My Generation

This is something I wrote a little over a year ago. It is technically part of a much larger project that will probably never reach any stage of completion, but I found it in my notes and, though it isn't about anything in particular, it has the virtue of being sustained and liftable. It was also before Obama-fever took over the Left. My cues are from Rorty, obviously so (with some Pirsigian pathos), but the way Obama has swept the Left off its feet, I think, shows that Rorty was tapping into a vein that was far more real than I imagine he even imagined. I wish he'd lived to see it.
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My generation has become deathly cynical and I'm not sure who to blame or how to change it. It's no use simply blaming us, those goddamn kids, nor our parents, those goddamn hippies. Everybody's just responding to their environment and the environment changed, no doubt irrevocably, and we didn't. We don't know how to maintain faith anymore because we now live in a time when just about every object of faith has been exposed as flawed. Intellectuals have been doing it for centuries, that's the basic function of intellectuals, but before the Industrial Age it stayed amongst the very few. The creation of the printing press, the fall of Latin, and the rise of the Modern University changed all that. Education is for everyone now--or at least increasingly so. Well, that's the hope at least. Maybe a goal we still need to work towards. Oh, who am I kidding, college is still only for well-off, white pricks like me.

You see how easy it is? We know too much. Current reality blots out hope for the future. Thanks to the Democrats, colleges were flooded after World War II. And the flooding didn't stop. People began to learn more, know more stuff, the kind of things only the few had known before--namely how corrupt and broken down everything is, how the rich and powerful (kinda' redundant) are always trying (and succeeding) to fuck us over.

Knowledge isn't bad. Unmasking objects of faith isn't bad. Why we should call it an "unmasking" is a better question. The effect of unmaskings is to expose flaws. To call it an "unmasking," however, is to imply that we were lied to, that we were told it was flawless and--surprise!--it wasn't. What is unclear to me is why this should cause us to be cynical rather than simply more self-aware--noticing finally the continuity between governments and religions and, ya' know, every particular person we've ever met. The idea of flawless objects is so absurd, we should wonder how we ever got conned into believing it.

See, again: the cynicism. Because this is exactly what the hippies began to think: they had been had, conned. They began spouting Foucault (fuckin' French), about how Truth is Power and Power Truth. The Man's got the Power and he defines the Truth. Nobody noticed that once you dissolve everything into a power relation, you lose your ability to use "power" as a derogatory epithet--you'd just as well speak of the power to help as the power to hurt.

But such nuance is lost on most people, especially when they're angry and looking around for a stick to beat people with. The question is: why were they so angry? Why do we call our grandparents the "Greatest Generation" and our parents "dirty hippies"?

I think it wasn't only the fact that far more hippies went to college than their parents, but also the fact that our grandparents combined faith in an untarnished object with a war worthy of fighting and our parents an unmasked--absurd--lie with a war that should never have been fought. How does anyone not become disillusioned after that?

So we lost hope. We became cynical. The intellectuals left us without an object--however flawed--to hope for and became preoccupied with an increasingly boring series of unmaskings, an army of academics who'd never heard of the law of diminishing returns. Everyone else was left adrift. We feel powerless to change anything. We have only one vote in millions.

Which is just about the stupidest thing--we have one vote? We is many, and many votes can do many things. When these lazy-ass bastards with opinions till Sunday on what's wrong with everything whine, "Why vote? I only have one," I just wanna' punch them in their stupid ass face--do they really think, after all, that we were better off when only white, landed dudes with slaves were voting? And hey, I'm sure it was a lot fuckin' easier when the King was the only one making any decisions. It just tears me up when--hey, not everyone's got new ideas about where to go or how to get there, but you don't even vote!?

Take [identity obscured]: she has one of the coldest, narrowest circle of sentiments I have ever encountered. She laughed at 9/11, thought they (Americans) were getting what they deserved. She thinks that anybody who joins the military deserves whatever they get if they were stupid enough to join. She'll believe any fool conspiracy, up to and including astrology. I cannot believe someone as intelligent as she could be so malformed--but then I remember that Heidegger was a Nazi and one of the world's greatest philosophers, and if Popper has his way Plato was a fascist.

[Identity obscured] is dumb about politics. I can't make chicken casserole. I guess we're all stupid about something.

What Happened to Political Philosophy?

If you ask a 22-year-old philosophy major for a Great Philosophers shortlist, one that extends until, say, 1950, it would probably go something like this: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre. In fact, it would probably even go in that particular order. However, if you ask for a shortlist of the great political philosophers, that list would likely go something like this: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx. Significantly shorter, yes, but why so little overlap? One might think specialization, and certainly when Plato and Aristotle were at it, everything was more or less "love of wisdom." But if you ask for a list of the great metaphysicians, or epistemologists, you get pretty much the exact same list as the Greats list (though a savvy student will hesitate with metaphysician, and in some cases epistemologist, for everybody after Hegel). And what's with no names from the early part of the 20th century?

What happened to political philosophy?

