2/9/12. The late philosopher Robert Nozick (1938 - 1998) was quoted in today's Wall Street Journal:
"From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectual have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best."
In 1998, I had the privilege of spending a day with Professor Nozick, inviting him to speak at the American Psychological Association convention held in San Franciso.
My introduction to Professor Nozick's talk:
August
15, 1998.
It is a privilege to be
here.
I am Steve Ceresnie, President of
the Michigan Psychological Association, a long time student---from afar---of
Robert Nozick’s work.
Professor Nozick assures me that
today’s experience is real, and not the product of my being connected to an
experience machine that generates such desires as introducing your favorite
philosopher to APA psychologists --- I’ll explain more about this experience
machine in a minute.
I am one of the many friends of
Marty Seligman, the psychologist’s psychologist,
whose creative ideas, optimism, and
commitment to bridging the worlds of science and practice, have inspired so
much of this APA Convention.
Unlike
many of his professional colleagues, Robert Nozick, the Arthur Kingsley Porter
Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, has the courage, concern, and commitment to
deal with the topics of life, living, and the massive problems of the 20
th
century.
He goes
after fundamental questions of social justice and human existence that his
colleagues ignore:
“Are there objective ethical truths?”
“Do we have a free will?”
“Is there meaning to life?”
In his
words, Robert Nozick was born “just one generation from the shtetl…” in
Brooklyn, New York.
He grew up in the
ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of Brownsville and East Flatbush.
After
graduating from Columbia College, he enrolled in the doctoral program at
Princeton.
During his Princeton years, a
Libertarian capitalist at Princeton whose arguments he could not refute
effectively challenged his own beliefs, making Professor Nozick more friendly,
in his own words to “capitalist acts between consenting adults.”
Robert
Nozick has been a member of the philosophy department at Harvard University
since 1965. And shortly after celebrating his 30
th birthday, he was
granted tenure at Harvard.
Professor
Nozick has been known primarily for his early work
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which won a National Book Award.
One reviewer
wrote that Nozick “has observed the breath-taking wickedness of
what the state is capable.” Yet, I must add, Professor Nozick is no apologist
for the status quo.
In fact,
Professor Nozick has never thought of himself as a political philosopher. He
has not responded to the sizable literature on
Anarchy, State, and Utopia and the vast majority of his writing and
attention has focused on topics of importance to all psychologists: knowledge,
the self, and why is there something rather than nothing.
Professor Nozick is the author of
five books:
Besides
Anarchy,
State, and Utopia, he has written:
Philosophical
Explanations,
The Examined Life (my
favorite),
The Nature of Rationality, and
most recently,
Socratic Puzzles, published
in the spring of 1997. A reviewer described Robert Nozick as “a professorial
stand-up comic steeped in the tradition of Woody Allen and Philip Roth."
In the spring of 1997, he
delivered the six John Locke Lectures at Oxford University, and a revision of
these lectures will be published by Harvard University with the title
Objectivity and Invariance.”
He has also published stories in
literary magazines including the piece: “God --- A Story” which begins:
“Proving God’s existence isn’t all that
easy---even when you’re God. So, I ask you, how can people expect to do it?”
To read his books is to imagine a
brilliant friend over for dinner who goes long into the night drawing from his
wealth of readings and depth of understandings.
The following chapter headings
from some of his books give you a taste of this wealth and depth of his
writings:
Parents and Children; Love’s Bond; Dying; The Nature of
God, the Nature of Faith; Sexuality; Creating; Emotions; The Holocaust.
His
chapter on the Holocaust --- alone --- should be required reading.
In
the introduction to his book
The Examined Life, which every
psychologist should read at least once, Professor Nozick writes and I quote:
“I want to think about living and what is important in
life, to clarify my thinking---and also my life. Mostly we tend---I do too---to
live on automatic pilot, following through the views of ourselves and the aims
we acquired early, with only minor adjustments…”
No doubt there is just too much meat
in Professor Nozick’s writings to summarize. But I must tell you that when you read
Professor Nozick’s work, your mind starts associating to startlingly fresh
perspectives, and is aroused by his gift for elegant, witty, and playful
thought experiments to represent philosophical problems. My favorite thought
experiment is what he calls “The Experience Machine.”
Professor Nozick’s describes this
experience machine: the one I still think I may be hooked up to.
Imagine a machine
that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might
desire. When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience
of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and
being loved in return. You can experience the felt pleasures of these things,
how they feel from the inside. You can program your experiences for tomorrow,
or this week, or this year or even for the rest of your life. If your
imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted
from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live you
fondest dreams “from the inside.” Would you choose to do this for the rest of
your life? If not, why not?
Professor Nozick tells us that
this thought experiment is designed to isolate one question:
Do only our internal feelings
matter to us?
Professor
Robert Nozick, the current President of the American Philosophical Association
(Eastern Division) will speak on:
THE PLACE OF
CONSCIOUSNESS. A discussion of the
function of consciousness and the relation of conscious experience to
neurophysiological process and events.
Please welcome Robert Nozick.
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