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Redaktion Roskilde Universitet: Asger August Olsson, Jakob El-Zein & Anders Kampman Syddansk Universitet: Helle Rieltoft Aarhus Universitet: Valde Hougaard & Anton Hvidtjørn

Vi søger medlemmer til redaktionen fra Københavns Universitet, Aalborg Universitet og

Dansk Pædagogisk Universitet.

ISSN 2245-0610

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arbejde. Omend dette næppe er ukendt for læseren, ønsker vi at understrege, at dette ekstracurriculære forum, hvor forfattere, reviewere, redaktører og læsere alle bliver klogere af arbejdet med artiklerne, er værd at værne om! Som supplement til den universitære læring, hvis vilkår gradvis forringes, er det vigtigt at påskønne mulighedsrum som disse. Netop derfor vil vi på redaktionen gerne takke alle forfattere og reviewere for deres bidrag. Tak!

I denne forårsudgave af TIDskrift kan vi således viderebringe tre artikler og en anmeldelse. Med artiklen Living Virtually or Virtually Living undersøger og diskuterer Mathias Ottesen forholdet mellem virtuelle og ikke-virtuelle verdner, ud fra en idé om ’steder’. Med et teoretisk afsæt i den sene Martin Heidegger og Marc Augés Non-places teori tilvejebringer artiklen en anderledes måde at tænke virtuelle verdner, og deres relation til den ikke-virtuelle virkelighed.

Ida Skovhus Hansen argumenterer i Moral Fictionalism for en fiktionalistisk opfattelse af moralens natur. Fiktionalisme er en metaetisk position, der følger den linje, som blev udstukket af den britiske filosof John Mackie. I sin berømte bog Inventing Right and Wrong proklamerede han, at ”there are no objective values”. Hvordan bør vi overhovedet tale om moralske emner, hvis der ikke findes nogen etiske kendsgerninger der kan gøre vores domme sande? Og kan vi overhovedet svare på dette spørgsmål på anti-realistiske præmisser, for så vidt det søger et svar på hvad vi bør gøre? Ida mener at kunne løse disse problemer ved at adoptere en moralsk fiktionalisme, der forstår moralsk sprogbrug mere på linje med fænomener som rollespil eller historiefortælling.

I artiklen Om mening viser Morten Meldgaard Madsen en facetteret tilgang til begrebet ’mening’ og dets mulighedsbetingelser. Efter læsninger

af, hvordan ordet bruges - i dagligdagssammenhæng og teoretisk - ender artiklen i et fænomenologisk eksistentialistisk svar, hvor meningen opstår i vores engagerede omgang med verden.

I Mod en nomadisk samfundsanalyse anmelder redaktionen John Benedicto Krejslers At analysere med Gilles Deleuze fra 2019. Den lille bog udfolder Deleuzes nomadiske forskelstænkning, der udfordrer identitets- eller Statstænkning, og søger at rammesætte det inden for de empiriske og samfundsvidenskabelige analyser. Gennem et mangfoldigt begrebsarsenal, samt nogle konkrete analyseekemspler, demonstrerer Krejsler nogle centrale perspektiver for en deleuziansk opvågnen. Til ære og kamp for en orkanisk kompleksitet vurderer anmelderen Asger August Olsson.

Således håber vi at have inspireret læseren til at udforske udgivelsens indhold på egen hånd.

På vegne af redaktionen Anders Kampman

Indholdsfortegnelse Living Virtually or Virtually Living ...................... 6 af Mathias Ottesen

Moral Fictionalism ............................................. 27 af Ida Skovhus Hansen

Om mening ......................................................... 47 af Morten Meldgaard Madsen

Mod en nomadisk samfundsanalyse ................... 68 af Asger August Olsson

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Living Virtually or Virtually Living - understanding virtual places through a reading of Heidegger’s philosophy

skrevet af Mathias Ottesen. , AU · udgivet februar 2020

Abstract In this paper I discuss the concept of place and its relation to virtual reality. In doing this I present a reading of Martin Heidegger’s later philosophy alongside a reading of Marc Augé’s 1995 Non-places. I argue that virtual places can exist but that they are of a different kind than non-virtual places. Finally, I argue that there are inherent problems with such virtual places on an environmentalist view, pertaining to the alienation of the inhabitants from the non-virtual Introduction

I was afraid for all my life, right up until the day I knew my life was ending.

and that was when I realized that ... as terrifying and painful as reality can

be, it's also ... the only place that ... you can get a decent meal. Because,

reality ... is real.

— James Donovan Halliday (’Ready Player One’)

In the 2018 film ’Ready Player One’ we meet James Halliday, the eccentric tech-geek and pop culture buff who invented the virtual reality gameworld called O.A.S.I.S.1 , which is seemingly inhabited by everyone alive. It appears on the surface that everything is possible in the digital world – nevertheless everyone, even the creator of the world, must return. In this case, called there by the sound of a growling stomach.

1 Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation.

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This pop culture tale of the battle for the virtual realm tells us that there are certain problems when considering virtual reality environments – even ones as advanced as in the film – as places. In this paper I will address these problems and suggest how we might understand virtual places. I will do this by drawing on the thinking of Martin Heidegger and non-place-theory as presented by French anthropologist Marc Augé. As such, I will be making three related points throughout this paper: 1) That Augé’s non-place theory supports and augments the view of

places as presented by Martin Heidegger, and can supply useful definitions for places, and

2) that on such a definition VR Environments (VR-Es) may be understood as what I call second-order places.

3) That such second-order places are problematic on an environmentalist view.

What is a place? In order to discuss whether there can be VR-E places we must first understand what it means to call something a place. Following Heidegger, we will start with his example of the bridge: ”The bridge is a location. as such a thing, it allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted” (Heidegger 1971: 153). To understand what this means, we must examine the four parts of the fourfold. The earth is “the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal” (Heidegger 1971: 147). It is closely related to the heaven, which according to Heidegger is:

[…] the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the

wandering glitter of the stars, the year's seasons and their changes, the light

and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency

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of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. (Heidegger

1971: 147).

Together these two constitute what we would normally refer to as nature, understood in the sense of that which is given to us and which is – at least without active intervention – out of our control. We did not create the earth that sustains us and all other life, nor do we command the drifting clouds or the rainfall. We might seek to or inadvertently affect it and we might react to it, but we are not ultimately the designers of our world.

The mortals are very simply put you and me. It refers to human beings and their ”being with one another” (Heidegger 1971: 147f). Lastly, we have the more contended part of the fourfold, namely the divinities. In my reading I largely follow the interpretation of Julian Young, on which the divinities are a reappearance of the heroes of Being and Time. Understood in this way then, the divinities are rolemodels, whether historical, fictive, religious or mythological. I make this point of the possible non-religious nature of the divinities despite the religious language in which Heidegger expresses the idea, since it seems that the role which Heidegger had in mind for the divinities, although it might once have been monopolized by the religious, is no longer. As rolemodels, the divinities are embodiments of right-doing and as such also represent a normative expectation. (Young 2000: 198ff, 2011: 288f)

Once again, we see with this pair that the fourfold is characterized by what I will call a givenness. The fourfold is not something that we control or create, it is given to us – with the words of the earlier Heidegger one might say that we are thrown into it.

The bridge can ”allow a site for the fourfold” and this is what constitutes a place (Heidegger 1971: 152). To make this idea clear Heidegger presents us with a Black Forest farmhouse:

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Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the black forest, which was built

some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. here the self-

sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals

enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm

on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows

close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose

proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep

down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It

did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room

in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the "tree of the

dead”— for that is what they call a coffin there: the totenbaum — and in

this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the

character of their journey through time. (Heidegger 1971: 157).

What Heidegger here describes is a gathering of the fourfold. The prominent parts of this farmhouse have come to be in reference to the elements of the fourfold. The placement and roof-design gathers in the earth and sky, the altar corner, the community table, the childbed and the coffin gather in the mortals and divinities. Had the weather or the nature been different, the farmhouse would have too, and as such also the lives of those living in it. Had the customs required something other than an altar or a different placement of the coffin, this too would have changed the layout and lives of the farmhouse.

I have mentioned the givenness of the fourfold above. This notion is important, because it is characteristic of what Heidegger calls dwelling, a certain mode of being-in-the-world which involves letting the world freely disclose itself while not subjugating it to our will. It is also important because places for Heidegger seem to be dwelling-places. I will not go deep into the notion of dwelling, since a discussion of this is outside the scope of this paper (for more, see Heidegger 1971: 143-159). Suffice it to say, that the dwelling is closely connected to and problematized by the mode of Gestell, in which all is seen as malleable ressource and ultimately even

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humans themselves, reducing us to cogs in an impersonal rationale (Heidegger 2013: 19).

It may be taken as a trivial point, that the layout of our homes design our lives in a certain way but that is not all there is to places. Moreover, a respectful gathering of the fourfold, which does not subjugate it, makes room for a place in which solid identity can occur.

In the case of a subjugated gathering, ie. one that bends nature to our will, it presents an unboundedness, which does not make room for solid identity and life-design, for if we could freely design our lives this way, we could just as well design it another.

Heidegger is – although not explicitly – trying to define what a dwelling-place is and as such how to define a place that lets the world (Being) freely disclose itself. Given this it is obvious that not all things could be places in this rich sense – take for example many instances of the shopping mall; its construction requiring leveling of the natural landscape, its form paying no homage to the landscape it is placed in (which is perhaps also why many shopping malls feel very similar no matter where in the world they are) and with the only social interaction in mind of cashier-customer. Places and Non-places Summarizing the above we find that places, or perhaps more precisely dwelling-places, are constituted by their gathering of the fourfold, ie. by their reference to and respect of nature and culture. At the same time a place is also productive and restrictive in the sense that it lays out for its inhabitants a certain way of living.

A more recent thinker in the same vein is the French anthropologist Marc Augé. In his book Non–places, first published in 1995, he discusses the idea of anthropological places and so-called non–places. In the introduction to the second edition of the book, he defines anthropological

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places as ”[…] any space in which inscriptions of the social bond […] or collective history can be seen” (Augé 2008: VIII).

In greater detail, he defines places as spaces of identity, relations and history. Spaces can be ’of identity’ in the sense that:

The layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village,

placement of altars, configuration of public open spaces, land distribution,

correspond for every individual to a system of possibilities, prescriptions

and interdicts whose content is both spatial and social. (Augé 2008: 43).

It can be relational insofar as certain rules of residence which assign an identity also thereby place a person in ”[…] an overall configuration whose inscription on the soil he shares with others” (Augé 2008: 43). ’Relations’ in this sense then should not necessarily (or at least not primarily) be understood in the everyday sense of having relations – friends, family, love-interests or otherwise. Rather it means that places place us in systematic relations to each other. This can encompass the social relations but certainly also more functional relations. Augé then is in agreement with Heidegger insofar as places are constitutive of identity and of the possibilities of one’s life.

Places are then historical ”[…] from the moment when – combining identity with relations – it is defined by a minimal stability” (Augé 2008: 44f). That is historical insofar as it has references to the recollections of events and individuals that have been experienced2 or recorded customs and rites.

What is not mentioned in these definitions but rather only implied by Augé, is the importance of respected limits or boundaries in the sense that I have also discussed it above with regards to the given nature. He

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considers throughout the book the importance of alterity, in the introduction stating that ”[…] individual and collective identity is always constructed in relation to and in negotiation with otherness” (Augé 2008: IX), and the symbolic importance of frontiers (both physical and otherwise, e.g. language-barriers). For otherness to exist there must be a difference in identity between different places, yet construction following only technical ideals of effectiveness will most often not lead to such differences, since what is effective in one place is also effective in another if we can subjugate local conditions such as leveling grounds, removing forests and so forth. This is a situation in which ”[…] to cross international borders brings no more profound variety than is found walking between theatres on Broadway or rides at Disneyland” (Augé 2008: XII). Augé identifies globalization as the tendency for growing worldwide similarity and the removal of otherness and distance– a point that clearly echoes Heidegger in his critique of technology (see for example the introduction to ’The Thing’, Heidegger 1971: 163).

But what then is this thing called non–places? Obviously we are not to understand that this is some sort of non-existing entity in any physical or geometric sense. Non-places have extension (I use this term widely, as I also regard the virtual as having extension) just as well as places. Their difference lies not, so to speak, in their räumliche or mathematical-geometric features. Rather the difference is social–causal, in the sense that what matters in the determination is how it affects and creates identity and social possibilities for those interacting with it. This understanding also further shows why theories such as ANT are not directly opposed to this view, but rather that the place–non-place distinction serves to inform such a theory of different types of actors.

Augé offers the airport as an example of a non–place. There, we are reduced from persons to passengers and become ”[…] no more than what [s]he does or experiences in the role of passenger” (Augé 2008: 83) and

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the role of passenger, due to the setup of the airport, requires no knowledge of my personal identity – I am presented with ”[…] the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing” (ibid.) – and no relation between me and anyone else, except purely practical relations, which are for the most part maintained by signage (ie. where to go, what to do, etc.) The non-space ”[…] creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude” (ibid.). I propose the understanding then, that the non-place is an instrument for use as opposed to the place which has agency in the sense that it affects and structures persons and their lives. Place—Non–place Continuum A distinction has then been introduced between places, which bestow upon us identity, relations and historical anchoring, and non-places, which presents us with identity-loss and lack of structured relations. However this distinction is not absolute, in the sense that something must either be place or non-place.

The account presented by Augé is simply that ”[…] some places […] can be constituted in what for outsiders remains rather a non-place” and that ”[…] the possibility of non-place is never absent from any place” (Augé 2008: VIII, 86). The same is true in Heidegger’s account. The Black Forest farmhouse might be an example of how a place was once constructed, however it ”[…] in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build” (Heidegger 1971: 158). The farmhouse was once a place but is no longer. If it were to be constructed in the exact same way today, it would most likely be regarded an artifact fit for a museum, since the gods of the altar corner are no longer (at least not as exclusively) our gods, the ways of human interaction not the same and so forth.