When students take Philosophy 101, they are typically still taught that there are three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Some students (usually the ones already earmarked for phil-majorhood) will recognize the first two, but almost no one will have ever heard of the third. The professor, of course, will be quick to break down the etymological roots of all three, particularly the last: the study of "value". They will then explain that this branch breaks into the more well-known ethics and aesthetics. Occasionally that will be it--on with the show. Many times, though, the professor will also expand on the many sub-branches that have been created over time to help future majors swim later: philosophy of mind, of language, of science, of art (which has largely replaced "aesthetics"), moral philosophy (mainly the new moniker for philosophical study of "ethics"), political philosophy.

In 101 courses, however, political philosophy is usually overlooked, and sometimes even moral philosophy. Most of the focus remains on metaphysics and epistemology. The reasons for this are, naturally, many and complex, but some general considerations arise to answer some of the anomalies I pointed out earlier.

The most important reason is Kant. Kant institutionalized (for reasons having to do with his genius, but also because of the birth of modern universities and the professionalization--the professorialization--of philosophy) the historical line of personages that we now recite as the Great Ones by, during the creation of transcendental philosophy, splitting the difference between--what he named as--the traditions of Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). In fact, the very notion of "metaphysics" and "epistemology" as subjects, as different branches of philosophy, didn't really cohere until after Kant. ("Metaphysics," of course, is the name Aristotle's redactor gave to the first collection of writings after the previous collection, the Physics. Epistemology, I believe, wasn't coined until the 19th-century, in German as erkenntnistheorie.) Since Descartes began his philosophy by doubting everything he knew, and Kant then stepped back and wondered how we know anything at all, epistemology has seemed to be the most pressing item on the list, even right before the part where we divvy out the existence of things--how else, after all, would we know?

Epistemology becoming the king of the discipline, however, doesn't explain why the series of great political philosophers differs so much from the other series. It explains why the Great Metaphysicians series looks exactly like the Great Philosophers one, but not why Machiavelli didn't have a theory of knowledge, nor Descartes a theory of the state.

I think the explanation has to run through Plato's distaste for the affairs of humanity. "But Plato wrote the first comprehensive political theory?" It is true, Plato is usually the first stop for political philosophy, but you have to dig into what he was saying--Plato wanted to banish politics. Political, and moral, philosophy were supposed to be those branches where we deal with the Problems of Men, but ever since Plato wiped his brush of Philosophy over the canvas of humanity's interests, banishing Poetry, Politics, and Rhetoric, philosophers who have turned their attention to the temporal have all struggled with the tension between the subject matter's obvious humanness and their desire to rise above it. Plato created the desire to float into the heavens precisely because he wanted to push aside the things that otherwise seem the most distinctively human. Do animals have politics? Do they capture each other's passions with moving oratory? No, but they do all have a mode of being in the world. Our mode would seem to be like Aristotle said, animals with politics, but Plato put his stamp on humanity by suggesting that we were most human, not by doing all these human-y things, but when we rise above, that we were most human when we were rubbing elbows with eternity. Plato did it by creating a new activity that would be definitive of humanity, call it philosophy, theory or contemplation, that would allow us to show off our celestial side.

The impact was that Hobbes and Machiavelli seem to philosophers to be cynics, reveling in the baseness of humanity. To those still marked strongly by Plato, moral--and particularly political--philosophy needed to be devoid of the crass things we do on a regular basis, ego struggles, white lies, above all sex: these things had no place in a proper understanding of ethical behavior. This led to the abortive position of emotivism, and it led to subdisciplines--really, redefinitions of the discipline--like "moral theory" and "metaethics." All of these maneuvers were designed to get the human out of morality. But how the hell do you do that in politics?

Platonism never could figure out what to do with politics because it just seemed so coarse, after all, naturally and essentially having to do with other people. So philosophers have increasingly isolated themselves over 2500 years from the affairs of people. At least in regards to what they do professionally, politics was something they looked oddly at because it was the realm of human action, whereas their domain seems directly opposed to it, the realm of contemplation. They keep trying to affect human action, how we act in the world, but the further we get from Plato, the worse their specifically philosophical attempts seem. The dynamic of Platonism was such that it created a rift between the actual and the ideal, encapsulated in More's re-Platonizing of political philosophy, Utopia. More wanted to affect action, his book was a political tract that was to have real political effect, but Plato's stamp shows it's true colors in how we think of More's coined word today: utopic thinking is something that's out of touch with reality. Think of that old, post-60s Cold War chestnut: "Sure, communism works in theory, but...."

The struggle between Plato and the Sophists was the struggle between sophia and techne. "Loving wisdom" was something that Plato introduced, and it was not what other's had in mind. Pierre Hadot gives us a good reconstruction of what Plato did to wisdom in his What is Ancient Philosophy?. Early philosophers had no notion of philosophia, but they did think of wisdom as a kind of know-how, which is still the most commonly used notion of the word in common sense. Techne we can translate as "skill," and we can see how 5th-century intellectuals before Socrates might have thought sophia and techne very similar notions, wisdom being a generalized know-how and various skills being particular kinds of know-how. The epitaph of Thrasymachus, Plato's punching bag at the beginning of the Republic, read: "My career is sophia," which, in the Sophists adoring naïveté, they thought they could teach. Socrates' strategy and goal was to show that they were full of it by asking them what, exactly, they were teaching. The particular bit they were teaching was arete.

