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Beyond a Joke? • Paul Wasn’t a Control Freak • Who Cares Whether God Exists? • Nietzsche Rambles

Beyond a Joke?

SIR: I have just seen the small piece you published on jokes with sexual overtones that I told at a departmental Christmas party. (News, Philosophy Now Issue 26) The ‘less than eloquent’ case you said that I made in my defence was the pure contrivance of journalists – I refused comment, so they put words in my mouth. As most readers of your magazine will know, the question of what kinds of humour in what kinds of context are permissible is a complicated one. It is broached, briefly, in Chapter 6 of Ted Cohen’s recent book Jokes – Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters and I too have written on the subject. If you are not worried about your readers overdosing on humour (I note that Issue 25 has humour as its theme) I shall be happy to write a piece on the subject for Philosophy Now once my institution has completed its investigations of complaints that were made.

PROF. LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN
DEPT OF PHILOSOPHY, SWANSEA

SIR: The April/May 2000 issue contains in the News section two items on contemporary witch hunting.

One tells of a professor in Wales facing an inquiry into jokes told at a private party. The other tells of a professor in Germany facing protests against his views on euthanasia. Your tone makes clear your sympathy with the professor in Germany and your disapproval of the professor in Wales.

How do you explain the difference in your attitudes? Is it anything other than thoughtless political correctness? The final item in the News section is about Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who did not fear to criticise current orthodoxies. As someone said, “Go then and do likewise.”

ROBERT COLVIN
BANGOR, CO. DOWN

SIR: As the philosophy of humor is the only topic I take seriously these days, I could not resist buying the humor issue of Philosophy Now, the very first issue I have bought or read. I was excited to see a confirmation of the possibility that my personal obsession could be in tune with the zeitgeist, though my expectations were not high, as I have never been satisfied with the philosophical treatments of the subject I have read. A characteristic example is John Allen Paulos’ Mathematics and Humor. While examining the mathematical structure of jokes has its merits, the treatment of humor and the type of humor that is adduced for such treatment tends to be rather shallow and formalistic. Paulos refers to Wittgenstein as Madigan does, i.e. that a philosophical work consisting of jokes could be written, and Paulos went on to write another book, of that sort, I Think, Therefore I Laugh. Your humor issue, much like Paulos, engages both the philosophy of humor and the humor of philosophy. However, the tendency here too is to flatten out the potential depth of both topics by drawing parallels between them that focus upon logical, semantic, and epistemic puzzles and paradoxes. Such is Madigan’s and Rickman’s approach. Could this be because of the dominance of analytical philosophy over other traditions in the English-speaking world? I fear that when I finally get my hands on William Irwin’s Seinfeld and Philosophy, I’m likely to find the same sort of thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s a shame to see a great opportunity wasted.

The only article that approaches a serious philosophy of humor is Jorge Gracia’s ‘The Secret of Seinfeld’s Humor’. Gracia is on the right track when he argues that humor highlights the significance of the insignificant, thus drawing attention to the minutiae, mores, arbitrariness, and absurdities of cultures and human behavior. However, Gracia did not go the whole distance. The real secret of Seinfeld’s appeal is the severely simplified and restricted moral universe in which the characters dwell and their relentless one-dimensionality. Seinfeld and his friends, unlike even the shallowest of real people, can never experience real tragedy: their psychic lives are entirely reduced to the superficial mechanics with which they negotiate their interpersonal interactions.

So much for the philosophy of humor; now what about the humor of philosophy? What would it mean to make philosophy humorous? My approach is to examine irony as a philosophical method. The figures that most interest me are Friedrich Schlegel, Kierkegaard, and Adorno, though one would have to add Nietzsche to this list. Irony comes to the fore when communication is suspect and philosophy becomes an object of distrust. Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity dwells in a different universe from the technocratic smugness of analytical philosophy, whose social role is to suppress the actualization of philosophical selfconsciousness of society as a whole.

RALPH DUMAIN
WASHINGTON DC

Paul Wasn’t a Control Freak

SIR: It seems to me that Terri Murray, in her essay ‘Christian Ethics’ (Issue 25), capitalizes on the inherent tension between act-based and agent-based ethics in both Jesus’s and Paul’s teaching in order to propose a sort of conspiracy theory. Apparently Paul, in pursuit of personal power (a.k.a. impoverished life, frequent abuse, death in prison, etc.), subversively replaced Jesus’ humanistic agent-based ethics with his own religious act-based ethics.

