Philosophy Paper 2
There are 6 (specific) requirements which must be fulfilled. However, you are ultimately responsible for choosing the topic and direction of your essay. There are obviously general requirements of any argumentative paper but I will add a rubric outline for argumentative papers below.
If you muck up one of these, then expects big points off of your paper:
1. Find a movie, short story, documentary, or complex news item (not a one-page article but only investigative or in-depth pieces, check with me if you are unsure) to base your analysis around and focus your thesis.
I have given you a few suggestions: the movie “Her” for philo of mind or personal identity and “Minority Report” for free will.
2. You must present a philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, or free will topic. The purpose is to argue/explain, for example, a theory in the philosophy of mind or personal identity in terms of the movie “Her”. Examples: Functionalism, Substance Dualism, Memory Theory, etc… In this case, you would be arguing that the character Sam is a mind or how to interpret Sam as a person over time as a way to make the case that the theory you are advancing/argueing for is the best answer to the mind-body problem.
3. Include an objection to your view. Some possibilities:
Could there be another theory that best explains our intuitions about thought experiments in the movie/show?
Does your theory lead to some absurd consequences whether in real life or via the movie’s world?
Is there a possible way to develop a contrasting view of the OSes from the behavior of one of the characters?
4. Include discussions of the thought experiments, ideas, philosophers found in the textbook and links given to you by the prof.
5. You must include one secondary source and provide a full works-cited page. (This means citing the articles we used IN CLASS, from the research, the textbook, and EC work). This also means you SHOULD be using the course material to help make your case in addition to the secondary source from the textbook.
6. Word Minimum: Roughly 1500 -1800 words (MINIMUM). It is permissible to go over the 1800 words if needed (no excuses about not knowing you could write more to fulfill the tasks).
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Existentialism is a Humanism
Jean-Paul Sartre, 1945
1
My purpose here is to defend existentialism against several reproaches that have been laid
against it.
Existentialism has been criticised for inviting people to remain in a quietism of despair, to fall
back into a the middle-class luxury of a merely contemplative philosophy. We are reproached
for underlining human nastiness, and forgetting, as the Catholic Mme. Mercier has it, the smile
of the child. All and sundry reproach us for treating men as isolated beings, largely because we
begin with the ‘I think’ of Descartes. Christians especially reproach us for denying the reality
and seriousness of human society, since, if we ignore God’s eternal values, no-one is able to
condemn anyone else.
Existentialism is being seen as ugliness; our appeal to nature as scandalous, our writings
sickening. Yet what could be more disillusioning than repeating those mottoes like ‘don’t fight
against tradition’, or ‘know your station’? They say that man is base and doomed to fall, he
needs fixed rules to keep him from anarchy. In the end, is not what makes our doctrine so
fearful to some merely the fact that it leaves all possibility of choice with man?
It has become fashionable to call this painter, or musician or columnist an “existentialist” – a
term so loosely applied that it no longer means anything at all.
However, it can be defined easily. Existentialists are either Christian, such as the Catholics
Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, or atheists like Heidegger and myself. What they have in common is
to believe that existence comes before essence, that we always begin from the subjective.
What does this mean? If one considers a manufactured object, say a book or a paper-knife, one
sees that it has been made to serve a definite purpose. It has an essence, the sum of its purpose
and qualities, which precedes its existence. The concept of man in the mind of God is
comparable to the concept of paper-knife in the mind of the artisan.
My atheist existentialism is rather more coherent. It declares that God does not exist, yet there
is still a being in whom existence precedes essence, a being which exists before being defined
by any concept, and this being is man or, as Heidegger puts it, human reality.
That means that man first exists, encounters himself and emerges in the world, to be defined
1
Squashed version edited by Glyn Hughes: http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/sartre.htm
2
afterwards. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. It is man who
conceives himself, who propels himself towards existence. Man becomes nothing other than
what is actually done, not what he will want to be.
And when we say that man takes responsibility for himself, we say more than that – he is in his
choices responsible for all men. All our acts of creating ourselves create at the same time an
image of man such as we believe he must be. Thus, our personal responsibility is vast, because
it engages all humanity.
If I want, say, to marry and have children, such choice may depend on my situation, my passion,
my desire, but by it I engage not only myself, but all humanity in the way of the monogamy. In
fashioning myself, I fashion man. This helps us to understand some rather grandiloquent words
like anguish, abandonment, despair.
The existentialist declares that man is in anguish, meaning that he who chooses cannot escape
a deep responsibility for all humanity. Admittedly, few people appear to be anxious; but we
claim that they mask their anguish, that they flee it.
This is what Kierkegaard called the anguish of Abraham. You know the old story: An angel
commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son. But anyone in such a case would wonder straight
away, is this an angel? am I the Abraham? If we hear voices from the sky, what proves that they
come not from hell, or the subconscious, or some pathological state? Who proves that they are
addressed to me?
Each man must say to himself: am I right to set the standard for all humanity? To deny that is to
mask the anguish. When, for example, a military leader sends men to their deaths, he may have
his orders, but at the bottom it is he alone who chooses.
And when we speak about ‘abandonment’, we want to say that God does not exist, and that it
is necessary to follow this conclusion to its end.
The existentialist is strongly against that sloppy morality which tries to remove God without
ethical expense, like the French professors of the 1880’s who saw God as a useless and
expensive assumption but still wanted definitive rules like ‘do not lie’ to exist a priori.
The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it rather embarrassing that God does not exist, for
there disappears with him any possibility of finding values in a heaven. Dostoevsky wrote “If
God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; that is the starting point of existentialism.
We are alone, without excuses. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be
free. There is no power of ‘beautiful passions’ which propel men to their actions, we think,
rather, that man is responsible for his own passions.
The existentialist cannot accept that man can be helped by any sign on earth, for he will
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interpret the sign as he chooses. As Ponge has truly written “Man is the future of man”.
To give you an example of this ‘abandonment’, I will quote the case of one of my pupils who
came to me. He lived alone with his mother, his father having gone off as a collaborator and his
brother killed in 1940. He had a choice – to go and fight with the Free French to avenge his
brother and protect his nation, or to stay and be his mother’s only consolation. So he was
confronted by two modes of action; one concrete and immediate but directed only towards
one single individual; the other addressed to an infinitely greater end but very ambiguous.
What would help him choose? Christian doctrine? Accepted morals? Kant?
I said to him, “In the end, it is your feelings which count”. But how can we put a value on a
feeling?
At least, you may say, he sought the counsel of a professor. But, if you seek advice, from a
priest for example, in choosing which priest you know already, more or less, what they would
advise.
When I was imprisoned, I met a rather remarkable man, a Jesuit who had joined that order in
the following way: As a child, his father had died leaving him in poverty. At school he was made
to feel that he was accepted only for charity’s sake and denied the usual pleasures. At eighteen
he came to grief in a sentimental affair and then failed his military examinations. He could
regard himself as a total failure, but, cleverly, took it as a sign that the religious life was the way
for him. He saw the word of God there, but who can doubt that the decision was his and his
alone? He could as easily have chosen to be a carpenter or a revolutionary.
As for ‘despair’, this simply means that we will restrict ourselves to relying only on our own will,
or on the probabilities which make our action possible. If I am counting on the arrival of a
friend, I presuppose that their train will be on time. But I am still among possibilities, outside
my own field of action. No God, no intention, is going to alter the world to my will.
