Interview with Professor Jim Stramel

Maureen Cohen, May 2003

It was my great honor and pleasure to interview Philosopher and Professor, Dr. Jim Stramel. Dr. Stramel has been teaching philosophy at SMC since 92 (part-time – since 99 full-time). We started off our discussion about the nature of philosophy and I invite you to “listen-in” and gain some insight from one of SMC’s favorite professors.

What is the goal of philosophy?

THE goal?

Or is there a goal?

Well, the main overarching goal is developing wisdom. Go back to the etymology of the term and “Philosophy” means “the love of wisdom.” Philosophy is the attempt to acquire systematic and comprehensive knowledge about anything and everything. Most philosophers have a tendency to seek a grand theory of everything. They want to know about everything. They want to know how it all fits together, how it all works, relationships between different issues and questions… but inevitably, in doing the work of philosophy, we typically wind up specializing. I am a specialist in ethics, for example. There aren’t enough hours in the day to devote to studying everything, so instead, we specialize. The ethicist will talk to the epistemologist, the epistemologists will talk to the metaphysicians, they will talk to the aestheticians, who will talk to the logicians, and so we have a community of scholars. We’ve put all that knowledge and information together, and so we, together, are collectively moving humanity closer to achieving a grand theory of everything… to answer all the interesting questions.

Is there one grand theory that does apply?

Many philosophers, starting with Plato, have been… the term we use is, systematic philosophers. They attempt to develop a grand theory of everything. But not all philosophers believe that it is appropriate or possible. So they do not engage in that same sort of systematic philosophy.

So you certainly can, in the history of philosophy, find examples of people who think that there is some answer, a grand theory of everything. Of course, any grand theory that is going to answer every question is going to have to be quite complicated. It’s not going to be a single statement or doctrine determinate of the truth like “everything’s relative”. The joke that I sometimes make in class is a reference to Douglas Adam’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe”. There is a line in there from one of the characters, searching for the answer to “life, the universe, and everything.” And he discovers the answer, and the answer is “42”. Well, it’s a joke, obviously! The answer to life, the universe, and everything, cannot be as simple as “42” or “everything is relative” or any other simple slogan. So, the grand theory of everything is going to have to be very complicated because we have lots of different kinds of philosophical questions. “Everything” covers a lot.

What made you become a philosopher, and in particular, focus on ethics?

Well, I discovered philosophy by accident. I didn’t seek philosophy out, knowing what it was. I took a philosophy class, not really knowing what it was about, and fell in love. I just thoroughly enjoyed it, so I took more philosophy classes. Originally I was a political science/ pre-law major. I was going to become a lawyer. That’s all I ever remembered as a kid, wanting to be a lawyer. But then I hated political science when I got to college and I started falling in love with philosophy and pretty soon I had shifted majors.
Now, what are you going to do with a degree in philosophy? Not very much. No one is going to hire someone just because they have a B.A. degree in philosophy. One thing you can do with a degree in philosophy is teach. And that seemed appropriate as I have always loved and valued education. And I discovered that I had a knack for it as a teaching assistant, which is how I supported myself in part, with my financial aid package in grad school. But initially, it was a bit of a fluke.

Why ethics?

Well that developed years later, after I started studying philosophy. Originally, I became interested in questions about knowledge – epistemology. I started a dissertation on contemporary theories of justification of empirical knowledge. I floundered and struggled, because we didn’t have a specialist on staff and I learned too late that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Nobody gave me good advice… that maybe I should have a more manageable project. I wasted two or three years struggling, trying to put together a dissertation in epistemology. Then, another kind of fluke happened. There is a fellow named Simon LeVay, a Salk Institute researcher… you remember when those studies came out about the size of the hypothalamus and theories about causes of sexual orientation?

Yes

Well Simon LeVay was the guy who did the research on the hypothalamus and he came to Los Angeles to form the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education in West Hollywood. When I heard about this, I thought: well, they ought to have a course in ethics that deals with moral problems of concern to gays and lesbians; you know, same-sex marriage, sodomy laws, privacy, non-discrimination, that stuff. So it was in putting together the syllabus, and the reading to create that class, that I discovered that there were some really good philosophical questions here about gay life and there was not very much good literature in philosophy about these issues. I also was provoked in particular by one person, Richard Mohr, who wrote a paper on the ethics of outing. I thought he was wrong, wrong, wrong and I wanted to write a response.

