What’s the Speed Limit? And What Would Edmund Burke Say About It?

A resident in the United States will be familiar with the roads and streets in her or his neighborhood and beyond. An obvious feature of almost any thoroughfare is a speed limit, which is often, but not always, posted. Laws regulating the speed of cars is a common type of legislation; it is also an example of the principles which Edmund Burke sought to explain.

In many of the fifty states, there is a general principle which states that city streets have a speed limit of 25 miles per hour, and country roads have a limit of 55 miles per hour. These two clear and simple axioms would seem to generate a decision procedure for most, if not all, thoroughfares.

Yet, in practice, one will encounter posted speed limits of all kinds of arbitrary numbers — limits other than 25 or 55 MPH. One commonly sees posted limits in multiples of five — 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 MPH — and occasionally numbers like 8 or 12 MPH.

Sometimes speed limits in cities will exceed the usual 25 MPH, and countryside limits will sometimes be below the standard 55 MPH. Freeways will have limits of 70 or 75 MPH, and sometimes even higher numbers.

The thought of Edmund Burke is often best understood in the context of the French Revolution and his commentary on it.

The style of political ideology which energized the French Revolution would embrace the axiomatic system of 25 MPH for city streets and 55 MPH for country roads absolutely and simplistically. There would be no other speed limits considered. Every street in the nation would be either 25 or 55 MPH, and the choice between the two would be based upon whether the thoroughfare was urban or rural. No other variation would be allowed or even contemplated.

By contrast, Burke would survey the situation as it is, with not only posted limits of 25 MPH and 55 MPH, but also with posted limits of all kinds of other numbers, and he would consider whether there was some reason for all these different numbers. Burke would proceed on the assumption that there is a reason why things are the way they are. If a local town council chose to post a limit other than 25 or 55 MPH, then it would be prudent to inquire as to why and how the council arrived at the decision to post the number it did.

Here the reader may imagine all kinds of scenarios: some streets in the town have few residents and few intersecting streets, and so a limit of 30 MPH seemed safe; other streets have thick traffic, many residential structures and many intersecting roads along their paths, and so a limit of 20 MPH seemed wise. In the countryside, perhaps a particular road was winding and tended to accumulate ice in cold weather, and so a lower limit of 50 MPH seemed appropriate.

Burke might suggest that decades of experience informed legislations prescribing all manner of speed limits other than 25 and 55 MPH. He would not argue that such laws are sacrosanct and can never be questioned. On the contrary, he would encourage such questioning, and encourage the questioner to consider the answers carefully.

There is a reason why things are the way they are.

There are reasons why societies and cultures have arrived at the patterns which they have. It is possible to contemplate adjustments to convention, but it is wise to do so only after carefully weighing the generations of experience which have brought society to those conventions.

The apparent patchwork of varying speed limits may appear to be illogical and haphazard. A system which assigned every road and street to either 25 MPH or 55 MPH might seem more rational and axiomatic. But the patchwork system is the accreted wisdom of decades. Successive city councils will have encountered varying events and circumstances, and will have adjusted legislations accordingly.

It is impudent to arrive lately to the question and presume to impose a rationalized system upon a complex state of affairs.

Simplistic and absolute patterns, imposed arbitrarily in the name of being imposed rationally, lead more often to problems than to resolutions.

This is one of the major tenets of Burke’s thought.

Edmund Burke’s plea is for the would-be revolutionary to consider that the system which he desires to destroy is, while not perfect, still the accumulation and coalescence of decades and generations of experience — of people encountering a wide range of conditions and events, of people having already seen the results of a variety of responses to those conditions and events, and having learned the results and having chosen carefully from among them.

Complex systems are the result of a history of varying experiences — and of people having made varying decisions in response to those experiences — and a massive catalog of such experiences and the sundry responses to them constitutes a nuanced reality which in turn informs legislations. Burke does not argue for the permanence of societal standards, but rather he argues for a nuanced examination of the existing norms before any alteration is suggested — and such proposed alterations are better when they are slight and not radical.