In the end, Descartes meant the same, that we must act without hope.
Marxists have answered “Your action is limited by your death, but you can rely on others to
later take up your deeds and carry them forward to the revolution”. To this I rejoin that I cannot
know where the revolution will lead. Others may come and establish Fascism. Does that mean
that I must give up myself to quietism? No!
Quietism is the attitude of people who say: “let others do what I cannot do”. The doctrine that I
present is precisely the opposite: there is reality only in the action; and more, man is nothing
other than his own project and exists only in as far as he carries it out.
From this we see why our ideas so often cause horror. Many people have but one resource to
sustain them in their misery; to think, “circumstances were against me, I was worthy of better. I
had no great love because I never met anyone worthy of me. I wrote no great book because I
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had no time. I am filled with a crowd of possibilities greater than anyone could guess from my
few achievements.”
But in reality, for the existentialist, there is no love other than that which is built, no artistic
genius other than in works of art. The genius of Proust is the works of Proust. A man engages in
his own life, draws his own portrait, there is nothing more.
This is hard for somebody who has not made a success of life. But it is only reality that counts,
not dreams, expectations or hopes. What people reproach us for here is not our pessimism, but
the sternness of our optimism.
If people reproach our writings, it is not because we describe humanity as frail and sometimes
frankly bad, but because, unlike Zola whose characters are shown to be products of heredity or
environment, you cannot say of ours “That is what we are like, no one can do anything about
it”. The existentialist portrays a coward as one who makes himself a coward by his actions, a
hero who makes himself heroic.
Some still reproach us for confining man within his individual subjectivity. But there is no other
starting-point than the “I think, I am” – the absolute truth of consciousness, a simple truth
within reach of everyone and the only theory which gives man the dignity of not being a mere
object.
All materialisms treat men as objects, no different in their being bundles of determined
reactions than a table or a chair or a stone. We want to constitute a human kingdom of values
distinct from the material world.
Contrary to the philosophy of Descartes, contrary to the philosophy of Kant, we are discovering
in the cogito not just ourselves but all others. We discover an intersubjective world where each
man has to decide what he is and what others are.
It is not possible to find in each man the universal essence called human nature, but there is a
human universality of condition. Any purpose, even that of the Chinese, or the idiot or the child
can be understood by a European, given enough information. In this sense, there is a
universality of man; but it is not a given, it is something perpetually re-built.
That does not entirely refute the charge of subjectivism. People tax us with anarchy; they say
that “you cannot judge others, because you have no reason to prefer one project to another.
You give with one hand what you pretend to receive from the other.”
Let us say that moral choice is comparable to a work of art. Do we reproach the artist who
makes a painting without starting from laid-down rules? Did we tell him what he must paint?
There is no pre-defined picture, and no-none can say what the painting of tomorrow should be;
one can judge only one at a time.
5
Amongst morals, the creative situation is the same, and just as the works of, say, Picasso, have
consequences, so do our moral judgements.
That student who came to me could not appeal to any system for guidance; he was obliged to
invent the law for himself. We define man only through his engagement, so it is absurd to
reproach us for the consequences of a choice.
But it is not entirely true that we cannot judge others. We can judge whether choices are
founded on truth or error, and we can judge a man’s sincerity.
The man who hides behind the excuse of his passions or of some deterministic doctrine, is a
self-deceiver. “And what if I wish to deceive myself?” – there is no reason why you should not,
but I declare publicly that you are doing so.
We will freedom for the sake of freedom. And through it we discover that our freedom depends
entirely on the freedom of others, and that their freedom depends on ours. Those who hide
their freedom behind deterministic excuses, I will call cowards. Those who pretend that their
own existence was necessary, I will call scum.
To the objection that “You receive with one hand what you give with the other”, that is, your
values are not serious, since you choose them, I answer that, I am sorry, but having removed
God the Father, one needs somebody to invent values. Things have to be taken as they are.
One has reproached me ridiculing a type of humanism in Nausea, and now suggesting that
existentialism is a form of humanism. The absurd type of humanism is to glory in “Man the
magnificent” ascribing to all men the value of the deeds of the most distinguished men. Only a
dog or a horse would be in a position to declare such a judgement.
We cannot, either, fall into worshipping humanity, for that way leads to Fascism.
But there is another humanism, the acceptance that there is only one universe, the universe of
human subjectivity. Existentialism is not despair. It declares rather that even if God did exist, it
would make no difference.
“What Makes a Life
Significant?” by William
James
William James, Thoemmes Press
About the author. . . . William James (
1
842-1910), perhaps the most promi-
nent American philosopher and psychologist, was an influential formula-
tor and spokesperson for pragmatism. Early in his life, James studied art,
but later his curiosity turned to a number of scientific fields. After gradua-
tion from Harvard Medical College, James’ intellectual pursuits broadened
to include literary criticism, history, and philosophy. He read widely and
contributed to many different academic fields. The year following gradu-
ation, James accompanied Louis Agassiz on an expedition to Brazil.1 As
a Harvard professor in philosophy and psychology, James achieved recog-
nition as one of the most outstanding writers and lecturers of his time.
About the work. . . . In his Talks to Students,2 James presents three lectures
to students—two of them, being “The Gospel of Relaxation,” and “On a
Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” The third talk is the one presented
here. His second, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” has as its
1. See the short essay, “In the Laboratory With Agassiz,” by Samuel H. Scudder, in
Chapter 1.
2. William James.Talks to Students. 1899.
1
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
thesis that the worth of things depends upon the feelings we have toward
them. Read it online as a companion piece to this reading at theWilliam
JamesWebsite noted below in the section entitled “
.”
From the reading. . .
“Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections
to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold.”
The Selection from “What Makes Life
a Significant?”
[Life’s Values and Meanings]
IN my previous talk, “On a Certain Blindness,” I tried to make you feel
how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we
fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view. The
meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us. There lies
more than a mere interest of curious speculation in understanding this. It
has the most tremendous practical importance. I wish that I could convince
you of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis of all our tolerance, social, reli-
gious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and
sanguinary mistake that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing
to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own pecu-
liar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere
by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should
presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them
in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the
trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the
enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has
the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital
insight into the nature of Jill’s existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in
2 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological
anæsthesia as regards Jill’s magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to
Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill’s palpitating little
life-throbsare among the wonders of creation,are worthy of this sympa-
thetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like
Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward
a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires,
understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too;
for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead
clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented
that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were
not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack’s way of taking it—so
importantly—is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth
in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness
never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any ofus
be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay
us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to
realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.
If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone
at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons
do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight
in other people’s lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if
their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is
not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and
you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable
to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.
We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weigh-
ing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful revela-
tions of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to alter much.
Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable by others, for
beings as essentially practical as we are necessarily short of sight. But, if
we cannot gain much positive insight into one another, cannot we at least
use our sense of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going
over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of those hideous ancestral
intolerances; and cruelties, and positive reversals of the truth?
For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some principle
to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my previous lecture by
a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your indulgence for a similar
bit of egotism now.
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 3
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
From the reading. . .
“. . . I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons
do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking
delight in other people’s lives; and that such persons know more of
truth than if their hearts were not so big. ”
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds
on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred
enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and
industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity
and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on
a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants,
beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means
for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher
wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast. You have mag-
nificent music—a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most
perfect open-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic
exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and
the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kinder-
gartens and model secondary schools. You have general religious services
and special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running
soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men.