What is his position?

He defends it. He believes that gay people, who are openly gay, should never participate in keeping someone else’s secret… that this leads to self degradation and is a violation of our own dignity. I was very stimulated by what Mohr wrote and suddenly felt like I had some things to say, in ethics, which I had never found really interesting. Because the epistemology project was not happening and I suddenly saw a clear and manageable thesis and I was motivated to work on these other issues, I completely switched gears. I abandoned the epistemology project, formed a new committee and I began a new dissertation project on ethical issues arising in connection with disclosures of gay identity.
Sometimes in life circumstances conspire to present an opportunity you never expected and you find out that you love it and its working and it’s paying the bills and … life is good!

Do you have a favorite philosopher?

Aristotle is my favorite in ethics, he is my exemplar. He is the person that I like the most and his theory is the type that I model my own approach after.

Is there a philosopher that you feel has been overstated or perhaps a field of philosophy which you are less fond of?

I do struggle with a contemporary school of thought, some people think that we are in a new era or phase in philosophy, that we have now moved out of the modern period of philosophizing and we’re now into a postmodern period. I have a great deal of difficulty with postmodernism and some of the schools of thought that are part of that. It’s a loose kind of collection. Postmodernism is not just one theory or one thing, buts it’s kind of a general movement and I have some difficulty with some of these ideas.

Is it the pessimism?

Well there is some of that. In ethics, one of the big problems I have with postmodernist theories is that they tend to be relativists. Postmodernists deny that we can know the objective truth, that we can have knowledge…….They definitely have some points to make, but I can’t go as far as they go. In ethics, for example, a classic postmodernist ethic is existentialism. And existentialism denies that there are objective universal moral values. Nothing is given, nothing is predetermined, everything is open. There is no human nature that defines morality for us. And so we have to define who we are. We have to take responsibility for our own choices…and for the people we become by acting. We express our values by the choices we make.

And what are those values?

That’s the problem. Which values? Is it completely open ended? And in some places they want to say “yes” and other places they seem to want to say “no”. And so I have difficulty understanding exactly what the position is, whether the position is consistent. But the biggest problem, focusing on the ethical aspect of postmodernism or postmodern theory, is that they do not seem to give us any meaningful guidance. Okay, yeah I get it, I’m supposed to be responsible for my choices, that’s what they call “being authentic” and not blaming others or blaming circumstances, saying how powerless I am because the powers-that-be are setting things up in a certain way and I don’t have choices. You do have choices! Okay, fine; yes we have choices and I should be responsible for my choices….How am I supposed to make my choices?! On what Basis am I to decide what to do?

Right, if there are no foundations to ethics

Or if there are no universal moral values, what am I supposed to think about? What am I supposed to aim at…in making these choices? So postmodern theories of ethics tend to tear down, but it’s not clear that they can provide anything in its place.
If some supreme, ultimate authority were to grant you the true answer to one philosophical question, what would that question be?
I think the $64 million dollar question is…. The nature of consciousness. How do you get subjective mental states, mental states with subjective, phenomelogical content out of biochemistry? How do you get thoughts, intentions, and attitudes out of the firings of neurons? How does that happen? For example, you can do experiments in the laboratory where they can electrically stimulate certain portions of the brain, and the subject seems to see yellow.

Or a memory comes back?

Yes, lots of different things can happen. So you get this subjective phenomelogical state: it seems to me that I’m seeing yellow, but there is no yellow before my eyes; it is just a direct electrical stimulation of the brain. Well, how does neuro-biology translate into something like a thought? I think that’s the grand philosophical question.

Science continues to expand its base of knowledge and ask questions that would never have been conceived of in the past. What new questions will philosophers ask in the near future?

