a game of chess

A Game of Chess

I want to explicate the game of chess as an exemplar of the basic structure as socially constituted.  I am not making special claims for the game of chess, per se, except to say that it is familiar enough that one can lay bare one or two crucial points.  The first point, one that I have already made, is that any particular game is governed by intentionality, and the moves in the game are instrumental to that end.  The whole game, of course, is arbitrary -- that is to say, it could have been otherwise -- and one could easily imagine a history of the game where the rules and expectations of play might have had one trying to capture the queen, not the king.  The arbitrariness of chess suggests what might be called its intermediacy -- that is to say, the game in its entirety serves the purpose of another intentionality, which in turn suggests a basic structure for the intentional as we might typically understand it, a point I will return to later.  In the end, however, there is nothing or little in chess or its governing intentionality that might suggest a "natural" or a "basic" need.  Once engaged in a game of chess, however, checkmate becomes the governing intentionality, and one makes moves to arrive at a state of affairs, a condition of the world (at least that portion of it represented by the chess board) that "counts as" checkmate.

Here it might be useful to note that in chess one has an opponent.  While it strains credulity a bit to think that the originating framers of the game could imagine a situation where the opponent is a machine, it is not particularly difficult for us, in this day and age, to imagine the same, and so it is not necessary to think of one's opponent as another subjectivity beyond the confines of the game, but it is necessary to this of it as subject to the same imperative to reach checkmate.  In this respect, I and my opponent are the same, and when I think of my opponent, I think of him it in terms of a "desire" to reach checkmate, knowing full well that it is, so to speak, merely a programmed desire captured in its hardware and software.  If we confine ourselves to the game, and only the game, it is unnecessary to think of one's opponent in any other way -- unnecessary to think of one's opponent as anything other than an automaton -- but of course we do think of our human opponents in other ways, and this too suggests the intermediacy of chess.  In a tournament setting, for example, the game itself might well be instrumental to the additional end of receiving the cash prize and the recognition that comes of being a "winner."  It is the intermediacy of chess, as a social constituted game, that allows for its instrumental application to another governing intentionality, and here again of course the instrumental act may have more or less utility relative to that end.  One might, for example, lose the match and fail to gain either the prize money or the recognition, in part because lacks cognitive capacity relative to one's opponent.

Here too, it might be useful to note that one's opponent is actively trying to prevent one from achieving checkmate or, perhaps more precisely, is attempting to reach checkmate first.  It is presumptive to the game, and allows one rationalize the opponent -- that is to say, to ask "why?" of its moves and assign a "because" to it.  This is not so much a psychological claim as a logical claim.  One does not necessarily proceed through the game asking "why did he move his pawn there?" and answering one's own inquiry, "ah because he wanted to threaten my knight and weaken my attack."  Indeed, such questions are often asked and answered, not as running commentary, but retrospectively as explication, but it is sufficient at the moment to note that one can ask and answer such questions if one "knows" the governing intentionality.  Imagine, for example, watching a game of chess, not knowing that the opponents are pursuing checkmate.  One might imagine it as a game, not unlike checkers, where the governing intentionality is to remove the opponents pieces from the board and have the last piece standing.  The game would appear irrational both in its progress and its end, leading one to believe (perhaps) that one missed the point (though not necessarily so).  I am suggesting, of course, that the basic structure "rationalizes" our lives -- provides, as it were, the formal element in a form of life.  This is an important point, and I will advert to it often, but for the moment it is enough to point it out.

Along that line, however, one might expect to find the rules of chess set out, quite literally, in a rule book that defines and prescribes the game.  This need not necessarily be the case for all forms of life, insofar as the instrumental act is chosen, not solely for its utility, but as a signifier to a signified intentionality -- a choice that prescribes limits on those acts potentially instrumental to a given intentionality.  Within chess, however, it is clear enough that the rules of the game -- that is to say, the restrictions on the moves of the various pieces -- rationalize the game in quite another sense.  If there were no limitations on the various pieces and allowable limitations on their moves, the game itself, as a game, is inconceivable.  It is an instructive mental exercise to imagine what a game of chess might be like were there no division of labor, so to speak, among the pieces, and no prescriptive limitations on their movements.  For the players, there is no ontological reason, as it were, to follow the rules and move the bishop only diagonally across the board, but there is a deontological reason to follow the rules.  Once one enters into a game of chess, as a game of chess, one is more or less obliged to abide by the restrictions on the various pieces.  I say "more or less" obliged, because it is always possible to imagine cheating, moving a piece impermissibly, say, when one's opponent is out of the room, but it is only possible to imagine cheating, breaking the rules, if there are rules in the first place, including the rules that set out the governing intentionality of checkmate.  It is likewise an instructive mental exercise to imagine watching a game of chess as a spectator and detecting one of the players in the act of cheating.  One can ask, "why did he cheat as he did?" and answer "because in two moves he will be able to escape his opponents attack and mount his own."  Intentionality, in short, rationalizes even the act of cheating.

One can imagine cheating in a different sense.  Here again, imagine watching a game of chess as a spectator and detecting one of the players in the act of cheating.  One can ask, "why did he cheat as he did?" and answer "because he has set his opponent up for checkmate in two moves.  Clearly he wants to lose!"  One can imagine the same even without "cheating," per se, by choosing moves that lack utility relative to the governing intentionality.  One can still rationalize the act, "because he wished to lose the game," but such a rationalization seems to beg the question and elicit a subsequent "why?" -- the answer to which points to the game's intermediacy, the instrumentality of the game itself within a broader social network of intentionalities -- "because he stands to make less on the prize money than the gambling bets he made on the side."  Insofar as chess is wholly prescribed within the rules of the game, and insofar as one chooses to enter into (or not enter into) the game, both forms of "cheating" are possible.  I am suggesting the difference between a form of cheating that violates the obligation to pursue checkmate -- that violates, so to speak, the given intentionality of the intentional act -- and a form of cheating that violates the obligation to do so within permissible limitations on the pieces -- that violates, so to speak, restrictions on the instrumentality of any instrumental act.

Neither form of cheating is permissible, of course, but the distinction enters into moral and political discourse around a question of banality.  Imagine, for example, a broadly conceived social game, the governing intentionality of which is "the extermination of the jews."  It is not, unfortunately, an uncommon game, and one could conceive it as "the extermination of the sunni muslims," or "ethnic Serbs," or the like.  Given the intentionality, one can further imagine means instrumental to the satisfaction of the given intentionality -- in the case of the social game aimed at the extermination of the jews, an extensive network of labor camps and railways to transport the jews to the labor camps.  Within that, one can imagine Adolf Eichmann, whose governing intentionality was to "keep the trains on schedule," a game that itself involved a range of acts instrumental to its satisfaction.  The banality of evil that Arendt points to is, perhaps, captured in my phrase, "broadly conceived social game."  At one level, of course, I want to argue that "the extermination of the jews" is no different than any other broadly conceived social game, at least insofar as its basic structure is concerned.  It is no different than, say, "maximize corporate profits," though I would also want to argue that the former is morally reprehensible, while the latter is morally neutral, at least within our current moral sensibilities.  We would expect, in other words, those in a position to do so, like Eichmann, to help throw the over-arching game aimed at "the extermination of the jews."  He did not, of course, and continued playing his particular role, "keeping the trains on time," with some managerial competence -- a role that would have been perceived in and of itself as morally neutral had the cargo been, say, potatoes for the troops and not jews for extermination.     

Freedom

Freedom

If the basic structure is meaningful, then it might be useful here to lay out more explicitly the implications for human freedom.  The basic distinction is one between freedom from and freedom to -- not a particularly startling distinction, but one that is often confused, particularly in a discussion of rights and obligations on the social scale.  I will return to both, but for the moment we can look at the basic correspondence between freedom from and intentionality -- that is to say, I must free myself from my subjectivity to the given imperative -- but then too, insofar as I must free myself, I must be free to act instrumentally.

We could look at the basic structure through a slightly different frame, as a matter of choice.  At one level, thinking of this physiologically constituted form of life, I do not choose intentionality.  I do not choose, for example, to become hungry.  I just do, and I must act on that imperative.  We would not normally think of the desire to satisfy an appetite as an obligation, per se, but let us just say that we are more or less obliged to go about the task of finding something that will serve as food.   At another level, thinking of this as a socially constituted form of life, I do choose, for example, to play chess, and in that sense give myself an imperative. There is an artificiality about the given imperative to seek checkmate, and I can simply quit playing at any time, but to do so for most leaves something unfinished. I suppose too that I could go through the motions of seeking checkmate and not really seek checkmate -- engage in a duplicity or hypocrisy -- but insofar as I am going through the motions of chess as a form of life, I am going through the motions of seeking checkmate.  Regardless whether I am given the imperative physiologically or I give the imperative to myself, it is a given imperative none the less.  Once I have chosen to play chess, I am obliged to seek checkmate.  In either case, freedom from the given intentionality predicates a future state, a not-yet, and to be free from predicates a future state of being in which one is no-longer beset with the given intentionality.  As an aside, speaking of the temporal frame implicit within the basic structure, we might think of it as eschatological.  Insofar as intentionality brings me into being and does so recurrently, again and again I grow hungry, and I must free myself from my subjectivity to its imperative recurrently, again and again I must go in seek of food, one can better appreciate the eastern eschatological imperative to free oneself from the cycle of birth and death or the more western imperative to free oneself from the trials and tribulations of this existence for a predicated future state of being once and for all free from subjectivity to intentionality.

