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哲學 – 開欄文
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杜蘭的《西洋哲學史話》不是我讀的第一本哲學書，記得在它之前我就讀過《老子》。但它是對我影響最大的幾本書之一。主要的原因是：
a. 它引起我對哲學的興趣；
b. 它奠定了我對哲學一知半解的基礎；以及
c. 整體來說，它堅定了我追求知識的決心(該欄開欄文第3節)。
順帶說一句：我不敢以「知識份子」自居，但頗以身為「讀書人」自豪(該欄開欄文及《目的、行動、和方法》一文)；也就對兩者都有所期許(該文第4節)。
我不是哲學系出身；但因為對「人應該如何自處」以及「人應該如何待人接物」這兩個問題很有興趣，免不了接觸到一些探討「基本問題」的書籍(請見本欄第二篇文章)。現在垂垂老矣，不再有讀書的腦力；只能把過去的心得做個整理，算是收收網吧。
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格林教授的「物質基礎論」 -- Paul Austin Murphy
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下文一個特色是大量引用學者們本人的論述，然後加上作者說明和解讀。至於莫菲先生是否掌握到這些學者思想的重點，有請看官們自行定奪。
我接受「唯物論」，自然也是「化約論」和「物質基礎論」的「同路人」(1)。另一方面，目前(和可見的未來) 我並沒有任何具體的「答案」，或值得一提的「想法」；但是，針對「浮現論」、「資訊處理論」、或「量子意識論」等解釋「意識」的觀點，區區、老夫、在下、我，認為它們都是在「病急亂抓藥」。
附註：
1. 「化約論」 -- reductionism；「物質基礎論」 -- physicalism，記得我曾將此詞譯為「物性主義」或「物質主義」。
索引：
Greene, Brian：美國理論物理學家
physicalism：「物質基礎論」
reductionism：「化約論」
Physicist Brian Greene’s Apologetic, Yet Strong, Physicalism
Paul Austin Murphy, 05/17/26
The theoretical physicist Brian Greene upholds a very strong physicalism, as well as a “deep-seated reductionist commitment” too.
Religious People and Anti-Materialists
It’s the case that many religious people, anti-materialists, spiritual idealists, romantics, etc. aren’t against reductionism and “materialism” in the abstract: they’re against such isms only when they trespass on the sacred realm of human persons, as well as on the related notion of human consciousness.
This essay keeps away from the subject of consciousness because that’s a can of worms to be tackled separately. However, Brian Greene himself tackles it in detail. In terms of physicalism and consciousness, this is how he sums up this subject:
“We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles.”
In any case, Greene is extremely upfront about his physicalism, even if, at the very same time, he’s seemingly at pains to justify himself to religious people, anti-materialists, romantics, etc.
Greene is upfront about being a reductionist too. For example, he says that he has a
“deep-seated reductionist commitment, which holds the view that by fully grasping the behaviour of the universe’s fundamental ingredients we tell a rigorous and self-contained story of reality”.
Note Greene’s words “self-contained story of reality”. That isn’t the same as claiming reductionism tells the only true story of reality. However, it is a vital and important story. This is a theme that Greene often comes back to. As seen, he uses the word “story” in exactly the same way in which another American theoretical physicist, writing about the same subjects, does. That physicist is Sean Carroll. (See my ‘The Physicist Sean Carroll on (Scientific) Emergence’ and the next essay.)
In another passage, Greene states both his reductionism and his physicalism. He tells his readers that he
“can envision a future when scientists will be able to provide a mathematically complete articulation of the fundamental microphysical processes underlying anything that happens, anywhere and anywhen”.
Surely that statement must apply to all the big subjects and issues, such as consciousness, free will, war, love, hate, etc. Or does it? Note that Greene uses the word “underlying” (as in “underlying anything that happens”). This is an important caveat. Why? It’s because saying that X underlies (or underpins) Y isn’t the same as saying X “is identical to” Y, or that X can “tell us everything” about Y. In fact, if those two interpretations were true, then the word “underlying” simply wouldn’t be accurate. All this makes a big difference, despite the endless conflations uttered by some religious people and nearly all anti-materialists.
Greene goes on to tell his readers more about what his word “underlying” means, and he does so through the example of the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. He quotes Democritus stating the following:
“‘Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.’”
Greene says that Democritus’s point is that
“everything emerges from the same collection of ingredients governed by the same physical principles”.
What’s more,
“those principles, as attested to by a few hundred years of observation, experimentation, and theorizing, will likely be expressed by a handful of symbols arranged in a small collection of mathematical equations”.
At first, Greene stated that “fundamental microphysical processes underlie[] anything that happens, anywhere and anywhen”. Then, through the voice of Democritus, he states that “everything emerges from the same collection of ingredients”. These two expressions more or less state the same thing, if from two different angles. In other words, X can underlie Y, and Y can emerge from X. Neither formulation implies or entails that X is Y. Of course, the concepts of underlying and emergence need to be explained and justified too.
Greene on Human Persons
Greene himself does trespass on the sacred realm of human persons mentioned earlier. He writes:
“Yet, maintaining our physicalist stance, you and I are nothing but constellations of particles whose behavior is fully governed by physical law.”
Oh yes!
Greene uses those terrible two words: “nothing but”! This, of course, echoes the very often-quoted passage from Francis Crick. Here it is again! —
“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
This all hinges on what the words “nothing but” really mean. In a past essay (2019), ‘Francis Crick’s Deliberately Provocative Reductionism’, I argued that Crick was being provocative when he used these words. Moreover, it’s hard to know what they could even mean when taken literally.
Just to take one example. If you and I were nothing but constellations of particles, then we would be indistinguishable from other constellations of particles, such as heaps of shit or rocks. So Greene is being poetic and provocative too, just like Crick. That’s because he’s already told us what he really means: particles, fields, laws, etc. underlie/underpin you and I. Alternatively, you and I emerge from particles, fields, laws, etc.
Greene on Reduction, Emergence and New Laws
Greene mentions emergence, at least indirectly, when he writes the following:
“Although voluminous data confirm that we have a deep understanding of the laws governing individual particles (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, and so on), perhaps when a hundred billion billion billion particles are arranged into a human body and brain, they are no longer governed, or at least not fully governed, by the fundamental laws of the microworld.”
This means that Greene fully acknowledges the possibility of new laws. He may even do more than merely acknowledge it.
It’s worth asking here where that (to use Greene’s own phrase) “line in the sand” is when we see a miraculous move from old laws to (possible) new ones. Greene writes:
“It’s not as though the universe comes equipped with a line in the sand separating things that are properly described by quantum mechanics from things properly described by general relativity. Dividing the universe into two separate realms seems both artificial and clumsy.”
In crude terms, why does the change need to come when we reach a hundred billion billion billion particles and not a hundred billion particles? What about a billion particles? Why not a million or even ten particles? We’d need to explain how and why higher numbers alone bring about new laws.
Greene, like many other physicists, basically states tha Laplace’s Demon doesn’t actually exist. He happily concedes that "admittedly, no one has ever carried out the mathematical analysis required to make predictions for the lawful progression of particles” when it comes to large objects and systems. What’s more,
“[e]ven predicting the motion of a far simpler object like a pool ball can elude us because small inaccuracies in determining the ball’s initial speed and direction can be exponentially amplified as the ball ricochets off the banks of the table”.
All that doesn’t really concern Greene, at least not in this context. He concludes:
“So my focus here is not on predicting your next move. My focus is on the existence of laws that govern your next move.”
Greene isn’t concerned with “unexpected and impressive phenomena” (such as “typhoons and tigers”) here either. He believes that it’s still the case that
“all evidence suggests that were we able to work out the math for such large groups of interacting particles, we would be able to predict their collective behaviors”.
In a sentence. The issue here isn’t prediction: it’s the emergence of new laws.
So Greene is well aware of the limitations of reductionism. For example, he says that he
“would be stymied, of course, in trying to explain many other things in staunchly reductionist terms, from Pacific typhoons to raging volcanoes”.
However:
“But the challenge presented by these happenings, and a world chock-full of examples like them, is solely that of describing the complex dynamics of a fantastically large number of particles.”
Finally: “If we could surmount that technical hurdle, we would be done.”
On the surface, Greene seems to be ruling out emergence here, or at least ruling out strong emergence. After all, isn’t the argument from emergentists that new laws and features emerge at “higher levels”? Even so, such higher-level laws and features would still be underpinned by particles. Alternatively, they would still emerge from particles. Still, Greene doesn’t mention this. Instead, he boils the problem down to “complex dynamics” and “a fantastically large number of particles”.
If new laws and features do truly emerge, then surely this means that Greene’s ideal prediction, or ideal reduction, would still be impossible… Unless these two things can exist together. In other words, can we have an ideal prediction, or an ideal reduction, even if new laws and features do occur at higher levels?
Greene on Information
I wonder if the ideal reduction, or ideal prediction, is affected by the introduction of information into this story, as Greene does. In the following passage, we see Greene stating his reductionist and physicalist position again. Yet, this time, with the added ingredient of information:
“To describe the state of the world now, I provide information that specifies the configuration of all the dancing particles and undulating fields permeating space. The laws of physics take that information as input and yield as output information that delineates the state of the world later on. Physics, according to this framing, is in the business of information processing."
It’s worth noting that in this specific context Greene brought up information and processing in response to the position of the philosopher David Chalmers on consciousness and “inner experience”. However, it’s clear that he adopts an informationalist position generally. (Basically, one that’s in tune with the ideas of John Archibald Wheeler.)
What work is the word “information” doing in the quoted passage above? That can be asked because often when I read people talk about information, it seems to have little purpose: it’s a needless addition. Or worse, such people are referring to information as if it’s a… well, physical thing.
Take the words of the physicist Christopher Fuchs:
“‘It is amazing how many people talk about information as if it is simply some new kind of objective quantity in physics, like energy, but measured in bits instead of ergs. You’ll often hear information spoken of as if it’s a new fluid that physics has only recently taken note of.’”
Of course, in an everyday sense, physicists have always dealt with information, just as Tom, Dick and Harry have. However, information in these contexts means much more than that.
Written by Paul Austin Murphy
MY PHILOSOPHY: https://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/ My Flickr Account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193304911@N06/
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波德雅、尼切、弗洛伊德的「表相論」 -- Rodeux
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下文從視覺藝術的「錯覺手法」做為切入點，討論「實相」、「表相」、和「幻相」之間關係的哲學議題。我沒讀懂；轉載於此，留待解人或有緣人。
或許因為我沒什麼慧根；在我讀來，下文作者的觀點基於文學家的自由聯想多過愛智者的邏輯推論。
我不熟悉波德雅的學說；有興趣的網友請點擊以下參考條目：
* 此欄2026/04/01貼文
* Baudrillard Notes: Seduction contra Eros
* Seduction and Reversibility: Baudrillard’s Symbolic Challenge to Modernity
索引：
Seduction：For French theorist Jean Baudrillard, seduction is not about sexual desire, coercion, or romance. Instead, it is a playful, strategic manipulation of appearances, artifice, and signs.(AI摘要)
Trompe l’oeil：錯覺法
Uncanny：奇妙的，神秘的，難以(或無法)解釋的
Enchanted Simulation: Baudrillard, Nietzsche, Freud and the Uncanny Force of Illusion
Rodeux, 03/19/26
Thesis
Trompe l’oeil reveals a central tension in Baudrillard’s thought: although simulation seeks to make the world fully visible and operational, seduction reintroduces illusion from within. Far from being the opposite of reality, illusion is one of its conditions. Nietzsche helps clarify this by showing that life depends on appearance and artistic force, while Freud helps explain why hyper-real images become uncanny precisely when they seem too real.
