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Ieva Bērziņa-Andersone (I.B.A.): My first question will be very general. How would you describe your main interests in philosophy and how did you came to them?
Simon Blackburn (S.B.): Well, I came to the philosophy as a very young man, being an undergraduate student. I think at that time my interests were very much at the philosophy of science. I was very interested in a thing called Hume’s problem, which is also known as the problem of induction. It is about the reason why we are expecting constancies and stabilities in nature to continue: why do we think that the laws of nature last over all the time and all the space. When, after all, in our own view we see only a very little segment of time and space: so how we manage to generalize? And that’s a quite interesting problem, there are various things that can be said about it, and that was the first problem that really grabbed my attention. I did my PhD on that. Then I became more interested in the philosophy of language in general. In 1984 I wrote a book in the philosophy of language, which is called Spreading the Word (Spreading the Word, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984 – I.B.A.). And in that I put forward a particular view on a way in which moral language works in ethics, and that generated quite a lot of discussion. So many people think of me now as a moral philosopher, although in fact I came to it through the philosophy of language.
I.B.A.: I noticed that your bibliography includes a very wide range of topics, including analytical philosophy, ethics, and also lately even ancient philosophy: you have a work on Plato’s Republic (Plato’s Republic, New York: Grove Atlantic, 2006). So, how do you choose your topics and which are your favourite ones?
S.B.: Well, sometimes the topics are chosen for me. A publisher might write to me and say: we would like you to write a book, for example, on Plato – that’s why the Plato book happened. Usually I am rather reluctant to a work if it’s not on topic I feel I know already. But sometimes I think, well, I really ought to know more about this than I do know: so this is more like conducting my education in public. I get to learn something I want to learn and at the same time to write something about it.
I.B.A.: Would you identify yourself with any particular trend in philosophy, or would you just say that you are a 20th/21st philosopher?
S.B.: I think the second one. I don’t think of myself as locked into some „-ism”, like logical positivism or empiricism. I think I have quite a flexible approach to philosophy. On the other hand, there are certain values I stand for in philosophy: reason, clarity, care in presenting problems, care in presenting the history, and so on. So, I think the educational side is very definite in certain virtues I want my students to have, and which I hope that I have. But after that – what you write about or what interests you as a philosopher, - I think the more variety you can find in the tradition, the better. I mistrust philosophers who think of themselves as very specialist, as I’m not sure you can ever do a single speciality in philosophy without doing other things as well.
I.B.A.: Talking about educational values, you have published several introductory books for general public: such as Think (Think, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Being Good (Being Good, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; reprinted as A Very Short Introduction to Ethics, 2003). Do you think that any generally educated person should have a basic knowledge in philosophy?
S.B.: Well, I might not go that far: that everyone should. But I do think it does lots of good if people do. It seems to me that the basic building blocks of philosophy do afford people a way to think better about things, which otherwise they would think probably rather badly about. For example, in one of my biggest books, Truth (Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed. Penguin Books (UK) and OUP (New York) Spring 2005 – I.B.A.), I was speaking about relativism, objectivity, knowledge, truth. I think, in the recent years lots of people have been very confused about these notions. You hear people saying that it’s all about a matter of opinion, that anything goes, that it’s judgmental to criticize other people’s views, and so on. I think an awful lot of that kind of thoughts are bad, and people would do well to read and think about the ways in which philosophers themselves have gone through that sort of scepticism and have gone outside in the other side.
I.B.A.: Your book Think has recently been published in Latvian (Saimons Blekbērns. Domā. Neatvairāms ievads filozofijā, Rīga: ¼ Satori, 2007). What was your goal when writing this book and what, if anything, would you expect from your reader?
