Averroes

The Andalusian Arab Ibn Rushd (1126-1198 CE), known to the Latins as Averroes, was the most highly regarded commentator on Aristotle in the medieval and Renaissance Latin- and Hebrew-speaking worlds. Many of Aristotle’s central works first became available in Latin due to the translation of commentaries by Averroes that included Aristotle’s full text. In the early 14th century, the pope directed that European universities should teach Aristotle from the commentaries of Averroes, except where the opinions of “the Commentator” contradicted Christian faith. The first printed editions of Aristotle in the Renaissance were actually editions of Averroes with the works of Aristotle embedded in them.

Averroes was an Islamic judge in the Maliki tradition, and also an important medical authority. He maintained that philosophy and Islam taught the same truth in different ways. In addition to commentaries on Aristotle and works on law and medicine, he wrote several works on religion, and a short commentary on Plato’s Republic. The voluntaristic Sunni theologian al-Ghazali had written an influential denunciation of philosophy, which Averroes famously refuted in his Incoherence of the Incoherence. For most of his life he enjoyed the patronage of the Almohad caliphate, which controlled southern Spain and northwest Africa, but the situation was tenuous. Further East, the the Islamic Golden Age’s marvelous flowering of all sorts of learning and popular interest in “ancient wisdom” had already passed, as religious conservatives acquired greater influence.

As a reader of Aristotle, Averroes contributed greatly to distinguishing Aristotle’s own thought from that of the neoplatonically influenced commentary tradition. Though he only had access to Arabic translations of Syriac translations of the Greek, he did an amazing job of close textual analysis, comparing different translations of the same work to get better insight. He still inherited al-Farabi’s over-emphasis on demonstrative “science”, underestimation of the place of dialectic in Aristotle’s thought, and privileging of theory over practical ethical judgment, but on countless other points promoted textually sound and interesting readings of Aristotle’s works.

I feel a little guilty for perpetuating the Western obsession with a very narrow if important strand of his thought, concerned with his unique views on the nature of “intellect”, but I don’t read Arabic and my Latin is very poor, so my acquaintance is mainly based on sources in modern European languages. I also find the whole debate about intellect fascinating in its own right. (See also “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera; Fortunes of Aristotle; Errors of the Philosophers; 1277.)

“This Human Understands”

Imagination rather than intellect is actually the main locus of human consciousness for both Thomas Aquinas and the great Aristotelian commentator Averroes whom Aquinas famously criticized, according to medieval scholar Deborah Black.

“[W]ithin the Aristotelian framework which Aquinas and Averroes share, the psychological explanation and interpretation of intellectual consciousness is not itself a given, even if the experience of consciousness is. Consciousness of thinking may play a central role in Cartesian philosophy, and in the system of Averroes’s and Aquinas’s predecessor, Avicenna. But it has no such privileged status in the philosophies of Aristotle, Averroes, or Aquinas, in which the possible intellect ‘is actually nothing before it thinks,’ and is only able to think itself after it has been actualized by some other object”, she wrote in her 1993 essay “Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Aquinas’s Critique of Averroes’s Psychology”.

The relation of so-called “intellect” (nous) to the human “soul” (psyche) in Aristotle has historically been a major point of contention. These words are used in subtly or extremely different ways by many authors. I strongly recommend holding off on any easy identification of either of them with what modern people think of as subjective mind or consciousness.

Aristotle seems to apply a variant of his fruitful pairing of potentiality and actuality in his rather minimalist account of intellect. These notions were developed in greater detail in the commentary tradition. To hazard an oversimplification, intellect in actuality was considered to be something immaterial that makes things intelligible, whereas intellect in potentiality was considered to be something with no form of its own that takes on intelligible forms.

The great Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias identified the potential or “material” intellect with a part of the soul, which he considered to be inseparable from the body, and therefore mortal. The actual or “agent” intellect he identified with a divine principle that he also gave a cosmological role.

The brilliant Arabic commentator Averroes (Ibn Rushd) argued that both aspects of intellect were symmetrically unique immaterial principles, outside the soul but connected with it. He became convinced that all humans must share a common “material” (potential) intellect, which grounds the real existence of logical universals and intelligible forms, but gets its contents from human imagination, and would not exist if there were no rational animals.

