Robert Nozick

Alan Lacey

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317489979
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Filosofia
• Thema: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Although best known for the hugely influential Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick (1938-2002) eschewed the label 'political philosopher' because the vast majority of his writings and attention have focused on other areas. Indeed the breadth of Nozick's work is perhaps greater than that of any other contemporary philosopher. This book is the first to give full and proper discussion of Nozick's philosophy as a whole, including his influential work on the theory of knowledge, his notion of 'tracking the truth', his metaphysical writings on personal identity and free will, his evolutionary account of rationality, his varying treatments of Newcomb's paradox and his ideas on the meaning of life. Illuminating and informative, the book will be welcomed as an authoritative guide to Nozick's philosophical thinking.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Introduction: analytic philosophy

Nozick is a fox, not a hedgehog, to borrow Isaiah Berlin’s colourful way of classifying thinkers. (The reference is to the seventh-century BC Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote: “The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one — but it’s a good one”.) By far his most widely known book is Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his first major publication, published in 1974. This has been immensely influential, not only in philosophical circles but in practical politics as well, especially in Great Britain and the United States, where it has offered stimulus and support to the resurgence of free market capitalism that has occupied the closing decades of the twentieth century. But Nozick himself has a different view of it: “Others have identified me as a ‘political philosopher’”, he writes on page 1 of his latest book, Socratic Puzzles (SP), “but I have never thought of myself in those terms. The vast majority of my writing and attention has focused on other subjects”. He goes on (p. 2) to describe his method of work. He doesn’t pay close attention to the criticism his work receives, and then reply to it with a succession of revisions and modifications, but gets on with something else instead. This is partly, as he makes clear, because he doesn’t want to acquire a defensive attitude to his own ideas, but partly because his natural inclination is towards exploring rather than consolidating. This might suggest a certain flightiness or dilettantism in approach; but such a suggestion would be quite misleading. When he engages with a topic his work is intense and penetrating and shows an enviable ability to think through the hidden implications of the view he is considering and of alternatives to it.

So far he has published six books, including two volumes of essays, one original and one of reprinted articles etc. As well as political philosophy these have covered ethics, epistemology, methodology, the theory of choice, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and what might be called the philosophy of life. In at least two of these areas, apart from political philosophy, namely epistemology and philosophy of mind, he has contributed notable ideas that are at the forefront of current thought.

Nozick was born in New York in 1938, as a Jew of Russian extraction, and came to philosophy in the late 1950s against a background of analytic philosophy. He discusses his attitude to this in an interview with Borradori in her book The American Philosopher, which consists of interviews with nine American philosophers (together with valuable and illuminating editorial material by Borradori herself). The term “analytic (or analytical) philosophy” is used in somewhat varying, although related, senses. In the 1920s and 1930s the logical positivists pared philosophy right down by insisting that any utterance which is to be meaningful in the primary sense of being used to assert something (as against asking, commanding, expressing attitudes, etc.) must be either a tautology of logic or mathematics or else verifiable by appeal to sense experience (helped by the laws of logic and mathematics where necessary). This approach, which seemed to leave no room at all for philosophical statements properly so called, did not last long. (Its main British representative, A. J. Ayer, declared on television in 1960, “Logical positivism is dead”.) But its influence was, and still is, immense. Analytic philosophy, as understood by Borradori and Nozick, grew out of it, widening its horizons so far as meaningfulness went, but keeping a piecemeal approach to its problems, rather than trying to construct large-scale systems, and maintaining a certain isolation from other disciplines, both humanistic and scientific; philosophical questions were philosophical and must be pursued for their own sakes and by philosophy’s own methods, not those of the sciences or arts. It is this isolationism that proved to be one of its weakest points. Its insistence on rigour had always allied the analytic movement to the sciences, despite their differences, and philosophy of science was always a popular and highly respected part of the subject. Problems about space and time, matter and substance, life and the lifeless, body and mind, and many others, cannot be solved without taking account of the data of the sciences. In the case of the physical sciences at least, this had generally been acknowledged from the start. But there is a difference between accepting scientific conclusions among the premises of an argument and finding that the process of arguing itself involves an ongoing appeal to the sciences at almost every step. Philosophical and scientific questions remain different, but the supposed sharp borderline between their methods tends to become eroded. Philosophers may not themselves conduct experiments, but their method may involve frequent second-hand investigations into empirical questions by asking their colleagues in the laboratory next door.

In the case of ethics and politics, analytic philosophy thought it should confine itself to examining the nature and status of the subjects themselves, the meanings of their central terms, the role of truth and falsity in them, the structure of arguments in them, and so on, leaving substantive views in them to moralists and politicians since it was assumed that any position on these substantive questions could be combined with any view on the properly philosophical questions (often described as those of metaethics). For instance, it was assumed you could discuss whether “Abortion is wrong” was an assertion of something as being true or an expression of an attitude etc., independently of whether you agreed with it. If you did, the question would concern what you were doing in so agreeing. But this independence too proved illusory, and philosophers came to realize they had to enter the arena and discuss the substantive issues.