S.B.: Nearly all writers, I think, have this possibly ghost or phantom, which is the general reader. So I wrote this book for the general reader. The book came out of the introductory course on philosophy that I gave in particular in America. And I felt that the American education is very often built around great, big compendiums of huge encyclopaedic books, which probably should be put out. They have a bit of Descartes, a bit of Hume, a bit of Kant. And I felt that they are more or less useless as teaching tools of philosophy, and that you have to have a different approach. So I wrote my book, which is the expression of that different approach. I want people to think of one problem at the time, not necessarily to worry them with many details on what Descartes said about it, and what Kant said about it, but to focus on the problem itself. And then to suggest questions that they might want to ask about it and the other views and approaches that are available. So it is a problem-centred book. Once I had done it for these classes in America, I thought, well, maybe there is more interest about it elsewhere, too, and it proved to be so. It has been published in perhaps 18 or 19 languages.
I.B.A.: Would you expect that this book is read not only by philosophy students?
S.B.: I would hope so, yes. I had an e-mail just in the last few weeks from a young man in Syria, saying that he thought this book was needed in Muslim word, and asked for a permission to translate it into Arabic. Of course, I was delighted. I thought, maybe because of chapters about God and so on, it is very useful to the Arab world, too.
I.B.A.: Your other introductory book, Being Good, is on ethics. Would you share the Socratian view that in order to be good you have to know what is good, and if you know it, then you also act in that way?
S.B.: No, I don’t have the Socratic view (laughs). I think people often know what’s good, but still have temptations of various kinds to do other things. People are not as rational and so controlled by reason as Socrates thought or Plato thought. Of course, any interpretation of what Socrates thought or what Plato thought, is controversial. The Socratic paradox: that nobody knowing evil does evil – I think it is just not true. People do knowingly do what is wrong and what they do know to be wrong.
I.B.A.: In that case, what was your reason for writing this book?
S.B.: I thought that people are often in a way afraid to think about ethics. They are afraid of being judgmental, of being unrealistic, and that their ethical expectations are too high in comparison to what people are or can be as well. They are afraid of relativism, again, of different opinions, and they don’t know how to cope with those. So there is a number of obstacles to try and think clearly on how to behave, what to do, and so on. And I wanted to write a book to identify those obstacles and talk about them.
I.B.A.: In this book and generally, it could be said that you are more addressing the so called second order questions of ethics, such as what is the status of values, instead of primary or first-order questions, such as what exactly to do. Why do you have such an approach?
S.B.: Right. I think ethics is very interesting, because, of course, many ethical dilemmas occur within the practical living, like what to do, what is the right solution or the right thing to do here. I don’t think a philosopher is particularly qualified very often to advise in such situations. The situations are very concrete, there are many details, every situation is different from any other. I don’t pretend to give you recipes for living, and I don’t think philosophers should do that. What I think you can do, though, is to encourage people not to be afraid of, first, certain kinds of virtues, and, second, of various kinds of vocabulary to express them. So, for example, if we take a very contested term, say, evil. George Bush was rather laughed at when he talked about the “axis of evil”, and I think it was a very silly phrase, and it’s easy to criticize him on the grounds that he regarded somebody as evil. It is often a way of refusing to understand what motivates them. I think very few human beings are actually motivated by the evil. They are motivated by other things, like justice, the desire for revenge, and occasionally they are motivated by anger, which, I think, is an evil motivation. But it is very rare in politics. So, what motivates people is a wide variety of different things. Anyway, to see that and to think about it, it seems to me you have to some familiarity of this vocabulary, and you mustn’t be afraid of the vocabulary. I think, in the modern world people often are afraid: they think it is something old-fashioned, preachy, churchy, being superstitious. They think that these words have had their day, but I think these words are very important. So, such words as hope and dignity are important. We have to maintain a familiarity with them, we have to be able to use them without a post-modernist sneer in our faces. That’s something I was trying to do in that book (Being Good – I.B.A.).
I.B.A.: Your approach to meta-ethics, the second order questions, such as on the status of values, has been described as “expressivist”. What do you understand by that?