Unfortunately, only quotes reflecting their respective arbitrary positions are provided, leading us to believe that there is such a dichotomy between their teachings. I will attempt to fill in some gaps. Jesus says “anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19). In contrast, Paul says “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under supervision of the law” (Galatians 3:25). When the so-called humanist is asked “what must we do to do the works God requires”, he answers “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent” (John 6:28-29). I suppose we are in agreement that Paul is certainly not a humanist, but his epistles were not devoid of helpful advice for practical living. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others as better than yourself. Each one of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4). Now that we see that there is no fundamental difference in the two systems, shall we conclude that they are both contradicting themselves? Not at all. There is a significant overlap between the two theories, which Murray did mention but neglected to explain. If the law spells out what is right and wrong from an external perspective, it is only natural that one who is internally inclined to be good will exhibit such qualities. It is somewhat of a paradox, but certainly not an insurmountable one.

DAN NAIRN
NEWARK, DELAWARE

Who Cares Whether God Exists?

SIR: I enjoyed the article on Plantinga and the philosophy of religion, but also was troubled by its provincial tendency to restrict the meaning of ‘philosophy of religion’ to analytic obsession with justifying the existence of God. This provincialism has two facets.

First, the author sidelines phenomenological inquiry without ever really giving a just explanation of that kind of approach, and he completely ignores alternatives such as the Pragmatist approach of thinkers like John E. Smith, Robert C. Neville, and Robert Corrington. Second, the author neglects the philosophical context of world religions, some of which have little at stake in theistic, let alone monotheistic problems.

What phenomenologists, pragmatists and cross-cultural philosophers of religion often share is a recognition that, in fact, the question of the existence of God is of little interest for a genuine understanding of religion(s). Plantinga et alia clearly use philosophy to attempt to prove a worldview. This is all very well, but is that the best strength of ‘philosophy of religion’? And is it truly the best way to dignify one’s worldview? I suspect the answer to both questions is “no.”

ANDREW IRVINE
BOSTON UNIVERSITY

Nietzsche Rambles

SIR: Bob Harrison’s article in issue 26 interested me a great deal. Concerning moral facts, the article put forward an argument for their existence by attacking the ideas of David Hume and the ‘Boo/Hurrah’ party. The argument was very sensible, but I think an important point has been overlooked.

Hume was a moral sceptic who thought our moral values are subjective; when we make a moral judgement, we base it upon whether we, put crudely, ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the thing being judged. Now, Bob Harrison quite rightly points out that things are not so simple. We often do things out of a sense of duty, out of a ‘motivating belief’ that we should act in a certain way; to visit our sick mothers for example. These beliefs are what lie behind our ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ and are taken to be evidence of ‘moral facts’.

What is not taken into account here is what lies behind the motivating beliefs, their origins. Motivating beliefs have evolved. When we adhere to ‘rules’ such as “I should not steal” or “I should tell the truth” – which I take it are examples of the ‘motivating beliefs’ referred to – we are repeating our cultural heritage; these laws are ingrained into us because have protected a stable community for so long. Morality is law. At one point in the article, Bob Harrison touched upon this in writing that our “community has long since decided it approves of certain things and disapproves of others”, and this explains precisely his ‘motivating beliefs’. But these beliefs are still human, they do not belong to ‘objective truth’ or ‘moral fact’. Society long ago began to adhere to these values for the preservation of the community and came to enforce them. Thus it can be said to have created these values.

I apologise if I have misunderstood what is meant by ‘moral fact’; to me it suggests something existing objectively, guaranteed as if by divine decree. And its antithesis is something ‘man-made’, human. For reasons I won’t go into I don’t want to defend Hume’s philosophy verbatim, but what lies behind it is the Nietzschean aphorism that I think rings true,that “there are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena”.

Morality lies in the eye of the beholder.

CHRISTOPHER CARSON
LIVERPOOL

SIR: I had high hopes of your Philosophy Now: a magazine of ideas, in an era when even Margaret Thatcher’s old cohort commander Sir Alfred Sherman acknowledges his Who’s Who occupation as “purveyor of second-hand ideas, there being no market for new ones”.

But what faith can one put in a philosophical publication – or in the integrity of its ‘Faith vs. Reason’ debate – when it describes C.S. Lewis (no relation, I hope) as “a tireless academic defender of Christianity” and Antony Flew as “a notorious atheist.” Why can’t Flew be “a tireless academic defender of atheism” and Lewis “a notorious Christian”? (Or, more accurately still, as Nietzsche would have said, notorious Nazarene.) Sounds like a magazine of orthodoxy to me.

J.V. STEVENSON
LONDON SE17