Philosophy East and West

Persons and Possible Worlds, by Eliot Deutsch, is a very distinctive book in a number of ways. It features remarkable breadth and erudition. It also moves effortlessly back and forth across the line between contemporary Western philosophy and Indian and Chinese philosophy. Topics addressed include personhood and consciousness, rationality, time, space, causality and creativity, morality, and finally destiny and [End Page 106] death. There are not many philosophers who could be as good as Deutsch is on such a broad range of topics.

There are fascinating insights in a number of places. Deutsch offers an interesting discussion on the linkage between, on the one hand, the refusal to allow the spontaneity of self to be a creative force in one's life and, on the other, a kind of self-deception. The chapter on the performance of emotions explores the way one can discover one's values in the emotions one has. Much of this is consonant with, and indeed slightly ahead of, the best current work on the emotions. Emotions as performances can involve an effort at clarity and appropriateness. But it is also true, as Deutsch points out, that emotions often have scripts written largely in social terms.

Material of this intricacy and broad range cannot be represented adequately in any review of manageable length. In what follows, I will concentrate on a recurrent theme, and also on two chapters that seem to me to be of special interest. These are chapter 13 on "Causality, Creativity, and Freedom" and chapter 14 on "A Creative Morality."

The recurrent theme concerns a middle path between relativism and the view that the world has a single, objectively apprehendable structure. Deutsch argues for "a kind of pluralistic, but not relativistic, philosophical anthropology, ethics and epistemology in a cross-cultural context" (p. ix). One difference between relativism and pluralism is that the pluralist can accept "exclusionary principles" (p. 135). Exclusionary principles in ethics include "The end does not justify the means" (p. 152). The very logic of instrumental rationality, Deutsch insists, calls for moral commensurability between means and ends. Any account of justificatory reasoning has to recognize "various exclusionary principles" (p. 154; see also p. 159).

This theme is of crucial importance for comparative philosophy, and indeed for any cross-cultural appreciation whose stance is neither supine acquiescence nor patronizing ethnocentrism. It also places Hilary Putnam and T. S. Kuhn as natural allies of Deutsch's orientation. Nevertheless, to judge by the literature on what is called antirealism, it is not always appreciated by philosophers. Kuhn, for example (as he complains in his "Reflections on My Critics," in the Lakatos and Musgrave collection Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge), has often been misinterpreted as a relativist. Deutsch hits the nail on the head, in my view, by marking the separation between pluralism and relativism in terms of exclusionary principles. This parallels Kuhn's insistence that nature cannot be put into an arbitrary set of conceptual boxes, and that there are good reasons why scientific theories come to be rejected.

The chapter on "Causality, Creativity, and Freedom" begins with the clever idea of examining causality (and freedom) by attempting to understand one unusual causal process, that of artistic creativity. This can be appreciated in relation to any philosophical orientation (such as that of Wittgenstein) that is distrustful of generalization. Perhaps our usual view of causality works better for some cases than for others?

Deutsch wishes to argue (against most current assumptions) that the notion of covering law is not "primary for the meaning of causality" (p. 218). Instead, the meaning of causality is bound up with the concept of normality (p. 235). In insisting [End Page 107] on this, Deutsch connects with a variety of twentieth-century subtle discussions of causality, including Elizabeth Anscombe's example of knowing immediately (without appeal to any covering law) that one's fright was caused by the face at the window and also Hart's and Honore's view of causation in the...