## Inbox - [Now writing on Nietzsche](https://www.elijahmillgram.net/work-in-progress.html). - Aeon article - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/serial-hyperspecializers.html - YouTube? - Books: - Great Endarkenment - Hard Truths, ch 12. - Argues against the doctrine of unrestricted bivalence, i.e. idea that propositions are either true or false. - Who was Nietzsches Genealogist? (in library) - Commensurability in perspective ## His own bio https://www.elijahmillgram.net/ we learn what matters from experience, and that consequently one widespread preconception -- that being practically rational has to do solely with effectively pursuing one's desires or ends -- is a mistake ## D’où venons-nous. . . Que sommes nous. . . Où allons-nous? The incoherence of utilitarianism has to do with the attempt to capture the **person-by-person importance of desires and projects** (consisting or expressed in being the source of a person’s own reasons for action) in an **impersonal theory** of what would be on the whole best. Several years previously, Edward Craig had developed some of Williams’s early remarks into an account of knowledge. 20 Craig proposed sidestepping the exercises in conceptual analysis that still dominate epistemology by asking what function ascriptions of knowlege serve; he addressed his question by imagining a society that lacked the concept (a society in an epistemological “state of nature”) and considering whether and why they would want to introduce it. The need he identified was a **generic and transmissible certificate for information**. **To say “I know that p” conveys roughly that p is good enough to go on**; that I can tell you so without having to ask precisely to what use you are going to put p; and that you can tell the next person to come along what I have just told you. (Of course, the first-person use of such a certificate is not necessarily the primary one.) Any society lacking such a certificate would have to invent one, and when they did, it would have roughly the contours familiar from our concept of knowledge.21 Now, Craig’s treatment perhaps inadvertently highlights a choice that epistemologists have made, for the most part unawares: to provide a theory of the most generic epistemic certificate, rather than the many other more specialized certificates in circulation. Some examples of the latter: not all knowledge is news (which implies recent provenance and salience); publication in academic journals provides a very large variety of different sorts of epistemic certification; degree-granting institutions provide a very large number of distinct forms of epistemic certification to individuals (rather than to packets of information); labels on products may inform you that they contain chemicals “known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.” The choice historically made by epistemology as a field is reasonable if the generic certification is especially important, but not otherwise. [...] we have, on the one hand, the earlier contrast between beliefs and assertions and, variously, imperatives, oughts, desires, and the like; the generic label, “true,” accompanies the use of this contrast. On the other, we have the contrast between truths that can be rendered fully objective and those which can’t, typically because they involve applications of thick ethical concepts. [...] To say that “true” is the (or a) generic alethic certificate is to say that we do not, in using it, have to specify which pool of information is in question, or who the certificate is meant for, or what its ranges of acceptable use are. [...] More importantly, much information is generated as approximations, idealizations, and their less-than-accurate kin, and whether these are usable or not depend on what aims or concerns one has. (**There is no such thing as an approximation’s being good enough, plain and simple; to use an approximation competently, one must be able to answer the question, good enough for what?**) ## Metaphysics by Forgetting https://dailynous.com/2015/06/17/metaphysics-by-forgetting-guest-post-by-elijah-millgram/ It’s not a new idea that intuitions are views, or perhaps intellectual habits, that were arrived at for some reason or other, only we’ve all forgotten what it was. We mostly still don’t realize what our technical term for this is, the one we use to mark simultaneously having forgotten how we came to think something, along with our dogged insistence on the something we nonetheless continue to think. That term is “a priori”. [...] [Old-school metaphysics] analyses are our version of “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”: there is this _thing_, say, metaphysical necessity, _it_ is _just that way_, and we’re sure because our intuitions say so—which again is what we say when we’ve gotten used to doing it one way, and can’t remember why. The subtext is that there’s no need to reconsider how we _do_ do things. ## Serial hyperspecialisers [https://dailynous.com/2015/06/03/serial-hyperspecializers-and-how-they-think-guest-post-by-elijah-millgram/](https://dailynous.com/2015/06/03/serial-hyperspecializers-and-how-they-think-guest-post-by-elijah-millgram/) This sort of low-key transhumanism matters for philosophers, because philosophical problems almost always turn out to be about what the right way to think is, and a creature’s cognition should match its form of life.  