Being and Existence: Passive or Active?

Those who analyze language as a way to investigate metaphysics have long wrestled with the verb ‘to be’ in various languages and various grammatical forms. Verbs like ‘see’ and ‘eat’ and ‘sing’ seem intuitively easy to define. The verb ‘be’ is intuitively understood in daily practice, and yet the definition of this verb and the referent of the word ‘being’ are debatable.

The reader will be aware that Martin Heidegger explored ‘being’ by contrasting two German words, Sein and Dasein. The former corresponds roughly to the English infinitive construction ‘to be’ and the latter is used in everyday speech to indicate ‘being there.’ Heidegger uses Dasein to refer to human existence: a human’s experience of being. He uses Sein to refer to being in general.

The detailed interpretation of Heidegger’s use of Sein, Dasein, ‘being,’ and ‘existence’ is a complicated and controversial discipline unto itself.

For the present discussion, it is worth noting that Sein and Dasein are active verbs, for which no passive form is possible. The same is true of the English verbs ‘be’ and ‘exist’ — these verbs all have active nominative subjects and no accusative direct objects. These verbs denote some type of agency.

There is another linguistic artifact which expresses being in a transitive way: the German construction es gibt. This structure is usually rendered into English as “there is” or “there are.” But the grammar of es gibt makes the being thing — the thing which is — into a direct object. The existing thing is being put into, and kept in, existence. There seems to be no clearly analogous construction in the English language. It is left as an exercise for the reader to survey English idioms, past and present, to see if there is some such analogous formulation.

Heidegger hints at this type of being — or this aspect of being — which lacks agency when he uses the word Geworfenheit. This word is often translated into English as ‘thrownness’ — human existence is beyond its own control: a human being finds himself thrown into a time and a place not of his own choosing. Not only is the spatial-temporal physical location not chosen, but also cultural and social contexts are not chosen.

The question at hand is this: to investigate the nature of Being by contrasting and comparing the grammatical nominative subject with the accusative direct object. There remains, of course, the question of whether it is a valid or sound method to use the grammar of natural language to explore metaphysical questions.

The reader will remember that Heidegger wrote that Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins, but while that sentence is thought-provoking, it hardly serves to solve or explain these questions.

One might postulate a spectrum, at one end of which is Being as absolute agency: God said, “I am that I am,” a sentence which has kept philosophers, theologians, and Semitic philologists busy for 3,500 years. Being is in this sense an assertion and an action. Being as a choice and as an act of the will.

At the other end of the spectrum is Being as ultimate passivity: That which is — things which are — have been thrown into existence. A conscious, knowing, deliberate thing — a person, a human — finds himself thrown into existence. One simply is, and is at a time and place not of one’s choosing. Searching one’s memory, one finds that at some point in time, one started to be. One simply was. It was certainly not a volitional act. One did not choose to be, nor was one at first even conscious of being. Somehow, it gradually dawned upon one, that one was.

Perhaps one clue is to be found in this usage: that es gibt is often used of inanimate things, and more often used of unaware and non-sentient things. To be sure, this is not a universal rule, and exceptions will be found. But might one generalize that es gibt mainly describes unconscious objects?

On the other hand, Heidegger’s Geworfenheit describes the experience of beings which are aware, conscious, and sentient.

Questions about Being are so foundational and basic that they link automatically to other branches of philosophy and to the written works of many different philosophers. When one notices one’s awareness — whether it be the earliest childhood memories or simply awakening each day — one is suddenly confronted with a world which “is there” — eine Welt, die es gibt — Who put it there? Why is it there? Why is there something rather than nothing?

To be aware and to be conscious leads to experiencing this sense of “thrownness” and to ask, in the first person, Who threw me? Why did someone throw me? Who made me? What is this world into which I am suddenly and involuntarily thrown?

To fully explore Being, the reader will need, in addition to Sein and Dasein, a sense of es gibt.