Vol. XIX, May 2008

epis teme A Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy

ep•i•ste•me \ep' i ste' mé\ n. [Gk. epistém(é)]: knowledge; specif., intellectually certain knowledge

Volume XV • September 2004

Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Episteme

Volum

e XIX

M

ay 2008

ep•i•ste•me \ep' i ste' mé\ n. [Gk. epistém(é)]: knowledge; specif., intellectually certain knowledge

e p i s t e m e An International Journal

Of Undergraduate Philosophy

Volume XIX • May 2008

Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Episteme Volume XIX• May 2008

Episteme is published under the auspices of the Denison University Department

of Philosophy in Granville, Ohio.

ISSN 1542-7072

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Editor-in-Chief

Stephanie Rozman Assistant Editors Megan Henricks

Kelly Jones Public Relations Chair Alexander Rosenberg

Editorial Board Christopher Barber

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Nathan Dailey Kimbrey Havens Sarah Kalinowski Megan Keaveney

Susan Stevens Faculty Advisor

Alexandra Bradner

Statement of Purpose

Episteme is published annually by a staff of undergraduate students at Denison University.

The Editors, Episteme, Department of Philosophy, Blair Knapp Hall, Denison University, Granville, Ohio 43023. [email protected]


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Please send all inquires to:

Episteme aims to recognize and

providing examples of some of the best work currently being done in undergraduate philosophy programs around the world by offering

work. It is our hope that the journal will help stimulate philosophical dialogue and inquiry among students and faculty at colleges and universities.

Episteme will consider papers written by undergraduate students in any area of philosophy; throughout our history we have published papers on a wide array of thinkers and topics, ranging from Ancient to Contemporary and philosophical traditions including Analytic, Continental, and Eastern. All papers undergo a process of blind review by the editorial staff and are evaluated according to the following criteria: quality of research, depth of philosophical inquiry, creativity, original insight, and clarity. Final selections are made by vote of the editors and the editorial board.

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Table of Contents

Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence as a Psychological Test of Action Micah Dugas, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Forcing Freedom: Applying Mill’s Principles of Liberty in an International Society Jill Zimmerman, Tulane University

Possible Worlds and Counterfactuals: Critique and Commentary on Complicating Causation Roman Feiman, University of Toronto

The Natural Philosophies of Descartes and Newton: A Kuhnian Reflection Stephen Trochimchuk, Lakehead University

Call For Papers, Vol. XX (2009)

E p i s t e m e

An International Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy

Volume XIX

CONTENTS

The editors express sincere appreciation to the Provost’s Office, the Denison Honors Program, Melissa Rubins, and Faculty Advisor Alexandra Bradner for their assistance in making the publication of this journal possible. We extend special gratitude to the other Philosophy Department Faculty: Mark Moller, Barbara Fultner, Tony Lisska, Jonathan Maskit, Ronald E. Santoni, and Steven Vogel for their support.


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May 2008

Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence as a Psychological Test of Action

Micah Dugas

I. INTRODUCTION

T he doctrine of the eternal recurrence played a central role in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. While the doctrine’s centrality is indisputable, its function has been debated. It has been interpreted variously as a

traditional piece of metaphysics on the one hand, and as a psy-chological test of the will’s commitment to a given action on the other. In this paper, I undertake an exposition of the role of the eternal recurrence in relation to certain key features of Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as the Overman and the will to power. I will argue that the psychological test interpretation is to be preferred above the metaphysical interpretation. While the metaphysical interpretation fails to harmonize with key features of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the psychological test interpretation harmonizes far better with them. The metaphysical interpreta-tion is to be rejected because i) it fails to act as the “heaviest bur-den” that Nietzsche so heavily emphasizes, ii) its ultimately de-terministic undertones are inconsistent with Nietzsche’s insis-tence on the freedom of the will, and iii) its identification with a natural law is incompatible with Nietzsche’s many rejections of laws, both natural and moral. Finally, it shall be argued that we must understand the psychological test interpretation as apply-ing only to the Overman. The doctrine is inapplicable to any


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Micah Dugas was born in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he attended school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He graduated with his B.A. in philosophy in May 2007, and will begin a Ph.D. program in philosophy at the University of Miami starting this fall. He has broad interests that include the history of philosophy, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of language.

other audience, and many objections to Nietzsche’s thought can be avoided by taking this point into account.

II. REVALUATION OF VALUES In The Joyful Wisdom 341 we find the first mention in Nietzsche's published works of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence: "If that thought [of the eternal recurrence] acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to all and everything: 'Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?' would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity.” But before we can appreci-ate the importance of this idea it is necessary to understand that Nietzsche saw the eternal recurrence as a replacement for tradi-tional morality. He felt the need to push down what was already crumbling, to question the grounds of traditional morality, to "shatter the old law-tables." 1 Throughout his works, Nietzsche offers a very powerful critique of nineteenth-century European morality, and it is only after we understand his critique and what he perceived as the inevitable collapse of traditional morality that we can understand how the doctrine of the eternal recur-rence is intended to fill the resulting vacuum.

Nietzsche sought to overthrow traditional morality for sev-eral reasons. One primary reason concerned the question of God’s existence. Certainly a large part of traditional, i.e., Judeo-Christian, morality is tightly tied to theism. This connection can best be seen in the Decalogue. Our views of morality are often inseparably linked to a divine command. However, against this view of morality Nietzsche makes the famous claim through the mouth of a madman, 2 and later through the mouth of Zarathus-tra, that "God is dead." 3

To Nietzsche, the implications of this statement are terribly unsettling, and he was far from finding in this a cause for rejoic-ing. He referred to the collapse of traditional morality as a "lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of crumbling, destruc-tion, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent." 4 For Nietzsche, to say that God is dead is not to say that a god who once existed has died—as in Christianity—but to say that the

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very idea of God is no longer worthy of belief. The idea of God has died. Christ now merits no more belief than a Zeus or an Odin. All figures are equally myths, who have passed away. But beyond this, in a broader sense it means that the whole idea of an otherworldly realm, of a Kantian noumenon, of anything beyond this earthly existence, has also become unworthy of be-lief. 5 Somewhat parenthetically, it can here be objected that the moral ruin that Nietzsche feared is not a logical consequence of the death of God unless one subscribes to the Divine Command Theory of morality. According to this view, the existence of moral truths is dependent upon the existence of God, a point that is controversial and almost univocally rejected. Whether Nietzsche himself accepted the Divine Command Theory may not be completely clear, but at the very least his fears do seem to be justified in light of the fact that the better part of humanity does subscribe to the Divine Command Theory, and may very likely believe nihilism to be the logical corollary of atheism.

Although Nietzsche accepted the nonexistence of God, he was still uncomfortable with the many detrimental beliefs that are tied to this moribund idea in the popular imagination. Firstly, tied to this notion of God, mankind holds almost univer-sally to belief in personal immortality, the belief in an afterlife. Nietzsche vehemently attacked this belief because he considered it an escape from this world into an otherworldly realm that does not exist. Rather than living this life here and now in the fullest overflow of joy and power, one negates this world in a spirit of weakness and looks for a beyond. But since there is nothing be-yond this life, the desire for an afterlife is essentially a desire for nothingness. Thus, Nietzsche accuses his religious and philoso-phical contemporaries of being nihilists and “world calumnia-tors.” The belief in immortality “destroys all rationality, all natu-ralness of instinct—all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering.” 6

Another dangerous belief that is popularly thought to ema-nate from the idea of God as lawgiver is the notion of a static re-ality, i.e. laws, both moral and physical. Moral laws are created by society in order to preserve the weak. But the fixed nature of these laws is at odds with the nature of reality, which Nietzsche

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tells us is essentially one of Heraclitean becoming. Things con-stantly change in a continuous flux, and to impose static rules upon humanity and nature is to deny the fact that reality con-stantly changes. "They will not learn that man has become. . . [that] everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths." 7 Nietzsche thus radically denies the existence of a rational and moral world order.

Although Nietzsche recognizes the tenuous position in which the death of God leaves humanity, it would be a mistake to think that he believed the situation to be hopeless. Quite to the con-trary, he tried to separate his own position as far as possible from those perceived nihilists whom he was attacking, e.g., Schopen-hauer. His position is ultimately very optimistic. With the death of God, mankind is free of all moral constraints. The horizon is finally open for him to set out upon his own sea, to create his own values, to bring forth a new dawn. 8 And the new dawn will usher in a new kind of man. In place of God and the weak Chris-tian type of human, Nietzsche gives us the Overman. 9

The Overman, the individual possessing the strongest will to power, creates his own values and does not allow them to be vul-garized by the consensus of the masses, whom Nietzsche con-temptuously branded as the “herd.” But the sort of willpower that the Overman wields is first and foremost power over him-self. Nietzsche is very clear that the struggle and overcoming in which the Overman engages is, above all, self-overcoming. This point will be discussed more fully later.

Thus it can be seen that the collapse of traditional morality gives a few exceptional people the opportunity to exercise their creative potential in determining what is right for them as indi-viduals. And here it should be noted that, for Nietzsche, the de-nial of objective value absolutely does not entail the denial of all value. Value of all varieties, and not merely moral value, re-mains as that which the Overman must create as the personal expression of his will to power.

So, in his process of substitution thus far, Nietzsche has given us the Overman in place of God, and the earth in place of



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heaven. Finally, as we shall now see, he has given us the eternal recurrence in place of immortality.

III. THE METAPHYSICAL INTERPRETATION As already mentioned, the eternal recurrence can be interpreted as either a metaphysical doctrine, or as a psychological test, with cogent reasons for both views. Having discussed Nietzsche’s revaluation of values, we shall now discuss the metaphysical in-terpretation. The metaphysical interpretation is the view that an infinite number of cycles of identical repetition actually take place in the universe. Among other passages, the metaphysical interpretation seems to find support from certain statements in The Will to Power:

In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since be-tween every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated.10

This passage seems to indicate that here Nietzsche is thinking of the eternal recurrence as something that is part of the objective structure of the universe, something like a law of nature.