If we’ve come to have a different form of life (a form of life that consists in having many thoroughly different forms of life, side by side but temporarily), we should expect to find, when we take another look, that we’ve got a different pile of philosophical problems to deal with. Apriorism is acting like you already know what’s going on, without bothering to look.  The posture of philosophy has been apriorist pretty much throughout its history.  But we’d better ask:  when can you afford this posture?  Well, when the intellectual equipment—the concepts, the opinions, the guidelines—that a creature is going to need are stable, they can be front-loaded; however, they’ll be stable when what the creature does and how it works (as we were putting it, its ergon) doesn’t change, or only changes very slowly.  We’re not like that anymore.  So we can’t afford to be apriorist; the job of philosophy for us, for the transhumans we’ve become over the last couple of centuries, can’t be to figure out the built in opinions and concepts and categories and so on.  That’s philosophy for an older, defunct species to which we are very peculiarly related. Instrumentalist (or “Humean”) theories of practical reasoning are how philosophers talk through the strategy of hardwiring designated objectives into an organism, so that it can execute a life plan suitable to a stable environment.  Your environment is no longer stable enough for relying on desires to be a decent strategy.  Instrumentalists (“Humeans”) have a view of practical rationality suitable for a cruder, simpler species. ## New Books Network: John Stuart Mill [https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-in/elijah-millgram-john-stuart-HnTKMc2R-ea/](https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-in/elijah-millgram-john-stuart-HnTKMc2R-ea/) Default view in analytic philosophy and the West is that meaning of life comes from projects, career is one of the key projects. Recommends David Wiggins: Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life; Nagel on the Absurd. #todo Also references Bernard Williams and Susan Wolf. Life projects needs to be open-ended—otherwise you might die too soon or too late. Can think of Bentham and Mill's method as all about trying to avoid having to appeal to intuition. Mill encountered Bentham's principle of utility age 16 as a total, almost sublime revelation, an epiphany. Then at 18 had a breakdown triggered by being given a massive stack of Bentham's handwritten papers to edit. Bentham's handwriting was terrible, the papers seemed like those of an obsessive crank, it became apparent to Mill just how unsystematic Bentham's drafts were, how little the principle of utility is actually underwriting the claims. Furthermore: Mill had a wonderful education. A philosophical education of this kind gives you taste, and in particular taste of argumentation. To Mill, Bentham comes across as crude, inept, childish. In a later essay on Bentham, Mill said he was "essentially a boy", that Bentham never grew up. From the crisis onwards, Mill found it hard to take Bentham's work seriously. The epiphany about the principle of utility is an aesthetic response, c.f. Kant on the sublime. And when Mill reacts in dismay, that's also an aesthetic response. Millgram: [Aesthetics is not properly regarded as a side-discipline of philosophy, it's much more central, foundational even.] You can't do the other stuff (regular philosophical enquiry) without having worked out views on aesthetics. Mill decided to try to fix the quality problem, to fix the aesthetics of the [Bentham] project, to make it beautiful and wonderful so that you could be emotionally committed to it. And that is why utilitarianism and all the stuff we inherit from Mill has been so influential. Mill was trying to make Bentham's project actually worth being committed to. PH: this reminds me of things Tyler Cowen says about his own work and thought, and his objections to x-risk focused longtermism. If you are an analytical historian of philosophy, you are supposed to be figuring out what the dead guy thought, what the text really says. And when you do that, you're done. Millgram claim: Mill, like anyone who lives a project life, won't be equipped to understand some of the reasons that are moving him. And he will himself misunderstand and misdiagnose some of these [aesthetic] turning points. It's great to figure out what Mill thought his mental crisis was about (good book by Candice [inaudible] at Chicago) but we can't stop there. We want to understand how project lives play out. It's probably built into project lives that they have certain kinds of blind spots, so we have to go further. Interviewer: Mill sets his sights on reforming Bentham's project so that it's more worthy of his allegiance. Interesting lens on some of the more famous philosophical manoeuvres e.g. higher/lower pleasures distinction, emphasis on individual liberty which seems hard to square with other commitments of utilitarianism. Millgram: Mill is trying to construct an integrated platform, an ideology, a package, where every part is tailored to belong in the package. The principle of utility is supposed to be the keystone that ties everything together but it is tailored to do exactly that. Remember Bentham thought of the principle of utility as being about the sensation of pleasure and pain. This would have struck the young Mill as being incredibly crude and wrong and philosophically inept. I mean if you do work on pleasure the first thing you realise is that it can't be a sensation. So Mill keeps Bentham's words but shifts the meaning. Utility not about sensation of pleasure