The word has gone through a number of stages of translation, which itself gives us a potted history of philosophy's struggle between theory and practice, contemplation and action. The oldest English translations we were living with at the beginning of the 20th century was arete as "virtue." The trouble with virtue is that it is something we tend to itemize into various virtues, like the virtue of compassion or temperance. So arete seemed to equivocate between various things we could teach, and teach better by knowing what it, in its various particular guises, was (thus lending credence to Plato's turn to the heavens) and a more hard to define general thing, as in, "That person has virtue." They have virtue? What, exactly, do you mean?

What, indeed, and it becomes worse, and Socrates' rancor over the Sophists even more understandable, when we move to arete as "excellence," a translation that started to become popular around the middle of the century. "That person has excellence" doesn't even make much sense in English, but it is closer to what the Greeks meant. How on earth do you teach excellence, in general? The difficulty seems to be that it is only by being more specific to an activity can you describe how one is excellent in it. I think the way we boggle at the question of teaching arete so defined is the degree to which we take Socrates as making an advance in our moral knowledge--he was right to call the Sophists out on teaching arete, for what the hell does it mean to do that generally?

Alexander Nehamas has proposed going even further, and suggests translating arete as "success." Now, on the one hand, this makes sense of the Sophists in a way that "excellence" does not. The Sophists were interested in the affairs of humanity and in Greece, at that time, the only way to make it as a citizen of a city-state, particularly in Athens, was by being able to perform orally in front of an audience. Athens in the 5th century became the seat of the birth of both modern democracy and a modern judiciary. Every citizen was their own politician and their own lawyer, every citizen expected to be able to argue and defend their own viewpoint in politics and their own case in law. Nowadays we bemoan the rise of professional politics as a weakening of the idea of democracy, with its sense of everyone having their own voice. We have a (largely correct) sense that having professional politicians makes it easier for citizens to become uninformed, when the only way for a true democracy to work, as the American Founding Fathers foresaw, is to have an informed electorate. And yet, there is a strong analogy between politics and law, reflected in the view of them the Athenians took--every citizen their own law-maker and -interpreter--and in the history of those activities since: no one bats an eye at the professionalization of law. How can any person be expected to argue the ins and outs of their case when there is such a massive amount to know about law, being the particular kind of thing it is?

The Sophists were performing a much needed service for the Athenians by teaching them how to be successful in their duties as a citizen of Athens. People don't just naturally know to argue and present the best case. You have to learn how to do that, and that's what the Sophists were doing: teaching the Athenian's success in the domains of politics and law. But because of the nature of concepts and language, these ideas were not the evolved notions we have, but still being tried out. The Sophists said they were teaching "success," but--and this is on the other hand--Socrates perceived rightly a problem with teaching a general skill called "virtue" or "excellence" or "success." Like Socrates, we wonder what it could possibly mean to teach "success" generally, an even worse proposition than "excellence."

Plato rectified the matter by giving a particular spin to sophia that distinguished it from techne. Plato took over from Socrates the idea that "wisdom" was actually an an ineffable object. Socrates, noting the absurdity of trying to teach a general techne called arete, called attention to it by asking the teachers what exactly it was they were teaching--give me a definition. Socrates would then dialectically beat the crap out of every definition given, and declare at the end that, if you can't give it a defensible definition, then you must not know what you are doing. QED. Plato thought this brilliant, which it was, a terrific strategy on Socrates' part to make fun of the Sophists. But Plato thought it was more than a terrific way to show up the Sophists, a way of punching up the difficulty in teaching something general, like "success." Plato thought that Socrates was showing us what true wisdom was, which in Socrates' analysis always ended up a blank--no definition ever survives. True wisdom was acknowledging the fact that we were fallen beings (hence Socratic superiority in knowing that you don't know) and turning it into the essence of an activity definitive of humanity.

That was the trap Socrates set for Plato, and that Plato, for lack of knowing how to resolve it, repeated in his writings, indelibly marking the tradition--philosophers must teach something because we are fallen beings who have to act in the world, but the sad truth of it is, we can never have what we most want. Socrates placed wisdom beyond the bounds of reason by showing that if we could not define the essence of an object, we could not teach it. But we've had to go on teaching it anyways. The ultimate parody of the struggle between the Sophists and Platonists, between not knowing what to teach and teaching something, comes to us in the form of an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch. The younger brother asks his older, successful brother for advice for an upcoming interview, whether he has a secret weapon. The older, wiser brother makes him promise not to tell anybody and, noting that it is kind of a long-term strategy, asks him how much time he has. The younger brother says he has only a week, and the older brother says that it still might work. His secret wisdom, the secret to all of his success, the strategy he has employed? "Every time a penny passes through your hands, stick it up your ass. And then spend it." The younger brother first thinks he's joking, and then recoils at the thought that this is what his brother does, this is his secret:

"Thanks Nick, yeah. I thought you were really going to help me. How is sticking pennies up my ass going to help me?"

