The respective ideas of Hume, Wittgenstein and Mahayana Buddhists are interrelated and are characterized by empiricism and naturalism. Not surprisingly the response they invite most prominently is a Kantian one. But Kant deduced that there had to be necessary preconditions for the possibility of representational experience: it was the representation of the world that had to be “conditioned.” None of these thinkers – not even Hume on my reading – defines experience as involving the formation of representations in the first place. Furthermore remember that the subject of this chapter is consciousness, and consciousness is not obviously amenable to a representational “explanation” even for those who are inclined to address intentionality that way. In any event if one balks at, say, the “solipsism” argument I certainly agree that it is a bit breath-taking, but I wouldn’t introduce it here if I knew of an argument that refuted it.
The present set of arguments, that will now be deployed against the “absent qualia” arguments that purport to show that there is a metaphysical problem about phenomenal properties, can all be attributed to some combination of Hume, Wittgenstein and/or Buddhism. The first two arguments are “soft”: they start with two respective points about the nature of language and conclude that private qualitative experience, whatever its ultimate ontological status may be, cannot be the subject of language. This is a soft conclusion because it sets aside the question of whether there really is anything that can coherently be regarded as “inner,” private experience. The remaining arguments are “hard”: they start with the inseparability of mind, experience and world and conclude that it is incoherent to posit the existence of phenomenal properties if these are taken to be mental properties distinct from the physical properties of the experienced world. However although the first two arguments are soft they do, if persuasive, suffice for the naturalization of psychology, because they demonstrate that qualitative experience, whatever that may be, could never have been a subject for natural science, and so is not a problem for natural science.
1) If language needs inter-subjective criteria of appropriate conditions of use then the phenomenal vocabulary, like all language, cannot function in virtue of referring to anything “private” to the individual. This argument is explicit in Wittgenstein, a case can be made that it is implicit in Hume’s verificationist epistemology. It is “soft”: it leaves the ontological status, if any, of qualitative experience alone. It naturalizes psychology the way that classical, early 20th century behaviorism naturalized psychology: an operationalist protocol excludes reference to the “inner” from science, so understood.
2) If the “meaning” of language/symbols is nothing more nor less than everything that has been accomplished through the use of individual, concrete tokens, then the phenomenal vocabulary cannot function by referring to anything private. This is functional-role semantics and it is unique to Wittgenstein among this group (although other philosophers, such as Pragmatists, also develop this sort of operationalist account of language). It is soft; the ontological status of qualia is not addressed directly.
3) If the self is nothing neither more nor less than the experiences of the world by the self, then there can be no duality between the “self” and the “world.” This is Wittgenstein’s “solipsism” argument, first presented at the end of the Tractatus, and the same idea is found in the Mahayana sutras of classical Buddhism and in Zen Buddhism. This is a “hard” argument: on this view the existence of phenomenal properties is denied. It is another argument that seems implicit in Hume, but Hume does give a very explicit argument to the same effect:
4) If experience defines the limit of what can be known, it is absurd to posit a distinction between the “mental” and the “physical.” Hume’s version is quite as hard as #3 because it produces the same conclusion that it makes no sense to speak of either side of the duality of mind and matter: both concepts collapse simultaneously. It is neither materialist nor idealist, but a position of non-duality. This view is shared by Berkeley.
5) Consciousness cannot be located in the world, so consciousness cannot be said to have any properties. This argument follows from #3. It is explicit (and elaborated at great length) in its Buddhist version but also clearly implicit in both Hume and Wittgenstein. It does not follow from this that consciousness cannot be a property. Just what we mean when we predicate consciousness of a thing is what is at question, although I take it as now established that the criteria for predications of consciousness are necessarily operational.
If the most tempting line of rebuttal to all of this is a Kantian one, remember that these arguments are here deployed to show that there are no phenomenal properties. This question about consciousness has been disentangled from the problem of intentionality. The motivations of the three sources of the set of arguments are varied: Hume fills out the radical implications of empiricist epistemology as far as they go; Wittgenstein has a vision about the foundations and limits of logic; and the classical Buddhists appear to take the metaphysical implications of non-duality both literally and seriously. Whatever one makes of these sources (or of my interpretations of them), it is at least fair to say that they place the burden on those who would say that there are phenomenal properties, metaphysically distinct from physical properties, to articulate reasons why anyone should think so.