or pain, but about people getting what they want. But as John Dewey remarks it is only a child who thinks that "I want it" is a compelling reason. So Mill reconstrues "getting what they want" as "people who know what's what getting what they want". Think of this as the IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes theory of reasons. This allows Mill to weave higher and lower pleasures into the principle of utility. Turns out, according to Mill, that if you ask people who know what's what there are some goods that you just don't trade away, you don't trade them off for anything else. These are what Mill calls the higher pleasures. In Mill remember it is British empiricism, philosophy built around a psychological theory. Most of the work gets done by psychological implementation. Mill has an explanation for why people would get conditioned into refusing to trade off certain goods and pleasures at all. A miser is someone who treats money as a higher pleasure. Money is associated with all the goods that it can buy, so for some psyches the activation level of the money nodes is constantly reinforced and ends up dominating all the other goods. When people read Mill casually it is too easy to come away with the impression that a higher pleasure is a kind of culture snob pleasure, maybe great literature or classical music or something like that. But while Mill left open the idea that these are higher pleasures, the things he actually argued for as such—in the eyes of people who know what's what—were things like liberty and justice. It's not like these are other ideas that Mill has in political philosophy that have to be somehow squared with the principle of utility. Mill is spelling out what utility involves. This is the conception of utility, the grown up version of Bentham's principle that Mill wants us to take seriously. Free will was another higher pleasure, Mill has two good treatments, both underrated. Second one: a configuration of personality in which for any motivation you have, you have available to you other motivations which you could muster to trump it. You're not controlled solely by one single motivation—it's the opposite of monomania. Mill thinks that if you know what's what, you just won't trade this away—it's a higher pleasure. Mill felt a bit trapped in his own life project. He was trying to get his own free will back, in this second sense. The primary purpose of the institutions he designed was to produce people whose wills were free. (Mills first treatment of free will also interesting, it's a response to determinism.) Conceptual analysis—reflecting on examples, articulating concepts we already have—is not an appropriate method for approaching the question of the meaning of life. Millgram thinks that the “life projects” answer to question of meaning of life is just not an option for us. He says he has two key arguments in the book, but doesn’t elaborate. #todo ## Course synopses Meaning of life course: The Meaning of Life is, surprisingly and unbeknownst to most analytic philosophers, a subspecialty in analytic philosophy with a state of play, currently defined by two papers: Thomas Nagel, "The Absurd," and David Wiggins, "Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life." Wiggins's paper, after a good deal of ground-clearing argumentation, advances roughly the following proposal: a life is meaningful (the important things in it "add up" to a life) when, for anything in the life that matters, a full explanation of why it matters will end up invoking all the other things that matter in that life. What this formal condition amounts to substantively and in practice evidently depends on the modes of justification that such explanations invoke. When justifications are instrumental or means-end, the lives that satisfy this condition are project lives (an approach recently defended in print by Susan Wolf). When the justifications invoke aesthetic relations, the resulting model is the life as a work of art (as recently promoted by Alexander Nehamas). This year, we will closely examine two lives: Oscar Wilde, who tried to make his life into a work of art, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who perhaps made his life into a work of art -- or perhaps lived a life that didn't add up at all. Both lives are very well documented, both from inside and out, and we will read both their own writings and appropriate biographical and historical source material. Sounds like pragmatism course has an interesting angle on Dewey, perhaps inspired by Nietzsche / Conant on Schopenhauer as Educator: For Dewey, philosophy of education was first philosophy: he began by asking what it takes to teach someone, and what is involved in learning, and in thinking that topic through, ended up having to address the full menu of philosophical problems. [...] Our focus will be the way all of those views fell into place around and were shaped by his attempt to understand education. Lol wat? "Orwell taught us to fear technocratic jargon that doesn’t let us say what we mean. But that is language at its best." ## Tyler Cowen interview What do you think is the most underrated tool in the rationality toolbox for practical reasoning? MILLGRAM: This is really, really basic, but I think people don’t pay attention to their own experience. They pay attention to experience when they are trying to figure out what’s going on factually, but **when they’re trying to figure out what to do, they discount experience as an input.