Over the past thirty years and most notably during the Reagan administration, the United States has seen an increase in the rates of incarceration as well as an increase in minimum sentence lengths. These factors of more people serving sentences for longer periods of time have created a prison overcrowding problem. With the jail cells filling quickly and the government losing the necessary money to build new facilities because of a slumping economy, the public sector had to find innovative ways to house the growing population of prisoners. One of the options presented was to privatize the prison system and contractually hand over custody of a specified amount of overflow prisoners and house them in prisons built and maintained by private, third-party entities. This solution has caused widespread debate over a plethora of issues. One of the main concerns is with morality: is it moral for a company to make a profit from the incarceration of other people? Another concern is of quality: are private prisons providing the same degree (or better) of prisoner rehabilitation and safety? These concerns are extremely important to investigate in order for someone to make a sound decision on their position in regards to private prisons. However, this paper will investigate another vitally important aspect of private prisons, their legal liability.
This topic of liability has created a long standing debate for prisoners’ rights—who, if anyone, is responsible or liable for infringing on the rights of prisoners? Advocates for prisoners’ rights would claim that running a prison comes with a certain amount of responsibility, not only from the public sector’s contracting over of prison jurisdiction (and thereby the administration of justice), but also a responsibility to humanely maintain the health, safety, and dignity of those prisoners who were ushered into the service of the private sector. This does not necessarily mean that prisoners are subject to the same laws and given the same rights as non-incarcerated citizens. This has displayed in one instance within Bell v. Wolfish (1979) in which the Supreme Court ruled that body cavity searches and postal delivery withholdings are not infringements of the individual’s Fourth Amendment rights, but instead these actions were “reasonable responses by [prison] officials to legitimate security concerns,” and thereby such measures are taken at the expense of the individual for safety concerns of all. In subsequent years, however, prisoners would have their Fourth Amendment rights revoked completely with the Supreme Court’s ruling of Hudson v. Palmer (1984) which found that the Fourth Amendment is not applicable to prisoners. Because of the individual’s status as a prisoner, they have thereby lost certain rights that they would otherwise have if it were not for their incarceration out of respect for the other prisoners, confined to the same proximity. However, this loss of rights is contended in legal battles by lawyers and inmates who are determined to raise the precedent for prisoners’ rights. This legal fight is interesting in the case of state or federal inmates and guards because in the case of a lawsuit for the infringement of rights, it brings up a question of responsibility—who is responsible for the actions taken against the prisoners? Is it the governing entity of the state itself, or the individual guards acting on behalf of the state?
On the morning of November 26th, 1965 six unnamed undercover narcotics agents breached the apartment of Webster Bivens and his family under the authority of the Federal government and arrested him for alleged narcotics violations without a warrant to authorize the infringements of Bivens’ Fourth Amendment rights. During the arrest, the narcotics agents searched the home of the Bivens family “from stern to stern” and “threatened to arrest the entire family.” Bivens was then taken to booking and subjected to a visual cavity search, although no charges would be filed against him in the end. In 1971, Bivens would file a lawsuit, complaining that “the arrest and search were effected without a warrant, and that unreasonable force was employed in making the arrest…[Bivens] claimed to have suffered great humiliation, embarrassment, and mental suffering as a result of the agents’ unlawful conduct, and sought $15,000 damages from each of them.” The courts would rule in favor of Bivens on the grounds that, among other things, the agents were unable to show a cause of action or probable cause for searching the Bivens’ apartment. This was an important ruling because until then, agents acting under the colors of the State or Federal government were allowed qualified immunity which, much like a soldier “just taking orders,” granted the agents immunity from civil rights violations. The outcome of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971) was that a plaintiff could have an implied cause of action for the constitutional rights violations against the agents, thus protecting the state from the detrimental actions of those acting on behalf of law. This ruling was in favor of personal responsibility—those who committed the unreasonable search and seizure of the Bivens home were the targets of the lawsuit, not the Federal government itself. This ruling is the government’s protection against the injustices of any agents working on its behalf.