You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic dis-
eases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture,
you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the
best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the
name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what
human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no
dark corners.
I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the
charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin,
without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.
And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and
wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily
saying: “Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage,
even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance
straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this
4 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang;
this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offer-
ing it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid
lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,—I cannot abide
with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilder-
ness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the
precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite;
and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level
and quintessence of every mediocrity.”
The Boat Landing, Lake Chautauqua, New York, Library of Congress
Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless
fancy! There had been spread before me the realization—on a small, sam-
ple scale of course—of all the ideals for which our civilization has been
striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the in-
stinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called culti-
vated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contradiction
and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor drawing a full salary, was
in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I could.
So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was
so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever
falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that
it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style,
expressiveness and picturesqueness,—the element of precipitousness, so
to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger. What ex-
cites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 5
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting
battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced
to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of
death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of
death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which
danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious al-
ready that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on
its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the
struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things
become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost
and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its
success to pursue another more rare and arduous still—this is the sort of
thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems
to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring
home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the
place’s historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle mois-
ture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the
ball-field.
Such absence of human naturein extremisanywhere seemed, then, a suf-
ficient explanation for Chautauqua’s flatness and lack of zest.
But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It looks
indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about
our civilization were, after all, quite right. An irremediable flatness is
coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and
teachers’ conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths
and romanticchiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we
must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if
we can, in the romancer’s or the poet’s pages. The whole world, delightful
and sinful as it may still appear for a moment to one just escaped from
the Chautauquan enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just
those ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua As-
sembly on an enormous scale.Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben
untergehn. Even now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and com-
promise for every small advantage are crowding out all other qualities.
The higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.3
With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward Buf-
falo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the
3. This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine wars. Such outbursts
of the passion of mastery are, however, only episodes in a social process which in the
long run seems everywhere heading toward the Chautauquan ideals.
6 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very
suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I had been steep-
ing myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at life with the eyes
of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human
nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying
round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think
of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of
romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring
classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to
be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proof building that is
going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattleyards
and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the de-
mand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day
of the year somewhere, is human naturein extremisfor you. And wherever
a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and
aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under
the length of hours of the strain.
From the reading. . .
“An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and
mediocrity, church sociables and teachers’ conventions, are taking
the place of the old heights and depths and romanticchiaroscuro. ”
As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed
to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I had
ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my
soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty skin were
the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account of. Every other
virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, and unexpectant
of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our soldiers, thought I,
these our sustainers, these the very parents of our life.
Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and
reverence in looking at the peasant women, in from the country on their
business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried
and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick wool
stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering thorough-
fares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty, envying noth-
ing, humble-hearted, remote;—and yet at bottom, when you came to think
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 7
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and corruptions of that city
on their laborious backs. For where would any of it have been without
their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the fields? And so with us: not to
our generals and poets, I thought, but to the Italian and Hungarian laborers
in the Subway, rather, ought the monuments of gratitude and reverence of
a city like Boston to be reared.
[Courage of the Everyday Person]
If any of you have been readers of Tolstoï, you will see that I passed into
a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that convention-
ally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery,
patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious natural man.
Where now is our Tolstoï, I said, to bring the truth of all this home to our
American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away from that
spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched culture-as it calls
itself-is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too bide-bound to
even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a Kipling be enlisted in this mis-
sion? or are they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and not humane
enough for the inner joy and meaning of the laborer’s existence to be really
revealed? Must we wait for some one born and bred and living as a laborer
himself, but who, by grace of Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and
with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight into life.
In God’s eyes the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture,
of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit? and all the other
rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must
be so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain is
the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life,
each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally
struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up.
The exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant
portion of the whole business; and the distinctions of position can only
be a manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these
underground virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest
human life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist
only in particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and
decoration of the surface-show.
8 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
Thus are men’s lives levelled up as well as levelled down,—levelled up
in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness
and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to be
obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us
up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other
purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinc-
tions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape of a reli-
gious prophet has to arise—the Buddha, the Christ, or some Saint Francis,
some Rousseau or Tolstoï—to redispel our blindness. Yet, little by little,
there comes some stable gain; for the world does get more humane, and
the religion of democracy tends toward permanent increase.
This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great con-
tent. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence, so that
I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so save time.
But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more impersonal
way.
Three Peasants Walking to Market, Library of Congress
Tolstoï’s levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of melan-
choly commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitledMy Con-
fession,which led the way to his more specifically religious works. In
his masterpieceWar and Peace,—assuredly the greatest of human nov-
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 9
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
els,—the rôle of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier named
Karataïeff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that, in spite of his igno-
rance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, which have been
closed, to the mind of the principal character of the book; and his exam-
ple evidently is meant by Tolstoï to let God into the world again for the
reader. Poor little Karataïeff is taken prisoner by the French; and, when
too exhausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other prisoners
were in the famous retreat from Moscow. The last view one gets of him
is his little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly
awaiting the end.
“The more,” writes Tolstoï in the workMy Confession,“the more I ex-
amined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became that
they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the possibil-
ity of life.. . . Contrariwise to those of our own class, who protest against
destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and
misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and tran-
quil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be otherwise, and that
it is all right so.. . . The more we live by our intellect, the less we under-
stand the meaning of life. We see only a cruel jest in suffering and death,
whereas these people live, suffer, and draw near to death with tranquillity,
and oftener than not with joy.. . . There are enormous multitudes of them
happy with the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is
the sole of good of life. Those who understand life’s meaning, and know
how to live and die thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by
hundreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and
pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing
the vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life, the
more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It
came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of the
rich, disgusted me—more than that, it lost all semblance of meaning in my
eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts, all appeared
to me with a new significance. I understood that these things might be
charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them no depth, whereas the
life of the hardworking populace, of that multitude of human beings who
really contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light. I understood
that there veritably is life, that the meaning which life there receives is the
truth; and I accepted it.”4
In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental
virtue of mankind.
4. My Confession, X. (condensed).
10 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
“What a wonderful thing,” he writes,5 “is this Man! How surprising are his
attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, sav-
agely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey
upon his fellow-lives,—who should have blamed him, had be been of a
piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?. . . [Yet] it matters
not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage
of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous
morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his
brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who sells herself
to rob him, and be, for all that, simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a
child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others;. . . in the slums of cities,
moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without
hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet
true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted
perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace,. . . often repaying the world’s
scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple;. . . everywhere
some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought
and courage, everywhere the ensign of man’s ineffectual goodness,—ah!
if I could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all
the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under
every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks,
still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging to some rag of
honor, the poor jewel of their souls.”
