Self-Constitution

This book, which I have already read since the beginning of this blog hence the link above and the shortness of this entry, is, as I stated before, easily in the top few philosophy books I've read to date. I stand by everything I said about it last time, and have nothing in particular of reflective note to add, but I will say, going through a period of my life at the moment where I have been struggling with being an effective agent in both doing and/or not doing the things that I know to be best for me, the calm, rational train of thought Korsgaard carries throughout here was a real blessing to help me reassert some semblance of control over my habits. As I said before I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to know themselves better and become a better person, regardless of how familiar you are with philosophy - though her arguments are intensely academic in nature the way she writes should be largely accessible to anyone with an above-American vocabulary.

Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity & Integrity

This book by Christine Korsgaard is quite possibly in my top three or four philosophical books I've read, period. I had read sections of it alongside this a few years ago when I was doing an undergraduate essay on conceptions of agency in practical reason, earmarking it as a book to revisit and properly digest later on - this time not for mere academicalism but to properly imbibe of and benefit from the potency of insights she makes herein.

   Synthesizing ideas from Plato, Aristotle and Kant, alongside her own formidable weight of intellectual reflective handling of such diverse themes of psychological behaviouralism, the questions of what makes a person effective at being a person, how we respond at all to things like goodness or rightness; the ground covered here is incredibly holistic in scope and yet holds together into a cohesive train of argument that never dithers on the fences of empty philosophizing but consistently returns to the fertile soil of pragmatic, day-to-day human lived application - which is what all true philosophy should be and do, imho. I'm not going to pretend a cogent synthetic summary of the ideas contained herein is at all within either the intentional or possible parameters of my writing this post, but to give a roughly hazarded breakdown of what I think she's getting at in this book - it is the very question of what it means to live well, how a human person can conceptualize themselves in practical ways in relation to ideas about goodness and reason in a world so often devoid of either in the immediate circumstances; and how constantly choosing to cultivate one's own identity in line with notions of goodness, rational truth and whatnot ultimately shape the meaningful essence of our identities - how well we do this developing what she refers to as our integrity. She does shine some excellently critical lights into the murkier what-if corners of our failures to do this as well - with such problematic elements of human being as ignorance, moral failure, and incoherent aspects of our constituted beings all being dealt with generously and in my opinion rather satisfactorily. One small gripe I would take with it is that she deals primarily with autonomy and agency in these senses with regard to the individual, and so much of the kind of organic intersubjectivity that shapes, for good or ill, our capacities and efficacies in the pursuits talked about in this book aren't given the scrutiny I would have been keen to hear her delve into - but this is a small trifle when one considers how much truly helpful ground she has otherwise covered - no doubt that side of things is something she has talked about elsewhere,* or may someday.

   As you'd probably guess from an Oxford University Press book, it is pretty dense reading and though Korsgaard writes excellently and this is much more accessible than a majority I think of typical books in this kind of ballpark, it would still be a bit of a hard go for those who haven't delved previously into the mindfields of psychological philosophy - but I'd say probably most people seriously willing to give their brains a bit of a workout could handle this book relatively easily, so long as you don't expect it to be the kind of thing you can just bash out in a few afternoons, and are happy to google the occasional word. And yes, I would very much recommend this book to basically anyone as the insights contained in it are so life-givingly pragmatic and reasonable that it would be an excellent book to anyone - so if you'd like to take the plunge and give your own grasp at being a coherent person a long hard thought-stare, I heartily recommend Christine Korsgaard's work as a springboard - and though I can't say I'm a scholar I'm confident enough this is a good starting point.

* I am speculating here - sadly, as I am no longer a student of any university, my access to philosophy books is now considerably more limited, as they're bloody expensive, and they won't let me in the student libraries with quite the same degree of welcome as I once had.

The Sources of Normativity

This book, a compilation of Christine Korsgaard's 1996 Tanner Lectures,* was one of my selected core readings for an excruciatingly difficult philosophy mini-dissertation which I completed last week. It was the most intellectually strenuous thing I've ever worked on, but was also really interesting, so despite having handed in the final draft last Wednesday, I've still got my student library card until June 13th so am making the most of it by reading through the texts more thoroughly - it's an important topic and I want to actually understand it somewhat! The book contains four lectures by Korsgaard herself, then critical replies by G.A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and finally a reply to these replies from Korsgaard again. I only skimmed these reply bits because the bulk of the original idea material is found in the main section and to be honest I've read far too much academic philosophy in the last two months to plough through an extra 92 pages of stuff that didn't fascinate me.

   Anyway, sorry, what's it about? To explain it to someone already familiar with moral philosophy and practical reason would be superfluous as the lectures are quite short and available free online (see link at bottom); to explain it to someone not already quite closely familiar with these topics would be an endeavour far beyond the capacity of time I want to spend on this post. But I'll try, and if it sounds interesting, give it a read below.

   Normativity is that realm of reality comprised of oughts, shoulds, goods, rights, and so on; conceptual, social, ethical, psychological and philosophical structures that lend purpose and direction to our lives as rational will-directed beings. We're more than mere biological animals following instincts, we have the capability to step back in reflection from our activities and assess our desires, reasons that apply to actions that we could take in given circumstances, and so on, and we assert our self-constituted identity by committing our will to endorsing any of these given reasons for action and acting accordingly. But where do these 'reasons' come from? Korsgaard presents the four main cases that have emerged most plausibly throughout the history of moral philosophy: voluntarism (we are obligated by a legislator whose authority in relationship to us can prompt us to follow their commands), realism (we are obligated by the embeddedness-in-reality of values that give us reasons to act in particular ways), reflective endorsement (we are obligated to act by ourselves when we rationally assess external conditions' relation to our own mental activity to see what we consider would be good for us to do), and Kantian rational autonomy - which she argues emerges as a synthesis of the true aspects of the other three. Her arguments for this are extensive, deep, and compelling. Once having established her slightly-modified interpretation of Kant's model, she discusses how we may consider this to apply and function with our perception of values, our intrinsic value of human and animal life, our rational faculties, and our constitution of ourselves as agents with integrity in our identities based on our conduct - all very interesting and too complex for me to summarise.

   I've literally read so many chapters and articles about practical reason and moral psychology recently. It was quite refreshing to sit down and go directly through one book on the topic, especially one that as far as I can see is pretty much right on all points as this one. I feel like I'm actually learning helpful applicable things about what goodness and persons are from philosophy, which does happen sometimes. As I said, this was my last ever essay, so I'm no longer a student of the subject, which is a shame, but my interest will live on - I'll be one of those weird postgrads who takes books from someone else's course out of the library for personal interest reading. But yeh, Christine Korsgaard is a top philosopher, and if my hashed attempt to explain what this book is about hasn't completely put you off, particularly if you're already interested in theories of why people do what they do and how we could rationalise it in a good coherent way, check out these fantastic lectures from the pdf link below.

* The lectures themselves, effectively comprising the entirety of the book, are available for free online here:

http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/k/korsgaard94.pdf