With regard to human existence, the implication of this view is that each of us has already lived this exact life an infinite num-ber of times in the past, and will continue to live it an infinite number of times in the future. As Nietzsche states in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Now I die and decay . . . But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur--it will create me again!... I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things. 11

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Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence

Firstly, in support of the metaphysical interpretation, it should be mentioned that Nietzsche did consider undertaking a more extensive study of the physical sciences to try to find sup-port for this theory. However, Nietzsche himself may have taken a somewhat equivocal position on this matter. Our goal is not to find which interpretation is true, or even which Nietzsche be-lieved to be true, but rather to find which interpretation better harmonizes with the body of his philosophical writings. With that said, we shall turn to a critique of the metaphysical interpre-tation.

While the above passages do seem to lend a certain measure of plausibility to the metaphysical interpretation, several prob-lems with this view quickly arise. Firstly, this interpretation con-flicts with Nietzsche’s conception of the eternal recurrence as the “greatest burden.” And it does this specifically with regard to memory and suffering. Supposing that the metaphysical inter-pretation is the proper one, we are at an almost complete loss to make sense of Nietzsche’s reasons for describing the eternal re-currence in these terms. Presumably, Nietzsche is telling us that the idea of a lifetime’s worth of pain and anguish eternally re-turning could crush us with despair. With this anguish in mind, we are supposed to exercise our will carefully in making choices that would not lead us into eternal regret.

But this attempt to make sense of the eternal recurrence as the greatest burden rests upon a deep misconception. According to Nietzsche, the life to which we return is not a similar life. It is exactly the same, down to the smallest details. But then it would follow that in order for the events of one's present life to be iden-tical to the events of one's previous life, there can be no memory of the previous life. Because one does not have any memory of one's past recurrences, neither will one have any memory in a future recurrence. This is to say that there is no "continuity of consciousness" between the cycles of existence. 12 Hence, there cannot be any accumulation of suffering throughout eternity be-cause one cannot remember what one has already suffered in the previous cycles. Nietzsche thinks that we can be guided by the consideration of whether or not we can will something eternally.

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However, in identical repetition, it takes no more courage to will something once than it does to will it infinitely. 13

In this respect, the question of whether or not we could will to repeat something eternally would be a point of complete indif-ference to us. After we have suffered all that we will suffer in this life, that amount, although terrible, cannot increase by any memory of past suffering or dread of future suffering. All pain in our future recurrence is beyond the range of our present con-sciousness, thereby making us unable to experience it as we ex-perience fear of pain later in this life. It is "only by inappropri-ately construing the suffering of some future recurrence on the model of suffering later in this life [that] the question of the eter-nal recurrence of one's pain weigh[s] upon one with 'the greatest stress.' " 14

Thus, the metaphysical interpretation of the eternal recur-rence would seem to be problematic as a guide for one’s will, since there can be no accumulation of pain to help one avoid un-wanted choices. Presumably, it is pain or regret of some form that lies upon us as "the greatest burden," that gives us good rea-sons to consider our actions very carefully. However, if pain cannot increase beyond this life, then we cannot suffer anything worse than what we would suffer without identical repetition. The metaphysical doctrine seems to make Nietzsche's "greatest burden" less burdensome.

A second problem with the metaphysical interpretation con-cerns what appear to be the deterministic undertones of the doc-trine. It is a point of contention as to whether such a view poses a serious difficulty for free will. As stated in the passage from The Will to Power quoted above, Nietzsche says that between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible com-binations must take place. A literal understanding of the eternal recurrence places the strongest kind of necessity upon all of the material world, human existence included.

On this view, our choices acquire less weight, since we are not really free to make them. We are caught within a nexus of possible combinations that demand actualization. Any choice that one makes, since that choice would be the result of a possi-

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ble combination, would have to take place. If our choices are de-termined by a previous state of the world, and if these choices must conform exactly to the choices of an infinite number of pre-vious cycles, then we are not free to make those choices. The question of whether we could will something eternally would be completely irrelevant for us, since we would be eternally com-mitted to it anyway. Further, asking ourselves the question at all seems to be an attempt to surreptitiously slip in the thought that we are in a first cycle, that we are in possession of a tabula rasa with regard to our actions. But in infinite time there can be no first cycle, and hence no first choice. There is always already an infinite number of cycles behind us.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about this rather unpalatable conclusion is that such determinism seems to be at odds with Nietzsche’s numerous attempts to help us place the deepest sig-nificance upon our choices, and with his many passages discuss-ing the freedom of the will. And it is because of these "fatalistic overtones" that Schacht considers a metaphysical interpretation to be “one of Nietzsche's thought-experiments which fails.” 15

A final problem with the metaphysical interpretation is that it may also be objected that interpreting the eternal recurrence as an objective statement of how nature operates would place a glaring inconsistency in Nietzsche’s philosophy. He scrupu-lously avoids attempting to give insight into the nature of the world as it actually is—the thing-in-itself—and he despised phi-losophers and scientists who attempted this. In The Joyful Wis-dom, he tells us that we ought to "beware of saying there are laws in nature.”16 Where scientists think that they are truly explaining things, in reality they are only describing things better than those in previous ages have done. 17

So, to think that Nietzsche intended the eternal recurrence to function as a law of nature is to place him at the receiving end of his own fierce criticisms. Just like every other attempt at formu-lating natural law that he objects to, such a scientific position would attempt to fix the nature of reality, which Nietzsche has already told us is one of change and flux. This is certainly not the most charitable interpretation of Nietzsche’s work. In con-

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clusion, the metaphysical interpretation simply does not work. It fails to harmonize with the key features of Nietzsche’s thought. However, this failure of the metaphysical doctrine does not de-tract from the doctrine's usefulness as a psychological test. 18 Of course, it is clearly not the case that the failure of the metaphysi-cal interpretation entails the success of the psychological test in-terpretation. The latter must be judged on its own merit.

IV. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST INTERPRETATION To view the eternal recurrence as a kind of decision-making pro-cedure for the will presents itself as the more plausible interpre-tation. In the collapse of moral absolutes, the will — which is “beyond good and evil”— has filled the void. Nevertheless, the unbounded will needs some guide to outline what is (for the in-dividual, at least) the preferred course of action. As quoted above, Nietzsche says that we should create our values by asking ourselves whether or not we can will them eternally. 19 Although we will not eternally recur, we ought to choose as though we will recur, as though we would have to repeat our actions forever. In the words of Kaufmann, we must understand the eternal recur-rence “not as a dogma but as a hypothesis.” 20 Thus, rather than a scientific theory, the eternal recurrence is meant to act as a practi-cal guide to our actions. If, upon reflection, we decide that we cannot will a particular action forever, then we should probably refrain from it.

to make ethical decisions, since ultimately there are no such things as ethical decisions: “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” 21 It is cer-tainly not Nietzsche's intention to give any supreme principle of morality. Supreme principles of morality —specifically the cate-gorical imperative, for Nietzsche — are all equally guilty of glossing over the highly individual nature of each particular ac-tion. “By means of them [supreme moral principles], indeed, a semblance of equality can be attained, but only a semblance,—that in outlook and retrospect every action is, and remains, an im-

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When considering the eternal recurrence, it is very importantnot to confuse it with a moral principle intended to help one


penetrable affair.” 22

While there have been attempts to compare the eternal recur-rence to the categorical imperative, these are ultimately very mis-guided. A person who chooses his or her course of action based on whether they could will it for eternity has in mind certain psychological considerations and consequences. However, this is far from Kant’s position, which stresses the logical consistency of maxims and places no consideration upon consequences, psy-chological or otherwise. 23 The contrast between Nietzsche and Kant is thereby one of consequentialism versus deontology.

Against Kant, Nietzsche calls on us to be the active creators of our own values, to find what judgments are the expressions of our will to power, rather than to follow a supreme principle that is often someone else’s expression of their will to power. “A vir-tue has to be our invention, our most personal defense and neces-sity: in any other sense it is merely a danger. ‘Virtue,’ as Kant desired it, is harmful.” 24

The eternal recurrence is potentially very powerful as a guide because it forces one to refrain from committing to a given action unless one can support that action with the entire will. Nietzsche would not have us making careless decisions, but rather placing the highest consideration upon each choice. Since this life is the only opportunity that we have, we must act with the fullest measure of strength and freedom here and now. Nietzsche con-ceived of the eternal recurrence as the greatest illustration of life-affirmation that we can possibly display. It is tightly knit to his idea of amor fati, love of one’s fate. To be able to eternally will the repetition of our life means “that one wants nothing to be dif-ferent, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” 25 It means a justification of the world and of our lives with all of our pleas-ure and pain. Ultimately, it is the ability to love even the suffer-ing of our life that gives life its justification and purpose.

Further, the eternal recurrence does not demand any kind of consistency in what we will, and so what we will in one moment may not be what we will in the next. Changing our mind is per-fectly consistent with the idea of creation and becoming. How-ever, this is not to say that choice is arbitrary. As Nietzsche tells

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us, the “good” decisions are those that are the expression of power, and the “bad” those that are the expression of weakness. “What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness.” 26 Thus, while particular expressions of the will to power will undoubtedly vary, the “good” choices are those that proceed from power.

But the generality of our discussion thus far may create some confusion. One potential point of misunderstanding about the eternal recurrence may arise from a failure to realize Nietzsche's audience. To Nietzsche’s credit, he was fully aware that the eter-nal recurrence was not for everyone, and very serious problems arise if one ignores this fact and thinks that he intended it for so-ciety. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Nietzsche’s works contain numerous attempts to clarify this point. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche explicitly says, "I never speak to masses." 27 Else-where, he explains how he has both chosen who his reader is, and who he is not. A writer not only wants to be understood, but he also wants to be misunderstood by those to whom he is not writing. 28 Examples could be multiplied, but the fact that Nietzsche deliberately made many of his works unclear to the average reader seems a sufficient indication that he was not writ-ing for everyone, but rather to the strong individual. The very esoteric character of his works forces one to learn to read him very carefully, a mental exertion for which most readers will not have the patience. 29

His doctrine presupposes an exceptional individual, one who can create his own values and will them eternally without exter-nal help. It is totally inadequate for any other type of person, and is not strong enough for the masses; or perhaps it would be truer to say that the masses are too weak for it. And this is the primary point: The eternal recurrence is fundamentally and in-extricably tied to Nietzsche’s conception of the Overman. It loses its effectiveness with any other person.