Aquinas located both intellects within the human soul, while giving the latter the elevated, more neoplatonic metaphysical status of an “intellectual soul”, and strongly associating its intellectual character with personal immortality. Especially in later works, Aquinas polemicized sharply against Averroes, claiming that Averroes could not even consistently say that “this human understands”, because for Averroes in his Long Commentary on the De Anima, there is only one material intellect shared by all humans.

Deborah Black argues that the two phases of intellect in Aristotle work together to constitute objects and intelligible forms. This need not imply an experience of immediate self-awareness. For Aristotle, Averroes, and Aquinas, intellectual self-awareness emerges only indirectly.

Black points out that Aquinas typically uses words like “perceives” or “experiences” in talking about self-awareness, and seems to deliberately avoid words implying intellectual comprehension. She sees this as reflecting Aristotelian scruples, and notes the studied vagueness of Aquinas’ endorsement of Augustinian immediate self-awareness. In his refutation of Averroes, Aquinas does appeal to the experience of consciousness, but she notes that he does so initially to argue against Plato’s identification of human being solely with intellect, pointing out that the same person perceives herself both to understand and to sense. “This human understands” does not actually emphasize any deep reflexivity, only individuality.

Aquinas approves of the fact that for Averroes, intellect is in some way united with the body, but argues that because for Averroes that union occurs only through a working of intellect on the contents of imagination, the human individual for Averroes does not herself think. On the other hand, Black argues that Aquinas does not take into account the fact that although what Aquinas himself calls imagination is an entirely passive reception of images, the contents of imagination for Averroes have a much more active character. For Averroes, according to Black, it is the active character of the contents of imagination that manifests human self-awareness. Because Aquinas views imagination as entirely passive, he refuses to acknowledge any credibility to this at all, claiming that the contents of imagination Averroes appeals to are really nothing more than the equivalent of inert colors on an inert wall, and that this makes the human equivalent to a wall.

Averroes compares active intellect to light, and so-called “material” intellect to a transparent medium such as air. Aquinas makes it sound as though the material intellect for Averroes would be analogous to the eye, which would make the material intellect a sort of mind behind our minds. However, Black says Averroes always compared it to a transparent medium, not to the eye. She argues that neither of Averroes’ intellects is a mind or a knower or subject in the modern sense. In her 2004 essay “Models of the Mind: Metaphysical Presuppositions of the Averroist and Thomistic Accounts of Intellection”, she contends that for Averroes, far from being the mind behind our minds that would make us into mere puppets, the material intellect serves as a shared instrument for human agents who individually constitute themselves in imagination.

Averroes’ notion of intellect, Black suggests, is mainly concerned with the constitution of intelligible objects as universals from imaginative content. It does not act as a subject in the modern sense. She cites a number of passages from Aquinas indicating that he, too, often treated intellect as an instrument, rather than as our very essence. (See also Parts of the Soul; Aristotelian Subjectivity Revisited.)

Commitment to Commitment

A commitment to the practices associated with commitment is more fundamental than any particular commitment we may have. To say it another way, taking our committedness seriously is more important than the exact content of our particular commitments as to what is good and true, or to what we will do.

A high level of seriousness about commitments does not mean sticking to our guns at all cost. If we truly take our commitments seriously, that ought to mean that we also want to improve them when we have the opportunity, and to fix them when they are broken.

The American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) famously made the remark that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do”. One might hope that he really meant to distinguish between a foolish consistency and a wise one — between a kind of rigid adherence to mere formalisms, and what I might call consistency in substance or essence or deep meaning. The latter would be more akin to personal integrity.

Emerson himself was a bit intemperate in the passage that followed (“Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today”). He further confuses the matter by connecting this message with the theme that “great souls are always misunderstood”. This is all in his essay “Self-Reliance”. The rhetoric is quite memorable and there is a sense in which each of these sayings has validity, but they are both what Hegel would call “one-sided” formulations that are highly vulnerable to misuse. Their combination suggests the dangerous implication that it must be our fault if we don’t understand the one who says contradictory things. This clearly goes too far.

In the course of arguing that it is actually possible for a human to have a kind of general knowledge of being, Aristotle in Metaphysics book IV chapter 3 famously defends a principle of noncontradiction that is not merely formal.