Introduction
In a culture saturated with images, reality seems increasingly transparent. Everything appears available to view, record, and reproduce. Yet certain images still fascinate us in a different way: they do not merely show the world, but unsettle our confidence in it. This is the paradox at the heart of Jean Baudrillard’s reflections on simulation and seduction. If simulation seeks to make everything visible and operational, seduction reintroduces ambiguity, appearance, and illusion. The result is not a simple return to unreality, but a challenge to reality itself.
Baudrillard’s account of trompe l’oeil painting gives this problem a striking visual form. These paintings seem intensely realistic, yet their very precision makes them strange. They do not simply imitate the real; they make us wonder what the real is. Read alongside Nietzsche and Freud, Baudrillard’s point becomes sharper: illusion is not merely opposed to reality. It is one of the conditions through which reality is sustained, experienced, and, at times, disturbed.
Simulation, Seduction, and the Return of Illusion
For Baudrillard, simulation does not just represent the world. It produces a world that is fully legible, fully available, and increasingly stripped of uncertainty. In such a regime, the real is overexposed. It no longer hides behind appearances but is generated through signs, models, and endless visibility.
Seduction moves in the opposite direction. Baudrillard describes it as neither pure appearance nor pure absence, but “the eclipse of a presence” (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 85). Its power lies in flicker, withdrawal, and ambivalence. Rather than adding more meaning, it interrupts the drive to make everything transparent. Seduction fascinates because it withholds as much as it reveals.
This is why illusion cannot simply be expelled from the simulated world. It reappears from within the very field of signs that seeks to master reality. Seduction is thus not external to simulation, but its internal disturbance.
Trompe l’oeil Against Linear Perspective
Baudrillard turns to trompe l’oeil to show how this disturbance works. Unlike Renaissance linear perspective, which organizes the visible world into ordered depth and harmonious space, trompe l’oeil unsettles that order. Its objects do not invite the eye gently inward; they seem to press forward, toward the viewer, as if crossing the boundary between image and thing.
John Haberle’s A Bachelor’s Drawer exemplifies this effect. Its coins, cards, stamps, pipe, and scraps of paper are painted with such exactness that they appear almost tangible. Yet this exactness does not secure reality. It destabilizes it. The objects feel both present and oddly displaced, so faithful to the visible world that they begin to seem unreal. Baudrillard writes that trompe l’oeil, “by mimicking the third dimension, questions the reality of this dimension” (1990, p. 63). The painting does not simply deceive the eye; it tests the viewer’s belief in reality itself.
This is what makes trompe l’oeil an “enchanted simulation.” It openly presents itself as artifice, yet by exceeding the effects of the real, it throws the reality principle into doubt.
Nietzsche and the Force of Appearance
Nietzsche helps clarify why this challenge matters. He does not treat appearance as a superficial veil over truth, but as one of the forces through which life becomes bearable and intelligible. “We have art in order not to perish from the truth” (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 40). Art, in this sense, is not decoration. It is a necessary mediation.
This brings Nietzsche close to Baudrillard’s idea of vital illusion. Both reject the assumption that truth alone grounds reality. Human beings live through forms, appearances, and interpretive constructions. Seduction, understood in this light, resembles a force rather than a concept: it acts before stable meaning is secured, disrupting the fantasy of a fully transparent world.
One need not identify seduction directly with the Dionysian to see the kinship. In both cases, a deeper instability unsettles the calm surface of rational order. What appears most solid is sustained by forces it cannot fully control.
The Uncanny Precision of the Hyper-Real
Freud provides the affective register of this experience. The uncanny arises when something is both familiar and strange at once, when what should remain secure in perception begins to waver. As Freud puts it, the uncanny belongs to what is “long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud, 2003, p. 124).
That is precisely the effect of trompe l’oeil. In A Bachelor’s Drawer, the objects are ordinary and recognizable, yet their hyper-real exactness makes them unsettling. Perfection removes the small irregularities that usually anchor perception in the everyday. The result is not simple illusion, but hyper-illusion: an excess of realism that makes reality suspicious. The viewer hesitates, caught between recognition and doubt.
Freud thus helps explain why these paintings fascinate. Their power lies not in trickery alone, but in the way they make the familiar world feel subtly wrong.
Vital Illusion and the Fragility of the Real
At its deepest point, Baudrillard’s argument is not that illusion replaces reality, but that illusion helps make reality possible. This is where Nietzsche and Baudrillard converge most strongly. If truth were immediate and naked, it would be unlivable; if reality were stripped of all appearance, it would lose the very conditions that make it intelligible. Illusion is therefore not a flaw in the system. It is one of its supports.
Freud complicates this insight by showing that what sustains reality can also unsettle it. Because the real depends on structures of familiarity and appearance, it is never fully secure. It can always begin to flicker.
Conclusion
Trompe l’oeil matters because it makes this flicker visible. In A Bachelor’s Drawer, reality is not simply copied but placed under pressure. Baudrillard sees in such images a form of seduction that resists the totalizing logic of simulation. Nietzsche helps explain why illusion is indispensable to life, while Freud shows why such illusion can become uncanny when it grows too exact.
Taken together, these thinkers suggest that the real is neither self-grounded nor immune to appearance. It depends on illusions it cannot entirely master. That is why certain images continue to fascinate us: they do not merely represent the world, but reveal how fragile our sense of reality has always been.
References
Baudrillard, J. (1990). Seduction (B. Singer, Trans.). New World Perspectives.
Freud, S. (2003). The uncanny (D. McLintock, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1919)
Hegarty, P. (2004). Jean Baudrillard: Live theory. Continuum.
Nietzsche, F. (2003). The birth of tragedy (R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1872)
Written by Rodeux
I’m passionate about languages as intricate systems that shape human experience. Guided by inspiring mentors, I explore their complexity, diversity, and meaning.
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《19世紀最危險的哲學觀念》讀後
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我退休之前忙於生計，沒有那個美國時間去考慮生死、人生意義這類重大，但不能改善生活物質條件的問題。70歲以前還能看書、寫寫文章，也就不怎麼在它們上面下功夫。70歲以後幹不了正經事；剛好在《傳媒》上看到很多這方面的文章，也就偶而跟著湊湊熱鬧。
該文作者還是位大學生(本欄上一篇)，他很可能還沒修「邏輯101」課程；如果修過，大概被「當」掉不只一次。
活著並不是個容易的「活」；它需要一定份量的「客觀資源」，和某種程度的「主觀意願」。如果一個人真的接受梅蘭德的看法，他/她未必會「自殺」；但對「活下去」不置可否的人，肯定活不久。此所以沒有一個活著的人(不論他/她是不是哲學家)會宣揚：「活著是個錯誤」。
釋迦牟尼以後，大概沒有人比他把「人生是苦」的來龍去脈講得更透徹；「死」是一種「解脫」，則眾人皆知。問題的重點在於：選擇「最終的『解脫』」需要的不是「睿智」，而是「有『種』」。
該文提到叔本華，請參考：Schopenhauer, Arthur。另請參考：《時也，命也！》(作者Michelle No)
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19世紀最危險的哲學觀點 ---- Major Moss
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The Most Dangerous Idea in 19th-Century Philosophy
Major Moss, 02/05/26
Supposing that existence itself is a mistake — what then?
Most philosophers, I suspect, however much they may flirt with pessimism, never quite allow this idea to be entertained. Many will concede that suffering, illusion, and futility are unavoidable aspects of any life, yet will still hold the stance that, for whatever reason, we should try and stay alive. Something must still be done. Something must still be built. Our existence, though imperfect, should not be cut short.
Philipp Mainländer is one of the very few philosophers who did not turn a blind eye to this possibility.
A Life Oriented Inward
Mainländer, born Philipp Batz in 1841, lived an outwardly unremarkable and inwardly withdrawn life. He was trained by his father in commerce, briefly enlisted in the military, and largely self-educated himself through solitary reading. Poetry and philosophy offered him a sense of coherence, that the ‘disorder’ of experience could at least be diagnosed.
At some point, he seemed to have encountered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, who, even having only recently died, had already influenced nineteenth-century German thought considerably.
Of course, Schopenhauer had quite the disquieting philosophy, too.
Schopenhauer claims that the foundation of reality is not reason or purpose, but a blind, irrational, and ceaseless striving that constitutes the inner essence of all things, which he calls the Wille zum Leben, or Will to Live, which sustains life without regard for happiness or meaning. To Schopenhauer, desire renews itself endlessly, and satisfaction collapses almost immediately.
For lack of a better analogy, he thinks to exist is to be caught in a rushing river, grabbing at roots along the bank for momentary relief only to have them break apart as you cling to them. You are expected to experience pain in this cycle. The river’s momentum overwhelms any other purposes you manage to theorize.
Mainländer accepted Schophenhauer’s claims almost without reservation. What troubled him was not the claim that life was saturated with suffering, but that said suffering does not have a direction. A world governed by the Will, he believed, couldn’t just move aimlessly. Movement itself implies a trajectory, and if existence was indeed inseparable from pain, then the direction of that movement ought to be explainable.
So, in his central work, The Philosophy of Redemption, Mainländer explains just that.
The world, he argues, is made up of individuality and movement. Individuality splits reality into separate beings; movement compels them forward. Both components arise from the same source. And yet, what distinguishes Mainländer from other pessimists is that he believes movement, one of the key components of our existence, trends toward extinction. He believe the Will to Live is indicative of our contradictory nature, and puts forward in its place the Will to Die.
God, After the Fact
At the origin of all thing, Mainländer suggests a single, undivided unity. He names this unity God, and insists, quite carefully, that the term is philosophical rather than theological.
Mainländer’s God does not preside over the world as a theistic God would. Instead, he believes God is the world, or rather, dismantled himself into it. And, due to fact that His ‘unity’ could not be annihilated all at once, it fractured into individuality, giving rise to a multiplicity of separate beings such as you and I. Both components of the Mainländer’s universe post-God, that being movement and individuality, unfold as the gradual attenuation of that original unity, slowly moving toward an end consisting of non-being.
This, for labelling sake, is what we call a pandeistic theory, combining “pan-” for all, and deism.
Toward Stillness
Mainländer names this end redemption. It is only obtainable through the exhaustion of striving itself. When movement ends, suffering, bound as it is to movement, ends with it. Non-being is preferable to being, for Mainländer, because it is the logical preference.
“In the heart of things, the immanent Philosopher sees in the entire cosmos only the deepest longing for complete extinction; it is as if he heard clearly the call that pierces all the celestial spheres: Redemption! Redemption! Death to our Life! and the cheering reply: you all will find extinction and will be redeemed”
From Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption)
So what we have, so far, is this: suffering is unavoidable in existence; suffering persists because existence itself is movement; and movement tends, inevitably, toward non-being.
So, if the end of all striving is already fixed, and if suffering plagues us every step along the way, then why on Earth should we continue bearing it?
Why persist through exhaustion when we will, inevitably, die?