Nietzsche fully recognized that the radical stance of his phi-losophy, e.g., the denial of objective value, would usher in tur-moil. His attempt to correct millennia of lies—his revaluation—

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would inevitably lead to unprecedented conflict. 30 But lest it be thought that Nietzsche was insensitive to the upheavals that his philosophy was likely to cause, it should be noted that he ac-knowledged that the task of liberation from convention was a very delicate one. As he says in The Wanderer and His Shadow, “only the ennobled man may be given freedom of spirit.... In any other mouth his motto would be dangerous.” 31

The weak individual should absolutely not liberate himself from traditional morality, and Nietzsche had no intention of try-ing to liberate him. Instead, this person should stay bound. The masses need strong external coercion, e.g., the state, Christianity, etc., to keep them under control. As Nietzsche succinctly tells us in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "he who cannot obey himself will be commanded.” 32 Freedom should only be given to those who are strong enough for it. To remove all restraints from the masses would be to loose true anarchy upon the world, a form of behav-ior which Nietzsche detested as much as he did Christianity. 33

When his philosophy is used to advance anarchy or anti-Semitism, we should keep in mind that this was the opposite of his intentions. Nietzsche’s comments on such positions are de-cidedly negative, and only a willful misreading such as that of the Nazis can invite misunderstanding. Those who defend such positions with Nietzsche's philosophy are ignoring Nietzsche’s clear condemnations of such views and trying to enjoy the free-dom of the destroyer without paying the high price of the crea-tor.

And the creator does pay a high price. Although it may seem as though the creator is wildly free and uninhibited after having cast off all moral restraint, Nietzsche tells us that the very reverse is the case. Behind every action must be the consideration of whether that action can be willed forever. Such a person has to choose here and now, and cannot look for escape in a beyond. Only such an individual truly lives with the full consciousness of her own complete freedom. As the creator of her own laws, she must also be her own judge and punish herself when she violates those laws. And "it is terrible to be alone with the judge and



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avenger of one's own law." 34 But here an obvious question may be asked. What happens if

the Overman’s values conflict with the values of society in such a way that hostility becomes inevitable? This is certainly to be ex-pected at some point. Judging by the emphasis that Nietzsche places upon the ideas of upheaval, chaos, and war, is seems im-possible that the Overman can peacefully coexist with society. In his better interests, the Overman may decide to live in solitude, something for which Nietzsche frequently affirms the need, e.g. Zarathustra’s residence on a mountaintop as a recluse. How-ever, solitude is for the sake of the Overman rather than for the safety of society, since interaction with the latter may prevent the Overman from fully creating his own values, from achieving the highest exercise of his will to power. Nietzsche tells us that al-though powerful, the type of human that he is seeking is also very delicate, and has often been destroyed by society. Through-out the ages, he has been a "fortunate accident... never as some-thing willed." 35 Certainly never willed, because his powerful in-stinctual nature makes him a terrifying creature for society. But the well-being of the masses and the Overman’s ability to peace-fully coexist with them was not part of Nietzsche’s concern.

But we must expand upon this point. If the Overman hurts his neighbor while creating his values, then this cannot be avoided. But, intentionally hurting others is not part of the Overman’s character. Rather, any harm done to society during the creation of values is only incidental and is not part of the Overman’s deliberate intentions. So, contra many misunder-standings of his thought, “tyranny over others is not part of Nietzsche’s vision, though the failure to indulge in it is no virtue unless one has the power to become a tyrant and refrains deliber-ately.” 36 Refusal to enter into tyranny over others is a further ex-pression of the Overman’s will to power. And the power that the Overman wields is first and foremost to be understood as power over himself, rather than power over others. In this respect, Nietzsche’s conception of the Overman is very similar to Aris-totle’s view of the noble and virtuous person, and much under-standing of Nietzsche can be gained by a comparison to Aris-

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totle. Neither philosopher is concerned with morality proper, but rather with a person’s ability to be noble, disciplined, and self-controlled. Numerous passages in Nietzsche show the pow-erful influence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and in this re-spect, Nietzsche’s conception of the ideal man is very similar to the classical Greek view of the virtuous man.

To return to our discussion of the Overman’s relation to soci-ety, Nietzsche never promises that the Overman would help to bring about an orderly society. Indeed, those looking for a sys-tem with which to build an orderly society should look else-where, because order was never Nietzsche's intention. To at-tempt to construct an orderly society from Nietzsche’s philoso-phy, we would have to completely overlook passages where he speaks of his Dionysian nature, the nature that "encompasses joy in destruction." 37 And again he tells us that “the last thing I should promise would be to ‘improve’ mankind. No new idols are erected by me.” 38 As Kaufmann has so aptly put it, “For Nietzsche, the Overman does not have instrumental value for the maintenance of society: he is valuable in himself because he em-bodies the state of being that has the only ultimate value there is; and society is censured insofar as it insists on conformity and impedes his development.” 39

V. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS To conclude our discussion of the psychological test interpreta-tion of the eternal recurrence, we must recognize that it harmo-nizes with the body of Nietzsche’s thought far better than the metaphysical interpretation does. The former ties in with the key motifs of Nietzsche’s philosophy such as the Overman, the will to power, and his method of speaking to the individual far more effectively than the metaphysical doctrine can. This ability of the eternal recurrence so interpreted to make Nietzsche’s thought coherent seems a persuasive reason to accept it as the more vi-able interpretation.



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Micah Dugas

NOTES 1 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 214. 2 Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 125. 3 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 2. 4

5 On the issue of Nietzsche’s critique of Kantian noumena and God, see Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 335. 6 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 43. 7 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 2. 8 9 I have chosen to follow Kaufmann in translating the German Übermensch as Overman, rather than its oft-used alternative trans-lation Superman, since the former seems to be more in keeping with the German meaning, and with Nietzsche’s specific refer-ences to self-overcoming. See Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 307. 10 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1066. 11 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 237. 12 Solomon, Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, 335. 13 Hatab, Nietzsche and the Eternal Recurrence: The Redemption of Time and Becoming, 113. 14 Solomon, Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, 340. 15 Schacht, Nietzsche, 265. 16 Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 109. 17 Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 112. 18 Schacht, Nietzsche, 266. 19 Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 341. 20 Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 332. 21 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 108. 22 Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 335. 23 Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 322. 24 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 11. 25 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 258. 26 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 2. 27 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 353.

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Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 343.

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 343.

28 Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 381. 29 For other passages in which Nietzsche discusses the deliberate lack of clarity of his works, see Beyond Good and Evil, 30, 40, 230, 270, 278, 289, and 290. 30 See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 353. 31 Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, 350. 32 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 136. 33 See Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 57. 34 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 88. 35 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 3. 36 Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 316. 37 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 5. 38 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 2. 39 Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 315.

WORKS CITED

Hatab, Lawrence J. Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence: The Redemption of Time and Becoming. Washington, D.C: University Press of America, 1978. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J. Hollindale. England: Penguin Books, 1961. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist. Translated by R.J. Hollindale. England: Penguin Books, 1961. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollindale. Vintage Books, 1989.



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Micah Dugas

Schacht, Richard. Nietzsche. New York, NY: Routledge, 1983. Schacht, Richard. Nietzsche, Selections. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993. Solomon, Robert (ed.). Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays. NY: Anchor Books, 1973.

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Forcing Freedom: Applying Mill’s Principles of Liberty in an International Society

Jill Zimmerman

Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead! Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets!

–William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

ublished in 1859, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty advo-cates individuals’ moral and economic freedom from the state. Nearly 150 years later, Mill’s work continues to be relevant in determining our personal liberties

and the limits of the government. However, as society becomes increasingly international in scope, it is important to consider how Mill’s liberty theory applies to international affairs and the relations between governments. When Mill’s principles are ex-tended to such an application, they become more difficult to de-fine. In this paper, I will consider what the appropriate applica-tion of Mill’s theory is to the relationship between nations that do not endorse the liberty principle for their citizens1 – but do not interfere with other nations – and those that do endorse the lib-erty principle for their citizens. Though Mill has written specifi-cally on the topic of interventionism (namely, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention”), this paper will focus primarily on Mill’s

Jill Zimmerman is currently a senior at Tulane University, where she is studying philosophy and English. Her philosophical interests are eth-ics, legal and political philosophy, and the history of moral and political theory. She has an increasing interest in the relationship between political philosophy and international politics, specifically on issues of religious freedom. After graduation, Jill will be entering the world of public policy as a legislative assistant for the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, DC.

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principles of liberty as outlined in On Liberty, with reference to his other works only to illustrate that my interpretation of On Liberty is in accordance with them. I will first consider an exten-sion of the harm principle2 to intergovernmental relations, which would require that liberal nations respect the autonomy of non-liberal political authorities in all cases where the non-liberal po-litical authority does not cause harm to other nations. I will reject this application of Mill’s theory on a number of grounds with the purpose of furthering the contention that On Liberty supports intervention at least in some instances. I will then argue that a correct interpretation of Mill’s theory will support the interven-tion of liberal governments on behalf of those citizens whose governments do not endorse the liberty principle, but do not in-terfere with other nations.

Other liberal theorists have contended that the aim of liberal foreign policy is “to be quiet, to be unostentatious, to pretend to nothing, not to thrust claims and unconstitutional claims for as-cendancy and otherwise in the teeth of your neighbor.”3 Other liberal theorists, such as Joseph Strayer, Charles Tilly, and An-thony Giddens,4 have argued that states are autonomous and sovereign based on their function: “the state’s ‘function’ was to make war and to build power vis-à-vis other states and society. ‘Society’ was largely an adversary in this process as it resisted the states rulers’ power to extract resources and to monopolize political and judicial authority.”5 Although it is accepted that Mill does not subscribe to a similar view of state autonomy and the power of nations, I am going to put forward one interpreta-tion of On Liberty that would agree with those liberals who favor state sovereignty. Though this interpretation, which I will refer to as the argument from analogy, is of my own creation and is not an exact representation of the liberal arguments cited above, it will be useful in illustrating the true scope and nature of Mill’s liberty theory as opposed to the liberal state sovereignty argu-ments cited above.