"You don't just stick them up your ass, you spend them. I told you, it's a long-term strategy. I've been doing this for 11 years now, and every day for the last 11 years, I've stuck $30 in pennies up my ass. I use them for everything, cab rides, movie theaters, groceries."

"What does that accomplish?"

"Will you listen? That's a lot of ass-pennies I've got out there, my friend. And here's where the magic comes in: when I meet someone who intimidates me, who puts me on edge, a real 'hard ass,' I just think to myself, 'they've probably handled one of my ass-pennies.' In fact, they probably got one in their pocket right then. That just seems to sort of give me the upper-hand. I mean, hey, I haven't touched anything that's been in their ass."

And that is what has happened to political philosophy. Plato made wisdom ineffable, which means the secret of life could be, according to the philosophers, sticking pennies in your ass. Nothing is closer to the heart of the human experiment than our negotiations with each other over how we are to function together--but is that the essence of humanity? "Go ahead, defend that thesis. I will destroy it," says the ghost of Socrates. Plato thought the wisdom of Socrates was the idea of an ineffable object of supremacy that was pure and holy and so extraordinarily not human, totally free of humanity's taint. What we should come to acknowledge as the wisdom of Socrates, however, is not the inhumannes of abstraction, but the total inanity of looking for abstract essences that somehow control particular, specific human activities. No general definition of arete is going to tell us how to teach it as a general techne. Though the Sophists thought of themselves as teaching a general skill called "success," careers spent in service to wisdom, what they were actually doing was something more specific, teaching Athenians how to survive in the Greek city-state environment.

Philosophy has been trying to work out the relationship between our self-understanding of what we are doing and what we are actually doing ever since Plato. One direction has been to play out the consequences of Plato's self-understanding of what philosophy was, and since it was directed towards an ineffable object, the effect was to remove philosophy further and further away from anything applicable to the affairs of humanity. Once you could connect it to what we do, a Platonist would come along and go, "Oh, well, that must not be what we should be talking about then," because the very fact that it was useful for humanity showed that it was not what Plato was talking about. The other direction was in the direction of the Sophists, the actual activity of philosophizing, which is a practical activity of teaching people how to think. We know, now, that that is what the Sophists were actually doing (and Socrates doing better) because we know with much better clarity and understanding that thinking is a social activity, even when done alone. The activity of reflection is only possible by the internalizing of a voice different from our own in our mind. We think by making explicit in our minds some thesis which we would otherwise bring out, make into action, but instead of actualizing it, we try and defeat it, play out the consequences of the idea in our head, look for alternatives--all things that involve pretending to be someone or something else with a different viewpoint.

The Greeks were trying to teach us how to think, and though Plato totally misconstrued the activity, we can still see the virtue in philosophy. Political philosophy is that amorphous activity that bounces back and forth between political realities, details, behavior, laws and ideal fulminations of how things might be, should be. Political philosophy has historically been neglected in the canons of disciplines because it is the true king discipline--not philosophy as Kant thought, not science as Comte thought, not religion, not psychology, not linguistics, not history, not any of these. Political philosophy is the great discipline because all other disciplines, all other activities find their place within it. It is the conjunction of the two sides of our humanity, action and contemplation. It is a thing that is almost impossible to foresee how it is to be done well. Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Albert Hirschman, Albert Hofstadter, Thom Hartmann, Paul Krugman, Foucault, Rorty, Pirsig, Harold Bloom, Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Michael Oakeshott, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, Jonathon Lear, Randy Rhodes, Aaron Sorkin, Upton Sinclair, Milan Kundera, Cindy Sheehan, Judith Shklar, Randolph Bourne, Alexis de Toqueville, Jefferson, Dewey, Markos, Stanley Fish, Dan Savage, Elaine Scarry, John Hollander, Walter Ong, Walter Kaufmann, Michael Walzer, Habermas, Adorno, Gadamer, Louis Menand, Clifford Geertz, Ruth Benedict, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Annette Baier--they have all written things that can aid a political philosopher. Some self-consciously do political philosophy, some politics, some subjects related to politics, or philosophy, but a few in a connection that is probably opaque until I relate how I've, at least, found wisdom on their pages relatable to something called "political philosophy."

What do they all have in common? Nothing. Doing good political philosophy is impossible to define in a way that will predict where you can find wisdom. And that's generalizable to life. And because utterly unpredictable, professionals at it are partly historians and commentators on a diffuse array of writers, thinkers, singers, painters, speakers, as many activities as you can list--the political philosopher creates a canon of wisdom-creators and because it will partly be so idiosyncratic because of its diffuseness (we all find wisdom in different places), it is hard to see that profession as massively important. Which is just as well, because the fact that political philosophy is what it is also makes all of us political philosophers in the required sense, and the notion of specialists in political philosophy either stupid (because Platonic) or just meaning, "Well-read in other wisdom-seekers."