** This is true among the professional philosophers, and I think it’s true of just anybody. Mill complaint: not enough attention on what they want, they prefer--just look at what is expected of them, and go with that. --- there’s something very weird about philosophy, in the West anyway. It’s a discipline that’s well over two millennia old, and some of the smartest people who have ever lived have worked in this discipline, no question, and there aren’t any results. Maybe it’s a feature and. . . Now, maybe you think they’re all not truth seekers; they’re just after being interesting or something like that. But it’s hard to believe over that kind of stretch of time. Instead, it looks to me like there are patterns of ideas or dialectical patterns that people are forced into, that don’t produce the convergence but which they’re helpless against. This book is called The Unity of Philosophical Experience. He is illustrating my view with the precurrence of it. The part of the book I was reading last night, the beginning, it starts off discussing medieval treatments of universals. His line is, people get forced from position to position to position. You don’t get agreement, but it’s also not a random walk. It’s as though the path is carved in stone, and when later philosophers start at the beginning of that path, independently, they too get forced down the same route. The project you’re working on now is a new book project. It’s tentatively titled Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together? Linked article: Nietzsche often identified life itself with the “**will to power,” that is, with an instinct for growth and durability**. That concept provides yet another way of interpreting the ascetic ideal, since it is Nietzsche’s contention “that all the supreme values of mankind lack this will—that values which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are lording it under the holiest names.” Thus, traditional philosophy, religion, and morality have been so many masks a deficient will to power wears. The sustaining values of Western civilization have been sublimated products of decadence in that the ascetic ideal endorses existence as pain and suffering. Some commentators have attempted to extend Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power from human life to the organic and inorganic realms, ascribing a metaphysics of will to power to him. Such interpretations, however, cannot be sustained by reference to his published works. Tyler: But when I read Nietzsche today, he doesn’t actually seem to me like a great philosopher; he seems to me like a once-important philosopher, that so much of his work is very context specific. “**Will to power” is a phenomenal insight, but we now have better explications of the will to power.** MILLGRAM: I think we can learn from him because, in a lot of ways, we haven’t caught up to what he was doing. **There are some moves he makes that we’ve almost gotten to the place where we’re like three steps behind.** One of the reasons for the choppiness is that Nietzsche couldn’t work for more than 20 minutes straight. He simply couldn’t stay on point. He was really sick. ... If you’re a philosopher but also not if you’re a philosopher — **if you’re a philosopher, you take for granted a way of thinking about people that — you can think of it as a notation that we don’t have an alternative to**. You ask, “What does **he** think?” It’s as though there’s a hook, and then there are the various beliefs or things the person wants or is after that sort of hang off of that hook. Built into that picture is a kind of **presumption of a certain amount of coordination and consistency and taking responsibility for those attitudes**. This is the default view in philosophy. The phrase that you’ll see to label this is **unity of agency**. There’s a lot of discussion, starting with Harry Frankfurt maybe in about 1970, of what it takes to get that full ownership. The assumption always is that it’s a good thing, and mostly we have it. People who don’t are lost causes, hopeless. COWEN: **But no one has it, right**? We know from behavioral economics, preference reversals, or the order of the day. MILLGRAM: Right. **Nietzsche really doesn’t have it. He’s a philosopher, and he’s trying to cope with him not being the agent, which is the only kind of agent we already have tools to talk about and understand. He’s philosophizing for himself. It’s an exercise in personality management. He’s trying to manage his own disintegrating personality and keep it together and functioning as much and as long as he can.** He’s also theorizing about it. ... You know Nietzsche was — if you had to describe his program in a phrase, it would be — the program he’s offering people would be **inventing values**. Let me give you a characterization of — nowadays (not in Nietzsche’s own day) we have a subspecialty of philosophy, metaethics, which you can think of as the metaphysics of values or of the things you should do. For about 100 years, over the course of the 20th century, if you were thinking metaethics, you basically fell in one of two camps. You could be — I hate this phrase, but **you could be a moral realist. You think that the values are out there already and what you should do is some special fact, and you just have to be responsive to this truth, this fact about what you have to do or what’s important. Or you could be (I hate this word too) a noncognitivist. The evaluations, or the shoulds: they’re expressions of your feelings, or they’re commands that you give other people and maybe also yourself, or they’re expressions of your commitments that you’ve taken on.