100 REAL THALERS

As I re-read and edited each chapter of my Autobiography, in preparation for posting it on box.net, I thought again of a lesson I have learned from my many years of involvement with USSAS, with the SUMMA program, with the Scholars of the Twenty-first Century program, and with my other efforts actually to change the world in one way or another. Since I am still, in my heart of hearts, a Kant scholar, let me introduce the lesson by quoting a passage from The Transcendental Dialectic. The passage, as all philosophers reading this blog will know, appears in Kant's famous refutation of the Ontological Proof for the Existence of God:

"A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. For as the latter signify the concept and the former the object and positing of the object, should the former contain more than the latter, my concept would not, in this case, express the whole object, and would not therefore be an adequate concept of it. My financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hundred real thalers than it is by the mere concept of them (that is, of their possibility.)" KRV A599=B628.

During my long career as a philosopher, stretching back now into the middle 1950's, I have devoted a good deal of thought to Big Questions. What is the nature of political Liberalism? Is there an a priori proof of the universal validity of The Moral Law? Can there be a de jure legitimate state? Had my tastes run to metaphysics and logic rather than to ethics and political philosophy, I might have pondered the fundamental nature of the one actual world, or even of the infinity of possible worlds.

We philosophers are much attracted to Big Questions. They seem much more important than Small Questions. If I am going to think about the nature of a hundred possible thalers, why not think about the nature of a million possible thalers? It costs no more, takes up no more space on the page, and is not one whit more difficult.

But as soon as I tried to change the world ever so little, by offering partial bursaries to a handful of poor Black South African students, I discovered that it is very difficult indeed actually to produce even the slightest real world alteration. I cannot count the hours I have spent over the past twenty-one years writing letters of appeal, rounding up signatories to those letters, xeroxing, merge printing, folding and stuffing,tr, sealing the envelopes, putting stamps on them, writing thank you letters to the donors, arranging for bank transfers to South Africa, traveling there to meet with the students and the university officials who are looking after them. And all that effort just to help perhaps fifteen hundred young people get a university education. Considering how fast I write, I would imagine I could have written five or ten more books in the time that all took. And those books could have dealt with the very largest questions I could think to ask. But as Kant so wisely says, even though a hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers, the hundred real thalers have a quite different effect on my financial situation.

What do I learn from this life lesson, buttressed as it is by a quotation from my favorite philosopher? Very simply, I learn that although as a blogger and an author of political writings I can with no effort at all proclaim on the largest of questions -- the future of capitalism, the possibility of socialism, the imperial thrust of American foreign policy -- when it comes to actually trying to change the world, the most I can hope to do is to make a tiny impact, utterly unnoticed by any regional, national, or transnational measures. Because the gap between what I earnestly want and what I can realistically accomplish is so vast, I must find quotidien satisfactions sufficient to sustain me, so that I will, day after day, year after year, continue to make the effort. Not to do so would be shameful, an abdication of my humanity. But to expect triumphs, or even measurable results, would be foolish indeed.

UPLOADING COMPLETED

It is now 6:23 a.m., and I have completed uploading THE USE AND ABUSE OF FORMAL MODELS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY -- A TENDENTIOUS TUTORIAL IN FIVE PARTS to box.net. I even found a lovely picture of a saddle point on the web and copied it into my tutorial. This is the second blog that I wrote while also writing my autobiography almost a year ago. It introduces you to the technical details of Rational Choice Theory, Game Theory, and Collective Choice Theory, complete with a proof of Arrow's Theorem and a semi-proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Game Theory. It also has a discussion of the Prisoner's Dilemma that will, I hope, stop you from ever mentioning that abomination again. This is the high point of my nerdiness, and I think I need to do some blog posts on movies, menus, and baroque music just to show that I am not a total geek. Feel free to download the tutorial and use it in any way you wish. [I guess I don't actually have to say that about a blog, right?]

DONE

I have now edited and posted on box.net my entire three volume autobiography. You are welcome to vist that site to read any or all of it.

STILL TRUCKIN'

In case anyone wonders, I have been working flat out to get my autobiography edited and posted on box.net. I am now into volume three, and moving fast. After that I will tackle the book-length tutorial on Formal Methods that I wrote as I was also writing my autobiography. Then I can go back to outraging all of you by indicating why I am pleased with the direction Obama has taken.