However the discussion is far from over. Having assembled this set of arguments I now need to apply them to the various “absent qualia” arguments that have been the backbone of the critique of functionalism and the emergence of consciousness as a problem for cognitive science over the past thirty years.
My aim is not to show that operationalist theories such as functionalism are adequate to address the problem of consciousness; I am not “defending” functionalism from the “absent qualia” critique. My view is that intentional predicates must be handled operationally, while phenomenal predicates cannot be – that is, they cannot be to the philosopher’s satisfaction, notwithstanding the fact that all predication, to be intelligible, must adhere to intersubjective operational criteria. Functional descriptions abstract away from hardware: they include no physical descriptions. In the same way they abstract away from consciousness: they include no phenomenal descriptions. Of course this is true because there is no such thing as “phenomenal description” if by that one means reference to “private” experience. But a further point is that there is no reason to think that phenomenal experience is multiply realizable (supervenient), while intentional states are self-evidently so.
The point of the following discussions of the inverted spectrum problem and the zombie problem (both variants of the “absent qualia” problem) is not, then, to vindicate functionalism as a theory of consciousness. Theories don’t address pseudo-problems. The significance of the “absent qualia” arguments in the present context arises when they are offered as evidence that physicalism is ontologically incomplete.
Showing posts with label Hume. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hume. Show all posts
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Hume on Qualia
Hume, a thoroughly modern anti-philosophy philosopher, argued that much confusion and intemperate speculation could be got rid of by acknowledging that knowledge, and therefore philosophy, had limits. There are what I call a “soft” and a “hard’ interpretation of Hume. On the soft interpretation, Hume flags an eternal question mark hanging over the limit of experience: we cannot know what lies beyond and we must simply accept that fact. This is Hume the cheerful skeptic, reassuring us that it’s alright that there are things we cannot know and cannot prove. On the hard interpretation, Hume defines knowledge as the output of experience. Belief is only habituation. In Of Miracles, for example, Hume is not telling the reader that Hume does not believe in miracles: he is arguing that the reader does not believe in miracles by virtue of the very definition of “belief.”
Hume says, "For as to the notion of external existence, when taken for something specifically different from our perceptions, we have already shown its absurdity" (Treatise 1.4.2, Of scepticism with regard to the senses). Hume is not a skeptic whose empiricism entails codifying Cartesian scepticism as irrefutable. To the contrary, Hume takes the position that Cartesian scepticism is a pseudo-problem. An idea that unifies the Treatise is that, contrary to the rationalists’ assertion that logical proof is the paradigm of knowledge, there are in fact no logical proofs for anything we “know” (and Hume is very much focused, as any good epistemologist should be, on the appropriate conditions for the use of the verb “to know”). To “know” something, for Hume, is to be habituated to have a certain expectation of potential future experiences by the regularities of past experiences.
The very idea of a distinction between “external existence” and “perception,” Hume says, is absurd. The idea that we are stuck inside our heads, unable to see around our mental representations, is absurd. At 1.2.6, Of the idea of existence, and of external existence, Hume writes: “Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv'd from something antecedently present to the mind; it follows, that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions.” It is meaningless to talk about some “reality” beyond the reality of experience since on the empiricist criterion of “meaningful” a statement is significant to the extent that it can be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of experience. This is exactly Berkeley’s view, stated in less paradoxical language: the Humean version of the argument that the problem of phenomenal properties is a pseudoproblem hinges, as Berkeley’s version does, on the absurdity of stating that there are physical properties when these are taken to be properties separate from the properties of experience.
This is not at all equivalent to saying that there is an external world to which we do not have access, trapped as we are within the conceptual framework of our representation (remember it is Kant who insists on that): empiricism rules out any such speculation. When Hume says that there can be no proof of the external world he is simply iterating another example of his refutation of Cartesian rationalism: if there are no rational proofs of anything than the word “knowledge” cannot refer to beliefs grounded in rational proof as distinct from experience.
“The world,” understood in any meaningful way, refers to the world of experience. It is literally inconceivable that there might be a world distinct from experience, or experience distinct from the world. Technically the position is nominalist: “the world” is the name of the category of all experiences. And on that point, Hume, in a footnote to 1.2.6, explicitly cites Berkeley: “A great philosopher (Berkeley)...has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annex'd to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them” (1.1.7, Of abstract ideas: the “external world” is an abstract idea of this kind).