All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our Tolstoïs and
Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive. Yet you remember the Irishman
who, when asked, “Is not one man as good as another?” replied, “Yes;
and a great deal better, too!” Similarly (it seems to me) does Tolstoï over-
correct our social prejudices, when he makes his love of the peasant so
exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated man as absolutely
as he does. Grant that at Chautauqua there was little moral effort, little
sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down in the souls of the par-
ticipants we may be sure that something of the sort was hid, some inner
stress, some vital virtue not found wanting when required. And, after all,
the question recurs, and forces itself upon us, Is it so certain that the sur-
roundings and circumstances of the virtue do make so little difference in
the importance of the result? Is the functional utility, the worth to the uni-
verse of a certain definite amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no
greater if the possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working
out far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and
5. Across the Plains: “Pulvis et Umbra” (abridged).
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 11
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
drawing water, just to keep himself alive? Tolstoï’s philosophy, deeply en-
lightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It savors too
much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which declares the
whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions to be a cun-
ning fraud.
Switchtender on Pennsylvania Railroad, Library of Congress
[Ideas of Individuals]
A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never be-
lieve the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys and
virtues are theessentialpart of life’s business, but it is sure that some
positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If it is idiotic
in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and
dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty
boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is with us really under
every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your college; in the stock-yards and
on the freight-trains; and in the czar of Russia’s court. But, instinctively,
we make a combination of two things in judging the total significance of
a human being. We feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product
only could be calculated) of his inner virtueand his outer place,—neither
singly taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning
for life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They
12 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
must be significant elements of the world as well.
Just test Tolstoï’s deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts. This
is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer in the
demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the spiritual condi-
tion of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to belong:—
The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown men,
and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell to the
highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each day. We
are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular strength in
the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. It
is all the capital that we have. We have no reserve means of subsistence, and
cannot, therefore, stand off for a “reserve price.” We sell under the necessity
of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or
starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way
of meeting this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our
labor.
Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and be will certainly get from
us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is secured for this
purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He has sole command
of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when the debris is
cleared away. In the mean time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost of
physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are capable of. If be
should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue
at work, he would not be the loser; for the market would soon supply him
with others to take our places.
We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,—that we have sold our
labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it where be
could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and be must get all the labor that he
can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little
as we can. From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated
every element which constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel no personal
pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our employer. There
is none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only
the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the signal to quit
work, and for our wages at the end.
And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no certainty
of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves, we must
expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be driven, like the
wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren, hopeless lives.
And such bard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which one
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 13
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it be-
cause they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his polar
expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is it the insen-
sibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible, and we extol
them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the crown-
ing beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery to a task, the loss
of finer pleasures? Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the
higher fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,—read the records of
missionary devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things,
then, taken by itself,—no, nor all of them together,—that make such a life
undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do
the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God’s creatures.
Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was too
steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.
Steelworker with Daughter, Ambridge, Pennsylvania, Library of Congress
If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what
made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,—that their
souls worked and endured in obedience to some innerideal, while their
comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These ideals
of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate,
14 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
although something about the man may often tell us when they are there.
In Mr. Wyckoff’s own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal
was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry through a
strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge his sympathetic
insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat and toil acquire a certain heroic
significance, and make us accord to him exceptional esteem. But it is
easy to imagine his fellows with various other ideals. To say nothing of
wives and babies, one may have been a convert of the Salvation Army,
and bad a nightingale singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all
the while be labored. Or there might have been an apostle like Tolstoï him-
self, or his compatriot Bondaïeff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor
as their religious mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with
many. And who knows how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of
which Phillips Brooks has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present
in that gang?
“A rugged, barren land,” says Phillips Brooks, “is poverty to live in,—a
land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a root to cat. But
living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it
all the time by judging it after the standard of the other lands, gradually
there come out its qualities. Behold! no land like this barren and naked
land of poverty could show the moral geology of the world. See how the
hard ribs. . . stand out strong and solid. No life like poverty could so get
one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let
us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown
away. . . . Poverty makes men come very near each other, and recognize
each other’s human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands
and cries out for faith in God. . . . I know how superficial and unfeeling,
how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem. . . . But I am
sure that the poor man’s dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy,
depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and
kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness
and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often
goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where he
lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he
shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of
regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so
long.”6
The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer’s life consist in
the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The backache, the
6. Sermons, 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 15
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
long hours, the danger, are patiently endured-for what? To gain a quid of
tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin
again the next day and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we
raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be out
conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon
their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. And this is why we
do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even
brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal, and the
laborers are supposed to have followed none.
From the reading. . .
“If there were any such morally exceptional individuals, however,
what made them different from the rest?”
You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the
complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop un-
der our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been led
to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be
present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are led
to say that such inner meaning can becompleteand valid for us also, only
when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal.
[Ideals]
But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite ac-
count of such a word?
To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something in-
tellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we
have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness
that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must benoveltyin an
ideal,—novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is
incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person
may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that there is nothing abso-
lutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. To keep out
of the gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of
our brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.
16 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere ide-
als are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape
or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse-
makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance, possibly
have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it does our
horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bring-
ing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a starched shirt
and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough
to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant
of men. Tolstoï would be completely blind in despising him for a prig, a
pedant and a parody; and all our new insight into the divinity of muscular
labor would be altogether off the track of truth.
But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous. The
more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you con-
tinue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of the labor-
ing man’s virtues are called into action on his part,—no courage shown, no
privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in the attempt to get them
realized. It is quite obvious that something more than the mere possession
of ideals is required to make a life significant in any sense that claims the
spectator’s admiration. Inner joy, to be sure, it mayhave, with its ideals;
but that is its own private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders
as we are, with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging
recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the
sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by
the dimension of the active will, if we are to havedepth, if we are to have
anything cubical and solid in the way of character.
The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly recogniz-
able purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two different parents,
either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by themselves give no
reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And let the orientalists and
pessimists say what they will, the thing of deepest—or, at any rate, of
comparatively deepest—significance in life does seem to be its character
of progress, or that strange union of reality with ideal novelty which it
continues from one moment to another to present. To recognize ideal nov-
elty is the task of what we call intelligence. Not every one’s intelligence
can tell which novelties are ideal. For many the ideal thing will always
seem to cling still to the older more familiar good. In this case character,
though not significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we
are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 17
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolstoï, and
choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any common
unintellectual man can show.
Harvard Gate, Harvard College, Library of Congress
[Culture, Courage, Ideals, and Joyful
Sympathy]
But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to be
reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and dropping
them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then Tolstoï
and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I took up
ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe in what
sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend singly to redeem life
from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are not enough to
do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and
will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to
danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be some sort of fusion,
some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively
and thoroughly significant to result.
Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of sig-
nificance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The answer
of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a balance struck
18 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer, all the same a real
conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes
have been opened to many important things. Some of you are, perhaps,
more livingly aware than you were an hour ago of the depths of worth that
lie around you, hid in alien lives. And, when you ask how much sympathy
you ought to bestow, although the amount is, truly enough, a matter of
ideal on your own part, yet in this notion of the combination of ideals with
active virtues you have a rough standard for shaping your decision. In any
case, your imagination is extended. You divine in the world about you mat-
ter for a little more humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence,
and love for others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased
importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious inspiration
and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than large amounts of
that sort of technical and accurate information which we professors are
supposed to be able to impart.
[One Last Example]
To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one brief
practical illustration, and then close.