Beyond that, neither are we perfectly free to act instrumentally.  The first and perhaps most significant limitation is utility.  While in some respects, I might be free to eat sawdust, eating sawdust will exacerbate, not free me from my subjectivity to my hunger, and in this sense, utility has a sort of prima facia primacy as a first level consideration in choosing how to act.  This is not to suggest that the utility of the act is somehow self-evident or obvious.  If we imagine our hunting-gathering ancestors traipsing into new territory, coming upon an unfamiliar berry, it might suggest itself as food, but we might also imagine some hesitation, some trepidation among those who first raise it to their lips.  Not all things that suggest themselves as food turn out to be good for food.  For the moment, I don't want to make too much or too little of utility, and I am clearly considering it from an individual perspective where the proof is in the pudding so to speak -- whether or not it frees me from my subjectivity to the given intentionality.  As an aside, however, utility, this differentiation between those acts good for (over against all those not good for) the satisfaction of a given intentionality, also implies a primitive sort of semanticity.  If we consider hunger, for example, we come into being within a world already divided between those things which have utility as food (and many others things that do not have utility as food).  The dividing line between food (and all that is not-food) may not be immediately obvious, but the dividing line is there, is discoverable, and the objects of the world fall into place on one side or the other of the line.  I am suggesting, in other words, that intentionality brings me into being, but it is being already meaningful.

The second limitation is capability.  If utility relates to intentionality, whether or not a particular act satisfies my intentionality, capability relates to instrumentality, the range of acts available to me.   Here again, given my physiology, eating sawdust might not have much utility as food for me, but I do have the capacity to eat sawdust.  I could choose to eat sawdust, even though it would not have much utility, in ways that I simply cannot choose to flap my arms and fly, even though flying might have considerable utility on a number of occasions.  If we enlarge the discussion a bit, placing it in a more modern political economy, the distinction between utility and capacity takes on a greater significance.  For example, there are acts that might have perfect utility in the alleviation of an appetite -- e.g. stopping by a restaurant, ordering up some food, and eating it.  In some theoretical sense, I also have the human capacity to do so.  There is nothing in my make up as a human being that prevents me from ordering up food in a restaurant in the way that my physiology prevents flight without considerable mechanical help.  I can read the menu, speak clearly enough to get my preferences across to the wait staff, and in this sense, I have the given capacity to order up food and I am perfectly free to do so, supposing I have the money.  Because I am a bit impecunious at the moment, however, I lack what might be called the contingent capacity.  I am not free to engage in an act that otherwise would have considerable utility in freeing me from my hunger.  Here again, for the moment, I don't want to make too much or too little of capacity, and I am clearly considering it from an individual perspective where the proof remains in the pudding -- whether or not I have at my disposal the means to free myself from subjectivity to the given intentionality.

All of which brings us to the third limitation, contingency.  If intentionality brings us into being, it brings us into being here and now, into a contingency that is not of my choosing.   This, of course, is the existential conundrum.  We come into being as one who grows hungry, but what one can do and how one can do it are limited within the here and now.  I am not wholly free to act as I might want to act.  One can easily enough imagine being born into a famine where that which might have utility to alleviate my hunger is simply not available, or where I lack the capacity to engage in those means available to others and resort to other means -- e.g. rummaging through the dumpsters behind the restaurant.  As much as I might want to be the person in the restaurant, not behind the restaurant, I cannot choose to be other than who I am, such as I am, where I am, when I am.  There is much to say about contingency, and most post-structuralist philosophy is an examination of contingency -- what it means, so to speak, to be present in a world already meaningful, where the "already" points to being before and beyond my being, and my intentionality is felt, if I may pun a bit, a hole in what is whole -- a lack that must be filled -- a not-yet that must be fulfilled.  I am free to, but not perfectly free to, fulfill myself from within a given contingency, and there is of course a great injustice, a great inequity in contingency, one that will be repaired in the end times.  

Instrumentality

Brings One into Being

Given an intentionality, there must be some instrumental way, some instrumental means to move one from the state of "not-yet" to the state of satisfaction.  I have used the rather pretentious phrase, "the instrumental act brings one into being," to describe what I believe to be a point of convergence (if not the point of convergence) for ontology and epistemology, and the point of convergence is in "instrumentality." If we revert to our hunger game for a moment, it should be clear enough that, considered from a purely utilitarian frame, some things in the world will count as food, other things will not, and hunger will drive a creature to seek out those things that count as food and ingest it.  The former, I might add, takes place within a realm of freedom, the latter is rather mechanistic, but it is important to note for the moment that the intentionality creates a dualistic categorization of the world, a differentiation between those things that are food (and all that is not).  An amoeba swimming in a droplet and a human being in a wider world are not fundamentally different in this respect.  Both "categorize" their world into food (and all that is not food) and there must be some level of "awareness" of the differentiations within their world.  I would not, of course, be so bold as to suggest that the "awareness" is of the same nature or the same quality -- indeed what counts as food will be wholly different for the two creatures -- I am simply suggesting that intentionality brings it and us into interaction with the world, such as it is, and it does so instrumentally.

There are a number of things I can and should point out here, and I should begin with the observation that instrumental acts are, to a certain extent, arbitrary, but it is an arbitrariness bounded by contingency and utility.  If I am hungry, there are any number of instrumental acts that I can use to satisfy my hunger, any one of which might be sufficient unto the cause.  As I pointed out earlier, if I am hungry enough, and if circumstances are dire enough, I could even go so far as to scrounge for insects.  Fortunately, circumstances are not so dire, and I can open the refrigerator and scrounge there for something that might take away my appetite.  Just how I go about satisfying my hunger, the instrumental acts I actually engage, are the result of many things, not least contingency (what is available for me to do).  I am in the world here and now, and I interact with a world here and now, in the early twenty first century, in the United States, in a mid-sized city replete with grocery outlets, to which food is brought through a wide distribution net from as far away as Mexico and from which I can purchase from an equally array of potential foods.  The notion "I can purchase" -- as opposed to say, "I can grow" -- evinces a whole range of preliminary activities within institutions that provide "a living," the money that was needed to purchase the tomatoes, the mozzarella, and the basil that are waiting in the refrigerator to become the salad which in turn will satisfy my hunger.  To suggest that a given intentionality, my hunger, brings me into being is at once a statement trivial and profound.  I am hungry here and now, and I am free to engage in any number of instrumental acts, any efforts I might make to free myself from the subjectivity of my hunger must take place within the contingency of here and now.

On the side of utility, given an intentionality, some things do (and other things do not) contribute to its satisfaction.  If I am hungry, I do not go to the garage and rummage through my tool box for something to eat, but go to the kitchen and rummage through the refrigerator.  In some ways this seems too obvious to mention, and perhaps it is, but often the obvious is overlooked.  Here I want to make a couple of ancillary points.  The utility of any instrumental act (or the actual instrumentality of any instrumental act) is bounded by contingency, the historical "here and nowness" of its performance.  I have already elaborated on contingency, and don't really need to do so again, but I need to point out something that is equally obvious but often overlooked -- the performance of an act is adaptive, both in the micro scale adaptations of and to the world such as it is here and now (including the adaptations of my individual physical being in the world, my "going" to the refrigerator) and in the macro scale adaptations of and to the world such as it is here and now (including the adaptations of the institutional contingency, the facts of a refrigerator, the electric power to run a refrigerator, the distribution networks necessary to fill the refrigerator, and so on).  I am, so to speak, subject to the subjectivity of a given intentionality -- I am hungry -- and the "I am" that is hungry, the "self" that is hungry, makes use of the world such as it is here and now to free itself from its subjectivity.  The "self" that is hungry at once adapts to the world in which it finds itself to free itself from its hunger, and in doing so the performance of the act, changes the world, however slightly.  If I eat the tomatoes and mozzarella, it is no longer there to be eaten.  The instrumentality of an instrumental act is both bound by contingency and, in the performance, changes contingency.

A Bit of Summative Elaboration

If I might elaborate a bit here, there are several claims implicit to what I'm saying.  The first set is materialist.  I have a physical being such as it is, and because my physical being is such as it is, I have intentionality.  We can describe, for example, the physical mechanisms that make me grow hungry, and that might be useful knowledge, but the "makes me" in "makes me grow hungry" implies that my physical being exercises a certain autocracy over the "me," the subjective self, an autocracy that I express in the phrase "I am subject to the subjectivity of a given intentionality."  The "makes me" in "makes me grow hungry" also implies that the autocracy, being subject to the subjectivity of a given intentionality, is undesirable, is being bound to one degree or another in a form of suffering.  It is an imperative to no longer be subject to the subjectivity of the given intentionality, or an imperative to free myself from its suffering.  To free myself from the subjectivity of the given intentionality, I must be free to act, but my freedom is bound up within contingency and utility.  I am here and now, but I am "not yet" free from my subjectivity, and I must act within and on the world such as it is, and my act must be efficacious if I am to free myself.   The imperative, or so I want to say, "brings me into being," brings the "me'ness" of the "me" into being as the subject that must act, and is also intended to suggest that it brings me as a subject into awareness of and engagement with the world such as it is.  The given intentionality shapes "me" as and within a "form of life."

The second set is institutional.  To extend the argument a bit, it is possible to imagine a single individual  fraught with intentionality -- the science fiction scenario, where the protagonist wakes from an apocalyptic event, alone in the universe, a singularity.  The physical trappings of institutional life remain -- the abandoned cityscape -- but it is rendered uncanny by the absence of others.  We do not, of course, live in a world absent others, but it is possible to imagine being in the world alone in part because we are in the world alone.  I do not have the immediate access to others intentionality in quite the way that I have immediate access to my own intentionality.  I do not "feel" others suffering in quite the way the way that I "feel" my own suffering, indeed, for the most part, I do not feel it at all.  This has a number of implications.  At some fundamental level, of course, I can behave as though I were truly a singularity, and that all others around me were simply automatons of one sort or another, that all others around me were part of the world within which and with which I must satisfy any given intentionality.  There is, in this, a reduction of the other to a mere instrumentality, the value of which, to "me," is merely their instrumentality to a given intentionality, their utility.  I am suggesting, of course, that is precisely how we behave in the world -- to an extent.  To do so wholly, to reduce the other to mere utility, is pathological, though it goes without saying that we all know those who see others principally in their instrumental value.  It might be indicative of a creeping pathology that much recent apocalyptic fiction, where protagonist inhabits a world almost, but not quite bereft of others, cannibalism has become a central trope.  In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the protagonist must navigate a world where most value him, not as human beings, but for his utility as meat stock.

