Emptiness, race and orientation - Part 4
What to do with Emptiness? Step Two - Using Concepts Wisely
[Conclusion, Continued from Part 3]
Having (in my opinion at least), wrapped up the discussion of race, let’s move to a wider view in order to hone in upon the big problem: what good are concepts, then?
Let’s say that folk racial divisions as we understand them are not grounded in science. Further, let’s admit that even the urge to “ground in science” is related to specific aims (predictibility, testability, law-like properties, etc.).
Do I then walk around and pretend that I don’t see the world in terms of race? Saying, “Oh, you’re black? I didn’t notice–I don’t see race” is pretty idiotic, so no, I’m not saying that. Worse yet, if I want to (and I do) maintain some kind of classical liberal ethical/social stance towards humanity, and yet I admit that the concept “humanity” is ultimately empty, then haven’t I just tossed any pretense of ethical obligation out the philosophical window?
As Shawn puts it, “social constructions don’t seem [to be] very dependable apart from their very limited, transient, and definitely non-universal social settings. After all, you even say you can pick and choose which constructions you wish to express, right? These things can’t be [too] important.”
He pits social constructions against “the Word of God” which identifies marriage as between one man and one woman, and excludes “alternative expressions.” There is, then, an essence of marriage.
I’ll admit that this topic is one that I’m still very much working on. The above represents the distilled summary of where I’m at, sans much of the philosophical underpinnings. Where I’d like to go is to flesh out the connections between the reality which resists us and emptiness. That is, as much as I might want to “choose which constructions [I] wish to express” without any reference to a) other people b) physical reality c) my psychology and experiences; I simply can’t.
Going back to the question of same-sex orientation and choice: reality resists my efforts to “re-orient” myself as heterosexual and, as Shawn has suggested, his (imaginary) efforts to “re-identify” as another race, let’s say East Asian. So while ultimate reality is empty and our concepts have no inherent essential constituents, but are rule-based, useful “constructs”, they are useful because of something, namely, the way the world pushes against us.
So that’s the first thing–there is a push back against our concepts, but characterizing just how significant a “push” is part of the challenge.
Secondly, not all “social constructions” are so “non-universal.” Human beings have evolved in such a way that, despite having some conceptual flexibility, we have some very significant ways in which we see the world together. One of these is the predominance of “gods” throughout human history. There is a definite family-resemblance aspect that resists any attempt to define “god” neatly, yet it is not entirely devoid of content. Our minds tend to assign agency, personality, purpose and so on to invisible beings which are in some way implicated in our social affairs.
Human love, likewise, is grounded in, yet not reducible to, the urge to propagate genetic material. You’ll see a wide range of flexibility in what cultures understand “love” and “marriage” to be, but yet there’s a family resemblance, certain elements which seem to be broadly shared.
In conclusion, then, although I could take the philosophical cop-out and say “And at this point, I leave the normative implications to the ethicists”, I’ll at least point a way forward.
Norms, I would think, since they arise out of human concerns, need to be understood in that context, yet recognized as changeable as all concepts are. I personally think that there are human capabilities which are grounded in biology–but conceptually unmoored from it–that we ought to respect. Thus if I wish to use my capability for love, affection, concern, fidelity, intimacy, etc., with a woman who freely consents, then that is a decision that ought to be respected. The boundaries of such partnerships (”What about the children!?” “Will man-dog be next!?”) press back against us in the form of observing what causes psychological harm, physical damage, etc.
Conclusion
In closing, I think that the concern about making “banal” the widespread heterosexual legal unions in the United States is unfounded. Simply put, if “marriage” is recognized by family resemblance and not essence (try to find one characteristic that is constituitive of male-female unions: fidelity? bearing children? a kind of sexual activity? healthiness?), then recognizing that same-sex unions also fall into the same pattern does no harm. The desire for the moniker “married” on the part of same-sex couple is that concepts guide treatment–and I’d personally rather not have to fight my way into an emergency room to hold the hand of a dying spouse.
Further, even if one were to hold fast to an essentialist, sacralized understanding of marriage as originated in an eternal deity, it’s simple enough to say, “My government has called something ‘marriage’ which is not. They’ve made a mistake, but it will not change my mind.” Thus Christians and others can continue to use their own names (and they do) for what they view as non-marriage. The state is not, on this view, what makes ‘marriage’ sacred, non-trite, holy, etc., anyway.