What happened to political philosophy? It has been going through the growing pains one could safely predict of anything that evolves, but in it's peculiar case, it has been the reflection of Humanity's Evolutionary Story as it, in effect, wishes to relate its past, present and future all at once. The mark of Platonism, carried out, makes philosophers understand whatever it is they teach to be effectively like ass-pennies--look, wisdom is ineffable, so as far as anyone can know, sticking these pennies in your ass is going to make you successful and better at life. And yet, philosophers and intellectuals are successful at making humanity better. What 2500 years has taught us is that the self-understanding of what philosophy is that Plato gave us might be the problem.

poem

Faintly forgetting the fervor for a second,
The triune head of the Savior paused his fecund
Story-telling, arguing and parabolas
To look all about at all of the fabulous
Sons and daughters that were playing in his muck.
Curious at their upheaval, they had no luck
In securing the station history secured him.
For his genius created a veil very thin
That hid from his view his impossible constraints
On love and wisdom and life. With silenced complaints,
He created a template for mediocrities.
Revising the words of his beloved Socrates:
"The unexamined life is not yet worth living,
But it will be as soon as seeing is believing."

Waiting For More: Gross and Rorty

I thought about being sarcastic and urbane in writing about Neil Gross' new book on Rorty, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the obvious puns coming to mind, but the thought passed as I came to realize that Gross wrote pretty much the book he had intended to write. It is only partly a biography as Gross intends Rorty to be a case study for what Gross calls the "new sociology of ideas." Having only really heard about the book as the first biography, my expectations were for something like what Ray Monk did for Russell and Wittgenstein, though obviously not enough time had passed for something exactly like it. Given this, let me waste no more time and say upfront that if you are looking for a good biography of Rorty's life, keep waiting. This isn't what you are looking for.

I should confess that I didn't read the book straight through. Most of the book is laid out simply as a biography of Rorty's years up to his exodus from Princeton, and so I jumped to the chapters where might lay hidden answers to the most intriguing episodes of his life: his divorce from Amélie and his tenure as president of the Eastern Division of the APA. I read those with great interest and then trailed back to read the whole thing. The book did give me some interesting new details of his life, but no new insights. If you've had the time and obsession to read almost everything Rorty's ever published (small though that number may be), then Rorty pretty much gives you the same insights to his life and work that Gross thinks he is providing. As I read, I began to suspect that Gross was up to something other than biography because, while providing more than a few details and making judicious use of Rorty's unpublished letters, Gross wasn't developing anything like a classic, biographical narrative.

This suspicion was cleared up handily when, after finishing all the biographical chapters, I went back and read his introduction and then his concluding chapters. In the intro, Gross disabuses the reader of the notion that he is writing a biography centered around any of three types: humanistic, contextualist, or poststructualist. The humanistic approach is the kind Monk wrote, whose "goal is to bring life and work together as part of the project of taking measure of a particular intellectual's life, asking after its significance and broader meaning, with special reference to questions of creativity and virtue, the ethics of intellectual and political engagement, the dilemmas of authenticity, the dangers of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and the value of the ideas themselves." (6) Sad for me, since this strikes me as a great thing to do and an enjoyable thing to read, but fair enough: not humanistic. Check.

Gross' "contextualist approach" is exemplified by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. In these, the intellectual historian is interested in "understanding what [a text's] author was trying to do in writing it: what kinds of argumentative moves she or he was attempting to make, against whom, and with what intended effect." (6-7) As I think of Skinner and Pocock as intellectual historians par excellence, this was also disappointing, for they do the kind of work that brings us down to the nitty gritty of what lost-to-time writers' self-image was, of reminding us of what life used to be like and what these writers were saying to themselves about what they did. What Gross called poststructuralist reminds me of what Rorty called Geistesgeschichte: big sweeping stories of where we were to where we are now. In these stories, we tend to ignore what writers thought they were doing to play out what they did to move us further along whatever path we are choosing to highlight. Not what Hayden White or Foucault were doing? Fine--but what is Gross doing, then? (I should note that the above is not exactly what Gross meant by "poststructuralist," but he suggests that "concern with historical objectivity" and "belief in the singularity of authorial intentionality" (7) is illusory for them, but these are, not only possibly contentious attributions, but certainly philosophical add-ons, not something that conditions the type of histories they write.)

As I said earlier, Gross thinks of himself as writing a case study for the "new sociology of ideas." This endeavor, apparently, is a search "to uncover the relatively autonomous social logics and dynamics, the underlying mechanisms and processes, that shape and structure life in the various social settings intellectuals inhabit: academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary fields, scholarly networks, and so on." (11) Taking off from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, this basically sounds to my ears like doing for the humanities what Kuhn and Latour did for the sciences. Which sounds great, though indeed a little different from the other three approaches.