It perhaps goes without saying that the protagonist would prefer to be valued otherwise, and part of the horror of reading The Road lies in the disconnect between our own recognition of the protagonist for his humanity within a world where he has been reduced to a potential meal.  It is one thing for "me" in my singularity to reduce others to their instrumental value, but quite something else for others to reduce "me" to a mere instrumental value.  I am suggesting, of course, that the "me'ness" of the "me" comes into being relative to a given intentionality, and one such intentionality that brings the "me'ness" of the "me" into being is the need for "recognition" as full human being.  I should point out that my need for recognition does not place a special or metaphysical demand on others -- they may still view me solely as an automaton -- but the instrumental means available to me, and the efficacy of those instrumental means, does imply and depend upon what might be called an semiotic epistemology of others.  If I see someone eating, for example, I make the assumption that their behavior is governed by the same intentionality that my behavior is governed by when I eat, and the ravenousness of their eating signals the urgency of the intentionality.  I know the other, not because I can feel their hunger, but because I can, so to speak, read their acts as signifiers to a signified intentionality, one that I share.  There are, of course, any number of things wrong with the assumption.  When I see a spider eating a trapped fly, though we recognize the governing intentionality of "hunger," there is little reason to assume that the spider with all its differences of physiology "feels" hunger in the way that I feel hunger.  That argument extends upward and outward to suggest that unless another is "me" precisely, and of course no one is "me" precisely, they cannot know with certainty how "I" feel when brought into being by "my" governing intentionality, so I am left with my singularity and my impossible need for recognition -- one of the great discoveries of adolescence.

Having said that, however, the reconciliation of my singularity and my need for recognition implies not a social contract as such (there is no particular time at which people sit down and decide upon these matters) but a social semiotic where my instrumental acts signify a signified intentionality.  I should point out as well that there is nothing particularly "intentional" about this, nor is it contingent upon "language" per se.  I eat, not because I wish to signify a signified intentionality, but because I am beset to one degree or another with hunger and eating is instrumental to the satisfaction of that intentionality.  My actions, so to speak, nevertheless signify a signified intentionality, and insofar as I am also beset with the need for recognition, and that need demands of my instrumental acts that they be comprehensible to others, there is a corresponding instrumental demand that my acts conform to the apparent expectations of others -- to choose from among the available instrumental acts those acts that will signify the signified intentionality.  This implies a two-fold contingency -- a physical contingency that determines the available acts, and from within the physical contingency a social contingency that limits the available acts.  The latter is not necessarily "rule" bound, though the limitations might well be described as "rules," perhaps even prescribed and enforced as "rules" (one can think here of dietary restrictions -- more on that later) but it is worth noting that, under duress, the "rules" break down and the instrumental acts nevertheless signify a signified intentionality.



                                     
     



    

Back to the Top -- Intentionality

Artificial Intelligence

Let me begin with an apology for a certain amount of terminological awkwardness.  I have settled on the term "intentionality" and have been pondering the notion of a "governing intentionality" for most of my (largely wasted) adult life.  There are a number of near synonyms that I could have chosen -- mission, purpose, end -- but each comes freighted with its own connotations, most of which I want to avoid for reasons that will become apparent.

Rather than provide a formal definition of intentionality, let me just say that I first began pondering intentionality in the context of artificial intelligence.  The anecdote I use stems from the mid-eighties when I was in graduate school, specifically when I was in a computational linguistics course.  I took on, as a class project, the programming of a computer to produce sentences, and then, just to take it to the next level, gave it a vocabulary and syntax so the cumulative sentences would resemble a poem by the poet John Ashbery.  It all sounds much more impressive than it was, but the poems that the machine produced were close enough to being poems that they were able to fool some of my fellow graduate students in the English department -- that is to say, some took them to be poems by a person -- which is to say they passed the infamous "Turing test."  In order to read a poem as a poem, one must ascribe authorial intent to the text.  One must assume, in other words, that the author intended those particular words and that he meant something by them.  Those who were fooled by the poems did just that and some had quite ingenious "readings" that ascribed intent and meaning well beyond anything the computer had in mind.

I bring this forward to talk about the disconnects, the first of which is the disconnect between the intentionality governing production of the poem and the intentionality ascribed to the poem itself.  At one remove, I created a computer program.  While I was quite proud of the body of the program, it did what most would consider a simple and useless task.  It chugged from an initial state, a sort of "go-signal," to a final state, "a printed poem."  The program "knew" that it had achieved its final state when it had fulfilled certain criteria specified in advance in the body of the program.  I have strong doubts that the computer had "intention," in the way that we would normally think of "intention" as a state of mind, but I cannot be sure.  I had no doubt, however, that the computer had "intentionality," that it worked through more or less random iterations until it satisfied the criteria of the final state and a produced what was recognizably a poem.  In a certain social context, where there were writers and readers of poems, the readers struggled through the "surrealist" combinations until they too had satisfied the criteria and had produced what might be called a "reading."  To use Wittgenstein's term, both the computer and the reader engaged in separate, but connected "language games."  The outcome of neither game was entirely predictable, at least not to me, but the game itself and the outcome of the game, the satisfaction of the criteria, was recognizable.

The Hunger Game

Let me put this same discussion in another context, one that most would recognize as wholly physiological -- hunger.  Most would consider hunger and the need to satisfy hunger a basic need, not only for humans, but for most living things.  For those who are reading this, it sits right down there at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and it occupies a good deal of our time and effort throughout any given day.  I don't want to make too much or too little of this, but most of us would consider hunger mechanistic -- that is to say, it is built into the mechanism of our physiology.  We feel hungry, and when we feel hungry, we go about the business of getting something to eat, something that will satisfy our hunger.  To use the language of the previous section, our bodies chugged from an initial state, a sort of "go-signal" of hunger, to a final state, a "satisfied hunger."  Here, however, I have no doubts whatsoever that I was aware of my hunger, that I had "intention" to satisfy my hunger, and that I took certain actions that I knew would suffice to do so -- I went to refrigerator in search of left overs that I could heat up in the microwave, found them, and ate them.  I went through the motions of what most would recognize as a "hunger game," and if my actions were being watched, some hidden spy camera in the light fixtures, my actions would signal (or to use a more loaded term, would signify) my "intention" to get something to eat.  Likewise, though, I have no doubt that I had "intentionality" -- that the physiological "go signal" of my hunger was prior to my "intention" to get something to eat and that the instrumental acts associated with getting something to eat were governed by that physiological state.    The final state of "a satisfied hunger" is itself a given -- that is to say, I did not choose to be hungry, and while I could choose to resist the impulse or attempt to ignore the stomach pangs, it is there nevertheless -- but the final state of a satisfied hunger does not determine the acts sufficient to its satisfaction.  One can imagine many ways of going about "getting something to eat."  Instead of opening the refrigerator, I could have grabbed the car keys and popped on down to Burger King.   Nevertheless, implicit to my physiological being are certain criteria that the instrumental acts must meet in order to bring about "a satisfied hunger" -- certain acts do (and many more potential acts do not) contribute to the final state of a satisfied hunger.

There are a couple of things I want to point out here.  First, the whole business of intentionality, as I am describing it above, can be rather uncanny once we recognize it for what it is.  Consider, for example, the sci-fi staple, the almost human android.  I am imagining the Star Trek character of Data, but I could be speaking of the more sophisticated android like creatures that populated Battlestar Gallactica.   Imagine, in other words, that everyone around you is simply a machine, cleverly designed by an advanced alien race to replicate the actions of human beings in every possible way conceivable.  Unlike you, they have no "inner life."  They do not have "states of mind," but in the limited case here, only the intermittent "go-signal" that sets in motion a "hunger game," which they play to completion, and then go about other "games."  Ultimately, it's not terribly difficult to imagine, in part because we suspect that we are indeed machines at some level, and in part because we do not have the sort of direct access to the inner lives of others that we have to our own.  We must "surmise" it from actions that we recognize as instrumental to certain intentionalites.  Even if we don't recognize the substance, placing it in the mouth, masticating it, swallowing it, all signal someone who is attempting to reach the final state of a satisfied hunger.  We must "surmise," as an interpretive act, that the "eater" felt hungry and has the intention of satisfying that hunger.  I will return to this point later, but it is important to keep it in the back of one's mind because it has moral and ethical implications.  In certain respects, by asking you to imagine a world in which others are simply machines (and by implication, sub-human) I have also asked you to inhabit the world of a socio-path, one who fails to "surmise" the inner lives of others.

Second, as a sort of first noble truth, I am suggesting that intentionality is suffering.  We have labeled it differently -- hunger as need, hunger as desire, et cetera -- but at fundament hunger is a state of discomfiture.  Having said that, "suffering" overstates the case, "discomfiture" understates the case, but it serves to make another point.  I strongly suspect that I have not felt hunger in quite the way that others around the globe have felt hunger.  I am more to the "discomfiture" end of the spectrum than the "suffering" end of the spectrum, and the instrumental acts sufficient to its satisfaction are more readily available to me, in wider variety than for many others.  We might split a hair and suggest that others play the "hunger game" while I play something more akin to an "appetite game," and such distinctions may prove to be important, but for the moment I simply want to make the point that the game comes as an a priori and a  governing imperative.  I must do something, and insofar as it must satisfy certain criteria or conditions set out within my physiology, I must eat.  I must, in other words, free myself from hunger, and I am more or less free to engage in instrumental acts pursuant to that end.  I say "more or less free" because clearly some things can be eaten, other things cannot, and among those things that "can" be eaten from a purely utilitarian perspective, we may choose not to eat.  While I have no particular objections to eating insects, and I recognize that they could be a source of protein, I choose not to do so, in part because my hunger is more "discomfiture" than "suffering," in part because it is simply not what "we" do.  If my wife were to observe me scrounging the back yard for bugs to eat, she might "surmise" that I was hungry, but she might also "surmise" that I had gone off he deep end.

