Privatizing Public Space

A familiar experience is coming inside from wintry weather, in which one hand had been gloved and the other exposed, and placing each hand in the same water, with one feeling lukewarm, and the other, scalding hot. Such an example has led some philosophers to conclude that the Hot and Warm are not physical properties of the water, but ideas in the mind of the experiencer. Protesting that a thermometer reports the presence in the water of one or the other quality is ineffective, because all that it registers is the movement of mercury. Berkeley was the first to generalize this result to all experiential qualitites, a doctrine called 'Phenomenalism', from which he drew the conclusion that the life of each of us is a private spiritual journey. Phenomenalism has always had a great appeal to someone who would prefer to see themselves as more than a physical creature sharing space with other such animals, and, a good argument can be made that Neo-Conservatives and George Bush subscribe to such a world-view. However, a fundamental flaw in the original example is telling writ large. A plain explanation of why the two hands feel different qualities in the same water is that what they feel is a function of their previous state, i. e. the water temperature will feel different ways to two hands that entered the situation in different conditions, so that of course water that is a lot warmer than a cold hand will feel hot to it, but not to one that might be only mildly cooler than it. The lesson is that how objective properties are experienced is relative to the prior state of the experiencer. For sure, the Hot is experienced privately, but that does not warrant the detachment of the experience from the objective physical world that includes both hand and water. Likewise, a factory might be private property, but the pollution that its smokestack spews into the air is quite public, and a 'God-instructed' killing is still a killing.