New philosophical questions are always emerging - sure. In part, this is in response to changing circumstances. For example, in ethics, people are now publishing papers and writing on the question of the morality of cloning… because all of thesudden science has presented us with the new possibility of cloning. Twenty year ago no one even dreamed that this would be one of our questions.

Do we have proper structures, principles or theories from previous moral philosophers with which to answer these questions?

Well, I would think that most people would say yes – at least generally. Maybe we don’t yet know the answer to the question about cloning, or whatever other new questions that emerge, but I am optimistic that with hard and careful work, we can make progress and eventually figure it out. We have the resources available – we can stand on the shoulders of the giants in philosophy who have laid much of the philosophical groundwork.
So I would say that the answer to your question is “yes” and I would come at it from the virtue ethics point of view: Is the practice of cloning something that a virtuous person would do? Or does it manifest any vices?

I would say whatever the problem is, whether it is cloning or sexuality or internet privacy; or whatever it is… this is the correct theoretical perspective to take, to try to answer these questions.
I can imagine new developments where we would come up against the limits of the resources we already have and we would need to do some new work or come up with a new theory, a new principle, something… in order to answer the new questions. There might be an example that comes out of the development of virtual reality, because it involves new technology, and new ways of relating via the new technology. That could raise new questions and it might be that because of the context, circumstances are so different from what we’re used to dealing with in the past that we find that we need to develop a new theory or principle or approach because it is so unique. For example, does it mean the same thing to be a person in cyberspace as it means to be a person in “real” life” It might; but we might also have to make some interesting adjustments in our view of what it means to be a person in a virtual reality environment.

Postmodernism… is that the latest in philosophical theories or is there something else about to emerge?

One of the current debates in philosophy is whether we are now in a postmodern era and have moved out of modernism, or whether we are still basically modernist and the postmodernists are just tinkering around the margins. So there is a controversy actually about whether there has been a shift and whether we are now in a new postmodernist era. Some people say no, some people say absolutely yes.

Is there something else emerging on the horizon?

I don’t think so. I haven’t heard of any kind of consensus about the next period or the next movement, or anything like that. Postmodernism is as far as we’ve gotten, although some folks even think we are now moving into a post-modern era.

Philosophy benefits the study of law; what about a computer science major; they may question how they might benefit from philosophy. There are really no ethics involved there…

Oh, sure there are! For example, there’s the question of privacy. You also have questions about ownership and fair use of electronic media; or if somebody posts something on a website, does that mean that it is fair game? Or think about the common practice of “file sharing,” instead of paying royalties for songs. Is this just morally unproblematic “sharing”, or is it theft? So there are questions there too. In fact, we could come up with interesting philosophical questions on just about any topic!

How about physics for example, has it overlooked philosophical issues?

Well no, actually; of the sciences, physics tends to be the most philosophical. In fact in grad school, I took a course, taught by one of our philosophers on the faculty, in “the philosophy of quantum mechanics”. Physics tends to be fairly philosophical because it is a speculative discipline, even though we are talking about the physical universe. But, it’s different from say chemistry where you are in the laboratory, doing hands on experiments. You’re not really thinking much about the abstract, theoretical, conceptual kinds of questions; whereas physics forces you to do that sort of stuff. Yes physics does experiments in the lab too - They have their particle accelerators and things like that, but there is a lot more speculation in physics than there is in most of the hands on sciences like biology or chemistry. The “hard” sciences… they typically do the science, asking scientific questions, seeking scientific answers to those questions, but they don’t philosophically reflect much about what they are doing as they do science. One of the neat things about philosophy is that even for disciplines that themselves are not philosophical; philosophers take it upon themselves to think philosophically about those disciplines. So there is the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, philosophy of law, philosophy of education…there is the philosophy of everything!

Do you have a favorite student or a fellow graduate who is doing something unique in the area of philosophy?

I do have a few students who have declared philosophy as their majors and some who are pursuing higher degrees, but that is nothing noteworthy or unusual. Sometimes students, who are interested in psychology or want to become therapists, have found philosophy to be useful.