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How are we to account for this fluid movement between place and non-place? Is the place/non-place question answered merely by reference to subjective experiencing? If that were the case, we could hardly build places for others nor set out to intentionally create non–places, except for ourselves.

According to Augé the difference is at least centrally explained by language, since it is ”what weaves the tissue of habits, educates the gaze, informs the landscape” (Augé 2008: 87). We are in other words conditioned through language to experience the world in a certain way – the world presents itself to us differently. This I will call the laden-experience answer. Augé references Baudelaire and highlights the difference between merely seeing chimneys or seeing ”masts of the city” (ibid.: 89). In Heideggerian terms, the world is never presented to us as is but rather in a specific mode of unconcealment. The essence of a thing should not, according to Søren Gosvig Olesen’s reading of Heidegger, be considered a static truth but rather as Ereignis, an event or a certain way of disclosing (Olesen 2013: 128).

Considering the insights of behavioral design, it seems foolish to say, that the setup of our surroundings does not also set us up to seeing the world one way or the other. But cultures change both over time and (although increasingly little) over distance and so does the substantial content of the fourfold. As such, that which was once a place, may not be so forever and that which is a place for one person is not necessarily one for another.

Understanding places and non-places in this way makes room for the understanding of place–non-place as a continuum while not committing one to the claim that it is merely a matter of subjectivity. Rather, it is an interplay between object and subject.

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The possibility of VR places In the previous sections I have tried to show the advantages of jointly considering the place-theories of Martin Heidegger and Marc Augé. I have argued, that there is an important overlap between the two and that Augé can help us understand Heidegger in more contemporary and less poetic terms, which will hopefully be helpful in the practical applications of the ideas Heidegger has to offer. At the same time, through his criticism of technology, Heidegger can inform us as to why we should worry about the existence of places or the domination of non-places in ways that Augé does not.

To summarize, I have argued that on this view, a place is understood as an area in which humankind is rooted within the world, connected to the past and to each other – where one can dwell, in Heidegger’s terms and that this is achieved through building that takes into account local conditions and adjust to them, rather than try to overcome or control them and represent local traditions and norms in the process.

In order for something to constitute a place then, it must meet certain requirements: There must be a respect for geographical limitations, a live historical anchoring through monuments and practices and the creation of a social identity and a configuration of relations related to the space – or said with Heidegger, it must gather the fourfold of earth, heaven, mortals and divinities. VR Places How does one then evaluate whether there can be places within VR-Es? I aim to show whether such places could occur on principle. As such, what one should look for in order to determine if VR-Es can be places is whether they can fulfill the necessary criteria, as stated above, for being perceived as places. I will go through each requirement individually, discussing its

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possibility within virtual space and I will discuss them in order of descending clarity of answer.

Singular identity and relations / the mortals It seems a rather uncontroversial claim, that identities are formed in some relation to virtual environments whether it be video games or certain social media. However, as we saw above with the case of the airport, not all identities are singular identities, e.g. the anonymous identity of ’airport passenger’, which assigns the individual to a certain class but does not constitute a singular identity. As such, group-identities e.g. as belonging to a certain fraction in a MMORPG3 would not be enough to satisfy this requirement. But one might imagine a virtual simulation of any given existing non-virtual place. It seems implausible to claim, that the mere fact that it is now digitalized and accessed via a headmounted display or another form of technology makes it less constitutive of singular identity in the sense that Augé has described it. Therefore, the virtual in and of itself cannot rule out this possibility.

However, it does raise some interesting questions concerning the places of virtuality. Although the make-up of a town could be identically simulated on a computer and accessed, it would be different from the non-virtual exactly because it must be actively accessed and therefore can also be left again at our leisure. We do not actually choose to be born and we cannot merely resign from the non-virtual to a more basic reality.

This is however not a principled argument against the possibility of virtual places, but rather a contingent one. The film The Matrix has popularized the idea of a completely simulated reality in just this way, in which the inhabitants do not know that they are in a simulation and as such do not know of the weakened constraints of their environments. The possibility of such a situation – although we might not technologically be

3 Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game

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able to achieve it currently – shows that it is not the virtual as such that accounts for the difference, but perhaps rather a certain epistemological condition; the knowledge that we are not (as) limited.

Concerning relations and the ”configurations of positions” described by Augé (Augé 2008: 44), it seems as intuitive as with identity, that a non-virtual place could be digitally simulated and retain its relational characteristics. We might also look to various non-realistic virtual spaces such as Facebook, in which Facebook defines our identities in terms of friends, page-admins, followers and followed and we stand in relation to one another based on where we can ’go’ and what we can do or how we are expected to act towards another (i.e. the follower-followed relation). As such we both receive identity within the place and are placed in relations to others by it. With Heidegger’s farmhouse we are placed in relations based on the rooms we are allowed, our places at the table and so forth, and it seems the same may be true within a VR-E. Historical anchoring / the gods At first thought a problem comes to mind regarding the virtual and the historical. Most who play videogames or those who have tried VR-experiences know that save-points, reloads and other time-distorting features are usual parts of many virtual worlds. It seems to problematize the possibility of historical virtual places, when you can start over at your convenience, because it counters the consolidation that is normally associated with history; although we might wish to in many cases, we cannot go back and redo history.

My response to this objection would be that there are many different forms of VR-entertainment. One form might be the well-known narratively driven single player game-form (e.g. the Batman Arkham trilogy, the single-player mode of the Call of Duty series or others) and this form does

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indeed seem to fall on this objection, since it is hard to see how history can be established when it can always be revisited and remade.

However, that is not all there is to say about history and the virtual. The fact that one form of digital virtual experience cannot be historical in this sense, where history is created and consolidated throughout the user’s interaction with the experience, does not mean that the virtual excludes history. We might have other forms of VR-Es which do not have these same features in which that which has been experienced really is then consolidated as history and where historical places could then exist.

We might also understand history in a different sense, in order to understand the possibility of places in VR-Es. Many fictional worlds upon which virtual worlds are based (e.g. Middle Earth, the world in which The Lord of the Rings takes place) have an expansive lore filled with tales, heroes, wars, cultural innovations and so on. Such a ready-made history could then be what a historical building or statue refers to, rather than the history made by the users. It might be objected then, that history is removed from the users, seeing that all history is created before and without them. However, this should not be considered as worrisome as it might seem, since many people alive today have not lived through what is considered history. If this were an objection to places in VR-Es, then it would also be an objection to places in general. As such, I do not believe that this objection rules out historic rootedness in a VR-E, although it may be conceded that at least the phenomenological experience of time might be different depending on the degree of immersiveness. Limitation / earth and sky As I have laid out above, an important aspect of Heidegger’s thinking on places focuses on limitation and respect of the given. In the same vein, I have argued that the anthropological approach of Augé also at least recognizes the importance of boundaries in the sense of demarcating

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difference. This seems to be the point where the virtual is truly different to the non-virtual, since the virtual is necessarily constructed. Heidegger’s earth and sky were given to us – which should not be mistaken for a theological claim but rather understood as the fact that we have not created existence for ourselves – but we have given the virtual world to ourselves. We, or at least the programmers and designers among us, create the virtual worlds for ourselves. It may then intuitively seem, that the virtual by its very nature does not respect limitation.

This objection mistakes the world’s creation in its entirety for the creation of individual places within it. It holds, that since it is a prerequisite for placeness that it is created in respect for the given environment without reducing it to ressource and that VR-Es are created by humans with no regards to any ’given’, VR-Es cannot be places. This is mistaken in two related ways. Firstly, it mistakes ’world’ for ’place’. The theory as I have presented it does not place importance on how the world came to be, only that it was not created by those who inhabit it, thereby opening the possibility of caring for the given – even the notion of ’given’ suggests that at least it could be accepted that the world was created. In the virtual analogy then, it does not matter that the VR-E is created by a group of programmers, this would merely make them analogous to the God of the old testament; they are the givers of that which we are given.

Furthermore, the importance is not how what is came to be, but rather the way in which we interact with it and how we treat it, so even though the VR-E may be created to raise profits (by some game-company), this does not stop the users from respecting it as given. However, curiously, it does seem to stop or at least hinder the developers from experiencing places within their own VR-E, since it would not be given to them by themselves, insofar as they could always change it.

It may also be objected, that the digital nature of a VR-E is problematic, since this in some sense has already reduced it to malleable

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resource, since the code can easily be rewritten and nothing is anything but a constellation of 1’s and 0’s. This again does not raise any concerns that could not be analogously raised against the non-virtual. There is nothing about the fact that everything is made up of different constellations of atoms, that requires any specific mode of being nor any specific way of interaction with the world. As such, we might be aware that everything can be treated as malleable resource but persist in treating it otherwise. Second-order Places As I have tried to show above, it is possible for there to be places within a VR-E. However even after this affirmative discussion something may still irk the reader in this conclusion – because it seems intuitively, that such virtual places would be different in some important way to non-virtual places. I have been asked too, why it would even be necessary to uphold the idea, that there is a relatedness between the virtual place and the non-virtual. I hold that it is unfruitful to completely separate the two phenomena, since it seems that people tend to be able to have similar interactions with both, with regards to sociality, identity and so forth. We are also starting to see more examples of lives lived for the most part in the virtual without obvious ailments, which seems to suggest some level of interchangeability (See for example Baym 2015).

I will try to settle this uneasiness by drawing on Jeff Malpas’ work on the non-autonomy of the virtual, and argue that these virtual places – although possible – are a different type than non-virtual places. They should be considered second-order places.

Finally, in this section, I will argue that a prevalence of such second-order places is not unproblematic. I will do this with a view to how it might affect the individual’s relationship to one's basic sustaining environment. According to Malpas, the virtual is non-autonomous in two ways. It is:

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1) causally non-autonomous, and 2) contentually non-autonomous. It is causally non-autonomous in the sense that its existence is dependent on structures outside of the virtual realm, e.g. physical servers on which the virtual exists and also that our interaction with the virtual is made possible by non-virtual object, such as HMD’s and controllers or mouse/keyboard and computer screen. It is contentually non-autonomous in the sense that ”[…] the content that is embodied in the virtual is always dependent on the everyday world in which the virtual is embedded” (Malpas 2009: 135f). This is because we experience the virtual through certain ”frames of significance”, which we, according to Malpas, bring with us from the non-virtual. This latter type of non-autonomy seems less strong than the former, as Malpas seems to acknowledge himself, as he too brings up The Matrix, in which an individual’s entire life is lived within the virtual, removing the need to view the world as different from the ’everyday’ (Malpas 2009: 135ff).

First we must understand one important aspect of the virtual, namely the need to avoid so-called immersion breaks. According to the definitions of VR-Es given by David J. Chalmers they are ”[…] an immersive, interactive, computer-generated environment”. In this context ’immersive’ is to be understood as generating ”[…] perceptual experience of the environment from a perspective within it, giving the user the sense of ’presence’” (Chalmers 2017: 3). This immersion on a broad understanding is a way of maintaining the sustained investment in the VR-E. However immersion can be broken in cases when the user is made aware of the non-virtual reality. (Slater 2009 p. 3552, Grabarczyk and Pokropski 2016 p. 31) e.g. a HMD-user bumping into non-virtual elements such as furniture or walls, or hearing the noises of the cars on the road outside while in a

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fantasy medieval-esque setting. It follows then that in order to maintain immersion, the VR-E must be designed to avoid such breaks in the form of reminders of the non-virtual.

So we have on the one hand a non-virtual world on which the virtual is causally dependent and a virtual world which in order to maintain itself must block out reminders of the existence of this more basic non-virtual world.

When considered using the terminology of the fourfold, the causal non-autonomy states that the virtual in fact relies on earth and sky. However, they lie outside of the domain of the virtual itself. In the case of a non-virtual place, we might then visualize the gathering of the fourfold around the center-place as in fig. 1.

In the case of the virtual place however, this seems to change, since the fourfold gathered cannot be the same as the non-virtual fourfold, since this would lead to immersion breaks4. So we might visualize the gathering of the virtual fourfold as in fig. 2, with the smaller innermost circle representing virtual counterparts to the non-virtual components of the fourfold; virtual heaven, earth, mortals and divinities. These counterparts

4 Excluding perhaps Augmented Reality programs that are meant to serve as direct extensions of the non-virtual.

Heaven

Earth

Mortals Divinities

fig. 1

Heaven

Earth

Mortals Divinities

fig. 2

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are necessary to uphold immersion. This now can illustrate what is meant by second-order places. Virtual

places are second-order in the sense, that the fourfold they gather is non-identical to a more basic fourfold. More basic is in this case to say of something that it is more autonomous.

The virtual second-order place must, in order to maintain immersion for its users, hide the existence of the underlying reality and therefore also the causal implications on it. Following Malpas I hold that the strength of acknowledging this relation lies in the fact that the causal dependence on the non-virtual also means that the virtual is causally effective on the non-virtual (Malpas 2009: 139). In the most obvious way by using non-virtual resources to power the virtual existence.

If the second-order place cannot acknowledge its non-autonomy without immersion breaks, and part of its non-autonomy is the effect actions within the virtual has on states outside of the virtual, then it follows that it cannot acknowledge such a relation. The consequence of this is that users of the second-order places must be actively alienated from the non-virtual reality.

On an environmental view in a time when we more than ever are prompted to be aware of the impact our actions have on the sustainability of our existence this is objectionable. One might for instance imagine a second-order place set up in such a way, that although actions within seems to have regular or expected consequences, they could have disproportionate consequences outside of the virtual, without the knowledge of the active agent, e.g. a virtual setup where every step taken causes immense deforestation. This is of course an extreme and unlikely example, but it serves to show the dynamic in question and we might still criticize it on less extreme grounds, ie. the resources it requires to power the servers necessary for your activity in the virtual.