If we recall that the foundation of Schopenhauer’s river was momentum, and clinging to the banks for momentary relief from suffering, then the foundation of Mainländer’s river would be its direction — that you will inevitably fall off a waterfall and surely die. He would not see a point to clinging to the banks as you are only prolonging your time in this river of pain. In fact, he believes you should redeem yourself by swimming with the current to kill yourself, thus satiating the cosmos’ longing for complete extinction.
What makes Mainländer’s philosophy difficult to assimilate to is that it simply doesn’t issue any demands. It calls for us to do nothing. Our lives will conclude regardless. Human action neither completes nor obstructs it. Nothing is required, and nothing is prohibited.
Perhaps this is what makes Mainländer a bit uncomfortable to read. Philosophical frameworks tend to survive throughout time because they are, at least for the most part, practicable, pragmatic, or useful, offering some sort of consolation, motivation, or ways by which we should reform our lives.
His system does none of this, perhaps because he placed no value on longevity, believing it to be irrelevant to a universe oriented toward exhaustion.
Shortly after the publication of The Philosophy of Redemption, Mainländer took his own life. Naturally, the proximity of this act to his work has invited speculation, though such speculation proves little. Many who articulate pessimistic philosophies live long lives; many who end their lives hold no philosophy at all. However, personal suffering and a history of mental illness in his family almost certainly shaped Mainländer’s fate, as well as, perhaps, his disposition toward the darker reaches of pessimistic philosophy.
Written by Major Moss
Writer and student at the University of Texas at Austin.
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「理解框架」概念為思考盲點 - Paul Austin Murphy
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請參考本欄上一篇。
There Are No Conceptual Schemes
Paul Austin Murphy, 09/29/22
Philosopher Donald Davidson once wrote that conceptual schemes are deemed to be “ways of organizing experience”; as well as “systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation”. What’s more, “they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene”. From this line of reasoning (which Davidson himself rejected), we pass on to such things as “linguistic relativity” (or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and, perhaps (!), Kuhnian paradigms and Wittgensteinian language games.
Let’s start off with Donald Davidson’s take on what conceptual schemes are supposed to be. Davidson wrote the following:
“Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene.”
This passage can be found in Davidson’s paper ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’. That paper at least partly inspired the following essay
Donald Davidson (1917–2003) 照片
Davidson (who died in 2003) was primarily responding to the thesis that different “individuals, cultures, or periods” have different conceptual schemes. What’s more, these schemes are said to be at odds — or even in conflict — with each other.
The position that Davidson was at least partially arguing against is what’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (It’s worth stressing here that Davidson certainly wasn’t doing anthropology, history or political commentary.) The following is one definition of that hypothesis:
“The simplest Sapir-Whorf hypothesis definition is a theory of language that suggests that the language a person speaks determines or influences how they think. According to Sapir-Whorf, a person’s native language has a major impact on how they see the world.”
This means that Davidson’s clause “we are told” (in the opening passage) gave his game away…
That game being his rejection of the very idea of a conceptual scheme.
Davidson’s position was that there is only one conceptual scheme.
This basically means that, in a strong sense, there are no conceptual schemes at all… Or at least there are no conceptual schemes as such things came to seen by certain philosophers — and, indeed, by various social scientists.
Crudely speaking, this particular take on conceptual schemes (i.e., the one which Davidson had a problem with) partially mirrors Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a scientific paradigm and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game. However, if anything, a conceptual scheme has been deemed to be much deeper and far broader than a (scientific or otherwise) paradigm or a language game. Indeed it can even be argued that paradigms and language games must themselves belong to (or be embedded within) broader conceptual schemes.
All that said, I won’t be commenting on Davidson’s paper or even on anything specific within it. The main reason for that is that Davidson had a particularly epistemological take on this issue. (See the note at the end of this essay.)
We can start here with the American philosopher Thomas Nagel.
Nagel advanced the view that we can divorce ourselves from our conceptual schemes and even from our concepts. (It must be stressed here that the position which Nagel advanced is quite unlike Davidson’s.)
Thomas Nagel
In his book The Last Word (1997), Thomas Nagel argued that the “obsession with language” and conceptual schemes has “contributed to the devastation of reason”. He went on to argue that if philosophers and laypersons stress the importance of language and conceptual schemes generally (which are, after all, contingent), then they’re in effect stressing the contingencies of psychology and culture too. And it’s this approach, Nagel concluded, which “leads to relativism”.
All this raises the following two questions:
(1) How many (broadly speaking) differences are required to create a separate conceptual scheme?
(2) How many differences are required to make two different conceptual schemes mutually incompatible or even incommensurable?
If a distinction were to be made between two different conceptual schemes, then the boundary between them may well be vague. So how deep must conceptual variance go before something is christened a conceptual scheme? Would it necessarily mean that a new conceptual scheme would — or could — never (metaphorically) look out at other (possibly rival or competing) conceptual schemes in order to judge (or simply evaluate) them?
Clearly, simple differences in beliefs can’t themselves constitute different conceptual schemes. If that were the case, then we’d all belong to different conceptual schemes. In fact each individual would have his or her own conceptual scheme.
So perhaps it’s when concepts and/or beliefs begin to link up together and have mutual implications and entailments that the question of different conceptual schemes arises.
Take the following technical distinction which was made by the American philosopher Steven Stitch (1943-) in his paper ‘The Problem of Cognitive Diversity’. He wrote:
“[T]he Yoruba do not have a distinction corresponding to our distinction between knowledge and (mere) true belief.”
In this essay’s context, this raises the question as to whether or not having (or accepting) the distinction between knowledge and true belief itself entails, implies or generates other concepts which, in turn, partly help form a distinctive conceptual scheme. (Of course we can also ask if this is just a philosophical distinction that not even all members of “our own” culture — whatever we take that to be — share.)
Firstly, a belief in true belief or knowledge isn’t itself really a single belief. It’s a belief made up of other beliefs.
Again, the main question is whether or not we can stand outside our conceptual scheme (or conceptual schemes) and evaluate other conceptual schemes (or other cultures and historical periods).
Perhaps the American philosopher Thompson Clarke (1928–2012), for one, believed that we can. In his paper ‘The Legacy of Scepticism’, he wrote:
“Each concept or the conceptual scheme must be divorceable intact from our practices, from whatever constituted the essential nature of the plain. […] [O]bservers who usually by means of our senses, ascertain, when possible, whether items fulfil the conditions legislated by concepts.”
So did Thompson Clarke himself step outside his own conceptual scheme into other conceptual schemes in order to evaluate them? Alternatively, did he adopt a God’s-eye view (or “view from nowhere”) of what he called “the plain”?
There is a hint in the above passage that Clarke believed that he could become free of both concepts and conceptual schemes when he asked “whether [sensory] items fulfil the conditions legislated by concepts”. Thus, these sensory items (contrary to the note on Davidson at the end of this essay) seem to come first — at least in this instance. In any case, Clarke was certainly committed to the world’s “essential” nature when he wrote about “the essential nature of the plain”.
Some readers may now ask what “truth in all discourses” (if not in all conceptual schemes) actually is. It may also be asked if truth can be external to all conceptual schemes.
Truth in All Conceptual Schemes
What if a member of each conceptual scheme has his/her own version (or versions) of the nature of truth? And what if each member of such conceptual schemes also has his/her own truths?
Wouldn’t this create difficulties in communication… or worse?
That said, if different conceptual schemes can accept or believe (discounting different languages) the same claims (for example, that 2 + 2 = 4 or that Napoleon was an Emperor of France), then why can’t they agree on other more esoteric, recondite or controversial things too? Indeed it could be the case that from the fact that different conceptual schemes accept the non-contentious, then they may then (mutually) accept the contentious too.
Think here of how easy it is to agree on the weather, “established facts”, etc., and yet how hard it sometimes is to agree on politics, morality, art, music, etc.
More particularly, if different conceptual schemes can discuss and even agree on the weather, when Hitler died or what is the largest body in the Solar System, then perhaps they can also discuss and agree upon more contentious issues…
Or are there language games about the weather, historical facts and astronomy too?
Let’s get back to truths (or indeed facts) which are external to conceptual schemes.
If a conceptual scheme is chosen (rather than, say, born into) by an adult individual, then it must be so for reasons which are external to that conceptual scheme. Similarly, an individual may reject his — or a — conceptual scheme for reasons external to that conceptual scheme.
Now let’s (perhaps) be a little naïve here. Take these three simple logical examples and statements:
(1) A = A (in all conceptual schemes)
(2) A = B = C ⊃ A = C (in all conceptual schemes)
(3) P ⊃ Q P∴Q (in all conceptual schemes)
Similarly, does the schema (if not the actual content)
The sentence “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.
hold in only one conceptual scheme?
More factually and empirically.
If everyone — or almost everyone — believes that Napoleon was an Emperor of France, then they must also believe many other things which can be — or are — derived from (or dependent upon) such a belief. For example, that France exists. That France did indeed have an Emperor. That there was a time when France didn’t have an Emperor. (This last belief isn’t logically derived from the initial belief.) And if we all believe that Napoleon was an Emperor of France, then surely we may then also mutually believe that there were specific reasons as to why he became such a leader. So perhaps there can be agreement on those reasons too.
Those simple bits of logic above were intended to show that the contentious can be derived from the uncontentious. This itself may shows that if conceptual schemes share the uncontentious, then there’s nothing to stop them — in principle — from sharing the contentious too.
All this, in turn, casts doubt on the incommensurability (see also Kuhnian incommensurability) and untranslatability theses when applied — specifically — to conceptual schemes. And, if that’s the case, then perhaps the idea of different — or even rival — conceptual schemes is flawed.
That said, none of the above need imply that there’s a possibility of escaping from all conceptual schemes into Thomas Nagel’s or Thomson Clarke’s wilderness of Nowhere — the view from where we can see the world As It Truly Is.
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Note: Donald Davidson’s Own Take
It’s worth stressing here that Donald Davidson’s own position (which is quite unlike anything advanced in the essay above) was grounded on purely epistemological and philosophy-of-mind considerations, not on denying (or, for that matter, stressing) anthropological, historical and/or cultural differences.
That grounding can be found in the following passage (from the paper ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’), in which Davidson wrote:
“The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical. Since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think, obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs. But a causal explanation of belief does not show how or why the belief is justified.”
Another passage (from the same paper) is even more apposite in this context. Davidson continued:
“Accordingly, I suggest that we give up the idea that meaning or knowledge is grounded on something that counts as an ultimate source of evidence. No doubt meaning and knowledge depend on experience, and experience ultimately on sensation. But this is the ‘depend’ of causality, not of evidence or justification.”
Basically, then, if this distinction between (as it were) pure and given “experiences” (or “sensations”) and later beliefs is rejected (as Davidson did), then the idea of conceptual schemes being free to (metaphorically) make sense (in multiple different ways) of those pure and given sensations is much harder to defend.
