To understand Inception, begin at its inception: Memento

The having the idea of anything in our mind no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world. –John Locke

In all of the analyses of Inception I’ve read so far, I have been surprised to find Nolan’s previous film Memento conspicuously absent from the discussion. The Matrix comes up most frequently, but so too do a number of other films, such as Dark City, Lathe of Heaven, Paprika, and on. To my mind this is odd, for the key to “understanding” Inception, or even just appreciating it as something more than “a fancy heist film that sports some fancy but well trod ideas about the appearance/reality distinction” is to understand the continuity it has with the themes developed in Memento. To see how this is so, let us step quickly through Memento.

In Memento Lenny creates his reality by using information that he has inscribed onto his body, as well as "mementos" that he carries around with him. Using these codes and artifacts he able to construct, repeatedly, in an iterative manner and on an ongoing basis, a narrative that guides him to his ultimate goal: the killing, in revenge, of the man who murdered his Beloved, his wife. Unfortunately for Lenny, it is possible for him to be manipulated by people who are able to get inside his "decision loop." Because Lenny has no memory outside of his physical inscriptions and photographs, anyone who is able to manipulate these objects, either directly or indirectly, winds up altering Lenny’s reality. At the end of the film we reach the beginning of the narrative where it is shown how Lenny is one of the participants in this reality manipulation, as he is revealed to have been manipulating himself, as a third party, fully knowing that he is consciously producing a fantasy for himself, but also knowing that this fantasy will help him accomplish a concrete goal that he wants to accomplish. Fantasy (a false belief) becomes a means to a real end (the slaying of person that he realizes has been manipulating him).

Inception picks these ideas back up, but generalizes them to the point where they become metaphysical. In Inception Lenny's physical mementos are dissolved into pure "ideas," and as such, they become, in a Lockian fashion, the ground of our access to reality. The film makes this explicit as it opens with Cobb discussing “The Idea” as the most powerful force in reality generation (not having the script I don’t recall how he phrases this, he may have called it a “virus” or “parasite” but the crucial point here is that he here lays out the thesis of the film: that a single idea can transform our experience of reality). Here Cobb nodes in the direction of memes, but much more importantly invokes the “Idea” idea, which can be traced back to Locke:

even the most abstruse Ideas, how remote soever they may seem from Sense…are yet only such, as the Understanding frames to itself, by repeating and joining Ideas, that it had either from Objects of Sense, or from its own operations about them.

For the remainder of the film the Idea idea remains lurking in the background, repeatedly manifesting in a variety of ways. The most obvious way that it manifests is as the possibility that all the proceedings are “just a dream.” This is emphasized by the “dream within a dream” scenarios, and by the general acknowledgment that it can be difficult to tell dreams from reality. This latter fact necessitates that each dreamer carry a special token called a "totem" to serve as their anchor to reality; each totem's special attributes enabling its owner to establish whether or not they are in their original frame of reference. Here danger threatens: as in Memento, the loss of the totem (memento) or its corruption will render the bearer of that totem anchorless, adrift without a way to establish their original frame of reference, unable certify that they are really in the “primary” frame of reference, also known as “the real world.”

These epistemic problems are not, however, the message of the film, it is not just one more VR film once more reminding us that it might all be a dream (though obviously it is doing this too insofar as it accepts this as a possibility, as does Memento, though in Memento it is suggested that this is the case only for Lenny, or people in Lenny’s condition, as when Lenny asks, in a moment of anxiety that stems from an intuited sense that he is just making everything up as he goes along: “Is the world still there when I close my eyes?”). Inception, at the meta level, more or less accepts that “it is all a dream.” Therefore, the question becomes: what are the psychological consequences of this fact? What does it mean that we are driven by ideas rather than driven by something called “reality.” The “real” story that lies behind the surface story of the heist, and of the dreams that house it, is the story of “inception”—that is to say, the story of how transformative ideas are generated, and how that generation shapes our experience of the world. We are clued in to the importance of the idea of “inception” precisely by the fact that it is offered, at the beginning of the film, as the opposite of “extraction.” But inception is not the opposite of extraction. The opposite of extraction is insertion, not inception. Yet insertion would seem to be a sufficient category: aren’t Cobb and his team merely placing an idea in someone’s mind? Why not call the movie “Insertion?” Inception on the other hand means roughly “at the beginning of something.” So here we are alerted to the fact that inception has a special import or quality over and above the “mere” insertion of an idea. What is this special quality?

