Could you have someone else’s memories?

When you have a memory (for instance, you remember walking down the street from your house to the office this morning) — it seems perfectly obvious that this must be your memory. If you remember it, then the remembered episode must also be one of your past experiences. Otherwise it would not be a memory, but a fantasy. (Or some other kind of imaginative project.)

Yet some philosophers[1] have speculated about the idea of q-memories (or quasi-memories). A q-memory is like a memory; but if you have a q-memory, you don’t remember an episode from your own life, you remember one from another person’s life.[2] (Perhaps we could profitably apply the notion in an interpretation of Poe’s “Tale of the Ragged Mountains”?)

1) Richard Wollheim[3] has criticized the notion of q-memory as, first, “incompatible with the way […] in which persons, even as they live in the present, can be brought under the influence of the past” (TL 111-112); and secondly, as unintelligible (TL 112-117). The latter argument is more detailed, but the former is more interesting. Wollheim doesn’t pursue it in The Thread of Life, because in that book, he has used centered event-memory, the particular type of memory in question, to characterize what it means to live a human life. And assuming that characterization to fit, the argument would run into a circularity. But precisely why would that be?

2) The argument takes the form of modus tollens:

a) If q-memory were possible, then people could not lead their lives in the way they do.
b) People lead their lives in a way so that they can be brought under the influence of the past.

Premise b) expands the consequent of premise a) here, therefore

c) If q-memory were possible, then people could not be brought under the influence of the past.

The somewhat obscure phrase “brought under the influence of the past” means broadly this: when a person leads a life, he experiences it in the present — and thereby forms dispositions which then persist. Such dispositions can be beliefs, memories, dispositions to fantasize in a particular way, and so on. These dispositions exert some force over the person: memories come unbidden (sometimes); beliefs shape the way we perceive reality and act in the world; fantasies can inspire us or drain our energy away. We lead our lives, as Wollheim puts it, always “at a crossroads: at the point where a past that has affected him and a future that lies open meet in the present” (TL 31). And “that the past influences the person largely through mental states is responsible for much of how we live” (TL 32). This is the general claim of the book, and it is crystallized in premises a) to c) above.

Now since

d) We in fact lead our lives in the way we do.

e) Therefore, q-memory is not possible.

And e) follows from c) and d) by modus tollens.

3) So far, so good. The argument is valid, but its cogency would depend on the rather large claims about how we lead our lives. And evaluating those claims would mean to engage with the whole argument of The Thread of Life. But I’m not concerned with whether the argument is cogent; I’m concerned with the question why Wollheim thinks that it is circular.

To answer that question, it will be helpful to understand why Wollheim is interested in the idea of q-memory in the first place. The reason for that is that

“centered event-memory is best studied for the contribution it makes to the way in which persons lead their lives […] Specifically, it must be sufficient for the identity of a person’s life.” (TL 110)

In Wollheim’s picture, we can use centered event-memory as sufficient identity criterion for the life of a person (the totality of all events, actions, perceptions etc. in which that person is ever involved). If you have a centered event-memory of an episode (such as walking down the street from your house to the office this morning), this is sufficient for concluding that both the episode and your remembering pick out the same overall life.

Thus, the overall argument reads like this:

i) If q-memories were possible, centered event memory would not be a sufficient identity criterion for lives. 

ii) If q-memories were possible, then people could not be brought under the influence of the past. 

iii) People can in fact be brought under the influence of the past. 

iv) Q-memories are not possible. 

v) Therefore, centered event-memory is a sufficient identity criterion for lives.

Here, premises ii) to iv) are the equivalent of a) to e) above, and iv) follows from ii) and iii). As it stands, the argument is not valid, but it now fully reflects the line of thought which Wollheim presents. Supposing it could be made valid (which I think possible), it is now also quite clear where the circularity lies. For in order to state premise ii), one must assume something very close to v).

[1] Sydney Shoemaker (“Persons and Their Pasts”, in: American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970), 269-285), and following him, Derek Parfit, (“Personal Identity”, in: The Philosophical Review LXXX (1971), 3-27).

[2] Strictly speaking, the notion of q-memory is construed so that it contains memory as a special case, so when you’re having a q-memory, you are remembering something either from your own or from another person’s life. But the latter is of course the more intriguing possibility.

[3] Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life. The William James Lectures 1982. New Haven: Yale UP 1984. Quoted directly with TL and page number.

Wandering, soul-wandering, and magnetic rapport

After a day-long hiking trip in the Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville, Virginia, Augustus Bedloe has an astonishing tale to tell: was it a dream? a vision? or even a real experience — that he was transported to a different time (almost fifty years earlier) and a different place (the Indian city of Benares), where he got entangled in a riot, lived through the last hours in the life of a hot-blooded young officer and a strange after-death experience, until he then found himself back on his walking trail and returned home?

What are we going to make of "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains"[1] like this? Among those who hear of it is Dr Templeton, a physician who has been treating Mr Bedloe for some time, and who has established a kind of 'magnetic rapport' with him. After Bedloe has finished, we learn that Dr Templeton, at the exact time of that strange experience, had written an account from his own memory of those riots in Benares of the year 1870 in which his good friend, the young officer Oldeb, had died in an ill-judged attack. More coincidences: there is a portrait of Oldeb that remarkably resembles Bedloe, whose name incidentally is almost what you get when you read the officer's name backwards.

1) Two possible ways of explanation suggest themselves: one based on metempsychosis, the other based on hypnosis. Let's begin with the latter. The explanation would go somewhat like this: Dr Templeton is an enthusiastic follower of the theories and practices of Mesmerism, which postulates an 'animalistic magnetism' that accounts for a deep connection between physician and patient. Treating Bedloe, Templeton has achieved a remarkably stong influence on him: "between Doctor Templeton and Bedloe there had grown up, little by little, a very distinct and strongly marked rapport, or magnetic relation. I am not prepared to assert, however, that this rapport extended beyond the limits of the simple sleep-producing power; but this power itself had attained great intensity. [...] the will of the patient succumbed rapidly to that of the physician, so that [...] sleep was brought about almost instantaneously, by the mere volition of the operator, even when the invalid [i.e. Bedloe] was unaware of his presence."[2] (941)

Given this way of influence without observable interaction, perhaps Templeton's recounting and writing down of his earlier experiences have been sufficient to draw Bedloe, in the solitude of his walk (and under the influence of a strong dose of morphine; 942, 943) into a vision that shared its content with Templeton's memories. Templeton, as it were, telepathically transferred the recall of what he eyewitnessed a long time ago into Bedloe's weakened and suggestible mind, by either deliberate or accidental use of his 'magnetic' connection with his patient.

