Morality After Boston

I don’t know whether, in the aftermath of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, our sense of morality becomes clearer or not. My initial reaction of revulsion - both at the human cost and at the very idea that someone somewhere thought this was the way forward – seemed to present morality in clear black and white terms: the bombing was about as wrong as you can get morally. It was indiscriminately destructive of human life, and young life at that. It was so incredibly sad. It was pointless. It was evil.

And those runners, organisers and spectators who instantly thought of others and who helped and comforted the wounded, despite the immediate risk of further bombings, deserve our total moral approbation. These are good men and women, showing true humanity, whom I hope I might emulate if ever I am placed in similar circumstances.

But morality cannot rest there. At its core morality is not about our yesterdays but what we should do right now, this moment. And right this moment, to use Obama’s words, there is a need to understand why. Yet the reason why is not clear at all.

Kant - we should remember - never asked why. His most important question, underpinning even his highest moral philosophy, was how ("How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?"). ‘How’ gives us a clearer object to investigate. In the confusion ‘how’ gives us focus. 'How' allows means to be assessed relative to ends, but also subjects those ends to a fair bit of questioning too. "How", we must ask, "is your goal valid?" "It just is" is no answer.

So perhaps we too should ask how instead of why. Not just in the detailed forensic investigation now underway (and certainly not in the brow-beating sense of "How could we have allowed this?"), but much more fundamentally. We should ask how the perpetrator(s) came to view ordinary, everyday people as somehow being legitimate targets. To plant a bomb is an evil act, but the seed of such evil germinates in the failure to appreciate other people as real individuals, and instead dismiss them merely as an undifferentiated mass under the heading of ‘Americans’ or ‘Bostonians’ or 'Runners' or whatever category your cod philosophy suggests. Behind such indiscriminate evil there is always a superiority complex that pathetically employs such categories.

When it comes to questions of morality ‘how’ is more significant than ‘why’. In the end ‘why’ can only come from the mouth(es) of the perpetrator(s) and, to be honest, I do not want to hear their irrational rationalisations of why they did what they did. Naturally they will have their superficial reasons but nothing they could say would make their actions any less evil; it would only add stupidity to their enormity.

‘How’ stands a better chance of telling us what we want to know. 'How' might get us to the point of seeing how such people are created. 'How' might help us see how certain ideas can be used to reduce whole masses of real, individual people to subhuman categories ready to be slaughtered. Asking ‘how’ is what we need to do right now. And of course keep running.

The Fitness Concept

Holly Hayes Wood

"Conceptions without perceptions are empty". That was the nagging idea circulating round my head as I pushed hard during last Sunday’s cross country run (the last of the season) at Holly Hayes Wood near Coalville. It’s funny how the body does that when you run. At your run-all-day pace you can be creative and think up solutions to your problems. But when you’re pushing hard the higher faculties shut down, and your body does the 'thinking', concentrating just on the important stuff like breathing, lifting the knees, and swinging the arms. At this pace you’re mind is left only with the remnants of a thought: a half-remembered phrase that becomes a mental chant to be repeated in time with your stride.

Why that particular phrase at Holly Hayes? Well, Kant says something like it in the Critique of Pure Reason to imply that the rationalist philosophy is unable from its own resources to arrive at knowledge - it needs the content provided by experience to make its concept meaningful. I’m perfectly sure that Kant did not have running in mind when he wrote those words, but for a moment last Sunday I thought they might apply: tackling an incline through the trees whilst listening to the heavy gasps of a fellow runner on my tail I became desperate to inject some perceptions into my conception of fitness.

It seems that we are all increasingly concerned with physical fitness, and the world seems divided sometimes between those who are ‘fit’ and those who are not. But does the concept of fitness neatly divide into an either/or condition like that? Is the concept meaningful at all without a set of circumstances to which it can be applied? In other words, we must ask "Fit for what?" This is where the race comes in. Before Sunday's race I would have replied “Fit enough to run” if asked. But during the race I, like every runner, was given the opportunity to fine tune my pre-race fitness assessment. As I kicked up the incline with the heavy breather ready to take my place at a split second’s notice I knew, at that moment, that I was at least fitter than him, but not quite as fit as the runner just ahead who had already reached the crest.

As my position fluctuated during the remainder of the race so did my assessment. And so did my view of who was doing the assessing (viz. me). I was not simply measuring my fitness, I was playing with the concept. At various points in the race I was deciding that "I don't fit in here, I'd fit better over there, just the other side of the runner in front". And just behind me many others were 'playing with the concept' in the same way (I'm not bloody Superman).