This quality can be found in the conditions required to make inception possible. In both Memento and in Inception the condition is this: one must be able to access the deepest drives of the individual that is being incepted, those emotions that are constitutive of their identity. Once one understands what these driving emotional forces are, they can be harnessed to redirect, or even remake the individual. The emphasis is thus not on the insertion of the idea, but on the fact that the insertion of the idea results in an inception, that is to say, in a beginning, a new identity for the individual who has been “infected” or “inspired” by this new idea. We can see these constitutive forces in Lenny’s drive for revenge, as it is constantly being reshaped to fit new targets; we see it in Fischer’s yearning for both acceptance by and individuation from his father, and ultimately we see it in Cobb’s crushing guilt over the death of his wife, who was killed when Cobb infected her with the Idea idea itself.

In all of these cases the central dynamic is the dynamic of interpretation. We see this very explicitly in the case of Lenny, who is constantly pouring over his mementos, trying to build a picture of his target, John G, a target that morphs over time as various bits of data are added and removed. We see this in the case of Fischer, who agonizes over his father’s last word: “disappointed.” His Oedipal deadlock is finally resolved when he reinterprets this word not as testimony of his father’s disappoint in him, but as his father’s disappointment that he ever tried to be him in the first place, that he is not "his own man."

With Cobb, the question of interpretation becomes more difficult, for Cobb’s condition is tied to the central problematic of inception itself. At this level of the film all the threads come together: in order for Cobb to complete the mission, the mission that will get him back to his Beloved children, he must overcome his guilt over having infected his wife with the Idea idea. The success of the mission, and his overcoming of his psychic deadlock are thus coextensive: he cannot “see” his children until he completes the mission, and completion of the mission becomes the event of confronting his wife who personifies the collapse of the real into the Idea idea. Once Cobb reinterprets his psychic inventory, contained in all the rooms of memories “he cannot change” he is freed from his Limbo, and able to re-unite with his children. In the final moment when Cobb reunites with his children, we are once again reminded that frames of reference are ambiguous relative to interpretation. For Cobb now leaves his anchor behind: having acquired the Beloved, he no longer needs it, but we watch it spin so that we can know if Cobb has really acquired his goal. Will the top spin forever, detached from physical law? Or will it at long last fall to earth, so that we can know he is once again anchored in a world with determinate rules? We are not given this final confirmation, just as we are not shown in Memento if Lenny’s wife was ever murdered, for Nolan wants to inspire us with the Idea idea, which is to say: he wants to leave it open to our interpretation.

To some this will be unsatisfying. Some will prefer Neo’s assent out of the cave, The Matrix teaching us that when we understand The Matrix, we will be able to achieve god-like control (similarly Dark City). Inception (like Existenz) denies us this route, and recommends the view that no final anchor can be found once we find ourselves behind the veil of ideas. If there is an anchor to be found here, it is simply this: to love the objects of our care.

A final note: none of the preceding is intended to function as a commentary on the quality of the film as such. It is simply a quick sketch of the film from the vantage point of its meta structure, in particular as it relates to the themes of Memento. The question of how well the film hangs together at its various levels in terms of coherency, aesthetics, and so forth is another matter, and one that I am not addressing here.

Nozick's Experience Machine (Part 1): Is it OK to live in a world composed entirely of our own shit?

The next several posts will consider Rober Nozick's well known "Experience Machine" thought experiment offered up in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. An online .pdf can be found here.

Most people would agree that having pleasurable experiences is a necessary part of being happy. But are pleasurable experiences, in and of themselves, sufficient for happiness? If there was a way to ensure that you would have nothing but pleasurable experiences for the rest of your life, would that be enough to make you happy? Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment purports to help us answer this question. By many accounts, the experiment is, if not conclusive, at least strongly suggestive that most of us are not philosophical hedonists (we do not believe that pleasure is the essence of the good). We want, according to this story, something more than the experience of pleasure.

Opening his thought experiment Nozick asks: "What matters other than how people's experiences feel "from the inside?" To answer this question he suggests we imagine a machine capable of producing consistent, high quality, desireable experiences for us on an ongoing basis:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.

On the standard reading of Nozick's machine we are to ask ourselves: if such a device existed, and if we were completely assured of its efficacy in producing pleasurable experiences of the exact type and quality we desired, would we want to to plug in? And if not, if we feel that we don't want to plug in, or if we have the intuition that we shouldn't plug in, doesn't this mean that we reject philosophical hedonism? Doesn't it tell us something important about what is important to us?

