THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT

I just finished watching The Queen's Gambit and I will freely confess that I was moved to tears by it.  It evoked so many lovely memories of my son, Patrick, when he was a little boy and a young man. And having the special connection with it that I mentioned in a previous post was rather overwhelming. One of my personal and unexpected delights was discovering that the actor who plays one of the central male characters was, when he was a little boy, the actor who played Liam Neeson's son in the charming movie Love Actually.

As you live through the last 75 or 80 hours until the first results start coming in on Tuesday, I can strongly recommend this as a binge watching experience.

ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT IT

In many colleges and universities, courses regularly meet either on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays or else on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you are teaching a Tuesday – Thursday course, then since this is Thursday, your course would next meet on election day, assuming classes are not canceled on that day. That's not too long a wait, is it?

Now to be sure, Susie and I once went to Paris for the spread between a Thursday class and a Tuesday class. What happened was this: I flew all the way to Australia to watch Patrick play in the World Junior Chess Championship. (I changed planes in Los Angeles and walked past a bar where a television set was showing the debate between Lloyd Benson And Dan Quayle in which Benson got off the classic line "I knew Jack Kennedy, Senator,  and you are no Jack Kennedy".)  The airline was having a triple frequent flyer miles special and I picked up so many frequent flyer miles that I could take Susie and me to Paris but the restrictions on when I could use it were so severe that we finally decided to use up the miles by leaving for Paris after my Thursday class, spending the weekend in Paris, and returning in time for my Tuesday class.  So the spread between the Thursday class and the Tuesday class is not nothing but still, I am sure I can last that long.

POINT OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE

In my endless quest for ways to pass the time until the votes start coming in, I found on Netflix a miniseries called The Queen's Gambit.  Based on a novel, this is the story of an orphan girl who is a chess prodigy.  The series has seven parts, each one almost an hour in length, and the last part (I have only seen three parts thus far) is devoted to a game that she plays against a strong Russian Grand Master.

That fictional game is based on an actual game that was played in 1993. The Russian Grand Master was Ivanchuk, a very strong player. His opponent was… my son, Patrick Wolff.  Not a bad way to pass the time!

CONFESSIONAL

Before I return to our current obsession with the election, I thought I would say something about how I think about the work of a great philosopher. Truth to tell, I don’t have anything novel or important to say about the election, no inside information, no report of my conversations with unnamed sources in the White House or in the Biden campaign. I have never so much as seen a presidential candidate in person, except of course in 1952 when I took part in the Harvard Square I Go Pogo rally and Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo, drove by in an open car.

 

Why on earth would anybody be interested in how I think about the work of a great philosopher? Well, this is a blog, which is to say a web log, which is to say a record of my private thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. So here goes.

 

Let me begin by observing in a seemingly irrelevant fashion that although there are many wrong ways to play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto there is no single right way. The wrong ways of course are endless: to begin with, you can just play the wrong notes or you can play them out of tune or you can pay absolutely no attention to Beethoven’s markings of tempo and such. But if you are presented with Hilary Hahn and Itzhak Perlman playing the Concerto, it would be absurd to say that one of them must be doing it wrong since they are doing it differently. I believe that the same can be said of the interpretation of a great work of philosophy. There can be endlessly many wrong ways of reading it but there is surely no single right way. Indeed, the case of interpreting a work of philosophy is even more complicated than that of playing a great work of music.

 

I am really not interested in what I philosopher believes. I am only interested in whether he or she can make a powerful argument for some interesting thesis. In short, I am really not interested in what is rather oddly called “the history of ideas.” I have in my long life engaged deeply and seriously with the thought of only three great thinkers: Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Karl Marx. In each case – I am not sure why – something in their writings seized me and virtually compelled me to struggle with those writings. As the Good Book says, Genesis chapter 32, in each case I have wrestled with the text and have refused to let it go unless it blessed me.

 

In each case, I begin by intuiting, if I may put it that way, a deep and very powerful claim that the author is making, a claim that I find interesting and exciting. Quite obviously, this is a subjective response. It is typical of great works of philosophy that serious readers approach them in many different ways, finding in them different theses that excite them and that they wish to explore. Once again, as with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, there are any number of theses that cannot plausibly be found in the work or that are not capable of sustaining an interesting interpretation, but among the powerful theses there is no single one that must command the attention of any serious reader. Indeed, on the basis of my experience I believe very strongly that the most interesting and powerful thinkers often have their hands on ideas that they cannot with complete success articulate, but which they are unwilling simply to give up so as to make their writings superficially consistent. Thus, as I see it, the challenge confronting the serious reader is to seize on one or several of these claims and struggle with them, looking in the text and even beneath the text for the argument that will establish the claims.