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We might, in other words, be lulled into a false belief of a self-sustaining world while being removed from the actual sustaining factor5. Of course, even with VR-Es, we are presently never completely untethered from the non-virtual. There is yet the anchoring feature of our embodiment in the non-virtual. So far, no technology exists that does not require our material self in the non-virtual to interact with the virtual. However, this does not save the virtual place from this critique, given that immersion is still possible (we forget ourselves, so to speak and accept a virtual counterpart for our embodiment, as in cases such as the rubber-hand illusion experiment, in which a rubber hand is placed in front of a test-person in such a way, that it appears to be their own hand and when prodded, they report the sensation appearing in the rubber hand, rather than their own. (Slater 2009: 3554).

Insofar as we have an ethical obligation to either ensure the well-being and possibilities of future generations or the well-being of the planet (however unclear that notion may be) or a combination of the two, it seems that wide-spread use of second-order places may be in opposition to such an obligation. As such, this paper might serve as the groundwork for a more thorough ethical examination of second-order places for researchers working with ethical design and like fields of work. Conclusion To sum up, I have argued that there is nothing about the virtual itself that excludes virtual reality environments from including places in the sense that I have presented. However, I have qualified this position by drawing on Jeff Malpas’ idea of the non-autonomy of the virtual to introduce a distinction between first- and second-order places, VR-E places being an example of the latter. Second-order places are defined by the non-identity between the fourfold gathered and a more basic fourfold. I have also

5 A critique that might find suited allies amongst ecological marxists. See fx. (Foster 1999)

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argued that it is a necessary feature of the VR-E to hide the relation to the non-virtual from its user to avoid immersion breaks. Building on this, I have presented an environmental critique of second-order places and their active alienation of the users from the actual consequences of their virtual actions on non-virtual reality and pointed to possible further works to be done.

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Bibliography Augé, M. (2008). Non-places. London, Verso.

Baym, N. K. (2015). Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Chalmers, D. J. (2017). "The Virtual and the Real." Disputatio 9(46): 309-352.

Foster, J. B. (1999). "Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environ-mental Sociology." American Journal of Sociology 105(2): 366-405.

Grabarczyk, P. and M. Pokropski (2016). "Perception of Affordances and Experience of Presence in Virtual Reality." AVANT Vol. 7(2).

Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry Language Thought. New York, HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Heidegger, M. (2013) [1954]. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York, HarperCollins Publishers.

Malpas, J. (2009). "On the Non-Autonomy of the Virtual." Convergence Vol. 15(2): 135-139.

Olesen, S. G. (2013). Hvad er det væsentlige ved teknikken? Nye Spørgsmål om teknikken. K. Schiølin and S. Riis. Aarhus, Aarhus Universitetsforlag: 123-138.

Paddock, T. R. E. (2010). "Bridges: Technology and the Social." Environment, Space, Place Vol. 2(2).

Slater, M. (2009). "Place Illusion and Plausibility can lead to Realistic Behaviour in Im-mersive Virtual Environments." Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences Vol. 364(1535): 3549-3557.

Young, J. (2000). “What Is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the World.” Heidegger, authenticity and modernity: essays in honor of Hubert L. Drey-fus. M. A. Wrathall and J. Malpas. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England, The MIT Press.

Young, J. (2011). "Heidegger’s Heimat." International Journal of Philosophical Studies: 285-293.

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Moral Fictionalism skrevet af Ida Skovhus Hansen, KU· udgivet februar 2020

Abstract In this paper, I argue for a fictionalist conception of morality. The inquiry will be conducted by first examining two different assumptions on which moral fictionalism relies; anti-realism and cognitivism. Next, I will examine what exactly makes a theory fictionalist and survey some popular formulations of such theories. Lastly, I will look at what the consequences of a moral fictionalist revolution might be and conclude that fictionalism provides promising answers to many of the questions which we would typically ascribe to morality. Introduction In this paper, I will try to answer the question: Should1 we adopt a fictionalist stance in metaethics, why, and what would be the metaethical result of a fictionalist revolution? To answer this question, in the first part of this paper, I will explore anti-realism and cognitivism, which are underlying assumptions of fictionalism and explain why I think this leads us through error theory to a dilemma. In the second part, I will describe the theory of revolutionary moral fictionalism and give a naturalistic account of our current moral practices. In the last part of the paper, I will consider what might be the consequences of a fictionalist revolution and argue that it might help us find better solutions to what we typically would call moral problems, if we adopted a fictionalist stance in metaethics.

1 "Should" is only to be understood in a practical sense here. Were it to be understood morally, it would be self-defeating, as will become clear later in the paper.

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The Path to Fictionalism There is more than one way to become a fictionalist in metaethics, but no matter which path one takes, it starts with a suspicion towards moral realism. When we say: ‘It is wrong to torture other people’, we seem to assert it as a fact. We are ready to defend this belief, and should we be so unlucky as to actually witness torturing we might also feel an immediate physical reaction. Most of our ordinary moral language seems to lead us to moral realism. In Andrew Fishers Metaethics: An Introduction (2011), moral realism is defined as a view, where moral properties or facts exist independently of anyone’s judgements about such entities, (Fisher 2011: 5), although there are disputes about whether moral realism covers an even broader group of theories (Lewis 2005: 315). But moral realism becomes suspicious when we think about these moral properties or facts.

The error of moral realism is expressed by David Lewis in “Quasi-Realism is Fictionalism” (2005):

The distinctive error of 'moral realism' says that there are properties,

perhaps non-natural properties, such that we can somehow detect them; and

such that when we do detect them, that inevitably evokes in us pro- or con-

attitudes towards the things that we have detected to have these properties.

('Inevitably' might mean 'necessarily' or it might mean 'as a matter of

exceptionless psychological law'.) (Lewis 2005: 315)

The feeling of uneasiness about moral properties or facts is what leads us to anti-realism. Anti-realism can now be defined as the view that there are no moral properties or facts (Fisher 2011: 6). But why should we be uneasy about moral properties or facts, when most of us readily accept, for example, physical properties and facts? John Mackie brings forth three challenges to moral realism in his book Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). The first is the challenge from relativity. This challenge relies on the fact that people disagree about morality and have widely different

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moral codes. The relativity of moral codes is not just found between different cultures, but also amongst equally well-informed and similarly rational individuals (Fisher 2011: 41). This disagreement is a challenge, which leads us to uncover an oddness about the moral facts of the realists. They do not seem to be like the scientific or historical facts, about which we expect to agree if we are equally rational and well-informed.

This oddness leads us to Mackie's second challenge, the queerness challenge. Mackie invites the realist to explain what kinds of entities moral values are, implying, that if they were to exist, they would have to be very queer. Fisher mentions three conditions moral values would have to live up to on most realist accounts: they would have to be independent from our beliefs, they would need to be accessible to us, and lastly, they would have to give us reasons to act (ibid.: 42). Problems arise when we realize, that the reasons moral values can provide us with, are independent of our desires. What would motivate us to pursue moral values, when they are independent from our desires? Mackie believes that there would have to be a to-be-pursuedness built into the moral values themselves (ibid.: 42).

Mackie's third challenge is an epistemological version of the challenge from queerness. He argues that if moral values are different from anything we know about in the universe, if they are queer, then we would need a special way of accessing them, perhaps even through a kind of moral intuition, this being needed if we cannot observe them or their effects (Mackie 1977: 38).

Whether or not the challenge from queerness is effective, is highly dependent on which ontological view one subscribes to. When Mackie challenges the realist in this particular way, one of his presuppositions must be naturalism. This limits the kinds of entities Mackie wants to allow for in his ontology to be the ones dealt with by science and psychology

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(ibid.: 48). But naturalism itself is a contended position. In this paper, I will assume that some sort of naturalism is correct.2

After shortly explaining Mackie’s error theory, I will now turn to discussing the anti-realism the theory leads to.

Anti-realism The anti-realist metaethics that this leads to is a broad category spanning over everything from expressivism to error-theory. To limit our scope, we must first ask ourselves whether or not we think that our moral judgements are truth-apt (can be either true or false). We typically think that a sentence is only truth-apt, when some feature of the world makes it true or false. The fact works as a truth-maker for the sentence (ibid.: 58). Not all sentences are truth-apt. ‘Boo torture!’, is an example of a sentence which is not so. Expressivism uses this fact to argue that our moral judgements are actually not assertions or beliefs at all, but rather expressions. They do not think our moral judgements are truth-apt and thus become non-cognitivists. Non-cognitivists generally believe that moral judgements are not beliefs but something else, which is not truth-apt (ibid.: 92). Non-cognitivism, however, faces a problem that becomes pertinent when we use moral terms in both asserted and unasserted contexts. It is called the Frege-Geach problem and arises because of the fact, that the meaning of moral terms differs in different contexts for the non-cognitivist (ibid.: 92). For, for example, the emotivist this means that when I utter the sentence ‘It is wrong to torture animals’, what I am really expressing is the non-cognitive ‘Buh torturing animals!’. However, if I were to say ‘It is wrong to torture animals, or it is permissible to eat meat’, neither proposition is asserted, and the sentence is truth-apt. We do not generally allow meaning to fluctuate according to whether something is

2 Naturalism is not thought by all philosophers to be inconsistent with moral realism. Consideration of this particular form of moral realism is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.

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asserted or unasserted. Non-cognitivism becomes even more problematic, when we use moral terms in for example modus ponens arguments, as can be illustrated via this example:

1. Torturing animals is wrong 2. If torturing animals is wrong, then we shouldn't torture animals in

industrialized farming 3. We shouldn't torture animals in industrialized farming

This argument is not valid due to the fact that ‘torturing animals is wrong’ has a different meaning in (1) and (2). If the non-cognitivist is correct, we will have committed the fallacy of equivocation (ibid.: 95).

The easiest way to avoid the Frege-Geach problem is to acknowledge that our moral language is actually cognitivist in nature. We do express beliefs that are truth-apt when we talk about morality. Cognitivism makes our moral disputes and phenomenological experience of our moral language relevant again and not just stubborn expressions of prescriptions or taste.

Yet the endorsement of cognitivism in combination with anti-realism, must lead us to the conclusion that, because there are no moral properties or facts that can make moral judgements true, all our moral judgements are false. This is the central tenant of John Mackie's error theory (ibid.: 39). The endorsement of cognitivism however, also leads to an apparent problem for the error-theorist. Mackie's starting point is the ordinary language of morality, and the use of this language implies cognitivism, but also realism and truth. So how is Mackie justified in dismissing realism and truth if he purports to take moral language seriously (ibid.: 47)? Although I believe the best defense for choosing cognitivism is to point to the Frege-Geach problem, I will try to show that there is nothing inconsistent about being both an anti-realist and a cognitivist, by comparing this way of thinking about morality with the way in which

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historians think about other discourses, where we would all agree that there are no facts to make the beliefs of the people participating in it true.

Analogy In Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006) he introduces the idea of an outsider investigating a phenomenon on Earth (Dennett 2006: 74). But we might as well imagine a historian investigating the phenomenon of phlogiston. Such a historian would surely come to the conclusion, that most of our scientists at one point spoke as if phlogiston existed. They had beliefs about phlogiston and they used the name in sentences which they believed, and we still believe, to be truth-apt, for example ‘Phlogiston exists’. Now as a scientist himself, we would want the historian to live up to certain scientific standards. We would especially like the historian to withhold judgement about the existence of phlogiston. It would simply be bad science if the historian concluded that phlogiston existed, but it would not seem odd to us if the historian acted as though sentences involving phlogiston were truth-apt. From this example we can see that it is better to be more reluctant in a critical setting like science to admit to the existence of mind-independent facts, than admitting to cognitivism.

Lewis, however, makes us aware of distinctions between different kinds of errors. He takes the example of the phlogiston theory, an erroneous theory which could not survive the correction of its errors, and then an example of an ancient theory of the motion of the sun across the heavens, from which certain sentences can be deduced, in which we still believe, although the theory as a whole turned out to be erroneous (Lewis 2005: 317). Lewis believes the error-theorists has chosen the former interpretation of the error of moral realism, whereas he agrees with the latter interpretation of the error of moral realism. In addition to this, Lewis believes that morality as it is, is too ill-defined for us to be able to show that morality itself contains errors and not just that some moralists

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are in error (ibid.: 318). I believe, as Lewis, that given both the vagueness but also the relativity of morality, it might be hard even to limit what is and is not morality in certain contexts, and therefore we should probably only cautiously accept the error theory. Even if error theory is not fully accepted, this will not hinder us in accepting fictionalism, from a perspective like Lewis’s.

After drawing this analogy to phlogiston, I will now try to explain out current moral practices from a fictionalist standpoint.

Explaining Morality At this point we might ask ourselves: How did we come to have this false belief in moral realism? To give a naturalist account of our current morality it might be suggested that, if morality has a pragmatic advantage, it might have been a tool which made certain types of problem-solving easier. This does not mean that there needs to be just one origin of morality. It might have been, akin to what Dennett suggests with religion (Dennett 2006: 67), that it was a useful interpretation of certain situations, which in general tends to make certain kinds of problems easier for people (perhaps psychologically) to handle. It should be made clear, that this is not a subscription to the naturalism of some moral realists, but a naturalist explanation of our current moral practices.

Joyce and Lewis also characterize their views as forms of naturalism. Joyce characterizes his position as one in which moral belief function as expedients “[...] supplementing and reinforcing the outputs of prudential reasoning” (Joyce 2005: 301). Lewis sees his own view as a form of analytic naturalism. He believes that value is connected to desire and that empirical psychologists in the distant future will be able to define value as “[...] those properties that we are, under certain ideal circumstances, disposed to value” (Lewis 2005: 320). Lewis suggests that there are certain properties which we are disposed to value, connected with our desires. His

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naturalism is not aimed at explaining our current moral practices but to direct our future ones. He also, however, hints at a possible explanation of our current realist practices, as us not being in total error concerning our moral practices but an “[...] intermediate alternative: you might describe us – some or all of us – as being in a state of confusion such that fictionalism or quasi-realism would be the minimal unconfused revision of our present state.” (ibid.: 319). This also makes especially Lewis’s theory closer related to modern naturalist realist theories of morality, for example Kim Sterelny and Ben Fraser’s evolutionary moral realism, as seen in their paper “Evolution and Moral Realism” (2016). Lewis’s fictionalism thus seems closer related to a realism about morality, and this point is also discussed by Lewis, who admits that his theory might be categorized both as realism and anti-realism, depending on how realism is interpreted.