The Chess Game

Let me put this initial discussion of intentionality into one last context.  Current novels and movies aside, most do not think of hunger as a game -- not, for example, in the way we think of chess as a game.  Here again, let me point out the basic structure of what I'm describing as intentionality.  In any chess game, there is an initial state of affairs in the arrangement of the pieces on the board, a go signal when one of the two players moves the first pawn, a number of intervening moves each of which is intended to achieve a final state of checkmate.  There are, of course, profound differences between the hunger game and the chess game.  The one is for the most part biologically constructed, the other is a social construct from top to bottom.  I use the term "socially construct" rather guardedly, but purposefully on a couple of levels.

At one level, there is the game itself.  While the game has an existence outside and before any particular player, and in that sense is a given, but the game itself is wholly constituted within and by its "rules."  This would seem to have rather profound implications for the governing imperative.  Because the hunger game is implicit to our biological being, we do not choose either the initiating state or the final state, and because it is implicit to our biological being, because it comes from within our very being, so to speak, it would seem to carry a different weight than the governing imperative of chess.  We suffer under a failure to satisfy our hunger in ways that we do not suffer under a similar failure to achieve checkmate, and somehow this difference must be taken into account.  Perhaps so, and they are very different games, but for the moment, I am merely suggesting a structural similarity.  Because the chess game has been defined within our social environment, we do not choose either the initiating state or the final state, and in that sense the chess game, no less than the hunger game, presents us with an a priori and a governing imperative.  Once I have chosen to enter into the game, I must achieve checkmate.  I must, in other words, free myself from the "not-yet" (as in "not-yet-checkmate") and I am more or less free to engage in acts pursuant to that end.  Here again, I say "more or less" because some acts are efficacious to that end, other acts are not, and among those acts that might potentially be efficacious (if only I could move my knight just a bit differently I would have him) are those that are prohibited under the rules of the engagement.

At another level, there is the competition between the players.  I could have chosen solitaire as my example, and avoided this discussion for the moment, but the chess game allows me to make a number of additional preliminary points.  If we imagine a chess game in progress, the two players are sitting slumped over the board, and one makes a move.  Both players are now attempting to reach a state of checkmate, both have entered into a state of "not-yet-checkmate" and the white player's move has now set the context for the black player's move.  He makes a move, and his move sets the context for the white player's next move, and so on.  I am suggesting that there is an evolving contingency within which each of the subsequent moves take place.  The white player is free to make his moves, the black player is free to make her moves, but each move changes the contingency within which the next move takes place -- changes, that is, the potential efficacy of any individual move.   The while player may have had a strategy, but the black player's move just threw it out the window, and a move that is possible -- that is permitted under the rules -- no longer has pragmatic efficacy.  The black player is, in effect, still free to make the move, but insofar as the white player's last move precludes its effectiveness,  insofar as it no longer contributes to his freedom from "not-yet checkmate," one might say there is a difference between a theoretical freedom to act and a pragmatic freedom to act.   I am simply making the common sense observation that the imperative remains the same, but what is possible is not always practical, and it is good to keep the distinction in mind.

The Institutional

Ok, at one level there is the game itself, and it is socially constituted within the mutually understood rules of the game, and then there is the playing of the game.  Some will recognize this as de Saussure's structuralist distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic -- between the grammar of a language and the actual production of contingent utterances within that language -- between the rules of chess and the actual production of a contingent game within those rules -- and so on.  I am less interested in the temporal argument per se (though clearly, intentionality, as I have described it, exists within the temporal frame of a "now" fraught with the "not-yet") somewhat more interested in what might be called the "institutional" argument.  It is the admittedly structuralist distinction between an institution, which we generally understand to have a synchronic existence and the individuals who participate within the institution, which we generally understand to have a contingent diachronic existence.  In general parlance, we hear this referred to as "being part of something larger than ourselves," and I am suggesting that the a priori and governing imperative -- that intentionality -- brings into being an institution.

The choice of language is not altogether gratuitous.  Within political and moral philosophy, it is rather commonplace to imagine points of origin, so I will engage a version of that particular thought experiment and allow the uncanny to peek through momentarily again.  Imagine, if you will, that technology has progressed to the point that we can replicate exactly existing human beings, with one exception -- they have no memory, no contingent experience, prior to the moment of being "activated."   Imagine further that a group of human beings have been placed on a deserted island, which we will call Eden to capture its paradisiacal nature.  At the moment of their activation, they have he inherent biologically constituted imperatives, but no others, nothing that would resemble a "socially constituted imperative."  They are merely an aggregate of "individuals," in what might be called a "state of nature," and I will refer to this aggregate as the "polis" for lack of a better term.  It is clear enough that the polis lacks a collective purpose, and whether the polis devolves into a Hobbesian war of all on all, or evolves into a utilitarian commune, depends upon any number of contingent factors, but is also clear enough that those in the polis will create institutions which do have a collective purpose.  If one imagines a Hobbesian war of all on all, it will not be long before one has something that resembles a police force.  If one imagines a utilitarian commune, it will not be long before one has something that resembles a redistributive economy, moving goods (e.g. food) from those with a surfeit to those in need.  The institution as such may have an historical point of origin, but once created, once given an a priori and governing intentionality, the institution takes on a life of its own -- to use Wittgenstein's phrase, it becomes a "form of life."

I am also suggesting that some of the same distinctions pertain as we speak.  The individual, as an individual, is brought into being by intentionality.  He or she or it must engage instrumentally with the world to satisfy what has been given as an intentionality.  I am, as it were, subject to the subjectivity of my given imperatives, you are subject to the subjectivity of your imperatives, et cetera.  We can look at the city of New York or Los Angeles and see nothing but an aggregate of individuals, each engaged instrumentally with the world to satisfy their individual imperatives.  The institution, as an institution, is brought into being by intentionality. It must engage instrumentally with the world to satisfy what has been given as an intentionality.  We can look at the City of New York or Los Angeles and see a polis  proper, with institutions, each engaged instrumentally with the world to satisfy their individual imperatives.  Insofar as individuals participate within institutions, within socially constituted intentionalities, I am subject to the subjectivity of those institutions within which I participate, you are subject to the subjectivity of those institutions within which you participate, et cetera.  Here again my language is not gratuitous.  I use the phrase "brought into being" and "subject to the subjectivity" rather deliberately, and I return to them in my next set of posts, but let me close out this post with an observation.  Just as I don't know if my poem writing computer program had an intention to write poems, a consciousness or a subjectivity within the wiring of the machine, I do not know if an institution has an intention to satisfy its intentionality, a consciousness or subjectivity that transcends the consciousness or subjectivity of the individuals that participate within it.      

The Democratic State

To make clear what is at stake here, let me first distinguish between a "polis" and an "institution."  The polis I want to define as any recognizable aggregate of people, for the most part geographic.  A major city stands as a polis.  The difference between a polis and an institution, analytically, can be revealed by asking the question what is the governing intentionality of each.  I want to say neither Salt Lake City nor New York City have a governing intentionality, but they do have institutions -- city government, the police, the metropolitan opera, and the like -- and it is relatively easy to articulate a governing intentionality (a mission and purpose) for each.   It was, I think, the great genius of the framers to recognize this distinction implicitly, and upend what is traditional by placing the polis over the institution.

Both the theocratic and ideological states want to give governing intentionality to the polis -- that is to say, turn the polis into an institution.  Winthrop, for example, wanted the Plymouth settlement to be a city on the hill, a shining example of the Puritan faith, and as such provided governing imperatives for each and all.  Lenin, for example, wanted the Soviet state to be the harbinger of the world wide communist revolution, and as such provided governing imperatives for each and all.  It is, of course, somewhat more complex, but whether one credits the will of god or the will of history, in both cases, the state must then be free to act on behalf of the governing intentionality, reducing individuals to instruments to that end.

The democratic state substitutes the will of the people for the will of God (a substitution that particularly galls the conservative evangelical for whom the will of God, as revealed, can not be supplanted).  It might be argued that the will of the people is no more no less a contingent, historically determined fiction than the will of God, and I will argue as much insofar as the will of the people is revealed through institutions no less than the will of God.  Consider, for example, the "vote," such as it is.  Given opposing courses of action, the vote reveals the will of the people, and often winners and losers,  a majority and minority opinion, the latter of which might be called the opposing faction because, as I suggested to a colleague, losers are typically neither gracious in defeat nor persuaded by the vote itself.  Consider also, for example, the notion of the market place, such as it is.  Given opposing courses of action, the market place reveals the will of the people, and often winners and losers, the invidious comparisons of pecuniary emulation, to invoke Veblen.  Relative to the individual, the so-called "invisible hand" of the marketplace substitutes for the invisible hand of God and bestows grace on the winners, penury on the losers, and as such carries not only utilitarian significance, but also moral significance as well.  The successful are the virtuous, a paradigm upheld more in the supposition than in the examination of fact (e.g. that "hard work" and a sort of native "cleverness" are the virtues most in demand, and that anyone in possession of these virtues can rise to the top).  So long as there are institutions to keep the peace on the streets (e.g. the police) and so long as there are governing norms (e.g. the constitution, which substitutes for the sacred text, and the first amendment right to speech) the state can subsist, as a polis, without a governing intentionality.