 

In launching on such an adventure, the reader must be willing simply to brush aside passages that conflict with the central claim and which – this requires judgment on the reader’s part – are of secondary importance and can safely be ignored. The idea, as I see it, is to plunge into the depths of the caves of Moria (if I may use that analogy) and wrestle with what one finds there, relentlessly, doggedly, until one emerges with a coherent argument, changed inevitably as Gandalf was by the experience.

 

Now all of this sounds intolerably pretentious and self-important, but as I observed when I began this is a blog and of one is not going to be honest about what one is seeking to do, then why bother having a blog?

 

Well, it is a little bit past 11 in the morning and if we count this day as already in the books, then ignoring election day itself there are five days left. Someone with a serious commitment could hold his breath that long surely!

LET US TALK FOR A MOMENT ABOUT SOMETHING TRULY IMPORTANT

When you are cooped up in an apartment, as I have been for more than seven months, you quite naturally cast about for sources of amusement. This quest has led me to some pretty bad movies on Netflix, to some interesting brief lectures about Paleolithic man on YouTube, and also to a number of the interviews and lectures that have been posted there featuring Noam Chomsky. It is difficult actually to know when the original interview or lecture took place because the date given is simply the date on which it was uploaded, but by watching Noam age and his hair grow somewhat longer, it is possible to take a guess as to whether what I am watching is five years old or 40 years old. After a while, I noticed that he repeats himself, sometimes using the very same linguistic examples. How could it be otherwise? Even for someone like Noam who has virtually transformed an entire field by his work and has ranged across the world in his political commentary, there have to be times when he seeks to say the same things in slightly different ways.

 

In a much diminished fashion, I face a similar problem. After publishing 21 books, writing eight or 10 others that have not been formally published, and posting well over a million words on this blog, I find myself saying things that at some time, somewhere, in some form or other, I have said before. Last night as I lay awake at about 3 AM, I began to think about the deep contradiction that exists between Kant’s theory of knowledge and his ethical theory, a fact that I think is essential to an understanding of his work. I have actually published an article on this subject, but it appeared in a book so obscure that I am not sure anybody still alive has ever read it. Curious as to whether I had talked about this on my blog, I used the search facility it provides and sure enough found that at the end of the 19 part series on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason posted in August 2011, I had indeed discussed this subject in a relatively brief form.

 

Now, nine years is several lifetimes in cyberspace and there cannot be many current readers of this blog who were actually around when I posted that series and furthermore who read it, so it occurred to me that as we all await the results of the election, this might be a good time to step aside from that tension producing enterprise and once again explain why I believe that there is an insoluble conflict between Kant’s theoretical philosophy and his moral philosophy. I have no idea whether anyone reading this blog these days will find the subject of any interest whatsoever but I surely do and it is my blog so here goes. We shall see how long I can keep myself diverted from an obsessive examination of the latest poll results.

 

Let me begin with what theoretical physicists call a gedankenexperiment.  Let us suppose that a professor of creative writing is teaching a class of 12 students to whom she gives the following exercise: write a short story about this class, being sure that your story satisfies two requirements, first, that every member of the class appear by name in the story and second, that the story be in the form of a first person narration with the narrator being the character in the story who represents you, the author. In general, we may assume, the twelve students will write twelve quite different stories but it is imaginable that by some fluke (or, as Leibniz would say, by a preestablished harmony), all twelve stories will be word for word identical (I assume that the author refers to himself or herself by name rather than by the word “I”.)

 

Even in this unlikely event, the stories will differ each from the other in one fundamental respect. In each story, the character who represents the author will be different. In Lydia’s story, the character named Lydia will be the appearance in the story of the author, who is Lydia. In Nathan’s story, the character in the story who is the appearance of the author will be Nathan, and so forth. Leaving aside cheating or joint authorship, is there any way that two characters in numerically the same story could each be the appearance in the story of its author? The answer is self-evidently no.

 

But in order for Kant’s ethical theory to be logically compatible with his theory of knowledge, the answer to this question would have to be yes. How so? I will explain.

 

As I trust we are all aware, Kant believes that the Moral Law is binding on and applies to persons, which is to say to things in themselves, or more precisely to selves in themselves, not to phenomenal appearances. As an appearance in the realm of phenomena, I like every other appearance stand under universal causal laws. Just as one can with sufficient knowledge predict the movement of billiard balls or stars or leaves falling from a tree, so with sufficient knowledge one can predict the behavior (not, notice, the actions) of human beings.

 

The Moral Law is the universal principle, knowable a priori, that binds absolutely all rational agents as such, whether human or otherwise. The law is experienced by we who are humans and who are only imperfectly rational, as a categorical imperative or command but if there are perfectly rational agents, such as angels, they would experience the Moral Law in much the way that logicians experience the laws governing the syllogism. I may be tempted to break a promise, hoping that I can get away with it, but no logician is tempted, when no one is looking, to decide that if some A are B, and some B are C, then some A are C.

