VIRTUAL REALITY AS MORAL IDEAL
If you have children, you know that the will of a toddler has a kind of purity to it: he wants what he wants, and refuses what he refuses, without reference to any fact that might inconvenience his will. It is freezing outside, but he doesn’t want to wear shoes to the park. By contrast, the will of an adult is shaped by his interactions with material reality. To say that the will is shaped by the world means that putting on shoes, for example, is no longer experienced as an accommodation. It is just what one does, as a condition for the possibility of doing anything else.
Beyond such minimal conditions, we enter the realm of skill. In skilled action, there are a lot of contingent facts about stuff that have to be learned at a deep level if we are to achieve our purposes: catching a fly ball, hitting a slap shot, cornering a motorcycle. Further, these are purposes we didn’t even have before we began our initiation into the skill, and started to perceive the affordances that this skill revealed in our environment. Acquiring skills, we acquire new motivations; a new space of reasons for action.
The adult will is not something self-contained; it is situated in, and formed by, the contingencies of the world beyond one’s head. The kind of self that accepts this elemental fact contrasts with, and therefore brings into clarifying relief, the more fragile kind of self that is posited in contemporary ethics and fostered by contemporary technology. The freedom and dignity of this modern self depend on its being insulated from contingency—by layers of representation.
As Thomas de Zengotita points out in his beautiful book Mediated, representations are addressed to us, unlike dumb nature, which just sits there. They are fundamentally flattering, placing each of us at the center of a little “me-world.”1 If the world encountered as something distinct from the self plays a crucial role for a person in achieving adult agency, then it figures that when our encounters with the world are increasingly mediated by representations that soften this boundary, this will have some effect on the kind of selves we become. To see this, consider children’s television.
THE MOUSEKE-DOER
In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, by far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence. Fold-down beds, ironing boards, waves at the beach, trailers (especially when Goofy is at the wheel of the towing vehicle, on a twisty mountain road), anything electric, anything elastic, anything that can become a projectile. Anything that can suffer termite damage that remains hidden until the crucial moment. Springs are especially treacherous, as are retractable blinds. Snowballs can be counted on to grow by a couple of orders of magnitude on their way down the slope toward your head. At any given moment, the odds of being seized by the collar by a severely overwound grandfather clock are nontrivial. Icicles: don’t stand anywhere near them. Bicycles tend to become unicycles, unpredictably, and rubber cement is easily mistaken for baking powder. Why do they have nearly identical labels?
These early cartoons present a rich phenomenology of what it is like to be an embodied agent in a world of artifacts and inexorable physical laws. The tendency of these things to thwart the human will is exaggerated, and through exaggeration a certain truth gets brought forward. As the stand-up comics say, only the truth is funny. In depicting the heteronomy that the world of objects inflicts on us, the slapstick sufferings of Donald Duck acknowledge, and thereby seem to affirm, the human condition as it is, beneath the various idealisms that would transport us out of that condition.
The Disney cartoon franchise now has many departments. One of them, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, on the Disney Junior network, retains the same characters. But the difference in how material reality is presented could not be more stark, and in this difference a shift in the relation between self and world becomes evident as well.
Each episode begins with Mickey looking into the camera and speaking directly to the viewer in tones of solicitous hypercongeniality, pausing every so often to elicit a response as he cups his hand to his ear. Once he has performed this ritual of seeking consent, he speaks some magic words (“Miska, Mooska…”) and the Clubhouse rises up out of the ground in a psychedelically abstract, parklike landscape. There, the characters present themselves for review, each auditioning for the viewer’s consideration with his or her own brand of delightfulness.
The Clubhouse is filled with amazing technology that always works perfectly. In the episode “Minnie’s Mouseke-Calendar,” a strong wind is blowing. You might think this is the setup for some slapstick. But when Goofy starts to get blown away, a retractable hand rises up out of a trapdoor (disguised as a paving stone) and gently pulls him back down to the earth.
The current episodes are all oriented not around frustration but around solving a problem. One does this by saying, “Oh Tootles!” This makes the Handy Dandy machine appear, a computerlike thing that condenses out of the Cloud and presents a menu of four “Mouseke-tools” on a screen, by the use of which the viewer is encouraged to be a “Mouseke-doer.”
In the episode “Little Parade” some wind-up toy marching band figures have been overwound and scattered, and must be retrieved. One of them ended up on the other side of a river that runs beneath the cliff Goofy is standing on. Goofy says the magic words. The Handy Dandy machine boots up and presents its menu of options; one of them is a giant slide. Perfect! The slide is conjured out of the ether and settles gently into place to run from the cliff to the far bank, where Goofy retrieves the errant toy.