If we accept Mackie's error theory or at least, like Lewis, that there is some central error in moral realism, we are left with a problem: if morality is fraught, what should we then do? At first sight even this question seems impossible to ask if we adopt an error theory. As error theorists we must interpret the ‘should’ exclusively as a pragmatic ‘should’ (Joyce 2005: 288). There are two typical reactions to Mackie's conclusion: we can become eliminativists, and abolish morality altogether, or we can make-believe morality. The best option will have to be decided on practical grounds, therefore if we want to make-believe morality, be moral fictionalists, we will have to show that it is a pragmatically better solution than eliminativism. This means that the metaethical question of why we should undertake ethical questions at all, is prominent within fictionalism. Before looking into these pragmatic reasons for choosing fictionalism, we will have to take a closer look at moral fictionalism itself.

In this section, I have explained the theoretical background for moral fictionalism and the considerations that lead to the theory. In the

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following, I will present the theory of moral fictionalism and different objections against it.

Moral Fictionalism In “Moral fictionalism versus the Rest” (2006) Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall, and Caroline West presents moral fictionalism as follows:

The only requirement we make for a moral fictionalism is that morally

evaluative claims are given in the combination of the base discourse with the

fiction and the bridge laws. (Nolan, Restall & West 2006: 310)

This means that if we are to express any evaluative moral claim, we have three requirements; a base discourse, bridge laws, and a fiction. The base discourse can contain no moral ontology, no objective prescriptive claims, and no positive moral claims. This means we are still allowed to use moral terms in claims like “[...] literally speaking, it is not the case that causing suffering is morally wrong” (ibid.: 309), but we cannot use moral terms in any positive claims, for example, “x is morally right/x is morally evil” (ibid.: 309).

The bridge laws give us the relations between the non-moral base discourse and the moral discourse of the fiction: “[...] bridge laws connect moral discourse to non-moral discourse by way of biconditionals or conditionals of the usual kind, and the fiction will be a moral theory couched in these moral terms.” (ibid.: 310)

An example of what might be such a bridge law could be supervenience of the moral on the non-moral. This would guarantee the appearance of supervenience in our moral language, making sure that we cannot have a change in the moral without a change in the non-moral (ibid.: 317). The fiction itself can have moral properties and moral ontology of any kind, it can contain a lot of claims or nearly none.

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A modal form of moral fictionalism is suggested by both Nolan, Restall and West, and Lewis. In this version of moral fictionalism you imagine the world which is closest to yours in which the fiction is told as, and is, an actual fact. Blackburn recites Lewis as defining the theory:

A sentence of the form 'in fiction f, F' is non-vacuously true iff, whenever w is

one of the collective belief worlds of the community of origin of f, then some

world where f is told and known fact and F is true differs less from the world

w, on balance, than does any world where f is told as known fact and F is not

true (Blackburn 2005: 325)

In Nolan, Restall and West's modal version of moral fictionalism they draw an analogy to religion. We could “[...] suppose, for example, that there might be a divine command theory combined with atheism. Then there are no instantiated moral properties, but there would be if there were a God.” (Nolan, Restall & West 2006: 309). Whether or not any form of modal fiction is actually true in a given world, and thus not a fiction, depends entirely on the ontology of that world, and our ability to discover whether or not our beliefs are true in a modal moral fictionalist scenario would depend on our ability to uncover this ontology.

Richard Joyce distinguishes between two kinds of moral factionalism, that each has a different understanding of the fictionalist’s use of ordinary moral language in his “Moral Fictionalism” (2005), namely whether the fictionalist is making an assertion about a fiction or a fictional assertion (Joyce 2005: 292). If the fictionalist chooses the former, she might end up with a predicament similar to the Frege-Geach problem. If we make assertions about fictions, this fails to account for the use of moral claims in certain arguments. Joyce explains this in an argument where he makes use of a broader kind of fictionalism about different discourses. In Joyce's argument we imagine a color fictionalist giving the following argument:

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P1: Fresh grass is green. P2: My lawn is made of fresh grass. C: Therefore, my lawn is green.3

The problem arises when the we make assertions about the color fiction, so we have to rewrite the first premise, adding the prefix “According to the fiction of a colored world [...]” (Joyce 2005: 292). In adding the prefix, the fictionalist makes the argument valid, but she also makes it an actual assertion. If we are to interpret the prefix as something along the lines of “it is true in the fiction of...” (ibid.: 293), then this leads to a new problem. The sentence would still be an assertion and since we can take any color assertion and use it as a premise in any other argument, this would mean that the prefix would have to be applied to every assertion the fictionalist might make as long as the assertion can be combined in an argument with the color claim (ibid.: 293). The account also fails to explain the contexts in which the fictionalist would deny her former claim, “What I said earlier was, strictly speaking, false” (ibid.: 292). These contexts are what Joyce calls critical contexts. An example might be the philosophy class. This is the context in which the individual is at her most critical, reflective and undistracted. “Critical thinking investigates and challenges the presuppositions of ordinary thinking in a way that ordinary thinking does not investigate and challenge the presuppositions of critical thinking.” (ibid.: 290).

These problems do not arise if the fictionalist is making a fictional or make-believe assertion instead. When we make-believe an assertion the content of the assertion does not change, what changes according to Joyce is “[...] the 'force' with which it is uttered.” (ibid.: 293). Joyce appeals to the fact that there are different ways to 'express' something and that this way of expressing oneself would, following a fictionalist revolution, be one

3 Joyce 2005: 292

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established by a linguistic convention (ibid.: 297). This becomes more obvious if we imagine that a group or society of people decide to become fictionalists, or if we think about how our own group conventions like sarcasm and storytelling work.

Lewis believes that we can achieve the goal of only making fictional assertions or what he calls quasi-assertions if we endorse projectivism: “Projectivism is the view that this [the before mentioned error of realism] is indeed an error; our pro- and con-attitudes actually originate within us as a result of our psychology and upbringing.” (Lewis 2005: 316)

He believes that projectivism is not only held by error theorists but also by quasi-realists, a position that the quasi-realist Simon Blackburn contends. The quasi-realism of Blackburn is an anti-realist non-cognitive explanatory position; Blackburn seeks to explain our realist moral language given that anti-realism is correct (Fisher 2011: 97). Quasi-realists seek to imitate the realist, and to argue that we can build up a realist moral language from our sentiments (Nolan, Restall & West 2006: 315). Most quasi-realists contract to a form of minimal truth in which “[...] once we have assertion conditions with a fairly stable set of conditions about what is appropriate to assert and what is not appropriate to assert then we have truth conditions.” (ibid.: 315). The prescriptions about what is assertible cannot be explained in moral language, but in terms of attitudes and variance in these. To Lewis, once one has subscribed to projectivism (for example by deciding what can be asserted and what cannot and projected this into the world) every moral claim is proceed by a “disowing preface” (Lewis 2005: 315), therefore every moral 'assertion' becomes a quasi-assertion, and to Lewis this is moral fictionalism “Blackburn's quasi-realism is just this kind of moral fictionalism. For Blackburn's quasi-realism does not come out of thin air. (If it did, perfected quasi-realism might indeed be indistinguishable from realism.) It is motivated by the previous discussion of projectivism.” (ibid.: 319).

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Fictionalism vs Quasi-realism In his reply to Lewis, “Quasi-Realism no Fictionalism” (2005), Blackburn argues, that fictionalism contains central flaws which is not found in quasi-realism and even declares that “Fiction is not part of the solution – it is the central core of the problem.” (Blackburn 2005: 331). Blackburn believes that the solution of quasi-realism is one without pretense, as we will have come to agreement about our construction of minimal truth conditions, following which we are free to act in a moral realist manner. I agree with Blackburn that quasi-realism is not fictionalism, but I also agree with Lewis in that were quasi-realism to succeed in their project of building a system of morality on minimal truth conditions, they would be indistinguishable from the realists. What would make them uncannily like the realists, would be their adherence to minimal truth conditions.

Blackburn also present arguments against Lewis's moral fictionalism. He worries that a modal formulation of fictionalism which Lewis proposes, presuppose that we “[...] understand the idea of the fiction being told as known fact.” (Blackburn 2005: 325). This happens because any kind of fiction requires us to imagine a place where something, that we know not to be true in our world, is told as a known fact. We need to know what it is that we are pretending. As Blackburn himself points out, this is no problem when we discuss what we might call literally fiction, for example when we start a story with the preface4 'Once upon a time...', but it becomes a problem, when we want to discuss a fiction, which we do not generally see as a fiction, for example:

Now we ask: is it true in the color fiction, that canaries are yellow? To answer

we need to understand what it is for 'canaries are yellow' to be fact, and to be

known as such, although in our world it is not. (ibid.: 325)

4 The distinction between prefix and preface is explored in Lewis 2005.

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From the case of color fictionalism, we can draw an analogy to morality. The question then becomes whether morality is closer to the unproblematic cases of fiction that we have or to the case of a color fiction. Another problem arises if we look to fictions where impossible things happen. This however this problem can easily be avoided if we adopt very liberal bridge laws to connect our fiction to the base discourse.

Blackburn likewise believes that our phenomenological experience raises a problem for the fictionalist and asserts that to adopt fictionalism would be unsatisfactory to a person who has fought against a moral system. It would be like we were to “[...] continue as before only with our fingers crossed.” (ibid.: 331). I, however, believe that fictionalism can easily avoid this problem. I will elaborate on this later in the paper.

In fictionalism it seems to be assumed that we know the difference between a fact and a fiction, but this boundary seems vague (ibid.: 335). My appeal in this case will be to the truth-maker theory. Blackburn admits that a conversation where “[...] there is a set or words, some of which sound to be telling a story, some of which sound to make claims on what exists [...]” (ibid.: 336), where the story is told with conviction, but does not admit of any of enquiry, this will indeed be an odd conversation.

A last problem arises when we ask if people truly are motivated by fictional stories in the same manner they are motivated by belief. The fictionalist need not argue that it makes no difference to motivation that we are motivated by a story rather than a belief. The fictionalist has already cast aside all belief in moral realism, the fictionalist need only show that there are some advantages of motivation in keeping morality (Joyce 2005: 302). Joyce points out that: "A quick argument to show that a positive answer is within reach begins by noting that engagement with fiction can affect our emotional states." (ibid.: 302).

To this he adds the premise that emotional states can affect motivations, and thus behavior (ibid.: 302). The connection is obvious if

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we think about how literature, television, commercials and social media impacts us, and how entire industries have been built up around selling us products around which fictions of health or popularity etc. are built up, fictions we know to be false, but that does not keep us from buying into them anyway. These industries could not exist if people were not motivated by their fictional assertions. We surround ourselves with fictions, which we acknowledge to be fictions, but we still act as if some of these fictions were real.

Whether we arrive at fictionalism through presupposing error theory as Joyce, Nolan, Restall and West does, or through recognition of an error in realism as Lewis does, we still need to show that fictionalism is the pragmatically superior solution to eliminativism, in the wake of adopting anti-realism.

In this section I defended moral fictionalism as a metaethical position. I will now explain which pragmatic reasons there are for choosing fictionalism rather than eliminativism.

A Fictionalist Revolution There are several pragmatic reasons as to why we should not give up on morality altogether. The first and most serious would be that:

Eliminativism about moral discourse would force great and wide-ranging

changes to our patterns of speech and thought on much the same scale as

would eliminativism about folk psychological concepts. (Nolan, Restall &

West 2006: 311)

If eliminating our moral language would be tantamount to eliminating our folk psychological concepts, then one clear advantage of keeping fictionalism becomes the convenience it represents. It would certainly be very difficult to give up on folk psychological concepts, and even though I do not myself think that giving up morality would represent a challenge of

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the same magnitude, such a consequence should be taken seriously. Our moral discourse is an intricate part of much of our social behavior. It regulates personal relations and enable us to coordinate different practical problems and attitudes (ibid.: 307). In short, we should (pragmatically should, due to effectiveness5) keep using a moral fiction because it is useful to us in many different contexts.

A second advantage of fictionalism over eliminativism is its expressive power (ibid.: 311). With a moral fiction we have easy access to expressing more than we had without one. Analogously the moral color fictionalist is allowed to talk about color whereas the color eliminativist is not, there is no need for the fictionalist to 'translate' or rewrite any sentences to avoid using color vocabulary. The extra expressive power is important, as it allows us to be more effective when solving pragmatic problems or problems of cooperation. This advantage points us to a third one. With a greater expressive power, fictionalism has more potential to help in many disputes and practical problems without having to revolutionize our ordinary language, as soon we want to discuss something that remotely relates to the topic of morality (ibid.: 311).

It is the withdrawal from ordinary moral language in critical contexts, which make the fictionalist exactly that. This is what accounts for the fact that she is not suffering from self-deception. We already know of situations where people engage in fictions like role-playing, but hopefully would retreat from the role-playing discourse if we were to press them on the subject matter of whether elves really existed. One could be worried that this might mean that the fictionalist is lying to the rest of the world when engaging in ordinary moral talk (Joyce 2005: 297), this would first of all be solved if we were to have a collective fictionalist revolution, even though

5 It might be objected here that effectiveness will be a new value, when used in this way. Yet this is contested because effectiveness of often closely tied up with rationality. We might have a case where we can choose between two different scenarios, one more effective than the other. If all other things besides effectiveness are equal in the two scenarios, would it not be irrational to choose the less effective scenario?