My philosophy blog:
Written by Paul Austin Murphy
MY PHILOSOPHY: https://paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com/
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真相、詮釋、和理解框架論 – Outis
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請參考本欄下一篇。
下文介紹戴維森博士對「理解框架論」的批判。由於原文每節都是一整段文字；讀起來甚是吃力，也不容易了解。我將每一節文字依照意旨分成幾個獨立段落，比較容易閱讀和理解；如產生反效果，在此致歉。
「理解框架」一詞依照字面通譯為：「概念架構」；不過，拙譯或許更能表達此「術語」的意思；尚請指正。
我只讀過戴維森博士一本論文選，並不熟悉他的思想；但久仰他的大名。2002年戴維森博士應邀來台演講；由於機會難得，我特別起了個早，跑到清華大學敬陪末座。不幸次年就在報上看到他過世的消息。在此略誌數語，以為紀念。
請參考：(下文提及學者及學派相關資訊)
* Feyerabend, Paul Karl
* Kuhn, Thomas
* McDowell, John
* Quine, W.V.O.
* Rorty, Richard
* Sapir, Edward (下文未提及)
* Whorf, Benjamin Lee
* Linguistic relativity
Truth, Interpretation & the Rejection of Conceptual Schemes
“On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974)
Outis, 03/21/26
Critique of the scheme–content distinction (Davidson vs. Quine, Kuhn, Whorf)
Donald Davidson’s 1974 paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” initially presented to the American Philosophical Association and later included in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, launches a penetrating critique of the scheme-content distinction, a foundational concept in various philosophical traditions. The distinction posits a neutral, unstructured content — such as sensory experience or empirical data — that is organized or interpreted through diverse conceptual schemes, leading to potentially incommensurable worldviews.
Davidson contrasts his position with thinkers like W.V.O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who, in different ways, endorse versions of this dualism. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) undermines the analytic-synthetic distinction but retains a form of relativism through indeterminacy of translation, where empirical content underdetermines theoretical schemes. Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) suggest that scientific revolutions involve changes in conceptual schemes, rendering pre- and post-revolutionary theories incommensurable due to differing organizations of the same data. Whorf’s linguistic relativity hypothesis, derived from studies of Hopi and other languages, argues that grammatical structures shape conceptual frameworks, implying that speakers of different languages inhabit distinct realities.
Davidson dismantles this dualism by arguing that the metaphor of schemes “fitting” content is incoherent: if schemes are truly alternative, there must be a way to identify the shared content, but this identification presupposes translatability, collapsing the distinction. He contends that these thinkers rely on an untenable empiricist dogma, where experience is a neutral arbiter, but in reality, interpretation is holistic and inseparable from belief systems. This critique positions Davidson as a unifier, rejecting relativism in favor of a singular, interpretable reality.
Argument: no criterion for translating radically different schemes
Central to Davidson’s paper is the argument that there exists no coherent criterion for identifying or translating radically different conceptual schemes, rendering the very notion unintelligible (“notion”一字在此指：”radically different conceptual schemes”).
He examines purported examples of alternative schemes, such as alien languages or historical paradigms, and shows that claims of untranslatability fail to hold. If a scheme is so divergent that translation is impossible, then we lack grounds to assert it organizes content differently — or even that it is a scheme at all.
Davidson employs a reductio ad absurdum: suppose we encounter a language where sentences do not align with ours; to deem it untranslatable, we must first interpret it partially, but successful partial translation enables full translation via holistic adjustments.
He draws on his radical interpretation framework, where an interpreter starts from scratch, using behavioral evidence to assign meanings and beliefs simultaneously. Without a neutral content to compare, differences in schemes dissolve into mere failures of interpretation, not genuine alternatives.
This argument exposes the circularity in relativist positions: to identify divergence, one must presuppose commonality in truth conditions or rationality. Davidson illustrates with thought experiments, like imagining a scheme where “true” sentences are those we deem false, but such massive inversion would undermine the attribution of any scheme, as it violates interpretive norms.
Ultimately, the absence of a translation criterion reveals that conceptual schemes are not empirical hypotheses but philosophical artifacts, better abandoned for a direct engagement with truth and meaning.
Charity & the impossibility of massive disagreement
The principle of charity plays a crucial role in Davidson’s rejection of conceptual schemes, underscoring the impossibility of massive disagreement between interpreters and subjects. Charity requires maximizing agreement in beliefs and rationality when interpreting others, assuming their views are largely true by our standards.
In the context of schemes, if we posit radical divergence, we would attribute widespread error or irrationality, but this contravenes charity, making interpretation untenable. Davidson argues that disagreement presupposes a background of agreement: to identify a specific false belief, most beliefs must align, providing the interpretive base.
Massive disagreement, therefore, erodes the evidence for attribution, leading to indeterminacy rather than alternative schemes. This ties into his holism: beliefs form interconnected webs, and charity ensures coherence across the system. For instance, in anthropological encounters, apparent exotic beliefs (e.g., in witchcraft) are reinterpreted charitably as metaphorical or contextual, not indicative of wholly different schemes.
The impossibility of massive error stems from the constitutive role of truth in interpretation: sentences held true correlate with worldly causes, anchoring agreement. Davidson’s view counters skepticism by affirming that human rationality is universal, not scheme-relative, fostering a pragmatic optimism about cross-cultural understanding.
Implications for relativism, incommensurability, and cultural anthropology
Davidson’s dismantling of conceptual schemes has profound implications for relativism, incommensurability, and cultural anthropology, effectively deflating relativist anxieties while promoting interpretive unity.
Relativism, which holds truths or meanings relative to schemes, collapses because without identifiable schemes, there are no relativizing frameworks.
Incommensurability, as in Kuhn’s paradigms or Feyerabend’s anarchism, loses traction: scientific changes are shifts in belief sets, not unbridgeable gaps, allowing translation across eras.
In anthropology, Whorfian relativism is tempered; linguistic differences reflect varying emphases, not alternate realities, encouraging ethnographers to seek charitable translations over exoticization. This fosters a non-imperialist approach: cultures are interpretable on their terms, but those terms must connect to ours via shared rationality.
Implications extend to ethics and politics, rejecting cultural relativism that shields practices from critique, as universal interpretability implies common moral grounds. Davidson’s view supports pluralism without fragmentation, where diversity enriches a singular discourse rather than splintering it.
Relation to Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics
The rejection of conceptual schemes is intimately linked to Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics, where meaning is elucidated through truth conditions derived from Tarskian theories.
In radical interpretation, a truth theory serves as a meaning theory, assigning conditions under which sentences are true, constrained by evidence and charity. Schemes would disrupt this by allowing multiple truth theories for the same data, but Davidson argues that holism and charity yield convergence, not multiplicity.
Truth is not scheme-relative but primitive, enabling interpretation without neutral content. This semantics obviates the need for schemes by treating language as directly engaging the world, with meanings fixed by causal relations and intersubjective agreement. The paper thus integrates with his broader project, where rejecting dualism reinforces the unity of truth, meaning, and reality.
Influence on Rorty’s anti-representationalism & McDowell’s “Mind and World”
Davidson’s ideas profoundly influenced Richard Rorty’s anti-representationalism and John McDowell’s Mind and World, reshaping pragmatism and epistemology.
Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) embraces Davidson’s rejection of schemes to dissolve the appearance-reality distinction, viewing language as coping tools rather than representations. Rorty radicalizes this into neo-pragmatism, where truth is solidarity, not correspondence, though Davidson critiqued Rorty’s relativist leanings.
McDowell’s 1994 work draws on Davidson to argue against coherentism and foundationalism, positing that experience is conceptually structured through “second nature,” echoing scheme rejection by integrating mind and world without dualistic gaps. Both extend Davidson’s anti-dualism, influencing quietism and perceptual externalism.
Contemporary relevance: pluralism, conceptual engineering, post-truth debates
In contemporary philosophy, Davidson’s rejection of schemes remains relevant to pluralism, conceptual engineering, and post-truth debates.
Pluralism benefits from his unity: diverse perspectives coexist within interpretable bounds, avoiding siloed relativism.
Conceptual engineering, as in Haslanger’s ameliorative projects, aligns with Davidson by treating concepts as revisable without scheme shifts.
In post-truth eras, his emphasis on charity counters polarization, urging interpretive generosity amid misinformation.
Applications in AI ethics question whether machines possess schemes, while global dialogues use his framework to bridge cultural divides.
Further Readings
* “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) — Proceedings and Addresses of the APA & in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
* Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation — Donald Davidson (1984/2001) — essays 13 & 14
* Relativism & the Limits of Interpretation — Jeff Malpas (in Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning)
* Davidson’s Rejection of Conceptual Schemes — Michael P. Lynch (in Philosophy Compass)
* Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity — Richard Rorty (1989) — Rorty’s Davidsonian turn
* Two Dogmas of Empiricism — W.V.O. Quine (1951) — in From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953)
* The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas S. Kuhn (University of Chicago Press, 1962; 50th anniversary ed., 2012)
* Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf — John B. Carroll (ed.) (MIT Press, 1956)
* Mind and World — John McDowell (Harvard University Press, 1994)
* Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature — Richard Rorty (Princeton University Press, 1979)
* A Companion to Donald Davidson — Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (eds.) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) — includes essays on relativism and schemes
* Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality — Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (Oxford University Press, 2005) — chapter on conceptual schemes
* Truth and Predication — Donald Davidson (Belknap Press, 2005) — extends ideas on truth and interpretation
* The Essential Davidson — Donald Davidson (Oxford University Press, 2006) — anthology with key papers including on schemes
* Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology — Michael Krausz (ed.) (Columbia University Press, 2010) — includes discussions of Davidson’s critique
相關詞彙：
* Conceptual scheme: Language and objects (ontology) are assumed as conceptual scheme by some authors. - In contrast, the content is formed by stimulus influences. In particular, between W.V.O. Quine and D. Davidson the status of the conceptual scheme is disputed. See also reference system, language, meaning.
Written by Outis, 03/22/26
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Published in LICENTIA POETICA
Unveiling the Soul of Expression. Delve into profound exploration of liberated discourse. Explore the interplay of emotions and ideas, as this publication navigates the intricate realms of philosophy.
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值得一讀的4本哲學類書籍 -- Mark Manson
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下文列舉的4本書中：我30-40年前，在書店陳列架上經常看到第二本這部暢銷書，後來也多次看到它被引用。第三本介紹尼切的生平。雖然我一本也沒有讀過，但開卷有益；而且有以上兩本在內，門森先生的功力和推薦應該信得過；所以轉載於此。
4 Modern Philosophy Books You Should Read
Mark Manson, 03/19/26
When most people think of philosophy, they likely imagine indecipherable books that stretch on for a thousand pages, saying and solving nothing. They envision stuffy old men in misbuttoned shirts, untied shoelaces with mismatched socks, shuffling about the hallways of some archaic university, mumbling to themselves, completely unaware of the humanity around them.
And most of the time, they wouldn’t be wrong. As someone who reads a lot of philosophy, I’ve struggled through my fair share of overlong philosophy books that seem outdated or worse, irrelevant. Which isn’t to say I haven’t also come across brilliant ones that offer a nuanced understanding of the often indecipherable world around us.
Here are four best books on modern philosophy that I discovered in recent years. They cover a wide array of topics and were (mostly) enjoyable reads. Approach them with an open mind, and they may rekindle the sense of wonder you lost to adulthood.
Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Sufferin by Scott Samuelson
A number of people asked me this year for recommendations of books to start learning more about philosophy and I think this book is as great a starting point as any.
There are two things I loved about this book. The first is that Samuelson structures the book around one of the fundamental questions of philosophy: how do we justify and cope with unnecessary suffering in the world? The book is a nice tour of the major perspectives throughout history — from the Ancient Greeks and Christianity to Buddhism and Confucius.
