A Critique of Rawls

John Rawls (1921-2002) is to be revered primarily for two doctrines: his conception of justice as fairness, and the proposition that baseball is the best of all games. There is no longer an opening day, but in this opening week it seems apt to consider his arguments for the latter. There are six:

First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher's mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play.

It is as if these words were written behind a veil of ignorance. Baseball's rules were in serious flux for at least 50 years, with sigificant changes afterwards. Some highlights:

1845: pitching distance is 45'.
1865-9: pitcher's box introduced and modified year to year.
1872: pitcher allowed to snap the ball but must still throw underhand.
1880-1: number of balls for a walk reduced from 9 to 8 to 7.
1881: pitching distance increased to 50'.
1883: pitching allowed from anywhere up to shoulder height.
1884: base on balls to 6.
1886: to 5.
1889: and finally to 4.
1893: pitching distance is at last increased to 60'6", and pitcher's box eliminated.
1895: foul balls become strikes.
1904: height of pitcher's mound established at no more than 15".
1920: abolition of the spitball.
1968: pitcher's mound lowered to 10".
1973: DH rule introduced in the AL.

Not to mention changes in the size of the strike zone, official and otherwise...

Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types.

Third: the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.

These claims will be tempting to anyone with a soft spot for David Wells. But they were rejected by no less an authority than Phil Rizzuto, in verse:

The legs are so important.
In golf they're very,
People don't realize
How important legs are in golf,
Or in baseball,
And football, definitely.
Track.
Oh, in track.
All-important.
Jumping.
Soccer.
Is there anything, what?
Is there anything where the legs
Are not the most important?

Even in philosophy, I hasten to add.

Fourth: all plays of the game are open to view...

Fifth: baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball...

Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer.

These are familiar thoughts, but 4 and 5 apply to cricket, too, and the last is notoriously misleading. As Bill James is fond of pointing out, before the installation of lights, baseball did have a clock: it was dusk, when the Owl of Minerva flies.

I am British and I love baseball, but I never liked cricket and they are different in a crucial respect, which is the deepest attraction of baseball and which Rawls omits: the stillness at the centre of the game. Cricket may be dull, but the bowler runs to the crease before launching the ball. In baseball, the pitcher stands, looking for a signal to which he responds with a barely discriminable nod or shake of the head, breathing into his glove, staring, staring - as we hold our breaths, and everything waits.

Unwritten Books

My greatest intellectual fear – one that afflicts me whenever I finish writing something – is that I will have no more ideas, that I will realize that I have nothing to say. It could be worse, of course: I could fail to realize that I have nothing to say.

By way of insurance and with the inspiration of George Steiner, I here record five proposals for books that I would like to write. Steiner's own unwritten books include one on artistic envy, others on Jewish identity and animal rights. Notes for a book on his attachment to privacy appear beside a chapter on copulating with partners of every nationality: a penetrating study of language and sex. Steiner's erotic descriptions defy parody; read the Sunday Times review.

The suggestions that follow are not so erudite or, I hope, quite so embarrassing; nor are they all entirely serious…

1. Oxford's Hypatias – For about a decade from the late 1930s to 1940s, Oxford was home to five of the most influential women in 20th century philosophy: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Mary Warnock. Two of them – the least important in academia – have written memoirs, and we have Peter Conradi's meticulous biography of Murdoch. But there is no serious intellectual history of this unparalleled time.

2. What Does It All Mean? – Despite their numerous flaws, these posts at least did not ignore the question: "Does life have meaning?" not "What does it take to live a meaningful life?"

3. Oscar Charleston: the Hoosier Comet – Charleston may have been the greatest all-around baseball player in history, next to Honus Wagner. He played center field for a series of teams in the Negro Leagues, ending up at first base and managing the Pittsburgh Crawfords at their peak, from 1932-36. Unlike some contemporaries, like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and even Willie Wells, he has yet to attract a biographer, though his life was surely as memorable as any.

4. Epistemology of the Old Ones – When I was 15, I compiled an enormous box of notes for a book contesting the now orthodox reading of H. P. Lovecraft as a "mechanistic materialist." I don't recall the particular charges and I could not recommend the notes – "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." – but I suspect that there was something there.

5. Hull is Other People – As previously advertised, the story of my path from Kingston-upon-Hull to Pittsburgh, the Sheffield of Western Pennsylvania.

Let me stress that I make no claim of copyright here: with the obvious exception of number 5, these titles are yours to take. I ask only for a brief acknowledgment – "from an original concept by…" – and for a copy of the published book.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

[The setting is heaven, with the old foes reunited at last.]

GRASSHOPPER: I didn't expect to see you here!

ANT: Believe me, I'm equally shocked! – Glad, too, since I recently read a book about you that contained some thoroughly implausible claims, and I've been looking for an opportunity to take them up.

G: Ah yes, my authorized biography. Tell me, though, what do you find implausible in it?

A: This, for a start (the ant begins to read from page 34):

[To] play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.

So Wittgenstein should quake? As a definition of game-playing, this is hopeless. It may work for sports like running a marathon, where the goal of being 26 miles from here before the others would be achieved more efficiently by taking a cab. But what about chess? Checkmate is defined in terms of the rules: it is not a goal that could be achieved more efficiently without them!