May 24th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
There is a great difficulty with conventionalisms of all kinds that I would be interested to hear comment about. I have heard it said more than once that “there is a push back against our concepts” which is true, but this seems at best to give us something like Kant’s noumena. I take it that any conventionalism which is serious must accept that our conventional ways of seeing the world in some sense constrain our understanding of the world. Otherwise, if we can see past those concepts to directly grasp the noumena, we might as well abandon the conventions since they are somewhat misleading. Presumably the conventionalist thinks that it is not available to us to give up our conventions entirely (maybe we can modify them, etc. but we are stuck with conventional concepts of some kind). So what can we say, then, about the ‘push back’? If what pushes back is noumenal/ultimate reality we have no way of even theorizing about it. But now we seem to face a sort of paradox, since the conventionalist view presumed to tell a story about how we understand the world through the filter of our conventional concepts. And this story, if it is to be believed, seems to have been told from them ‘view from nowhere’ which by the lights of the very view is a perspective no one can occupy. What in the world is going on with conventionalism?
May 24th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Colin, thanks for the comment. Yes, this what I’m struggling with. McDowell’s story, as I understand it, is an attempt to give us concepts that are embedded in our very way of interacting with the world, but yet ones where we have some freedom in our judgment “that.” And then, no, we can’t see directly past the conventions, since we’re always stuck with conceptual knowing.
Buddhism, however, has a soteriological slant to it which aims to (again, as I’ve been reading it) get to a place where we can at least experience the world without concepts. Whether that’s an aim that most persons can attain is a separate question. This idea of concept-less experience is common in “mystical” peaks, and yet I’m skeptical about its possibility.
But you’re right about the story being told from the “view from nowhere”–that is, in fact, a complaint about Nagarjuna’s attempts. If you’re interested in dialethiesm, you should read the paper Graham Priest wrote with Jay Garfield on “Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought.” I’ve blogged about it here, too, so you can get a summary. That’s sort of where I’m coming from.
May 24th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Yeah I would like to read the Priest/Garfield paper sometime. Thanks for the feedback. I too am skeptical about the Buddhist or, more generally, mystical project, but it does make some sense of the conventionalist view. As I understand the mysticism of that tradition, one cannot really express the mystical experience in words, but one can say things evocative of its existence so as to inspire others to seek it out for themselves. And I guess it would be in this guise of ‘not literally true, but evocative of the truth’ that one might speak about ultimate reality versus the ordinary, constrained perspective.
May 24th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
As I understand the mysticism of that tradition, one cannot really express the mystical experience in words, but one can say things evocative of its existence so as to inspire others to seek it out for themselves.
Yes, that’s how I understand it - and most mysticism has that characteristic, whether Christian, Advaitic, Sufi, etc. Of course, it’s then a problem to use in argumentation for ultimate reality vs. conventional. I just spent some time this morning reading the Mulamadhyamakakarika (Garfield’s translation) and hope to blog about it a bit as it relates to these distinctions.
But it seems as if perhaps there are two ways to get at the conventional-ultimate distinction. One is experientially and one is through logic. Seems like both are necessary in Buddhist soteriology, but I wonder whether it’s legitimate to just take the latter and leave the former…or if that’s horrid Western appropriation!
(More seriously, I wonder how much the two are intertwined to support the two-tiered view of truth.)
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Hi Colleen,
Thanks so much for this series (as well as the reductionism and gender post — glad to see that got picked up at Philosophical Carnival!). The content here is very close to a lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking about lately. I’m wondering about the relationship you’ve drawn here between empty concepts, social construction and essences. Specifically: I’m a little confused about whether you think that socially constructed concepts (such as race, gender, etc) are ultimately empty or not, and whether you think that things that are socially constructed can’t have essences.
Here’s why I’m not sure about the first one. When I think of “empty concepts,” here are some of the things I think of: PHLOGISTON, UNICORNS, THE WHOLE NUMBER BETWEEN 5 AND 6. These are entities for which we have something like necessary and sufficient conditions, but that fail to exist “out there” (there’s no extension, or at least, no actual extension). It’s not clear to me that socially constructed entities are this sort of thing. For example, take the concept HAIRDRESSER. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what sorts of things need to be the case in order for an object to count as a hairdresser. These are (putatively) social constructed properties (say: being such that one is involved in relationships with other people such that one cuts hair as a service in exchange for money). But there are also such things as hairdressers out in the world, so the concept isn’t empty.