Nozick puts it this way: "We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it." What do we learn? Nozick offers 3 reasons we would not want to plug into the Experience Machine:

(1)"First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them."

(2)"A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person."

(3)"Thirdly, plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated."

I think that the way Nozick presents both (1) and (2) are problematic, and I'll discuss the reasons why in subsequent posts. For now I want to focus on claim (3), particularly as I think most if not all of Nozick's concerns can be reduced to (3), and furthermore, that it is (3) that drives the popularity of the thought experiment, as it makes assumptions that play to deeply ingrained biases that philosophers are likely to have. Nozick's concern is that hooking up to the machine will cut us off from something important (a "real reality?" readers are invited to come up with their own pleonasm here), and confine us to a "man-made reality." Nozick complains that in a "man-made" reality there is no "actual contact" with any "deeper" reality. To put it another way, Nozick is concerned that by hooking up to the experience machine, we will wind up living in a world composed entirely of shit that we make up, and will thereby lose contact with reality, the kind of contact one gets when, for example, one is kicking rocks. This notion, the notion of losing "contact" with reality, goes way back in the western philosophical tradition. Rather than being a problem of losing contact with reality, however, it is typically described as the problem of getting into contact with reality in the first place.

Plato, to whom we are reportedly footnotes, came up with (as far as the western tradition is concerned) the original experience machine, what we now know as Plato's cave. Describing the cave to Glaucon, Socrates paints a picture of this remarkable device:

"Next then", I said, "make an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind. See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets."

Elaborating his example further, Socrates goes on to describe how "along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts" move their various objects to and fro, so that the light from the fire projects shadows of those objects on the wall upon which the gazes of the cave denizens are fixed. "Do you suppose," asks Socrates "such men would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them?"

The denizens of Plato's cave live, in other words, in an entirely man-made world. A world of human artifacts, human energy, and human sounds. Within the cave, it is as James said: "the trail of the human serpent is over everything." Escape, however, is possible. At the back of the cave there is a path out, a "rough, steep, upward way," that leads from the darkness of the cave to the real world, or at least a non-human world, a world where the true nature of objects are revealed, "the things themselves" unmediated by fire and shadow.

The parallels with Nozick's experience machine are clear: human beings trapped in a world of their own making, out of contact with "actual" reality, unaware that a "deeper" contact with reality is available to them (or worse, consciously choosing to reject this deeper reality). I think there are (at least) two interesting things we can note here.

First, if one accepts a Platonic account of our epistemic condition, i.e. that our starting point is one of dramatic epistemic poverty, then most of us are already in a kind of experience machine. If this is right, how does our ignorance impact our considerations at the moment we consider hooking up to additional experience machines? I'll take up this question in a subsequent post.

For now I want take up a second consideration. Using Plato's allegory of the cave we can recast Nozick's thought experiment as follows: "Suppose there were a cave somewhere, where all experience was mediated by human artifice, but the form of that artifice could be organized by you ("preprogramming your life experiences" is the way Nozick puts it). In this cave you could ask for the specific kind of puppet show that you wanted, and all your experiences would be guaranteed to fit your tastes perfectly. Would you go to this cave and chain yourself up?" Given that the Platonic division of the world into "reality" and "appearance" has dominated the Western philosophical tradition for some 2 millennia, is it remotely suprising that philosophers might be somewhat disinclined to hook up to the experience machine? Framed in this way one is tempted to ask: did philosophers really need a new thought experiment to remind us that we don't want to be chained up in Plato's cave?

But note again Nozick's opening question: "What matters other than how people's experiences feel 'from the inside?'" This passage suggests that Nozick's philosophical anxieties go deeper than those unearthed by Plato's cave. What is the "inside" that he is referring to? Given the way the experience machine is described it can be nothing other than the "inside" of the human mind itself. What, after all, are our "experiences," but "ideas" lodged in the mind? So not merely the cave of culture, the cave of received opinion, the cave of human artifice, but the cave of experience itself. For the entire conceit of the experience machine assumes a deliberate hijacking of what Daniel Dennett has called "the Cartesian Theatre."