So that would be one possible explanation of what happened to Bedloe; the one based on hypnosis. If it rather seems bizarre to you, then wait until we get to the other one, the one that's based on metempsychosis.[3]

Before we get to that, however, let us check on the merits of the hypnosis explanation. On the one hand, it would account for the inexplicable similarity in content of Templeton's written tale and Bedloe's vision. On the other hand, it would be of no help with some of the other strange facts: no simple mental connection could have caused the resemblance in looks, and the close similarities in the names (spelled forward and backward), of Bedloe and Oldeb. So the 'magnetic rapport' between doctor and patient cannot be the whole story.

2) What about metempsychosis, then? The Greek term means soul-wandering, and the idea would be that in some sense, Bedloe is Oldeb, that the officer's soul was reincarnated in the other man. What Bedloe experiences on his trip is an actual memory from his previous life. We must remember that Bedloe, although a young man, has a certain air of coming from the past: "He certainly seemed young — and he made a point of speaking about his youth — yet there were moments when I should have had little trouble in imagining him a hundred years of age." (940)

Now this accounts for the coincidence in looks and names, and a couple of other details. But if that is what is going on, then how would we account for the apparent connection between Bedloe's experience on the trip and Templeton's writing an account of just those events? Perhaps we have taken it the wrong way round: we have assumed that Templeton is the sender and Bedloe the receiver. (Why does this seem the more natural reading?) But maybe we'll have to correct that. Maybe Bedloe's vision comes from an anamnesis of his soul, a remembrance of things past, and what he experiences is then sent via his 'magnetic' link to Dr Templeton. (Note also that Templeton is clearly shaken when listening to Bedloe's account. From this we can infer that he didn't suspect anything strange was going on when we was writing his account. Only once Bedloe has returned Templeton began to see the coincidences. So, strangely, Bedloe on his trip was aware that something extraordinary was going on; Templeton, writing his account, wasn't.)

Moreover, what Bedloe experiences is not a direct replay of Templeton's memories, for Bedloe experiences the whole thing from the point of view of Oldeb, not Templeton. This supports the interpretation that bases the vision onto metempsychosis, not thought transfer: if it were Templeton's memories that were transferred, then we would have expected the whole thing to play from Templeton's point of view.

But then why is the story set up so that Templeton doesn't merely receive the vision, but had himself been a witness of the original events fifty years ago? Why, for instance, couldn't Templeton just listen patiently to Bedloe's tale, then go off to a library and come up with the facts about India, Benares, the insurrection fifty years ago, and so on? What is the significance, for the story, that Templeton knew Oldeb himself?

3) Let's also note that much care is taken in the story to invoke the topos of independent verification, in a somewhat original manner: Templeton produces a notebook in which he has written an account of the very same events, at just the time when Bedloe, on his hike, had a vision of them.

The story doesn't state this, but we are obviously supposed to assume that what we would find in those pages would closely resemble what Bedloe had just narrated. (Templeton says so, but the actual text of the notes is not part of the story, nor does the narrator tell us anything else about them than what Templeton says.) So let's assume that Templeton's notes indeed contain a tale very like the one we've just heard from Bedloe. We are told by the narrator that the pages appear to have been freshly written.

4) So where does Bedloe's vision come from? Is it a case of soul-wandering, i.e. has the dead soldier's soul possessed the wanderer for a while, making him experience the events from around the time of his own (bodily) death? Or is it a case of thought transfer, i.e. has the connection between Templeton and Bedloe caused the latter to experience the events just as the former was writing them?

(Nothing precludes of course that Bedloe might have heard from Templeton about them. In fact, we could easily imagine the whole episode of Bedloe telling his story a pre-arranged confidence trick supposed to demonstrate super-natural powers. But even without assuming the intent to deceive, a simple explanation would be that Templeton may have talked about these events before and Bedloe just remembered the tale and visualized it under the influence of the lonesome setting out there in the mountains, the drugs, and possibly illness or exhaustion.)

The text supports both interpretations to some extent. That the 'magnetic' connection between Templeton and Bedloe has mitigated a transfer of Templeton's memories into Bedloe's vision seems mostly supported by the demonstration setup, that Bedloe is in fact a reincarnation of Oldeb, the officer and friend of Templeton's who died in Benares, seems to be supported by the similarity in appearance, and also by the subtle indication that Bedloe sometimes has an air of being a hundred years old.[4]

Maybe the idea was to have it both at once. So then there would have been soul-wandering between Oldeb and Bedloe and a magnetic communication of Templeton's memories to the latter. However, if the guiding question is what accounts for the extraordinary thing that happens to the wanderer, then the answer seems to be overdetermined here. Bedloe, on this combined interpretation, lives through the experiences of his former incarnation and the recall of his physician which coincide with his trip; it's so vivid and coherent because it's his actual former live and the doctor's memories; and finally, it's triggered by his physical exhaustion and mental relaxation and via the magnetic rapport with Templeton. This seems to be too much of a good thing.

So here we are with two interpretations that are too weak individually and too strong if combined. That's a pity, because I'm now going to analyze an element in the story that seems to me particularly well done, namely: the way Bedloe's immersion in the world of his vision is narrated. I would have liked to have the question of the main story line out of the way; but as it is, it's going to hover unresolved over what I think can be extracted from that element.

[1] Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains", in: The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume 3: Tales & Sketches II, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Cambridge: Belknap 1978, 935–953.

[2] The theory of Mesmerism with its 'magnetic rapport' that Poe builds into his story was widely discussed at his time. The view has been discarded long since, but there was some core of real phenomena behind it which is today known as hypnosis.