Perceptual states, on Hume's view, are not “copies” of external reality (this has been shown to be absurd by extension of the absurdity of the concept of “external reality” itself). Rather they are states of the body: the (physical) process of perception has caused a (physical) change to the body (the “impression”). Crucially the impression is not identical to the experience. The formation of the impression is one physical part of the larger physical event of experience. There can be no metaphysical distinction between the mind and the body for Hume, who denies the possibility of any metaphysical distinctions whatsoever (exactly as Berkeley does). When we talk about our “impressions” we are talking about states of our own bodies; this need not involve us in the concept of representation. This is why Hume says that we cannot even assume a numerical correspondence between impressions and “actual objects”: impressions, understood as the physical effects of physical causes, cannot be assumed to perform a representational function in the first place.
Aren’t we discussing qualia here, as distinct from mental representations? Can we sort them out? Yes: there are, on Hume’s view, no representations, but there certainly are experiences. Experiences don’t represent the world; they are constitutive of the world. So the qualities of experience are identical to the qualities of the world, nothing more or less. That is, if it makes no sense to speak of “qualities of the world” if these are meant to be distinct from the qualities of experience then by the same token it makes no sense to speak of “qualities of experience” either.
What remains is to decide how to talk (philosophy often comes down to making decisions about how to talk). Berkeley and Chalmers propose radical solutions: say that the world is constituted by “ideas” rather than by “matter” and say that the qualities of experience are non-physical properties, respectively. However, to accept Berkeley is to reject Chalmers and vice versa, because where Chalmers would codify the metaphysical distinction between mind and matter Berkeley would abolish it. I’m guessing most readers will agree that abolition is a better solution than codification, because codification amounts to simply throwing in the towel and conceding that naturalization is impossible. For myself, I am a staunch abolitionist.
Hume, writing with Berkeley well-digested, develops the essential argument without the outré metaphysical language. Hume collapses the subject-object distinction into the subject as Berkeley did before him. But Hume recognized that once the distinction was collapsed neither of the categories “materialism” or “idealism” made any sense. The distinction simply vanishes. If there are no “physical” properties when these are meant to be separate from “phenomenal” properties the argument works with equal force in the other direction as well. It is on this point that the early 20th century empiricists misinterpreted Hume so grievously, understanding him as a “phenomenalist,” one who holds that we can refer only to “phenomena” as distinct from the “actual” (else why use the word at all?). On empiricism properly understood there is no meaningful (semantic) distinction on which to hang the metaphysical language. This insight is also the crux of the next two versions of the argument, but both are worth considering in detail by virtue of differences in language and emphasis, and to cement the point.
Hume says, "For as to the notion of external existence, when taken for something specifically different from our perceptions, we have already shown its absurdity" (Treatise 1.4.2, Of scepticism with regard to the senses). Hume is not a skeptic whose empiricism entails codifying Cartesian scepticism as irrefutable. To the contrary, Hume takes the position that Cartesian scepticism is a pseudo-problem. An idea that unifies the Treatise is that, contrary to the rationalists’ assertion that logical proof is the paradigm of knowledge, there are in fact no logical proofs for anything we “know” (and Hume is very much focused, as any good epistemologist should be, on the appropriate conditions for the use of the verb “to know”). To “know” something, for Hume, is to be habituated to have a certain expectation of potential future experiences by the regularities of past experiences.
The very idea of a distinction between “external existence” and “perception,” Hume says, is absurd. The idea that we are stuck inside our heads, unable to see around our mental representations, is absurd. At 1.2.6, Of the idea of existence, and of external existence, Hume writes: “Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv'd from something antecedently present to the mind; it follows, that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions.” It is meaningless to talk about some “reality” beyond the reality of experience since on the empiricist criterion of “meaningful” a statement is significant to the extent that it can be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of experience. This is exactly Berkeley’s view, stated in less paradoxical language: the Humean version of the argument that the problem of phenomenal properties is a pseudoproblem hinges, as Berkeley’s version does, on the absurdity of stating that there are physical properties when these are taken to be properties separate from the properties of experience.