The Cartesian Theatre is the model of the mind that was bequeathed to us by Rene Descarte. It is a kind of souped up Platonic cave, where the prisoners are supplanted by our own "inner eye," a disembodied prisoner that inspects the parade of images supplied by our sensory experience and imagination. With the world of experience imploded into non-extensible mind, we are unerringly directed to the conclusion that we might be able to retreat entirely "within ourselves." This was the conclusion that Descartes came to during his Mediations, a metaphorical 6 day survey of the contents of mind, a cleansing programmatic exposition of radical doubt, a process of epistemological purification that would eliminate any unclear or indistinct ideas from the catalog of Descartes' beliefs, and thus lay a foundation for real knowledge, real contact with reality. But how much of the world can be doubted? As it turns out, quite a bit:

However, I must here consider that I am a man, and consequently that I am in the habit of sleeping and of representing to myself in my dreams those same things, or sometimes even less likely things, which insane people do when they are awake. How many times have I dreamt at night that I was in this place, dressed, by the fire, although I was quite naked in my bed? It certainly seems to me at the moment that I am not looking at this paper with my eyes closed; that this head that I shake is not asleep; that I hold out this hand intentionally and deliberately, and that I am aware of it. What happens in sleep does not seem as clear and distinct as all this. But in thinking about it carefully I recall having often been deceived in sleep by similar illusions, and, reflecting on this cicumstance more closely, I see so clearly that there are no conclusive signs by means of which one can distinguish clearly between being awake and being asleep, that I am quite astonished by it; and my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I am asleep now.

Here Descartes lays out the possibility that we are not only in a cave of received opinion, where we are chained to the particular ideas of our cultural milieu, but that we are locked inside the very substance of our own minds, our beliefs the spontaneous product of our imagination. But once this possibility is admitted, once the "images of things" are converted into "ideas" that we "represent to ourselves," then the way is left open to intense fantasies about radically skeptical scenarios:

I shall suppose, therefore, that there is, not a true God, who is the sovereign source of truth, but some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me. I will suppose that the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see, are only illusions and deceptions which he uses to take me in. I will consider myself as having no hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or senses, but as believing wrongly that I have all these things. I shall cling obstinately to this notion; and if, by this means, it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, at the very least it is in my power to suspend my judgment.

Putting Descartes's meditation in Nozickian language we can say: "I shall suppose, therefore, that I am hooked up to an experience machine, a machine that produces 'the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see,' and further, that this machine is controlled by an entity whose sole interest is in deceiving me about that true state of the world." Isn't it precisely this that Nozick asks us if we want to do? Doesn't he ask us if we want to become our own evil demon? To willingly give up our putative "connection" to reality and replace that connection with nothing but the limits of our imagination--in thrall to the vicissitudes of desire? Are we imaginative enough to be our own gods? Given the powers of an experience machine how could we help but become our own demon? In such a scenario, closed in on ourselves, with no "deeper" reality into which we might vent our spleen, how could our phenomenal world not fill up with our own shit?

Such, in my view, is the philosophical backdrop of claim (3), the claim that "plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct." Thus, far from merely arguing that we do not, despite ourselves, wish only to have pleasurable experiences, the experience machine argument is itself an experience machine that injects into us Platonic/Cartesian intuitions complete with concomitant ready-made anxieties. It is clear why such a thought experiment might be considered useful in undergraduate philosophy courses: if you want to pump into your students a powerful set of intuitions about the reality/appearance distinction, and connect those intuitions to things that that really interest them (TV, drugs, movies, music, video games, and other powerful experience inducers) then Nozick's experience machine is a good way to start the conversation. Who knows? You might even coax them out of the cave, or at least be the first person to give them a shovel.

With the preceding bit of context to ground our considerations, I think we can now consider some other questions. In particular, what of reasons (1) and (2) not to use the machine? Do these relate in any interesting ways to (3)? When people find that they have the intuition not to use the experience machine, is it the experience machine qua experience machine that they are reacting to? Or are there other contaminants in the vicinity? I will attempt to make some headway answering these questions in subsequent posts.

Part 2

Kick off: on kicking rocks and making shit up.