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this still might be a problem depending on how large this group is in comparison with the rest of the societies with which they are in contact. Second, I would argue, that whether the fictionalist is lying depends on the context and her willingness to be open about her metaethical position. Such an openness about a fictionalist metaethics need not be a disadvantage. This could help transform our current moral practices simply by casting them into doubt. Recent studies have suggested that most of the violence committed in different cultures have moral motifs, especially if the parties are deeply convinced that their moral is the correct one6. These studies cast into doubt whether it actually helps the moralist achieve her moral goal to be a devout moralist. This is not to say of course, that some people are not making the world a better place by their standards by behaving morally, but we cannot neglect the dangers of morality either. To draw an analogy to religion we might say as Dennett: “Religion [morality] does all this good and more, no doubt, but something else we could devise might do it as well or better.”7 (Dennett 2006: 55). The pitfalls of morality are part of the reason Richard Garner gives in his “Abolishing Morality” (2007) for suggesting that we should give it up:

[...] the death of moralizing might be good for the individual and for society,

and that moral abolitionism may be more useful than moral fictionalism in

helping us reach the goals that most compassionate moralists seek. (Garner

2009: 218)

Garner argues for eliminativism partly on the grounds that morality often seems to only reinforce already existing opinions and escalate conflicts as both parties invoke the 'right' to be on their side (ibid.: 221). But he also

6 To see a survey of different studies conducted in the field of motivations for violence, I recommend Virtuous Violence by Alan Page Fiske & Tage Shakti Rai. 7 Brackets added.

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argues that morality would not in fact, be as hard as many people imagine to remove from our language (ibid.: 223).

I would argue, that as a moral fictionalist you should not mindlessly adopt as fiction the already existing moral codes. In fact, I will claim that, in a world where at least a group of people have decided that moral realism is wrong, have gone through a fictionalist revolution, and then decided to keep morality as make-believe after careful practical deliberation, these people are not likely to forget this, at least in critical contexts. It is not at all certain that such a group of people would choose to adopt our current moral practices unaltered. In the light of arguments and empirical studies suggesting that blindly following moral systems might make you more likely to invoke morality as a means to escalate conflicts, the revolutionary moral fictionalists should take this and all other available related studies and arguments into account (I will assume that the participants in a fictionalist moral revolution possess the best available information), before deciding which fiction to tell. Some of the downsides of morality, which casts doubts on the entire enterprise for the eliminativist, could perhaps be avoided, if the fictionalist gives metaethics a more prominent role in her ordinary considerations. This is of course an attempt at finding a middle ground, and it might be hard to navigate in such murky waters. But in defense of the position it might be said that we manage to actually do this in many known fictions and following a fictionalist revolution people would, at least in critical contexts, be aware of their fictionalist convictions.

In this section I have examined different reasons why moral fictionalism is pragmatically superior to eliminativism and put forth a version of moral fictionalism, which I hope might help some typical 'moral' problems.

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Conclusion In this paper I have tried to answer the question “Should [practical] we adopt a fictionalist stance in metaethics, why, and what would be the metaethical result of a fictionalist revolution?” by first showing what different courses one might take to reach the metaethical position of moral fictionalism, and by examining the arguments in favor of anti-realism over realism and cognitivism over non-cognitivism. From this, I have led us on to both Mackie's error theory, and Lewis's attempt at equating Blackburn's quasi-realism with fictionalism. These approaches have led us to a revolutionary moral fictionalism.

Then I have defined the fictionalist position subscribed to by this paper, as having the requirements of a base discourse, bridge laws and a fiction. Following the definition and clarification of the position, arguments against moral fictionalism has been assessed and answers have been attempted. I have explained why fictionalism is pragmatically superior to eliminativism and advocated a form of fictionalist revolution after which metaethics is to be given a more prominent position in people's ordinary moral discourse.

From this, I can conclude, that moral fictionalism is an attainable and attractive position in metaethics and that a revolutionary moral fictionalism, might actually realize what moral realists often describe as moral goals.

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Bibliography Blackburn, Simon. 2005. “Quasi-Realism no Fictionalism”. Ch. 11,

Fictionalism in metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 322-338.

Dennett, Daniel. 2006 [2006]. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books.

Eklund, Matti. "Fictionalism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/fictionalism/>.

Fisher, Andrew. 2011. Metaethics. An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Garner, Richard. 2009. “Abolishing Morality” from, Joyce, Richard & Kirchin, Simon, A World Without Values, p. 217-233.

Joyce, Richard. 2005. “Moral Fictionalism”. Ch. 9, Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 287-313.

Lewis, David. 2005. “Quasi-Realism is Fictionalism”, Ch. 10, Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 314-321.

Mackie, John L. 1977. Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin Books.

Nolan, Daniel & Restall, Greg & West, Caroline. September 2005. “Moral Fictionalism versus the Rest”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 83, No. 3, p. 307 – 330.

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Om mening skrevet af Morten Meldgaard Madsen, DPU · udgivet februar 2020

Abstract I dagligsproget om uddannelse og pædagogik – og i bredere forstand – om det at være menneske, benyttes begrebet mening ofte som en sproglig schweizerkniv. Mening ordner alt fra indhold, betydning, sammenhæng og forståelse – til viden, sandhed, hensigt og formål. Potentiel forvirring og uklarhed følger, hvorfor spørgsmålet ikke er ’hvad meningen er?’, men ’hvad mening er?’ Sigtet med artiklen er en begyndende indholdsmæssig bestemmelse af fænomenet og en beskrivelse af forudsætningerne for at mening kan skabes, findes, gives eller hvordan den nu gestaltes. Kort sagt: hvordan kan mening forstås og hvordan manifesterer den sig? Foruden at sige noget om det substantielle, indholdet og forståelsen af begrebet, er hensigten at afsøge muligheder og grænser for det metodiske i tilgangen. Artiklen tegner konturer af et felt til videre undersøgelse, og eksperimenterer med indgange til dette felt. Konkret kan eksperimentet aflæses i form af tre bud – henholdsvis: en påpegning af mening som flydende betegner, en fortolkning af mening som nytte og en fremstilling af mening som forbundethed med verden. En fremgangsmåde ”Det er givet, at dagligsproget ikke har det sidste ord: I princippet kan man overalt udbygge det og forbedre det og erstatte det. Men husk: Det har det første ord” (Austin 1956: 182). Artiklen følger logikken i citatet af sprogfilosoffen John L. Austin. Der tages afsæt i dagligsprogsfilosofien og en overvejelse over ordets betydning, for dernæst at undersøge eksempler på, hvordan ordet anvendes. Devisen er, som Ludvig Wittgenstein pointerer, at det ikke er viden om hvad ordet benævner, men indsigt i

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hvordan det bruges, der er væsentlig for forståelsen af ordet (Wittgenstein, 1994). Undersøgelsen foregår i den sammenhæng ved læsning af tre udvalgte kronikker omhandlende mening.

Dernæst undersøges et eksempel på en teoretisk reflekteret anvendelse af mening. Ordet mening, bliver her til begrebet mening, ved det Austin benævner ’en udbygning af sproget’. Undersøgelsen foregår ved læsning af antologien Mål med mening (Fibæk Laursen 2018) og tre artikler af Ib Ravn, ph.D. lektor ved AU, omhandlende mening i arbejdslivet.

Antologien og kronikken af undervisningsminister Mette Riisager omhandler pædagogik og uddannelse, mens de to øvrige kronikker, der inddrages, i bredere forstand, omhandler det at være menneske (jf. indledningen). Teksterne er ikke et forsøg på at give et repræsentativt udsnit af, hvordan meningsbegrebet anvendes, men er alene at opfatte som eksempler, der tjener som undersøgelsens genstand. Afslutningsvis forsøges det at skabe en kobling mellem de to foregående undersøgelser og en fænomenologisk eksistentialistisk udlægning af mening. Udgangspunkt er her filosoffen Martin Heideggers Daseinsanalytik, som kort introduceres i afsnittet.

Intentionen med fremgangsmåden, der inddrager mange perspektiver, er at foreslå forskellige analytiske vinkler. I artiklen behandles disse derfor ikke ’tilbundsgående’, men præsenteres med forhåbningen om at kunne inspirere til videre, og mere grundigt, selvstændigt arbejde. En underliggende pointe er således, at der er forskel på om mening undersøges som et ord, et begreb eller et fænomen. En forskel, der gør sig gældende i såvel undersøgelsens fremgangsmåde, som i de svar der kan udledes. De to overordnede filosofiske perspektiver i artiklen er dagligsprogsfilosofi og fænomenologi - her introduceret i kortest mulig form. Dagligsprogsfilosofi er en filosofisk praksis, der undersøger, potentielt blotlægger og opløser, problemer ved at gøre

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opmærksom på, hvordan sprogets logik fungerer. Centralt står den allerede nævnte lære, at sprogets mening ligger i dets brug. I artiklen undersøges brugen af ordet mening, med henblik på at pege på de forviklinger det medfører, samt hvordan disse kan imødegås. Fænomenologi er læren om fænomener, det vil sige dét, der kommer til syne for en bevidsthed. Mening opfattes som præcis ’sådan et fænomen’. Ved at undersøge, hvordan mening hænger sammen med fænomener som engagement, erfaring og forståelse, siges der noget om, hvad mening er, og hvordan den viser sig i vores bevidsthed.

Sprogets væsen I Vidde og prægnans (1976) henleder K. E. Løgstrup opmærksomheden på to omstændigheder ved sproget, der er af særlig betydning for undersøgelsen. ”Vi ser ikke det sprog, vi ser med, så lidt som vi ser de øjne, vi ser med”, hedder det – og videre: ”Sproget er et organ for vor erkendelse, men det erkender ikke for os. Erkendelsen må vi selv præstere” (Løgstrup 1976: 27). Således forstået at indsigt i sprogets væsen, funktion, og væremåde er essentiel for vores erkendelse, og at sprogets væsen, funktion og væremåde umiddelbart skjuler sig for os. Det sprogfilosofiske problem Løgstrup peger på, skal her blive forsøgt imødekommet. Det sker ved en simpel opdeling mellem videnskabens operationelle definitioner og den før-videnskabelige forståelse, der kommer til udtryk i vores dagligdags sprog. En skelnen mellem dagligsprogets sprogfødte ord og det videnskabelige sprogs termini skal i denne forbindelse opridses.

Lader vi indledningsvis selve betydningen af ordet mening vente, kan vi med en skelnen hos Løgstrup, nærme os forståelsen af hvilken type begreb mening kan siges at være, samt hvilke karakteristika det kan siges at have. Opdelingen hos Løgstrup går mellem ’materielle ting og optiske fænomener i vores sansbare omverden’ på den ene side og ’fænomener der hører vor mentale og historiske tilværelse til’, på den anden (Løgstrup

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1976: 38). Konkrete eksempler kunne være: et bord, en skygge, farven rød på den ene side og en stemning, en begivenhed, en betydning på den anden. Forenklet sagt kan vi pege på de første, mens vi må tyde de sidste.

Semantikkens betydningstrekant (tegn (den sproglige term) – betydning - betegnet (den udenfor-sproglige ting)) indikerer, at vi har en anden adgang til det udenfor-sproglige end sproget (Ogden & Richards 1952: 11) (Svendsen & Säätelä 2008: 104). Det gør sig gældende for det materielle og de optiske fænomener (jeg kan eksempelvis røre ved bordet og pege på skyggen), men ikke for de mentale og historiske fænomener (jeg kan eksempelvis ikke røre ved ’valget’ eller pege på ’meningen’). Adgangen til disse er således altid gennem sproget, hvilket ifølge Løgstrup, ikke af den grund, gør dem mindre reelle fænomener end de første. For filosofisk at udrede betydningen af disse ord, er vi henviste til at besinde os på de vendinger hvori de forekommer, altså deres brug. Derfor går vejen over dagligsproget. En forståelse af hvordan dagligsproget fungerer skal her hjælpes på vej, med markeringer omkring vidde, prægnans og betydning.

Dagligsproget

Er spørgsmålet: ”Har disse ord mening?” ikke meget lig: ”Er dette et

værktøj?” samtidig med, at man peger på en hammer. Jeg siger ”Ja, det er en

hammer”. Men hvad nu, hvis det, som enhver af os ville anse for en hammer,

et andet sted var f.eks. et kasteskyts eller en dirigentstok. Find nu selv

anvendelsen! (Wittgenstein 1989: 166).

Løgstrup gør, på Wittgensteinsk manér, op med opfattelsen af, hvad han benævner ordenes fritstående betydning og opfattelsen af ordene som blot henvisende. Ordet kommer ikke med en betydning allerede før brugen, men får netop sin betydning, sin entydighed, af konteksten. Det er ifølge Løgstrup muligt i kraft af to gældende præmisser: Vidde og prægnans. Vidde betegner registeret af betydning ordene besidder, prægnans

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betegner præciseringen af, hvilken betydning, der i en given sammenhæng gøres gældende.

Løgstrup bemærker, at det særlige ved dagligsproget er, at vidde og prægnans i dagligsproget ikke er modsætninger, men ’går sammen’. Dette skyldes, at vidde og prægnans er hinandens forudsætninger: det er i kraft af vidden, ordet får mulighed for præcisering - og vice versa. Var ordet på forhånd entydigt, ville konteksten ikke kunne fremkalde præcis, den betydning af ordet, der fordredes. Forfaldsformen er derfor en fastlæggelse af ordets gængse betydning, hvorved ordet mister vidde og får en stereotyp, udvisket betydning.

Som indledningsvist bemærket har ordet mening stor betydningsvidde. I dagligsproget har det tillige flere gængse anvendelser, hvoraf de mest almindelige skal fremhæves: Mening som holdning, vurdering og opfattelse, som i: ’efter min mening er opera overvurderet’. Mening som formål, hensigt og intention, som i: ’meningen med at motionere er at komme i form’. Mening som betydning, definition eller indhold som i: ’meningen med udtrykket ’spidsborger’ er ’en snæversynet småborgerlig person’.