S.B.: Well, I’m quite unashamed of thinking that ethics is a matter of attitude, of practical stances. Attitude, emotions, permissions, giving permissions, prohibitions, telling people how they should behave on certain lines – in other words, it’s essentially practical. I think it distinguishes it from areas where we are thinking what the world is like. Ethics is not about what the world is like, it is about what the world should be like or could be like. So it is different from purely empirical matters or logical matters. The title “expressivism” means that, fundamentally, I approach ethics in terms of expression of attitude, or rather practical stances, practical positions, rather than getting at the truth about something. That is the “expressivist” bit. On the other hand, some writers go that far, but then they begin to think: oh, well, we talk about moral truth, and we talk about reason, knowledge and their connections to ethics, but perhaps it’s all a mistake. I don’t want to say it’s a mistake. I think that the way we discuss ethics, including notions like reason, knowledge, and so on, is in fact logically perfectly in order. Nevertheless, ethics is not about believes, it’s about stances, positions, practical postures towards the world.
I.B.A.: Looking at some of your publications, I have got an impression that you enjoy a possibility to look deeper in some quite mundane things and to reveal their philosophical and cultural background. I’m talking specifically about your book Lust (Lust, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). It was a bit surprising that you chose such a topic. And so I’d like to ask if you find philosophical writing also enjoyable, not only intellectually engaging?
S.B.: (laughs) Oh yes, I do enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it. The book Lust was an essay written in response to an invitation. So it didn’t start off due to my interest in the topic, it was simply an invitation to give a lecture in New York, and then a little essay would come out of it on one of the seven deadly sins. By the time they got to me, I was left with a choice between anger, lust or sloth (apathy). I didn’t want to write about sloth. I could have written about anger, but I’m not a very angry person (laughs), so I thought I would write about lust, which was more fun, actually, great fun to write. Have you seen the book?
I.B.A.: Yes, I have. And I also noticed that in this book, as well as in the book Being Good, and in your homepage (http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/) you use lots of illustrations: you use art, you use photography. Do you think art helps to understand philosophy?
S.B.: Oh, that’s a very good and big question. I don’t know if it helps to understand philosophy, but I find it interesting that art is obviously some sort of expression. And all good art is some sort of expression of something, which is sometimes called the spirit of an age. That reflects the network of ethics, ideology, attitudes towards the life, which sum up the way the particular time is. And, I think, philosophers are not immune to that, and the philosophers like David Hume are clearly 18th century thinkers, just like John Stuart Mill or Hegel are clearly 19th century thinkers. So there is an interaction between the philosopher and the age in which the philosopher lives in. Different philosophical problems come into prominence, people face different problems. So, a very obvious example would be that since 2001 a lot of political philosophers have been interested in violence, the relations between state violence and terrorism, for example. State violence like a kind of terrorism, or a just war theory – it is also back on the political philosophy agenda. And that shift in the politics of our time goes together with a shift in the philosophy. Similarly, art would be responsive to the same pressures. The art of a time is often a very good indication of the spirit of the age, of its temper, of the way in which people of the time think, what worries them, and what they’re happy about.
I.B.A.: Like the picture of Mick Jagger in your book Lust?
S.B.: (laughs) There you are, that’s about it exactly.
I.B.A.: Now a little bit of a different question. In an earlier interview you have expressed doubts on our capabilities to establish the existence of global warming...
S.B.: Oh, right, the global warming!
I.B.A.: ...Do you still agree with that statement?
S.B.: Yes, I think I do. But I would be a little bit careful. It is not so much that I would be a global warming sceptic. What I do dislike is the way the matter is usually discussed, in part, because very much of the discussion takes very little notice of measurements, the actual atmospheric measurements. And a lot of the discussion takes very little notice of the imperfection of measurements. This goes back to my start in the philosophy of science. You would very seldom see what a scientist would call a narrow bar. There is no doubt, in my mind, that the global warming movements have a great fear in them, those kinds what you read in newspapers all the time. Those are largely scare stories, which are not responsive to actual measurements of the temperature. In fact, measuring temperatures is a very difficult matter. It can actually take place only since recently: it requires, first of all, a huge number of crunching capacities of computers, and also satellite imagery that eventually enables to obtain rather reliable data on the temperature. As it happens, the global warming trend in the last quarter of the century... there hasn’t been much. Since 1998 the temperatures have been stable. Year 1998 was actually warmer than 2007. So, for example, the extent of the ice sheets this winter was greater around the North Pole than at any time since the 1970s. But you don’t read that in the newspapers. So, I’m really in an opposition to this, to this enthusiasm in Hume’s sense, which is unreasonable, an almost religious evangelism of global warming movement. I’m suspicious of it.