A further feature of philosophy in its analytic guise was its attitude to its own history. There are two attitudes in particular that one can take to the history of philosophy. One can study it for its own sake, trying to understand the positions of earlier thinkers in the terms in which they themselves would have understood them, emphasizing the questions they emphasized and bracketing one’s own views and interests. The danger of this, from the point of view of philosophy itself, is that it tends to separate itself from the rest of the subject and become something merely antiquarian, apart from probably being impossible to carry out without just slavishly repeating what the earlier thinkers said. The second approach is to subordinate the enquiry to one’s own philosophical interests, choosing philosophers for study according to how their interests coincide with one’s own, treating them as though they were contemporary colleagues who were simply talking in a rather antiquated language, but who were “really” trying to say the sort of things we think they should have said. The dangers of this are obvious enough, and it leads one to wonder what the point is of studying them at all. Of course these approaches need not be, and seldom are, held in such extreme forms. They are rather tendencies one can steer between, veering in varying degrees to one side or the other.

Naturally enough, in view of what we saw earlier, analytic philosophy veered towards the second approach. The history of philosophy has always been an important part of the syllabus in analytically inclined universities, but with a tendency to treat it as a foreshadowing of the truth, or as a source of building materials rather than from a conservationist point of view. Of course analytic philosophy was not alone in its guilt here, and was far from the worst offender. One can think of how the history of philosophy was treated in Soviet universities, or even by a philosopher as eminent as Aristotle, at least as often interpreted, who explicitly described the utterances of one of his predecessors (Empedocles) as “lisping” attempts at the truth (Metaphysics 985a5; cf.993a15, On Coming to Be and Passing Away 314a13).

Before going on, a further word about the term “analytic philosophy”. It can also be used more widely to denote the general method and spirit that has dominated most anglophone philosophy throughout the twentieth century, in contrast to “Continental” philosophy, so called because of its prevalence in France and Germany in particular, and also to various Oriental etc. systems. In this sense analytic philosophy’s main features are an insistence on rigorous step-by-step arguments with full attention (ideally!) to criticism at every stage, combined with a certain aversion, although less marked than in the narrower version, to large-scale system-building, and in particular to the development and presentation of systems without much attention to criticisms until the whole thing is finished. In fact, a certain comparison in respect of narrowness of scope could be made between analytic philosophy, especially in the narrow sense, and Continental philosophy: while analytic philosophy tends to ignore, or at least soft-pedal, the philosophies of the past, Continental philosophy (and many Oriental philosophies too) soft-pedal the need for rigorous critical examination of the individual steps of the argument as they are taken, using the tools supplied by logic where necessary. Analytic philosophy in the wider sense, however, including much of what is sometimes called post-analytic philosophy, is wider in scope and more tolerant than its narrower cousin, just as that in turn was wider and more tolerant than logical positivism.

In Nozick’s discussion with Borradori, “analytic philosophy” is used in the narrow sense, which I will therefore normally adopt in what follows, simply noting that much, although not all, of what Nozick wrote after abandoning analytic philosophy in this sense would still count as analytic philosophy in the wider sense, both in terms of many of its features and in terms of the subjects chosen for discussion.

Changes of interest

Nozick tells us (Borradori 1994: 76) that in his youth he was “quite interested in issues of social and political philosophy”; but he really began his philosophical career, as he goes on to say, in the sphere of philosophy of science, largely because of the influence of his teachers as an undergraduate at Columbia, notably Morgenbesser, and later, as a graduate at Princeton, Hempel. We will see shortly the importance that the influence of Hempel, undoubtedly an analytic philosopher, had on turning him away from analytic philosophy. This interest in philosophy of science did not lead to any book on the subject, but he turned instead to the related subject of decision theory, concerning “rational choice when it comes to accepting or rejecting a scientific hypothesis” (Borradori 1994: 77), leading to his Ph.D. thesis on “The Normative Theory of Individual Choice” (later published as a book in 1990). Even after that he toyed fruitlessly with an attempt to solve the free will problem (SP: l) before finally returning to political philosophy and getting down to Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU).

Throughout this period Nozick regarded himself as an analytic philosopher, if perhaps a rather loosely anchored one (Borradori 1994: 78). One feature he has always shared with analytic philosophy is a certain distancing from history, despite his growing and lasting interest in certain Oriental philosophies which he traces to his empiricist background that insisted you should “take your experiences seriously” (Borradori 1994:79). Among the great historical figures he acknowledges only Socrates as his master (Borradori 1994: 80; cf. SP: 2–3) and says he has “always started again from zero” (ibid.). In reflecting on his own reading of Quine, he remarks how he was struck “by the difference between thinking independently about a subject and thinking that is focused upon someone else’s ideas. When you approach a topic through the route of someone’s theories, that person’s mode of structuring the issues limits how far you can stray and how much you can discover. You think within their ‘problematic’” (SP: 8). Of course, as we can see from the case of someone like Descartes, this does not mean that one is not in fact influenced by one’s predecessors — otherwise the growth of philosophy would follow a very uneconomical course. Indeed Nozick himself says, when discussing what problems he is proposing to tackle in Philosophical Explanations (PE), “other philosophical views are scanned and searched for help” (PE: 21). This is different from using the views of some one philosopher as one’s basis.