I sætningen ’efter min mening er opera overvurderet’, kan mening udskiftes med opfattelse (’efter min opfattelse er opera overvurderet’), og budskabet med sætningen være intakt. Budskabet eller sætningsmeningen skifter, forvirres eller ødelægges ligefrem, hvis mening tages i en anden gængs betydning (eksempelvis: ’Efter mit formål er opera overvurderet’). Dette underbygger pointen om forfaldet ved den stereotype indsnævrede betydning af et ord.

Hvad der bemærkes ved disse eksempler er, at betydningen af ordet mening, i hvert fald i nogen grad, gives af sammenhængen eller sætningen, hvori det anvendes. Hvorvidt konteksten fremkalder den nødvendige anskueliggørende prægnante betydning – og dermed hvorvidt vi kan

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besinde os på brugen – undersøges i følgende tre kronikker, alle med mening i overskriften.

Mening som flydende betegner. En påpegning I kronikken En skole med mening (2018) anfægter Riisager, udlægningen af den danske folkeskole i den offentlige debat, som ”I en konkurrencestatslogik reducerer skolen med sin læringsoptimering og blinde anvendelsesorientering til noget, den ikke er” (ibid.: 4). Riisager anerkender, at der i skolen er unge, som er ulykkelige, mistrives, har ondt i maven, og at deres ”Følelser opleves som objektivt til stede” (ibid.: 3). Ligeledes anerkender Riisager, at der af folkeskolereformen er fulgt et politisk fokus på resultaterne af særligt dansk og matematik. På nogle skoler betyder det en nedprioritering af ”[…]kulturelle elementer som for eksempel morgensang, fortælling og kulturelle udflugter” (ibid.: 2). Riisager anerkender imidlertid ikke, at en ændring af de eksterne faktorer (karakterer, forventninger, faglige barrierer, eksternt pres) vil være det rigtige sted at sætte ind, for at løse problemerne. Vigtigt er det derimod, at skolen fungerer som en samfundsinstitution, der videregiver kulturarv, værdier og fortællinger. Disse ”[…] er vigtige for os som land, og har betydning for det enkelte menneske” (ibid.: 4).

Hvad mening, ifølge Riisager, nærmere dækker over og hvorvidt det er noget der opstår af sig selv eller skabes, gives der i kronikken ingen direkte svar på. Umiddelbart kunne de ovenfor anførte gængse betydninger af mening, alle gøres gældende. En skole med holdning, formål og betydning lyder som plausible bud, skolen som samfundsinstitution taget i betragtning. Bevæger vi os videre end de gængse betydninger, i en søgen efter den prægnante betydning af mening, gives der en smule hjælp af konteksten. Dog i en form, der betyder at tolkning er nødvendig. En sådan kunne se ud som følger: De unges mistrivsel må tages som udtryk for, at de mangler mening. At de mangler

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mening, skyldes ikke de eksterne faktorer, men indholdet i deres skolegang. ’En skole med mening’ skal derfor blive ”[…] markant bedre til at give eleverne bedre adgang til vores fælles fortælling” (ibid.: 4). En nødvendig omstændighed for at opleve mening, er således at være en del af noget større. Noget større er et fællesskab og en overleveret kulturarv, der viser ”[…] at verden både åbner sig og er givet” (ibid.: 4). Mening er altså givet, den ligger i vores fællesskab og fælles fortælling. Det er derfor blot et spørgsmål om at få adgang til den.

I kronikkerne Stop jagten på livets mening af Morten Nielsen, Lektor, Ph.D., Institut for Medier, Erkendelse & Formidling på Københavns Universitet og Fortsæt endelig jagten på livets mening af Søren Harnow Klausen, professor i filosofi på Syddansk Universitet, kobles mening eksplicit med begreberne lykke og det gode liv. Det grundlæggende spørgsmål der rejses i kronikkerne er, hvorfor det moderne samfunds øgede materielle velstand, fremgang i sundhed, teknologi, frihed til selvrealisering og generelt forbedrede levevilkår, samtidig betyder at mennesker i stigende grad oplever at være ensomme, angste, deprimerede og stressede. Implicit i denne spørgen ligger en formodning om, at det modsatte burde være tilfældet. Svaret på denne udfordring er, jævnfør titlerne på kronikkerne, henholdsvis at stoppe eller fortsætte jagten på mening. ’Jagten på’ indikerer at mening kan ’findes derude’ – uanset om man vælger at søge den eller afblæser forsøget, fordi man tror, at jagten i sig selv er problemet. I nærværende artikel er det interessante ikke, hvad tilgangene implicerer, og hvilken der er at foretrække, men alene hvordan ordet mening anvendes. Anvendelsen ser netop ud til at være sammenfaldende i kronikkerne. Mening anvendes som det ikke-indholdsbestemte fænomen, der skal give adgang til det gode - eller blot: et godt liv. Mening sættes som substitut for ’det-man-nu-end-finder-betydningsfuldt-i-sit-liv’, hvorpå eksemplerne der gives, er

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integritet, autenticitet, selvindsigt, selvoptimering, selvværd, penge og umiddelbar anerkendelse.

Mening dækker her over såvel Mening (med stort, som i: Meningen med livet) og mening som noget, der kan findes ”til husbehov” (Juul Nielsen 2018: 2). Endvidere benyttes prædikatet meningsfuld – og modsat: meningsløs – som et kvalitetsstempel, der kan appliceres på vores liv og elementer i det. Mening beskrives som noget kvantificerbart, som man kan have mere eller mindre af; vi kan med andre ord forsøge ”[…] at fylde vores tilværelse med mening” (ibid.: 1).

Læsningen af kronikkerne, underbygger min indledende indvending om uklarhed. Udfordringen jeg påpeger er, at den mening og betydning (af ordet mening), der præciseres og den konkretion der vindes, ikke giver den nødvendige præcisering. Præciseringen er nødvendig fordi sproget, som Løgstrup pointerer, ikke erkender for os. Erkendelsen må vi selv præstere og det kræver en sproglig præcision, som dagligsproget, dvs. brugen, ikke nødvendigvis ’leverer’. Løgstrup peger på mærkværdigheden ved, at et ord i sin betydning ’suger op i sig’ hvad det står for, og at ordet deraf får anskuelseskraft og kan fungere som billede eller repræsentation (Løgstrup 1976: 119). Jeg anfægter således, at det er tilfældet med ordet mening. For at blive i billedmetaforen, bliver billedet i min optik en anelse uskarpt, når det på én gang forestiller overleveret kulturarv, fællesskab, penge og selvoptimering.

Særligt i de sidste to kronikker mener jeg, at der i højere grad, end en egentlig betydning af ordet, kan tales om en funktion af ordet. Jeg påpeger derfor, at mening benyttes som flydende betegner. Det vil sige et tegn, hvis betydning ikke er fastlagt og derfor i forskellige kontekster, både antager forskellige former og udfyldes med forskelligt indhold. Anderledes fastlagt bliver meningsbegrebet, når der skiftes scene fra dagligsproget til det videnskabelige sprog. Denne ’udbygning af sproget’, eksemplificeres nedenfor. For bedre at forstå eksemplet, vendes imidlertid først tilbage til

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Løgstrups begreber vidde og prægnans, for at foretage to markeringer. Én om forskelle på sprogfødte ord og videnskabelige termini – og én om systematisering og reduktion som forudsætning for at kunne fastlægge betydninger.

Det videnskabelige sprog og termini I det videnskabelige sprog forholder det sig anderledes med vidde og prægnans, end det gør i dagligsproget. Her går vidde og prægnans ikke sammen og ordets åbenhed, som var en dyd, og dermed noget vi skulle værne om i dagligsproget, er ifølge Løgstrup det modsatte i det videnskabelige sprog. Kendetegnende for den videnskabelige terminus er, at denne kan defineres og dens omfang angives. Dermed opnås nøjagtighed på anderledes vis end i dagligsproget, men dermed ikke sagt, at videnskaberne er de eneste instrumenter til at konstatere kendsgerninger. Løgstrups pointerer netop, at dette også er muligt med vort dagligdags sprog. I tillæg, at der er kendsgerninger, som det dagligdags sprog er bedre til at konstatere – og distinktioner vi kun kan få udtrykt med dette naturlige sprog (Løgstrup 1962: 238). Som jeg læser Løgstrup, svinder vidden, mens prægnansen forstærkes i det videnskabelige sprog. Dernæst peger han på to forudsætninger for, at det kan ske. For det første at videnskaben afgrænser og formulerer sin egen systematisering af den region af verden, der ønskes undersøgt. Efterfølgende at der via den videnskabelige reduktion, ses bort fra alle andre ejendommeligheder ved fænomenerne, end dem man er interesseret i. Herved kan der etableres en teoretisk sammenhæng mellem fænomenerne, eksempelvis hvordan de er betinget af hinanden og reagerer proportionelt. Med reduktionen gør videnskaberne ét henseende eksklusivt og betydningerne entydige. Dagligsprogets henseende erstattes med et, af undersøgelserne udledt, henseende og de sprogfødte ord, erstattes af termini (Løgstrup 1976: 101).

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Et eksempel: En undersøgelse af en stol kunne fastslå, at det er noget man kan sidde på og ’stol’ kunne erstattes med termen ’siddegenstand’. Her gøres stolens henseende som brugsgenstand eksklusiv og dens betydning som ’genstand man kan sidde på’ entydig. Andre henseender som stolens materiale, stolens stil, stolen som ’genstand-jeg kan-stå-på-for-at-nå-øverste-hylde-i-skabet’ osv. tages ikke i betragtning. Ikke desto mindre bevarer stolen uden for det videnskabelige sprog disse henseender og betydninger.

I det følgende eksemplificeres, med udgangspunkt i antologien Mål med mening (Fibæk Laursen 2018), hvordan mening defineres i det videnskabelige sprog. Tillige problematiseres det, at betydningen, i hvert fald i dette eksempel, derved mister en subjektiv dimension.

Mening som nytte. En fortolkning I Mål med mening drøftes læringsmålstyringen i den danske folkeskole og der argumenteres for, at ”vejen frem er mål med mening” (Fibæk Laursen 2018:18). Ifølge Per Fibæk Laursen, mag.art., professor ved Danmarks institut for Pædagogik og Uddannelse, er problemet med Undervisningsministeriets projekt om målstyret undervisning, den ensidige vægt på målenes egnethed som styrings- og effektiviseringsinstrumenter. Dette medfører, at læringsmålstyringen ikke opleves som meningsfuld af feltets aktører. Fibæk advarer dog mod at ”droppe mål”, da man derved overser ”[…] at oplevelsen af meningsfuldhed i arbejdet hænger sammen med målrettethed” (Fibæk Laursen 2018: 12). Fibæk forsøger derfor at syntetisere målrettethed og målstyring. Fibæks intention er at definere målene anderledes, dvs. ikke blot som styrings- og effektiviseringsinstrumenter. Til dette benyttes formuleringen ’mål med mening’, og til denne behøves således en definition af mening.

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Den opfattelse af mening Fibæk henviser til, er hentet i Ib Ravns, forskning i mening i arbejdslivet (Ravn, 2008, 2009; Ravn & Tange, 2007). Den enkleste formulering af mening hos Ravn er: ”Et fænomen giver mening, når man indser, hvordan det indgår i en større sammenhæng” (Ravn 2008: 59). Ravns definition af mening kommer i stand ved en konceptualisering gennem fire delfaktorer (styrkerealisering, værdiskabelse, bidrag og fællesskab).

Konceptualiseringen eksemplificerer det videnskabelige sprog, med arbejdslivet som den region af verden, videnskaben undersøger. Systematiseringen af regionen, reduktionen og den teoretiske sammenhæng mellem begreber, som Løgstrup påpeger, er tydelige hos Ravn. Det ses i beskrivelsen af delfaktorerne som er ’tilsammen komplette’, ’distinkte’ og ’indbyrdes konsistente’ (ibid. 71). Ved hjælp af faktorerne defineres hvad mening er, med ’2 X 4 spørgsmål om faktorerne’ afgøres om man har mening og med faktorerne identificeres ’passende redskaber til at skabe mening’ (ibid. 72). Faktorerne konstituerer og operationaliserer således meningsbegrebet i én bevægelse.

I transformationen fra mening som sprogfødt ord til mening (i arbejdslivet) som term, prioriteres formålstjenstlighed eksklusivt: I den organisatoriske kontekst, hvis overordnede mål er maksimering, bliver mening til et middel til opnåelse af et mål. Indirekte, via formålstjenstligheden, knyttes mening derved til effektivitet: ”Meningsledelse er at fremme gruppens samarbejde og værdiskabelse, så alle bidrager optimalt med deres i et nøje samspil med kollegaerne” (Ravn 2009: 15). Ravns konceptualisering peger mestendels på, hvordan man øger nytteværdien af menneskers virke. Jeg fortolker dette, som en instrumentalisering af meningsbegrebet, da mening kobles tæt med rationalitet og effektivitet. Den ’udbygning af sproget’ jeg slog an med Austin og den fastlagte betydning af mening, jeg søgte med det

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videnskabelig sprog, ser vi eksemplificeret her. I kort form: mening er nytte.

Med anvendelsen af Ravns meningsbegreb, ender Fibæk således med at pege på mål defineret ud fra nytteværdi. Præcis fordi Ravns udlægning kobler mening med formålstjenstlighed og effektivitet, i en organisatorisk kontekst. Derved bliver mening til et styringsredskab og Fibæks intention om syntetisering mislykkes. Koblingen mål - mening, bliver i bedste fald en symbolsk handling, da den egentlige kobling er mål – nytte. Ønsker man mål, der ikke alene er styrings- og effektiviseringsinstrumenter, er det ikke gjort med at kalde dem ’mål med mening’. Hvis feltets aktører skal opleve målene som meningsfulde, må aktørerne selv bidrage til meningsfuldheden – bidrage til ’hvad mening er’. Af eksemplet kan vi udlede, at mening (tilsyneladende) har, hvad jeg har kaldt en subjektiv dimension. Dertil at mening omhandler oplevelsen af, hvad der er betydningsfuldt.