We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the labor-question;
and, when you go out into the world, you will each and all of you be caught
up in its perplexities. I use the brief term labor-question to cover all sorts
of anarchistic discontents and socialistic projects, and the conservative re-
sistances which they provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and re-
grettable,—and I think it is so only to a limited extent,—the unhealthiness
consists solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow countrymen remain
entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other half. They
miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral virtue, and they do not
guess the presence of the intellectual ideals. They are at cross-purposes all
along the line, regarding each other as they might regard a set of danger-
ously gesticulating automata, or, if they seek to get at the inner motivation,
making the most horrible mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think
of in the rich man is a cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effemi-
nacy, and a boundless affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a
pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disap-
pointment into envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind
of the dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimen-
tal act over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 19
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
him for just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly
taken, are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each,
in short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance
are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous fea-
ture of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of everybody
else’s sight.
Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and
better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got
to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen to the
end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you expect that they
will make anygenuine vital differenceon a large scale, to the lives of our
descendants, you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture.
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—the marriage,
namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity,
courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.—And, what-
ever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that mar-
riage to take place.
Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more elo-
quent than any I can speak: “The ‘Great Eastern,’ or some of her succes-
sors,” he said, “will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and cross the seas
without allowing their passengers to feel that they have left the firm land.
The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to be performed with
similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions
to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They
will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will
wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns
and sinking ships and praying bands; and, when they come to the end of
their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them
no more. But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of
the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents
and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with
it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eter-
nity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite
view of their relations to them and to each other.”7
7. Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.
20 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
Harvard Medical College, Boston, Mass., Library of Congress
In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those philosophers are
right who contend that the world is a standing thing, with no progress, no
real history. The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of
the show. The altered equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our
opportunities and open chances to us for new ideals. But, with each new
ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal
will vanish; and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should
with confidence say that the total sum of significances is positively and
absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any other of the world.
I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain qualifi-
cations in which I myself believe. But one can only make one point in
one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my point home
to you this evening in even a slight degree.There are compensationsand
no outward changes of condition in life can keep the nightingale of its
eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of different men’s hearts. That
is the main fact to remember. If we could not only admit it with our lips,
but really and truly believe it, how our convulsive insistencies, how our
antipathies and dreads of each other, would soften down! If the poor and
the rich could look at each other in this way,sub specie æternatis, How
gentle would grow their disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what
willingness to live and let live, would come into the world!
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 21
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
From the reading. . .
“Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere
ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some
shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high;
and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards,
shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage,
or endurance, possibly have them on the most copious scale. ”
Related Ideas
William James(http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/james.html). Links,
articles, etexts, reviews, and discussion groups are part of what make up
this extensive James site.
Classics in the History of Psychology(http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/). York
University History & Theory of Psychology Electronic Resource. Special
collections, extensive open-domain readings in the history of psychology
searchable by author or title, and suggested readings.
Agassiz, Louis,1
anarchists,19
Brooks, Phillips,15
character,17
culture,18
emotion
greed,19
friendship,3
history
progress,21
ideals,16
James, William,1
22 Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
“What Makes a Life Significant?” by William James
joy, 19
love, 2
middle class,4
nihilism, 12
pessimism,12
philosophy
Oriental,17
practical person,7
pragmatism,1
prophets,9
slave-morality,14
tolerance,2
Tolstoy, Leo,9
Utopia,5
values,2
virtue, 11, 19
Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction 23
- What Makes a Life Significant? by William James
- The Selection from What Makes Life a Significant?
[Life’s Values and Meanings]
[Courage of the Everyday Person]
[Ideas of Individuals]
[Ideals]
[Culture, Courage, Ideals, and Joyful Sympathy]
[One Last Example]
Related Ideas
Index
Chapter 10
The Nature of Mental States
Hilary Putnam
The typical concerns of the Philosopher of Mind might be represented by three questions
: (1) How do we know that other people have pains? (2) Are pains brain states?
(3) What is the analysis of the concept pain? I do not wish to discuss questions (1) and
(3) in this chapter. I shall say something about question (2).
Identity Questions
is pain a brain stater (Or, is the property of having a pain at time t a brain stater)
! It is
impossible to discuss this question sensibly without saying something about the peculiar
rules which have grown up in the course of the development of
‘
analytical philoso
–
phy
‘- rules which, far from leading to an end to all conceptual confusions, themselves
represent considerable conceptual confusion. These rules- which are, of course, implicit
rather than explicit in the practice of most analytical philosophers- are (1) that a
statement of the form ‘ being A is being B
‘
(e.g., ‘ being in pain is being in a certain brain
state’) can be corred only if it follows, in some sense, from the meaning of the terms
A and B; and (2) that a statement of the form ‘ being A is being B can be philosophically
infonnatit1e only if it is in some sense reductive (e.g., ‘ being in pain is having a certain
unpleasant sensation
‘ is not philosophically informative; ‘ being in pain is having a
certain behavior disposition
‘ is, if true, philosophically informative). These rules are
excellent rules if we still believe that the program of reductive analysis (in the style of
the 1930s) can be carried out; if we don
‘t, then they turn analytical philosophy into
a mug
‘s game, at least so far as
‘is’ questions are concerned.
In this paper I shall use the term
‘
property
‘ as a blanket term for such things as being
in pain, being in a particular brain state, having a particular behavior disposition, and
also for magnitudes such as temperature, etc.- i.e., for things which can naturally be
represented by one- or-more-place predicates or functors. I shall use the term
‘
concept
‘
for things which can be identified with synonymy-classes of expressions. Thus the
concept temperature can be identified a maintain) with the synonymy-class of the word
‘
temperature
‘.2 (This is like saying that the number 2 can be identified with the class of
all pairs. This is quite a different statement from the peculiar statement that 2 is the class
of all pairs. I do not maintain that concepts are synonymy-classes, whatever that might
mean, but that they can be identified with synonymy-classes, for the purpose of formal-
ization of the relevant discourse.)
The question What is the concept temperaturer is a very
‘
funny
‘ one. One might take
it to mean What is temperature? Please take my question as a conceptual one.
‘ In that
case an answer might be (pretend for a moment ‘ heat
‘ and ‘temperature
‘ are synonyms)’
temperature is heat
‘
, or even
‘the concept of temperature is the same concept as the
concept of heat
‘. Or one might take it to mean What are concepf$, really? For example,
what is “the concept of temperature
‘7 In that case heaven knows what an ‘answer’
�
52 Hilary Putnam
would be. ( perhaps it would be the statement that concepts can be identified with
synonymy-c Iasses.)
Of course, the question What is the property temperaturef is also
‘
funny
‘. And one
way of interpreting it is to take it as a question about the concept of temperature. But
this is not the way a physicist would take it .
The effect of saying that the property PI can be identical with the property P2 only if
the terms PI, P2 are in some suitable sense
‘
synonyms
‘ is, to all intents and purposes,
to collapse the two notions of
‘
property
‘ and ‘concept
‘
into a single notion. The view
that concepts (intensions) are the same as properties has been explicitly advocated by
Camap (e.g., in Meaning and Necessity). This seems an unfortunate view, since
‘
temperature
is mean molecular kinetic energy
‘
appears to be a perfectly good example of a true
statement of identity of properties, whereas
‘the concept of temperature is the same
concept as a concept of mean molecular kinetic energy
‘ is simply false.