Interim Report

Volumes One and Two of my Autobiography are now completed and posted on box.net. I think I have so much storage space that after I have finished, I will also post each volume as a single file. Then it is on to my multipart blog on Formal Methods in Political Philosophy, which is essentially a short book. Who knows what I will do after that!

A NERDY QUESTION FOR MY READERS

I am almost finished with the editing and revisions to Volume One. I have a choice: I can leave each of the six chapters of Volume One as separate posts on box.net, or I can combine them into Volume One entire, delete the separate chapters, and just post Volume One. The argument for doing the latter is that it would shorten considerably the list of things posted on box.net. What do you think?

ADDENDA

Earlier today, I transferred to box.net the edited and corrected version of Chapter Three of the first volume of my Autobiography. The chapter consists of selections from the 200 pages of letters I wrote home in 1954-55 during the thirteen months I wandered about Western Europe on a fellowship from Harvard. When I wrote Volume One, in late 2003, I had no expectation that anyone would ever read it [although, like all authors, I hoped], and in making my selections from the letters, I looked more for good stories and local color than for anything having to do with the philosophers I met along the way. As a consequence, I omitted several stories, from my three months in Oxford, that it occurs to me might amuse the philosophical readers of this blog, so herewith some of the things I left out of Chapter Three.

When I arrived at Oxford in September, 1954, I knew that I did not want to spend the entire year there, but I thought it might be fun to live for a term [eight weeks] in an Oxford College. That, however, proved to be impossible. To live in a college, one had to commit to an entire year. A friend from Harvard, Ronnie Dworkin [now Professor Ronald Dworkin, the leading legal philosopher in the Anglophone world,], was reading law at Magdalene College on a Rhodes, and he said it might be possible to be an "external" student of a college for just a term. hr offered to take me round to see the President, as the master of Magdalene College was called, to see whether it might be arranged. off we went to have tea in the President's lodgings, which my memory tells me was actually inside the college Quad, though that may be wrong. We sipped tea and made small talk for a bit, and then Ronnie and I stepped out into the sunlight. I asked him rather anxiously, "When do you think I will hear whether I got in?" Ronnie, who has a manner that the querulous might describe as supercilious, looked down his nose at me and said bemusedly, "But you have been admitted. Couldn't you tell?" I think I knew right then that Oxford and I were not made for one another. [Ronnie and Oxford suited one another perfectly, and for a while he was Professor of Jurisprudence there.]

The one thing I wanted to do at Oxford was to look up T. D. Weldon, who had authored a slender book on Kant's First Critique that I had found very helpful. Weldon was in fact a Fellow of Magdalene, so I figured I would not be bothering him too much. I found him seated on a chair looking rather like the Caterpillar in ALICE IN WONDERLAND. With a naive eager enthusiasm that, I now realize, was anathema to true Oxonians, I blurted out that I wanted to re-read the FIRST CRITIQUE with Kemp-Smith in one hand and Paton in the other. At that time, the two best-known commentaries on the FIRST CRITIQUE were by Norman Kemp-Smith and H. J. Paton. Kemp-Smith's was by far the better of the two -- Paton had the habit of tediously summarizing Kant as though that constituted an explanation -- but they disagreed on some central points, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it all. Weldon replied languidly, as though from a great height, that that was totally old hat. What I really wanted to do, he said, was to read Rousseau's Emile. It seems that the famously punctual Kant had been so taken by the book when it arrived that he had actually missed his famous daily walk with his servant, Lampe. I dutifully went right out and got a copy, but when I began to read it, I found myself mired in endless animadversions at swaddling and praises of breast feeding. Things were not going well for me at Oxford.

Although I was not a resident of Magdalene, I did rate a tutor. The College assigned me to a young [mid-thirties] chap named Peter Strawson. I went round to see him once, but by then I was totally turned off to the idea of actually studying anything, so I never went back. A pity. Strawson [who of course became one of the most famous English philosophers of the twentieth century] actually published an important book on the FIRST CRITIQUE, called THE BOUNDS OF SENSE, four years after I published KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY. His interpretation of Kant is the polar opposite of mine, and had I stuck it out, we might have had some interesting conversations.

Mostly, while in Oxford, I played bridge, went off to do some folk dancing in the kilt I had bought at the Edinburgh Festival, and even read some edition or other of Paul Samuelson's famous textbook, ECONOMICS, though I am happy to say it did not stick.