This is not at all equivalent to saying that there is an external world to which we do not have access, trapped as we are within the conceptual framework of our representation (remember it is Kant who insists on that): empiricism rules out any such speculation. When Hume says that there can be no proof of the external world he is simply iterating another example of his refutation of Cartesian rationalism: if there are no rational proofs of anything than the word “knowledge” cannot refer to beliefs grounded in rational proof as distinct from experience.
“The world,” understood in any meaningful way, refers to the world of experience. It is literally inconceivable that there might be a world distinct from experience, or experience distinct from the world. Technically the position is nominalist: “the world” is the name of the category of all experiences. And on that point, Hume, in a footnote to 1.2.6, explicitly cites Berkeley: “A great philosopher (Berkeley)...has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annex'd to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them” (1.1.7, Of abstract ideas: the “external world” is an abstract idea of this kind).
Perceptual states, on Hume's view, are not “copies” of external reality (this has been shown to be absurd by extension of the absurdity of the concept of “external reality” itself). Rather they are states of the body: the (physical) process of perception has caused a (physical) change to the body (the “impression”). Crucially the impression is not identical to the experience. The formation of the impression is one physical part of the larger physical event of experience. There can be no metaphysical distinction between the mind and the body for Hume, who denies the possibility of any metaphysical distinctions whatsoever (exactly as Berkeley does). When we talk about our “impressions” we are talking about states of our own bodies; this need not involve us in the concept of representation. This is why Hume says that we cannot even assume a numerical correspondence between impressions and “actual objects”: impressions, understood as the physical effects of physical causes, cannot be assumed to perform a representational function in the first place.
Aren’t we discussing qualia here, as distinct from mental representations? Can we sort them out? Yes: there are, on Hume’s view, no representations, but there certainly are experiences. Experiences don’t represent the world; they are constitutive of the world. So the qualities of experience are identical to the qualities of the world, nothing more or less. That is, if it makes no sense to speak of “qualities of the world” if these are meant to be distinct from the qualities of experience then by the same token it makes no sense to speak of “qualities of experience” either.
What remains is to decide how to talk (philosophy often comes down to making decisions about how to talk). Berkeley and Chalmers propose radical solutions: say that the world is constituted by “ideas” rather than by “matter” and say that the qualities of experience are non-physical properties, respectively. However, to accept Berkeley is to reject Chalmers and vice versa, because where Chalmers would codify the metaphysical distinction between mind and matter Berkeley would abolish it. I’m guessing most readers will agree that abolition is a better solution than codification, because codification amounts to simply throwing in the towel and conceding that naturalization is impossible. For myself, I am a staunch abolitionist.
Hume, writing with Berkeley well-digested, develops the essential argument without the outré metaphysical language. Hume collapses the subject-object distinction into the subject as Berkeley did before him. But Hume recognized that once the distinction was collapsed neither of the categories “materialism” or “idealism” made any sense. The distinction simply vanishes. If there are no “physical” properties when these are meant to be separate from “phenomenal” properties the argument works with equal force in the other direction as well. It is on this point that the early 20th century empiricists misinterpreted Hume so grievously, understanding him as a “phenomenalist,” one who holds that we can refer only to “phenomena” as distinct from the “actual” (else why use the word at all?). On empiricism properly understood there is no meaningful (semantic) distinction on which to hang the metaphysical language. This insight is also the crux of the next two versions of the argument, but both are worth considering in detail by virtue of differences in language and emphasis, and to cement the point.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
What Should We Be?
Readers of this blog know my main interests lie in the area of contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics. However, I enjoy, through my teaching duties, the luxury of regularly studying any number of other topics. Spring semesters one of my regular courses is Contemporary Philosophy. This spring I decided to conduct a survey of the 19th and 20th centuries in "two movements," an effort to get to the bottom of the so-called "Continental/Analytic" distinction, a polarizing categorization towards which I am generally skeptical, and of which I warn my students off (and I do feel that anyone who comes on as a strong partisan one way or the other is probably a mediocre philosopher, definitely a mediocre reader). The course outline can be found two posts previous to this one.
I started the first "movement" (in the compositional sense) with Kant, moving through the German Idealists, Hegel (and Kierkegaard presented as a reaction to Hegel), Marx (who I believe straddles the two so-called traditions), Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir, the "Critical Theory" of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Habermas), "Structuralism" (Foucault, Lacan), and finally, yesterday, Derrida. Now we will go back to the 18th century and start all over again with Hume, moving through a similar survey (this time composed almost entirely of English-language philosophers) through to the metaphysical revival of David Lewis and Alvin Plantinga.