The argument from analogy is based on the harm principle as Mill establishes it in On Liberty:

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The sole end for which mankind are warranted… in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.6

Put simply, the harm principle prohibits the restraint of another person’s actions unless those actions will cause harm to others. Although in On Liberty Mill intends this principle to guide a gov-ernment’s actions towards its citizens or a person’s actions to-wards other people, an analogy can be drawn from the relation-ship between persons to the relationship between nations, allow-ing the harm principle to be extended to foreign policy.

I will refer to the principle established when the harm princi-ple is extended to foreign policy as the “international harm prin-ciple.” Like the state sovereignty arguments made by the liberal theorists, mentioned above, the international harm principle will imagine governments to be separate entities, like a giant Hobbe-sian Leviathan. The international harm principle would require that government A ought not to restrain the actions of govern-ment B so long as B’s actions do not cause harm to other nations. For example, imagine that in a coup, France is taken over by a tyrannical ruler who bans all Frenchmen from eating baguettes because they are bad for individuals’ health. According to Mill’s position in On Liberty, the French law banning the eating of ba-guettes is a violation of its citizens’ liberty, but the international harm principle would prohibit the United States from interfer-ing, so long as the baguette ban does not cause it harm. If, say, France began dumping its uneaten baguettes into Italy, then the new law might cause Italy harm and the United States might be justified in interfering.7 A key point to observe in the harm prin-ciple analogy is that when the harm principle is extended to for-

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eign policy, governments become giant people and any interference with another government necessarily targets that government

and not its citizens; the purpose of any intervention is always to prevent harm to one’s own nation or to the community of na-tions, and not to help the citizens whose liberty is being denied.

Mill did not intend and would not support the analogy made from the harm principle to the international harm principle, and he would not support the consequential strict principle of non-intervention, either. In “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” Mill clearly argues that there are cases in which intervention is necessary and should be done.8 While the above harm principle analogy would seem to illustrate that in On Liberty Mill contra-dicts his argument in “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” I contend that Mill’s argument in On Liberty alone can show that Mill would not support a strict principle of non-intervention. While other liberal theorists have argued that, as in the interna-tional harm principle, nations ought not to interfere with other nations that do not cause harm, such arguments require an em-phasis on the sovereignty of the nation as a Leviathan-like entity to which Mill does not subscribe.

Like state-centric notions of liberalism, the analogy of the in-ternational harm principle does not take seriously Mill’s commit-ment to the individual as the central moral figure. By extending the harm principle to an international harm principle such that intervention is not acceptable in the case of a nation that does not endorse the liberty principle but does not interfere with other nations, we ignore one of the key concepts of On Liberty. In Chapter 1 of On Liberty, Mill says, “The subject of this Essay is…Civil or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.”9 The question is not “when is any party justified in interfering with another party’s liberty?” but rather one of society versus the indi-vidual. Furthermore, Mill spends an entire chapter10 arguing for the desirability of individuality and maintaining the principle that the free development of individuality is essential to the well-being of society. The individual is central to Mill’s liberty theory; liberty, as Mill conceives it, does not make sense unless the indi-vidual is its moral end, for liberty is the power of the individual within a society.

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Considering Mill’s emphasis on the individual as the moral end of liberty, the analogy argument for non-intervention must be reevaluated. The analogy used to extend the harm principle to an international harm principle requires that the nation becomes the ‘individual’ and the international community becomes ‘society,’ but such an analogy ignores the fact that individuals necessarily comprise any nation, and that Mill’s conception of liberty must chiefly concern those individuals. Take for example the case described above, where a tyrannical ruler takes over France and prohibits all French citizens from eating baguette. What is important to Mill’s liberty principle in this case is that the French citizens’ actions are being restrained, despite the fact (or at least not because of the fact) that their not eating baguettes would not cause any harm to society. When we use the interna-tional harm principle to imagine nations as sovereign entities in this case, we, as the United States or Italy or any other nation considering intervention, necessarily ignore the plight of the French citizens who are being denied their baguette and focus only on how the baguette ban affects us. If the ban does not affect us, says the international harm principle, we are not justified in interfering. In “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” Mill asserts, “of all attitudes which a nation can take upon the subject of inter-vention, the meanest and worst is to profess that it interferes only when it can serve its own objects by it.”11 In On Liberty, Mill’s emphasis on the importance of the individual to both the definition of liberty and to the well-being of society illustrates this same concept: that a political authority ought not to inter-vene solely for its own purposes. Because the international harm principle, like liberal theories of state sovereignty, would not al-low intervention except in the case that a nation is being harmed, to serve its own purposes while ignoring the importance of the individual, such a principle cannot be an appropriate interpreta-tion of Mill’s liberty theory.

I will now move on to my argument that Mill’s principles in On Liberty would require the intervention of liberal governments on behalf of those citizens whose governments do not endorse the liberty principle, but do not interfere with other nations. As I

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stressed in the previous two paragraphs, Mill has a strong com-mitment to the individual as the sole moral end of liberty and any foreign policy that does not take this commitment seriously cannot be an appropriate interpretation of Mill’s liberty theory. The single purpose of government for Mill is to preserve the lib-erty of its citizens, and furthermore, “the worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”12 It does not matter, then, whether it is government at the city, state, na-tion or world level, so long as its laws are laws that provide the most possible liberty to its citizens, or, put differently, its laws do not interfere with the actions of its citizens who do not cause harm to others. In utilitarian terms, nations themselves have util-ity only insofar as their citizens have utility, and their citizens have the most utility when they are free to pursue individual in-terests and to have discussions. Such freedom is not unlimited, but rather government “provides security for most of our free-dom by limiting some of it.”13 Albert William Levi goes even fur-ther in his analysis of On Liberty to say that “Liberty in a sense transcends the realm of the social altogether.”14 Assuming the social to include the governments and the laws that define social life, I take this to mean that liberty is part of some greater good, and thus government must answer to that good above and be-yond all else. All of this is to say that if a government does not endorse the liberty principle, it is not, in a sense, fulfilling its role as a government. A non-liberal government is like a band of rob-bers stealing its citizen’s liberties, and because that will poten-tially negatively affect the total utility of society, it may be neces-sary15 to take action against them. Even if a non-liberal govern-ment is, as Rawls would call it, a “decent hierarchal people,” and provides its citizens with basic human liberties and some system of justice, that government is still stealing from its citizens their freedom of individuality, and thus liberal nations have the right to choose to interfere with them.16

It may be argued that a non-liberal nation is like the Mormon community that Mill discusses in Chapter 4, and thus there is no right of interference. In Chapter 4, Mill says about the Mormon religion, which is voluntary, that:

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It is difficult to see on what principles but those of tyr-anny they can be prevented from living there [in a re-mote corner of the earth, which they have been the first to render habitable to human beings] under what laws they please, provided they commit no aggression on other nations, and allow perfect freedom of departure to those who are dissatisfied with their ways….I can-not admit that persons entirely unconnected with them ought to step in and require that a condition of things with which all who are directly interested appear to be satisfied, should be put an end to because it is a scan-dal to persons some thousands of miles distant, who have no part or concern for it.17

There are two important parts to this example; first, there are cri-teria for the recognition of non-liberal groups, and second, there is the establishment of why we should not interfere with such groups. Beginning with the first part, Mill supports the establish-ment of groups that do not endorse the liberty principle on two conditions: 1) they commit no aggression on other nations; and 2) they allow for the perfect freedom of departure. To use this ex-ample to argue that Mill would not support intervention, the non-liberal governments would have to meet these two criteria, and while it is clear that, in the case we are discussing, they do not commit aggressions on other nations, it is not as clear that they allow for the perfect freedom of departure. For the person who is dissatisfied with the polygamy that occurs in the Mormon religion, it would be difficult but reasonable for that person to leave; they would not have to travel far, and they would have at least some skills (particularly the ability to speak the language) that would help them survive upon exit. Referring one last time to the tyrannical ruler who bans Frenchmen from eating ba-guettes, I believe that it is unreasonable to say that the French citizens have freedom of exit. Because, for the majority of the population, leaving one’s country is prohibitively expensive and requires traveling vast distances, learning a new language and

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learning new job skills, it is not clear that citizens are “free” to leave, since one cannot be free to do what one cannot do. Because it does not meet the second criterion of freedom of departure, non-liberal nations do not fall into the same category as the Mor-mon example, and thus does not necessarily result in the same consequences.

In the second part of the above statement, Mill suggests that those people who are unconnected with the group have no busi-ness interfering with it simple because it is a “scandal.” As a counterargument to this, I will simply say that in our contempo-rary society, being unconnected from any other nation is impos-sible, and thus we have reason to concern ourselves with the lib-erties of other individuals. When Mill wrote the Mormon exam-ple, he could not possibly have imagined that society would reach the level of communication and interconnectedness that we have today. Because the Mormon example is not analogous to contemporary international relations, it fails as an argument against the right of intervention.

In conclusion, Mill’s liberty theory would give the right to

liberal nations to intervene with a nation that does not endorse the liberty principle even if that nation does not interfere with other nations. This conclusion is based on Mill’s commitment to the individual as both the sole moral end of liberty and as the basis for which government exists and is made legitimate. I have suggested that intervention would be a right and not an obliga-tion, but I will not go further to detail exactly how and when Mill would recommend intervention, for that is far too large a topic for this paper. However, I will assert that, following the princi-ples of liberty established in On Liberty, the decision of how and when to intervene ought to rest on the utility of doing so, with the assumption that whatever maximizes liberty while minimiz-ing harm to others’ liberty has the most utility.