He says in part, “For that which is necessary for one who understands any of the beings whatever to have is not a hypothesis” (Sachs translation, p. 58).

“[W]hat it is, after this prelude, let us state. It is not possible for the same thing at the same time both to belong and not to belong to the same thing in the same respect (and as many other things as we ought to specify in addition for the sake of logical difficulties, let them have been specified in addition). And this is the most certain of principles” (p. 59).

“[T]he starting point… is not the demand that one say something either to be or not to be (for perhaps one might suppose that this would require from the outset the things to be shown), but that what he says must mean something to both himself and someone else; for this is necessary, if he is going to say anything” (p. 60).

Robert Brandom argues that all the most important and valuable parts of Kant’s thought can be reconstructed in terms of the process of synthesizing a unity of apperception. This process is not a sequence of events that happen in the world; it is an ethical task for which we are responsible.

No truths follow from the principle of noncontradiction alone. In particular, it is not a deductive source of metaphysical conclusions.

On the other hand, it is what in Kantian language might be called a moral imperative. To be committed to commitment, I would argue, is to embrace that imperative. Stubborn persistence in self-contradiction destroys the possibility of shareable meaning and dialogue. In real life, self-contradiction happens to good people, but that should be an occasion for learning and humility, never something to proudly affirm.

As soon as we acknowledge piecemeal responsibility for the integrity of our commitments, we implicitly have responsibility for the integrity of the whole constituted by all our commitments. Commitment to commitment is an implicit condition of all our particular commitments, and it involves a responsibility for safeguarding and improving the integrity of the whole of our commitments. However fallible it may be, by its very nature it involves at least the germ of the crucial ability to learn, to improve itself and to correct itself.

This also has important consequences for what Kantian respect for others and the related notion of Hegelian mutual recognition look like in practice. First and foremost, respect for others takes the form of recognition of their implicit commitment to commitment, even when we do not endorse all the others’ particular commitments. (See also Brandomian Forgiveness.)

Logical Judgment?

It seems to me that “logical judgment” comes in a wide range of forms, from the preconscious syntheses of our evolved common sense that appear to us ready-made, to the most elaborately explicit works of interpretation. I see judgment as referring principally to a process, and only secondarily to the outcome of the process — to the deliberation more than to the verdict, as it were.

There is a traditional use of “judgment” as a synonym for “logical proposition”. I find this a bit odd; it would make more sense to think of a judgment as at the very least an assertion or denial of a proposition, even in contexts where the connotation of interpretive, deliberative process is suppressed, and the focus is only on an outcome.

In combination with traditional ideas about predication, this identification of judgments with propositions led to a notion of acts of logical judgment in which acts of grammatical predication such as construction of the sentence “Socrates is a human” were viewed as prototypical.

Even Kant’s discussion of the application of concepts in the first Critique bears noticeable traces of this predicative analysis of logical judgment. I think Kant across the larger body of his work played a major role in developing alternatives to the predicative approach that narrowly construed “judgment” as the application of a predicate to a subject. Indeed Brandom argues that Kantian concepts are only intelligible in terms of their contribution to the activity of judging. Nonetheless, when Kant talks about subsuming particulars under universals, the discussion still recalls the predicative approach. Certainly the application of universals to particulars is important, but it is only one of several dimensions that come into play in the constitution of meaning, and it is not the most fundamental.

In referring to the constitution of meaning, I have already implicitly moved beyond the predicative analysis. The problem with the predicative analysis is that it takes meanings for granted, and really only addresses their syntactic combination as pre-existing units. We need to address the broader territory of judgments about meaning and value that go below the level of pre-existing units and preconceived identities. Meanings of terms in context turn out to depend on judgments, which in turn depend on others, and it is the ties of mutual dependency that bind together this open-endedly expanding network that give relative definiteness to our determinations.

Real-World Reasoning

I think most people most of the time are more influenced by apprehended or assumed meanings than by formal logic. What makes us rational animals is first of all the simple fact that we have commitments articulated in language. The interplay of language and commitment opens us to dialogue and the possibility of mutual recognition, which simultaneously ground both values and objectivity. This opening, I’d like to suggest, is what Hegel called Spirit. (See also Interpretation.)