What emits, however, in the course of the investigation are what I can't help but think are commonsensical platitudes about how intellectuals live their lives and do their work. Gross first describes the "explanatory models" that Bourdieu and Collins have laid out before him, which is basically a focus on the social network of rewards and punishment in academia: "Struggling with other academics to win as much intellectual prestige as they can, they typically end up cleaving to theories, positions, and approaches defined as high status...." "On the whole ... ideas serve strategic functions for thinkers, helping to position them in academic hierarchies...." (12) This, itself, smells of a foul reductionism--we can read ideas as tools in the academic marketplace, and sometimes it pays to do so, but nobody except--if we believe Plato--the Sophists self-consciously did so at a general level. Intellectuals, not even the evil post-modernists, do not believe and think the things they do simply because it will get them money and fame.

Which isn't to say that this is all Bourdieu and Collins (on Gross' account) are suggesting. Their larger point, I am to understand, is something more like, "People from socially privileged backgrounds are more likely to rise in the academic hierarchy because the ones raising others were also from socially privileged backgrounds." This is more pointed, but this is, again, part of at least a leftist's common sense, and still says nothing exactly about why intellectuals believe the things they do from their own perspective. "From their own perspective" isn't, however, what the sociologists are after--which is fine. They want to explain the mechanisms of an academic community's reproduction of itself. And in this sense, pointing out the advantages of the rich and/or well-networked (only the latter in Rorty's case) is to the point. My problem is that Gross writes that "these theoretical frameworks are useful in explaining aspects of Rorty's life":

"Rorty sought to be more at the center of the disciplinary action and so refashioned himself as an analytic philosopher, working to bring himself to the attention of the analytic community. These efforts proved successful, allowing him to convert what was to be a temporary position at Princeton into a tenure-track post and giving him new network connections that made possible his further ascent in the disciplinary status structure." (13)

All I can think is that, while all basically true enough, this is quite the effort to use some expensive, theoretical tools for obvious, commonsensical junk that everyone already understands. I can just imagine conservatives seeing this as an indictment, because Gross' subject is Rorty, against post-modern, sophistical relativists, but all Gross is saying is that to get tenure, you have to impress the people giving it out. And to do that, you have to talk about what they think it is important to talk about. This doesn't seem insidious to me, as it might to some who haven't really thought much about cultural reproduction, but it also doesn't strike me as something path-breaking. Is the sociology of knowledge really in such a state?

Perhaps it is, and in that case Gross' "new sociology of ideas" would seem much needed, though again very boring on its surface. Gross' major addition is the concept of the "intellectual self-concept" to help combat the aforementioned reductionism and its tendency to flatten out the "richness and complexity of intellectual life," (15) which I take to be huge understatement. The reason I think so is because of Gross' "central empirical thesis":

"that the shift in Rorty's thought from technically oriented philosopher to free-ranging pragmatist reflected a shift from a career stage in which status considerations were central to one in which self-concept considerations became central." (15)

I would certainly agree that there was a shift, and one thing that Gross' digging suggests is that the financial difficulties his parent's struggled during his childhood left an impression on Rorty, which in part explains the energy with which he pursued retooling from, roughly, a metaphysician to an analytic philosopher (and the fact that he was trained by McKeon explains how he could do so without a significant change in his identity as an intellectual). But everyone knows that Rorty suffered a shift of some sort because he did it on an international stage. Gross' thesis is still too reductionistic, and in fact I think it may get Rorty wrong. I think Rorty may have liked having the high status of an "important philosopher" at Princeton, the number one program in the country, but nothing Gross offers as evidence really solidifies 1) status considerations as ever being central and 2) that self-concept struggles didn't guide in a significant way his behavior.

It seems to me, even after reading Gross' book, that Rorty's search for great ideas, his push for an environment that would help develop better and better ideas, his search for stimulating conversation--this explains the same phenomena Gross is looking at and this version shows continuity through his whole life and it ties to his own expressed views. In explaining why Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Gross says that Rorty,

"well positioned in a variety of intellectual networks, may have been better able to anticipate what the book's reception would be. In an environment where many humanists were coming to have their doubts about the new rigorism, there would tremendous interest in a book--particularly one written by an insider--that used 'rigorous' arguments to make a case for why foundationalist versions of analytic philosophy, and by implication its cognates in other fields, were ill conceived. That Rorty may have realized there would be such interest helps explain why he was eager to write the book and, perhaps--with the idea in mind of eventually accumulating status by writing it--why he allowed himself to drift more out of an analytic orbit over the course of the 1970s." (315)

This strikes me as just wrong. In the first case, there was no evidence presented that I read to support that Rorty anticipated PMN's positive reception by non-philosophers, and in fact Rorty's said quite a few times in interviews that it still boggled his mind even years after. In the second, it is possible that Rorty may have thought that the book he was writing might help leverage him into a position outside of Princeton, but I certainly don't think it prompted it's writing--when Rorty says he was surprised it's because PMN really is an insider book for insiders, written to continue an insider's conversation.