** Now, notice what happened in that ethics. **Whichever branch you took, this was a mythologizing of the abdication of responsibility**. It’s making it OK to be the subject in the Milgram experiments. So if the facts about what you should do are already out there — well, you’re not responsible. You’re just doing what the — and if it’s, like, your feelings, well, you’re not responsible for your feelings and you can’t control them. When Nietzsche says what you do with values is invent them — we’ve done that always inadvertently, but now it’s time to do it self-consciously. Not all the same for everybody; you could have idiosyncratic values, you could have temporary values, and they’re not whims. No more than other inventions, maybe the ones coming out of — you’re in San Francisco now, right? The ones coming out of Silicon Valley. **They’re not whims. If they fly, there’s a story about why they make sense. That’s an invitation to assume the responsibility that, within philosophy anyway, people have gone very far out of their way to slough off. That’s a big deal.** It’s one way to think about it again, in this next-step thing. The alternative that’s been emerging to these two camps in the last maybe few decades sometimes gets called constructivism. **One way to think about Nietzsche’s proposal is it’s in the spirit of constructivism, but it’s much more sophisticated. It’s a few steps up from where we are right now.** We’re in a place where that gesture will help some people to appreciate it, but he’s doing way better than we are. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructivism-metaethics/ Meier thinks (the guy you mentioned) — he thinks that Zarathustra is a parody of the New Testament. That’s not exactly right. It is a parody of the New Testament, but also of the Old Testament, and also apparently of the Quran, and also of Buddhist writings that Nietzsche knew about. It’s meant to be a parody or satire of religious scripture, but not the scripture of any particular religion. Zarathustra is obviously meant to somehow stand in for Nietzsche’s views. He talks about views that are familiar from other works. It seems to me that the exercise is to show that if you try to institutionalize the values Nietzsche wants you to invent and the values he’s inventing, if you try to make it — in the way that a religion institutionalizes values, the results will be completely perverse. They’ll be turned upside down and inside out. That’s the last thing you want. In Zarathustra — this just seems interesting to me — Nietzsche is setting up a problem which he tries to solve in the books he was working on till the end of his life, for the rest of his life. The awfulness of the — I mean the schlockiness of the book, the horrific sentimentality and sappiness, and the over-the-top — all of that stuff, that’s Nietzsche showing you what scripture looks like. COWEN: Is that parody, or is that Nietzsche recognizing the necessarily sentimental nature of prophecy, to some extent? If you think of Heidegger and Jung as two of the more insightful readers of Nietzsche on this, they don’t seem to think it’s parody, right? They’re recognizing these eternally recurring structures and how we tell myths. Let me give you an alternative way to see it. **Suppose you invent a value and you want to make it socially real, which usually takes time. That’s got two sides: It’s got an external side. Normally — the way we normally do it is we institutionalize the value. That has to do with creating a church or universities that teach students to do things a certain way. There are variations on this.** But there’s an internal flip side to that. **You have to change people’s tastes so that the new value becomes natural to them, that you’re changing their sensibility.** I think Zarathustra’s surface style is meant as an illustration of what that sensibility would look to us now, before we have it. You’re supposed to look at this. . . If you look at the King James Bible, it’s a classic of English literature. It’s up there with Shakespeare; every sentence almost is quotable. It’s just wonderful, right? If you look at Luther’s Bible in German also, it’s a classic of the German language. Every sentence is quotable. And If you look at the Hebrew Bible, it’s a reference point for every modern Hebrew-writing author, right? It’s a classic. If you look at the Quran. . . OK, how can this happen? There’s two explanations. One is that every time somebody writes a holy book, it turns out to be a classic of world literature just on its own. The other possibility is **when a book occupies a particular role in a culture, when it’s that sort of reference point, the sensibilities of people in the culture reshape themselves around the book so that it is in retrospect a classic.** Zarathustra, which is awful schlock, is inviting you to think, “What would have to happen to me for me to look at this book and have it seem to me as though it were like the King James, a classic of world literature?” At that point, you’re supposed to go, “Whoa, maybe this is a decision I need to think twice about.” The point is sort of a relative of — I don’t know if you remember Martha Nussbaum’s Fragility of Goodness. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/fragility-of-goodness/B212012979833A828690B9CA907A87BF#fndtn-information **The idea is you’re supposed to start to look inhuman. Then you’re supposed to think, “What kind of decision was it supposed to be, anyway? We’re supposed to be looking to the reform program to make things better for us.” Better by whose lights?