and Eve. Both, by Milton’s account, disobey precisely in the name of Liberty. Both Eve and Satan disobey a royal decree in whose making they had no part, and both dismiss that prior condition of their very being as an unjustified, enslaving restraint on their liberty.”

Simpson concludes by trying to encapsulate what the long Puritan Reformation of 1517-1688 meant for England, “No word short of “revolution” will answer to the experience. Once that word is introduced, a range of cultural practices (e.g. predestination and denial of free will; models of singular personal authenticity; image destruction; persecution of “witches”; suppression of drama; literalist reading practice; and absolutist policies) come into view as characteristic of revolutions, and as starkly contrastive with the preceding cultural dispensation…. Revolutions claim to start history afresh, and narrative of the pre-revolutionary period threatens the freshness of that start…. I have called that logic “permanent revolution.” Telling that story points us less to the Catholic/Protestant conflict and more to the much more dynamic energies within Protestantism, that pushed Protestant movements to reject prior versions of themselves.”

“Pessoa: A Biography” by Richard Zenith

Zenith had for years extensively translated Fernando Pessoa before deciding to undertake this 1000 page tome, a biography of Portugal’s greatest poet and, perhaps, its greatest philosopher, as well. Pessoa was an extremely odd man. His poetry was often written by heteronyms, not to be confused with pseudonyms. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls.” These were not mere imaginary friends, but embodied lives that lived within Pessoa. “Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me…. I can remember envisioning the shape, motions, character, and life story of various unreal figures who were as visible and as close to me as the manifestations of what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life.” Pessoa had a humor about it all. “Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?” Zenith adds, “Pessoa accepted that there was no essential self he would ever know. But he hoped to discover the place and significance of the relative self—the ever-changing person or ensemble of persons called Fernando Pessoa—in the grand scheme of things.”

The heteronyms living inside his head were something that Pessoa actively thought about and cultivated. He digs down into his method, “Let’s suppose that a supremely depersonalized writer, such as Shakespeare, instead of creating the character Hamlet as part of a play, had created him simply as a character, without any play. He would have created, so to speak, a play of just one character—a prolonged analytical monologue.” Zenith compares two of Pessoa’s most prodigious heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro and Bernardo Soares, “Caeiro had celebrated the outer world, all that is knowable through vision, hearing, and the other senses. He prided himself, on being “superficial,” asserting that reality has no inner “depth” except in our confused thinking. Soares, while seeing everything with no less clarity, internalized the world and then—in an instantaneous turnaround—externalized his sensations of it. His world included dreams and imagined things as well as things seen.” Caeiro insisted, “Behold the world!” Soares, “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write, I unroll myself in sentences  and paragraphs, I punctuate myself…. I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.” We will give Pessoa the last word,

In this world where we forget,

We are shadows of who we are,

And the real actions we perform

In the other world, where we live as souls,

Are here wry grins and appearances.

Pessoa’s aesthetic and artistic styles were as varied as his stable of heteronyms. Even writing as himself, he often contradicted himself, fibbed, and embellished. He once declaimed, “Superior artistic production is, by its nature, a product of decadence and degeneration.” He was a supreme degenerate, but only in the philosophical sense. He later claimed, “I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth.” As Alberto Caeiro,

If I die very young, take note:

I was never more than a child who played.

I was heathen like the sun and the water,

With a universal religion that only humans lack.

Pessoa’s politics, like everything in his life, were complicated. He was, above all, an individualist and a lover of personal liberty and freedom, both in art and in life. He also loved his homeland, in an abstract sense, though he also did love Lisbon, particularly (and in reality). Pessoa claimed, “My nation is the Portuguese language.” Words were his truths. Zenith expands, “Pessoa rejected fascism and other radical nationalisms for the same reason he rejected ideologies of class struggle such as communism: they reduced the individual to an interchangeable unit at the service of some higher, collective reality such as the nation, or the proletariat…. The only social reality, [Pessoa] insisted, is the individual.” As Alberto Caeiro,

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.

But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.

I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,

Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.

Being Fernando Pessoa was no easy task. “What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life—me, so calm and peaceful?” As Alvaro de Campos, he admits, “In each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.” As Bernardo Soares, “What I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been.” For his entire life, Pessoa also struggled to understand others. It was not for want of trying. As Bernardo Soares, “How other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which—because it’s a consciousness—seems to me like the only one.” Pessoa had enough trouble with the stable of consciousnesses just contained within his own head. “All of us, in our human and realized life, are but the caricature of our soul. We are always less than what we are. We are always a grotesque translation of what we wished to be, of what we inwardly and truly are.”