In "The Life of Samuel Johnson" Boswell narrates a discussion he had with Johnson regarding the philosophy of Berkeley:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

A couple hundred years later, Richard Rorty, sketching out the typical (essential?) structure of essentialist vs. anti-essentialist debates noted:

Essentialists typically rejoin at this point, that psychological nominalism is a mistake, that we should retrieve what was true in empiricism and not admit that language provides our only cognitive access to objects. They suggest that we must have some prelinguistic knowledge of objects, knowledge that cannot be caught in language. This knowledge they say, is what prevents the table or the number or the human being from being what they call a 'mere linguistic construct'. To illustrate what he means by nonlinguistic knowledge, the essentialist at this point in the argument, usually bangs his hand on the table and flinches. He thereby hopes to demonstrate that he has acquired a bit of knowledge, and a kind of intimacy with the table, which escapes the reach of language. He claims that the knowledge of the table's intrinsic causal powers, its sheer brute thereness, keeps him in touch with reality in a way in which the anti-essentialist is not.

Oh how little things change.

Berkley's idealism and Rorty's pragmatism are not the same of course, and the arguments they advanced were not directed toward the same ends. Berkley was trying to prove, by a kind of process of elimination, that everything must be an idea in the mind of God. Rorty, who had no use for gods of any kind, was trying to dissolve all "gods," supernatural or otherwise, into a creative naturalistic soup. Nevertheless, there is a connection between Berkley's rejection of abstract ideas, his emphasis that all things come "mixed," "blended," and "complicated," (an insight Hume called "one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made in late years in the republic of letters") and Rorty's anti-essentialist denial "that there is a way to pick out an object from the rest of the universe except as the object of which a certain set of sentences are true;" sentences, he goes on to note, that can only relate objects to one another (a fact that entails all objects so described are "blended," "mixed," etc.).

In this respect at least, in their emphasis on a kind of relational holism, Berkley and Rorty are united together against the rock kickers, as are all who find themselves attracted to thinking that strives to connect "all things" together. In opposition to this syncretic hackery, the rock kickers strive to determine the essential nature of each individual thing and thus, by extension, to discover the most essential things that there are (in order to better kick them).

Here I am running roughshod over further distinctions that could be made (a habit I will continue for at least the remainder of this post), as this is merely an introduction to the primary distinction I would like to make, a division of the world into "rock kickers" and "shit maker upers." Readers may recognize that I am here attempting to put one more spin on what C.P. Snow called "The two Cultures," which, very generally speaking, are the cultures of "science" and "art."

But as the rather informal expressions that make up my two cultures indicate, this is no technical distinction prefacing a delineation of boundaries between the various interfaces of scientific and literary culture. Rather I intend it to function like the distinction offered by William James in his lectures on pragmatism where he suggests that

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments...Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be "not in it," in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him dialectical ability.

James called these two temperaments, these "sentimental" and "hard-hearted" views, the "the tender-minded" and the "tough-minded" positions respectively. James intended that these temperaments stand in for clusters of "traits"--characteristics generally associated with the traditional divide between rationalists and empiricists. Adding to this basic distinction James layered on "idealism" vs "materialism;" "religious" vs "irreligious;" "dogmatic" vs "skeptical," as well as other oppositions. James intended to show how these oppositions might be mediated--or even dissolved--by the application of philosophical pragmatism. Ironically his efforts to mediate the temperamental split have largely earned him a place at the table of the tender-minded. For his pragmatic assertion that "ideas become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience," earned him few friends among the tough minded. Indeed, on the tough-minded view, ideas are true just insofar as they help us get into satisfactory relationship with reality itself, in the way bits of maps relate to bits of the world. To suggest that "ideas" are "true" insofar as they are in "satisfactory relation" with "experience" comes far too close to suggesting that what is true is whatever shit we make up to keep ourselves happy, and that is a truth no self respecting rock kicker can abide.

The cluster of dispositions and philosophical stances that James suggested as representative of the tough-minded temperament are, I think, still largely serviceable for today's rock-kicking contingent. Empirically minded, "going by facts," materialistic (philosophically speaking), irreligious, and skeptical are attitudes/stances with which most modern rock kickers would happily be associated. On the other hand, if we take Rorty as a paradigmatic case of milder than mild realism, a tender-minded fellow who just can't help but peddle his share of fashionable nonsense, we can see that the categories James proposed in conjunction with his "two temperaments" no longer apply (if they ever really did). For Rorty is a materialist through and through, not to mention irreligious and skeptical (exactly what he was skeptical about is point of contention).

That James's traits do not match up well with today's temperaments should come as no surprise: by his own admission, the traits he invoked were somewhat arbitrary, invoked as much to make a general point as to try to nail down once and for all the differences between the two temperaments. Discarding, then, the suggestions James offered, and interested in advancing my own variation on the theme, what basic traits do I suggest for today's loyal opposition?