With the Bivens clause in perspective, consider a second case, Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko (2001). Under a contract by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, private prison company Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) was operating a facility housing federal inmates. Malesko was one such federal prisoner under jurisdiction of the Le Marquis Community Correctional Center on the fifth floor. At the Le Marquis prison, only prisoners who had a cell on the sixth floor or above could use the elevators when returning to their cells. Malesko had a documented heart condition that inhibited his physical ability to climb stairs. Because of this, Malesko was allowed to use the elevator to prevent any aggravation to his heart. However, one day, “when a CSC employee forbade respondent to use the elevator to reach his bedroom, [Malesko] climbed the stairs, suffered a heart attack, and fell.” Shortly after the event, Malesko filed charges against CSC on the grounds of negligence in respect to his documented medical needs. The courts ruled that in light of the Bivens case which had a main goal of deterring individual agents from committing constitutional injustices, the ruling “may not be extended to confer a right of action for damages against private entities acting under color of federal law.” In other words, the only target that an inmate has for a lawsuit in a private prison lies solely with the guard. This ruling seems consistent with past thought, but has an unusual caveat.
By not extending the Bivens clause to include not only the individual agents but also the companies themselves the courts appear to have consistency, but with an interesting and very noteworthy caveat. The ruling in the Bivens case shows the court’s attempts at keeping their agents accountable for their actions, which shows that they value such accountability. However, when looking further into the rulings, it appears the courts have an unseen technicality in favor of the private prison industry. There are four different entities: the government (both state and federal), the government’s agents (the public sector prison employees), the company’s agents (the private sector prison employees), and the prison companies themselves. In order for the court’s desire for accountability of constitutional transgressions, each of these entities must be accountable for their actions. The first entity is the state and federal governments who have little interest or motive to enact or encourage constitutional infringements to prisoners in private institutions. One can accept this on the understanding that the state and federal governments are the very ones who can be credited for creating and maintaining the constitution, and for this democratic government to willingly and knowingly contradict its own constitution for any motive would be similar to a king committing treason upon his own country. Such an action as committing or encouraging constitutional transgressions against prisoners goes against the very foundation of the state and federal governments, and for these entities to do so would be self-destructive.
The next two entities are more straightforward, as established by Supreme Court rulings. The governmental agents and public sector prison employees are deterred from committing constitutional transgressions for threat of lawsuit under the Bivens ruling that they alone will be singled out for their actions. Similarly, the company’s agents and private sector prison employees are deterred from the same crimes under the Malesko case. This case is similar to the Bivens case, but instead applies the same precedent to private prisons.
The fourth entity, the private companies themselves, such as the Correctional Services Corporation or The GEO Group or the Corrections Corporation of America is the most peculiar. What makes them different is the legal relationship held by the companies and their agents as opposed to the government and their agents. The difference is that the private companies have no motive to decrease constitutional infringements of prisoners, whereas the government does. In other words, it should make no difference to the prison industry whether or not constitutional infringements are committed in their establishments, legally speaking. By ruling of the Bivens and Malesko cases, only the individuals committing the crimes are valid targets of a lawsuit, so why should the companies themselves care what goes on in their prisons? Surely, some managers and executives of private prisons have a conscience and do not intentionally wish harm on the health or rehabilitation of the prisons in their watch. But the difference is without some sort of expansion to the Bivens clause to include not only the private prison’s agents but the companies themselves, the companies could keep a hushed attitude towards the constitutionality of their establishments. The rules established by the prison companies themselves could have the potential to be infringements in themselves, and if a guard were to simply follow the rules of her or his job, the worker alone would be responsible for the constitutional infringement, not the influencing establishment as well. The rulings as they stand serve to cover the losses of the corporations by not threatening massive capital loss, but only minor and infrequent employee loss. The way in which the three other entities have an interest or need to uphold the constitution for fear of retribution, the fourth entity, the private prison companies, have no motive to curtail the amount of crimes against the constitutional rights of their privately held prisoners.
The next question is not legal, but normative: should private prison companies be held responsible as well as the private prison company’s acting agents for infringing on the constitutional rights of their prisoners? The answer to this question relies largely on one’s opinion to whether or not the private prison industry is worth maintaining. As an opponent of private prisons, I suggest that the only way for private prisons to be truly accountable for the care of their prisoners is to accept an extension of the Bivens clause to affect their interest as well as their agent’s. Otherwise, the private prison companies are nothing more than influential thugs who make money from detaining people by paying others to do their dirty work and looking the other way at what is necessary to ‘get the job done.’