I don't think I'm squeamish about what many people take to be concerns that cloud truth--money, status, job security--because Rorty had always been so frank about it. The problem is that this kind of supposition on Gross' part just seems to punch up the fact that ideas can't be reduced to social conditions, that whatever the sociology of knowledge is going to be good for, it's not telling us why particular intellectuals make the choices they do, because self-understanding is the whole bit: Gross' introduction of the "self-concept" concept seems to add back in the bits that originally would've allowed it to differentiate itself from the humanist and contextualist approaches. But then all we get are badly written biographies that don't claim to be biographies, but science, and say things with big, shiny new theoretical toys that everybody, being people who not only familiar with biographies, but live out their own biographies, already knows and understands, and then calls it an advance. It's just scientists doing badly what humanists already do well.

An example: "if an intellectual were to find himself in an institution that celebrated and attempted to foist on him an identity he found noxious, he could make an attempt to exit, do his best to ignore the views of those around him, or even try to change the institution." (280) Gee, really? This is supposed to be a claim that "synthesizes contributions from different lines of social-scientific investigation," (278) but it sounds to me as if he read a lot of boring research and forgot that he didn't himself need to be that boring. It sounds like the classic college freshman conundrum: told to always support my argument, what do I do about commonplaces? So they end up citing articles backing them up on the most obvious of "claims." Normally by the time one graduates, you've figured out what you need support for and what not. But more than a little of Gross' argument seems designed to inaugurate platitudes into a field that you begin to think must have been an absolute desert.

Another example: in explaining Rorty's choice in master's thesis topic, he says,

"The theory of intellectual self-concept helps us better explain the intellectual choice at hand. Rorty's time at Chicago occurred during prime identity formation years in his life course and was a period when he was making the transition from one institutional affiliation to another. The institution with which he had been most closely affiliated as a child and young adolescent--his family--had all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation." (304)

I think the really difficult thing would be to find a family that doesn't have "all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation."

I think my main disappointment with the book was not its argument with other sociologists, but that it seemed so close to saying something interesting. The idea of a self-concept, that an intellectual's self-understanding is centrally important to understanding their work, may be a commonplace to biography, but it is also something that Rorty argued for years was missing from philosophy. Rorty argued for years that lack of an historical sense in philosophy has handicapped its ability to understand what it was doing. Opening up the table of contents and seeing a chapter titled, "The Theory of Intellectual Self-Concept," caused me to think that some sort of interesting combination of Rorty's biography and his work to illustrate a larger point about philosophy being a kind of autobiography was in the offing, but nothing interesting ever appeared.

For all this, I was still satisfied in reading the book because for whatever it lacks in art and new insight, it is still quite capable in supplying the material and arranging it in pattern that, though not new, is still largely right. Gross was able to stay out of the way of his subject and is entirely neutral to the content of Rorty's ideas, and in fact his portrait is quite sympathetic and rebuts a few of the more pernicious views of Rorty floating around (like his relationship to Peirce and Dewey). However, as I mentioned at the outset, most of what Gross supplies can be gained by reading Rorty himself. If you want pretty much the same picture Gross offers, I would recommend his autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy and Social Hope and the collected interviews in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. One thing Gross does do inadvertently is give us corroborative evidence that Rorty really was being as honest and frank as he seemed to have been all those years.

Free Will and Determinism: The Contours of Moral Responsibilty

Note: This is a paper I wrote for a class on free will in 2002. In looking over my old papers, it turns out I've written quite a bit on free will, which is funny considering how little I'm concerned with it now. This paper, written before I knew much about pragmatism or Rorty, pretty well enunciates why I don't write much about free will anymore--it attempts to dodge the whole question. It also reminds me of "ordinary language philosophy," though this was well before I knew of that, too.

Also, please ignore my arguments, which will prove easy as I myself can't find any. What I do still find useful are my tables.

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In discussing the debate between determinism and free will or in simply discussing the dimensions of free will, it is often claimed that free will has a direct, intrinsic link to moral responsibility. Under the heading “The paradoxical consequences of determinism,” Cornman, Lehrer, and Pappas say:

“If, however, it is a consequence of the thesis of determinism that a person’s actions are the inevitable outcome of causal processes that began before he was born and over which he had no control, then, no matter what a person does, he could not have done otherwise. … Consequently, no person may reasonably be held responsible for any of his actions.”[1]

Dennis Stampe claims that an adequate characterization of free will “should fit with the belief that we are morally responsible for those actions we do in the exercise of the freedom of the will, because we were exercising the freedom of the will.”[2] It’s a common enough claim that it should be asked whether it is actually true or not. In the following, I hope to sketch the contours of our “normal” moral reasoning showing: 1) our normal sense of moral reasoning begins with causal responsibility, 2) moral responsibility is dependent upon a moral standard, and 3) where our free will fits into the picture.