The second thing I like is that Samuelson grounds his philosophical discussion in the real world. He is a volunteer teacher at a local prison. Therefore, he grounds many of the philosophical issues he brings up about suffering with discussions he’s had with the inmates at the prison where he teaches. The result is a nice application for some of the headier topics.
Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
I’m going to be honest. I’ve tried to read Gödel, Escher, Bach two different times in the last three years and failed (spoiler: there’s a bunch of math and stuff). But this time I powered through and I’m extremely grateful I did. Two comments:
1. Not even considering the content of the book, the format is absolutely a joy to go through. Hofstadter pulls from number theory, music theory, visual arts, molecular biology, Zen Buddhism, ancient philosophy, and funny little dialogues with talking animals and somehow ties them all together neatly into an 800-page book about paradoxes, self-referential systems, AI, and consciousness. The amount of thought and effort that went into this book is dizzying as well as breathtaking. It may be the most impressive book I’ve ever read in my life, for whatever that’s worth.
2. The central point of the book takes a long time to get to. In fact, you spend almost 700 pages leading up to it. Hofstadter complains in the preface to the anniversary edition that most people who read GEB actually don’t even get the main point of it. And part of that is likely because he doesn’t get to it until the last chapter.
His point is that systems, be they DNA strands or formal logic or computer programing languages or the human brain, are self-referential and inherently incomplete. This self-reference and incompleteness creates a sense of paradox, like:
The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
He then argues that it’s the emergence of these self-referential systems that make up the basis of consciousness. That essentially, what we understand as the “self” is merely a symbol constructed within the mind that is always interacting with every other symbol the mind constructs. In that sense, what we perceive as consciousness is a constantly fluid system of interactions between the mind’s “self” symbol and its “other” symbols.
I’m not doing his thesis justice, of course. But here’s another reason I loved this book — it explains how matter can order itself into such patterns of information that it can “spin up” and start processing greater and greater amounts of information to the point it becomes “conscious,” and how this is a very special and rare thing indeed.
I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux
If 2017 was the year I fell in love with Kant, 2018 is the year I fell in love with Nietzsche. I didn’t expect to love I Am Dynamite. Hell, I didn’t even expect to like it. I bought it because I wanted to use one of Nietzsche’s ideas in a section of my new book and was curious about some of his biographical details. This book had just come out and was being lauded as the most humane and accurate treatment of the philosopher’s life, so it seemed like perfect timing to buy it. I’d just pick it up, check out a few details, maybe use an anecdote or two in my own book, and that’d be that.
But I ended up reading the whole damn thing, cover to cover, in three days.
I couldn’t put it down. Not only is it sublimely written. But I had no idea how fascinating the man’s life had been. Likely born with a neurological disorder, Nietzsche spent most of his life in severe pain. He couldn’t be exposed to bright lights. He spent weeks at a time in dark rooms. He had debilitating migraines. Injuries from his military days hobbled him and poor medical treatments for dysentery and diphtheria left his digestive tract in ruins. His body was a ruin.
By all accounts, he should have been a decrepit, miserable soul. Yet, he lived his life with a fierce, shameless vitality. He attracted and mingled a motley band of celebrities, professors, royalty, and bohemians. Intellectually, his thoughts leapt over chasms that had halted those who had come before him. He was a charming, if bitter, man who had an almost prophetic vision into the future of western culture, as well as the world.
That little section in my book that was going to reference Nietzsche turned into multiple pages. Then it became a whole chapter. Then much of the book’s central premise came to rely upon Nietzsche’s thought. I read three of Nietzsche’s other books this year. I read another biography about him. I just couldn’t get enough of the man. One day, I’d like to read all of his major works.
If you are interested in philosophy, this book is a beautiful entry point to Nietzsche’s work and ideas. If you just love good biographies, this book is also a pure joy. If you’re into European history and want to understand some of the social forces that later led to the German nationalism, the Nazis, and how Nietzsche’s ideas were later distorted to justify some of the world’s worst atrocities, then this is also a must-read. I’m into all of the above, so I was in heaven. This was my favorite book in 2018.
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund
Full disclosure: I hated the last third of this book. I thought it was terrible. But the first two-thirds were so beautiful and profound, I couldn’t help but admit that this was my favorite read this year. The 35-page introduction was probably worth the price by itself.
This is a philosophy book. Philosophy tends to be either
a) an absolute chore to get through, often hardly making sense, or
b) one of the best reading experiences of your life (there’s a reason my favorite book the last three years have always been philosophy books).
This Life is, at times, breathtaking in its simplicity and depth.
The book attempts to create a secular basis of morality, something philosophers have done for millennia. The starting point is simple: we all die. This is possibly the only subjective truth we all share. And it’s from our knowledge of our own death that makes life feel scarce and valuable. Therefore, all meaning in life stems from the knowledge of our own death. Hägglund then spends most of the book making an array of arguments extending from this realization — how religious beliefs of an eternal life are at the root of all unethical behaviors; how the freedom to choose one’s own meaning is the hardest yet most important use of one’s mind; how the desire to escape death inevitably forces us to avoid what gives us meaning in life.
Then, about 220 pages in, the book gets political. Hell, it goes beyond political — it becomes unabashedly Marxist. While I have no problem airing intelligent discussions about Marxism, Hägglund tries to argue that Marxism is the logical extension of the moral framework he set up in the first two-thirds of the book. In my mind, it simply doesn’t work. The feeling of an author stepping out of his area of expertise is tangible while reading. He seems lost in some sections, desperately clawing to square his political beliefs with his philosophical beliefs. As a result, many of the statements about economics, means of production, growth and so on are naive at best, and plain wrong at worst.
Despite that, I wholly recommend the first 200 pages of this book. They are fantastically written and explained. They are deep and life-affirming without being religious. They are, hands down, my best reading experience of 2019.
Looking for More Books to Read?
I’ve put together a list of over 200 “best books” organized by genre, as well as my all-time recommended reading list that includes the book(s) I’m reading each month. Check them out.
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Author of #1 NYTimes Bestseller ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck’. OG Blogger. Psychology Nerd. I enjoy cats and whiskey. But not at the same time.
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意義從何而來？-Ralph Lewis
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路額實教授的論述和結論有相當多的思考盲點和認知偏執；短時間也說不清楚。先行發表於此，各位請自行欣賞或研判。
How Did Meaning Emerge in a Meaningless Universe?
How life created significance.
Ralph Lewis M.D., 01/15/26 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
* Meaning emerges from goal-directed life forms, not from information or physical patterns alone.
* Neural patterns gain meaning through evolutionary shaping, individual learning, and how they guide action.
* Consciousness makes meaning felt—organisms can hold options in mind, compare them, and choose.
This post is Part 1 of a series.
In an earlier post, I explored how meaning might arise in a physical, meaningless universe—drawing in part on physicist Carlo Rovelli’s relational account, which treats meaning as emerging when physical correlations acquire evolutionary significance.[1] But that post left largely unexplored how this actually happens in brains. How do electrical signals come to be about something? How does significance arise from circuitry?
This four-part series explores how the brain generates meaning, tracing how meaning emerges in living systems—from biological value and goal-directedness (Part 1), through the neural representations that guide action (Part 2), to shared symbols grounded in social cognition (Part 3), and finally to the cultural institutions and personal narratives that give meaning its richest human forms (Part 4).
The Gap Between Pattern and Purpose
Physical systems exhibit patterns—molecular arrangements, light wavelengths, temperature distributions, etc.—that we can describe in informational terms.
Claude Shannon’s information theory, developed in the 1940s for telecommunications, formalizes informational description by treating unpredictability as the measure of a signal. Predictable patterns (like “AAAAA”) contain little Shannon information because you already know what’s coming. Random patterns (like “XQJKZPM”) contain maximal Shannon information because every letter is unpredictable. Yet random strings mean nothing—they carry no semantic content. Shannon information says nothing about meaning.[2]
But meaning clearly exists for organisms with brains. A scent can signal food or danger to an animal. The brain’s representation of that scent is about something in the world. Philosophers refer to this property as “aboutness,” or intentionality. It arises when living systems register environmental patterns in relation to their own needs, capacities, and stakes in survival.
Meaning Is Fundamentally Relational
Meaning, however, exists not in neural patterns alone but in relationships between those patterns, the organism's evolutionary history, its current goals, and the environment it navigates. A pattern of neural firing becomes meaningful through how it was shaped by natural selection, how it's been tuned by the organism's individual learning, and how it's currently being used to guide behavior.
Consider place cells in a mouse’s hippocampus. When the mouse occupies a specific location, particular neurons fire. That pattern represents location because evolution favored spatial tracking, learning refined it through experience, and downstream circuits use it to guide navigation.
The meaning isn’t in the firing pattern itself but in its web of functional and evolutionary relations.[3] But this raises a deeper question: What makes these relations matter for the organism in the first place?
Value: The Missing Ingredient
Living systems must maintain themselves against thermodynamic decay. This creates intrinsic goals (that is, biologically grounded needs and action tendencies): to maintain viability and reproduce. As the neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon argues, this organizational vulnerability gives rise to genuine teleology: Systems that can fail have goals, and goals create value.[4]
This is where a semiotic framework becomes useful (the study of signs and how they acquire meaning): it distinguishes correlations that merely occur from those that function as signs for an organism. Signs, in this sense, are correlations that an organism interprets and uses relative to its goals.[5]
From Directive to Descriptive
Early in evolution, meaning-bearing signs take the form of simple biological signals—internal states that primarily control action rather than describing the world. When a bacterium detects a toxin, the internal signal doesn’t represent “Dangerous chemical X is present.” It functions, in effect, as “Move!”—a pragmatic control signal in neuroscientist and geneticist Kevin Mitchell’s sense, guiding behavior directly rather than encoding an explicit description of the world.[3]
But as nervous systems evolved to process long-range senses like vision, something changed: Directive signals were increasingly supplemented by descriptive models of the world. You can’t directly detect objects—only photons striking the retina—so additional processing evolved to infer objects from light patterns. This produced internal representations of world states rather than mere action commands. Crucially, these representations were decoupled from obligatory action and could be held “in mind,” compared, and evaluated before guiding behavior.
Predictive Brains and Valued Predictions
Rather than passively receiving input, brains continuously generate expectations shaped by prior experience and goals, updating them when predictions err.[6] When your visual cortex represents an apple, that representation is meaningful because it predicts features relevant to eating and action—sweetness, texture, and graspability. These predictions aren’t neutral; they’re saturated with value, and the brain doesn’t predict all features equally. Prediction errors drive learning because they signal that something relevant to action went differently than expected[7]—for example, when an apple that looks ripe turns out to be sour or inedible.