There are plenty of instances which illustrate how American government values self-preservation: taxation systems to provide programs for citizens, continual elections which have the potential for an adaptive government, welfare programs for working class, prison systems to keep violent criminals from killing the citizenry, laws protecting property, etc. all work together to ensure the safety and well being of individuals, and by doing so, ensuring the safety and well being of the governmental system by keeping those who constitute it healthy and willing to continually submit to the government for their self-interest in their own preservation.
Filed under: David Hume, Joseph Flanagan | Tags: emergence, Joseph Flanagan, probability, self
The expression of my individual experience requires that I engage in general or universal explanations consisting of relations and correlations. If any attempt at reflecting on myself requires the use of general facts to articulate my individual experience, then my experience is largely the same (in terms of expression) as others’ experiences. In order to claim something, such as the assertion that I am only a single possibility or the result of an intricate solution to a problem, then I must draw on universal understandings of possibilities and solutions. My common sense reasoning can provide the data needed to evaluate a problem of emergence (in this case, how to flourish or grow in the world), but in order to express this problem, I must appeal to universals, such as the process of flourishing and what it means to grow.
Physicians have meticulously calculated charts and dates of how to best solve the problem of simply growing by taking the average of a large group of children in the past, and finding the most efficient interim between shots and checkups as a child. The only way I can speak of “flourishing” or “solving the problem of survival” is by appealing to these generalities or averages, and assuming that the way I solved the problem, or the way the problem was solved for me (as I was unable to take care of myself as a child) was to take the general method that works for most, and apply it to my individual experience. The same process is at work in my attempts to claim that I am merely a single possibility in an endless list of possible selves. By using words such as “individual” and “possible,” I am using explanatory generalities (common understandings or comprehensions of the words) in order to articulate my seemingly individual experience, rather than expressing my solution to survival in a unique way, free from universal preconceptions.
My contrasting of individual instances from events governing the specific instance was faulty. By individual instances, I was referring to particular points of time, whereas events governing the instance were the amalgamation of instances that led to or caused another specific instance. However, to highlight an “instance” is impossibly vague, for any instance can be divided into infinite instances, such as in the parable of Zeno’s arrow. Additionally, an amalgamation of instances is not only arbitrary in its composition (when did the first cause of an event happen?), but any answer to this question is ultimately subject to the same Xenoian scrutiny. By assuming cause and effect, I was not only overlooking how this could not only lower the chances of an event happening or not happening, as a particular setup is (generally) more prone to occur than another different setup of events, but this overlooking also rejects probability as a whole, entailing that events happen because of other events, not because of random happenstance. For instance, if my claim is that my self is the probable solution to a series of problems, then the problems I initially face after birth largely shape the way I will or can solve them. Further, the events that set up my birth into a Western hospital required wars over land disputes, years of research and development, as well as the incentive to build the hospital in the first place. If I were to continue this path, it would assume a primary first event, from which all events happen prior to or because of its existence. Probability, then, only factors in to the possibility of that single event to even occur, or to occur in the particular way in which it did.If I were to express how probability is responsible for my development, I would need to appeal to universal understandings of probability and experience, as well as find a way to reconcile the problems in distinguishing instances from processes, and processes from instances.
Probability is one of the most perplexing processes of the human experience, likely due to its intimate relationship with our experience. The sheer magnitude of which we overlook our willingness to take probability as a meaningful quality is of extreme importance. The only way in which one might legitimately attach any degree of importance or significance to an event is to acknowledge its sheer improbability, never anything more than an individual possibility. In order to satisfy our insatiable desire for meaning within our world, we confuse these possibilities with meaningful acts worth analyzing, reflecting upon, and serving as an accessible platform for common sensical truth claims.
Flanagan claims, “Any given plant is just one of an endless range of possible solutions to the problem of emergence and survival within a physical and chemical environment” (Flanagan 103). If a plant is simply a solution to a problem, and not a purposeful being in itself (outside of its ability to complement its environment of other possibilities) then how does this translate into the human experience, who are also a part of the natural world? The chance of our births happening exactly as such, in the particular time and place to a particular person are unimaginably low. What insights into meaning within the human experience does this shift from truth criteria placed wholly within the world of immediate experience to wholly within the world of probability produce? If no event in the world was ever meant to happen, but happened of mere chance, why should any one moment have a regard as more or less significant than another moment?