Kant was right: for any concept to apply it needs to be filled with intuitions that we actively provide for ourselves. The race is the perfect place to get them.

Kant's Weekly Mileage

Kant was the type of runner known as a walker. I read on this website that every day at 3.30pm he would emerge from his lodging, wearing his cocked hat and a long-coat and carrying a rattan cane and would walk up and down his street exactly 8 times, covering a distance of 4 miles. That makes 28 miles per week, further - I would hazard - than many present-day runners.

Let's not discuss Kant's heart rate while he racked up the miles. For the sake of argument let's assume that he wasn't going at 90% MHR, but that it was raised by his exertions. He might well have chosen to cover 4 miles because it took him around an hour, which would make him a 15 minute miler. Respectable for a 5 footer with a bad back and a non-wicking long-coat.

Read any biography of Kant and it will mention his walking as a quirk, a remarkable feature in an otherwise unremarkable life, by which the citizens of Königsberg could set their clocks. With few exceptions, Kant's biographers have never been able to reconcile his sheltered existence with his revolutionary philosophical works. It is interesting, they say, that the life of the philosopher who effected a 'Copernican Revolution' and totally reshaped modern thought should be so dull in comparison.

But is Kant's commitment to 28 mpw merely a comparative dullness? Is his mileage not, rather, the key to his entire transcendental philosophy? What else could have constantly reminded him, as he broke into a sweat and increased his breathing rate, that there was more to being than abstract thinking, and more to philosophy than Wolffian rationalism. David Hume may have awoken Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, but I'll wager it was his daily exertion that kept Kant alive to the possibility of human thought transcending itself and grasping the empirical world.

Of course, as runners we know that thinking is bound to the respiration process, and that the noblest of theoretical enterprises is tied - somehow - to the acts of moving and breathing. As runners we are philosophers. Each time we lace up we take the first few steps along the Kantian road.

Making your Move

Earlier this month I ran in the Derby Runner League's two lap, 5 mile cross-country race at Foremark Reservoir. The thing about a two lap race is that you know exactly where to make your move. The first lap should have revealed as much of the course as you need to know: the turns, the chicanes, the hills, the mud baths and the finish funnel. So on the second lap you've no excuses. You cannot blame the finish for coming too quick, before you had a chance to kick for home. Nor can you accuse it of coming too late, after all your energy is spent.

On a two lap cross country race you know exactly who your opponent is. I'm not talking about the race favourite - not all of us can consider ourselves potential race winners; nor am I talking about your friendly club rival - all that goes out the window after the starter pistol goes off. Your true opponent is the runner in front when it comes to make your move. Or the runner who is breathing down your ear at that same moment.

This is a runner whom you have probably never met before, and to whom you will probably never introduce yourself. You might never see their face. But you'll recognise their breathing and their gait, and you'll know that, with only so many seconds before the finish funnel swallows you both, it's either them or you.

But wait just a minute. This is what you know. But what do you actually want? The rational mind - either before or after the race - knows that victory is preferable to defeat. But in the race itself, at the very moment when you must make your move, what is your heart's desire? Is it to win?

Perhaps if I asked what is your heart and lungs' desire, the question would not be so straightforward. At that particular point in the race they have their own agenda, and can be quite eloquent about it too. Sure, they can scream in pain, but they can also express complex ideas. Like little devils on your shoulder they can say "You've done enough today. Your final position doesn't matter as much as an even pace all round. Save yourself for the next race. Let the other guy kill himself if he wants. Don't give him the satisfaction of a sprint finish". Believe me, I have heard these voices. They are reason's last gasp.

When it comes to the moment of truth, your heart's desire can become a matter of sheer indifference. When it lies within reach, as a result of your own superhuman effort, the simple matter of plucking it seems the last thing you want to do. But 'twas ever thus. If it became easier to fulfill your desires the nearer to them you got, then mankind would have  succumbed to and died of sloth several thousand years ago. The truth is, the nearer we get to them the harder they are to reach. But the final challenge is no mere exercise in problem-solving - it is a moral test of human will. In the final few seconds of a race, if you are to go up against your opponent, your will must go up against your reason's siren-like ability to bring it down. When the funnel is in sight, my advice is to stop up your ears with beeswax and kick harder.