Amateruish design blunder

In today's print edition of the YDN, there is a photo of the Whiffs singing in tuxedos, one of whom is jumping onto the back of another. Directly beneath that photo is the headline: "Conn. may legalize civil unions." Way to go, YDN.

(Thanks to Nash for pointing this out.)

Kant Talk

Here is a transcript of my hastily composed remarks at yesterday evening's Paskus Mellon Forum in Jonathan Edwards College:

I am going to talk about Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which develops a philosophy of beauty and art (among other things). Since my senior essay is about stuff at the end of the book, I’m not going to talk about my senior essay, and instead I’m going to focus on the beginning of the Critique, which my paper relies upon. Unfortunately, I do not have my copy of the Critique in English with me – I left it at home – and all I have is the copy of the Critique in the original German, which would be really useful... if I knew German. So if I say something wrong, it’s almost certainly me screwing up, not Kant, who almost never screws up (except when he discusses women or Jews).

I would like to think about the same problem that Kant thinks about in the beginning of the Critique: What is beauty? (Philosophers apparently love questions of the form “What is x?” “What is x?” was probably once the title of someone’s dissertation.) So what is beauty? It is uncontroversial to say that when we experience beauty, we experience some kind of pleasure. To call something beautiful is to assert that it gives us this kind of pleasure. Obviously, this is not yet a sufficient definition of beauty, because video games and bagels also give us pleasure but we might not want to be forced to call them beautiful. So now let us pose the question: how does the pleasure we get from beauty differ from other kinds of pleasure?

As a start, it is helpful to notice that some kinds of pleasure are at least partly determined by particular sensory experiences, while other kinds of pleasure seem to have nothing to do necessarily with particular sensory experiences. I suppose that if I won the lottery, I would experience some pleasure. Say I never saw the money itself, because it was just put into my safe deposit box by my housekeeper. And say that I never even get to use the money myself, because I bequeath it to my children. Even though I never see (or smell) that money, I still get pleasure just by thinking privately about how great it was to win. Whatever is giving me pleasure, it is not determined by the particular sensory experience I have, since I never get any sensory experience of the money which is the source of my pleasure. Apparently, it is enough for me to think (even if I am wrong) that the money exists, that it is there in my bank account for my use. And apparently, the thought that the money exists is a necessary condition for this non-sensory type of pleasure, since my pleasure would cease and I would get very pissed off if I found out the money I won in the lottery was really just a hologram of money. In general, if I have pleasure in something and that pleasure has no necessary relation to a particular sensory experience, that is, if I have pleasure just at the thought of that something, then I care whether that something really exists – because it is that something, not something else, the thought of which affords me the pleasure. So let’s agree that in cases where I get pleasure independently of particular sensory experiences, it matters to me whether the objects of my pleasure actually exists. Another way to say this is that I am interested in the existence of a certain object (as opposed to disinterested).

Now let’s think about cases where there is a necessary relation between pleasure and a particular sensory experience. Obviously, experience of the beautiful falls somewhere in this category. But the question is: is it the case than all instances of pleasure that have a necessary relation to a particular sensory experience are instances of the experience beauty? Or are there some kinds of necessarily sensory pleasure we experience that are not instances of beauty? Kant claims yes to option number two, and he claims that the distinction between pleasure in the beautiful and pleasure in other types of sensory experience turns on the same distinction between interested and disinterested pleasure that we just saw. Here’s how this works. If sensory experience of an object causes pleasure in us, sometimes it is because of a pathologically determined response. If you have ever enjoyed a massage or a meal on an empty stomach, then you know what I am talking about. In these cases, we wish that our nervous system be stimulated in a certain manner such as to produce pleasure. It is as if a certain pleasure switch gets flipped on when we experience this kind of stimulation. So in this kind of case, the pleasure cannot happen without the interaction of our body and the switch-flipper. That is to say, this kind of pleasure depends upon the existence of the switch-flipper – without a real hand performing a massage, without a bowl of real food, there is no pleasure. So under the category of pleasure that has a necessary relation to a particular sensory experience, there is one sub-category of pleasure where we are interested in the existence of the object of pleasure.

According to Kant, pleasure in the beautiful is a different sub-category of pleasure. As a matter of fact, he claims, when we experience something in the beautiful, we have no care whether it actually exists or not – the pleasure we experience is disinterested in its existence. If I take LSD and see a beautiful landscape, and then later on I recover and discover that I was merely hallucinating, my discovery that the landscape did not really exist makes no difference to me with regard to the pleasure I took in the landscape’s beauty. Similarly, when I look at an image on a wall and enjoy it because it looks beautiful, it makes no difference to me what kind of object is producing that image, whether it is a painting or a hologram. My satisfaction in the beauty of the object has nothing to do with what kind of object I think it is, or even whether the object exists at all (as my LSD example shows). That is to say that the enjoyment of beauty is a purely disinterested satisfaction (i.e. disinterested in the existence of the object of pleasure).