Surely there are events that are unique in their own right, such as a 100th birthday, or the birth of a child, or breaking your hand on a bike ride. These events are just as much up to probability as any other, but they are unique within one’s life as milestones or particularly pleasant, unpleasant, or simply memorable. To search for meaning within the question, “Why did I break my hand?” beyond the insight of mere chance is to fabricate a world of meaning for self-fulfillment or peace of mind; something caused this, we’re not alone or stranded in our world. When I think of the two choices with seriousness, the option to fabricate a world of meaning rather than acknowledging omnipresent probability is on the contrary less comforting. As Jean-Paul Sartre stated, “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” I am comforted knowing that each event is merely up to probability, for probability is a comforting process to invest one’s mind to. It appeases the unpleasant times by removing agency to the event, and the pleasant times are even more so, simply because of the sheer luck that the moment happened to involve a pleasant experience, when it could just have as (un)likely have happened to involve unpleasant ones.
If the parallel between the probability of a plants emergence is directly applicable to the emergence of human life, what problems of emergence and survival have I adapted to, and had the problems consisted of another set of possibilities, how might I be a totally different being in the world? To begin, the number of variables determining my first experiential moments are inexhaustible: whether or not I was born in a hospital or into a dumpster, the country and society into which I began, the position I came out of the womb, the skill of the doctor to not drop me on the ground, or the fact that the doctor decided to show up to work, etc. Even more, there is a very common debate within contemporary societies about when exactly a person’s life begins (in regard to abortion positions). As far as I can tell, my earliest memories that are easily recalled are from when I was supposedly about three years old. I have no recollection of ever being a fetus in a womb or having been born, but I was by definition alive at both times. What processes did I adapt to or assimilate during this time of unconscious consciousness? What solutions did I adapt to manifest, like the plant growing towards the sun?
The most primary process I probably adapted to make sense of the world around me would have been, like Virgil, the struggle to see, and not simply look. The difference is primarily the use (or not) of interpretation. To look is to simply have visual input, whereas the ability to see entails the creation of depth perception and the differentiation of objects from the raw data from looking. This process allows me to differentiate the letters (at least in Latin-based languages) in my own name, then in other words, then in sentences, then I learned how to translate my thoughts into letters like I am doing now, silently typing, with no linguistic or visual references of any kind. This process is specifically tuned to the location of my birth, and had I been born in another location, I might only recognize another set of visual linguistic clues, thus changing the process with which I process my thoughts. For as far as I can tell, I primarily think in English, unless I am intentionally trying to fit into another natural language, like Spanish or French, or an artificial language, like logic or HTML; but doing so requires a specific effort, and the results are usually a translation of my thoughts in my birth language of English, simply because I adapted to solve the problem of communication within my primary environment. The fact that I grew up thinking in English and not Chinese (or thinking at all!) was purely an instance of probability, and has no significance or implication of preference.
Another primary process needed in order to function in my environment that came after seeing but before reading was the ability to form sounds with my vocal chords. By learning how to cry, I was able to notify other humans that had learned to differentiate a baby’s cry from Mozart that I was in need of something. By mimicking the sounds I heard and attributing various meanings to them, I was able to form words and eventually sentences. Additionally, as I grew older and more adapted, I was able to distinguish the voice of my family from other voices, and voices from music, and music from jackhammers. However, this differentiation itself is learned, and what distinguishes voices from music from jackhammers is an arbitrary process, learned in order to function and flourish in the world around me, much like how the flower opens its petals as it buds in order to flourish in its environment. The fact that the flower opens its petals to the sun and not the moon is also an instance of probability—it just so happened that the sun is beneficial to some organisms like flowers, but harmful or undesirable to others, like bats. Further, in order to designate the sun as beneficial and not merely a coincidence of its presence causing flowers to open and bats to hide is to attach some sort of meaning that is beyond purely within probability.