Many philosophers believe that the statement
‘
pain is a brain state
‘ violates some
rules or norms of English. But the arguments offered are hardly convincing. For example
, if the fact that I can know that I am in pain without knowing that I am in brain state
S shows that pain cannot be brain state S, then, by exactly the same argument, the fact
that I can know that the stove is hot without knowing that the mean molecular kinetic
energy is high (or even that molecules exist) shows that it is false that temperature is
mean molecular kinetic energy, physics to the contrary. In fact, all that immediately
follows from the fact that I can know that I am in pain without knowing that I am in
brain state S is that the concept of pain is not the same concept as the concept of being
in brain state S. But either p~ or the state of being in p~ or some p~ or some pain
state, might still be brain state S. After all, the concept of temperature is not the same
concept as the concept of mean molecular kinetic energy. But temperature is mean
molecular kinetic energy.
Some philosophers maintain that both
‘
pain is a brain state
‘ and ‘pain states are brain
states’ are unintelligible. The answer is to explain to these philosophers, as well as we
can, given the vagueness of all scientific methodology, what sorts of considerations
lead one to make an empirical reduction (i.e., to say such things as
‘water is H2O
‘
, ‘light
is electromagnetic radiation
‘
,
‘
temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy
‘
). If, without
giving reasons, he still maintains in the face of such examples that one cannot
imagine parallel circumstances for the use of
‘
pains are brain states
‘
(or, perhaps,
‘
pain
states are brain states’), one has grounds to regard him as perverse.
Some philosophers maintain that
‘
PI is P2
‘ is something that can be true, when the’is’ involved is the ‘is’ of empirical reduction, only when the properties PI and P 2 are
(a) associated with a spatio- temporal region; and (b) the region is one and the same in
both cases. Thus ‘temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy
‘ is an admissible empirical
reduction, since the temperature and the molecular energy are associated with the
same space-time region, but ‘ having a pain in my arm is being in a brain state
‘ is not,
since the spatial regions involved are different.
This argument does not appear very strong. Surely no one is going to be deterred
from saying that mirror images are light reflected from an object and then from the
surface of a mirror by the fact that an image can be 1ocated
‘ three feet behind the
mirror! ( Moreover, one can always Bnd some common property of the reductions one is
willing to allow- e.g., temperature is mean molecular kinetic energy- which is not
a property of some one identification one wishes to disallow. This is not very impressive
unless one has an argument to show that the very purposes of such identification
depend upon the common property in question.)
Again , other philosophers have contended that all the predictions that can be derived
&om the conjunction of neurophysiological laws with such statements as
‘
pain
states are such-and-such brain states
‘
can equally well be derived &om the conjunction
of the same neurophysiological laws with ‘ being in pain is correlated with such
-and-
such brain states
‘
, and hence (sic!) there can be no methodological grounds for saying
that pains (or pain states) are brain states, as opposed to saying that they are correlated
(invariantly ) with brain states. This argument , too , would show that light is only correlated
with electromagnetic radiation . The mistake is in ignoring the fact that , although
the theories in question may indeed lead to the same predictions , they open and
exclude different questions.
‘
Ught is invariantly correlated with electromagnetic radia
–
tion
‘
would leave open the questions What is the light then, if it isn
‘
t the same as the
electromagnetic radiationr and What makes the light accompany the electromagnetic
radiation ?
‘ –
questions which are excluded by saying that the light is the electromagnetic
radiation . Similarly , the purpose of saying that pains are brain states is precisely to
exclude from empirical meaningfulness the questions What is the pain, then, if it isn
‘
t
the same as the brain stater and What makes the pain accompany the brain state?
‘
If
there are grounds to suggest that these questions represent, so to speak, the wrong way
to look at the matter , then those grounds are grounds for a theoretical identification of
pains with brain states.
If all arguments to the contrary are unconvincing , shall we then conclude that it is
meaningful (and perhaps true ) to say either that pains are brain states or that pain states
are brain states?
1. It is perfectly meaningful (violates no
‘
rule of English
‘
, involves no
‘
extension
of usage
‘
) to say
‘
pains are brain states
‘
.
2. It is not meaningful (involves a
‘
changing of meaning
‘
or
‘
an extension of
usage
‘
, etc.) to say
‘
pains are brain states
‘
.
My own position is not expressed by either 1 or 2. It seems to me that the notions’
change of meaning
‘
and
‘
extension of usage
‘
are simply so ill defined that one cannot in
fact say either 1 or 2. I see no reason to believe that either the linguist , or the man-on –
the-street, or the philosopher possess es today a notion of
‘
change of meaning
‘
applicable
to such cases as the one we have been discussing. The job for which the notion of
change of meaning was developed in the history of the language was just a much cruder
job than this one.
But, if we don
‘
t assert either 1 or 2- in other words , if we regard the
‘
change of
meaning
‘
issue as a pseudoissue in this case
– then how are we to discuss the question
with which we started?
‘
Is pain a brain stater
The answer is to allow statements of the form
‘
pain is A
‘
, where
‘
pain
‘
and
‘
A
‘
are in
no sense synonyms , and to see whether any such statement can be found which might
be acceptable on empirical and methodological grounds . This is what we shall now
proceed to do .
Is Pain a Brain State?
We shall discuss is pain a brain stater then . And we have agreed to waive the
‘
change
of meaning
‘
issue.
Since I am discussing not what the concept of pain comes to , but what pain is, in a
sense of
‘
is
‘
which requires empirical theory – construdion (or , at least, empirical speculation
), I shall not apologize for advancing an empirical hypothesis . Indeed, my strategy
The Nature of Mental States S3
S4 Hilary Putnam
will be to argue that pain is not a brain state, not on a priori grounds, but on the
grounds that another hypothesis is more plausible. The detailed development and
verification of my hypothesis would be just as Utopian a task as the detailed development
and verification of the brain-state hypothesis. But the putting-forward, not of
detailed and scientifically
‘finished’ hypotheses, but of schemata for hypotheses, has
long been a function of philosophy. I shall, in short, argue that pain is not a brain
state, in the sense of a physical-chemical state of the brain (or even the whole nervous
system), but another kind of state entirely. I propose the hypothesis that pain, or the
state of being in pain, is a functional state of a whole organism.
To explain this it is necessary to introduce some technical notions. In previous papers
I have explained the notion of a Turing Machine and discussed the use of this notion
as a model for an organism. The notion of a Probabilistic Automaton is de Aned similarly
to a Turing Machine, except that the transitions between
‘states’ are allowed to be
with various probabilities rather than being
‘deterministic’. (Of course, a Turing
Machine is simply a special kind of Probabilistic Automaton, one with transition prob-
abilities 0, 1). I shall assume the notion of a Probabilistic Automaton has been generalized
to allow for ‘sensory inputs
‘ and ‘motor outputs
‘- that is, the Machine Table
specifies, for every possible combination of a
‘state’ and a complete set of
‘
sensory
inputs
‘
, an
‘instruction’ which determines the probability of the next
‘state’, and also the
probabilities of the
‘motor outputs
‘. ( This replaces the idea of the Machine as printing
on a tape.) I shall also assume that the physical realization of the sense organs responsible
for the various inputs, and of the motor organs, is specified, but that the
‘
states’
and the ‘inputs
‘ themselves are, as usual, specified only
‘
implicitly
‘- i.e., by the set of
transition probabilities given by the Machine Table.