** I think Nietzsche is prodding you in the same way. --- COWEN: I like very much your book about John Stuart Mill, your latest book, called John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life. Let me see if I understand your view properly. It seems to me you’re fairly critical of lives that are full of projects because, in some way, they make people subordinate to external authorities. Is that a fair reading of what you’re suggesting? If you have one big project, a project that you think is the meaning of your life, or that has that function, that role: Not only does it tend to push everything else out, but you end up being very, very focused on getting the project to cohere internally, figuring out how to make all the parts fit together. As your very, very ambitious project gets more and more tightly wound. . . Here’s the actual punchline of the book: If what you were looking for was the unified project that will occupy your whole life and be the meaning of your life, as the project gets more and more tightly wound, it starts to develop fissures and you end up not having the unified project and the unified life. COWEN: But doesn’t self-deception kick in to save you? There’s no set of views that are even close to fully coherent. You work very hard, as Mill did, to get your views to have more consilience. Maybe ultimately you fail, but he did many great things. He actually had many wonderful projects: liberation of women would be one, voting rights would be another; we could go on through the list. He loved his work as a process. He had a lot of value in the moment-to-moment existence of his being. It’s like Hume’s card players, except you get to be in Parliament and write incredible books and essays. If at the end of it all it wasn’t that coherent, Mill’s self-deception kicked in. He still thought he did wonderful things; it was a somewhat self-validating self-deception. Why should we be so worried about that? Take the people who did the mRNA vaccines: they had these incredible projects, which — the vaccines work; there’s a coherence to that. By the end of their lives, they’re likely to feel very good about this. Why don’t we just take the money and run, and applaud? I’m interested in looking at the role that something you would be comfortable describing as the meaning of somebody’s life can play in a personality and in a life. Of course, what roles something can play depends on what the architecture of the personality in the life is. People have differently structured personalities. Mill is interesting to me because he was a very mobilized personality. I mean he accomplished remarkable amounts, and it’s all very, very structured: subprojects inside subprojects inside subprojects. He was able to sustain this over most of his life. For him, for a personality like that, the natural role for the meaning of his life is to be something that guides action, because he’s so good at acting. At the other extreme (we were already talking about Nietzsche), you have somebody who is completely disintegrated. Giving him a big project, to which he’ll refer his decisions, that’s simply not going to work because he can’t make plans and execute them. For him, something you’d think — he invented a number of values that you could think of as successive meanings of his life for the different configurations of his disintegrating personality, and because they couldn’t tell him what to do, they had a different role. It’s like by appealing, by serving as a pole star to his different psychologic — his psychic parts, they could keep the parts flying more or less in the same configuration, and that’s how Nietzsche managed to actually write his last books. For people, I guess, like myself, and I suppose most of us, who are somewhere in the middle, who aren’t so tightly wired — as wired as Mill or as fragmented as Nietzsche, there are other functions a meaning of life could have. On the Mill extreme, I think what you see in Mill is that turning your life into a single unified project and being as tightly wired as that isn’t, in fact, an option; it doesn’t work out to be as tightly wired as that, and so you should just give it up as an objective. The thing you might end up with might look to you like you’re pursuing a single project, if you’re self-deceived about it, as you say, but we’re already moving towards the middle of the spectrum. COWEN: To ask you a rather forcing economists’ question: At the margin, should we be taxing or subsidizing life projects? MILLGRAM: If you think that you can’t actually get somebody to have something that lives up to the billing, that really is the life project, there’s no point in subsidizing it. Subsidizing something that you can’t get people to do. . . But people are built differently. Again, if you think of there’s something like a spectrum, with more tightly wired people on one end and more disintegrated people on the other end and different configurations in the middle, it’s not as though there’s any one thing we should be encouraging people to do. Different ways of approaching their lives are going to suit different people. MILLGRAM: First of all, although Bentham was a very strange guy, he had a lot of bad ideas, but also a lot of really good ideas. And the good ideas, they speak for themselves. . . COWEN: Well, they do maybe today, but they don’t to most of the world even now, and they certainly