Artificial Intelligence and Meaning
Could any sufficiently complex computer generate meaning by instantiating patterns and predictions like those found in brains? Not as computers are currently designed. Computers can instantiate patterns and predictions, but meaning emerges only in systems with intrinsic goals—systems for which outcomes genuinely matter. When a chess program evaluates positions, nothing matters to the program itself. When a brain generates prediction errors, something genuinely matters: The organism is navigating toward self-maintenance and reproduction, ends that are inherent in its organization as a living system.[3,4] Whether artificial systems could develop genuine meaning for themselves remains an open question, but it would require them to have stakes in their own continued existence.[8]
Consciousness and the Evaluation of Meaning
Neurobiologist Simona Ginsburg and evolutionary biologist Eva Jablonka propose a key evolutionary threshold: Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), the ability to form flexible compound associations between arbitrary stimuli and value outcomes and to use these associations across contexts. This allows an organism to hold multiple representations "in mind" simultaneously, compare them, and choose among them based on learned values.[5]
Before the evolution of UAL, organisms tend to respond to stimuli reflexively. After UAL, they can evaluate alternative responses before acting. This transforms the adaptive landscape.
Consider a pre-UAL animal encountering food near a predator. Fixed responses dominate: Approach food, flee predator. But with UAL, the animal can represent both possibilities, weigh relative values, and choose. Representations become objects of evaluation.
Before UAL, organisms respond without clear evidence of felt experience. After UAL, behavior suggests conscious awareness. Ginsburg, Jablonka, and their coauthor, philosopher of biology Jonathan Birch, argue that once animals can flexibly learn and compare options, their internal states are no longer just control signals—they feel like something. Consciousness isn't something added later—it emerges with UAL itself. The functional processes that enable flexible learning don't just correlate with consciousness; they constitute it.[5]
How this works mechanistically remains incompletely understood. For example, some theorists argue that consciousness emerges when representations become globally available for comparison within a “global workspace,”[9] while others emphasize recursiveness—the ability to represent one’s own representations. On either view, consciousness arises when meaning becomes an object of evaluation rather than a mere control signal.
How distributed neural processes create unified subjective experience remains incompletely understood. What's clear is that for conscious organisms like us, meaning is always experienced, not just enacted. Consciousness may be what goal-directed interpretation and evaluation feel like from the inside.
Evolutionary Transitions in Meaning
Jablonka and Ginsburg identify major evolutionary transitions in how goals, values, and meaning operate:
* Nonconscious to conscious: The emergence of UAL enabled flexible learning, evaluative comparison, and subjective experience.
* Nonlinguistic to linguistic: The emergence of symbolic cognition allowed meanings to be shared, preserved, and transformed across generations.
Each transition introduced new forms of goals and values, reshaping the targets and dynamics of selection. The transition from nonconscious to conscious processing—the shift from neural to mental—is particularly consequential: Once organisms could consciously evaluate competing representations, selection began to operate not only on behavior but also on representations themselves—what Jablonka and Ginsburg call mental selection.[10]
The Trajectory of Meaning
We’ve now traced meaning from its origin in goal-directed life to its emergence as something organisms can consciously evaluate.
In Part 2, we’ll examine how neural circuits give rise to semantic content and support the flexible use of meaning in perception, thought, and action.
References
1. Ralph Lewis, “In a Meaningless Universe, Where Does Meaning Come From?,” Psychology Today, March 9, 2023, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/202303/in-a-mea…; Carlo Rovelli, “Meaning = Information + Evolution,” in Wandering Towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Matter Become Purposeful?, ed. Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018), 17–27.
2. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379–423, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.
3. Kevin J. Mitchell, “The Origins of Meaning: From Pragmatic Control Signals to Semantic Representations,” preprint, PsyArXiv, 2023, https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dfkrv_v1.
4. Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).
5. Jonathan Birch, Simona Ginsburg, and Eva Jablonka, "Unlimited Associative Learning and the Origins of Consciousness: A Primer and Some Predictions, "Biology & Philosophy 35 (2020): article 56, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09772-0; Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, "Learning and the Evolution of Conscious Agents," Biosemiotics 15 (2022): 401–437, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09501-y.
6. Andy Clark, “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science, ”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36, no. 3 (2013): 181–204, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477.
7. Anil K. Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 2021); Karl Friston, “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 2 (2010): 127–138.
8. There are many ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems fall short of human cognition. Acutely mindful of this in developing this blog series, AI tools were cautiously used for research support, idea generation, and assistance with phrasing and clarity, but all analysis, arguments, and interpretations are the author’s own, and the final prose reflects the author’s voice and expertise.
9. Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, “Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing,” Neuron 70, no. 2 (2011): 200–227, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2011.03.018.
10. In mental selection, internal representations compete for influence over behavior, and those that better guide action are preferentially retained and reused through learning and experience. Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, “Consciousness: Its Goals, Its Functions and the Emergence of a New Category of Selection, ”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 380 (2025): art. 20240310, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0310.
Ralph Lewis, M.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and a consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto.
Consciousness Essential Reads
There Goes the Sun: Pondering the Universe's Past and Future
Why Consciousness Science Needs Darwin
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尼切和馬克斯兩位思想的對比 - Christopher Linkiewicz
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在我「私淑」的許多大師中，馬克斯和尼切大概排數一數二的位置；卡木、柏格、韋伯、米爾斯、達斯妥也夫斯基等等的位置就得慢慢思量了。別的「心法」或「文功」我這個蠢弟子學不會，只希望能多多少少沾染到尼切「存在風」和馬克思「戰鬥性」兩者的一些影子。
下文近3,000字，我一時三刻之間讀不完；由於上述因緣，循往例，先刊出、後拜讀、再找時間寫「讀後」。
Nietzsche Contra Marx
Perspectives on Method and Ideology
Christopher Linkiewicz, 01/19/26
Introduction: Marxism Today
Communism and Marxism have experienced a resurgence in popularity since 2015 with the rise of Trumpism, although earlier political trends have also influenced the popularity of alternative leftist ideologies, notably the Reagan presidency. The 20th century saw numerous communist governments rise and fall, notably the Soviet Union (1922–1991); China has been communist since 1949; North Korea since 1972; Cuba since 1976; Vietnam, 1976; Laos, 1975. In the United States, the 1950s saw the rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, which was characterized by institutional anti-Communism and fearmongering that there were “205 card-carrying Communists” working within the US government.
In the present day, numerous monumental political events have contributed to the overall perturbation of the left: the rise of Trumpism; racist police brutality; extreme concentrations of wealth in high places; fascist echo chambers overrunning the normal functioning of social media like Twitter/X; Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine; and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The prevalence of dubious right-wing and alt-right politics have generated substantial interest in alternative left-wing politics: Marxism, communism, socialism, anarchism. Arguably, the presence of the opposition between right and left has led to the aggravation of both sides of the political spectrum. Antifa arguably embodies the resentment of the left and a willingness to engage in direct political action; whereas the influential linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky has detracted from Antifa as being “a gift to the alt-right.”
Increasingly, an emerging class-consciousness has appeared on the left, with the object of pushing back against the demons of ultra-conservatism, neo-fascism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, artificial political polarization, exclusive tribal dynamics, psychological warfare, societal breakdown and urban decay, the (often self-conscious) collapse of values into nihilism, etc. This shift in the culture of the American left, particularly the alternative left, has often expressed itself as an increased interest in communism and Marxism.
Given the unpredictability and volatility of our present context, many leftists, including politicians, have turned to the challenging and exciting writings of Karl Marx. These politicians — principally democratic socialists —may not represent the prodigious threat to the system allegedly posed during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Democratic socialists more nearly resemble progressives and Greens, but have been willing to ride the coattails of Marx’s resurgence in popularity. Bernie Sanders wrote a book called It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism — whose title represents a thinly-veiled reference to Marx and to the recent surge in enthusiasm of workers and leftists about Marxism and communism. Marx’s critique of capitalism is incisive, reminding us — in theory — of our mutual responsibility and shared humanity, with, for instance, his concept of the alienation of labor.
The alienation of labor is defined in the first chapter of Capital (1867–1894), and refers to the propensity of capitalists to reap the surplus of the labor of their employees. Under capitalism, workers serve a function: their job entails the performance of certain useful tasks and the production of certain definite products or results. In other words, laborers sell “themselves”— their time, their attention, their skills — working so many hours per week, and in return they receive a wage or salary. That is, in the Marxist cosmology, the extent of their usefulness to capitalists. The express purpose of labor is the production of a commodity. A commodity is a product, or, to use Marx’s terminology, a use-value —which has a price, and the price determines the overall importance of the labor required to produce that commodity, to capitalists.
Capital is a dense and challenging “deep dive” into economics and sociology — viewed, however, through a lens that is unmistakably philosophical. Before he was a Marxist, Marx himself had been a member of the philosophical sect known as the Young Hegelians. We should assume, therefore — although Marx is primarily recognized as an economic and political author — that Marx has maintained some general connection to the world of philosophy. That being said, Marx is not necessarily a mere “philosopher,” in the conventional sense of a more or less humble, ivory tower-dwelling theoretician of abstractions, dreams, and possibilities; his role, historically, is decisively one of overwhelming influence with far-reaching real-world consequences.
Nietzsche “on” Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), best known as one of the primary forerunners of Existentialism, along with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), never mentions or engages with Marx anywhere in his œuvre. An investigation of any possible connection or opposition existing between the works of Nietzsche and Marx, then, must necessarily constitute a speculative engagement with the consequences of their individual tendencies in thinking.
Communism and Left-Authoritarianism
Democracy is not necessarily well enough equipped on its own to defend against a concentration of racist, fascist, and alt-right attitudes among conservatives. Communism is one of the most frequently drawn-on formulas that leftists have turned to in their efforts to push back against the rise of Trumpism, neo-fascism, and recent political turmoil. The resurgence of interest in Marx may speak to a sincere desire and a need for humanistic politics in a survivable society. But Marx doesn’t set himself up as a simple agent of peaceful change.
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), co-authored by Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two authors acting as lifelong collaborators attempt to draw on “the specter of communism,” amassing the interest of workers and laborers throughout Europe, to seize the means of production, overthrow capitalism, and institute socialist governments. In a word, the goals of communism are understood to run counter to the self-interestedness of the capitalists, and it is for this reason that, for communists, revolutionary change can only be achieved through revolution. For communists, the proper direction of society, politics, and economics, can only be achieved by a complete dismantling of a corrupt system that has perpetuated unending class struggle.
For Marx and Engels, and for communism and the proletariat (working class), capitalism must be phased out in order to make a space in which for socialism to emerge — not as an improvement upon capitalism, but as a complete re-creation of the economic and political machine. The state exists to protect the interests of the ruling class, and consequently, Marx and Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto, violent revolution may sometimes be necessary to fully realize the interests of the communists. In practice, as is well known, communist regimes have often been unstable, brutal, and authoritarian. Under Stalin, the USSR silenced dissent and instituted “state art,” with rigid regulations controlling subject matter and tone, including a positive portrayal of socialism.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
When overthrowing corrupt, capitalist orders, in order to transition to a socialist government, an interim government is to be found in what Marx and Engels called the dictatorship of the proletariat. The capitalist government does not represent the interests of the proletariat. The proletariat, or working class, is the class whose interests are to be represented by a socialist government. This new government, it is assumed, will take time to implement — especially in lieu of violent revolution.
This is one place where Nietzscheans might wish to stop us. What are the consequences of the proletariat seizing control of society? What specific value do the individual members of the proletariat have for me? After all, as a prospective Übermensch, I may wish to, say: lead my own life, develop my own skills and abilities, implement my own values, etc. An individual proletarian’s wishes, whims, or happiness may or may not interest me directly in any way that is not more or less transitory.