[3] But note that we're working here, of course, with the materials of the story. I don't mean to suggest that telepathy and the like take place in the real world. However, Poe himself might have assumed that at the time of writing his story — he might have taken it as valid science, that is, he might have been in the business of creating science fiction; or he might have assumed that his audience would take it as valid science. That's all that is required to base an interpretation of the story on it.

[4] It also seems to be a convention of the genre, at least for Poe, to kill off the host character after a successful soul transfer. That commonality might also count for categorizing it with metempsychosis plots. Compare "Morella", and "Ligeia".

Recalling and recounting

Let's look closer into memories. In the video excerpt from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire we have seen what we might call a trip into the past. The protagonist sees with his own eyes some events that have taken place years before. This is achieved by means of a magic device, not by some recording technology, but either way, the way the protagonist comes to witness those past events resembles a kind of highly sophisticated, multisensory holographic film playback. More interestingly, we immediately realize that we're looking at past events that are in some way recounted. We understand, at the latest when we hear Dumbledore's explanatory comment, that we have just re-experienced an episode out of his memory.

So far, so good: the scene has served its function. However, if you think about it for a moment, you'll notice that appearances notwithstanding, all this is in fact very different from memories as they work in our lives.

When you remember an episode from your past, normally you won't go through the whole sequence in minute detail. If it is a vivid memory, then you'll probably have no difficulty to invoke the mood, the general feelings you had; you're probably also able to make some key images or sounds present again in a kind of sensual way (that is, you'll see them with your mind's eye, or hear them with your inner ears); and you'll be clearly aware of spoken words and sentences, though very likely again not all of them, but some that stand out for you in your recall. For me, one of the strongest memories I have is of a particular concert given ten years ago by a violinist I admire; it was the first opportunity for me to listen to her playing live, and I can recall clearly many of the details: the way the room looked, the row in which I was seated, the setup of the stage, the orchestra, the acoustic impression I had, the excitement I felt, the way the music affected me. And yet of course when I recall this experience, I don't go through the whole of the concert, movement by movement, in sequence and in tempo. What I recall are the feeling, the general flair, and several key impressions.

If that is how memories usually work, then why can we still understand what the film wants to express (namely, that Harry has just lived through one of Dumbledore's memories)? It's because there is something of which it reminds us. But that is not a typical memory, but recounting a memory, more precisely, the recounting of a memory for the benefit of someone else who wasn't there. When I'm not just recalling a past episode for myself, but want to relate it to someone in order to help him imagine what it must have been like to have been there, then what I do must be more structured and more detailed than simply recalling the feeling, the general flair, and several key impressions. What we do then is to tell a story. We describe the surroundings; we point out the key characters, their look, words, and actions; we narrate the events in a certain order that leaves out the unimportant ones but brings the important ones into an intelligible sequence.

So what the scene in Dumbledore's office resembles is not recalling a memory, but recounting a memory in dramatized form. It's not as if Dumbledore would remember, but as if Dumbledore narrates what he can remember. The past events are brought into a story-like structure for the benefit of a listener. (Or, in fact, for both a listener and us, the audience.) True, the job is done not by Dumbledore himself but by a magical device (the Pensieve). But the structure is still the structure of telling-it-to-someone-else, not the structure of simply remembering.

Consider this: a classical flashback would have served the exact same function. We can easily imagine Dumbledore and Harry sitting in the office, with Dumbledore saying something like: "I still clearly remember, it was a few months after the war, when we were all convened at the ministry...", and then blending over into the scene of the hearing. In that case, it would have been easier to detect that we're not simply witnessing the process of remembering, but the structured and dramatized recounting of a past scene. (There is of course a reason why the magical device is used instead of a classical flashback: the Pensieve has some role to play later on in the plot, and it's introduced here in preparation of that later role.)

Thus passage into memories (as a variety of a past world) will be rather passage into a narrated version of those memories; memories themselves are too unstructured to constitute a proper destination location. (Compare this with dream worlds, which are also strictly speaking to unstable to make a good destination, but are prepared by fiction that features passage into them in a manner that addresses this difficulty; I have discussed this in an earlier post.)

Passage illustrated IV - the dramatized memories

Let's widen the scope a little. The spectrum of unreal worlds is not restricted to those created in fiction.

Harry Potter (in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) encounters a magic item called the Pensieve, which can be used to externalize memories. That way, one can re-examine what one has experienced before; and it is suggested that this works without the effects of fading or distortion that our memories in the real world suffer. When Harry gets close to the Pensieve, he is drawn into the memories of its owner (Dumbledore, the headmaster of the school).

There is no interaction between the protagonist and the past world; Harry is just watching. This seems appropriate if we remember that what the movie presents us with is a memory from the past, which is supposed to be unchangeable, since it already has happened; moreover, it is someone else's memory — so it's doubly removed from any possible outside influence.

We have here short, but discernible departure and arrival sequences. Is there also a setup-recognition structure? Yes there is: Harry (and we, the audience) can recognize both the room in which the memory scene takes place and some of the key players in the scene (apart from Dumbledore himself, the camera also catches 'Mad Eye' Moody, Ivan Karkaroff, Barty Crouch, and Rita Skeeter); and Harry (and we) can do so because there was a scene earlier in the movie in which he was in the exact same room in a similar situation (formal hearing), and all the key players involved were of course introduced already in the exposition of the story. Thus we can recognize that we must be in a memory (played in a kind of holographic cinema) from several clues that were carefully prepared beforehand.[1]

There is, however, no shifted passage, and it also appears that the character is not physically away from the origin location. Harry is mentally fully absorbed in the scene which he experiences, but he remains in the room with the Pensieve. It's comparable rather to getting immersed in a dream (in which case you're still physically there, lying asleep somewhere) than to actually travel, where you fully depart from the origin location. Again, this seems appropriate if we consider the nature of the departure location; after all, this is a memory, a mental item, so it seems natural to get immersed mentally, but not drawn in physically. (Compare this with the instances in my earlier post, where the destination locations, such as scenes in movies or a painting, were fictional worlds we are supposed to imagine as 'being there somewhere'.)