Here is an example of somebody who was a grad student with me, who is a friend of mine, who got his PhD in philosophy. Instead of doing what I am doing, teaching full time as a philosopher, he started a magazine and an organization focused on the use of science and technology to perfect mankind and to extend life. He is a cryonicist: he has a contract to have his head frozen when he dies … under the theory that eventually science and medicine will be able to fix whatever killed him, or grow him a new body, so that he can have more life…because life is good! It’s sure better than being dead!

And is he studying the ethics of that as well?

Well, I’m sure he has thought about those issues, although he’s not primarily an ethicist. But he has this organization, and they have members from around the globe, and a magazine called “Extropy”. So here is a person who has gone on to use philosophy in life rather than teaching philosophy.

Are you planning on continuing your Philosophy 1 course, using Star Trek?

Yep, Amber Katherine and I are planning to teach that indefinitely.
And what is the point of utilizing Star Trek episodes?
Philosophy 1 is a general introduction to philosophy. What is unique about it is the strategy that we take and how we teach the course. What we are doing is using “the franchise” - all the different series, all the different movies - and we’re using the episodes in Star Trek to raise and to illustrate the philosophical ideas … as a spring board for discussion of philosophical issues and theories.

For example, in tonight’s class, we’re going to watch from “The Next Generation,” an episode called “I, Borg.” The crew discovers a little Borg ship with only a couple of Borgs in it and one of the Borgs is still alive. So they beam the Borg back up to the ship, but all the Borgs communicate with each other so they are now going to know where the ship is, and so the mother ship is going to come and kill them. They have to think about what they should do with this Borg. Should they just kill it? Or maybe they should reprogram it with a virus so that when the mother ship comes and picks him up it will infect the collective and kill all the Borg. So it is a question about whether it is morally permissible to use this being as a means to the end of killing the Borgs. And what becomes really interesting about this episode is their interactions with this Borg individual… the question is what does it mean to be an individual? What is the nature of community and what is the nature of the individual self? In the Borg language, they don’t even have a word for “I,” they can’t even think of themselves as individuals. They are a “collective” – a “hive-mind.” There are no individuals! This Borg, which they name “Hugh”, seems to develop a sense of self over the few days that they are dealing with it and then they have some questions. If it is a “self” they can’t just upload a virus that’s going to infect the mother ship; because he’s a person, valuable in itself. They conclude that it would be wrong to use him as a means to annihilate the rest of the Borg.

I was never much of a Star Trek fan, so I didn’t think this course would interest me, but it actually sounds very interesting.

Star Trek… almost all of the episodes, are morality plays, raising these interesting philosophical questions about human life. Star Trek is not about aliens, it’s about humans. The whole point of it is to explore what it means to be human and how to live a human life. They use the alien characters as touchstones or sounding boards. Think about Spock for example. Spock represents the purely rational - well, not purely, he’s a hybrid after all…

But non emotional

Right… but the Vulcan half of him is pure reason. Well, what would life be like if we were pure reasoning human beings? What is an appropriate role for the emotions? Spock is always struggling with his emotions. He’s always trying to squash them. But we’re not Vulcans, we’re not half breads, we’re humans, and surely emotions should have an appropriate role in human life. The android, Data, wants desperately to experience feelings and emotions. What would human life be like if we were like Data, unfeeling, emotionless beings?!
So you use aliens, you use other creatures, other species to think about, to explore the possibilities of what it means to be human. How should we organize human life? What would be the best form of government? ... all kinds of philosophical questions. That was the whole motivation behind the series with Gene Roddenberry. So philosophy 1 is not a new class, just a new approach and it picks up on something in popular culture which students are familiar with, as a hook… a way a drawing them into the discussion about philosophy. The point of the class is not Star Trek; our goal is to use Star Trek as a means of exploring philosophical questions.
As far as new courses… aesthetics is a new course which we may develop.

How would you explain the field of aesthetics?

Philosophy of art, the nature of beauty, the nature of the sublime.
So is it how you decide what should be considered art?
Yes, that’s part of it. What is art? What are the defining features of art? What makes something beautiful? How do we understand aesthetic properties? What kind of theory of art should we hold?

Thank you for your time Professor Stramel. I have enjoyed being a student in your ethics class this spring and I am looking forward to the Star-Trek course next fall.