Nietzsche’s method
This, however, doesn’t necessarily make a philosophical comparison of Marx and Nietzsche hopelessly speculative. Nietzsche casts himself in his books as an iconoclast, criticizing and deriding any and all philosophical and literary predecessors, as well as distancing himself from the egalitarian values and tendencies of democracy. He is often remembered — and misunderstood — for setting up an opposition between “master” and “slave” morality, a dichotomy he adopted from G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), but radically recast in the milieu of his own philosophy. For Hegel, the “master” and “slave” opposition refers to the outcome of just such an opposition, and implies the more primitive fact of power structures as such.
Hegel himself opposed the institution of slavery, putting forward a universal moral standard emphasizing what democratic institutions refer to as “human rights.” Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master and slave morality speaks, rather, to the opposition between “life-affirming” and “life-denying” morality —respecting self-overcoming and self-benefit, as opposed to ascetic religious values like universal compassion and charity — and as such is intended to bolster his individualistic imperative toward the creation of aristocratic values.
Marx and Nietzsche, therefore, share a common antecedent in the figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Marx, on the one hand, inherited the general form of Hegel’s dialectical method, reshaping it into what has come to be known as dialectical materialism — itself distinct from Hegel’s method and therefore no longer Hegelian. Nietzsche, on the other hand, directly and repeatedly attacks the “will to a system,” and thereby explicitly distances himself from Hegel’s overall philosophical project. Nietzsche preferred to play the part of a gadfly, scrutinizing assumptions and refusing to put forward a systematic philosophy in the spirit of Kant or Hegel (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, Part 1: “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”). Any comparison of Marx and Nietzsche must therefore rely on a general sense acquired from a careful reading and interpretation of both thinkers.
In regards to Nietzsche’s opinion on Marxism, one might imagine that concepts of the will to power and a “master morality” would have placed Nietzsche’s interests in an opposition to Marx’s. Marx wanted to bring accountability to the proletariat, the working class at large; Nietzsche wanted to overcome the interests of the “herd” and instill aristocratic values for the capable and worthy. If the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t speak to aristocratic values, but wounds or undermines them, it may not hold the interest of Nietzsche’s ideal reader. On the other hand, one might also imagine Nietzsche as moving altogether independently of Marx’s influence.
Bureaucracy and Banality
Within the government itself — from auxiliary office spaces where bored civil servants unleash psychopathic apathy and sadomasochistic rage on the defenseless, the unemployed, the mentally ill; to wealthy millionaires in Congress — there exists a preponderance of what the public has come to know as “bureaucracy.” Bureaucracy refers to the hierarchical infrastructure of “the system.” The bureaucracy is the hand that feeds its employees and, often, neglects the needs of the populace. It is a largely reflexive internal structure that subsists on the complicit participation of its representatives.
Philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt’s book documenting the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, formulates a novel theory of the psychology of Eichmann. Eichmann never witnessed the results of his own actions; theoretically, as a mere bureaucrat, he himself didn’t directly commit any crimes against the Jews during the Holocaust, even as he participated in the Nazis’ hierarchy.
In 1934, when Eichmann applied successfully for a job, the S.D. [Sicherheitsdienst (the Security Service of the S.S)] was a relatively new apparatus in the S.S., founded two years earlier […] to serve as the Intelligence service of the Party […]. Its initial task had been to spy on Party members, and thus to give the S.S. an ascendancy over the regular Party apparatus. Meanwhile it had taken on some additional duties, becoming the information and research center for the Secret State Police, or Gestapo. These were the first steps toward the merger of the S.S. and the police[…]. Eichmann, of course, could not have known of these future developments, but he seems to have known nothing either of the nature of the S.D. when he entered it; this is quite possible, because the operations of the S.D. had always been top secret. As far as he was concerned, it was all a misunderstanding […]. (The Portable Hannah Arendt, pp. 313–314)
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt introduces the concept of “the banality of evil.” This refers to the breakdown of responsibility that occurs within a bureaucratic hierarchy, where one is innocent of the hierarchy’s overall consequences because one’s role within the hierarchy is one of passive acceptance of a minor role. The hierarchy exists for a purpose, but that purpose is not shared by all of the hierarchy’s members. Responsibility is deferred.
Likely, neither Marx nor Nietzsche would approve of the banality of evil. In his existentialist magnum opus, Jean-Paul Sartre coins the term mauvaise foi, or bad faith — a term that likely would have resonated with both Marx and Nietzsche. In practice, the banality of evil might be seen as influencing Marxists to recognize the corruption of the present order. On the other hand, one can imagine almost any government falling prey to the banality of evil.
Marxism and Nietzscheanism
It begins to appear that Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective areas of interest and target audience are quite different. Marx wants to bring about a new political order that emphasizes the worker in the proletariat (political orders affect everyone), while Nietzsche wants to be read by, and create readers, who are self-sufficient, willing to consider radical ideas, and create their own values. Does such a convergence of ideas, between Marxists and Nietzscheans, lead to a direct opposition of ideologies? Fortunately, it seems Nietzsche intended to eschew the need for ideology altogether, attacking the weaknesses of ideology in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers.” Yet one might criticize the writings of Marx for being too practically concerned for those of an academic philosopher, and not “metaphysical” enough — in the way that Kant’s system, and Nietzsche’s destruction of it, are both in some sense “metaphysical.” The will to scrutinize dangerous or ill-considered ideas is prevalent in the writings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche applies the method of skepticism (one of the philosopher’s most powerful tools) to skepticism itself in Beyond Good and Evil. Arguably, Marxists, post-Marxists, communists, and other left-wing ideologies, do not necessarily train their adherents to use logic, skepticism, and other tools in a rigorous way. Their primary concern may be in gathering like minds to work on like-minded projects. Yet for the philosopher — as opposed to the members of political organizations — these tools are essential to developing an accurate, functional picture of reality, unafraid of thinking radically, but ready to question the motive or structure of any idea or ideology.
20th-century philosophy
Nietzsche’s legacy is prevalent throughout the landscape of 20th-century philosophy, including explicitly, with French Nietzscheanism — which included Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze — but also among authors not using the “Nietzschean” demonym: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida absorbed significant influence from Nietzsche. Generally, these authors have also been influenced (in one way or another) by Marx, and the “specter of communism” was no doubt a conscious consideration for all of them, whether or not any relationship to Marx or communism was present in their writings (as in the case of Louis Althusser and other structural Marxists).
Sartre’s Marxist Existentialism
The 20th century French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre — in contrast to Nietzsche, one of his primary influences — had a more sympathetic view of communism. Sartre’s “undiscovered” last work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason — a sprawling, unfinished philosophical treatise longer than Being and Nothingness — represents the culmination of a longtime affinity for Marx and communism, and the object of uniting Marxism and existentialism. The Critique serves as the mature expression of ideas found in his preceding work investigating a synthesis of existentialism and Marxism, Search for a Method. The Critique also serves to investigate and lay out the basis of dialectical materialism, and as such serves as an undertaking already within the milieu of Marxism. Dialectics, within Hegelianism, refers to the process of developing opposed ideas toward a resolution; while in the work of Marx and Engels, dialectical materialism refers to the development of oppositions with reference to a matrix of social and economic situations.
Sartre’s affinity for Marxism and communism had, in previous decades, contributed to his falling-out with his longtime compatriot and literary fellow, Albert Camus, a permanent break that would last for the rest of their literary and personal lives. Camus had previously been a member of the French Communist Party (1935–36), and briefly the Algerian Communist Party (1936) (he was native to Algeria, although professionally based in Paris). Camus participated actively in the French resistance against the French Occupation, contributing to and serving as editor of the banned newspaper Combat.
Ultimately, Camus’s short-lived affinity for communism and Marxism took a back seat to his humanitarian and humanistic concerns, and it was on this basis that he broke with Marxism and communism. Sartre and Camus became ideologically opposed, particularly on the status of violence in communism, with Sartre viewing “the cause” as primary, while Camus’s moral objections prevailed over his willingness to play a party to what he sensed as an authoritarian tendency within communism.
Conclusion
Marx and Nietzsche do not directly engage or encounter one another anywhere in their writings, which are themselves predominantly concerned with very different subject matter: for Marx, economics, social thought, and political action; for Nietzsche, self-cultivation and the “will to power.” Marx sought to bring more power to working people, while Nietzsche arguably sought separateness from common and ordinary people, in much the same way that he admonishes pity and democratic values. Both thinkers exerted significant influence on the history of 20th century philosophy, which must also inevitably carry into the 21st century. The relationship between Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective legacies, or whether there is any, etc., may ultimately remain an open question.
Bibliography
* Arendt, Hannah. The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: The Viking Press.
* Camus, Albert, 2004. The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert, Justin O’Brien, Hamish Hamilton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
* Hegel, G. W. F., 1807. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Marx, Karl, 1867–1894. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books.
* Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, 1848. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers, 1970.
* Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1943. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1992. New York: Washington Square Press.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1960. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Verso.
* Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1960. Search for a Method. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Vintage Books.
Written by Christopher Linkiewicz
I am a writer, musician, photographer, and more recently a painter, with a BA in philosophy. https://buymeacoffee.com/consensusreality
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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客觀主義、相對觀、和關係論 - Pierz Newton-John
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下文作者是第n位自以為找到「真理」的半吊子哲學家。所謂「半吊子」，我指的是：作者用了80%左右篇幅東拉西扯的批評傳統「(自然)科學」觀點；但他沒有講清楚自己的觀點「是什麼」，以及「為什麼」它優於前者。
相較於論述需要「能破能立」這個標準，我給下文的評語是：「未破未立」。不過，作者本人似乎也了解到這一點；他在全文最後給自己搭了個台階(請見「作者後記」)。
我過去常常以「喃喃自語」或「大呼小叫」來描寫這一類型的「政論性」文字。
Objectivism, Relativism, Relationalism
The case for a fully relational account of reality
Pierz Newton-John, 01/05/26
Take a glance around the space in which you find yourself and make a mental note of what you see. Really, take a moment. In all likelihood, the description you came up with consists of something like a laundry list of objects, perhaps with some propositional clauses to establish their relative locations. “I see a wilting Christmas tree, a sofa. An iPad is lying on the sofa next to some cushions (…)” — and so on. This type of summary — objects first, relations second — reflects our default perceptual mode, especially in Western industrial society, in which many of the things we see around us are manufactured objects that do not interdepend with their environment in any significant way, unlike the things we find in nature, which are less sharply bounded, more interpenetrating.
And yet there is another way we could see the same perceptual facts, one which privileges relationality over objects. This is closer to the view of the artist, perhaps, of the psychedelic trip, or the meditative state in which the separateness of individual things is dissolved within an indivisible wholeness. Psychedelics pioneer Stanislav Grof called this mode of perception “holotropic” — moving in the direction of wholeness — as opposed to the everyday “hylotropic” mode, which divides the world into parts. It is also the Buddhist perceptual mode, in which everything is a “dependent arising”, nothing stands alone and self-subsistent.
It is obvious, if we think about it, that the boundaries our perception draws around things don’t really exist. Step outside of the moment in time and space you currently occupy and the coffee table is revealed as a four-dimensional tube through spacetime, a standing wave of electricity and quarks, the ghostly mathematical denizens of the quantum world. Every ostensibly solid thing is an exchange of information from some place to another, a process too slow-oozing to recognise as such. This echoes the insights of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who argued a century ago against the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” For Whitehead, the world was composed not of static material substances, but of dynamic “occasions of experience” — a flow of events rather than a collection of things.