Mening er således i artiklen forsøgt eksemplificeret med såvel dagligdags som videnskabeligt sprog. Dagligsprogets ’mening’ blev så bred, at indholdet forsvandt og ordet blev en ’tom beholder’ eller ’flydende betegner’. Videnskabens ’mening’ blev så snæver, at begrebet ikke gjorde plads til det indhold, ’der var brug for’.

Slutteligt forsøges, med en fænomenologisk fremstilling, at skabe en forbindelse mellem de to udlægninger. Udgangspunktet tages i det, der så ud til at være fælles for udlægningerne: At mening har at gøre med en subjektiv oplevelse af noget betydningsfuldt.

Mening som forbundethed med verden. En fremstilling. Fremstillingen henter inspiration i eksistentialismens begreb om det absurde (Kafka 1969) (Camus 2015). I forbindelse hermed beskrives, hvordan mennesket oplever meningsløshed som fremmedgørende og hvordan mødet med det irrationelle, det tilsyneladende meningsløse,

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påvirker mennesket eksistentielt. Pointen ikke værende, at tilværelsen er meningsløs, men at mennesket som væsen begærer sammenhæng og klarhed. Ikke blot som et lystbetonet begær, men som et immanent behov. Mennesket antager med andre ord, at mening eksisterer, selv når den i udpræget grad synes fraværende.

I denne forståelse har mening med selve det ’at være menneske’ at gøre. En fremstilling med sans for den eksistentielle dimension er, at vi søger mening for at føle os forbundet med verden. Med udgangspunkt heri, undersøges mulighedsbetingelserne for at mening kan manifestere sig som en forbundethed med verden.

Mening og forståelse Den fænomenologiske antagelse er, at vi for at forstå et fænomen må forstå, hvordan det fremtræder for os. Og i forlængelse deraf, at vi for at forstå, må inddrage det subjekt, fænomenet fremtræder for. Fænomenologisk kan spørgsmålet om mening derfor stilles i formen ’hvordan fremtræder mening for os?’. Med henvisning til Heideggers Daseinsanalytik (2014), bliver spørgsmålet således ikke hvad mening er, men hvorledes eller hvordan mening er. Netop fordi Daseins eksistens ikke er tingsligt foreliggende (et ’hvad’), men tidsligt fremadløbende (’hvorledes’) (Heidegger 2014: 32). Givet at mening fremtræder som forbundethed med verden, er spørgsmålet dernæst, hvordan dette kommer i stand.

Daseinsanalytikken undersøger den menneskelige eksistens grundformer med henblik på at blotlægge den forståelse af verden, vi kan have. Hos Heidegger arbejder fænomenologien hermeneutisk, i den forstand, at den udlægger og fortolker fænomener fra det ontiske (hverdagslige) med henblik på at forstå væren (os selv). Heidegger peger på, at vores eksistens er situeret i verden og kun takket være denne væren-

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i-verden, kan verden træde frem for os og give erkendelse (Heidegger 2014: 58).

Min grundlæggende præmis om, at mennesker er orienteret mod mening (jf. indledningen) bærer med sig, en antagelse om at mennesker formoder, forventer om man vil, at mening findes, gives eller kan skabes. En antagelse, der accentueres med tydningen af mening som forbundethed med verden. Med Heideggers beskrivelse af Dasein, mener jeg på to centrale punkter at kunne underbygge min antagelse. For det første i den forstand, at der med Dasein peges på, at vores situerethed og engagement i verden ikke er tilfældigt eller et valg, men derimod et konstitutivt træk ved vores væren. Dernæst at der med Dasein peges på, at forståelse er en del af vores indre struktur, vores måde at eksistere på. Forståelse er således ikke én blandt andre mulige erkendelsesformer, men et fundamentalt eksistentiale (Heidegger 2014: 170) (Hyldgaard 2006: 34). Med andre ord: Mennesket forholder sig forstående til sig selv og sin omverden. Mennesket fortolker og udlægger sin omverden, som var der mening i den.

Mening i denne forstand er dermed ikke noget, knyttet specielt til tegn (som ord og begreber, jf. artiklens indledende undersøgelser) eller andre åndsprodukter, men simpelthen et træk ved verden (Lübcke 2010: 227). Som Dan Zahavi, professor i filosofi, opsummerer: ”Vi er hvad vi er i kraft af vores verdensengagement, og verden er – qua fundamental meningssammenhæng – også kun hvad den er, grundet vores involvering” (Zahavi 2018: 44). Forholdet bevidsthed – verden er således betinget af mening snarere end kausalitet.

En verden af mening Meningen kommer af bevidsthedens iboende intentionalitet eller rettethed (Husserl 1989: 17). I den daglige tilværelse kommer det til udtryk på den måde, at vi agerer som var der hensigt bag handling og hændelser, og som var der mål og formål med vores ageren. Hos Løgstrup hedder det, at vor

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daglige erkendelse er teleologisk bestemt (Løgstrup 1976:112). Men verden besidder ikke kun den mening, det enkelte menneske selv tillægger den. Som Husserl bemærker: ”Jeg lever i en verden, som er gennemsyret af referencer til andre, og som alle andre allerede har udstyret med mening [...] Selve den mening verden har for mig, har sin oprindelse uden for mig” (Zahavi 2018: 70).

Hos Løgstrup får den menneskelige tilværelse mening gennem de før-kulturelle fænomener, der manifesterer sig som tillid, åbenhed, barmhjertighed mv. Mening er hos Løgstrup således ikke skabt af mennesket selv, men givet. Dog således at vi selv i handling må afgøre, hvilken skikkelse vi giver tilværelsen med og mod hinanden (Løgstrup 2008: 87).

Hvad jeg forsøger at tilnærme mig er, som anført tidligere, det subjektive aspekt af meningen. I henhold til fremstillingen af mening som forbundethed med verden, er det min forbundethed jeg efterspørger. Og givet at mening ’er overalt’ er spørgsmålet, hvordan mening ’for mig’ gestaltes.

Mening ’for mig’ Hos Husserl findes relevante distinktioner til en udlægning af mening ’for mig’:

Enhver mening som denne verden har for os, både den alment ubestemte og

dens i detaljer bestemte mening, er en i inderligheden af vores eget

iagttagende, forestillende, tænkende og vurderende liv bevidst mening og en

mening som formes i subjektiv genesis (Husserl 1989: 17).

’Den i detaljer bestemte mening’ som analytisk skelnes fra ’den alment ubestemte mening’ opfattes som udtryk for den mening, jeg efterspørger. ’Den i detaljer bestemte mening’ kan ifølge Husserl betegnes som en bevidst mening og en formet mening. I henhold til det første (en bevidst mening) bemærker jeg, at det er mening, som den er givet i min

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bevidsthed. At meningen er en bevidst mening, er udtryk for at verden får mening og gyldighed i vores egen bevidsthed.

I henhold til det sidste (en formet mening) bemærker jeg, at der således ikke er tale om en (selv)skabt mening. Som en variation over frasen ex nihilo nihil fit – ’intet kommer af intet’, må konklusionen være, at der skal være mening for at der kan skabes mening. Mening ’for mig’ er dog ikke noget jeg skaber, men noget jeg former. Det gør jeg med udgangspunkt i allerede eksisterende mening, altså i ’den alment ubestemte mening’. At meningen er formet subjektivt, skal medtænke at subjektiviteten, fænomenologisk forstået, ikke er en skjult inderlighed, men et åbent verdensforhold (Zahavi 2018: 79). Vel at mærke i en verden, der ikke er summen af genstande eller kausale relationer, men en meningshorisont, vi bestandigt er situeret i forhold til. Mening angår altså i denne beskrivelse et forhold mellem subjektivitet, intersubjektivitet og objektivitet.

Hvordan mening formes og får gyldighed ud fra forholdet mellem subjektivitet, intersubjektivitet og objektivitet, skal i det følgende indkredses. Konkret eksemplificeret med henvisning til Heideggers begreb Entwurfen og Jean-Paul Sartres Projekt. Mening som formet Med Entwurfen beskrives hvordan forståelse arter sig, som et udkast i retning af én bestemt mulighed blandt mange. Forståelse betyder her ’at indsætte i en sammenhæng’ (Thyssen, 2012: 586). Dasein betegner en praktisk-pragmatisk omgang med verden, hvor tingene omkring os opfattes i brugsrelationer og som noget der angår os. Det vil sige, at det der ses, ses i en sammenhæng – og det der forstås, forstås som ’noget’.

Vores eksistens fortsættes gennem disse ’forståelsens stadige udkast’. Mening ’for mig’ formes, og får på den måde gyldighed, gennem min

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omgang med verden, det vil sige: gennem mine stadige tolkninger – og stadige udkast. Hos Sartre (2013) kan mening som formet beskrives på en måde, hvor det subjektive element træder i forgrunden. Grundlæggende sker det i kraft af intentionalitet og rettethed – mere konkret som resultat af, at et menneske (en bevidsthed) sætter mål og formål. Herved skabes relation til tingene, der med Sartres terminologi skifter karakter fra væren-i-sig til væren-for-sig i vores opfattelse af dem: fra kontingent hen mod nødvendig.

Hin klippeblok, som vil udvise en dyb modstand, hvis jeg vil flytte den, vil

tværtimod være en nyttig hjælp, hvis jeg vil bestige den for at beskue

landskabet. I sig selv [..] er den neutral, det vil sige, at den afventer at blive

oplyst af et mål for at manifestere sig som modstander eller hjælper (Sartre

2013: 559).

Klippeblokken tilskrives værdi og mening i vores projekt, dvs. i vores omgang med den. ”Intet objekt, ingen gruppe af objekter, er specielt udpeget til at organisere sig som baggrund eller form: Alt afhænger af i hvilken retning min opmærksomhed går” (Sartre 2013: 42).

Opmærksomheden ordner således tingene i forgrund og baggrund. En handling, der implicerer at udvalgte ting, elementer eller fænomener ydes særlig opmærksomhed, hvormed andre ydes mindre opmærksomhed. En handling, der derfor kan betegnes som værdisætning og en handling, der fordrer aktivitet og engagement. Mulighedsbetingelserne for mening, samt en sammenfattende fremstilling Hermed kan der siges noget om omstændighederne og mulighedsbetingelser for mening som forbundethed med verden og denne mening ’for mig’ som formet – i kort form: (i) Mening formes ud af en

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grundlæggende sammenhæng mellem selvet, den anden og verden. (ii) Meningshorisonten udgør den baggrund ud fra hvilken forståelse og mening er mulig. (iii) Intentionalitet og rettethed, udgør de omstændigheder ved bevidstheden ud fra hvilke, deltagelse og engagement kan opstå.

Opsummeres de øvrige indsigter omkring mening, giver det udgangspunkt for en sammenfattende fremstilling – igen i kort form: (iv) Mening er hvorledes, dvs. ikke et hvad. (v) Mening som forbundethed med verden er en oplevelse af sammenhæng mellem bevidstheden og omgivelserne. (vi) Mening ’for mig’ er mening som den erkendes i min bevidsthed. (vii) Mening som formet er således ikke noget jeg finder eller skaber - og endelig (viii) Mulighedsbetingelserne for mening er den meningshorisont jeg selv indgår i.

Med ovenstående i betragtning, lyder buddet på en fremstilling: Mening er erfaring af betydningsfuldhed, gennem vores engagerede omgang med verden. Med verden forstås det betydningshele eller den meningshorisont, hvoraf vi selv udgør en del – og med omgang den værdisætning hvorigennem betydningsfuldhed og gyldighed opstår.

I forhold til en dagligdagsopfattelse af hvad mening er, virker fremstillingen umiddelbart plausibel. At mening har at gøre med – og manifesterer sig som – engagement, ligger tæt på en dagligdags opfattelse af mening: Vi tolker optagethed af en given situation, som udtryk for meningsfuldhed – og omvendt: Manglende deltagelse som udtryk for at noget ikke ’giver mening’. I fremstillingen afløser erfaringsbegrebet det erkendelsesbegreb, der ellers er brugt i undersøgelserne. Det gøres for at understrege, at der ikke er tale om et subjekt på analytisk distanceret afstand af verden. Erfaring er netop det ’der også forandrer det erkendende subjekt’ (Hyldgaard 2006:49). Hermed skaber fremstillingen den kobling – den forbundethed – mellem mennesket og verden, der ifølge undersøgelsen viste sig som centralt i forståelsen af mening.

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Litteraturliste Austin, John Langshaw. (1956). A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential

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Camus, Albert. (2015) [1942]. Sisyfos-myten (7. udgave ed.). Kbh.:

Gyldendal.

Fibæk Laursen, Per. (red). (2018). Mål med mening : mellem dannelse og

målstyring (1. udgave ed.). Kbh.: Hans Reitzel.

Heidegger, Martin. (2014) [1927]. Væren og tid (2. udgave ed.). Aarhus:

Klim.

Husserl, Edmund. (1989) [1927]. Fænomenologi. Tid skrift, Nr. 11 (1989),

5-30.

Hyldgaard, Kirsten. (2006). Videnskabsteori : en grundbog til de

pædagogiske fag (1. udgave ed.). Frederiksberg: Roskilde

Universitetsforlag.

Juul Nielsen, Morten Ebbe (2018). Stop jagten på livets mening. Kristeligt

dagblad, p. 9.

Kafka, Franz. (1969) [1925]. Processen (2. udgave ed.). Kbh.: Gyldendal.

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Løgstrup, Knud Ejler (1976). Vidde og prægnans : Sprogfilosofiske

betragtninger : Metafysik 1. Kbh.: Gyldendal.

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Løgstrup, Knud Ejler (2008) [1978]. Skabelse og tilintetgørelse :

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meaning : A study of the influence of language upon thought and

of the science of symbolism : With supplementary essays by B.

Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank (10. ed. 2. impr.. ed.). London.