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NOTES

1 The non-liberal nations that I discuss in this paper do not in-clude barbarians, for it is clear that Mill believes that barbarians are, like children, incapable of autonomy; “Despotism is a legiti-mate mode of government in dealing with barbarians….Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion” (Mill, On Liberty, 13-14). Because Mill applies the principle of liberty only to civilized peoples, barbarians are excluded from my argument and it can be as-sumed that when I discuss non-liberal nations I mean those na-tions that are civilized but whose governments do not endorse the liberty principle for its citizens. 2 As defined in Feinberg, Social Philosophy, 25. 3 Miller, “John Stuart Mill’s Theory of International Relations,” 494. 4 See Ercegovac, “Competing National Ideologies, Cyclical Re-sponses,” Chapter Four. 5 Thomson, “State Sovreignty in International Relations: Bridg-ing the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research,” 216. 6 Mill, On Liberty, 13. 7 That is not to say that Italy ought to go to war against France, for it depends on utility: “As soon as any part of a person’s con-duct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has juris-diction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion” (Mill, On Liberty, 76). The example is intended only to draw a distinction between acts that harm others and those that are self-regarding, within the scope of international rela-tions. 8 In “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” Mill is careful to ex-plain that intervention is dangerous and generally unjustifiable, but he clearly argues that there exist cases in which intervention is necessary and should be done. In cases of self-defense: “We must except [from the general principle that it is not right to

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interfere with another nation], of course, any case in which such assistance is a measure of legitimate self-defense” (260). In cases of a tyranny aided by foreign arms: “Intervention to enforce non-intervention is always rightful, always moral, if not always pru-dent” (261). 9 Mill, On Liberty, 5 (emphasis added). 10 Chapter Three: “Of individuality, as one of the elements of well-being.” 11 Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” 243. 12 Mill, On Liberty, 115. 13 Gaus, Political Concepts and Political Theories, 116. 14 Levi, “The Value of Freedom: Mill’s Liberty (1859 – 1959),” 15. 15 I want to stress that no nation or group is ever obligated to take action against another nation or group that does not support the liberty principle so long as there is no act of aggression and the members do not ask for help, and even then it is unclear if there would be any obligation to intervene. I only contend that there would be a right to intervene. 16 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 62. 17 Mill, On Liberty, 92.

WORKS CITED

Ercegovac, Peter Anthony. “Competing National Ideologies, Cy-clical Responses.” The Nationalism Project. Madison, WI: The Nationalism Project, 1999.

Feinberg, Joel. Social Philosophy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973. Gaus, Gerald F. Political Concepts and Political Theories. Boulder,

CO: Westview Press, 2000. Levi, Albert William. “The Value of Freedom: Mill’s Liberty

(1859-1959).” Limits of Liberty. Ed. Peter Radcliff. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1966. 6-18.

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Mill, John Stuart. “A Few Words on Non-Intervention.” Disserta-

tions and Discussions: Volume III. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1882. 238-263.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and other writings. Cambridge, U.K.:

Cambridge University Press, 2000. Miller, Kenneth E. “John Stuart Mill’s Theory of International

Relations.” Journal of the History of Ideas 22.4 (Oct-Dec 1961): 493-514. JSTOR. Tulane U Lib., New Orleans, LA. 17 Sept 2007 <http://www.jstor.org>.

Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1999. Thomson, Janice E. “State Sovereignty in International Relations:

Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Re-search.” International Studies Quarterly 39.2 (Jun 1995): 213-233. JSTOR. Tulane U Lib., New Orleans, LA. 3 Oct 2007 <http://www.jstor.org>.

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Possible Worlds and Counterfactuals: Critique and Commentary on Complicating Causation

Roman Feiman

P hilosophy, particularly the discipline of metaphysics, has long concerned itself with the problem of causation. Though the nature of causation may seem intuitively obvious or axiomatic, it is precisely due to these im-

pressions that it deserves deep philosophical investigation. There is never any doubt that causation exists in some way (that is, hat events somehow ’lead’ to other events). However, what exactly is meant by saying “A causes B” is not so clear. The difficulty of this question becomes more evident when one looks at the long string of illustrious philosophers who have attempted its solu-tion – from David Hume’s anti-realist regularity theory of causa-tion, 1 to John Mackie’s more elaborate explanation 2 in a similar tradition. The most recent of these propositions, and one that has proven particularly influential, is David Lewis’s theory of possi-ble worlds. 3

This paper will analyze Lewis’s view, examining both its ad-vantages and its flaws. It will examine the viability of the entire “possible worlds” enterprise, looking at two traditional critiques of this approach as well as a more original argument. Of particu-lar interest will be the phenomenon of preemption and the prob-lems this phenomenon presents for Lewis’s view. Though pre-

Roman Feiman will graduate from the University of Toronto this spring, with concentrations in psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. His philosophical interests are mainly in the philosophy of mind and its relation to psychology; specifically, the nature, structure, origin, and acquisition of concepts. More recently, he has become interested in the interactions between metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mind, and how these apply to processes of detecting and creating patterns, abstractions, and concepts out of an infinitely "messy" world. Roman intends to pursue this line of work through graduate work in psychology and cognitive science.


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emption has long been problematic for many theories of causa-tion, it will be argued here that the issue is in fact much less seri-ous than it appears, not only for Lewis’s account, but for all oth-ers as well. Finally, the viability of Lewis’s theory will be exam-ined in light of both its flaws and advantages.

In David Lewis’s account, a statement of causation is similar to a counterfactual statement. 4 Saying “A caused B” is thus much like saying “If A had occurred, B would have occurred also, and if A had not occurred, then B would not have oc-curred.” It is important to note the difference between counter-factual conditional statements and material conditional state-ments, which are usually of the form “If A, then B.” In a material conditional, B is true only if A is, and to check whether A is true one need only compare its claim to the state of the world. Coun-terfactuals have a different nature – rather than making claims about what is, counterfactuals concern themselves with what could be. So if A were true, what would be the consequences for B? Here, a problem quickly arises. How can one check the valid-ity of any given counterfactual conditional? A brief illustration: while the truth of the material conditional, “If Jimmy drove, he crashed his car” is easy to check through reference to real events, how would one check the counterfactual, “If Jimmy had driven, he would have crashed his car?” Since this statement does not concern what actually happened, its validity cannot be deter-mined by reference to any real event. Rather, information might be required on how safe Jimmy’s driving is generally, what car he drives, the road conditions and, in fact, an infinite number of other factors.

It seems, therefore, that any theory that uses counterfactuals requires some scheme by which their validity can be determined. Lewis was aware of this issue and proposed a solution that serves as the basis for his theory – the idea of possible worlds. The claim is that our universe is only one of an infinite number of possible worlds, and that each of these worlds is different in some respect; anything from a minor detail such as the color of a given chair, to things as drastic as the laws of physics. In fact, the only laws that all possible worlds must follow are the laws of

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logic, such as the law of non-contradiction, which says that no proposition can be both true and false. Using this idea, Lewis claims that in order to check whether a counterfactual condi-tional is true, one must simply look at the nearest possible world in which the prerequisite condition (called “A” above) holds. The nearest possible world is one in which as many aspects of the world as possible are similar to ours. So if A is true in our world, then ours is the nearest possible world required. If A does not hold, then by definition the possible world of interest is the one where absolutely everything is identical to our world, except that A holds. For instance, if a counterfactual is concerned with a spe-cific red chair being blue, then the nearest possible world that must be examined is the one where that chair indeed happens to be blue, but everything else is unchanged from our world. Lewis proposes that in this nearest possible world it is possible to turn the original counterfactual claim of interest into a material condi-tional claim; that is, since A is true in this world of interest, we should check if B is also true. If that is the case, then the material conditional holds in this possible world, which logically implies that the original counterfactual holds in ours.

Causation is, in fact, a bit more complicated. To claim that event A caused event B, one must first validate the correspond-ing counterfactual (what Lewis calls “causal dependence”), but there also must be a chain of events of any length, termed a “causal chain,” leading from event A to event B, with every event causally dependant on its predecessor. With this scheme, it is worth noting that while causal dependence is sufficient for causation (by definition, it is simply a causal chain with two members), causation is not simply causal dependence. This is because causation is a transitive relationship (A can cause B, can cause C, etc.) while causal dependence is not.

While this approach may seem promising, it is not without its flaws. The most obvious argument that can be leveled at the pos-sible worlds theory is that it is too demanding, metaphysically. This argument is something of a reductio ad absurdum – the kind of use of possible worlds that Lewis proposes implies that they exist, a notion that is absurd and impossible. After all, if one ac-

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cepts the existence of infinite possible worlds somewhere in the realm of reality, one might as well accept ghosts, witches or any other number of potentially convenient explanatory agents that cannot be shown to exist. This argument is even more cogent given Lewis’s conviction that possible worlds are in fact real enti-ties, 5 to the point that we are only one of these worlds, such that a person in another possible world considering us is no less real than we are while considering that person’s possible world.

However, if one rejects this belief, there does not appear to be any reason to be convinced by the above criticism. Though it may seem devastating at first to Lewis’s theory to reject the idea that possible worlds are real entities in the physical non-abstract sense in which Lewis views them, this is not the case. After all, convenient logical devices are commonly used without any need to establish a physical existence. One obvious example comes from our use of numbers. Though whether abstract objects such as numbers are in some sense “real” is still an ongoing debate, there is no doubt that numbers are not physical entities in the sense that possible worlds are claimed to be. Nevertheless, and regardless of whether they are real or not, it is difficult to deny their theoretical usefulness. In a similar way, there is no need to claim that possible worlds exist as physical entities in order to employ them for testing counterfactuals. Granting possible worlds the same ontological status as abstract objects seems more than sufficient.

Another issue that has long been used to challenge most theories of causation is the question of preemption. 6 Preemption occurs when some event A causes event B, but if A had not caused event B, then some event A-2 would have caused B. The issue for Lewis’s approach arises from his use of counterfactuals in the concept of causal dependence. If B would have occurred regardless of A, then it would seem that A did not cause B be-cause one of the two conditions of Lewis’s causal dependence does not hold. If A had not occurred, then B still would have oc-curred.

However, there is a problem with the idea of preemption, and with the criticism it implies: is the B that occurs due to A the



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same as that B that would have occurred due to A-2? An example will illustrate the issue. If Jimmy crashes his car (B) because he falls asleep at the wheel (A), but he would have crashed anyway because of black ice up ahead (A-2), there is an important sense in which the two crashes would not be identical, with respect to what the car hits, at what time, at what angle, etc. In fact, the two crashes would not be the same event at all. In this way, the argu-ment of preemption seems to employ a sort of philosophical cheating. In a more rigorous and accurate way, preemption can be rephrased using the type/token distinction. Type of events B, such as “crashing the car,” are indeed subject to preemption, but these are not a problem for Lewis. However, two token (specific) events can never be identical to each other, so that the same to-ken of event can never have two causes such as in the above ex-ample. Preemption is thus a flawed argument, not only against Lewis’s explanation of causation, but against all others as well.