There is the broad outline, and what is most called for (I believe) is a post-democratic state that is not regressive the to the barbarian or the theocratic, but difficult to imagine.  As with any substitution, and the will of the people for the will of God (or history), there are consequences, not least what might be called the "primacy of rhetoric."  This carries the full freight of the platonic distinction between dialectic (aimed at truth) and rhetoric (aimed at persuasion).  Within the polis, moral efficacy rises, not with the dialectical apprehension of truth, but in what most can be persuaded to believe. Here again, this is particularly galling to those who would believe that there is truth, that it is apprehensible to human beings, and that truth should govern, not a transient social majority.  This plays out on two fronts, the one being religion, the other being science, both of which ostensibly aim at truth once and for all.  Consider, for example, the following from the correspondence section of the newspaper:

"I find it curious that Latter-Day Saints who are Democrats sincerely feel they are taking the high road on social issues, when actually the opposite is true.  What these misinformed Mormon Democrats fail to realize is that we are obligated as individuals to help the needy through voluntary donation of our time and resources, but it should never be done through the forced process of involuntary, confiscatory taxation!  There is a huge difference between those two philosophies.  One way is very good; the other way is evil through and through.  This is apparently not understood by those well-meaning members.  If they stopped to think about it, they would realize that it was Satan's plan to force us all to be good (Democratic strategy) but Christ taught us to do good of our own free choice (Republican plan)  If everyone understood this simple correct principle, there would be no more liberals." SL Tribune, Sep 10, 2012.

There are any number of difficulties with Mr. James C. Green's argument, so many that it would take a chapter to address them all.  I bring it forward to point out that his fundamental position is theocratic, not democratic (though one suspects he would feel he is both).  Within the polis, the majority  can be persuaded to create an institution whose governing intentionality it is, so to speak, to provide alms to those in need.  Within the polis, the majority can be persuaded to levy a tax to fund the institution whose governing intentionality it is to provide alms to those in need, and do so on privately held good Christian principles.  Ostensibly, within the polis, those who disagree, as apparently Mr. Green would disagree, can likewise exercise rhetoric to persuade a majority to disband the welfare institution in favor of private giving.  Given the opportunity, one suspects Mr. Green, not unlike the mullahs of the middle east, would impose the "simple correct principle," regardless of the majority opinion, in part because, to his mind, the majority opinion is so obviously false.  Truth should prevail over mere opinion.        



PS the barbarian state and the imperial state I see as roughly synonymous, insofar as the history of imperialism is the history of the survival instinct writ large, but more on that later as well.      

The Four Contextualizations

The four contexts or forms of life are the barbarian, the theocentric, the ideocentric, and the democratic state.  I think, definitionally, what is meant by each is relatively clear, but I should point out first of all that there are no clear types.  While I would say, generally speaking, the four supersede each other historically, the theocentric form of life is an imposition from within and on the barbarian form of life, the ideocenric is an imposition from within and on the theocentric form of life, but it is a theocentrism that has not shaken free entirely of the barbarian, and so on.

The barbarian state is analytically, if not historically, prior to the others.  It emerges from within and represents what might be meant by a more or less Hobbesian state of nature resulting in a sovereign.  It is predicated on the absolute freedom which leads to the war of all on all postulated by Hobbes.  The virtues most in demand are the barbarian virtues of strength and cleverness, or as Veblen put it, the virtues of Achilles and Ulysses.  There is a rudimentary market, but it is essentially a barter economy, where the excess goods of one are distributed to others in exchange for their excess goods of another -- likewise the acquired skills of one are distributed to others in exchange for the acquired skills of another.  The moral virtue most in demand is reciprocity, fairness, though it is a reciprocity always subject to invidious distortion by individual disparities of strength and cleverness.  The state, such as it is, exists through the appropriation of tribute, in part because it has the acquired strength to appropriate tribute, in part as an exchange for protection from yet others who might appropriate tribute.   An individual, the sovereign as it were, personifies the state, not abstractly as a trope, but concretely in his person.  His rule and rules, his authority, so to speak, emanate from his character and his virtues, his strength and his cleverness, and it demands two moral virtues of those subject to his subjectivity -- respect and loyalty.  The governing intentionality of the state, as such, is survival.  For the sovereign, survival in the role as sovereign.  For those subject to his subjectivity, survival within the appropriations of the sovereign under his protection from the violent appropriations of others.

The theocentric state emerges from within and is a superimposition on the barbarian state.  I do not want to dispute the existence of divinity.  It seems clear enough to me that divinity exists, if only in the mind of humankind, and if only as an evolutionary quirk, yet nevertheless tangibly enough to motivate the creation of the most superb temples and paintings and poetry.  It also seems clear enough to me that humankind invents gods and goddesses, a mythos, to articulate these intimations of the divine.  There is a very long history of religious apprehension, in both senses of the word apprehension, and I will take this history as sufficient proof that divinity exists, and that the institutional articulations of that divinity are the creation of men and women over time.  Having said that, the theocentric state emerges from within the context of the barbarian state.  The emergence of monotheistic religion posits a God that is, at once, a reflection of the sovereign, but one that transcends the sovereign.  The transcendent god served first, principally, as a justification for and a means of rebellion against the caprice of the sovereign and the moral decay of the state.  The (re)emergence of evangelical Christianity and Islam serve as a case in point, but in the nature of such rebellions, if successful, the rebels must rule, but they do so not simply on the usurpations of might, but a might that has been sanctified by God.  The transcendent God served subsequently, principally, as a justification for the exercise of state power, but it is a state power that (ostensibly) freely limits its freedom to act in fealty to the moral imperatives of the transcendent sovereign God.  The Machiavellian prince revealed sufficiently the inherent duplicity, insofar as the barbarian virtues of strength and cleverness are the virtues which most sustain power, and the state must  continue to appropriate tribute, but the sovereign himself must in turn pay tribute to the transcendent God.  His rule and his rules, his authority, so to speak, emanate not only from his character and his virtues, but from the transcendent God, and it demands again two moral virtues of those subject to his subjectivity -- respect and loyalty to him as the representative of the transcendent God.

Ideology emerges from within theology, and literacy plays a role not only in the institutionalization of religion around the sacred text and its explication.  Religion, as it were, posits an intentionality once and for all and set out the instrumental means of attain to the satisfaction of that intentionality.  This intentionality is at once individual and historical -- individual insofar as it predicates the end of suffering and the fulfillment of desire (e.g. the kingdom of heaven, the pure land)  if and only if one demonstrates fealty to the religion by freely accepting limitations on one's freedom (e.g. thou shalt not kill) -- historical insofar as it predicates an end time (e.g. the kingdom of heaven on earth) which is the fulfillment of God's plan for mankind.  The latter is often hastened by the former.  Regardless, religion, in positing an intentionality once and for all, and by setting out the instrumental means of attaining to the satisfaction of that intentionality once and for all, superimposes another moral virtue -- purity and sanctity -- on in-group loyalty.  Consider, for example, dietary restrictions.  They have no instrumental value, per say, to basic biologically driven intentionality (the suffering of hunger or the desire for food).  They are, largely, arbitrary impositions on a pure utility, and have, as it were, a role as signifier to a signified fealty to a particular religion, to a particular form of purity and sanctity.  They are also signifiers of an in-group loyalty, being one of us, and consequently not simply religious disobedience, but also  social disobedience and the pretext for the exercise of state power, an exercise sanctified by God and exercised through the sovereign against those who would impose a false god from without, and those who would subvert the true god from within.  The exercise of power is still the exercise of coercive power, but it is the "principled" exercise of power.

Here again, I should perhaps emphasize that the locution "from within" is intended to suggest an interdependency, and another principle which perhaps might be called "substitution."  Ideology emerges from within theology when one term is substituted for another.  In the great twentieth century ideology of communism, both engaged in what might be called a substitution of terms.  Communism predicated the end of suffering and the fulfillment of desire within the communist state proper.  The underlying religious structure remained the same, with the substitution of terms.  I am suggesting, of course, that the ideological state, is simply a recasting of the theocratic state under secular terms, and both the theocratic state.          


          

Incommensurability

Beyond intermediacy, there is what might be called the principle of incommensurability.  Although freedom is a necessary condition for morality, we recognize that it is not a sufficient condition.  Something more is needed, and I have expressed it elsewhere as "freedom must freely limit itself" for a condition of morality to exist.  It is this insufficiency that I term incommensurability because ultimately freedom and morality are incommensurate, as is freedom and justice.

There is an unfortunate anthropomorphism of "freedom," and I could have expressed it "a free people must freely limit themselves," but that too brings a number of new questions to the foreground.  Just what, for example, would we consider "a free people?"  I will let the statement stand with the understanding that it is precisely what must be explicated, and explicated within context.   I believe there are essentially four contexts:

i.  freedom and morality within the barbarian state
ii.  freedom and morality within the theocentric state
iii.  freedom and morality within the ideocentric state
iv. freedom and morality within the democratic state

In the background, of course, are notions of wealth, and the distribution of wealth, but I will deal with that within the analytical frame articulated within the last few posts -- that is to say, wealth is an instrumental means to an end.  Such is the immediate outline of the supreme fiction.

Insurance Battles to Come

I left off last post with the statement that "morality sneaks in here."  Actually, "sneaking" might be a poor choice of word, but it nevertheless makes its presence felt.  It is a Kantian notion that choice and morality are intimately bound, and so freedom and morality are intimately bound.  A simplistic version goes something like this -- we cannot hold a person morally or ethically responsible for an action if he did not choose that action freely.