Let me stop explaining Kant’s argument, which I have only begun to address, and point out some interesting consequences of this line of reasoning. You might wonder: why is Kant entitled to claim that judgments of beauty are not pathologically determined? Perhaps science will eventually discover that there are certain characteristics of certain types of visual experiences, for example having the Phi proportion, that makes us judge them as beautiful. The response to this would take a long time to flesh out, but let me just say this one word: if you come up with a set of characteristics that an object must have to be beautiful, then I will be able to produce an object that satisfies all those characteristics and is nevertheless not beautiful. In other words, Kant claims that it is impossible to come up with a set of rules that an object or an appearance must follow in order to be beautiful. For Kant, rules can guide the construction of machines, but they necessarily cannot guide the production of beautiful art.

Any questions?

Please Comment

Several people have contacted me personally with commentary on the content of this blog. Apparently, more than a few of my friends track this page, and it would be great if some discussion would get going in the comments section of the blog. So instead of writing me an email or calling me to discuss your opinions, please post your comments online! Anything is welcome, whether it's silly or negative or whatever. And remember, anyone can make anonymous postings.

This Article Does Not Belong in the YDN

For once, there is something in the YDN that I agree with almost without exception: Steven Syverud’s piece arguing that Yale should offer the same financial aid reforms, including the elimination of the parent contribution requirement for families whose income is under $40,000, that Harvard and Princeton introduced last year. Yale has no better way to serve its own interests than by making its degrees available to the brightest scholars in the world, regardless of their financial background. The data cited by Syverud strongly suggest that Yale’s share of those scholars will be disproportionately low as long as it delays following Harvard and Princeton’s lead. I hope I am correct when I say that Yale is managed well enough that we’ll see such changes later in 2005.

Syverud did not mention the most persuasive rationale for eliminating the parent contribution (probably because it has come up in the YDN a few times already), so let me restate it here in case anyone is wondering what’s wrong with requiring low-income families to invest %10 or more of their income in college education. Frequently, because such families struggle to make ends meet, the scholars themselves must assume responsibility for earning the parent contribution, so that the parent contribution is in effect an addition to the student contribution, which is by itself already too great a burden on young scholars ($4200 per year, according to this piece by Yonah Freemark).

Only one section of Syverud’s piece made me blink: his claim that “there are more than a few families in America with substantial wealth but little in the way of yearly income,” and therefore that there should be additional restrictions of eligibility for financial aid (such as a limit on the total assets of the family, I suppose) that Harvard and Princeton have not yet instituted. To the best of my knowledge, I have never met anyone whose family makes less than $40,000 a year but is wealthy anyway. What is the basis of the claim that there are “more than a few families” like that?

Open Letter to Kanye West

Dear Kanye,

I just found out that I will probably be moving to Chi-town this summer or fall, and I am wondering whether we could kick it together. You might wonder what brings me to your hood. Well, in addition to wanting to give you your propers, I am going to Chicago to start the PhD program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. I know from your record “The College Dropout” that you are not the world’s biggest fan of higher education, but I assure you that I am not pursuing this degree because I am afraid that my “parents will look at me funny,” or because I am “insecurr,” or anything like that. In fact, my parents would prefer that I go to law school or business school or become a banker or a politician instead. Even a rapper, I think. “Now I could let these dream-killers kill my self-esteem, or use my arrogance as the steam to power my dreams.” Although I will probably never get that paper, I’d rather do philosophy than “do the ugliest things for the road to riches and diamond rings.”

If you happen to be looking for a housemate, I would be happy to take a look at your crib and maybe move in (if the price is right). I think we would be a good match – I too prefer sippin sizzurp to eating pancakes, I too am still struggling in the wake of adolescence to assert my independence from my family, and of course I like spoken word. To prove it, here’s a few rhymes I bust to the beat of “Through the Wire”:

Now there’s somebody from New Haven was ill, got a deal
From the hottest philosophers around
But it wasn’t about Ryle and Nagel, was more like Kant and Hegel
And the whole idealist crowd.

And he explained the story bout the Categories
And what we need to do to beat Hume.
Good thought, bad proof, right worry, wrong table.
In the blink of an eye, empiricism’s doomed.

Let me know what you think.

Much love,

Kessler

Science should stay clear of socially sensitive issues instead of settling them?