[1] Strictly speaking, it would be necessary to distinguish whose recognition is the relevant one in setup-recognition-structures: that of the passenger, or that of the audience? That's an interesting question, but let's collect some more samples before we go deeper into it.

Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog

During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)

You can download the pdf version here.

The table of contents looks like this:

Preface

Activities

  Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · Philosophy

Goals

  Beauty · Excellence of character · Eudaimonia

Theory

  Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · Present

References

History, time travel, and informedness of unreality

'Join us for an amazing journey through time!' — Exhibitions at history museums sometimes advertise that they will 'take you back in time', typically to some earlier period the exhibition is about. And in fact, if the period in question is interesting and colorful enough in itself, and the exhibition supports it by a suitable manner of presentation, focusing not so much on written descriptions and explanations, but rather on rich tableaux, original costumes and items from the time, and appropriate lighting and background sound, you may easily find yourself suddenly 'in' that past world, looking at a lavish banquet, say, feeling almost as if in fact you were there.

Now this is 'time travel' only in a metaphorical sense: you're not actually going back in time — you're just imagining yourself at another time. Or perhaps you don't even imagine yourself as being there, you simply imagine what it must have been like, how it must have looked (and sounded, and smelled) at that time. This is different from time travel as it is presented in novels and films: there, a character is transferred from his own time into a different time and then is actually there. Put differently, a time traveler in a movie would perceive a different world, the world of the past, while a museum visitor imagines it. Both may have some visual impression (and again, also impressions on the other senses, too) of that world. But where the time traveler perceives an independent reality, not subject to his will, the museum visitor shapes such a world in his imagination, and is therefore free to include whatever he fancies (he might for instance imagine his romantic partner sitting at that banquet table in an exquisite old-fashioned dress). By virtue of this difference, the museum visit isn't time travel in a proper sense, only in a metaphorical sense, based on some similarities in the experiences one would have.

In order to make this distinction as clear as possible, I have so far not mentioned a complication, which we now have to look at. The complication is this: even though we imagine (not perceive) the world of the past into which the museum invites us, we couldn't just dream it up ourselves. After all, the very purpose of the exhibition is to make us familiar with details about the past which we didn't know about so far. We learn something from it, something we didn't know before, and what we learn is obviously not coming from our imagination, but comes from the outside, channeled through its presentation at the exhibition. Where does it come from?

The exhibition will be informed, often by historical or scientific fact which we know about. Thus, if the exhibition is about dinosaurs, much of the information will come from science (what did a dinosaur look like, what were its dimensions, its color and shape, its typical movements, how would a typical environment have looked, which plants were there, and so on). It's science which reconstructs these things and can tell us how we would have to imagine them in order to keep within established facts. If the exhibition is rather about historical or cultural matters (such as the history of an island or the life and work of a composer, say), then that information comes from history. (History has methods that are somewhat different from those of science.)

So, from a historical exhibition, we can learn something about the real world, even though we look at the world of an instance of unreality. I call this the informedness[1] of unreality by bits and pieces from the real world. This does not run counter to the general character of the unreal as imagined, as being a product of the imagination; it just shows that the workings of the imagination always take up some materials from reality and include, shape and develop them in the process of generating an instance of unreality. You can learn from an exhibition about the past just as you can learn from a movie or a novel, or a dream: for instance, if you are a reader of crime fiction, you might learn a bit from it about police procedure, or forensic science. Of course, it's only in there because the author has researched it and built it into the world of her story, and it goes without saying that there is no guarantee that it's not fictional — the author might just have invented some bit of science which was necessary for the narrative, but which isn't actual science. Even dreams include memories, thoughts and emotions from waking life as building blocks, however much they may rearrange and distort them; from these you may pick up things about yourself and your recent experience you haven't noticed (yet) while awake.

(Such informedness is in some respects a counterpart to sedimentation; just like the latter, the former results from the interplay of reality and unreality, resulting in a mix of both along the path. Instances of the unreal sediment into reality when they influence our views and actions; bits and pieces of the real make up the materials from which the worlds of unreality are created.)

[1] It's also sometimes called fictional export. See for instance Christy Mag Uidhir and Allen Hazlett, "Unrealistic Fictions", in: American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011), 33–46. This seems to be a very helpful notion, but I have to read up more about it.

Time-traveling to the sequoia trees

Vertigo (from which the visual motto of this blog comes) has sparked quite some reflection, both in discussions, aesthetic and otherwise, and in movies themselves, as intertextual references.

The most directly inspired follow-ups are of course Chris Marker's La Jetée and Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. The memorable scene under the sequoia trees in Vertigo, in which Kim Novak's character points out the dates of her birth and death (and we get the feeling that she really is possessed by a ghost in this moment, a ghost who reflects on its own former life, its beginning and end), returns in both later science fiction movies as a quotation.

The past and the future, two forms of unreality which we can become particularly desperate wishing to travel to, are never out of sight in all three films; but the two later ones are imaginative science-fiction films that use time travel whereas Vertigo was based on other motifs.

More precisely: the past and the future are expressly sought in both movies; their character as unreal is dramatized by first making them accessible (and apparently even changeable), which is made possible by the device of time travel, and then bringing them into the paradoxical shape of a story knot.

Vertigo, on the other hand, never focuses so baldly on either the past or the future. In Vertigo, the past exerts its influence in the shape of history (personal history, as in Scottie's fear of heights; family history, as in the fake Madeleine's unhappy and mad ancestor; and local history, as illustrated in the melancholic reflections in Gavin Elster's office, the San Francisco bookstore, or finally under the sequoia trees); the future looms in deceptive suggestiveness, in dreams, and in the shape of a plot which drives relentlessly towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion. Character traits and dramatic constellation have in Vertigo the function that in La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys is taken over by the science-fiction devices of time travel and story knots.

Gambling with Sartre

So, if we take Kierkegaard's definition of the self, unreality is inherent in the structure of the self. (If we both accept Kierkegaard's definition of a self, and that the past is a form of unreality—which are mere claims so far. Let's further suspend judgment on all that and keep playing the game a little longer.)