This, of course, is fraught with difficulty.  The banality of Adolf Eichmann's evil, for example, lies in his participation in an institution, a form of life, one governing intentionality of which we want to call "evil."  It wished to free itself from an ethnic impurity.  As a manager within that institution, Eichmann made generally competent instrumental decisions, banal decisions, relative to what was given as a governing intentionality.

Here is another example, one closer to home.  The governing intentionality of "insurance" as an industry is to make money, to improve profits.  They take money in the form of "premiums" and pay out money in the form of "claims."  Within this basic set of "rules," there is a strong incentive to maximize "premiums" and minimize "claims."   At the furthest extreme, they would collect money from everyone and pay out money to no one.  Assuming that people have a choice in the purchase of insurance, itself arguable, there are "market based" checks and balances within the basic rules.  People would cease paying premiums if there were no opportunity to make a claim.  Nevertheless, the basic rule within the insurance industry prevails, and one expects that executives within the institution spend considerable time "minimizing risk," and the insurance operative who spends his day poring over claims looking for defensible ways to deny them, is behaving how?  He is simply making, one assumes, generally competent instrumental decision, banal decisions, relative to what was given institutionally as a governing intentionality.

There are a number of implications within the example above, the first being the principle of intermediacy.  One might imagine a morally neutral institution whose governing intentionality is "getting the trains to run on time," but that same institution becomes morally suspect when it is instrumental to another morally suspect institution whose governing intentionality is "ethnic cleansing." 

Likewise, one might imagine a morally neutral institution whose governing intentionality is "making money."  Personally, I find it a bit difficult to imagine as much, and that perhaps was a motivation for Marx to find a post-capitalist society, but be that as it may for the moment, we can make the assumption  that there are morally neutral institutions dedicated to "making money."  Likewise, we can imagine a morally positive institution whose governing intentionality is "healing the sick."  A moment's reflection should reveal that the institutions of insurance and healthcare have many fracture points where their governing intentionality, their values, so to speak, compete.  The insurance industry may be morally neutral, considered in the abstract, but when it becomes instrumental within the institution for "healing the sick," it becomes morally suspect.  

You can imagine that I'm pondering this in anticipation of "insurance wars to come," as we struggle to find ways to pay for my wife's health care ...   

          

Dull Day

Yesterday was a dull day at work, so I answered a few emails, read on and off in one of my Buddha books as Lora calls them (specifically a compilation of essays on the Lotus Sutra) and made some pencil notes my supreme fiction.  Lora, as it turns out, received the results from her MRI at around two in the afternoon, and the news was mixed.  There was nothing wrong with her brain, and that is good to know, but the stenosis on her upper spine has progressed and so the debility will likely grow worse.  She will likely need some form of surgical intervention.  Altogether, pretty much the news we expected to hear, but still discouraging.

I left off with the notion of "intermediacy," which is tied closely with a corresponding notion of intention.  There is an answer to the "why?" question.  I go to work, and why?  so I can earn the money to provide basic necessities and gain health insurance, and why? because health insurance helps pay for the preservation and quality of life that modern medicine provides, and why?  Anyone who has engaged a two year old in conversation knows there is no end to the "why?" question.  The distinction between intentionality and instrumentality, then, is basically an analytic distinction.

To the broader question, again, "are we free?"  Here I want to suggest a distinction between negative and positive freedom.  I want to define negative freedom as a freedom from.  Intentionality as a broader concept is closely allied with the notions of need, of suffering, of desire, all of which we want to free ourselves from.  I want to define positive freedom as this freedom to.  I am free to act instrumentally on the world to free myself from need, suffering, desire, which I take to be synonymous with free to act instrumentally on the world to satisfy a given intentionality.  The notion of negative freedom is complicated, however, by a corresponding notion of "fetters" or those things that prevent or impede us, circumstantially, from satisfying a given intentionality.  It would be easier, for example, to produce more oil (and hence greater profit) domestically were it not for the inconvenience of environmental regulations.  The conservatives, of course, would free themselves from those government "fetters" so they can be more free to satisfy the need for more oil (and hence more profit) domestically.

The question of morality and ethics sneaks in here.  

illness

I pretty much painted myself in a corner in my last post, but then these posts are notes to the supreme fiction nevertheless.  I have spent a lot of time awake over the last couple of nights worried about my wife, and worried about the finances, and worried about the finances most because I am worried about my wife.  She has spinal stenosis and has been experiencing symptoms of late.  She lost function of her leg the other day, and at her last doctor visit, she couldn't perform a simple task with her left hand.  It surprised and frightened her.  She couldn't move her finger from her nose to the doctor's upheld finger, which is not something one would expect to find impossible to perform.  They scheduled her for MRIs, and we spent most of the afternoon yesterday awaiting results.  They didn't come.

In the meantime, we were informed that the cost of the MRI, out of pocket, would be $1,800 dollars.  One of the mysteries of timing, right now, we have the money.  Five weeks ago, we would not have had it, and she said, "I wouldn't have had the test."  The $1800 is just the beginning.  The radiologist who reads the film will have charges, and whatever the treatment happens to be, there will be charges there that will exceed what our insurance will pay, and as the billing clerk points out, "will be our responsibility to pay."  There will come a point where our very modest savings will be wiped out yet one more time, and we will need to make some decisions.  Not doing what is necessary is inconceivable to me, and so the worry about the money is not cupidity, but the fear of being finally stymied in defeat.  No matter which path my mind goes down, it ends there -- stymied in defeat.

My work, and my philosophy, to a certain extent, are a distraction.  When I find myself tossing in bed, I try to think through a problem, a solvable problem, start to finish.  The other night, I tried to outline, top to bottom, my supreme fiction.  I went over it and over it in my mind, and I really didn't get far.  I know the end is a moral society, so therein lies the title, and it begins with my obsessive thinking about freedom and intentionality.  So the initial section would be titled "some basic concepts and distinctions," and it would address the underlying question, "are we free?"

The first concept is "intentionality," and it answers the question, "are we free?" in the negative, or perhaps more precisely with "not exactly."  Intentionality, I want to say, is "given."  Some are given physiologically (e.g. the need for food, drink, and sex).  Some are given psychologically (e.g. the need for recognition).  Some are given institutionally or as forms of life (e.g. the need to achieve checkmate in chess or cure patients of their ills in medicine).  I say, "not exactly," because there may be some freedom in the choice of one intentionality over another, but once chosen, the intentionality governs our behavior.

The second concept is "instrumentality," and it answers the question, "are we free?" likewise with "not exactly."  Our behavior is, I want to say, instrumental to the satisfaction of a given intentionality.  Here, of course, we choose the means instrumental to the given end.   The first limitation on our instrumental freedom is "utility."  Some actions are (while others are not) instrumental to the given intentionality.  The second limitation on our instrumental freedom is "capacity."  I do not have the personal capacity to address my wife's ills, and so must engage those who do, the health-care system, and my means of engaging is the health-care system is pecuniary.  My capacity to address my wife's ills is limited by the largess of my insurance and the depth of my pockets.  The third limitation on our instrumental freedom is "contingency."  I exist here and now and must make my choices from within the peculiar set of circumstances that surround me.  My worries about my wife would likely not be tainted by pecuniary worries were I situated in Mitt Romney's set of circumstances, or Paul Ryan's set of circumstances, but I am not.  My lot, so to speak, was cast into a very different world, with very different choices.

The third concept might be called "intermediacy."  We are not simple creatures.  A given intentionality is at once an end unto itself, but is often also intermediate to another end.  I engage in my "work" as an academic administrator, for example, not only as an end unto itself, but because it provides health insurance and remuneration which are instrumental to another intentionality.            

credo

There are a couple of things that I have come to believe, and perhaps first among them is this:  positive freedom, the unrestricted ability to do what one can do, is necessary, but insufficient to morality.  This is essentially a Kantian idea, and comes down to a simple assertion that one can must be free to choose between moral and immoral actions for the distinction to have meaning.  Positive freedom, in and of itself, is a moral value only in this a priori sense, but we also recognize that additional conditions must apply if the choice is to be a moral (or an immoral) choice, perhaps first among them that the choice is "rational."  We do not hold those incapable of rationality -- the very young or the mentally incompetent -- morally culpable in quite the same way that we hold those capable of rationality morally culpable.  Just what does (and does not) count as "rationality," however, is deeply disputable, and I will come back to it, but  let me just say that "rationality" in and of itself is likewise insufficient if the choice is to be a moral choice.  We can make a perfectly "rational" calculation around an action that is wholly centered on its utility -- pursue a path, for example, that makes us happy, but does so at the considerable expense of others.  Yet additional conditions beyond "rationality" must apply if the choice is to be a moral choice, and perhaps the most significant among them is the so-called golden rule -- do to others as you would have them do to you.  It is neither moral nor immoral to act on behalf of utility, unless of course the utility comes at the "considerable expense of others."  Morality has a social dimension from the outset, and there can no more be a "private morality" than there can be a "private language."  If one were entirely alone in the universe, actions could still be "judged," but they could be judged only relative to their utility to some given end, and the distinction between moral and immoral would lose meaning.  This is essentially Wittgenstein's idea, and it comes down to the simple assertion that moral judgement is a public judgement within a particular cultural context.