There is, however, one criticism of the possible worlds ap-proach that is, perhaps, a little more original and cannot be dis-missed as easily as the two objections above. While possible worlds do indeed seem to be a method of truth evaluation for counterfactual conditionals, it is worth examining precisely how this is achieved. In the example above, “If Jimmy had driven, he would have crashed his car,” we may check the validity of this statement using possible worlds. Assuming Jimmy did not drive (or crash his car) in our world, we take the nearest possible world – one in which Jimmy did indeed drive. Now, according to Lewis’s method we check whether Jimmy indeed crashed his car in this world. But here lies the problem, for there does not seem to be any easy way to decide whether this is true. In fact, it appears once again that we must rely on factors such as Jimmy’s driving record, road conditions, etc. Though things have become more complicated, we are back to using our intuitions regarding causation. Though intuition is a useful tool in philosophy, and one against which many theories and views can be tested, it is not at all helpful here – rather, determining a causal link using intuition is precisely what we sought to avoid. Lewis’s entire proposal can be viewed as an attempt to remove ourselves from

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intuition by finding a more formal, less subjective way to deter-mine the presence of causation. Indeed, worse than making no progress, it seems that the possible worlds proposal actively hin-ders the effort. Starting from intuitions about causation, an entire complex proposal that is explanatorily and perhaps metaphysi-cally demanding has been built, only to find that in the end it re-lies on precisely the same intuition to make the final judgment call. This critique appears devastating unless some response to it can be found.

Lewis’s proposal, while flawed, is not doomed. Though it may seem from the critiques above that possible worlds over-complicate the situation without moving past the use of intui-tion, it must be noted that causal dependence and causal chains are valuable insights, especially once the criticism from preemp-tion is dismissed. In fact, the entire proposal could still be res-cued with some suggestion of a way to move from our intuitions to a more mechanized explanation of causation once Lewis’s paradigm has been employed and a nearest possible world found. Until such time, however, it appears that while it is an interesting suggestion, this account of causation does not ad-vance our understanding of the phenomenon significantly. Cau-sation proves once again to be a slippery philosophical oppo-nent, and much remains to be investigated.

NOTES 1 See Hume, Inquiries concerning Human Understanding and Con-cerning the Principles of Morals.. 2 See Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation. 3 See Lewis, "Causation,” 556-67; and Lewis, "Counterfactuals and Comparative Possibility," 418-46. 4 Lewis, Counterfactuals,1-3. 5 Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, 1 – 92. 6 Lewis, "Causation,” 556-67.



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WORKS CITED Hume, David. Inquiries concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, third edition, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Lewis, David. "Causation.” Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 556-67. Lewis, David. Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1973. Lewis, David. "Counterfactuals and Comparative Possibility." Journal of Philosophical Logic 2 (1973): 418-46. Lewis, David. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1986. Mackie, John. The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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The Natural Philosophies of Descartes and Newton: A Kuhnian Reflection

Stephen Trochimchuk

homas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1 presents a radical account of the process of scientific change, and of the nature of science itself. The Scien-tific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-ries serves as the model of what Kuhn meant as a

proper scientific revolution, and Kuhn focuses primarily on the Copernican Revolution to illustrate this point. However, this paper intends to illustrate one other transition within this period that also supports Kuhn’s theory – namely, the transition be-tween the natural philosophies of the Cartesians and the Newto-nians. In particular, I would like to show how a number of con-cepts fundamental to each program are indicative of Kuhn’s no-tion of incommensurability between two competing paradigms, which serve to prevent an intelligible link between both worlds.

Kuhn begins his approach to the history and philosophy of science by rejecting the commonly held view of science as con-tinually progressing, that each scientific theory builds upon pre-ceding theories, edging always closer to the truth. Kuhn sees this as far too simplistic an account of the history of science, and ar-gues that there are radical and incommensurable discontinuities between different episodes of scientific investigation which make the idea of continuous progress untenable.

Kuhn sees the history of science as punctuated by radical in-

Stephen Trochimchuk is a senior at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he is studying philosophy and political science. His philoso-phical interests lie primarily in social and political thought, particularly issues in liberalism and postmodernity, as well as continental philosophy since Hegel and Nietzsche. After graduation, Stephen will be continuing his studies in phi-losophy at the graduate level. This is his first published philosophical work.

T


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tellectual revolutions that serve to overturn lengthy periods of mere puzzle-solving. These periods of puzzle-solving are char-acterized less by independent and objective research than by ad-herence to prescribed assumptions and expected outcomes. Dur-ing these periods of so-called “normal science,” curious or unex-pected findings are brushed aside as irrelevant, since they do not serve to confirm or support the current system of scientific the-ory. Therefore, research that serves to challenge current assump-tions is most often viciously attacked and debunked or ignored to the point of marginalization.

Kuhn refers to this system of dominant beliefs and assump-tions as a paradigm. Paradigms “provide scientists not only with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making. In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mix-ture.”2 According to Kuhn, only results which tend to strengthen the current paradigm are accepted during periods of normal sci-ence. The paradigm itself is never criticized directly or chal-lenged properly:

Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new theories, and they are often in-tolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the ar-ticulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.3

However, Kuhn claims that when a paradigm fails to provide adequate explanatory force for observed phenomena, or a new, more powerful model has greater explanatory power, the para-digm reaches a crisis and is eventually overthrown by intellectual revolutions. Thus, there is a “paradigm-shift,” in which a new paradigm literally takes the place of an old one. Kuhn writes:

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the transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal sci-ence can emerge is far from a cumulative proc-ess one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruc-tion of the field from new fundamentals, a re-construction that changes some of the field’s most elementary theoretical generalization as well as many of its paradigm methods and ap-plications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap be-tween the problems that can be solves by the old and the new paradigm. But there will also be a decisive difference in the modes of solution.4

As Kuhn illustrates, the Copernican Revolution is the quintessen-tial paradigm shift: where an entirely new, heliocentric world-view replaced the old, Ptolemaic idea that the sun revolves around the earth. During the period of the Ptolemaic paradigm, scientists based their findings and interpretations upon the as-sumptions and predispositions provided by the Ptolemaic sys-tem of beliefs. Only when Copernicus – with the help of Galileo – turned these beliefs on their heads could there be a proper paradigm-shift.

Kuhn claims that paradigm shifts are similar to a religious awakening or conversion, in that one paradigm replaces another “not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sud-den and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightning flash’ that ‘inundates’ a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution.”5 Furthermore, “once a paradigm through which to view nature has been found, there is no such thing as research in the absence of any paradigm. To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to re-ject science itself. That act reflects not on the paradigm, but on

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the man. Inevitably he will be seen by his colleagues as ‘the car-penter who blames his tools.’”6

An essential aspect of Kuhn’s theory is the notion of incom-mensurability, which serves to defy the notion that science pro-gresses necessarily towards some ultimate truth. For Kuhn, the rejection of a previous paradigm in favor of a completely new one rules out the possibility of comparison. This explains the problem that arises when two competing theories vie for the minds of the scientific community, that there is a certain break-down of rational argument and communication between adher-ents of competing programs. Kuhn argues that this is because scientists working within different historical periods and differ-ent paradigms live in psychologically different worlds. As Kuhn points out, “After Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world.”7 He means that when Ptolemy observes the sun, he ob-serves an object that moves around the earth, whereas Coperni-cus sees the central star of the solar system – their viewpoints are fundamentally incommensurable, in that the word “sun” means something entirely different within each paradigm. Supporters of either the Ptolemaic or heliocentric theories simply cannot ar-gue in rational terms, since they are unable to argue about the same thing – they each speak a different language with a different conceptual vocabulary:

the Copernicans who denied its traditional title ‘planet’ to the sun were not only learning what ‘planet’ meant or what the sun was. Instead, they were changing the meaning of ‘planet’ so that it could continue to make useful distinc-tions in a world where all celestial bodies, not just the sun, were seen differently from the way they had been seen before.8

Therefore, for Kuhn, there exist deep conceptual gaps between competing paradigms in science. Despite the fact that a scientist can learn a new lexicon and become “bilingual” between two competing paradigms, there is still no way of direct translation



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between them. As a consequence, one often has to use non-rational means of persuasion in order to convince an adherent of one paradigm to adopt another.9

For Descartes’ mechanical philosophy, “everything in nature is to be explained in terms of the size, shape, and motion of the small parts that make up a sensible body.”10 Indeed, Descartes would grant no other properties to matter than extension and motion, and he essentially reduces all mechanics and physics to a geometry of motions. In essence, Descartes’ mechanical philoso-phy treats the whole world as if it were a collection of machines, as he outlines in the Principles of Philosophy:

I have described this earth and indeed the whole visible universe as if it were a machine. I have considered only the various shapes and move-ments of its parts.11

I do not recognize any difference between arti-facts and natural bodies except that the opera-tions of artifacts are for the most part performed by mechanisms which are large enough to be easily perceivable by the senses—as indeed must be the case if they are to be capable of be-ing manufactured by human beings. The effects produced in nature, by contrast, almost always depend on structures which are so minute that they completely elude our senses.12

Men who are experienced in dealing with ma-chinery can take a particular machine whose function they know and, by looking at some of its parts, easily form a conjecture about the de-sign of the other parts, which they cannot see. In the same way I have attempted to consider the observable effects and parts of natural bodies and track down the imperceptible causes and particles which produce them.13



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In keeping with his mechanical conceptualization of the world, Descartes even goes as far as to claim that the human body is “nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.”14 Therefore, as mechanics subsume physics, “everything in physics now receives a mechanical explanation, that is to say, everything is explained as if it were a machine.”15