Since an empirically given system can simultaneously be a
‘
physical realization
‘ of
many different Probabilistic Automata, I introduce the notion of a Description of a
system. A Description of 5 where 5 is a system, is any true statement to the effect that 5
possess es distinct states 51, 51, . . . ~ which are related to one another and to the motor
outputs and sensory inputs by the transition probabilities given in such-and-such a
Machine Table. The Machine Table mentioned in the Description will then be called the
Functional Organization of 5 relative to that Description, and the 5, such that 5 is in
state 5, at a given time will be called the Total State of 5 (at the time) relative to
that Description. It should be noted that knowing the Total State of a system relative to
a Description involves knowing a good deal about how the system is likely to ‘ behave
‘
,
given various combinations of sensory inputs, but does not involve knowing the physical
realization of the 5, as, e.g., physical-chemical states of the brain. The 5″ to repeat,
are specified only implicitly by the Description- i.e., specified only by the set of transition
probabilities given in the Machine Table.
The hypothesis that ‘ being in pain is a functional state of the organism
‘
may now be
spelled out more exactly as follows:
1. All organisms capable of feeling pain are Probabilistic Automata.
2. Every organism capable of feeling pain possess es at least one Description of a
certain kind (i.e., being capable of feeling pain is possessing an appropriate kind
of Functional Organization).
3. No organism capable of feeling pain possess es a decomposition into parts
which separately possess Descriptions of the kind referred to in 2.
4. For every Description of the kind referred to in 2, there exists a subset of the
sensory inputs such that an organism with that Description is in pain when and
only when some of its sensory inputs are in that subset.
This hypothesis is admittedly vague, though surely no vaguer than the brain-state
hypothesis in its present form. For example, one would like to know more about the
kind of Functional Organization that an organism must have to be capable of feeling
pain, and more about the marks that distinguish the subset of the sensory inputs
referred to in 4. With respect to the first question, one can probably say that the
Functional Organization must include something that resembles a
‘
preference function
‘
,
or at least a preference partial ordering and something that resembles an
‘inductive
logic
‘
(i.e., the Machine must be able to ‘learn from experience
‘
). In addition, it seems
natural to require that the Machine possess
‘
pain sensors
‘
, i.e., sensory organs which
normally signal damage to the Machine
‘s body, or dangerous temperatures, pressures,
etc., which transmit a special subset of the inputs, the subset referred to in 4. Finally, and
with respect to the second question, we would want to require at least that the inputs in
the distinguished subset have a high disvalue on the Machine
‘s preference function or
ordering (further conditions are discussed in the previous chapter). The purpose of
condition 3 is to rule out such ‘organisms
‘
(if they can count as such) as swarms of bees
as single pain-feelers. The condition 1 is, obviously, redundant, and is only introduced
for expository reasons. (It is, in fact, empty, since everything is a Probabilistic Automaton
under some Description.)
I contend, in passing, that this hypothesis, in spite of its admitted vagueness, is far
less vague than the
‘
physical-chemical state
‘
hypothesis is today, and far more susceptible
to investigation of both a mathematical and an empirical kind. Indeed, to investigate
this hypothesis is just to attempt to produce
‘mechanical’ models of organisms- and
isn’t this, in a sense, just what psychology is about? The difficult step, of course, will be
to pass from models of specific organisms to a nomull fonn for the psychological description
of organisms- for this is what is required to make 2 and 4 precise. But this too
seems to be an inevitable part of the program of psychology.
I shall now compare the hypothesis just advanced with (a) the hypothesis that pain is
a brain state, and (b) the hypothesis that pain is a behavior disposition.
Functional State versus Brain State
It may, perhaps, be asked if I am not somewhat unfair in taking the brain-state theorist
to be talking about physical-chemical states of the brain. But (a) these are the only sorts
of states ever mentioned by brain-state theorists. (b) The brain-state theorist usually
mentions (with a certain pride, slightly reminiscent of the Village Atheist) the incompatibility
of his hypothesis with all forms of dualism and mentalism. This is natural if
physical-chemical states of the brain are what is at issue. However, functional states of
whole systems are something quite different. In particular, the functional-state hypothesis
is not incompatible with dualism! Although it goes without saying that the hypothesis
is ‘mechanistic’ in its inspiration, it is a slightly remarkable fact that a system consisting
of a body and a
‘soul’, if such things there be, can perfectly well be a Probabilistic
Automaton. (c) One argument advanced by Smart is that the brain-state theory assumes
only
‘
physical
‘
properties, and Smart finds
‘non-physical
‘
properties unintelligible. The
Total States and the
‘
inputs
‘ defined above are, of course, neither mental nor physical
per se, and I cannot imagine a functionalist advancing this argumentd ) If the brain-state
theorist does mean (or at least allow) states other than physical- chemical states, then his
hypothesis is completely empty, at least until he specifies what sort of
‘states’ he does
mean.
Taking the brain-state hypothesis in this way, then, what reasons are there to prefer
the functional-state hypothesis over the brain-state hypothesis? Consider what the
The Nature of Mental States 55
S6 Hilary Putnam
brain-state theorist has to do to make good his claims. He has to spedfy aphysical-
chemical state such that any organism (not just a mammal) is in pain if and only if (a) it
possess es a brain of a suitable physical- chemical structure; and (b) its brain is in that
physical- chemical state. This means that the physical- chemical state in question must be
a possible state of a mammalian brain, a reptilian brain, a mollusc
‘s brain (octopus es are
mollusca. and certainly feel pain), etc. At the same time, it must not be a possible
(physically possible) state of the brain of any physically possible creature that cannot
feel pain. Even if such a state can be found, it must be nomologically certain that it will
also be a state of the brain of any extraterrestrial life that may be found that will
be capable of feeling pain before we can even entertain the supposition that it may be
pain.
It is not altogether impossible that such a state will be found. Even though octopus
and mammal are examples of parallel (rather than sequential) evolution, for example,
virtually identical structures (physically speaking) have evolved in the eye of the octopus
and in the eye of the mammal, notwithstanding the fact that this organ has evolved
from different kinds of cells in the two cases. Thus it is at least possible that parallel
evolution, all over the universe, might always lead to one and the same physical
‘ corre-
late’ of pain. But this is certainly an ambitious hypothesis.
Finally, the hypothesis becomes still more ambitious when we realize that the brain-
state theorist is not just saying that pain is a brain state; he is, of course, concerned to
maintain that every psychological state is a brain state. Thus if we can find even one
psychological predicate which can clearly be applied to both a mammal and an octopus
(say ‘ hungry
‘
), but whose physical- chemical
‘correlate’ is different in the two cases,
the brain-state theory has collapsed. It seems to me overwhelmingly probable that we
can do this. Granted, in such a case the brain-state theorist can save himself by ad
hoc assumptions (e.g., defining the disjunction of two states to be a single
‘
physical-
chemical state’), but this does not have to be taken seriously.