That is the basic outline, but a couple of sidebar notes on unsettled matters might be necessary.  First, there are the "universalist" vs the "contingent" lines of thought.  On the universalist side, there is the desire to find that which is "true" once and for all.  There is a strong tendency in this direction, and it begins on the secular side with Plato and is reinforced on the sacred side within the thinking of most major theistic religions.  Kant is clearly within this line of thinking, and the so-called "categorical imperative" I am vastly simplifying, but the categorical imperative is golden-rule rendered universal, as in act in such a way that one's actions should become the template for a "a universal law without contradiction."  While Kant's argument is compelling in more ways than I can enumerate here, it's one of those things easier said than done.  It is easy enough to articulate a "universal law," but to do so "without contradiction" proves to be extraordinarily difficult in the messy contingency of life as most live it.  If one thinks of the legal code as an enactment of the moral imperative "thou shalt not kill," we have created any number of fine and arguable distinctions between murder and manslaughter to wrestle with the contradictions inherent within what at first blush seems a perfectly clear universal law.  On the contingent side, there is the recognition that moral values are at best messy, at worst irreconcilable one to another.  Most so-called post-modernist thinking falls off on the "contingent" side -- that is to say, the morality of a decision is contingent upon the circumstances within which it is being made.  Here again, the analogy to language is formative.  Just as a statement in a language is contingent for its meaning on the myriad of the syntactic and semantic relationships within the language, so too the morality of a decision is contingent for its force on the myriad of relationships within the culture.  The moral "truth" of an action cannot be determined once and for all, but only here and now, an assertion that opens as well an historical dimension insofar as the "here and now" today is not the "here and now" of yesterday, nor will it be the "here and now" of tomorrow.  It is a "whole" and must be considered as a "whole," but the "whole" of it is in constant flux.

Second, implicit in the above are the deeper questions about rationality itself, and might be labeled "science" vs "religion."  There are many shades of thinking here, and I would not presume to capture them all, but most are, to one degree or another, what I would call "domain specific."  As a broad commonsensical approach, for example, few would deny commonsensical rationality, the sorts of behavior we do (or don't do) engage because we desire (or fear) the consequences of our actions.  Few of us believe that we can flap our arms and fly, and hence do not leap from tall buildings for fear of plummeting to the pavement below.  To hold that belief, and to engage in that behavior, in short, is irrational.   Likewise, we recognize the differences, for example, between the rational behavior of the average commuter who is worried about making his eight o'clock meeting and the schizophrenic who is ranting about the coming apocalypse on the street corner.  Within the domain of the commonsensical, there are hundreds of background beliefs that we hold to be true (or true enough) to guide our everyday behavior.   Here I want to say, the domain of the commonsensical roughly corresponds with the domain of the scientific -- that is to say, observable and verifiable truth about the world we inhabit -- and it forms the dominant form of thinking today.  There is a universalist tendency within science, but again at the risk of over-simplification, it is a "contingent universalism."  There is a search for universal laws of nature, but those "laws," once "discovered," can be (and often are) supplanted by finer and more encompassing distinctions.  That search, as Kuhn and others have detailed, takes place on an historical scale, and while there might be an historical arch to how  "discovery" takes place, the historical arch itself isn't predictive of future "discovery."

One difficulty, of course, is that science, as such, says nothing about morality.  It can say a good deal about how we behave, and it can even say a good deal about why we behave in certain ways (and not in others) but science itself cannot make the transition from descriptive to prescriptive.  This is not to say that some writers have not tried to find a scientific base for morality or more precisely -- moral behavior -- but in doing so they commit a fundamental error.  Science, as an enterprise, is deterministic.  As a result, most discussions of morality within science are tautological.  For example, evolutionary biology is quite adept at explaining how we came to be as we are, and to suggest that there is an evolutionary base for such moral behaviors as altruism or self-sacrifice are important to the science of evolution because, as human beings, we are altruistic.  If the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then by definition it must account for our altruistic and self-sacrificing nature.  I say this because the original Darwinist formulations of evolutionary theory with the red in tooth and claw struggle for survival would seem to mitigate against behaviors like altruism, and so there has been some considerable thought given to the adaptive value of such behaviors.  By the same token, however, if the theory of evolution is true, if it has descriptive value, then too by definition it must account for our  selfish behavior, and it must do so "without contradiction," otherwise the theory must be modified to resolve the contradiction.  As it progressively resolves such contradictions, the descriptive validity of science becomes tighter and tighter, more and more true, but in the end it is confined to the domain of descriptive validity, and science as an enterprise does little or nothing to resolve the choice between altruistic or self behavior.

One could start over with the varieties of magical thinking.  Although certain forms of religious fundamentalism are very much with us today, I want to rather quickly set them aside.   I want to say that religion offers another form of "contingent universalism," but it is contingent only insofar as it's historical origins can be traced to a certain time and place.  I also want to say that religion represents its contingent point of origin as the end of contingency, a representation that requires considerable "denial" of what comes after.  To maintain the literal truth of the Bible, for example, requires extensive denial of a good deal that makes modern life possible, not least, of course, most of modern science.  Beyond that, however, are the more basic concerns that are implicit to the notion of "denial."  There is little or nothing in in theocentric religion, particularly the varieties of fundamentalist religion, that might be called democratic.  The basic belief structure asserts, "I am right, and those who do not share my faith are wrong," and then "wrong" on at least a couple of levels.  Not only "wrong" in one's beliefs, but also "wrong" in one's being.  If we are right, and there can be no doubt that we are right, those who hear the testimony, those who do not likewise believe, those who are not as we are, must be, in one way or another, fundamentally flawed as human beings.  There is a leap here between moral behavior, as such, to moral being and it is this leap that provides justification for many horrors.  If such fundamentalist thinking is coupled with political power, no matter how the power is attained, the results are rather predictable and wholly unfortunate for those who are not of the right sort, who are not moral beings.  If neither of the twentieth century horrors of nazism or communism were religious in their origins -- unlike, perhaps, the twenty first century horror of the Taliban -- most of the arguments that Hayek advanced against the ideological excess can be advanced against the theocentric excess.  Both, as it were, attempt to remake mankind for idealized vision of society, not a society for the pluralistic reality of mankind, and in so doing "impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate."

In short, one can arrive at morality neither through science, nor ultimately through religion.  One wants to say that it was the great genius of our constitutional framers to prohibit a state sanctioned religion.  Although I have railed some against the emergent plutocracy, and I do believe it poses a greater immediate threat, the imposition of a state religion poses a more traditional threat.   Although the latter begins with an affirmation of divinity and a vision of morality, when coupled with political power, it ends with autocratic denial and violence, both figuratively and often literally, of those and against those who cannot conform.  I would say the same of the religion of science -- that is to say, a "science" that believes it has escaped its contingency and found the final solution to the last question.  Fundamentalist, evangelical religion is much with us, in part because of the recent presidential politics that have elevated several of the most sanctimonious to the national stage, an equally evangelical religion of science -- or perhaps more precisely, of technology -- is very much with us.  For lack of a better term, one might call them the techno-utopians, people like Parag and Ayesha Khanna, authors of the pamphlet How to Run the World or Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization.  There is the persistent belief that a technology solution will redeem mankind.  Eugeny Morozov review the pamphlet in a recent New Republic, to devastating effect, and there is a lengthening tradition of dystopian literature from Brave New World to The Matrix, all of which suggests that the religion of technology, no less than religions of revelation, end in the borg-like denial and violence against the necessary condition of our moral being, our freedom.  Having said that, religion is nevertheless a fundamental liberty.  To deny religion is to deny something fundamental in the pluralistic reality of mankind.  I do not count myself as a religious person, a church going person, and I am willing to credit, to borrow a phrase, many varieties of religious experience, and I can do so because there are times when my soul lifts and I feel myself dancing at the edge of the universe with dragons and angels.  To deny my experience of divinity is to deny something fundamental to my being, regardless whether it is an epiphenomenon of my brain chemistry or a sidelong glimpse of God herself.

Yet freedom, in and of itself, is not a moral value.  Freedom must freely limit itself if it is to become a moral value.  Limitation is inherent in living insofar as living is a perpetual choice of this (over the universe of other possibilities).  Such choices, of course, locate themselves within a variety of spectra, from the self-conciously deliberate to the automatic unconscious, but they remain choices of this (over the universe of other possibilities) and to borrow a phrase, "that makes all the difference."  We recognize the tyrannical, not in the limitation of freedom freely limiting itself, but in the prescription of choice, that which sets out in advance what may (and what may not) be chosen.  We might, for example, talk about the tyranny of circumstance, the existential fact that one is here and now (and not there and then) or perhaps even more fundamentally the existential fact that we are, such as we are, in the given conditions of our existence -- that we grow hungry, thirsty, weary -- that we are short, unattractive, shy -- all of which set out in advance limitations on how we can (and cannot) act.  Since I have touched on technology, and the sorts of techno-utopianism that pervade the literature, perhaps it bears mentioning that technology in the broadest sense is designed to free us from the tyranny of circumstance.  If we can talk about a progressive development of technology, the progression resides in our expanding freedom from prescribed limitation on our freedom to act.  Insofar as it is impossible to imagine a moral individual or a moral society without a broad freedom to act, the utopian strain in the techno-utopian thought resides in precisely this progressive expansion of the domain of freedom and the imagined vanishing point where the technology frees us wholly from the tyranny of circumstance and sets us wholly free to define ourselves self ethically and morally.  It is a vision of the perfectly equitable, the perfectly just society.  In the end, however, the deeper irony is this:  technology changes, but does not free us from the tyranny of circumstance.  Technology itself becomes part and parcel of the circumstance and exercises its own forms of tyranny, and it is perhaps not by accident that the protagonists of the techno-dystopian literature battle to free themselves from the circumstantial tyranny of technology.      