So this week we are discussing and evaluating so-called Continental (I insist on the "so-called" when using either name). It was, I think, a very useful survey, illuminating a striking continuity of concerns and affirming the truism that there is "nothing new under the sun"; virtually the entire conversation called "Continental" philosophy follows in a thoroughly formulaic way from Kant and Hegel (I don't say that pejoratively).
What I want to discuss today (thinking about our classroom discussion tomorrow) is the question that emerged for my students in a persistent way starting around Nietzsche and Freud. (I argued that these two taken together represent the bridge from Romanticism to Modernism.) Even earlier Kierkegaard insists on the essential absurdity of our life-choices, and the real sense in which Schopenhauer is a "pessimist" is in his advice that we simply give up the existential struggle and find peace by sinking down into thinghood (the worst sin for existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre). The question is: if so-called Continental philosophers have worked so hard to establish our fundamental freedom and to deconstruct our assumptions about our own natures, than what should a body do?
My student Kristian Rullan raised the question during the discussion of Sartre: if Sartre is right that consciousness is negation and nothing but negation, and that therefore (as Nietzsche also argued) we are entirely responsible for the most "essential" aspects of our own identities, then what is/would be the "existential person"? What would the existentialist have us do/be? My student Yasmin Zapata, chaffing a bit perhaps under the insistent subversiveness of de Beauvoir's existential feminism and the "permanent revolution" prescribed by modern Western Marxism, asked why it was necessarily so terrible, after all, to be a product and a creature of an historically conditioned and socially constructed culture? And it does appear that starting at the very beginning with Kant's distinction between a noumenal world-in-itself and a phenomenal world-of-experience, there is nothing less than a fetish in the so-called Continental tradition with the idea that "ordinary" people are trapped in an illusory world and that "enlightenment" would consist of a breaking through the wall of illusion into authenticity. And this fetish is still wholly present in the Althusserian notion of the "prison-house of language" that is the basis of Derrida's work. (I don't necessarily have anything against fetishes, by the way!)
This is the basic question that we will be discussing in class tomorrow. I have two thoughts about it just now (and of course I have no agenda of defending or promoting so-called Continental). First, it is of the essence of existentialism (pardon the pun) that there is no prescription: there is precisely no Existential Man the way there was supposed to be, say, a Soviet Man (and indeed the Western Marxists reject the idea of a Socialist Man as well). Sartre's gift to us of an argument for freedom, whether it is effective or not, necessarily precludes any prescription as to what we ought to be (and before him Nietzsche wants us only to "go over and go under" the sickly essentializing of "human nature," and Heidegger defines thinking as moving towards what is not known and cannot be said). The existential version of feminism developed by de Beauvoir and explored by subsequent French psychoanalytic feminists such as Kristeva similarly rejects the conception of feminism as a mere power play between the given "masculine" and "feminine." All of psychoanalysis, for that matter, is properly understood as emancipatory rather than prescriptive. And Derrida claims to write on "the margin," outside of the logocentric tradition of "metaphysics," the function of deconstruction being entirely to throw us into the necessity of self-creation.
Speaking critically, I find all of this tradition to be something of a "prolegomena to some future act of self-creation": they all insist on the reality of choice and the virtue of authenticity above all, but one rarely sees them actually choosing anything. This is why I have some affection for Kierkegaard: he out of the whole group actually manages to digest and embrace the conclusion and makes a choice.
My second thought is this: Socrates tells us that human nature is to think about what it is that we believe to be true, and that philosophy is to state that belief as clearly and courageously as possible. Try as you might, he taunts his relativist antagonists in the Theatetus, your arguments will never free you from this human condition. In a way the so-called Continental tradition draws a similar moral: the permanent revolution, the overcoming and the going under, is otherwise known as living. It is nothing more or less than having a life, and when we cease to interrogate ourselves in this way we have ceased to be persons.
(Footnote: If you are moved by existentialist discussions of the nature of consciousness, try reading some Buddhism. It is a much older tradition that elaborates these ideas to a much deeper level.)