G: Perhaps you didn't read the book with sufficient care. What I call the "prelusory goal" of chess is that the pieces should be arranged so that the conditions for checkmate are satisfied, which indeed makes no sense apart from the rules, but can be achieved without following them, as when someone cheats, or sets up the board as an illustration without ever playing a game.

A: Hmm. Fair enough. Let me try again. Now that you've mentioned them, there seems to be a problem about those who cheat. Your definition mistakenly counts them as not even playing the game. Professionals will be tempted to do this all the time. Come to think of it, they cause problems anyway, since they don't accept the rules just because they make the activity in question possible, but in order to make a living.

G: You are certainly persistent, my friend. No surprise there! Professionals do accept the rules in order to make the activity possible, even though they have further reasons for welcoming its possibility. You were misled by the phrase "just because," which was never meant to conflict with this. And I deny that cheats play the game, strictly speaking; they merely pretend to.

A: Are you serious? Well, of course not, but still…you are proposing a definition on which the majority of baseball players are not playing baseball, since they pretend to have caught balls they merely trapped, to have tagged runners they missed, to have touched bases they merely passed by.

G: Not playing baseball when they do those things, that's all.

A: I can see that it's hopeless to press this line. Here's another: your definition counts as game-playing all kinds of activities that are not games at all. Think about the institutions of promising and punishment, as they are analyzed by Rawls in "Two Concepts of Rules": we engage in activity directed towards cooperation or deterrence using only means permitted by the rules of a practice, and we accept them because they make this activity possible – though, like professionals, we have further reasons for welcoming its possibility.

G: Ant! I would have expected you, of all insects, to do your homework. This is dealt with in the book. Rules against punishing the innocent or creating false expectations are not accepted because they make punishment and promising possible, but on moral grounds. That is why these institutions are not the institution of games.

A: But your proposal doesn't work. Yes, there are moral constraints on the institutions of punishing and promising, as there are on any activity – "Don't kill the shortstop sliding into second base" – but so long as the rules of those institutions are to some degree arbitrary, as Rawls suggests, you can't deny that they are games.

G: Let me answer you with a riddle, which came to me in a dream…

A: Don't play with me, grasshopper! The truth is that you don't have any reply to this objection. In fact, it's worse than you think. Almost any ritual that we engage in self-consciously is going to count as a game for you, along with a vast array of practices whose rules we adopt because we need some practice of that general kind. No wonder you find yourself able to argue that life in utopia consists exclusively in playing games: what doesn't? Alarmingly absent from your discussion, as reported in the book, is any reference to fun!

Not Pure Drivel

Some years ago, I wrote a post about philosophical humour. It ended up dwelling on philosophers. But there are also comedians who do philosophy.

Woody Allen is one of them, though he doesn't suit my taste: "When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." More compelling, perhaps, is Steven Wright, as in this incisive contribution to debates about absolute generality: "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

But these intellects suffer from a lack of formal philosophical instruction, without which comedy is at best contingent. They should learn from such luminaries as Bill Murray, Steve Martin and Ricky Gervais.

In Born Standing Up, Martin describes his comedic and philosophical education. The latter took place at Long Beach State College, was stoked by Lewis Carroll's logic, and ended in Wittgensteinian despair. The former began with the discovery of jokes, "musty one-liners from other comedians' acts, but to me they were as new as sunrise." Like John Stuart Mill, however, who in his nervous breakdown was "seriously tormented by the […] exhaustibility of musical combinations," and Frank Ramsey, who found that there was nothing to discuss, Martin faced a crisis: what to do when the jokes run out, like the periods of Times Roman?

His solution was a construction of genius, the rigorous application of logic to the problems of life. Objecting to the Freudian theory of laughter as the release of pent-up tension, Martin asked:

What if there were no punchlines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension?

This refutation of the tension theory inadvertently confirms its rival: the conception of comedy as incongruity. What could be more incongruous, and thus hilarious, than set-up after set-up deflated, no punchline ever supplied?

On this basis, we can prove the necessity of humour. If a set-up is followed by an incongruous punchline, then the joke is funny; if there is no punchline or if it is not incongruous, this too is incongruous and therefore funny. Our happy conclusion – Steve Martin's sublime discovery – is that it is impossible not to be funny. You've got to laugh.

Philosophy for Elliot

Plato, Republic:

Suppose that we were painting a statue, and someone came up to us and said, "Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body: the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black"; to him we might fairly answer, "Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful."

Kant, Critique of Judgement:

The faculty of desire, so far as it is determinable only through concepts, i.e. to act in conformity with the representation of a purpose, would be the will. But an object, or a state of mind, or even an action, is called purposive, although its possibility does not necessarily presuppose the representation of a purpose, merely because its possibility can be explained and conceived by us only so far as we assume for its ground a causality according to purposes, i.e. a will which would have so disposed it according to the representation of a certain rule. There can be, then, purposiveness without purpose, so far as we do not place the causes of this form in a will, but yet can only make the explanation of its possibility intelligible to ourselves by deriving it from a will.