Yet here again, in and of itself, freedom is not a moral value, even in its heroic opposition to tyranny, in part because we intuit rather quickly that my freedom to act is one thing, your freedom to act is quite another, and in the presumptive state of nature that Hobbes described my freedom will ever be a threat to your freedom and your freedom ever a threat to my freedom.  It is also the presumptive state of nature that the various forms of social Darwinism have described, if not exactly red in tooth in claw, then certainly barbaric in the fight for ascendancy, the free exercise of prowess over others to limit or eliminate their being as a threat.   As Veblen put it, "in the life of the barbarian, prowess manifests itself in two main directions -- force and fraud."  Though force and fraud are the virtues of Achilles and Ulysses, and we might find them both admirable types, perhaps even superior types worthy of our jealous emulation, but the free exercise of prowess over others, ascendancy, even superiority, portends nothing beyond itself.  Prowess is nothing more than prowess, and it is deeply erroneous to ascribe transcendent value to those who exercise prowess.   Prowess is not beyond, but before good nor evil, and the romantic turn of thought that would extol the Napoleanic escapades, that would posit a Nietzchean ubermensch, is deeply regressive and conservative, as Veblen's choice of barbarian would imply, of the primitive in our nature. We worship what we fear, and the Republican turn of thought that would reinstate the fully unfettered freedom of the free market is likewise regressive and conservative of a more Hobbesian, a more Darwinian state where the heroic struggle to survive produces the heroic type, where the free exercise of force and fraud results in the Achilles and Ulysses of the modern industrial and post-industrial economies, the CEO as a randy Nietzschian ubermensch, whose ascendancy would portend a transcendent value beyond the fact of and fear of those in a position to exercise their prowess over us, to demand deference and jealous emulation.

No, freedom is necessary, but insufficient to a moral life.  One must freely limit freedom, but the question that is always before us is just this -- "how so?"  There has been some discussion of late on the end of history, not as the end of chronology because presumably we go on accumulating events of interest, but rather as the arrival at a "process" once and for all.  For Francis Fukuyama and others, the "process" is liberal democratic deliberation on the order of the western democracies.  I wouldn't disagree with him too vehemently, though I would point out that western democracies are more fragile, less inevitable than he might believe. The history of mankind has been marked less by democratic deliberation, more by the exercise and institutionalization of prowess.  If one does not accept the simple proposition that might makes right, then the background question, "on whose authority?" comes to the foreground.  The answer to this question most in evidence is "on God's authority."  There are, globally, a variety of Gods to whom one can defer, but the pattern in evidence is largely the same, and it serves a two-fold purpose.  On the one hand, "on God's authority" does provide an authoritative answer, indeed the authoritative answer once and for all, to the "how so?" question.  Deference to the Koran, deference to the Bible, each provide more or less definitive limitations on one's individual freedom in the form of sacred law.  If there is to be a secular law, it is an elaboration on and the implementation of sacred law which ultimately takes precedence.  On the other hand, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question of luck or fortune.  It is probably not lost on most that both of the conservative candidates for president in this election cycle were winners of the so-called genetic lottery.  Insofar as they are the progeny of "self-made men," it is probably not lost on most that both of the "self-made men" happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and were in a position to benefit from their good luck.  One doesn't want to wholly discount their achievement.  Being in a position to benefit is not quite the same thing as benefiting, and there are heirs to good fortune that descend into lethargy and licentiousness, but nevertheless, "on God's authority" provides an answer to the question, why Romney and not me?  If the winners in the struggle for ascendancy are not simply random result of sheer chance, if the winners in the genetic and circumstantial lottery are those elected of God in fulfillment of his plan, we have something resembling the divine right of Kings, the divine right of plutocrats to exercise broad authority over others.  It is perhaps not entirely by accident that the Republican party is also the party of "god's authority," insofar as God's inscrutable distribution of good and bad fortune justifies the sorts of tyranny all too familiar through human history.  In an oddly Nietzschian transvaluation of Christianity -- or perhaps more precisely a Randian transvaluation of Christian ethics -- Paul Ryan "is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand's worship of the successful and contempt for the 'moochers," as Paul Krugman put it.  The rich are rich because they deserve to be rich, the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor, and Mr. Ryan is "also quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor -- for their own good.  In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, 'We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls the able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.'"

Another answer to the question "on whose authority?" is, of course, "on the people's authority," and it is this authority, not God's authority, to which the framers of our own constitution deferred.  There are, however, any number of difficulties.  "On the people's authority" does provide something of an answer to the "how so?" question, but it is a maddeningly partial answer.  This "how so?" is, of course, both a process and results question. "On the people's authority" suggests rather clearly that some form of democratic deliberation is necessary, as process, if we are to freely decide how to limit freedom.  It was perhaps the peculiar genius of the framers to prohibit limitations on the freedom of the press and the freedom to worship as forums for deliberation, but deliberation in and of itself implies differences of opinion, and just how those differences are to be resolved is another matter, particularly insofar as some differences ultimately are irreconcilable.  The ballot and majority rule provides one answer, and it is perhaps the most expedient means available to resolve without resolving those irreconcilable differences, and enough has been said about the tyranny of the majority that I do not need to repeat it here, but it does lend itself to a moral vision informed more by Ecclesiastes, less by Leviticus -- more that is by a sense of moral and ethical churning than to definitive answers once and for all.  To everything turn, turn, turn, he majority today may be the minority of tomorrow, a particularly distressing state of affairs for those who have, or believe they have, attained a state of moral and ethical certainty.  Democratic deliberation, as process, does nothing to guarantee a particular result or even a particular type of result, and "on the people's authority" produces a result that is forever mutable, transient, contingent.  If democratic deliberation represents an "end to history," it clearly does not put an end to disputations and events, but it does represent an end to any real sense of progression.  It is social darwinism, but it is social darwinism divorced of any victorian sense of social progress or social optimism.            

As an aside here, there is a certain mindset that would ask, "why not social progress?"  As rational beings, it would seem that government could approached as we approach science and technology, and to do so would fuel an optimistic social progress -- just as our cell phones become better and better, our government could become better and better -- and one doesn't doubt that thoughts around the great society are fueled, as Hayek put it, by "habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and engineer."  One could say the same of those habits of though engendered by the preoccupation with business problems as well as military problems, insofar as both business and military challenges are often allied with technology, and both are dedicated to the solution of a hedgehog problem -- making the institutional machinery work more effectively, more efficiently, and ultimately for the businessman more profitably and the military man more victoriously.  That was the mindset most disturbing to Hayek, who went on to remark that it "tended to discredit the results of the past study of society which did not conform to their prejudices and to impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are inappropriate."   For Hayek, of course, the sphere to which the mindset of the natural scientist and the engineer were least appropriate was the marketplace and the sorts of government action that would control the marketplace, and here one must give Hayek credit.  If the history of the 20th century is a history of anything, it is the history of imposed ideals of organization, wholly rational and ultimately wholly ineffectual, for some of the reasons that Hayek enumerated, but for the reason suggested famously by Isaiah Berlin, that dedication to the solution of a hedgehog problem, one which presupposes a governing intentionality, one that posits a proper end for mankind.   The theocentric presupposes a kingdom of heaven on earth, and in the meantime, as John Winthrop put, "we have entered into a covenant with Him for his work" to effectuate that "city on a hill."  The communist presupposes, if not a kingdom of heaven on earth, nevertheless a wholly rational state predicated on the wholly equitable distribution of goods and serves, and if we have not entered into a covenant with god, we are nevertheless engaged within the inevitable march of history to effectuate the wholly communal state.  In either case, as both Hayek and Berlin have suggested, dedication to the solution of the hedgehog problem, achieving the proper end for mankind, has engendered the greatest atrocities of history.

As a secondary aside, it is one thing to posit a personal governing intentionality, another to posit an institutional governing intentionality, and yet another to posit a universal governing intentionality for humanity proper.  One can set out a purpose for an individual life, and indeed the framer's first amendment protection of the right to worship as one sees fit gives broad latitude for the individual to frame and pursue an individual end, an individual "happiness."  Within the American character at least, there is a strong sense of both entitlement and obligation to frame one's own proper ends, even to the point of ascetic withdrawal from the social life of the times.  Thoreau and the Unabomber were not distinct in their rejection of the social life of the times -- to include the technical, business, and military mindsets of the time.  The fundamental difference was, of course, that the latter extended his personal pursuit of happiness into that which out to be the governing intentionality for humanity, the ontological 'this is my happiness' for the deontological 'this ought to be everyone's happiness,' and was willing to use violence to effectuate the extension of the personal to the universal.   While I would not want to completely discredit the individual intentionality -- the individual will to ends if not absolutely unique to the individual, then sufficiently nuanced in its differences to count as unique --  I do want to discredit the notion of a universal governing intentionality.  Here I want to make the analogy to language, more or less along the line of Wittgenstein, that a wholly private language might be possible, but it would not be comprehensible to others.  Thoreau and the Unabomber each might have a unique perspective on life and how it should be lived, but to make their interiority, as it were, comprehensible, to make it recognizable to others for what it is, they had to express that interiority within the established social conventions of English grammar and that, of course, implies some sort of socialization within the conventions of English grammar.  It is possible, as a thought experiment, to imagine Thoreau and the Unabomber sharing a "private language" and debating the efficacy of violence within that private language (as, say, two children raised in complete social isolation might develop a "private" language between them) but the point is simply this -- the interiority of a wholly personal and private governing intentionality must find its expression in social conventions if it is to be recognizable and comprehensible to others.  To use Wittgenstein's term, it must find expression within a form of life.  To be wholly comprehensible, one must act within the normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations, and therein lies the rub.  The normative boundaries of institutionalized expectations are always, to one degree or another, arbitrary and limiting.  One might speak English, one might speak Chinese, and one might even translate more or less successfully between the two, but one cannot speak both at once without lapsing into incomprehensible gibberish.  One must choose.

I am suggesting that the framer's particular genius lay in two things.  The first being a willful refusal to name one proper end for mankind, as evidenced for the most part by the willful refusal to name a state religion and the subsequent prohibition against the same.  The second being an 18th century faith, not in the individual, but in the collective rationality of mankind.  As a third and final aside, Rawl's condition of ignorance ...



                                      

Out of time ... more later ...