I’m also kind’ve confused about whether you think that any concept without an essence is an empty concept. I’m not quite sure that’s true, either. I guess in the way that I think about things, an essence is just a property or characteristic that all entities of a particular kind must have in order to be entities of that kind. It’s the thing that makes a thing what it is. This essence doesn’t have to be a natural property in order to be an ontologically legitimate property. Think of functional kinds — there is an essence to engines, for example, but this essence isn’t the unifying feature of what they’re made of. Rather, it’s the relationships between an engine and other parts, and the causal interactions that the engine is engaged in. Certainly there are such things as engines, and it seems plausible that there is SOMETHING like an essence to these entities. Perhaps socially constructed entities are similar to functional entities in this way.
Have you read Natalie Stoljar’s article on essentialism and social construction? It deals with a lot of this stuff:
Stoljar, N., 1995, “Essence, Identity and the Concept of Woman”, Philosophical Topics, 23: 261–293.
Again, I just want to say how much I enjoyed reading these posts!
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 am
Rachel, more later, but I think that when you say “empty” and I say “empty”, we’re meaning different things. I am using the term in the way that Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophers do, which does not have the same use as phlogiston, unicorns, etc. are “empty concepts.” The former is a technical term within Buddhism, the latter within Western analytic philosophy.
However, I will have to reflect a bit on just how the two uses relate to one another, and whether the adjective “empty” just happens to apply to both, or whether there’s a deeper conceptual link in what the systems intend.
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Okay, let’s take your comment piece-by-piece so I make sure I’m tracking:
When I think of “empty concepts,” here are some of the things I think of: PHLOGISTON, UNICORNS, THE WHOLE NUMBER BETWEEN 5 AND 6.
So, for your use of “empty”, I’m going to gloss “non-existent”, since what you’re getting at is there is nothing to which the concept refers. It fails in its attempt to pick something out in the world, even if it has had some kind of history of use.
It’s not clear to me that socially constructed entities are this sort of thing. For example, take the concept HAIRDRESSER. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what sorts of things need to be the case in order for an object to count as a hairdresser. These are (putatively) social constructed properties (say: being such that one is involved in relationships with other people such that one cuts hair as a service in exchange for money). But there are also such things as hairdressers out in the world, so the concept isn’t empty.
Now we have a distinction, between non-existent concepts and socially constructed concepts. The first are concepts which fail to refer to anything in the world. The second are concepts which pick out things in the world, but rely upon social conventions to do so. This implies, I think, a third set of concepts, something like natural kinds. These would be concepts that, to use the constant refrain, “carve nature at its joints.” They pick things out in the world, but along the contours of ontology, not social convention.
On this scheme, I think the Madhyamaka notion of “emptiness” would say something like this, using the central illustration of the concept “self”:
1. Some people, nihilists, say the concept self is an “empty concept”, what I gloss above as non-existent. We deny this stance.
2. Some people, other Buddhists perhaps, Hindu philosphers, say the concept self is a natural kind and picks out something essentially real. We deny this stance.
What do they claim positively?
You go on to clarify your thinking about essences:
Think of functional kinds — there is an essence to engines, for example, but this essence isn’t the unifying feature of what they’re made of. Rather, it’s the relationships between an engine and other parts, and the causal interactions that the engine is engaged in. Certainly there are such things as engines, and it seems plausible that there is SOMETHING like an essence to these entities. Perhaps socially constructed entities are similar to functional entities in this way.
This is what the Madhyamaka (I think) would want to say that all essences are. No so-called essence can be understood outside of relationships to other so-called essences. And since “essence” is often used in such a way as to imply ontological independence (claims like “red” would be understandable even if it didn’t instantiate in red things), that’s what is being rejected.
From the Internet Encyclopedia entry on Madhyamaka:
all explanatory categories turn out to be constitutively dependent upon the phenomena they purportedly explain – as, for example, notions such as “fire” and “fuel,” “action” and “agent,” or “cause” and “effect” are intelligible only relative to one another. To show the constitutively relative (i.e., dependent) character of all such explanatory categories and phenomena is effectively to make the one point that Mādhyamikas are most concerned to make: that insofar as there is nothing that is not dependently originated, there is therefore nothing that is not “empty” (śūnya).
The upshot is, I think, that the use of “empty concepts” is different than śūnya/emptiness, but that they’re easily mixed because the claim of everything being empty is often construed as nihilism.
I will check out that article, though. And I do need to parse these topics more carefully - I’ll beg pardon due to the bloggy nature of the writing and suggest that once I start writing actual papers on this topic, I can refer you there!