didn’t in Bentham’s time. The vision he needed to see — MILLGRAM: Stamps. Stamps! COWEN: OK? MILLGRAM: We don’t even think of this as something that was once a radical innovation that a crackpot had to suggest — but putting stamps on an envelope and dropping it in the mailbox: that’s Bentham. He had great ideas mixed up with other ideas that weren’t so good. https://iep.utm.edu/hadot/ COWEN: As the French philosopher Pierre Hadot has suggested, is philosophy — true philosophy — fundamentally dialogue? Rather than writing things and putting them out there. MILLGRAM: I don’t know that piece of Hadot’s. I do know his philosophy as a way of life. But this question was taken up very, very early in the history of philosophy — I guess it’s in the Phaedrus, right? COWEN: Sure. And there’s dialogue before this writing. The Socratic dialogues, while they are written by Plato, they’re dialogues — or representing dialogues, at least. MILLGRAM: Yes, and in the Phaedrus I guess Socrates floats the worry that written philosophy isn’t really philosophy. It’s the fossil of the real philosophy. The real philosophy can only be the spoken philosophy. The reason he gives is that you can’t ask the text questions about things it doesn’t talk about, and I take it that the Phaedrus itself — this is very typical of Plato actually. His dialogues — there’ll be moves that are made textually and then moves that are made by way of dramatic frame. The Phaedrus is Plato showing you how to write a dialogue (and he did this with almost all of his dialogues — anyway, the ones we mostly read) that you can ask questions of, and they will answer. The philosophical texts that survive, that we keep reading, all have this feature, or we wouldn’t keep reading them. The objection to written philosophy, as opposed to philosophy as dialogue — maybe it’s been addressed, though not all of us can do it — I don’t know if I can do it. --- Sometimes I think. . . Philosophy is an applied science. It’s the machine-tool industry of the mind. We make the intellectual tools that make the intellectual tools. We’re engineering and engineering science. We’re very high up in the value chain so people don’t notice, but that’s what we do. On that take, I have all of these colleagues — most of my colleagues who think that what they’re doing is completely useless, and they’re proud of it. They have the attitude that John Dewey complained about where you think of yourself as a member of the leisure class and you’re glad that you don’t do anything useful. There’s a second take on philosophy that I can’t get away from, which is that it’s a response of a certain kind to the imperative of the Delphic oracle: “Know thyself.” Philosophy requires you not to take things for granted and just — OK, I had a colleague in a previous job who remarked to me that there’s a phrase that nonphilosophers use that philosophers never use. It’s starting a sentence with “My philosophy is,” and he pointed out that what’s going to follow is some view that the person simply will not reconsider or give up — but that’s not what philosophy is about. Philosophy is about noticing that there’s something you’ve been taking for granted, and maybe it’s time to have second thoughts about it. Again, if that’s your view of what philosophy requires, there are a great many people in my line of work who don’t live up to that. That is just disappointing. They’re just very, very confident in the way they do things, and they’re not going to have second thoughts. Then there’s a third way of seeing what philosophy is. It’s got central questions that somehow don’t go away. Plato’s Socrates asks — the question is, How should you live? That’s one of them, and Kant had these four questions, right? What can you know, what should you do, and what can you hope for — and the fourth question was, What is it to be a human being? I think one of these questions is, What’s the meaning of life? Well, just on that last score, the meaning of life in analytic philosophy has been pushed to the very, very, very, very distant margins of the field instead of getting — as I think it should get — our most serious attention. So, when you ask that question, I end up feeling sort of depressed. --- I mean, think about that genre of philosophizing. There’s some kind of a thought experiment, maybe something about a trolley swerving from one track to the other and — or, I mean, there were a lot of these thought experiments. Maybe thought experiments about cutting people’s brains in half and putting them in different bodies. Philosophers invite people to have reactions, snap judgments. These snap judgments get dignified with the term intuition, but they’re just snap judgments. You might think, “What could the value of these snap judgments be, and why would you want to systematize them? Why would you think they were worth anything at all?” That’s a very, very — this is the methodology in philosophy that when you know that something has been produced by this methodology, you should go into it being very skeptical that anything of value could come out of it. I mean, nothing — unless you have some special reason to think that the snap judgments going in are high quality and they somehow are guaranteed to capture something important, you shouldn’t think that systematizing them is going to give you anything important or be of high quality. --- The way a lot of philosophers make up their minds about things is they consider some question and then they find an argument, and if the argument seems like