Wittgenstein, Lectures 1932-35:

In teaching a child language by pointing to things and pronouncing the words for them, where does the use of a proposition start? If you teach him to touch certain colours when you say the word "red," you have evidently not taught him sentences. [...] What is called understanding a sentence is not very different from what a child does when he points to colours on hearing colour words. Now there are all sorts of language-games suggested by the one in which colour words are taught: games of orders and commands, of question and answer, of questions and "Yes" and "No." We might think that in teaching a child such language-games we are not teaching him a language but are only preparing him for it. But these games are complete; nothing is lacking.

This is my body which is given for you

What are the metaphysics of Antony Gormley’s bodyforms, the lead cases cast from plaster moulds of his body that he has described as "three-dimensional photographs"?

Like photographs, they are films, hollow skins containing a pause that their stillness recalls. They do not move. These are not Giacometti’s walkers, so urgently kinetic that they have no time to bend their knees, but standing, lying, upright, bent, immobile.

They are houses, places in which to live, "intimate architecture." The comparison is made explicit in Gormley’s most recent exhibition:

The body is our first habitation, the building our second.

In Allotment, buildings are shrunk to the scale of bodies, with apertures for mouth, ears, anus and genitals. Space Station magnifies the crouching form of the artist into a perforated mass of balanced crates that echo the brutalist architecture of the Hayward itself.

The tendency is disturbing. It hints at a kind of immaterialism even Descartes disavowed:

I am not merely present in my body as a pilot in his ship, but […] as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and my body form a unit.

Gormley writes that "architecture is another kind of body, another container." But the body is not a container, and our relation to it is not instrumental. We do not use our bodies as tools with which test our view of the world. Or perhaps only Gormley does. When it is not alienated from itself, action is a form of practical knowledge: knowing what one is doing by doing it, and thereby knowing one’s own materiality. This knowledge is misplaced in the ineluctable stasis of the bodyforms.

I love them anyway. As beings at rest. As performances, their incarnation of everyman at odds with their palpable origin in the artist’s particular body. Most simply, there is the physical graffiti of Event Horizon, attentive and demanding our attention, like the blurred bodies of other people in Blind Light, the most impressive work in the present collection.

Gormley once wrote: "I am tired of art about art. I am now trying to deal with what it feels like to be a human being." A feeling is not a worldview. Like some critics, we may tire of the demand for art to be about anything, tire of interpretation, feeling its presence in the presence of others.

Rousseau Bites

In Rousseau's Dog David Edmonds and John Eidinow embark upon an impossible task. They aspire to make Hume seem less than a saint. Their strategy is equally quixotic: to find Hume guilty in the affair with Rousseau. Their book is exhaustively researched, but its argument pivots on innuendo. On conflicting accounts of their first quarrel:

Another discrepancy is over the nature of Rousseau's apology. In Hume's version, Rousseau is apologizing for his folly and ill behaviour; in Rousseau's version, the apology concerns Hume's character. Unquestionably, Rousseau's record of Hume's stilted reaction – so reminiscent of the Scotsman's embarrassing inarticulateness when playing the sultan in Paris to the two slaves – has the ring of veracity.

One need not be as sceptical as Hume to question an inference from his awkward reaction to the prospect of a public seduction to the cold reception of a private apology. The authors cite no other evidence.

They are willing to speculate elsewhere, too, always on behalf of Rousseau. When Madame de Boufflers ignores his letter vilifying Hume, they wonder whether "[perhaps] she recognized that some of his remarks about Hume were justified"; and they all but endorse the unprovable allegation that Hume was responsible for the nastiest quip in a fabricated letter from the King of Prussia written by Horace Walpole:

If you persist in perplexing your brains to find out new misfortunes, choose such as you like best; I am a king and can make you as miserable as you wish.

Rousseau was mad: neurotic, paranoid, aggressive, leaving a trail of broken friendships across Europe on his way to England. But it is Hume who is described in lunatic terms, writing "berserk letters to d'Holbach" – these have been conveniently destroyed; there is no evidence for claims about the "extraordinary violence" of their language – and exhibiting signs of "mania":

Perhaps the moral of the whole sad encounter is that while sane men cannot make madmen sane, madmen can make sane men mad. In his momentary madness, fury, and panic, Hume never grasped the root of Rousseau's complaint: that though Hume had carried out the obligations of a friend in practice, he was constitutionally incapable of doing so in spirit.

This is savage to Hume, who was loved by so many, and insanely generous to Rousseau. Do our authors forget the true cause of Rousseau's suspicions, which they carefully document? By his own account, Rousseau was terrified on the journey to Calais by Hume's muttering to himself, "Je tiens, Jean-Jacques Rousseau" and terrified again by his stare after dinner, "a frightening look that no honest man would ever have encountered." He suspected the domestic staff at a château in Normandy of being Hume's agents.

Rousseau was pursued by phantoms, not by the failure of others to conform to his demand for spiritual friendship. And Hume was rightly afraid that his reputation would be harmed by the brilliant, vindictive rhetoric of his accuser. With the appearance of this book, Hume's fear is finally justified.