Objective perception is a handy fiction. It is the shorthand that the cognitive apparatus of tool-using apes employs to parse the world into what James Gibson termed “affordances”: the evolutionarily meaningful opportunities for interaction our environment offers. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, in The Case Against Reality, takes this evolutionary logic to its radical conclusion. He argues that we are systematically deceived by our senses; natural selection has provided us with a “user-friendly interface” that hides the complex truth of reality, much as a desktop icon hides the voltage and code of the software it represents. Nothing is even remotely as it seems.
The lineaments of this perspective were visible as early as 1905, when Einstein discovered the interconvertibility of matter and energy with his famous formula e=mc2. “Energy” is just another word for change, so Einstein’s equation reveals the fact that matter is change, too, just locked in a cyclical pattern. But what, then, is changing? The notion of substance as an ontological primitive has evanesced completely, replaced by change without a substrate, a strange notion for us apes to get our jungle-made heads around.
In the Relational Quantum Mechanics pioneered by Carlo Rovelli, the philosophical lesson that quantum physics has been trying to teach us for the past century is that all physical properties are relational in nature. That is, they pertain between systems; they do not inhere within them. Again, it was Einstein’s Special Relativity that opened the door by showing how many properties hitherto assumed to be absolute — such properties as mass, simultaneity and length — in fact depend on the reference frame of the observing system. QM, according to Rovelli, merely generalises the principle to all measurable properties.
The great Buddhist sage Nāgārjuna (龍樹；Nāgārjuna) reached much the same philosophical conclusion as early as the second century CE through simple reasoning. Every observable event depends on prior causes. We cannot ever isolate some property of an object of which we can say: this does not depend on anything before it. Everything is a dependent arising, flowing out of the conditions of the past and inseparable from them. From this, he denied the inherent existence (Sanskrit svabhava) of all phenomena, both mental and physical. This realisation is a cornerstone of enlightenment.
The logical philosophical extension of our naive sensory perceptions is atomism.It takes the primacy of objects in our sensory field at face value, combines it with the observation that the behaviour of complex systems can, to a large extent, be understood in terms of the behaviour of the parts, and concludes that the foundation of reality lies in some smallest, indivisible part: the atom. The Ancient Greek thinker Democritus is the philosopher most commonly credited with originating this theory, though historians generally agree that he was extending the work of Leucippus, an earlier Presocratic whose writings are now completely lost to time.
Democritus envisaged the world as composed of countless, extremely small objects of different shapes and sizes, the combinations and interactions of which gave rise to all the phenomena of the world. The atom, as the ultimate “thing of things”, served as ontological bedrock, with the relations between them important but secondary. Indeed, Democritus simply assumed time and space as an implicit background: a neutral arena within which the atoms moved rather than an ontological substrate in their own right.
Although largely overshadowed in the Christian era by Plato and Aristotle, Democritus’s ideas had a comeback in the scientific era when they were dusted off by John Dalton in the early 1800s and given a new, more rigorous empirical formulation, the basis for modern chemistry. When combined with Newtonian physics, the nineteenth century saw the apogee of atomic objectivism: a worldview so thoroughly accepted and apparently vindicated by experiment that scientists of the day found any alternative to it virtually inconceivable.
Even Max Planck, whose work on blackbody radiation at the turn of the century gave rise to the earliest quantum theory, did not really believe the implications of his own work. h, the constant of quantised action that provides the units for quantum-level measurements, was, he thought, just a kind of convenient fiction, a “calculation device” rather than a fundamental feature of reality itself. And yet the crack he opened in the formidable edifice of Newtonian physics did not cease to ramify until the final demolishing blow was struck with Heisenberg’s first paper on quantum mechanics, in 1925.
And yet, almost precisely one hundred years later, the work is not yet entirely done.
It is, after all, not so easy to unmake the foundations of our perception of reality. The human mind grasps for concretions even in the face of all evidence that the world is not concrete. Niels Bohr’s defensive manoeuvre against the tide of an abstract, relational reality was a Kantian one: he threw up his hands at what it all meant and declared that it is not the physicist’s job to answer questions of interpretation, to understand the Kantian noumenon or “thing in itself”. Shut up and calculate, is how David Mermin famously encapsulated the attitude.
We have to understand the culture of physics — and science as a whole — to understand how this position could have held sway for so long as the canonical interpretation (or non-interpretation) of Quantum Mechanics. The foundations of science lie in the backlash against the excesses of the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century, when it was decreed that undecidable questions such as whether or not the bread of communion literally turns into the flesh of Christ in the mouth of the worshipper should be the reason for wholesale slaughter and the ravage of Europe.
Those early scientists rejected questions that were not tractable to some concrete procedure that could adjudicate them. They saw themselves as building a bulwark against the kind of superstitious insanity that had led Europe into the nightmare of the Thirty Years War and the burning of witches. Over three centuries from 1600, they parsed out the subjective from the objective, colour from wavelength, molecular motion from the sensation of heat, and found what they took to be the bones of reality: cold, hard matter, bereft of all subjective qualities. Atoms and the void: all else was vanity. Reduction — a hard-nosed, show-me-the-money attitude as much as an epistemological procedure — came to define the scientific worldview.
Physicists like Rovelli, who straddle the worlds of physics and philosophy, are still very much in the minority. Most people attracted to the physical sciences are engineering-adjacent, wranglers of differential equations or complicated experimental apparatuses. They have little time for what they regard as sterile language games. Mathematical rigour and quantitative prediction are everything.
Philosophy of science as a discipline has thus tended to be highly conservative. It has historically concerned itself primarily with providing a post-hoc account of what it is that scientists do, rather than venturing into the shark-infested waters of trying to define what it is that scientists study. Think of Karl Popper’s mid-twentieth century formulation of the scientific method: hypotheses followed by attempts to falsify them empirically. As later philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend subsequently showed, this is not at all what scientists do, yet such was the state of science’s own understanding of itself.
Today, that picture has perhaps begun to change. A relational philosophy of science — not of what scientists do, but an actual “non-materialist, physicalist” metaphysics — now exists in the mainstream. Every Thing Must Go, by James Ladyman and Don Ross, makes the case for what the authors term “Ontic Structural Realism” (OSR), a view of reality based on our best understanding of contemporary physics that dispenses with the primacy of matter (materialism) in favour of a structural account of reality: the world as a web of relations rather than a vast collection of tiny objects in mechanical collision. As the title suggests, this is a picture of reality with no “things” in sight — subatomic particles are treated as nodes in a network of interactions rather than independent individual entities. We have shifted away from objects with intrinsic properties and identities, to a purely relational field.
This is already a big advance on what I learned studying the History and Philosophy of Science in the 1990s, when ontology never even got a look in the door. Still, a less cautious and deflationary philosophical tradition less concerned with the sensibilities of engineers, could, one might suspect, go a step further. In OSR, certain intrinsic properties remain: the laws of physics, for example, continue to be intrinsic properties of the universe.
Yet there are good reasons to suspect that these laws, too, are part of a relational structure rather than representing absolute, unchanging properties of the universe. The so-called fine-tuning problem in physics is the challenge of explaining why it is that the constants of physics — the speed of light or the strength of the weak force, numbers that seem embedded into the way the universe functions — seem to be finally calibrated to values that allow for life to emerge. Tweak any of them even slightly, and complex structures collapse: stars don’t form, or burn up too fast, complex chemistry becomes impossible, black holes swallow everything.
The “coincidence” that all these values should be set within precisely the bounds that allow for the emergence of intelligent life demands an explanation. Yet if the laws of physics are just givens, fundamental properties that do not depend on any set of relations beyond themselves, then no explanation can ever be forthcoming. This seems unscientific at best. Must we accept that there is a boundary — the laws of physics — where no more questions should be asked, beyond which understanding cannot proceed, even in principle? This would be tantamount to magic: saying that the laws of physics are what they are “because”.
The philosophical view that I believe is rationally justified by our state of knowledge and the a priori consideration that there should be no “hard boundaries” in our metaphysics, no states of affairs beyond the at least theoretical possibility of explanation, is what I call strong relationalism. It is the view that all properties whatsoever are relational in nature. It is relations “all the way down”.
If this view is correct, there is an unexpected and radical implication. In a purely relational cosmos, there cannot be the kind of God’s eye perspective that is required for a completely objective account of the world. There is no “view from nowhere”, in Thomas Nagel’s phrase, but only ever “views from somewhere”: relational perspectives. That’s because such a godlike point of view would itself constitute a non-relational absolute, a point of fixity outside the infinite relational field. The first-person perspective comes built in to the structure of reality itself.
We could put it this way: we see the laws of physics we do because observers must occupy relational perspectives that support observation. Since they cannot find a “hard boundary” in their observational field of view, they must find themselves to be part of a field within which a coherent account of their own origins is possible: a story of the relations upon which their own existence depends. The preconditions of conscious observation include the apparent flow of time, a finely balanced interplay of stability and change that looks something like matter and energy, an informational arena that looks like space. At the same time, since the relational field is boundless, they must find their own existence also permanently a partial mystery. Infinity always bleeds through an explanatory gap.
Objectivity with a capital ‘O’ may be impossible, but relationalism does not imply a slide into relativism, or the idea that “every perspective is equally valid”. It is entirely possible to make strong, specific claims about truth within the framework of strong relationalism. It is just that such claims can never be regarded as fully self-contained or complete. We can see this principle reflected in post-Gödelian notions of mathematical truth. Even though Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem showed that no sufficiently strong set of mathematical axioms can be regarded as complete in itself, this does not stop mathematicians from constructing proofs and relying on them. In the same way, the impossibility of ever nailing our foot, as it were, to some absolute self-complete truth does not prevent us from asserting that the world is round, or even from making strong moral claims. It is always only a matter of defining the correct relational context within which those claims are made.
As we pass the hundredth anniversary of what may arguably be regarded as the true birth of Quantum Mechanics: The 1925 Heisenberg/Born/Jordan paper “Zur Quantenmechanik” (“On Quantum Mechanics”), we are, I believe, just beginning to understand the radical philosophical shift it implies. We are leaving the shallow waters of objectivism and its shadow twin relativism behind, and venturing out into the deep waters of a truly relational view of reality. This shift entails leaving absolute certainties behind for good, a leap into the unknown that brings with it a certain lurch of fear for a species long addicted to the false comfort of such certainty. Reductionists, seeing safety in the retreat to a deflationary “common sense” that looks increasingly naive, may baulk. Yet the problem of absolute belief is what gave rise to the religious wars from whose ashes the scientific project was born in the first place. It’s time to let go.
Final note: a skeptical reader will no doubt find some of the above argument under-specified, especially in relation to the larger, more speculative leaps. The scope of an article of this length makes this inevitable. A more rigorously argued version can be found in my currently short-listed submission to the Berggruen Essay Competition: “The Relational Cosmos: Consciousness in a World Without Intrinsic Properties,” to be published by the Berggruen Institute in due course
Written by Pierz Newton-John
Writer, coder, former psychotherapist, founding member of The School Of Life Melbourne. Essayist for Dumbo Feather magazine, author of Fault Lines (fiction).
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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