Sartre is making a similar point in the course his discussion of 'The Origin of Nothingness'.[1] He is out to show that between our actions and the motives we have for those actions there is inevitably a gap: our motives themselves are ineffective to bring about our actions. It's always possible that we act differently, or don't act at all. And though I may have a motive to act in a certain way, nothing in that motive is sufficient to make me act that way (rather than act differently, or not act at all). Sartre speaks here of "that nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act". (71) For him, this idea has to carry some theoretical burden: because of it we can experience human freedom: "the structure of motives as ineffective is the condition of my freedom" (ibd.). If we couldn't perceive our motives as in the end always ineffective, we wouldn't be able to see ourselves as free. But since we do experience them as ineffective, we are aware that we have to make up our attitudes and actions over and over again; thus "freedom [...] is characterized by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self which designates the free being". (72)

And he gives a very helpful example for this line of thought: the gambler. Sartre invites us to consider the case of a man who has been a habitual gambler and now wants to stop it—he's "freely and sincerely decided not to gamble any more." (69) He might have all sorts of good reasons (perhaps he realizes he risks financial ruin, or he feels he is a disappointment to his family and wants to correct that). So he makes a resolution of 'not playing any more'. Now, having thought it through and being determined to stick to the resolution, that should be enough to make his future actions comply with it, shouldn't it? However, what he actually experiences shows that this was an illusion: "when he approaches the gambling table, [he] suddenly sees all his resolutions melt away." (Ibd.) What he realizes is that however determined his stance might have been, it's in the past, and if he wants his reasons to guide his actions, he has to re-make the decision, he has to get to the resolve again:

I should have liked so much not to gamble anymore; yesterday I even had a synthetic apprehension of the situation (threatening ruin, disappointment of relatives) as forbidding me to play. It seemed to me that I had established a real barrier between gambling and myself, and now I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situation is no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a feeling. In order for it to come to my aid once more, I have to remake it ex nihilo and freely. (70)

One thing we should note here is that, in this example, freedom is not exactly welcome. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly disturbing insight that at this point, the gambler is free, i.e. exactly not bound by the resolution he had made in the past. Or, to put it the other way round: there was a certain comfort and security in the idea that a resolution might be enough to control one's further actions; the insight that it doesn't, that in the event there is nothing to stop one from acting against a resolution, destroys that comfort and security. Being free isn't always easy. (More often than not, according to Sartre, we attempt to look away from our freedom in an attitude which he calls 'Bad Faith' and illustrates most ingeniously a few sections after the passage I've just quoted.)

That we have to "remake the Self" (72) in this way is because the past that is involved here is a form of unreality (and not reality). (Notice, in the quote that I'm about to give, how Sartre tellingly puts the word 'magic' in the mouth of his gambler.) Or again, as Sartre puts the point:

The not gambling is only one of my possibilities, as the fact of gambling is one of them, neither more nor less. I must rediscover the fear of financial ruin or of disappointing my family, etc., I must re-create it as experienced fear. [...] After having patiently built up barriers and walls, after enclosing myself in the magic circle of a resolution, I perceive with anguish that nothing prevents me from gambling. (72)

And there we have it, the "nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act". (71) It's a nothingness (as Sartre calls it) which in this case comes from the past, a form of unreality, being involved here. (Other forms of unreality might come into play, but in this example, just as in my own example in my post about Kierkegaard's definition of self, it happens to be the past.) According to him (if I understand correctly), such nothingness is continuously involved in the relation of a human being with itself, and thus an inevitable component of it. When we become aware of this, one effect is that we become aware of our own essential freedom (which we experience in what Sartre calls 'anguish'). What's perhaps even more interesting is that, in continuously doing so, human beings (beings with consciousness and a self) perpetually bring nothingness into the world—that's where it actually comes from.

(But this is a topic for another time.)

[1] In chapter 1 of his Being and Nothingness. Translated and with an introduction by Hazel Barnes. NY: Washington Square Press 1992. Quoted with page numbers in the text.

Kierkegaard's despairable self

"Man is Spirit. But what is Spirit? Spirit is the Self. But what is the Self? The Self is a relation that relates itself to itself; or it is, in this relation, that which relates it to itself (the Self is not the relation, but that the relation relates itself to itself)."
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

First we might want to cut through the jargon of the first few sentences: what Kierkegaard wants to say is that the interesting or important thing about human beings is that they have a self. To have a self is to be a special sort of thing. Stones don't have a self. Artifacts, such as chairs and tables don't have a self.[1] Plants don't have a self, and most animals don't either.[2] But human beings have a self, and that is so essential to them that Kierkegaard straightforwardly identifies being human with having a self. It's what Man is — having a self.

The thesis of The Sickness Unto Death is that almost every self that is in fact out there, that is, almost every human being's self in the world, past and present, is defective. A self that is fully in order is very rare; the typical condition of selves is to be defective. The defect takes various forms, but there is a collective term that is used throughout the book for them: Despair. Despair is a condition we're all in (or, at any rate, most of us are in); it's the name for that pervasive defectiveness of selves. Thus, in order to explain what Despair is, it's necessary for Kierkegaard to first state what a self is, for only then we can understand in what sense and in which ways such a self may be defective. That's the point of giving a definition of a self.[3]

So now we have seen what the definition is for and what (intuitively) it is targeted at. We have some idea, that is, what we're talking about, what will be defined for us now. (It's only to be expected, of course, that our idea of a self will be changed in the process of understanding the definition. Part of the point of giving a definition is to clarify and sharpen our understanding of what's defined, and another part is to connect the idea of what is defined in the definition to other ideas. So we learn about distinctions and about connections to other concepts, and that will transform our overall view of things, including the thing that's talked about in the definition.)

Mariana Varela, Inextricable

Now let's sort this out carefully. I can have an attitude towards something. For instance, I can have an attitude to this armchair: that I find it inviting. I feel somewhat lazily drawn towards it, I imagine that it would be pleasant to be seated in it right now, and so on. I have an attitude of finding the armchair inviting.