Predication

It is extremely common to see references to “predication” as if it were a central concept of Aristotelian logic. We are so used to a grammatical interpretation in terms of relations between subjects and predicates that it is hard to disengage from that. However, historically it was Aristotelian logic that influenced ancient Greek accounts of grammar, not vice versa.

Modern logicians distinguish between a neutral proposition — which might be merely mentioned, rather than asserted — and the assertion of the proposition. Grammatical predication in itself does not imply any logical assertion, only a normatively neutral syntactic relation between sentence components. But “said of” in Aristotle always refers to some kind of meaningful assertion that has a normative character, not to grammatical predication.

Aristotle talks about what we might call kinds of “sayables” (“categories”). He famously says that we can only have truth or falsity when one kind of sayable is “said of” another. Mere words or phrases by themselves don’t assert anything, and hence cannot be true or false; for that we need what modern writers have referred to as a “complete thought”.

The ordinary meaning of “to categorize” in ancient Greek was “to accuse in a court of law”. Aristotle used it to talk about assertions. It didn’t originally connote a classification. The modern connotation of classification seems to stem from the accident that independent of what “category” meant in his usage, Aristotle famously developed a classification of “categories”.

Aristotle also talks about logical “judgment” (apophansis, a different word from practical judgment or phronesis). Husserl for instance transliterated this to German, and followed the traditional association of logical judgment with “predication”. But the ordinary Greek verb apophainein just means to show or make known. Aristotle’s usage suggests a kind of definite assertion or expressive clarification related to demonstration, which makes sense, because demonstrations work by interrelating logical judgments.

All of Aristotle’s words and phrases that get translated with connotations of “predication” actually have to do with normative logical assertion, not any connecting of a grammatical subject with a grammatical predicate. Nietzsche and others have complained about the metaphysical status foisted on grammatical subjects, implicitly blaming Aristotle, but all these connotations are of later date.

The great 20th century scholar of ancient and medieval logic and semantics L. M. de Rijk in his Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology (2002) argued at length that Aristotle’s logical “is” and “is not” should be understood as not as binary operators connecting subjects and predicates, but as unary operators of assertion and negation on whole propositions formed from pairs of terms. (See also Aristotelian Propositions.)

As in similar cases, by no means do I wish to suggest that all the work done on the basis of the common translation of “predication” is valueless; far from it. But I think we can get additional clarity by carefully distinguishing the views and modes of expression of Aristotle himself from those of later commentators and logicians, and I think Aristotle’s own more unique perspectives are far fresher and more interesting than even good traditional readings would allow.

Formal and Material Interpretation

Human reasoning has two sides, that could be called formal and material. Any reasoning applicable to the real world necessarily involves the “material” side that is concerned with actual meaning “content”. It may also involve the “formal” side, which aims to express reasoning in terms of mechanically repeatable operations that are completely agnostic to the actual meanings they are used to operate on. Reasoning in some abstract contexts may rely entirely on the formal side.

Aristotle is usually credited with inventing formal logic, but he paid a lot of attention to the material side as well. In the Latin middle ages both sides were recognized, but the formal side was generally emphasized.

Formal mathematical logic underwent an immense development in the 20th century, somewhat like the earlier success story of mathematical physics. The syntactic devices of mathematical logic seemed so powerful that its rise led to a great neglect of the material, interpretive side of logic. Husserl was one of the few 20th century authors who questioned this from the start. More recently, Brandom has argued that Kant and Hegel were both fundamentally concerned with the material, interpretive side of logic, and that this is what Kant meant by “transcendental” logic (and what Hegel meant by “dialectic”).

Generally when I mention interpretation here, I have the material side in mind, but there is also such a thing as formal interpretation. Formal interpretation or “evaluation” of expressions in terms of other expressions is the most fundamental thing that interpreters and compilers for programming languages do. As with material interpretation, formal interpretation makes meanings explicit by expressing them in terms of more elementary distinctions and entailments, but it uses purely syntactic substitution and rewriting to do so.

Material interpretation can always potentially go on indefinitely, explaining real-world meanings by relating them to other meanings, and those in terms of others, and so on. In practice, we always cut it short at some point, once we achieve a relatively stable network of dependencies.

Formal interpretation on the other hand is usually engineered to be decidable, so that it actually does reach an end at some point. The fact that it reaches an end is closely related to the fact that precise formal models are always in some sense only approximations of a determination of reality that is actually open-ended. Formal models are a sort of syntactic reification of open-ended material interpretation. We may think we have taken them as far as they can go, but in real life it is always possible that some new case will come up that requires new detail in the model.