I only have a few minutes between classes, so I will have to just sketch out the reasons why yesterday’s article about Larry Summers by the Grewal sisters is completely retarded. Let me tell you, if you had to pick two women to make the case that there are not innate cognitive differences between the sexes, the Grewal sisters are not the ideal candidates. To my complete amazement, they were willing to state publicly, in print, the opinion that science should not investigate the question of whether there are biological differences between the sexes, because science usually reaches conclusions that vindicate scientists’ own prejudices rather than actually getting at the truth. “We know from the field of social psychology that people are more likely to look for, notice and retain any evidence that confirms rather than disproves their own hypotheses, and scientific experiments are certainly fallible to this bias,” they claim (without citing any evidence). “Therefore, there are big problems with ‘simply’ asking questions about innate differences between men and women.” Now, the authors are certainly correct to think that science does not always come up with the correct answers, and in fact science does sometimes (and perhaps often) prove hypotheses that are later debunked as mere projections of prejudice into the academic arena. However, they neglect to notice that only science itself has the authority to debunk those prejudices. Consider the case of phrenology. This was a set of racist scientific theories about the anatomy of human skulls that was widely popular in the second half of the nineteenth century among academic scientists. If the Grewal sisters had their way, scientific research about the shape of skulls would have ended as soon as it was noticed that such research might lead to the conclusion that the human races are significantly (in terms of intelligence) biologically unequal. In that case, scientists might still be whispering at colloquia and faculty meetings today about what they suspected but were too afraid to confirm, namely that phrenology is a valid science. Academia would be concealing what it thought was the truth from the public at large, and perhaps even worse, it would be prevented from finding out the truth. As it turns out, thankfully, Grewal idiocy was not as common a hundred years ago as it is today, and science itself ended up disproving the fundamental claims of phrenology.

As anyone with half a brain would realize, it is ridiculous to hinder scientific investigations on the grounds that the conclusions might be wrong. With a synchronic and diachronic peer review system that has characterized the entire modern scientific endeavor, we can be sure that science eventually gets at the truth, not at some sort of dressed-up declaration of prejudice. The article’s narrow-minded skepticism about the validity of science is the type of bullshit I have unfortunately come to expect from undergraduates, but I am completely astounded that the elder Grewal sister, a graduate student in the psychology department (and therefore, I suppose, an aspiring scientist), could have written something so inane and at odds with the spirit of science.

Dear YDN: Please Put On Thinking Cap, Even When Preaching to the Choir

If I were going to make a speech to five thousand of the most intelligent young Americans, I would carefully sort through my thoughts beforehand. Apparently, the editorial board of the YDN prefers a different approach. Today’s editorial, which argues in favor of continuing to keep the Defense Department’s ROTC program out of Yale, relies upon hasty and imprecise rationale that unfortunately characterizes most of what shows up on the YDN opinion page. One can only hope that this editorial is the product of a last-minute effort to fill newspaper space by defending the status quo, not of a serious opinion whose owner never took time to think through.

The editorial’s central claim is that Yale should keep its campus free of any program which practices discrimination, and since the ROTC requires that its participants not openly identify themselves as homosexuals, Yale should not host the ROTC program, even though doing so would make scholarships and other academic and professional opportunities more accessible to Yale student ROTC participants. “So long as the federal government refuses to end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” according to this argument, “Yale’s obligation to bar discrimination on its campus trumps the value of making it somewhat easier for students to integrate military training into their studies.” In that case, the editorial board must also be in favor of banning the ethnic counselor program from campus, since that program also discriminates between students of different races by providing disproportionately high resources to members of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds. And the editorial board must also be in favor of keeping Undergraduate Career Services from helping students get dozens of scholarships that are available only to members of a certain ethnic background or sex. There is no other conclusion to draw from the assertion that Yale has an “obligation to bar discrimination on its campus.”

Giving the editorial’s author the benefit of the doubt, I assume that after a bit of consideration, he would attempt to draw a distinction between certain types of discrimination that Yale should tolerate and certain types of discrimination that Yale should not tolerate, although the editorial itself makes no mention of such a distinction. Because it is so difficult to determine exactly what that distinction should be, this is where the argument can get interesting, and this should have been the focus of the editorial, instead of being obscured by self-righteous rhetoric that capitalizes on Yale students’ tendency to approve of any argument defending homosexual rights, no matter how flawed it may be. Is discrimination itself wrong, or only discrimination in favor of certain groups? Does Yale have a special responsibility to protest discrimination practiced by the government, or should it protest all forms of discrimination? It appears that the editorial’s author has not even considered these questions.

In his attempt to take a stand against bigotry, the editorial’s author has succeeded more to reveal his own prejudices than anything else. His line of reasoning reveals that he has failed to take into account quite obvious objections to his argument. If the ROTC remains off Yale’s campus in the future, hopefully it will be because the majority of Yale students and administrators are sufficiently open-minded and clever to think out their own rationale for opposing ties between Yale and the ROTC – not because they are just as uncritical and dogmatic as the author of this editorial seems to be.