I started the first "movement" (in the compositional sense) with Kant, moving through the German Idealists, Hegel (and Kierkegaard presented as a reaction to Hegel), Marx (who I believe straddles the two so-called traditions), Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir, the "Critical Theory" of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Habermas), "Structuralism" (Foucault, Lacan), and finally, yesterday, Derrida. Now we will go back to the 18th century and start all over again with Hume, moving through a similar survey (this time composed almost entirely of English-language philosophers) through to the metaphysical revival of David Lewis and Alvin Plantinga.
So this week we are discussing and evaluating so-called Continental (I insist on the "so-called" when using either name). It was, I think, a very useful survey, illuminating a striking continuity of concerns and affirming the truism that there is "nothing new under the sun"; virtually the entire conversation called "Continental" philosophy follows in a thoroughly formulaic way from Kant and Hegel (I don't say that pejoratively).
What I want to discuss today (thinking about our classroom discussion tomorrow) is the question that emerged for my students in a persistent way starting around Nietzsche and Freud. (I argued that these two taken together represent the bridge from Romanticism to Modernism.) Even earlier Kierkegaard insists on the essential absurdity of our life-choices, and the real sense in which Schopenhauer is a "pessimist" is in his advice that we simply give up the existential struggle and find peace by sinking down into thinghood (the worst sin for existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre). The question is: if so-called Continental philosophers have worked so hard to establish our fundamental freedom and to deconstruct our assumptions about our own natures, than what should a body do?
My student Kristian Rullan raised the question during the discussion of Sartre: if Sartre is right that consciousness is negation and nothing but negation, and that therefore (as Nietzsche also argued) we are entirely responsible for the most "essential" aspects of our own identities, then what is/would be the "existential person"? What would the existentialist have us do/be? My student Yasmin Zapata, chaffing a bit perhaps under the insistent subversiveness of de Beauvoir's existential feminism and the "permanent revolution" prescribed by modern Western Marxism, asked why it was necessarily so terrible, after all, to be a product and a creature of an historically conditioned and socially constructed culture? And it does appear that starting at the very beginning with Kant's distinction between a noumenal world-in-itself and a phenomenal world-of-experience, there is nothing less than a fetish in the so-called Continental tradition with the idea that "ordinary" people are trapped in an illusory world and that "enlightenment" would consist of a breaking through the wall of illusion into authenticity. And this fetish is still wholly present in the Althusserian notion of the "prison-house of language" that is the basis of Derrida's work. (I don't necessarily have anything against fetishes, by the way!)
This is the basic question that we will be discussing in class tomorrow. I have two thoughts about it just now (and of course I have no agenda of defending or promoting so-called Continental). First, it is of the essence of existentialism (pardon the pun) that there is no prescription: there is precisely no Existential Man the way there was supposed to be, say, a Soviet Man (and indeed the Western Marxists reject the idea of a Socialist Man as well). Sartre's gift to us of an argument for freedom, whether it is effective or not, necessarily precludes any prescription as to what we ought to be (and before him Nietzsche wants us only to "go over and go under" the sickly essentializing of "human nature," and Heidegger defines thinking as moving towards what is not known and cannot be said). The existential version of feminism developed by de Beauvoir and explored by subsequent French psychoanalytic feminists such as Kristeva similarly rejects the conception of feminism as a mere power play between the given "masculine" and "feminine." All of psychoanalysis, for that matter, is properly understood as emancipatory rather than prescriptive. And Derrida claims to write on "the margin," outside of the logocentric tradition of "metaphysics," the function of deconstruction being entirely to throw us into the necessity of self-creation.
Speaking critically, I find all of this tradition to be something of a "prolegomena to some future act of self-creation": they all insist on the reality of choice and the virtue of authenticity above all, but one rarely sees them actually choosing anything. This is why I have some affection for Kierkegaard: he out of the whole group actually manages to digest and embrace the conclusion and makes a choice.
My second thought is this: Socrates tells us that human nature is to think about what it is that we believe to be true, and that philosophy is to state that belief as clearly and courageously as possible. Try as you might, he taunts his relativist antagonists in the Theatetus, your arguments will never free you from this human condition. In a way the so-called Continental tradition draws a similar moral: the permanent revolution, the overcoming and the going under, is otherwise known as living. It is nothing more or less than having a life, and when we cease to interrogate ourselves in this way we have ceased to be persons.
(Footnote: If you are moved by existentialist discussions of the nature of consciousness, try reading some Buddhism. It is a much older tradition that elaborates these ideas to a much deeper level.)
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