Attitudes can be to objects like an armchair, or to other people, but I can also have an attitude towards myself. I might reflect, right now, and find that my attitude towards the armchair (my finding it inviting) reveals something about me, at least about what I am right in this moment, right in taking this attitude (of finding the armchair inviting). I take myself to be lazy, let's say. Now I'm taking an attitude towards myself, the attitude of taking myself to be lazy (in finding the armchair inviting).

Assume, for a moment, that this sort of episode happens frequently: I consider myself lazy quite often; and not only when faced with armchairs I find inviting; let's say I'm also reluctant to get out of bed each morning; I'm constantly drawn to over-extend my lunch break; I'm hesitant to go out in the evenings for my sheer inertness, and so on. Let's assume, for a moment, thus, that I'm a generally lazy person. In the episode described above, when considering myself lazy when finding the armchair inviting, I recognize an instance of my general laziness. In other words, I relate my attitude towards myself (my considering myself lazy) to other, similar attitudes I have registered in the past. In so relating my attitude, I give meaning to the predicate 'lazy' by putting my attitude towards myself in a class of related attitudes (which would fall under the same predicate). Thus what I do isn't just taking an attitude towards myself, it's also an attitude that contains a further reflective self-reference (in putting itself, as it were, in the category of being an attitude of laziness).

Let's now drop the assumption I've made in the previous section: that episodes like the one described (episodes of considering myself lazy) happen frequently. Let's instead assume that such episodes have never happened before at all. The new assumption thus is the first time ever that I consider myself lazy, in finding this armchair inviting; moreover, this is indeed the first time (we now assume) that I consider myself lazy at all.

Note that we have two options here:
i) It's in fact the first time that I could consider myself lazy; it's the actual first time in my life ever that I had occasion for it; never before was I in a situation where some attitude I took towards something (armchair or other) gave me the opportunity to consider myself lazy.

ii) Although in fact I had many episodes of attitudes towards external things already, the thought hasn't so far crossed my mind to consider myself lazy; only now this has occurred to me, for the first time.

In either case I can either become aware that I'm lazy or be aware that I've become lazy. (That is, we have four cases here: first, that I get into such a situation for the first time but take myself to have been in it for longer and assume that I've just become aware of the fact; second, that again I'm in the situation for the first time and also think of myself as having come into it for the first time; third, that I've actually been there before and now correctly but for the first time notice it; and finally fourth, that I've been in that situation before but got aware of it only now and thus take it, incorrectly, to be the first time.)

In any of these cases again I'm not just taking an attitude towards myself, but also an one that includes that additional reflective self-reference (putting the attitude itself in the category of being an attitude of laziness, one that I think of as either just having come about or just having come to my awareness). So it's not just an attitude, but it also brings with it a comparison with attitudes (that were taken or not, in which they at least might have been taken) at earlier times. These additional reflective self-references (that they are self-references of the attitudes themselves) make up what we call the self. Or, to put it differently, you're said to have a self only if your attitudes include some of that rather complicated variety. And that means that in some way or other, your past attitudes are built into your self. This build-up of reality on unreality is again a form of what I've called sedimentation.

[1] Perhaps there will be rather sophisticated artifacts at some future time which will have a self; think of a supercomputer with an 'intelligent persona' here, one which starts developing its own thoughts, goals and so on. Perhaps that sort of being will have a self in the relevant sense then. But as of today, that's still firmly an idea from the realm of science fiction, even though some progress towards it has been made in the branch of science and technology known as Artificial Intelligence. So for the moment, artifacts don't have a self, even if in principle they might, and in the future they possibly will, have one.

[2] Recent research, especially on primates, more and more suggests that we should ascribe a self in the relevant sense to at least some animal species, which again shows that there's no absolute gap between humans and other beings with respect to having a self: it's something that we might in principle share with animals and machines; though (to repeat) it is still not fully settled whether in fact, and at present, we do. And even if so, there are still obvious large differences in degree with respect to how far developed these selves are, and thus we have to be careful not to be carried away with conclusions from such findings. (A caution which, alas, many science journalists and some popularizing scientists have long thrown overboard, which will probably not help improving the image of science in the long run.)

[3] The plan of Kierkegaard's author (the book is written under a pseudonym, and that is always relevant with Kierkegaard; so I'll not assume from the beginning that we're discussing Kierkegaard's text, but one that he puts before us as the work of an author who is himself already a character) is to explore the concept of Despair. I've capitalized the word to indicate that Despair, Kierkegaard's term, is potentially different in meaning from the everyday word. It's a central term, and it takes much of the book to explain what is to be understood by it. (And this being philosophy, of course, it's not simply settled; part of the challenge is always to interpret central concepts such as this one, so in a sense there is no fixed meaning at all for the term. We always have to keep in mind its interdependency and interaction with our interpretation of the book which discusses it.)

Kierkegaard's Despair is a defect in the Self. Before his author starts exploring the nature of this defect, its various forms of appearance, and the meaning of the fact (which he claims is a fact, anyway) that this defect pervades our reality and is a defect to be diagnosed in pretty much everybody's Self — before he starts discussing all this, he tells us what a Self is, so that we can understand the idea of a defective Self. It's a compressed passage and so obscure and complicated that some commentators have thought that it isn't even part of the more serious work but rather a playful, parodistic introduction (satirically imitating the jargon of another philosopher, namely Hegel). I don't think that's likely, though, so I'll just take it seriously, and take it to be doing what it purports to be doing, namely: defining what it means to be a Self (so that we later on can learn what it means to have a defective Self, i.e. what it means to be in Despair). For me, of course, the interest is mereley whether we can learn something interesting about any of the forms of unreality from all this.

Past names

Michael Dummett argues in his Gifford Lectures that what it is to understand a proper name is to be able to identify the bearer of that name (and then to check whether predicates apply to that bearer); for a name such Napoleon, this identification of the bearer is however not something that you can do as easily as with contemporary people:

Is it to know by what means an immensely aged man could be identified as Napoleon if we discovered that, amazingly, the Emperor had not died when we supposed, but had lived until the present? [...] Surely not. To understand the name 'Napoleon', one must know what the correct way, or at least a correct way, was to identify someone as Napoleon when he was alive.[1]

This strikes me as wildly implausible. Not only is it doubtful that most of us could indeed, as a time traveler to the 18th or early 19th century, recognize Napoleon on the street, say, in a group of soldiers. (My idea of his visual appearance has its origins in a couple of paintings and a few movies. It's probably not even good enough to identify those actors who played him on the street; much less the man himself, who in all probability only has some degree of resemblance with them.)