Another naturalized process I had to learn was the ability to use my body within my environment. I had to learn that the arms I saw were not just arms, but my arms, and not someone else’s arms. From there, I learned how to reach and grab through the learned depth perception. Eventually I could do things like play instruments and sports, where I could strategize and practice a learned set of movements, and even anticipate and learn from the movement of others. I learned how to move my body around other bodies, manners and customs, as well as the ability to judge the movement of others and determine their mood or intention. All of these systems of meaning that I learned to apply upon the world are compacted together into the same conclusion: probability. The many systems of constructing meaning are merely coincidental amalgamations of probable outcomes.
Once I was able to look, see, speak, read, write, and eventually gain fluent mobility, I started to form webs of meaning within other beings that happen to have had conformed to the same or similar problems of existence as I had. From this, I fabricated a sense of morality and values or judgments. Thinking in terms of solely probability has puzzling implications on morality. If all instances are merely products of probability, and insofar as instances that are deliberate have more meaning than probable ones (which have none), then all instances have little to no meaning. How then, could one justify that it is better to not kill your neighbor’s wife than to actually kill her? Thinking in terms of pure probability is not at all practical for any sort of functionality in a society, which is why we are taught these systems of meaning, which is a pitfall for this examination.
The underlying problem with my inspection is that by even finding probability possible to inspect requires the use of generalities to describe a probable set of events, ultimately incapable of being generalized without applying a learned sense of cause and effect. I am also, as was previously mentioned, only able to remember things from about my third birthday onward, and even then it is probably highly inaccurate, meaning that the order I learned the processes in, if I even truly learned them at all, might have occurred differently than I presume. My presumptions are based on past knowledge, passed on from general education of typical child development. Even my personal history is dependent on my learned values and expectations, despite my specific history’s extremely low probability to even happen at all, let alone in the increasingly specific way as I continually learn more modes of operating correlations into meanings.
Our actions, thoughts, and expressions are all coincidental and independent of each other, and it is only through learned modes of understanding and correlation can we form a coherent world. Although learned actions, or reactions to an environment are merely fabrications, they are useful to us in terms of efficiency. Without systems to translate correlations into meanings, science would be impossible and logical and moral analyses of instances would be futile. I have found the truth is rarely practical, and the practical is rarely true. The further I disavow my systems of meaning, the less I am able to efficiently function in society, and the better I can function in society, the more caught up I become in comm(non)sensical interpretations of my experiences. Whether or not a middle ground is reachable is still debatable. If I were to accept some probability and some common sense meanings, I would be unable to decide which ones to keep and which to disavow without drastically skewing my investigation into the possibility of my experience. Because of this, I am only able to see one side or the other if I am in to investigate the instances of my history in good faith. Each side comes with a price to pay, but whichever side one decides is a solution to their particular problem. Whether one operates from pure probability or common sense, irregardless; everyone must choose.
Filed under: Friedrich Nietzsche | Tags: coffee, development, faith, globalization, history, modernity, Nietzsche, reason
As a society, the notion that rationality and empirical observations should serve as the criterion for measurement is not a necessarily inherent quality of society, but rather a learned standard of operation. Societies were able to last for long periods throughout history using faith as the criterion for truth, specifically God. These faith-based schemas for evaluation and judgment were used by nobility to justify their reign, used by the pious to exploit for wealth, and used by the knights to justify an ethnocentric war.
After the fall of the Roman Empire In 476, few institutions were left standing. However, the Roman-Catholic church was able to survive, becoming an unchallenged power organized in the very same as the political structures of the recently fallen Rome. The usurpation of power by the church kept the religious and political lives of the citizens active, a key component of governing a large amount of people. The church’s monopolization of power allowed the threat of excommunication to rise to the direst of all threats, as there was no state for one to fall back on once the church disavowed them.
Friedrich Nietzsche accurately describes the power game as such, “the judgment ‘good’ did not originate with those whom ‘goodness’ was shown! Rather it was ‘the good’ themselves, that is to say, the noble, the powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to the low, low-minded, common and plebian” (Nietzsche 25). While the overarching globalization machine is not directly aimed at the manipulation of moral values, they definitely play a part in the societal thought and power shift. The church could not have risen to power without massive amounts of wealth, and at a time when society consists of a handful of affluent members and a majority of peasantry, those few with the money will have the loudest voice within the church. Kings would claim descent from the ‘family of the Kings,’ or the family of Jesus. By claiming divine right, the noblemen were able to use faith-based backing from the largest and most powerful institution in the European world, and to challenge the authority of the king would be the same as challenging God itself.