There are four problems per episode, and each can be solved using one of the four tools. This assurance is baked into the initial setup of the episode; no moment of helplessness is allowed to arise. There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world. I suspect that is one reason these episodes are not just unfunny, but somehow the opposite of funny. Like most children’s television these days, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is doggedly devoted not to capturing experience, that is, to psychological truth, but to psychological adjustment. It is not a depiction so much as an intervention—on behalf of parents, teachers, and others who must manage children.2 The well-adjusted child doesn’t give in to frustration; he asks for help (“Oh Tootles!”) and avails himself of the ready-made solutions that are presented to him.
To be a Mouseke-doer is to abstract from material reality as depicted in those early Disney cartoons, where we see the flip side of affordances. Perhaps we should call unwanted projectiles, demonic springs, and all such hazards “negative affordances.” The thing is, you can’t have the positive without the negative; they are two sides of the same coin. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.
This cartoon magic may be fanciful, but one would be hard-pressed to find any meaningful distinction between it and the utopian vision by which Silicon Valley is actively reshaping our world. As we “build a smarter planet” (as the IBM advertisements say), the world will become as frictionless as thought itself; “smartness” will subdue dumb nature. But perhaps even thinking will become unnecessary: a fully smart technology should be able to leap in and anticipate our will, using algorithms that discover the person revealed by our previous behavior. The hope seems to be that we will incorporate a Handy Dandy machine into our psyches at a basic level, perhaps through some kind of wearable or implantable device, so that the world will adjust itself to our needs automatically and the discomfiting awareness of objects as being independent of the self will never be allowed to arise in the first place.
The appeal of magic is that it promises to render objects plastic to the will without one’s getting too entangled with them. Treated from arm’s length, the object can issue no challenge to the self. According to Freud, this is precisely the condition of the narcissist: he treats objects as props for his fragile ego and has an uncertain grasp of them as having a reality of their own. The clearest contrast to the narcissist that I can think of is the repairman, who must subordinate himself to the broken washing machine, listen to it with patience, notice its symptoms, and then act accordingly. He cannot treat it abstractly; the kind of agency he exhibits is not at all magical.
The creeping substitution of virtual reality for reality is a prominent feature of contemporary life, but it also has deep antecedents in Western thought. It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us: trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions.
KANT’S METAPHYSICS OF FREEDOM
“Autonomy of the will is the property of the will through which it is a law to itself independently of all properties of the objects of volition,” Kant writes. “If the will seeks that which should determine it … in the constitution of any of its objects, then heteronomy always comes out of this.” In such a case “the will does not give itself the law but the object through its relation to the will gives the law to it.” Autonomy requires that we “abstract from all objects to this extent—they should be without any influence at all on the will so that [the will] may not merely administer an alien interest but may simply manifest its own sovereign authority as the supreme maker of the law.”3
These pronouncements only make sense if we recover some historical context and understand them as a response to a problem. Consider the alarm that must have come naturally to thoughtful people beginning in the seventeenth century. The new natural science offered a mechanistic account of nature from which there seemed no reason to exempt human beings.4 The naturalistic psychology of Thomas Hobbes and others threatened to subsume human freedom to the deterministic realm of material causation. Thus “free will” became a problem that had to be addressed. The foundations of morality seemed to be at stake. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant means to put the freedom of the will on a new footing, where it will float free of all natural necessities.
As the title of the Groundwork suggests, Kant tries to lay out not the actual content of moral principles, much less a detailed account of our obligations to others, but rather what kind of thing morality is. He insists that it exists in the realm of the ideal, not the empirical. This is crucial for the possibility of moral freedom, as against naturalistic determinism. So it is not a realistic picture of experience so much as a lawyerly argument, in which Kant tries to construct a fortress in which moral freedom is not threatened by the dumb causation of Newtonian nature. But this leads Kant into some strange assertions.
“The object through its relation to the will” cannot be allowed to determine the will, if it is to be free. I take Kant to be talking about relations of fit between a person and the field of objects that he deals with in his environment—precisely what we explored under the heading of “affordances” and “ecological niches” in the previous chapter. Kant builds a high wall between the empirical world and the purely intellectual, where we discover a priori moral laws. Reasons to act must come only from the latter if we are to be free, and the will is to remain pure, “unconditioned” by anything external to it.
But in our discussion of affordances and cognitive extension, we learned that we may acquire purposes through initiation into a skill, such that affordances perceived in the environment provide not just handles for actions previously decided upon by pure reason, but new motivations; a new space of reasons for action. This is precisely what Kant calls heteronomy, if I have understood him correctly, and I call the foundation of human agency as we actually experience it.
The challenge posed by cognitive extension to contemporary culture cuts deep, because Kant’s metaphysics of freedom is at the very core of our modern understanding of how we relate to the world beyond our heads. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse merely presents an exaggerated version of this understanding, and like most caricatures it brings to prominence the defining features of the thing caricatured.