And even if we could, normally we wouldn't say that that is what it means to know who Napoleon was. To understand the name, at present day, is first of all to understand that it is the name of a historical person, someone important enough that many people have heard about him. We would have to know some basic historical facts as well, although there might be no specific set of facts that would count as necessary and/or sufficient: if someone thought Napoleon was a Spanish painter in the early 20th century, we would say that person doesn't know who Napoleon was. If he says something like: "Oh, I know, it was this French king who made some conquests in Europe a couple of centuries ago", this we might count as knowing (even though we know Napoleon wasn't a king, but an emperor).

In short, in order to understand this name, we would have to find our way round in today's established history, not in eighteenth century Paris's palaces. Contrary to what Dummett seems to think, we wouldn't have to put ourselves in the shoes of some past observer in order to know what the name 'Napoleon' means.

[1] Michael Dummett, Thought and Reality. Oxford: Clarendon 2006, 74–75.

The unreality of the past

There is an old suspicion that the past and the future are not real: the only reality is the present. What has been is no longer; what will be is not yet. Over the centuries, there have been many different formulations of this view (in twentieth-century philosophy, it's often called 'presentism'); and I have myself given a version of it earlier when I counted the past and the future among the forms of unreality.

The view that only the present is real has its roots in some familiar common sense observations. People and objects cease to exist: people can die, objects can be destroyed. We have all been witness to processes of that sort. And likewise, we also have seen humans being born and growing into persons, objects being produced. Thus it's a fact of everyday life that many people and things we can refer to are only accessible from memories, records, by inferences from past actions and so on; something similar holds for future people. (You can talk about your great-grandfather or about your great-grandchildren, and it's perfectly clear that they are past and future respectively, and you'll never encounter them directly.)

Of course, this denies only some reality to the past or future. In some sense, your great-grandfather is still more real than, say, a character in a novel will ever be. Even if you know next to nothing about him, there is still some impact he has made: at the very least in having a part in the events that brought about your own existence. And yet, the more you think about it, the more difficult it seems to grasp exactly where the difference lies. For a start, fictional characters also can change the world in many ways. Children may be named after them, people may find inspiration in them, or they might become an element of the popular imagination (genres as different as the James Bond movies or Joyce's Ulysses have had that effect, as can be read off clearly from the teenage girls in the audience of a Connery-Bond screening or the crowds at the Bloomsday parties every year). If there is a difference between a person who really existed in the past and a character in a novel who never existed, it can't simply lie in the influence that (past or fictional) person had on the world.

There is such a difference for present people who really exist and fictional people: an existing person you can encounter, talk to them, shake their hands, interact with them in many ways; you can never do that with a fictional character. (You can shake Goofy's hand at Disneyland; but that statement is only true in a loose sense of speaking: we all know that it's an actor playing a role, and anyway you can have an actor play your great-grandfather's part at a family party and shake his hand, too.) But there is no such difference between past people and fictional people.

You could say that there is no such difference any more, and perhaps that would be a clue to a better candidate for the difference we're looking for: for people who once existed there has been a time when you actually could interact with them, while there has never been, and never will be, such a time with respect to a fictional character. Even this line of thought needs a lot of refinement, though. It works only partially. For instance, many of us have known their own grandfather, some have perhaps even known their own great-grandfather, talked to them, interacted with them. But once you get to a generation sufficiently removed in the parental chain, there is no more overlap period where you could have a direct interaction with your ancestors. To make the account work fully, it has to include some transitivity: a whole chain of potential direct interactions would connect you to a person who existed, while there is no such chain that can connect you with a fictional person. Take an example.

You can't have a conversation with Jane Austen; your mother couldn't, either; but your great-great-...-grandmother of some degree just might have — she didn't live in England maybe, but if she had traveled there and if she had done this and that, it would have been possible. And you're connected with that interaction via all the links between you and your mother, her and your grandmother, and so on. In that sense, there is a chain of potential direct interactions (they don't have to have happened in actuality) between you and Jane Austen, who, after all, really existed. There's no such chain between you and Elizabeth Bennet, whatever your great-great-...-grandmother of some degree would have tried. Elizabeth Bennet never existed. She's fictional.

But then again, notice that we had to make heavy use of the notion of possibility in this account. Now think about this: you don't have an older brother (if you have, suppose you haven't), but you can easily imagine what the world would be like if you had one; think about the interactions you'd have with your possible brother. Of course, since that brother doesn't exist, we're talking about an unreal person. However, in terms of the possibilities we had to invoke, he seems to be much closer than Jane Austen was. And she did exist. So where exactly does that leave our account of the reality of persons who existed in the past in terms of possible interactions?

If you've made it here, you're probably beginning to sense that there are interesting things to explore about the reality (if any) of the past and the future. They have been, of course, extensively discussed in the philosophical literature over the past twenty-five centuries or so, and there's a lot of fascinating things to learn from all this for the philosophy of unreality. Stay tuned...

Plato, Poe, and Perception

In Edgar Allan Poe's satirical short story "The Spectacles", a young man falls in love with a woman and hurriedly marries her, without ever having had a good look at her. That's mostly because he is extremely shortsighted yet too vain to wear glasses. And ... what can I tell you? The whole thing turns out to be not quite what he expected.

Myopia

1. Mistaken perception is one of the most common sources of unreality: we see, hear, smell something and take it to be something different than it really is; sometimes we even act on misperceptions, and then we have to correct not only our erroneous views, but also take responsibility for our misguided actions. In our everyday lives, of course, mistake and correction happen in quick sequence (for instance, when you think you see a person whom you know from a distance, and wave a greeting, merely to discover after a few quick steps towards them that it wasn't your acquaintance after all); the consequences are mostly negligible, or corrected without much effort. The basic pattern, however, is still the same as in Poe's story: we take in some sketchy information, interpret the situation wrongly, and then act in line with our false views. (The fault, dear reader, is of course not in our perception, but in ourselves; I've emphasized that point in an earlier post on "The Spectacles" and perception.)