However, the clergymen were not totally dependent on donations, for they had their own fundraising scheme. By 1100 C.E. the Roman-Catholic church has reached an apex in their influential power. By once again exploiting the church’s massive influential power, the clergy convince their flock to purchase indulgences, or to essentially purchase a ticket redeeming the buyer from their sins. It was thought that the purchasing of a ticket and the enactment of a good deed would save a trip to purgatory. This practice would continue largely profitable and largely unquestioned until later in 1517 with the Protestant Reformation.
The power of the church was not only exploited in economical scenarios, but ethical ones as well. The knights’ policy of violent imperialism was justified under this same pattern of faith-based thinking. The knights, alongside the help of the church, created an image of themselves as a righteous crusader purging the world of demonic spawn, when hindsight shows them as ethnocentric ignoramuses. From 1300 to 1450 European nations set out to conquer the world in the name of their God (as their expeditions were largely funded by the still-powerful and affluent Roman-Catholic church). However, their crusades to bolster the legitimacy of Catholicism had largely the opposite effect, opening their eyes to new and better goods, industries, and ideas.
In 1517, shortly after the crusades ended, Martin Luther declared that salvation could come from faith alone, and that the buying of indulgences was immoral. One of the major acts of Martin Luther was his translation of the New Testament into German to allow the people to read the text for themselves. This sort of thinking, the free dissemination of information and ideas instead of being horded by the aristocracy for power and personal profit was directly a result of the wave of change looming on the horizon for the Western world.
One of these changes was the shift from the age of faith into the age of reason. With new sciences like astronomy and geometry introduced from the East, the West began to pay more attention to their rationality and their senses instead of simply believing through the clergy. This new movement was aptly named, The Enlightenment. As Standage puts it, “the empirical, skeptical approach adopted by scientists was applied to philosophy, politics, religion, and commerce” (Standage 134). Whereas we previously explored the globe, we now explore our intellects and push the boundaries of our mental capabilities. The earlier societies were intoxicated with faith, and The Enlightenment called on society to clear up and promote lucid and rational thought.
A key component and catalyst for this social change was coffee, the great soberer. Upon consumption, the drinker gains feelings of alertness and sobriety, which became largely favored over the previously favored distilled drinks, consumed for the end purpose of inebriation. “Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated…and the quality and quantity of their work improved” (Standage 135). This change in favored drinks, as Standage presents it, directly mirrors the social change in preference and judgment among the intellectual realm. “Coffee was the great soberer, the drink of clear-headedness, the epitome of modernity and progress—the ideal beverage, in short, for the Age of Reason” (Standage 136). Perhaps what was most important was not the production of the drink alone, as rum and whiskey’s production had spurred economical development within the American colonies, but the manner in which it was consumed. Much like the Greek symposia, coffee encouraged drinkers to gather into drinking groups, but instead of drunken debauchery or games, coffee allowed its drinkers to partake in intensive intellectual conversations, as there was no risk of intoxication with the newly praised drink. Also similar to the Greek symposia was the high caliber of thought taking place, with the coffeehouses home to some of the Western world’s greatest thinkers, like Galileo and Hooke. This practice of coffee houses began in the early 16th century in the Arab world, but was largely improved upon by the Western interpretations in terms of success of the individual coffee shops.
In fact, in Europe coffee houses became so popular that regular patrons were accused of wasting their time conversing rather than doing more important manual or physical (practical) labor. In 1675, British King Charles II outlawed the coffee houses, declaring they “have produced very evil and dangerous effects…for that in such Houses…divers False, Malitious, and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad” (Standage 145). Once again, as with prior to the crusades, we see those in power attempting to halt the spreading of information and knowledge in fear of an undermining of their authority. As observed by historian Jules Michelet, those “who assembled day after day in the Café de Procope saw, with penetrating glance, in the depths of their black drink, the illumination of the year of the [French] revolution” (Standage 170). However, the coffee houses’ sheer popularity within the British people overrode any sort of legislation passed to hinder the coffee business—any laws enacted became unenforceable due to sheer large-scale disobedience of the legislation.