Ravn, Ib. (2008). Mening i arbejdslivet — definition og konceptualisering.

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Ravn, Ib. (2009). Meningsledelse : Ledelsesredskaber til at skabe mening i

arbejdet med. In Det meningsfulde arbejdsliv (pp. 57-90): Aarhus

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Ravn, Ib., & Tange, Nina. (2007). Videnarbejde og mening. In.

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Sartre, Jean Paul. (2013) [1943]. Væren og intet : et essay om

fænomenologisk ontologi (2. udgave ed.). [Aarhus]: Philosophia.

Svendsen, Lars. Fr. H., & Säätelä, Simo. (2008). Indføring i filosofi : det

sande, det gode og det skønne (1. udgave ed.). Århus: Klim.

Thyssen, Ole. (2012). Det filosofiske blik : europæiske mestertænkere (1.

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Zahavi, Dan. (2018). Fænomenologi : en introduktion (1. udgave ed.).

Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur.

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Mod en nomadisk samfundsanalyse – At analysere med Gilles Deleuze: en rejse i nomadebegreber, tilblivelser og kontrolsamfund (2019). Af John Benedicto Krejsler.

skrevet af Asger August Olsson, RUC · udgivet februar 2020

[Deleuzes] tænkning sigter mod at modne et potentiale for nytænkning og

aktivisme på samme måde, som et brækjern repræsenterer et potentiale i

hænderne på den villige aktivist, der drives af en ubændig nysgerrighed

(Krejsler 2019: 39).

Er det muligt at integrere den svært tilnærmelige og teoretisk flakkende filosof Gilles Deleuze i det samfundsvidenskabelige analyseapparat, og er det muligt at udvinde en relevans af de sværmeriske begreber, der knytter sig til hans tænkning? John Benedicto Krejsler, professor MSO ved DPU, gør forsøget i bogen At analysere med Gilles Deleuze - En rejse i nomadebegreber, tilblivelse og kontrolsamfund (2019), som er omdrejningspunktet for nærværende anmeldelse. Som forfatteren rigtigt nok peger på, findes der ikke én deleuziansk læsning, og derfor henvender han sig forsigtigt til særligt storværket Tusinde plateauer 1980 som Deleuze skrev sammen med Félix Guattari. Det er det filosofiske værk, der bedst giver anledning til den samfundsvidenskabelige analyse. Et halvt århundrede er gået, og nu ser tiden tilsyneladende ud til at være moden for en mere almen udbredelse.

Indledningsvis beskriver Kresjler Deleuzes udvikling fra de rent filosofiske værker fra 1960’erne til en mere politisk og samfundsrettet vinkel i de følgende årtier med et af det 20. århundredes mest skelsættende filosofiske projekter: Kapitalisme og Skizofreni, der er opdelt i Anti-Ødipus (1972) og Tusind plateauer. Herfra glider fokus over på dens

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egentlige ambition; at indføre Deleuzes begreber til samfundsvidenskabernes empiriske analyser.

Krejsler udfolder sin metodologi ved at præsentere den kanoniske forståelse af den franske filosofs egen tilblivelse. Han fremhæver en central pointe om bogens relevans for den samfundsvidenskabelige forsker, der vil tænke anderledes, aktivistisk og ikke reproducere de nuværende ‘sandheder’, men producere nye:

I dette arbejde med at vride sig ud af vanetænkning og dominerende

forestillinger om samfundet, kapitalismen, individet og andre

samfundsvidenskabelige begrebsligheder tilbyder Deleuze (og Guattari) en

værktøjskasse af begreber, som er så tilpas anderledes, at de tilbyder

tanken og tilgangen til forskningsarbejdet veje ud i utallige og uventede

retninger (Ibid.: 7).

Netop dét at Deleuze fordrer en radikalt anderledes tænkning, er det interessante og brugbare for det kritiske studie. Det opfordrer forskeren eller analytikeren til at tænke “kritisk på en affirmativ og livsbekræftende måde”. Hvor filosofiens rolle – som Deleuze og Guattari udlægger den i What is Philosophy? (1991) – er at kreere begreber, der tilpasser sig verdens dynamiske tilblivelsesprocessualitet bliver den samfundsvidenskabelige vinkel i højere grad at praktisere det og skabe empiriske studier ud fra de teoretiske indsigter og filosofiske rammer. Grundlæggende for Krejslers udlægning af Deleuzes program er vinklingen af Deleuze som en såkaldt glædesaffirmativ tænker.

Den pædagogisk velorkestrerede introduktion af Deleuzes tænkning bliver derfor præsenteret ud fra den gængse introduktion af filosofihistoriske pejlemærker som Hegel og Kant, men i særdeleshed bliver de af Deleuze selv ekspliciterede tænkere som Spinoza, Bergson og Nietzsche tilskikket opmærksomhed. Det sker delvist fordi Deleuze selv trækker på dem i specifikke og dedikerede værker om dem, men også fordi,

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han i sin egen filosofi, baserer sig på dem. Krejsler beskriver Deleuzes ud fra triadens optikker. En smule restriktivt kunne man mene. Jeg ser det dog som et didaktisk redskab, da det nu engang er et introduktionsprojekt. Bogen er inddelt i fem kapitler, af hvilke Krejsler i det første, ‘Det filosofiske grundlag’, beskæftiger sig med Spinoza-Bergson-Nietzsche-triaden.

Krejsler fremhæver dem som de mest afgørende filosoffer for Deleuzes udvikling af en “(…) immanent ontologi, der afviser determinisme og transcendente størrelser som afgørende for udfoldelsen af livet og dets potentialer” (Ibid.: 18). Her er vi inde i maskinrummet i den deleuzianske metafysik. Han udvikler en forskelsontologi, der muliggøres af Spinozas monistiske substanstænkning. Igennem dennes pantheistiske tankegang låner Deleuze den immanente ontologi, hvor der ikke hierarkiseres i forskellige tilstande af væren og derfor ikke differentieres mellem dem. Væren er for Deleuze differens.

Netop forskelsontologien er et afgørende fundament for forståelsen af Deleuzes projekt. Den dynamiske verden kræver dynamiske begreber. Derfor er samfundsanalytikeren, ifølge Krejsler, nødt til at:

Erkende, at det, der fremtræder som sandheder for os, træder frem af den

immanente eller iboende virkelighed, som vi selv er integrerede og

medproducerende bestanddele af, og som samlet strukturerer tegn og

materialitet på netop de særlige måder, der gør dem til sandheder for os

(Ibid.: 20).

Her fremhæver han et centralt element ved den deleuzianske tænkning, der synes at være det mulighedsrum, den aktivistiske forsker har at boltre sig i: At skabe begreber, der resonerer med og omdefinerer den ‘gamle’ verdens såkaldte sandhedsregimer. Udfordringen er, at idéen om forskellen vokser ud af det samme immanensplan, som den søger at undslippe. Det er disse strata, der fastholder sociale og psykologiske

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praksisser i vaner, koder etc., som tænkningen og den empiriske analyse skal bryde med. Strataene forstås som de jordlag, der på en måde fungerer som grænser for eksempelvis en given tænkning eller moralsk forfatning. Men kan man blot bryde og forkaste samtlige strukturer? Næppe. Hertil citerer Krejsler fra Tusind plateauer en længere passage, som jeg også tillader mig at citere:

Det skyldes at LuO [Legemet uden Organer] uophørligt svinger mellem de

overflader der stratificerer det og det plan som frigør det. Hvis man frigør

det med for voldsom en bevægelse og får strataene til at springe uden

besindighed, bliver man selv dræbt, smidt ned i et sort hul, eller endda ført

ud i en katastrofe – frem for at optegne planet. Det værste er ikke til

stadighed at være stratificeret – organiseret, ‘betydet’, undertvunget – men

at kaste strataene ud i en selvmorderisk kollaps som får dem til at falde ned

over os med større vægt end nogensinde før (Ibid.: 59f).

Den samfundsvidenskabelige, deleuziansk baserede bearbejdning af immanensplanet kan altså ikke blot være entydigt subversiv, men må forholde sig til en form for stabilitet, så nedrivningen af muren ikke ramler sammen over en. Dette såkaldte selvmorderiske kollaps bringer os netop til det element, der gør Krejslers udlægning af tænkningen relevant. Det påpeges, at verden og tænkningen er af samme immanensplan. Deleuzes begrebsapparat er en flaksende og kompleks størrelse, der åbner op for et mangefold af analyse- og forståelsesparametre, som forgrener sig i multiple variationer og folder sig ind og ud over hinanden. Disse begreber er centrale i Deleuzes filosofi, og fordrer en tænkning, der tager højde for den verden den er i og vice versa. Filosofien – og på Krejslers opfrodring også socialvidenskaben – former verden og verden former den. Den vinkel udformes bl.a. i kapitel 3, hvor Krejsler forholder sig til det samfundsvidenskabelige grundlag med hvilket han tillader et marxistisk lys at skinne over Deleuze.

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At analysere med Gilles Deleuze er en lille sag på 130 sider, og må formodentlig tænkes som en øjenåbner, snarere end en fornyer af den allerede eksisterende viden om Deleuze. Det filosofihistoriske nedkog synes især at basere sig på veletablerede læsninger af Deleuze, og derfor forekommer der ikke som sådan noget nyt ud af læsningen. Det er imidlertid heller ikke hensigten; den er snarere at rette sporet ind på samfundsvidenskaben og til det formål virker det fjerde kapitels analyseeksempler godt. Her viser Krejsler, hvordan Deleuzes begrebsunivers kan overføres og anvendes på en måde, der bevarer kompleksiteten. Han fremhæver, hvordan det for den samfundsorienterede tænker er væsentligt med fokus på økonomi, klasse og samfundsstrukturer, hvilket overses i post-tænkningens generelle fokus på æstetiske, emancipatoriske narrativer (Ibid.: 111f). Aktivismens, politikkens og filosofiens affinitet er for Deleuze utvivlsom, og hans ontologiske forskelstænkning fordrer denne tankegang i immanensplanet, han plæderer for. Det betyder, at der for Deleuze ikke er tale om en tænkning, der i praksis kan stå uden for den politiske og sociale sammenhæng, den er i. Derfor anser jeg den lille bogs ambition som indfriet.

Således, i hvad der skal få Deleuzes rhizomatiske begrebsarsenal til at være lettere at sluge for den nytilkomne Deleuzelæser, adopterer Krejsler ikke franskmandens skrivestil, men søger derimod at udlægge hans rodnetværk af begreber så de får en praktisk anvendelse i den empiriske analyse. Som eksempel herpå anvendes skizoanalysen eller pragmatikken som metodologi. Samfundsvidenskabens blik skal være kritisk i sin problematisering af samfundsdiagnostik, mens det samtidig fordrer et affirmativt og omstillende blik, der kan afstedkomme det gode liv eller samfund (Ibid.: 74). Krejsler åbner op for den deleuzianske værktøjskasse, som han transformerer til et samfundsvidenskabeligt perspektiv.

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Arbejdet med begrebsapparatet skaber multiple variationer oganvendelsessammenhænge. Det betyder, at bogen er mættet af begreber, hvor kun få har fundet vej til dette skriv. I Deleuzes tænkning er begreber som multiplicitet, foldning og strata centrale, da de både beskriver hans forskelsontologi, men ligeledes beskriver selve begrebernes virkning. Denne orkaniske måde hvorpå begreber cirkulerer om sig selv er det lykkedes Krejsler at koordinere sig ud af gennem et sirligt kurateret udvalg. Han kortlægger en pragmatisk metodologi, der kan betegnes som skizoanalytikerens rolle. Et perspektiv der fordrer udtrykssystemernes materielle eller ikke-formede materies indvirkning på organiseringen af livs- og samfundsnormer: “Eksempelvis hvordan kroppe og materie bliver til elever, skoler og disciplinerende regimer” (Ibid.: 55). Grundlæggende er pointen, at anvende et kreativt og tilblivende perspektiv, som ikke efterligner de dogmatiske strukturer, der er givet på forhånd.

Som del af analysestrategien må man fokusere på aspekter af en given livspraksis og aktualiseringer af den “(…) hvilket [...] vil sige alle de fragmenter af semantiske og materielle elementer, der altid allerede er til stede som elementer, som endnu ikke er aktualiseret, men potentielt kunne have været – og måske kan blive – aktualiseret” (Ibid: 58). Det kræver, uddyber Krejsler, at man åbner sig op mod det virtuelle rum som Deleuze låner fra Bergson. Det beskrives som hukommelsens uendelige rum af minder og fragmenter af tanker, hvor der foretages kontradiktioner og sammentrækninger af hukommelsens multidimensionalitet:

Sammentrækningernes formål er at muliggøre aktualiseringer, der kan

bringe fortidsforståelser frem, som nutiden skal bruge for at pege mod

fremtidsforståelser, der kan være ledetråde for individet.

Sammentrækningerne er som kontingente operative selektioner i det

virtuelle rum afgørende for formateringen af de aktualiseringer, der siden

får liv som tilblivelser eller hændelsesforløb for individet (Krejsler 2019:

26).

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Med det afsæt når Krejsler til bogens 5. og mest omfattende kapitel, hvor han tager Deleuzes begreber med på arbejde. Her eksemplificerer han tænkningen ud i konkrete samfundsanalyser i alt fra en dag på skolebænken, med sygeplejersken på arbejde og til en større kapitalisme- og noologisk videnskritik fra et nomadologisk perspektiv. Men alt dette må den kritiske, idérige og kompleksitetssøgende studerende eller forsker selv give sig i kast med. Krejsler har i hvert fald gjort sit for at introducere til en svært tilgængelig tænker, med fornuftige begrebslige nedslag i konkrete eksempler, gennem fremstillinger af centrale linjer i tænkningen.

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Litteraturliste Krejsler, John Benedicto: At analysere med Gilles Deleuze: en rejse i

nomadebegreber, tilblivelser og kontrolsamfund. 1. udg. Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne, 2019. ISBN 9788776831691