Pessoa’s reading interests were varied, but he always had a special place in his heart for all things mystical, occult, and esoteric. He often cast horoscopes for himself, his friends, and his heteronyms. He took it all deadly seriously and lived his life by what the horoscopes revealed. He also created and populated various secret societies and orders, complete with their own complex series of rituals, all in his own mind. “My brother, everything in this world is symbol and dream—symbols whatever we have, dreams whatever we desire. The whole universe, to which we belong through error and as punishment, is an allegory whose meaning you understand today since your eyes, being closed, are open, and your ears, being covered, are finally able to hear.” In one of his few book-length works published during his lifetime, “The Message”, Pessoa writes, as Portugal’s mythical long-lost King Sebastian returned,

Without madness what is man

But a healthy beast,

A postponed corpse that breeds?

“Wittgenstein’s Vienna” by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin

The central thesis of this book is that it is impossible to look at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy without considering the milieu in which the man was raised. By only considering his Cambridge days onward, after he had met Bertrand Russell, one is missing the uniquely Viennese aspects of his thought. As such, this book is as much a history of thought in fin de siecle Vienna as it is an encapsulation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

It was the beginning of the end for the Hapsburg Empire, where traditional culture and mores were transforming, yet Emperor Francis Joseph futilely sought to stem the tide of progress. “The values which this society cherished were reason, order and progress, perseverance, self-reliance, and disciplined conformity to the standards of good taste and action. The irrational, the passionate, and the chaotic were to be avoided at all costs.” Yet there was a burgeoning intelligentsia that was willing to go against the established grain. Karl Kraus in writing, Arnold Schoenberg in music, Adolf Loos in design, Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka in painting were all leaders of this rebelling artistic wave. This new literati were also polymaths who dipped their toes into adjacent fields, notably philosophy (on which every learned Viennese felt he was entitled to have an opinion). There were dozens of intellectual circles that met regularly to recite, debate, present, sing, drink, and gossip at the many cafes of Vienna. And there was one over-arching problem which kept cropping up, “the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication.”

Seen in this light the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” might, at first glance, seem less original, but not so, as it fused together prevailing Viennese thoughts to come up with a logical answer to the “problem” of language. And the genius of Wittgenstein was not only what was in the “Tractatus,” but what he deliberately left out, the essence of life that for him was of most import, “that skeptical resignation, insight into the incompatibility of reality, is not merely another negation among others. It is our best knowledge.” Wittgenstein’s project was to map out the limits of reason in the tradition of Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Tolstoy. It was to build a wall between fact and value, to assert that the first might be public in a sense, while the other was intensely individual. His message was at the same time anti-metaphysical and anti-positivist. As Paul Engelmann insisted, “positivism holds—and this is its essence—that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about.”

The “Tractatus” was so revolutionary because it got out of the way what could be justifiably said, what could be communicated adequately, so that one could instead focus on what was not spoken. Wittgenstein felt, “ethics is transcendental… How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher.” Again, “the fundamental point of this whole critique was to underline the ethical point that all questions about value lie outside the scope of such ordinary factual or descriptive language… [The] Tractatus becomes an expression of a certain type of language mysticism that assigns a central importance in human life to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of life. Only art can express moral truth, and only the artist can teach the things that matter most in life… It did not, of course, claim that morality is contrary to reason; merely that its foundations lay elsewhere.”

Wittgenstein was not trying to solve the problem of language because to him it was not a problem, but an unsolvable riddle. As Wittgenstein professes in his penultimate aphorism, “my propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright.” This is philosophy not written in stone, but as plastic utensils. If it serves its purpose correctly, then it can be discarded. 

However, Wittgenstein feared he would be inevitably misunderstood. In fact, he admitted, after reading Russell’s preface to the first edition, that Russell had badly misunderstood the whole thing. Wittgenstein came to the view that the only man who would understand the “Tractatus” was he who “has himself already had the thoughts which are expressed in it.” Or as he would later write to Engelmann (in a slightly different context), “how could I expect you to understand me, when I barely understand myself!” 

Wittgenstein is clearly a tough nut to crack. I think it would be fair to say that he was an ethical individualist. He viewed values as something intrinsically personal and, therefore, incapable of being truly expressed through language. “Collective morality is an illusion. The only hope for the individual is to find, and save, his own soul; and even this he can do only by avoiding worldly attachments.” His philosophy was so revolutionary in its modesty. Although later in life he would come to amend some of his positions in the Tractatus, his general gist would remain, “to say nothing except what can be said… and then, whenever someone else wants to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.”