For my purposes here, I do not think it necessary to go any further than the categories implicitly contained within my original distinction. On the one hand we have rock kickers, who find the truth, either through the careful and meticulous unearthing of rocks that were heretofore hidden from us by layers of obfuscation, or by accident, where the rocks are merely tripped over (or in the case of certain apples, when they are dropped on certain heads). On the other hand we have shit-maker-upers, primarily concerned with the fact that we are makers of things (not to mention ideas) and here we can open up our scope quite widely indeed, for shit-maker-upers are, in their wildest moments of excess inclined to declare that everything is in some important sense "made up," including rocks (at which point rock kicking and table slapping doth commence).

Let us consider some objections to the preceding.

It may be objected, that the label "tough-mindedness" should not be handed over so quickly to the rock kicking realist camp. Who, after all, is more "tough-minded" than the cultural relativist/nihilist, rejecting as he does all final values, whatever the dangers of such a position might be? What could be more "tender-minded" than realist fantasies about future utopias in which all men and women live out their lives happily exercising the commandments meted out by the Very Structure of Reason Itself? The categories are too malleable, they have an all too "aesthetic" or "emotive" feel to them. They are too easily wielded as platitudes to be paid to "one's own kind," or to be delivered as sneering rebukes.

Despite this potential plasticity of use, my own inclination is to let the stereotypical characterizations stand. For if we consider merely the common habits of use in this area, it does seem to be the case that more often than not "the tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and softheads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal," if by "tough" we mean rock kicking realists, and by "tender" all those fuzzy headed purveyors of whatever-they-are-making-up-these-days. As this set of paired lists suggests, and perhaps even illustrates, the tough-minded have a "straight up" attitude, while the tender-minded serve up their thoughts "with a twist."

More difficult are objections to the very notion of temperament as a constitutive element of philosophical positions. The current crop of tender minded thinkers: the "new fuzzies," people who like to focus on the fact that we make a lot of shit up (and who want to contribute their share), will not be so put off by the notion of "temperament" guiding their thinking. Our tough minded rock kickers on the other hand, may not be so enthused by this characterization. For to suggest, as James does, that the realist (empiricist) [rock kicking] position is itself guided by temperament comes close to suggesting that the realist is herself making shit up to suit her position. As James writes, the philosopher "trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it." This will not do. The entire idea behind the current "tough minded" stance is precisely that one is tough because one has suppressed one's own prior commitments in the pursuit of the the reality that lies in wait ready to be discovered. This is what makes "the truth" the truth: that it waits for us ready made, ready to be revealed after we peel back the layers of confusion and uncover the hard kickable rocks that lie underneath (all that shit).

In a sense this is a difficulty that recapitulates the entire debate. The make-shit-uppers want to suggest that it is precisely this fact, the fact that we always have prior commitments, be they temperamental or otherwise, that cause us to confabulate, to organize our very picture of reality around a small core of presuppositions from which we inevitably infer/construct the world, and that there is no final "way that the world really is." The rock kickers assert that it is not our own antecedent commitments that make up the makeup of the world, but rather that it is precisely the antecedent reality of the world that allows us to discover its true nature in the first place. On a tough minded view the suggestion that temperament guides both realist and anti-realist views is itself an entirely tender minded idea. If the rock-kicker admits that the notion of temperament plays an important role here at all, it will likely be via the suggestion that the tough minded realistic view that they espouse produces the kind of temperament we should all want. They may even want to suggest, in fact, that the pursuit of the truth will make us "straight up" folks, in a way similar perhaps, to the kind of linkage that Plato suggested must occur between knowing the good and doing the good.

So perhaps here one must take sides: Kick rocks? Or make shit up? Or is perhaps, some sort of synthesis possible, the way James hoped it might be? In the posts ahead I intend to continue to explore both rocks and other shit, and perhaps shed some light on this seemingly intractable controversy (or maybe I will just make more shit up). For now let us end with a little Wittgenstein, whose writings often seem to me like middle fingers pointed in all directions (a type of synthesis):

But the idealist will teach his children the word 'chair' after all, for of course he wants to teach them to do this and that, e.g. to fetch a chair. Then where will be the difference between what the idealist-educated children say and the realist ones? Won't the difference only be one of battle cry? (Zettel 414)