I.B.A.: So you don’t adhere to the so-called green and ecological lifestyle, which is currently quite fashionable?
S.B.: No, no, I actually try to. I mean, I cycle everywhere, we run a very small car, and so on. No, that’s a different matter to me: that’s sustainability. I think I’d be very sorry if we use up the earth resources in our generation. I’d also be very sorry if it turns out that there is global warming and we are responsible for it. I’m not set against the possibility. So, I think it makes sense to do one’s bit, that’s also cheaper.
I.B.A.: Right. Now let’s turn to another issue. Your responsibilities include also those of vice-president of the British Humanist Association.
S.B.: Yes.
I.B.A.: And some of your writings give hints that you find religious beliefs unfounded, and that you are sceptical towards them.
S.B.: Oh yes, so I am.
I.B.A.: So, how would you describe the contemporary humanism and your attitude to the religion?
S.B.: Right. Well, my attitude to religion is entirely as you say: I’m sceptical. I don’t believe in God, I certainly do not believe in any particular religion, either Christianity, or Judaism, and so on. I think it’s very difficult to be a humanist, because the word has quite a lot of historical associations. One thing what that might mean to people is an unfounded optimism that human beings are perfectable, that human life is on a continuous path of progress, and so on. I certainly don’t believe in that: there you have to look at George Bush or something like that. What I take it to mean is basically no different from doing serious ethics, but serious ethics without appeals to authority. So there is no holy book, no scripture, which tells how you ought to behave, there is no what the Americal philosopher Daniel Dennett calls the “sky-hook”: there is no place to plugging in, no transcendental voices, which tell you about human life. So what we have to do is... we have to do it ourselves: that’s what I mean by the humanism. For that purpose it’s very important to maintain hope, to maintain a kind of what Kant would have called the ability to respect human freedom, in other words, to continuously remind ourselves of the possibilities of action, and not to take everything as all set, fixed, certain and unalterable. It’s only when people started finding aspects of human life alterable, for example, get to clean water, get to medical hygiene, enhance food production, only then people started to think in terms of possibilities for action: that the change for the better can happen. So I think that giving people hope, providing them with freedom in that sense -- those are very important things that we can do, and that is the thing I am trying humanism to do. But no religion... Well, I shouldn’t be so dismissive as I try to say in my essay Religion and Respect (in: Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, ed. Louise Antony, Oxford University Press, 2007; also available at http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/PAPERS/religion%20and%20respect.pdf - I.B.A.) Religions are literatures, in which people try to come to terms with life, and sometimes they do it quite well. For example, some books of Bible, such as the book of Ecclesiastes - it is a sort of expression of stoicism; the book of Job; some of the moral teachings even of Jesus are not so bad. So, you know, it’s a mixed bag. But you have to find out for yourself, which bits you like and which bits you reject.
I.B.A.: The essay Religion and Respect, which you already mentioned, has also been published in Latvian. It was published in two editions of the cultural appendix of a daily newspaper, and in the second edition there were some angry comments that you were just being impolite towards your hosts...
S.B.: Oh, were there? Yes...
I.B.A.: ... And I was wondering whether you sometimes find such attitude towards yourself also here, in England, especially in Cambridge with its so many religion-rooted traditions?
S.B.: Right. Yes, I mean, if you come out as... I wouldn’t call myself a militant atheist, but certainly I’m a fairly intransigent atheist. And as somebody who on the whole is much more inclined to ridicule the religious belief, not to get angry about it. I find them ridiculous very often. Then, of course, you will meet people who don’t like being ridiculed, who take themselves very seriously. They, you know, believe in their traditions, and so on. Clearly, you have to be a little bit careful. But I think, as I say in that essay, nowadays, perhaps with the old age, I am more apt to be polite rather than to go around and throw offence on the religion. But on the same time, you see, I think that religions have to look at themselves, because a lot of religionists will demand respect, as if simply putting on the right cloth, being in the right church, be it a synagogue or whatever, is enough to be a good person. And it just simply is not so.