it gets them a conclusion, that’s enough for them: they stop, because they can’t think of any more arguments. If you could only think of one argument, this is a good way of — anyway, like Peirce would say, of settling on something. That wouldn’t work for Nozick because he could — arguments just sprang to his mind, more and more of them, instantly. He ended up thinking of arguments as — the idea that you could force somebody to believe something by giving them an argument, that’s just taking advantage of somebody’s disability: that they could only think of one argument, they can’t think of more. That’s why he titled his book (I guess it’s his second book) Philosophical Explanations. His line was, “OK, I know better than this. I’m not going to try to twist your arm with arguments. I’m going to give you explanations for things and you can buy them or not, but hopefully they’ll be illuminating.” That’s a very interesting place for somebody to be in. You have to be as smart as him to be in the place that he was. COWEN: Was Karl Popper a great philosopher, even a good philosopher? And why do his followers in practice so often seem to be dogmatic? --- COWEN: As you have tried to apply biography of a sort to John Stuart Mill, to Nietzsche — if you did the same to Derek Parfit, what kind of understanding do you come away with? MILLGRAM: Don’t spend your whole life living at All Souls [College]. MILLGRAM: Well, Parfit wrote a wonderful first book; I still teach this first book, the Reasons and Persons book. His last book was horrifically awful. I don’t know if I want to blame it on the institution. . . COWEN: Two volumes. It’s trying to reply to every possible criticism, right? MILLGRAM: It’s so bad. It’s thin in a way that the first one isn’t. I was actually visiting at All Souls when he was finishing it up, and I tried to have conversations with him about it and about the draft. We had frequent conversations, after lunch, and they would — within seconds — turn into Parfit saying, “But look, it’s obviously right; you just know that torturing babies for fun is a bad thing.” Whatever you think about the merits of torturing babies, not that I think it’s a good thing, there’s a thinness to that. You can see that the environment had somehow whittled him down or thinned him down. I don’t know enough to say for sure how it happened, but that’s my impression. It’s too cloistered an environment for you to want to spend that much of your life in it. --- COWEN: Let’s do all Q&A then. University of Chicago used to do that. To some extent they still do. Everyone has read the paper and you start with Q&A. Isn’t that much better? I think it’s much better. --- https://www.jstor.org/stable/2253760? seq = 1 I’ll give you a data point, actually. Sometimes I teach the same thing more than once, and there’s a paper that I found works to start a practical reasoning class off with: it’s Michael Smith’s “Humean Theory of Motivation.” You might know it or you might not. It works for the purpose. When students come up with an interesting, decisive, trenchant, cool objection, I type it up for them and give it out to them in the next class, but I also save it. I’m compiling these objections. I think this paper is something like 25 pages. And I now have a document that’s more than 30 pages of objections. The objections don’t run out. When you ask me, “What’s your resolved view in this problem space,” where I’ve been looking at arguments where I know very well that the objections don’t run out, I don’t really have a view. MILLGRAM: You won’t be surprised to hear that if there’s a domain in which I think I have a special experience, meaning experience that most people don’t have, it’s in philosophy. I have something like 40 years of training in, “OK, this is promising. This is going to pan out into something interesting. This will come together in a really cool way. Oh no, that one’s not going anywhere.” It’s very specialized. Not a lot of people have a use for it, but it’s unusual and I’ve got it. COWEN: Last question. Why do you view aesthetics as so central to philosophy? MILLGRAM: Leverage. Aesthetics has been ghettoized. If you look back a couple hundred years, if you look at people who are strong all-around philosophers, they knew they had to have views in aesthetics because they would need those views for something else. Kant had to have views in aesthetics to make sure he’d gotten the first Critique right. Schopenhauer had to have views in aesthetics. Nietzche had to have views in aesthetics. Hume had to have views in aesthetics. Somehow we’ve gotten the idea that, “Well, OK, aesthetics — it’s housed in philosophy departments for historical reasons,” but everybody has the attitude that we already know. We don’t need to listen to anything these people have to tell us; we don’t care. And they also think — and the people who do aesthetics have somehow internalized this — they typically don’t expect anyone else to be interested in what they do and have a use for what they do. This is terribly wrong. Here’s more experience, since we’re talking about philosophical experience. My experience is that when you look at issues in aesthetics that crop up, when you’re thinking about one thing or another — including logic, epistemology, Frankfurt stuff about what it takes to own what you think — there’s aesthetics at the heart of it. When you look at the aesthetics problem, the rest of it changes; you get leverage. So yes, you should absolutely pay attention to aesthetics if you’re in philosophy.