Cartesian mechanical philosophy adhered to a form of cor-puscularism in order to explain the nature of physical objects in the world. This view is closely related to atomism in that it claims that all physical objects – indeed, the entire universe – were composed of small corpuscles of various sizes, although corpuscles were seen as infinitely divisible, rather than being theoretically indivisible on the atomic account. What was unique in Descartes’ interpretation of the physical world was that he claimed that there could be no void between particles. Instead, Descartes argued that all matter was constantly swirling to pre-vent a void as corpuscles moved through other matter, thus the notion of a “vacuum” was a meaningless term. Le Monde, or The World, presents a corpuscular account of the universe in which swirling vortices explain the creation of the solar system and the circular motion of planets around the Sun, among other phenom-ena,. In The World, Descartes states that

when a body leaves its place, it always enters into the place of some other body, and so on to the last body…Thus there is no more a vacuum between bodies when they are moving about than when they are at rest. And note here that in order for this to happen it is not necessary that all the parts of bodies moving together should be arranged exactly in a ring, as in a true circle.16

In light of this view of the physical world, Descartes attempted to explain the apparent “force” that causes objects to “fall” towards



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the center of the earth, obviously referred to as “gravitational force” today. Garber highlights the importance of Descartes’ in-terpretation of gravity as a mechanical process:

If everything in nature is to be explained as if it produced effects like a machine, then gravita-tion cannot simply be assumed; gravitation itself must also be explained, and, within the mechani-cal philosophy, it must be explained mechanisti-cally. Or, to put it another way, when mechanics subsume physics, we can no longer appeal out-side of mechanics to some distinct science to supply necessary premises concerning heavi-ness: the premises necessary for doing the tradi-tional mechanics of heavy bodies must come from within the mechanical philosophy itself.17

In keeping with his notions that space is entirely composed of various particles, that movement through space is merely a dis-placement of some particles with others, and that particles are interpreted only in terms of size, shape, and motion, Descartes claims that objects do not fall towards the earth as a result of any gravitational pull. Instead, he claims that the tendency to fall to-ward the centre of the earth is a result of an “interaction between a body and a vortex of subtle matter that turns around the earth…bodies are pushed towards the centre of the earth by col-liding with the particles of subtle matter in the vortex,”18 and that “power which the individual particles of celestial matter have to move away from the centre of the earth cannot achieve its effect unless, in moving upwards, the particles displace various terres-trial particles, thus pushing them and driving them down-wards.”19 His notion of heaviness is summarized as follows:

All the subtle matter which is between here and the moon rotates rapidly round the earth, and pushes towards it all the bodies which cannot move so fast. It pushes them with greater force



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when they have not yet begun to fall than when they are already falling; for after all, if they are falling as fast as it is moving, it will not push them at all, and if they are falling faster, it will actually resist them.20

Therefore, Descartes’ conceptualization of “gravity” is pro-

vided in terms of size, shape, and motion alone, and fits within his general conceptualization of the world as fully consisting of various particles. In light of this, it is unsurprising that the Car-tesian interpretation of gravity is based solely on the collision between a heavy body and the particles of subtle matter. These are mechanical processes, in that they are explained “in terms one uses in explaining the behavior of a machine. In this way the (spring-driven) clock or the planetary system…can be explained by Descartes strictly in terms of size, shape, and motion of their parts.”21

It should be noted that Newton’s account of the world is also widely regarded as one that is based on mechanics. However, what is important is the distinction between the term mechanics within the two philosophies. As mentioned earlier, Descartes’ mechanics was a general view of the world as entirely functioning as a machine; Newton, on the other hand, viewed the term me-chanics as it is generally used today – it is the study of motion and the forces that change it. Forces, in Newtonian terms, do not neces-sarily function in the same way as a machine, and therefore may be explained in fundamentally different ways than they can in Cartesian terms.

Newton’s greatest achievement was his theory of gravity, from which he was able to explain the motions of all the planets, including the moon. Newton proved that every planet in the so-lar system at all times accelerates towards the sun, and that the acceleration of a body towards the sun is at a rate inversely pro-portional to the square of its distance from it. This, of course, led to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, by which every particle in the universe attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses



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and that is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Furthermore:

If a body be attracted by another, and its attrac-tion be vastly stronger when it is contiguous to the attracting body than when they are sepa-rated from one another by a very small interval; the forces of the particles of the attracting body decrease, in the recess of the body attracted, in more than a duplicate ratio of the distance of the particles.22

Newton claims that his theory explains:

That all bodies about the earth gravitate towards the earth, and that in proportion to the quantity of matter which they severally contain; that the moon likewise, according to the quantity of its matter, gravitates towards the earth…All bodies whatsoever are endowed with a principle of mutual gravitation.23

What is significant about this discrepancy between the two para-digms is the specific terminology or lexicon used by each para-digm in their respective accounts of gravity. Newton’s explana-tion of gravity in terms of a quality of a body of mass and an at-traction between two bodies is fundamentally at odds with a Car-tesian conception of gravity. For Descartes, as Garber illustrated, when mechanics subsumes physics, we can no longer appeal be-yond mechanics to some distinct science to supply the necessary premises concerning heaviness – the premises necessary for do-ing the traditional mechanics of heavy bodies must come from within the mechanical philosophy itself. Explaining gravita-tional force in terms of attraction does not fit within the Cartesian paradigm of explaining phenomena solely in terms of size, shape, and motion. As a consequence, Cartesian science simply could not accept Newton’s “occult” idea of gravity as being an



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attractive force innate in bodies of mass. Considering gravity as a universal force operating over empty space inevitably led to a problem of how any force could act at a distance. For a mechani-cal philosopher like Descartes, nothing could act at a distance. Rather, gravity must be talked about only in terms of a mechani-cal process – namely, as interaction between motion and parti-cles.

Newton also claims to have rejected the Cartesian explana-tion of planetary motion in terms of vortices, arguing that the Cartesian conception is missing a fundamental active principle that is essential for the perpetual motion of a vortex:

Cor. 4. …in order to continue a vortex in the same state of motion, some active principle is required from which the globe may receive con-tinually the same quantity of motion which it is always communicating to the matter of the vor-tex. Without such a principle it will undoubt-edly come to pass that the globe and the inward parts of the vortex, being always propagating their motion to the outward parts, and not re-ceiving any new motion, will gradually move slower and slower, and at last be carried round no longer.24

Newton claims that the trajectory of planets is to be explained in accordance with the Newtonian conception of gravitational force, as opposed to any appeal to vortices (as evident in the Cartesian interpretation):

The planets move in ellipses which have their common focus in the centre of the sun; and, by radii drawn to that centre, they describe areas proportional to the times of description.25

That the moon gravitates towards the earth, and by the force of gravity is continually drawn off



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from a rectilinear motion, and retained in its or-bit.26

For Descartes, the only cause for motion is vortices; to speak of it in any other way is to speak in essentially occult terms.

Within the Cartesian paradigm, there must be something physical and sensible between two interacting bodies to influence each other. Newton provides no such evidence:

Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power… But hitherto I have not been able to discover the causes of those properties of grav-ity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenom-ena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypothe-ses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.27

Newton rejects the Cartesian conception of vortices by instead appealing to gravitational force, but offers no cause of gravity – merely that gravity is a force that is proportional to the product of two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the point masses, and as mentioned earlier, he uses such anti-Cartesian terms as “attraction” to explain such a relationship. Indeed, in Newtonian natural philosophy, there is an apparent absence of causal hypotheses altogether.

For Newton, the cause of gravity is an unnecessary part of the explanation of how gravity operates. Instead, Newton literally turns the Cartesian methodology (the need for causal hypothe-ses) on its head – as well as its notion of gravity. Descartes sees “gravity” as a “push” force, while Newton views “gravity” as a “pull” or “attraction,” an inherent quality of bodies of mass. These terms used within each paradigm, and the respective ap-proaches to scientific problem-solving are so fundamentally in-



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compatible, so incommensurable, that they resist any forms of translation, and thus the debate cannot be resolved by purely rational means.

In addition to rejecting the Cartesian conceptualization of planetary motion, Newton also dismissed Galileo's mechanical theory of Earth tides in general favor of the Kepler-Gilbert the-ory, which holds that tides are caused gravitationally, primarily by the interaction between the moon and the earth. Further-more, Newton also rejected the Cartesian notion that all spaces are entirely filled with particles and thus, there can be no void between particles:

Cor. 3. All spaces are not equally full; for if all spaces were equally full, then the specific grav-ity of the fluid which fills the region of the air, on the account of the extreme density of the matter, would fall nothing short of the specific gravity of quicksilver, or gold, or any other of the most dense body; and, therefore, neither gold, nor any other body, could descend in air; for bodies do not descend in fluids, unless they are specifically heavier than the fluids. And if the quantity of matter in a given space can, by any rarefaction, be diminished, what should hinder a diminution to infinity?

Cor. 4. If all the solid particles of all bodies are of the same density, nor can be rarefied without pores, a void, space, or vacuum must be granted.28

However, if there is indeed a “fundamental conceptual gap” between the two paradigms, how is it that Newton seems to be able to argue against Cartesian mechanics so intelligibly? On the contrary, although the argument may appear to have established a bridge between the two paradigms, when given a closer exami-nation, it only reinforces the conceptual gap between them.



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In order to refute the Cartesian conceptualization of “space,” and the claim that there can be no vacuum, Newton appeals to “density,” a property of a body of matter. However, in Cartesian mechanics, there is no concept of “density.” Instead, “the nature of body consists not in weight, hardness, colour, or the like, but simply in extension.”29 For Descartes, matter has no other prop-erties other than size or three-dimensional extension. In measur-ing the quantity of matter, a Cartesian only relies on the meas-urement of the surface area or volume and the relative amount of three different sizes of particles. Bodies made up of a relatively high amount of the smallest particles are less solid, while those with a relatively high amount of the largest particles are more solid. For a Newtonian, quantity of matter is “mass,” a calcula-tion of density and volume; for a Cartesian, the notion of “mass” is spatial extension, and nothing more. The “density” of particles in a body of matter has no place in the equation; indeed, “density” has no place in Cartesian mechanics. For Newton, mass is not extension, yet extension is the only inherent property of matter for Descartes. As a consequence, the Newtonian concepts of “mass” and “density” are simply incomprehensible to a Carte-sian. Thus, although it appears as though Newton argues against the Cartesian claim that there can be no vacuum in space, it is only through the use of terms that are fundamentally unin-telligible to the Cartesian. Newton makes no attempt to refute Cartesian mechanical philosophy using terminology within the Cartesian paradigm, only that which is conceptually outside of it, which dissolves any grounds for rational, intelligible argument.