 

What is more, my duties are to other persons as rational agents, not to their appearances in the realm of phenomena. It is this fact, understood if not articulated, that gives rise to the familiar trope in science fiction of the explorer on a foreign planet who wonders which of the objects she encounters are the local inhabitants and which are merely part of the fauna and flora.  Is Jar-Jar Binks a rational agent to whom I owe debts of truth and equity or just an odd looking plant?  It may take a while to figure out that Chewbacca is indeed a person worthy of respect. (I pass over in silence Kant’s views on duties to oneself, such as the duty to develop one’s talents and not to abuse oneself. I can understand why some parents may think that a dutiful son should practice the violin and not masturbate but I do not think that rises to the level of universal ethical theory.)

 

And now the problem should be clear. According to Kant (or at least the interpretation of his philosophy to which I committed myself more than 60 years ago and from which I have never deviated), the transcendental ego synthesizes the manifold of intuition in such a manner as to impose upon it necessitated regularities that constitute the laws of nature. As Kant says in a famous passage in the first edition Deduction, “the understanding… is itself the lawgiver of nature.… However exaggerated and absurd it may sound to say that the understanding is itself the source of the laws of nature, and so of its formal unity, such an assertion is nonetheless correct and is in keeping with the object to which it refers, namely experience.”  (A126-7)

 

On reflection, it should be immediately obvious that just as it cannot be the case that two students in the class are each of them the author of numerically the same short story, even if each writes a story that is word for word identical with that written by the other, so it cannot be the case that two different noumenal agents, through their synthesizing activities in their role as transcendental egos, bring into existence numerically the same field of experience. Which means that no morally responsible agent, no person, can ever encounter in his or her or its field of experience the phenomenal appearance of another moral agent.

 

One could of course try to save Kant’s moral theory by arguing that it is not false but merely vacuous. The moral law would bind me if I could ever encounter someone to whom I could make promises or to whom I could tell the truth or with whom collectively I could enact the laws of the realm of ends, but by an obstacle impossible to overcome, I can never in principle be in a position to put the Moral Law into action.

 

I am quite certain that Kant himself was never aware of this problem and it is my impression, unsupported by an adequate reading of the secondary literature, that the problem is not widely recognized even today by Kant scholars.

 

Well, enough of that. Back to dissecting the polls.

A NON-GEOMETRICAL SPECULATION ABOUT LINES

As we all know, the early voting in this election has been off the charts. By the end of today, in all likelihood, 40% of all the votes that will be cast in this election will already be in. There have been endless stories on television about long lines, people waiting as much as 10 hours to cast their votes. And, of course, the burden of this extended wait time falls most heavily on minority voters.

 

But in all the commentary, I think something is being missed that is significant and rather cheering. Standing in line to vote has become a thing, a social event, something to do. There have been delightful stories of people bringing chairs to sit on and umbrellas to sit under, of good Samaritans handing out bottles of water and snacks, of musicians playing for the folks in line. I even saw a story about a group of people on line who started to do the wave as though they were at a baseball game.

 

When you think about it, standing in line for long periods of time is not in itself more difficult or more burdensome than waiting to get into a rock concert or standing by the side of the road to see a politician drive by or even jamming into a stadium to watch a football game being played way down on the field dozens of yards from where one is sitting.

 

I am reminded of the scenes at the first genuinely free election held in South Africa when Africans, some of them very old, waited all day long in long lines to cast the first vote in their lives.

 

Once the cultural shift takes place so that waiting in line to vote ceases to be a burden or pain in the neck and becomes an outing, an event, a badge of honor, then all of the voter intimidation in the world will not stop people from getting their votes registered. I think we may be seeing the first suggestions of a tsunami. God willing…

NINE DAYS

Well, we have nine days to go and I have completely run out of deep, thoughtful, provocative things to say. I am reduced to binge watching godawful offerings on Peacock.  I did find a little toy that might amuse you.  538.com has an app that allows you to pick a state, click on it to make it blue, and then watch as their computer recalculates the probability that Biden will win. You can find it here.  Right now, they are giving Biden an 87% chance of winning the election, but if early in the evening North Carolina is put into Biden's column, then you go to the app, plug that in, and it tells you that now Biden has a 99% chance of winning with a likely electoral vote count of 377.

I realize this does not compare in interest with a lengthy essay on what Theodor Adorno can tell us about the current uprising in Nigeria, but it is the best I can do.

One thing I will comment on about Biden. I have been much cheered by his repeated celebration of labor unions and his emphasis on the importance of creating good union jobs. That is not something I heard from either of the Clintons or indeed from Obama or from Carter, so far as I can recall. Maybe electing a president who is two generations past his prime has something to be said for it.