Observations such as these suggest that we generally have a certain practical interest in keeping close to reality, which is why in our everyday lives we usually try to double-check whatever we perceive (or remember, learn by hearsay from others, hypothesize, or otherwise get out of sources which we know may mislead us on occasion). We seek small reality-checks in much of what we do, in order to navigate our surroundings without drifting too far into unreality, because we know from experience that we are likely to be more successful in everyday life if we go with the flow of what's really going on, and adjust our course if necessary. We have a constant habit of eliminating unreality from our views in order to succeed in our activities and reach practical goals, a habit I call reflection. (In some areas of philosophy, there's a much more narrow and technical use of the term 'reflection'. That's not the sense I have in mind here; reflection, in the way I've introduced it, has more to do with the common sense notion of taking a step back and a deep breath, and calmly checking things over before forming a view or taking action.) Reflection has the function of keeping us close to reality in what we think and do.

2. In an interesting passage in the Philebus[1], Plato starts out with a perception example not unlike the one I've used (and the one that is, greatly exaggerated, at the basis of Poe's story as well), and generalizes this to other forms of unreality. Most interestingly, he discusses forms of unreality connected to the past and future, and that's what I'd like to take a closer look at here.[2]

In that passage, Socrates (Plato's lead character) sketches an account of what happens when we perceive something. For example, "it often happens that someone who cannot get a clear view because he is looking from a distance wants to make up his mind about what he sees"; when making up his mind, the perceiver would ask himself: "'What could that be that appears to stand near that rock under a tree?'". This way of describing it emphasizes the process character of what goes on: we take in the scene, and sometimes, when it is not clear and obvious what it is we perceive, we first have to decide what to make of how things seem to us. Only then it becomes a judgment (whether it is spoken out loud or remains implicit in what we feel and how we behave). And of course, judgments can be correct or incorrect; we might misjudge the situation, which happens all the time with perception: it can lead us astray. In the example, the man might correctly judge that it is a person what he sees; "he might also be mistaken and say that what he sees is a statue, the work of some herdsmen".

In both cases, the judgment can be neatly expressed as a sentence, as I just did at the end of the previous paragraph for both the true and the false version. It has, to put it in philosophical jargon, propositional content. However, Socrates makes it clear that this is not all there is to a particular act of perception. There is also all the sensual input itself, which is in this case visual input (but it could also be input from other senses, i.e. auditive, tactile, or olfactory).[3] The content is not exhausted in the mere word-content. There are also the images that you see. If you'd write down the sentence and then text it to someone, you would have transferred only part of the content. (Maybe if you'd take a photo and send it along with the text, you'd have transferred more, or even most of it.) So, in addition to the propositional content (the 'word' content), there's also what we might call pictorial content.

Right from the beginning, Socrates stresses that his account also applies to what happens when we remember something. Again, memory can fail us, and we might remember something incorrectly. And once more, to our false memory, there is not only the propositional content of what we remember ("I remember having seen this street at daylight.") There are also the images, which we can revive in our mind's eye. And as we all know, vivid and even convincing-seeming as such images can be, they're extremely unreliable.

Having covered the present (in perception) and the past (in memory) in their function as "lead[ing] to judgment or the attempt to come to a definite judgment, as the case may be" (38b), Socrates finally extends this to an analogue in the future: in hopes. (It seems to me he should better have used a neutral term, such as 'projections' or 'expectations', since hopes normally are associated with positive expectations only. I presume this choice is because what interests Socrates is the pleasure that we take in them, and we wouldn't find that in negative expectations, thus the restriction. For a general account, however, hopes would be only one side of the medal, the other being fears and the like.) As with memories and perceptions, hopes (which Socrates identifies with "assertions in us", that is, presumably the sentence formulations of what we expect to happen to us in the future) are associated with images: "someone often envisages himself in the possession of an enormous amount of gold and of a lot of pleasures as a consequence. And in addition, he also sees, in this inner picture himself, that he is beside himself with delight."[4]

The structural claim here is that if there is a kind of unreality we have to cope with in the present (in the form of false perception) and in the past (false memories), then there must also be something similar in the future (false hopes). This premise is emphatically confirmed by Socrates' interlocutor, which probably indicates it's an uncontroversial premise; at least Plato wants to take it as one for the purposes of this dialogue. (Compare also La. 198d for a similar structural claim about knowledge of present, past and future.)

When we're looking for unreality, then, be it in small and simple instances as in everyday life or even in elaborate illusions as in Poe's story, we must check for all areas: not just what's directly before our eyes, but also what's before us in time, and what has been before. A phenomenology of the unreal will thus have to cover the future and the past in addition to the present.

[1] 38c–39e. All quotes (unless otherwise indicated) are from that passage, taken from the Hackett edition: Plato, Philebus. Translated, with introduction, by Dorothea Frede. Indianapolis: Hackett 1993.

[2] The context is the notorious discussion of 'false pleasures', where Socrates argues that pleasures can be literally false, just in the same sense in which opinions can be false. He lists four different classes of false pleasures, and our passage here is taken from the exposition of the first of these classes. For my purposes, the connections to the theory of pleasure aren't relevant, and I've systematically left them out.

[3] Plato's argument is sketchy, and it proceeds by analogy; of course, much more would be needed for a full-blown account of perceptual content, and from a modern point of view, several serious questions would have to be raised. I won't discuss the question whether the account Socrates gives is sufficient for the purposes of his own argument; for me, the important aspect is rather the parallel with other forms of unreality, such as false memories and hopes, which we'll get to in a moment.

[4] Socrates goes on to claim that what causes us pleasure is within the pictorial content, and thus if the pictorial content is false, i.e. an instance of unreality, then the pleasures are 'false' in his sense. As noted above, I'm not interested in pleasure here. If you want to look further into this debated notion, a good place to start is Dorothea Frede's introduction (and its bibliography) to the Hackett edition. See note [1] above for the bibliographical reference.