We also use a kind of formal interpretation alongside material interpretation in our spontaneous understanding of natural language. Natural language syntax helps us understand natural language meaning. It provides cues for how different clauses are intended to relate to one another. Is what is meant in this clause an exception? A consequence? A presupposition? A fact? A recommendation? Something being criticized? (See also Formal and Informal Language.)

Formal and Transcendental Logic

One of Edmund Husserl’s works that I had not looked at before is Formal and Transcendental Logic (German ed. 1929). This will be a very shallow first impression.

Although he goes on to argue for the importance of a “transcendental” logic, Husserl is far from denigrating purely formal logic. He explores developments in 19th century mathematics that have some relation to logic, like Riemann’s theory of abstract multiplicities. Formal logic itself comprises both a theory of objects and a theory of forms of judgment; Husserl aims to give a deeper meaning to both. Ultimately, he wants to give a “radical” account of sense, or meaning as distinguished from reference. For Husserl, we get to objects only indirectly, through the long detour of examining sense.

Having previously severely criticized the “psychologistic” account of logic made popular by John Stuart Mill, here he is at some pains to establish the difference between transcendental and psychological views of subjectivity. Husserl often seems overly charitable to Descartes, but here he writes, “At once this Cartesian beginning, with the great but only partial discovery of transcendental subjectivity, is obscured by that most fateful and, up to this day, ineradicable error which has given us the ‘realism’ that finds in the idealisms of a Berkeley and a Hume its equally wrong counterparts. Even for Descartes, an absolute evidence makes sure of the ego (mens sive animus, substantia cogitans [mind or soul, thinking substance]) as a first, indubitably existing, bit of the world…. Even Descartes operates here with a naive apriori heritage…. Thus he misses the proper transcendental sense of the ego he has discovered…. Likewise he misses the properly transcendental sense of the questions that must be asked of experience and of scientific thinking and therefore, with absolute universality, of a logic itself.”

“This unclarity is a heritage latent in the pseudo-clarities that characterize all relapses of epistemology into natural naivete and, accordingly, in the pseudo-clear scientificalness of contemporary realism. It is an epistemology that, in league with a naively isolated logic, serves to prove to the scientist… that therefore he can properly dispense with epistemology, just as he has for centuries been getting along well enough without it anyway.”

“… A realism like that of Descartes, which believes that, in the ego to which transcendental self-examination leads back in the first instance, it has apprehended the real psyche of the human being… misses the actual problem” (pp. 227-228).

“For a radical grounding of logic, is not the whole real world called in question — not to show its actuality, but to bring out its possible and genuine sense and the range of this sense…?” (p. 229).

“The decisive point in this confusion… is the confounding of the ego with the reality of the I as a human psyche” (p. 230).

This last is an argument I have been concerned to make in a Kantian context. However one chooses to pin down the vocabulary (I have been generally using “ego” for the worldly psychological thing, and “I” as actually referring to a nonempirical, transcendental index of certain commitments), the distinction is decisive. Empirical subjectivity in the realm of psychology and transcendental subjectivity in the realm of meaning are extremely different things, even though we live in their interweaving. These days I’m inclined to identify the human expansively with that possible opening onto the transcendental of values — or “Spirit” in a Hegelian sense — rather than contractively with the “merely human” empirical psyche.

Logic for People

Leading programming language theorist Robert Harper refers to so-called constructive or intuitionistic logic as “logic as if people mattered”. There is a fascinating convergence of ideas here. In the early 20th century, Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer developed a philosophy of mathematics called intuitionism. He emphasized that mathematics is a human activity, and held that every proof step should involve actual evidence discernible to a human. By contrast, mathematical Platonists hold that mathematical objects exist independent of any thought; formalists hold that mathematics is a meaningless game based on following rules; and logicists argue that mathematics is reducible to formal logic.