The Handy Dandy machine would teach us that it is not essential to human agency that you understand how your choice is realized or that you in fact do anything to realize it. The intervention of magic allows the moment of choice to be isolated from the (mysterious) process by which that choice is to be made effective in the world. It is also isolated from what comes before choice; the options for action that you are to choose from are already there, presented to you without involvement on your part. In the previous chapter we learned that, on the contrary, your skill set determines what possibilities for action you perceive in your environment, as in the case of the trained martial artist. How we act is not determined in an isolated moment of choice; it is powerfully ordered by how we perceive the situation, how we are attuned to it, and this is very much a function of our previous history of shaping ourselves to the world in a particular way.
When Kant says the following, it seems to be his take on the martial artist who perceives affordances for combat in the stance of a belligerent man at the bar: “The will does not give itself the law, but an alien impulsion does so through the medium of the subject’s own nature as tuned for its reception.” The alien impulsion here is the motivational force that some concrete situation has for someone who is “tuned for its reception.” Such attunement is heteronomy, for Kant.
To be sure, this way of putting the matter seems apt if you focus on the case of a martial artist who responds to every solicitation or affordance for combat that arises in his environment and goes around karate-chopping everything and everybody in sight. Such a person would indeed be blameworthy in a way that Kant’s account of heteronomy captures well; he would be a kind of automaton. But it seems an extreme reaction to take the possibility of such a case as compelling us to ignore the mutual entanglement of will and world, or to posit their segregation as an ideal.
Kant does concern himself with the kind of sensitivity to the world that requires experience, but he treats this in a separate book, the Critique of Judgment, and it is significant that he segregates this topic from his argument about the metaphysics of the will’s freedom. Moments of attending to the world are separable from the moment of moral choice, and indeed the freedom of the will depends on such separation. Experience is always contingent and particular, and for that reason “unfitted to serve as a ground of moral laws. The universality with which these laws should hold for all rational beings without exception … falls away if their basis is taken from the special constitution of human nature or from the accidental circumstances in which it is placed.” To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.5
THE PLIABLE CHOOSER
Whether you regard it as infantile or as the highest achievement of the European mind, what we find in Kant are the philosophical roots of our modern identification of freedom with choice, where choice is understood as a pure flashing forth of the unconditioned will. This is important for understanding our culture because thus understood, choice serves as the central totem of consumer capitalism, and those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.
When the choosing will is hermetically sealed off from the fuzzy, hard-to-master contingencies of the empirical world, it becomes more “free” in a sense: free for the kind of neurotic dissociation from reality that opens the door wide for others to leap in on our behalf, and present options that are available to us without the world-disclosing effort of skillful engagement. For the Mouseke-doer, choosing (from a menu of ready-made solutions) replaces doing, and it follows that such a person should be more pliable to the choice architectures presented to us in mass culture.
The absence of the real from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse—indeed, the dissociative or abstract quality of children’s television in general these days—makes it an ideal vehicle for psychological adjustment; for constructing and managing the kind of selves that society requires, without meddling interference from the nature of things. The particular adjustments to be carried out will have to be determined by a Disney script supervisor, or some other functionary of the modern self.
The basic thrust of these interventions is not something that Kant caused. But when dumb nature is understood to be threatening to our freedom as rational beings, it becomes attractive to construct a virtual reality that will be less so, a benignly nice Mickey Mouse Clubhouse where there is no conflict between self and world; no contingency that hasn’t been anticipated by the Handy Dandy machine. Kant tries to put the freedom of the will on a footing that secures it against outside influence—so it will be “unconditioned,” a law unto itself—but he can do this only by removing the will to a separate realm, from which it can have no causal effect in this world, the one governed by Newtonian causation. The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence.6
With this comes fragility—that of a self that can’t tolerate conflict and frustration. And this fragility, in turn, makes us more pliable to whoever can present the most enthralling representations that save us from a direct confrontation with the world. Being addressed to us, these representations allow us to remain comfortable in a little “me-world” of manufactured experience. If these representations make use of hyperpalatable mental stimuli, the world of regular old experience may come to seem not only frustrating but unbearably drab by comparison.
But notice that somewhere in the vicinity of the ideas we have explored about cognitive extension and embodied agency, there may be a route out of this dependence on manufactured experience. In the case of the short-order cook, the hockey player, and the motorcycle racer, one takes one’s bearings from a field of objects external to the self, brings one’s actions into conformity with them, and something contingent results—some mix of joy and frustration according to one’s skill level and a lot of stuff that is beyond one’s control.
These experiences hint at the cultural possibilities of engineering and design. The design of things can facilitate embodied agency or diminish it in ways that lead us further into passivity and dependence.