Prior to coffee and the Age of Reason, information and ideas were largely the responsibility of the church and nobility. Now, as a result of the conquests and crusades into the East, the Western world has branched out for better or worse into the global community through the adoption of Eastern ideas, namely coffee houses and the intellectual freedom within them. This practice continues into the modern era—not only the practice of drinking coffee but also the gathering of groups into these coffee houses for the discussion of intellectual matters. Paired with the freedom of speech amongst the members of the coffeehouses, coffee set the world stage for the notion of freedom of information and an increasingly culturally tolerant world.
Filed under: Charles Baudelaire, Immanuel Kant | Tags: aesthetics, art, Baudelaire, beauty, history, Kant
Kant’s investigation of the inherent experience of beauty and Baudelaire’s theory of beauty both illustrate the inherent essence of beauty. Kant proposes that the experience of finding something beautiful is the same for everyone, the judgment behind the claim is the same process for each individual, but the specific object of beauty may differ for various individuals. Baudelaire states that beauty is bifurcated into two elements, the rational and the historical, where the rationality serves as the common ground, rather than Kant’s experience, and the historical is used as a way of understanding or manifesting the rational.
Kant separates beauty into two parts: imagination and understanding. He claims, when the two are united, this is “the basis of this pleasure in the harmony of the cognitive faculties” (Kant 6). The pleasure we experience when we see something beautiful is the harmony of our imagination and understanding. Kant claims the pleasure in this synthesis is “universally communicable” (ibid), “pleases universally” (Kant 7), and is inherent in each experience of aesthetic judgment. Additionally, this “universality which does not rest upon concepts of the object…is in no way logical, but aesthetic, i.e., does not involve any objective quantity [sic] of the judgment, but only one that is subjective…” (Kant 5). We can never speak of beauty itself, as in, what beauty is, however the experience of people’s judgments of beauty are the same—we are objectively subjective. No matter what one seems as beautiful, the experience of that judgment—the synthesis of imagination and understanding, will be the same. Our understanding of the universal statement ‘this is beautiful’ paired with our imagination of taste—similarly having an expectation and having it met (and possibly beyond), is the experience of the beautiful. In this way, the object we experience as beautiful acts as a caricature of beauty, insofar as we objectify and possibly idealize an object based on its fulfillment of our expectation or notion of beauty. To denote something as beautiful becomes to denote something as the exemplary object in itself, worthy not of necessity but of preference.
Baudelaire takes a similar view, arguably a macrocosm of earlier Kantian theory in that where Kant was concerned with the individual’s experience, Baudelaire is concerned with entire histories of individuals and the unfolding of their rationalities. He refers to the “relative, circumstantial element…its fashions, its morals, its emotions” (Baudelaire 3) as the historical viewpoint, similar to Kant’s previous assertion that what is beautiful is different between people. What is useful about Baudelaire’s theory is its application over long periods of time in phenomenological investigations, whereas Kant’s theory applies more intimately to the individual. Baudelaire suggests his addition is an imperative, and “without this second element [historical analysis]…the first element [rational experience] would be beyond our powers of digestion or appreciation” (Baudelaire 3). This viewpoint considers the dialectical relationship of individuals (rationality) and institutions (history/society) and how beauty is constructed within.
As I think both Kant and Baudelaire have used the same overall schema of aesthetic analysis, it is hard to say which I feel is more convincing. Depending on whether you are looking at an individual level or a larger scale would determine the effectiveness of either.
Filed under: David Hume | Tags: causality, David Hume, representation, sensations
Hume’s investigation into causality leads him to question how it is possible to arrive at any degree of accuracy or certainty of our knowledge when all our knowledge is rendered through our process of perception. Initially, the real entities have a stimulus in such a way that it is translated by a sense organ. These sense organs produce sensations, which are converted to representations or ideas when finally ending up in the mind. What is most peculiar about this is Hume’s investigation into how humans continually, despite knowing this psychology of representation, create and refine science, and “in vain we do home, that men, from frequent disappointment will at last abandon such airy sciences, and discover the proper province of human reason” (Hume 359). One generation creates a metaphysical science that is ultimately debunked, but people continue in vain to create these.