I.B.A.: I was thinking also particularly about the University of Cambridge. We have quite a lot of religion-related traditions here, for example, saying grace before the formal dinner, and the graduation diploma is handed over using the Trinitarian formula. Do you protest against such traditions?
S.B.: No, I don’t. It’s perfectly true that I don’t protest against them. And I find myself a little bit torn in a way: there are traditions, which I in a sense rather enjoy, and I’m not sure I would cheer if they would be disappearing. No, in that sense I am perhaps a little bit inconsistent. I don’t mind old traditions. But I don’t like being asked to go out of my way to respect them, though. By that I mean, you know, I wouldn’t like to go to a church service to do something, for example, to get married or to die. But what is nice in England is that you don’t have to. On the other hand, I wouldn’t refuse to go to formal halls because there is the grace, partly also because nobody takes it very seriously.
I.B.A.: What are your newest publications about? I have heard you have prepared something on Hume?
S.B.: Yes, I haven’t got it with me now unfortunately, but I have written a little book on Hume.
I.B.A.: What is it about?
S.B.: It’s called How to Read Hume. It’s in a series again, and I was commissioned to write it. The format of the series required to take ten passages of Hume in this case, and to talk about these passages. The passages that are considered are: Hume on philosophy of perception, philosophy of causation, which is the really famous one on the coordination between the cause and the effect. So, the perception and the causation, and then the general empiricism and his view on human reasoning, on the personal identity, which is very important – whether there is such a thing as one’s self, or is it purely a construction. That’s the metaphysical side. Then there are five sections on his ethics and political philosophy, and his aesthetics as well: the theory of the critical judgment.
I.B.A.: Hume’s work The Treatise on Human Nature has just been published in Latvian. Do you think that your book might help to understand this work?
S.B.: Oh yes, that’s exactly what it is meant to do. It is called How to Read Hume, so it is like a reading companion.
I.B.A.: Well, as we approach the end of our time, here is my last question, which is a very general one again. Do you think that doing philosophy, or studying philosophy, can help to lead a meaningful life?
S.B.: Well, I think almost everybody who studies philosophy comes out with being very, very glad that they have done so. They feel they have got something out of it that has changed them. It doesn’t enable you to earn a lot of money necessarily. The usual virtues of the liberal education are that you get the ability to use the language, to reason, to think clearly, to analyse problems. There are many disciplines or subjects who claim the same, for example, the history of law, the classics, and so on. I think what the philosophy specially gives people is a certain kind of confidence. Whenever I’ve seen scientists or historians who claim “Oh, I don’t know anything about philosophy”, then there is going to be a side of their very own subject they don’t know anything about. For example, the scientist may be confronted by creationists, for example, a scientist in geology may be confronted by a creationist who says that the earth is 6000 years old. The geologist would think it’s stupid. Now, how to argue with the creationist? In order to argue with the creationist the geologist has got to understand the logic behind his own dating processes. He might do that, he might understand them fine, but eventually it might meet with the creationist saying that it is just an article of faith: I’ve got my faith, you’ve got yours, so that’s the same – relativism again. It’s important, I think, that one knows how to deal with that situation: that one knows what to say then. If the scientist hasn’t done any philosophy of science he won’t know what to say. Or, again, if we think about a lawyer. Cambridge, I think, is very famous for its “black-letter law”: you only study law, you don’t study jurisprudence or philosophy of law, or political philosophy. Then you come up against somebody who says: laws are just rules written by whatever gang of bandits happens to be in power. So they are no different from the commands of a gangster. The lawyer says: do that and don’t do that; the gangster says: do that and don’t do that; the gangster has a gun, the lawyer has a prison – so what’s the difference? A decent philosopher of law should be able to give you some insight into how to answer such kind of question. I think a lawyer who doesn’t have a sense of how to answer that kind of questions is to that extent inferior: I mean, there is an aspect of his or her own subject, which they don’t understand. And that’s a pity, as the more you understand, the better, I do believe. So that’s my defence. And the philosophers are there to help people understand those kinds of difficult, reflective questions. That’s all we do.
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