Nozick's change of approach: proof and explanation

Nozick’s development after Anarchy, State, and Utopia brings us to a fundamental change in his whole approach to philosophy. Up to this time, as we have seen, he was firmly if not very enthusiastically in the analytic camp. But the Introduction to his second book, Philosophical Explanations, offers a different style of philosophizing, aiming at explanation rather than proof. It was this emphasis on explanation that linked this development to his teacher Hempel, whose most important contribution to philosophy of science consisted in a thorough examination of the notion of explanation, although with Nozick the notion led in a quite different direction from the analytic interests of Hempel. What Nozick objects to is the alleged coercive nature of philosophy in the analytical and similar traditions; Philosophical Explanations begins with a subsection called “Coercive Philosophy”. One thing Nozick objects to is attempts to “deduce [one’s] total view from a few . . . intuitively based axioms” (PE: 3), whereby “One brick is piled upon another to produce a tall philosophical tower, one brick wide”; if the bottom brick is removed the whole thing falls to pieces. He wants to replace this “tottering tower” model by one based on the Parthenon: “First we explore our separate philosophical insights, column by column; afterwards, we unite and unify them under an overarching roof of general principles or themes” (ibid.). Apart from the exaggeration of “one brick wide” —he speaks himself of “intuitively based axioms” (plural) — this is a fair enough point. Long arguments of a purely deductive nature do indeed incur this risk of collapse, because it happens so often that an argument is valid (having its conclusion follow from its premises) without being sound (having all its premises true as well). But it is not clear how far analytic philosophy faces this danger, although its parent, logical positivism, may do so in so far as it depends on the verification principle.

But Nozick wants to go further than this. The main idea is a remarkable one. He is against the whole enterprise of proof as an aim of philosophy because he thinks of it as trying to force people to believe things, and “[i]s that a nice way to behave toward someone?” he asks (PE: 5). He emphasizes the way in which we describe arguments as “powerful” or “knockdown” and as carrying “punch” or “forcing” people to conclusions (PE: 4). He supports this by appealing to the way children think of arguments as involving raised voices and anger. There is certainly a sense of the word “argue” in which it does mean this, although it is hardly its main sense, and certainly not its original one, which is something like “make clear” or “prove”, as in expressions such as “His treatment of his enemies argues his natural generosity”. But the more important point is the one about what Nozick sees as the coercive nature of argument. That there is some plausibility in this is shown by proverbial remarks such as “The man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”. Nozick points out that as a means of getting people to believe things, coercive argument has its drawbacks because of the weakness of the sanctions at the philosopher’s disposal. If the hearer “is willing to bear the label of ‘irrational’ . . . he can skip away happily maintaining his former belief”. If the philosopher wishes to pursue the matter he can only do so by “produc[ing] reasons for accepting reasons” — which begs the question. In the last resort the hearer could simply “sit there silently, smiling, Buddhalike” (PE: 4).

This is all very well but perhaps the irrationalist is getting away with too easy a victory. The difficulty of giving an ultimate justification for appealing to reason was clear already to Aristotle, who tackled the problem in Book 4, Chapter 4 of his Metaphysics by offering the earliest version of a kind of argument later associated especially with Kant and known as a transcendental argument. Taking the law of contradiction (which forbids the acceptance of any pair of contradictory statements) as the basis of rational argument, Aristotle says that of course we cannot force anybody to accept it by offering a proof of it because any such proof — indeed any proof at all — must rely on it, so that we should simply be begging the question. But if we are brought to a stand here so is our opponent, and far more radically. If he refuses to say anything then we cannot do anything with him — but why should this worry us? We cannot convince the table in front of us, but that is no problem. But as soon as our opponent tries to assert anything we have got him, for he is already committing himself to the law of contradiction. He cannot speak or even think coherently without so committing himself. At this point he will probably accuse us of smuggling in the word “coherently”; perhaps he just prefers to think incoherently. “I accept that the law of contradiction is valid”, he may say; “it’s just that I also think it’s invalid.” But if he asserts something and at the same time asserts its opposite, he has not achieved anything; whatever his purpose was in asserting it he will have frustrated that purpose. Of course he may have some ulterior purpose, as when a criminal might utter a contradiction to convince a court that he was of unsound mind, but then he has merely uttered the contradiction and not seriously asserted it, or even seriously thought it. I could utter a mere string of words such as “Over not yellow the when”, but I haven’t asserted or thought anything. Indeed, without the law of contradiction one could not use words at all, for what would they mean? Whatever I want my words to mean, if I allow at the same time that they do not mean that, then I have not even uttered a string of words, but merely a string of noises, like an animal.

Having shown, as I hope, that the law of contradiction is essen...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Anarchy, State, and Utopia: the moral basis
• 3 Anarchy, State, and Utopia: the political outcome
• 4 The later ethics and politics
• 5 Epistemology
• 6 Rationality
• 7 Metaphysics I: personal identity
• 8 Metaphysics II: explaining existence
• 9 Metaphysics III: free will and retribution
• 10 The meaning of life
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index