Turning now to the considerations for the functional-state theory, let us begin with
the fact that we identify organisms as in pain, or hungry, or angry, or in heat, etc., on
the basis of their behavior. But it is a truism that similarities in the behavior of two
systems are at least a reason to suspect similarities in the functional organization of the
two systems, and a much Wtllker reason to suspect similarities in the actual physical
details. Moreover, we
‘
expect the various psychological states- at least the basic ones,
such as hunger, thirst, aggression, etc.- to have more or less similar
‘transition prob-
abilities’ (within wide and i Il- defined limits, to be sure) with each other and with behavior
in the case of different species, because this is an artifact of the way in which we
identify these states. Thus, we would not count an animal as thirsty if its
‘unsatiated’
behavior did not seem to be directed toward drinking and was not followed by
, satiation
for liquid
‘. Thus any animal that we count as capable of these various states will at
least seem to have a certain rough kind of functional organization. And, as already
remarked, if the program of finding psychological laws that are not species-specific-
i.e., of finding a normal form for psychological theories of different species- ever
succeeds, then it will bring in its wake a delineation of the kind of functional organization
that is necessary and sufficient for a given psychological state, as well as a precise
definition of the notion ‘psychological state
‘. In contrast, the brain-state theorist has to
hope for the eventual development of neurophysiological laws that are species-independent
, which seems much less reasonable than the hope that psychological laws (of a
sufficiently general kind) may be species-independent, or, still weaker, that aspecies-
independent fonn can be found in which psychological laws can be written .
Functional State versus Behavior-Disposition
The theory that being in pain is neither a brain state nor a functional state but a
behavior disposition has one apparent advantage : it appears to agree with the way in
which we verify that organisms are in pain . We do not in practice know anything about
the brain state of an animal when we say that it is in pain; and we possess little if any
knowledge of its functional organization , except in a crude intuitive way . In fact,
however , this
‘
advantage
‘
is no advantage at all : for , although statements about how we
verify that .r is A may have a good deal to do with what the concept of being A comes
to , they have precious little to do with what the property A is. To argue on the ground
just mentioned that pain is neither a brain state nor a functional state is like arguing
that heat is not mean molecular kinetic energy &om the fact that ordinary people do not
(they think ) ascertain the mean molecular kinetic energy of something when they verify
that it is hot or cold . It is not necessary that they should ; what is necessary is that the
marks that they take as indications of heat should in fact be explained by the mean
molecular kinetic energy . And , similarly , it is necessary to our hypothesis that the marks
that are taken as behavioral indications of pain should be explained by the fact that the
organism is a functional state of the appropriate kind , but not that speakers should
know that this is so.
The difficulties with ‘ behavior disposition
‘
accounts are so well known that I shall
do little more than recall them here. The difficulty
– it appears to be more than a’
difficulty ,
‘
in fact- of specifying the required behavior disposition except as
‘
the disposition
of X to behave as if X were in pain
‘
, is the chief one, of course. In contrast , we
can specify the functional state with which we propose to identify pain, at least roughly ,
without using the notion of pain . Namely , the functional state we have in mind is the
state of receiving sensory inputs which playa certain role in the Functional Organization
of the organism . This role is characterized, at least partially , by the fact that the
sense organs responsible for the inputs in question are organs whose function is to
detect damage to the body , or dangerous extremes of temperature , pressure, etc., and
by the fact that the
‘
inputs
‘
themselves, whatever their physical realization , represent a
condition that the organism assigns a high disvalue to . As I stressed in ‘ The mental life
of some machines
‘
, this does not mean that the Machine will always avoid being in the
condition in question (
‘
pain
‘
); it only means that the condition will be avoided unless
not avoiding it is necessary to the attainment of some more highly valued goal . Since
the behavior of the Machine (in this case, an organism ) will depend not merely on the
sensory inputs , but also on the Total State (i.e., on other values, beliefs, etc.), it seems
hopeless to make any general statement about how an organism in such a condition
must behave; but this does not mean that we must abandon hope of characterizing the
condition . Indeed, we have just characterized it .
Not only does the behavior – disposition theory seem hopelessly vague; if the ‘ behav-
ior’ referred to is peripheral behavior , and the relevant stimuli are peripheral stimuli
(e.g ., we do not say anything about what the organism will do if its brain is operated
upon ), then the theory seems clearly false. For example, two animals with all motor
nerves cut will have the same actual and potential ‘ behavior’ (namely , none to speak
of); but if one has cut pain Bbers and the other has uncut pain Bbers, then one will
feel pain and the other won
‘
t . Again , if one person has cut pain Bbers, and another
suppress es all pain responses deliberately due to some strong compulsion , then the
actual and potential peripheral behavior may be the same, but one will feel pain and the
other won
‘
t . (Some philosophers maintain that this last case is conceptually impossible ,
but the only evidence for this appears to be that they can
‘
t, or don
‘
t want to , conceive of
it .) If , instead of pain, we take some sensation the ‘ bodily expression
‘
of which is easier
The Nature of Mental States 57
58 Hilary Putnam
Methodological Considerations
So far we have considered only what might be called the
‘
empirical
‘
reasons for saying
that being in pain is a functional state , rather than a brain state or a behavior disposition ;
namely , that it seems more likely that the functional state we described is invariantly
‘
correlated
‘
with pain , species
–
independently , than that there is either a physical
-chemical
state of the brain (must an organism have a brain to feel pain ? perhaps some ganglia
will do ) or a behavior disposition so correlated . If this is correct , then it follows that the
identification we proposed is at least a candidate for consideration . What of method –
ological considerations ?
The methodological considerations are roughly similar in all cases of reduction , so no
surprises need be expected here . First , identification of psychological states with functional
states means that the laws of psychology can be derived from statements of the
form
‘
such -and -such organisms have such
-and -such Descriptions
‘
together with the
identification statements (‘ being in pain is such
-and -such a functional state
‘
, etc .). Secondly
, the presence of the functional state (i .e., of inputs which play the role we have
described in the Functional Organization of the organism ) is not merely
‘
correlated
with
‘
but actually explains the pain behavior on the part of the organism . Thirdly , the
identification serves to exclude questions which (if a naturalistic view is correct ) represent
an altogether wrong way of looking at the matter , e.g ., What is pain if it isn
‘
t
either the brain state or the functional stater and What causes the pain to be always
accompanied by this sort of functional stater In short , the identification is to be tentatively
accepted as a
‘
theory which leads to both fruitful predictions and to fruitful
questions, and which serves to discourage fruitless and empirically senseless questions ,
where by
‘
empirically senseless
‘
I mean
‘
senseless
‘
not merely from the standpoint of
verification , but from the standpoint of what there in fact is.
Notes
1. In this paper I wish to avoid the vexed question of the relation between pRins and pRin states. I only
remark in passing that one common argument against identification of these two – namely, that a pain
can be in one
‘
s ann but a state (of the organism) cannot be in one
‘s ann- is easily seen to be fallacious.
2. There are some well-known remarks by Alonzo Church on this topic. Those remarks do not bear (as
might at Ant be supposed) on the identification of concepts with synonymy-classes as such, but rather
support the view that (in formal semantics) it is necessary to retain Frege
‘s distinction between the
normal and the ‘oblique
‘
use of expressions. That is, even if we say that the concept of temperature is the
synonymy-class of the word
‘
temperature
‘
, we must not thereby be led into the error of supposing that’the concept of temperature
‘
is synonymous with
‘the synonymy -class of the word
”
temperature
” ‘ – for
then ‘the concept of temperature
‘ and ‘ dtr Btgriff dtr T emperatur’ would not be synonymous, which they
are. Rather, we must say that the concept of
‘
temperature
‘
rt/trs to the synonymy-class of the word’
temperature
‘
(on this particular reconstruction); but that class is identifitd not as
‘
the synonymy-class to
which such-and-such a word belongs
‘
, but in another way (e.g., as the synonymy-class whose membeR
have such-and-such a characteristic use).
- chpt10