For Brouwer, a mathematical theorem is true if and only if we have a proof of it that we can exhibit, and each step of that proof can also be exhibited. In the later 19th century, many new results about infinity — and infinities of infinities — had been proved by what came to be called “classical” means, using proof by contradiction and the law of excluded middle. But from the time of Euclid, mathematicians have always regarded reproducible constructions as a better kind of proof. The law of excluded middle is a provable theorem in any finite context. When the law of excluded middle applies, you can conclude that if something is not false it must be true, and vice versa. But it is not possible to construct any infinite object.

The only infinity we actually experience is what Aristotle called “potential” infinity. We can, say, count a star and another and another, and continue as long as you like, but no actually infinite number or magnitude or thing is ever available for inspection. Aristotle famously defended the law of excluded middle, but in practice only applied it to finite cases.

In mathematics there are conjectures that are not known to be true or false. Brouwer would say, they are neither true nor false, until they are proved or disproved in a humanly verifiable way.

The fascinating convergence is that Brouwer’s humanly verifiable proofs turn out also to exactly characterize the part of mathematics that is computable, in the sense in which computer scientists use that term. Notwithstanding lingering 20th century prejudices, intuitionistic math actually turns out to be a perfect fit for computer science. I use this in my day job.

I am especially intrigued by what is called intuitionistic type theory, developed by Swedish mathematician-philosopher Per Martin-Löf. This is offered simultaneously as a foundation for mathematics, a higher-order intuitionistic logic, and a programming language. One might say it is concerned with explaining ultimate bases for abstraction and generalization, without any presuppositions. One of its distinctive features is that it uses no axioms, only inference rules. Truth is something emergent, rather than something presupposed. Type theory has deep connections with category theory, another truly marvelous area of abstract mathematics, concerned with how different kinds of things map to one another.

What especially fascinates me about this work are its implications for what logic actually is. On the one hand, it puts math before mathematical logic– rather than after it, as in the classic early 20th century program of Russell and Whitehead — and on the other, it provides opportunities to reconnect with logic in the different and broader, less formal senses of Aristotle and Kant, as still having something to say to us today.

Homotopy type theory (HoTT) is a leading-edge development that combines intuitionistic type theory with homotopy theory, which explores higher-order paths through topological spaces. Here my ignorance is vast, but it seems tantalizingly close to a grand unification of constructive principles with Cantor’s infinities of infinities. My interest is especially in what it says about the notion of identity, basically vindicating Leibniz’ thesis that what is identical is equivalent to what is practically indistinguishable. This is reflected in mathematician Vladimir Voevodsky’s emblematic axiom of univalence, “equivalence is equivalent to equality”, which legitimizes much actual mathematical practice.

So anyway, Robert Harper is working on a variant of this that actually works computationally, and uses some kind of more specific mapping through n-dimensional cubes to make univalence into a provable theorem. At the cost of some mathematical elegance, this avoids the need for the univalence axiom, saving Martin-Löf’s goal to avoid depending on any axioms. But again — finally getting to the point of this post — in a 2018 lecture, Harper says his current interest is in a type theory that is in the first instance computational rather than formal, and semantic rather than syntactic. Most people treat intuitionistic type theory as a theory that is both formal and syntactic. Harper recommends that we avoid strictly equating constructible types with formal propositions, arguing that types are more primitive than propositions, and semantics is more primitive than syntax.

Harper disavows any deep philosophy, but I find this idea of starting from a type theory and then treating it as first of all informal and semantic rather than formal and syntactic to be highly provocative. In real life, we experience types as accessibly evidenced semantic distinctions before they become posited syntactic ones. Types are first of all implicit specifications of real behavior, in terms of distinctions and entailments between things that are more primitive than identities of things.

Distinction

So, I want to say that distinction is something good, not a defect we ought to remedy. It is a fundamental symptom of life. Stoics, Buddhists and others remind us that it is best not to be too attached to particular forms. This is a wise counsel, but not the whole truth. I am tempted to say there is no compassion without some passion. Caring about anything inevitably involves distinction. It is better to care than not to care.

Everything flows, Heraclitus said. But in order to make distinctions, it has to be possible to compare things. Things must have a character, even if they do not quite ever stay still within their frames. Having a character is being this way and not that. Real being is always being some way or other. Its diversity is something to celebrate.

It is not immoral to prefer one thing to another. We can’t be who we are without definite commitments. Perfect apathy would lead to many sins of omission. It is better to have lived fully. We are not apart from the world, but inhabit the oceans of difference, and sometimes must take a side.