Hume begins his analysis of causality by stating three principles of connection between ideas: resemblance, contiguity, and cause or effect. Resemblance is the association of an image with an idea; seeing a painting of an object leads to an impression of the object in our mind. Contiguity is an appeal to the universal understanding of an object in order to comprehend a specific instance—talking about a shoe brings up impressions of a formal shoe. Lastly, cause and effect is the pairing of a cut and pain in a single instance, associating them simply by their order of occurrence—because they happened in succession, the first instance (the cut) caused the second (the pain). By means of cause and effect, “we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses” (Hume 366). Both resemblance and contiguity require the use of our memory and our senses, however, cause and effect relations require no memory of past events and the causal relationship is totally intelligible, completely outside the realm of experience. Yet, we continually cling to these causal relationships in science laboratories and daily life. Hume asserts that with this common sense belief in the world, our knowledge has a genesis in consistency and our objectivity depends on one’s subjectivity.
The problem with this, for Hume, is that nothing is able to more forward prior to theory. All information Hume is able to accrue is done so in the very same manner as when he was a child in his crib. “I cannot now discover an argument which, it seems, was perfectly familiar to me long before I was out of my cradle” (Hume 372). This primary belief in causal relations has at its root the faith that “the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities” (Hume 371). However, the past does not dictate the future, and any certainty of the qualities of the future is derived from uncertain means—certainty derived from subjective interpretation of real entities through the process of representation. At the end of Hume’s analysis, causality is shown to be the primary mode of association of two ideas. If philosophers striving for certainty are gathering information in the same way as a child in the crib, what then does that say about the degree of certainty that we can attain from our representations?
The most intriguing facet of Bergson’s analysis of laughter is his ongoing analogy of the mechanization of laughter as a “living thing,” or as a historically unfolding social process. Published in 1901, Henri Bergson was writing amongst his contemporaries who were mostly interested in the processes of the unconscious in psychological terms, most notably Freudian psychoanalysis. However, Bergson’s text is distanced from any stringent psychological examination, focusing on the more sociological aspects of laughter as an ultimately human process sustaining social boundaries and mores. Laughter is a part of society just as much as society is a part of laughter.
Bergson takes the famous adage of man as an animal that laughs and turns it around, claiming that man “might equally well have [been] defined as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other…produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts to it” (Bergson 2). Narcissistically, humans are only able to laugh at objects or people within the human realm—narcissistically projecting a mode of humanness to the object of laughter. However, what is most peculiar about this particular point is “that a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is unconscious” (Bergson 5). Laughter is an inherently human action revolving around the human enterprise. However, in order to become a successful comic, one must be a human without being a human—one must physically exist as a body and shirk consciousness itself (one of the defining elements of humanity) in order to be successful. That is not to say that those in a comatose are comedic geniuses, rather, that comedic geniuses are unconscious of the way in which humans are tacitly or explicitly expected to behave. The more successful one is in losing one’s humanity for the sake of comedy depends on the naturalness of the cause of laughter. “The more natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find the effect” (Bergson 6). The more natural, or rather, the more explicitly human a process is, the funnier the outcome of a situation will be. We laugh at the purely human; yet, one’s comedic credentials come with this ability to create comedy unconsciously, without the most primordial sense of humanity. This is not simply a formula for comedic gold, but an insight into social boundaries. Not only is consciousness an important part of defining humans from anything else, but also emotion. However, “indifference is [laughter’s] natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion” (Bergson 2). Laughter strays from emotion, like consciousness, in that both act as natural attempts to justify this strange staccato noise and the shaking of one’s limbs at the immediate experience of it.
The lack of justification given for this phenomenon allows it to act as a social spectre, and “it is in this sense only that laughter ‘corrects men’s manners’” (Bergson 9). The threat, ‘they’re all going to laugh at you!’ is an all too common statement used to scare someone from acting a certain way—the threat of being deemed, essentially, a human without humanity (without consciousness or emotion) is a social threat in itself. Within a world of human exchange, what could be worse than losing one’s humanity? “By the fear which it inspires, it retains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep…” (Bergson 10). The thought of stepping out of the boundaries of unspoken social contracts of consistency and predictability is too much for the non-comedians to fathom. In this way, laughter keeps people in check with the expectations of society with the issuance of an unspoken threat of ridicule while at the same time answering back to humans—formed out of purely human social exchanges.