What was particularly significant about Descartes’ program was that he set out to provide an account of natural phenomena through reason: in an a priori, deductive, synthetic methodology, rather than purely through examination of empirical evidence. Although there is a great deal of debate over the role of experi-ence and non-mathematical evidence in Descartes’ natural phi-losophy, what seems to be clear is that Descartes held a priori rea-soning, based on first causes or principles of nature established through geometry or mathematics, to be paramount in scientific inquiry. As Sakellariadis demonstrates, Descartes was particu-



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larly dismissive of empirical evidence presented to him by his contemporaries that served to counter his own theories:

The burden of Descartes’ [letter to Mersenne of 18 December 1629] suggests that Mersenne sent him some data that seemed to refute his the-ory…Referring to the measured acceleration of the pendulum bob, [Descartes] wrote: “As for the magnitude, I ignore it. And even if he can make a thousand experiments to find it more accurately, I do not have to take the trouble to do them myself, if they cannot be explained by reason.” No matter how clearly the results of Beeckman’s and Mersenne’s observations dif-fered from the predictions of Descartes’ princi-ples, no matter how accurate or reliable the re-sults, Descartes claimed that he was not con-strained to consider them…unless the results could be adequately explained by another, more logical theory.30

Therefore, by and large, Descartes sees proper scientific theories as being derivable through a priori reasoning, and consequently to be held no matter what empirical evidence served to counter them. In Kuhnian terms, Descartes has become entrenched within a certain way of seeing things, in that he tends to see only that which he expects to see. Only results which tend to strengthen the current paradigm get accepted during this period of “Cartesian normal science.” Indeed, it would seem as though such rigidity may have served to cloud Descartes’ vision.

On the other hand, a scientific hypothesis or theory that relies primarily on empirical evidence is, on the Cartesian paradigm, simply an inadequate one. However, within the Newtonian paradigm, even the approach to natural philosophy is fundamen-tally distinct from that of the Cartesian. As Newton proclaimed during his Presidency at the Royal Society, the Newtonian



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program was to reinstate the significance of empirical evidence in scientific inquiry:

Natural Philosophy consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature, and reducing them, as far as they may be, to general Rules or Laws – establishing these rules by observa-tions and experiments, and thence deducing the causes and effects of things.31

Newton’s empirical method claimed to provide the proper de-scription of the relevant natural phenomenon and, in light of that description, provide general principles that account for such phe-nomena. No a priori reasoning is necessary to account for natural phenomena. Indeed, the Newtonian empirical method was in-tended to “loosen what Newton took to be the pernicious grip of Cartesian notions within natural philosophy.”32 For Descartes, empirical evidence alone can neither confirm nor disconfirm hy-potheses; for Newton, they are essential for both. Clearly, the two paradigms have distinctly incompatible criteria for what counts as an adequately solved scientific problem.

To reiterate, according to the mechanistic scientific program, all natural phenomena must be explained in terms of size, shape, and motion. As a result, a scientist working within this para-digm must explain all natural phenomena, such as planetary mo-tion or trajectories and gravitational force, in terms of various collisions between small bodies making up the larger bodies of everyday experience. The idea that things operate only through the size, shape, and motion of their parts is not intelligible to the Newtonian as it is to the Cartesian. Within the Newtonian para-digm, such mechanical explanations are misplaced, and are en-tirely unnecessary. Instead, as in the case of gravitational force, one explains such natural phenomena in terms of an attractive force between each body in the universe. There exists a signifi-cant incompatibility between the Cartesian and Newtonian con-ceptions of both “matter” and “space.” The foundation of Carte-sian physics relies on the denial of the existence of vacuums or



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voids between or within particles. On the Newtonian concep-tion, such denial does not exist; indeed, it is viewed as entirely erroneous. When a Cartesian talks of “space,” his conceptualiza-tion is so fundamentally opposed to that of the Newtonian para-digm that it defies accurate comparison. “Space” for a Cartesian simply is not “space” for a Newtonian – the same goes for “matter,” “gravity,” and “planetary motion.” Thus there are se-rious difficulties in directly comparing or translating these com-peting conceptions; in other words, these terms are fundamen-tally incommensurable.

The consequences of such a fundamental conceptual gap is great, as it is indicative of how the Newtonian system did not build upon the ideas of the Cartesians, but rather reinvented the nature of science itself – both the explanatory power of science and its limits. There was no clear progression or improvement from Cartesianism to Newtonianism. Instead, the Cartesian para-digm was quite suddenly discarded by scientists and replaced by the Newtonian worldview:

[W]hile the standards of corpuscularism re-mained in effect, the search for a mechanical ex-planation of gravity was one of the most chal-lenging problems for those who accepted the Principia as paradigm…Unable either to practice science without the Principia or to make that work conform to the corpuscular standards of the seventeenth century, scientists gradually ac-cepted the view that gravity was indeed innate. By the mid-eighteenth century that interpreta-tion had been almost universally accepted, and the result was a genuine reversion…Innate at-tractions and repulsions joined size, shape, posi-tion, and motion as physically irreducible pri-mary properties of matter.33

Due to these fundamental gaps between the two worldviews, the remaining supporters of the Cartesian paradigm were unable



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(though, in many cases, they were quite unwilling) to change their own worldview and adopt the Newtonian program, and thus became increasingly marginalized by the scientific commu-nity. The Cartesian paradigm, rather than being acknowledged as deficient and accordingly improved upon, eventually died out with the last of its supporters. Just as Kuhn claimed, the debate between the two camps was not resolved by purely rational means such as deliberation or subtle adjustments in light of new findings. It was, rather, a relatively sudden switch creating a new, widely held, distinctly Newtonian worldview.

digms. However, this is clearly not the case when analyzing the Cartesian and Newtonian paradigms. As a consequence of op-posing standards for what counts as an adequately explained scientific quandary, as well as a fundamental conceptual gap be-tween the two systems, there is no such intelligible link between the Cartesian and Newtonian paradigms, which in turn provides clear support for the Kuhnian theory of the nature of scientific revolutions.

NOTES 1 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd Edition. Chi-cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 2 Ibid., 109. 3 Ibid., 24. 4 Ibid., 85. 5 Ibid., 122. 6 Ibid., 79. 7 Ibid., 117. 8 Ibid., 129. 9 The shift from Aristotelianism to Cartesian mechanics is exam-ined in Daniel Garber’s “Descartes and the Scientific Revolution: Some Kuhnian Reflections.” Garber illustrates that “there could scarcely be a more paradigmatic instance of a Kuhnian scientific



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As Garber has shown, it may be inappropriate to deny the intelligible link between the Aristotelian and Cartesian para-

revolution than this, the transition between one scientific para-digm and another.” However, it should be noted that Garber argues that the Kuhnian model of incommensurability between two paradigms may not apply in this particular case. Garber claims that there is no such conceptual gap between the two paradigms, as the notion of a machine was as “fully compatible on the Aristotelian paradigm as it was on the Cartesian.” Never-theless, as it will be shown, a Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm analysis is indeed supportive of Kuhn’s model. 10 Garber, “Descartes and the Scientific Revolution: Some Kuhnian Reflections,” 408. 11 Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, Pr IV 188. 12 Ibid., Pr IV 203. 13 Ibid., Pr IV 203. 14 Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. XI, 99. 15 Garber, “Descartes, Mechanics, and the Mechanical Philoso-phy,” 192. 16 Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 86. 17 Garber, “Descartes, Mechanics, and the Mechanical Philoso-phy,” 193. 18 Ibid., 195. 19 Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, Pr IV 23. 20 Ibid., vol. III, 135. 21 Garber, “Descartes, Mechanics, and the Mechanical Philoso-phy,” 198. 22 Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 173

23 Ibid., 325. 24 Ibid., 314. 25 Ibid., 342. 26 Ibid., 331. 27 Ibid., 446. 28 Ibid., 336. 29 Descartes. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, Pr II 4. 30 Sakellariadis, “Descartes’s Use of Empirical Evidence to Test Hypotheses,” 69. 31 Newton, Philosophical Writings, ix.



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32 Ibid., xii. 33 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 105-106.

WORKS CITED Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes. Ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, new edition. 11 vols. Paris: CNRS/Vrin, 1964-74. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Edited and translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-91. Garber, Daniel. “Descartes and the Scientific Revolution: Some Kuhnian Reflections.” Perspectives on Science. 9.4 (2001): 405-422. Garber, Daniel. “Descartes, Mechanics, and the Mechanical Philosophy.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy. XXVI (2002): 185-204.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd Edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Newton, Isaac. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1964. Newton, Isaac. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Andrew Janiak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sakellariadis, Spyros. “Descartes’s Use of Empirical Evidence to Test Hypotheses.” Isis. 73.1 (1982): 68-76.



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E p i s t e m e announces the scheduled publication of

Volume XX • May 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS Episteme is a student-run journal that aims to recognize and encourage excellence in undergraduate philosophy by providing examples of some of the best work currently being done in undergraduate philoso-phy programs. Episteme is published under the auspices of Denison University’s Department of Philosophy. Episteme will consider papers written by undergraduate students in any area of philosophy. Papers are evaluated according to the following criteria: quality of research, depth of philosophic inquiry, creativity, original insight and clarity. Submissions to be considered for the twen-tieth issue (May 2009) should adhere to the following stipulations:

1. Be a maximum of 5,000 words. 2. Combine research and original insight. 3. Include a cover sheet that provides the following informa-tion: author’s name, mailing address (current and permanent), email address, telephone number, college or university name, title of submission and word count. 4. Include a works cited page in the Chicago Manual of Style format. Use endnotes rather than footnotes. 5. To allow for a blind review process, the author’s name should not appear on the submission itself. 6. Submissions should be sent electronically, formatted for Mi-crosoft Word.

Please send papers and cover sheets to [email protected].

Rolling submissions accepted. Submissions to be considered for May 2009 publication must be received by November 14, 2008.

Questions should be submitted to The Editors

([email protected]).


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Vol. XIX, May 2008

Documents

Transcript of Vol. XIX, May 2008