Responsibility means “to be the cause or source of.” If A were to throw a baseball, it could be said that A was responsible for throwing a baseball. Very simply, moral responsibility for one’s actions begins before the determination of the freedom of the will, as is commonly supposed. Moral responsibility begins with causal responsibility, or, rather, moral responsibility begins with the differentiation between individuals (ego differentiation), or (to use another vocabulary) with the differentiation between causal chains (the Matt causal chain vs. the Dennis causal chain). This also works in the case of placing responsibility on a group of people, such as placing the responsibility of slavery upon white Americans (if one were so inclined to do). All white Americans would be considered part of the same causal chain if that is how the chain is broken up.[3]

If responsibility is created by the differentiation of the ego from the Other, from me to you, then responsibility for our actions still has meaning in a determinist system. Contrary to reasoning displayed by Cornman, Lehrer, and Pappas, a person may have no control, but they are still responsible. And think of the changes to the legal system. The penalty for murder would be the same across the board. Insanity as a plea would be removed. The mentally handicapped would be tried as equals to those with full mental capabilities. In fact, everyone would be tried on an equal footing, be they age 2 or 100.

Of course, this is not how we reason. Without considering the metaphysical reality of free will, we reason morally with it as a consideration. As Stampe says, we have a belief that free will is linked somehow with moral responsibility. We typically insert “voluntary action” in place of “free will,” but the effect is still the same. We say, “Person X ate that hot dog freely or voluntarily or of his own free will,” without reference to a metaphysical entity called “free will.” The fact is, even in a deterministic system, a consideration of the freedom of the will could still be used in assigning moral responsibility. What I wish to investigate is how, generally, we reason morally. I hope to sketch the outlines of how we reason about moral responsibility to find how exactly the issue of free will plays into it.

Moral responsibility is the degree to which labels of honor or reproach and/or rewards and punishments are adjudicated based upon moral behavior. Moral behavior is desirable behavior. An objection to this very simple definition may be that it does not account for so called “morally neutral” behavior, such as intelligent, skillful, or beautiful behavior that may also be desirable behavior. A person may have made a shrewd chess move, but we typically do not refer to excellent chess playing as morally sound behavior. However, I think this type of objection begs the question of what moral standard we are using. A moral standard, which tells us what moral behavior is, tells us what is right and wrong. The reason you follow any particular moral standard is because “right action” is behavior you want and “wrong action” is behavior you don’t want, i.e. moral behavior is desirable behavior. The moral standard itself tells us what exactly is morally desirable behavior, such that it can exclude astute chess maneuvering.

It may seem that I’m stretching out the definition of moral behavior and morality in general to proportions that aren’t useful. The problem is that it is difficult to talk about moral responsibility in general without immediately begging the question in favor of a particular moral standard. Moral responsibility is assigned according to a system of morality. Break a moral law and the system tells you how to be punished. Perform a moral duty and the system tells you how to be rewarded. We cannot assign any kind of moral responsibility without recourse to some moral system, even if the system is as simple as “Ye are morally responsible for all thou is causally responsible.” The earlier illustration of causal responsibility as the genesis of moral responsibility is, in fact, not a necessary condition, but a contingent one. Theoretically, we could say that A is responsible for B’s problems even if A had nothing causally to do with them. But we don’t reason this way and so we are already within a moral standard of some kind. What I would like to do is take an example of behavior that would generally be considered immoral: killing person X. This is pretty much universally considered undesirable. I hope to sketch the outlines of how we reason morally by taking four different causes of X’s death and seeing how we assign moral responsibility.

Take these four examples:
1) Dog A (with rabies) kills person X: we hold dog A responsible.
2) Insane person B (with no control over his actions) kills person X: we hold person B responsible (to an extent).
3) Person C with a gun to their head is forced to kill person X: we do not hold person C responsible.
4) Person D kills person X: we hold person D responsible.

Table 1: (CR=causal responsibility, VA=voluntary action, MR=moral responsibility)

The Killer: -- CR? -- VA? -- MR?
A ------------ yes --- no ---- yes
B ------------ yes ---- no ---- yes
C ------------ yes ---- no ---- no
D ------------ yes --- yes ---- yes

An objection might be raised about assigning moral responsibility to a dog or an insane person. However, as far as I can tell, moral responsibility is as my definition holds: the basis of handing out labels of honor or reproach and/or rewards or punishments. Given that and what moral behavior is (at root, desirable action) we have the ability to say, “That’s a good dog” or “Bad dog!” And we do say those things. Those are labels of honor and reproach. And we punish the dog for doing bad things and reward it for doing good things, all the while knowing that the dog is not exercising any free will. In the case of the dog with rabies we put the dog down for doing something as morally extreme as killing a person. The same goes for the insane person. If an insane person goes out and kills somebody, we punish him (by sending him to a mental hospital or something of the kind) even though he had no free will. The reasoning is that “he was a detriment or destructive to society and/or harmful towards himself or others,” i.e. he is performing undesirable behavior, a.k.a. immoral behavior.

It can be argued that when we say, “Good dog!” we are not giving the dog a moral label, but merely giving the dog positive reinforcement. This is entirely possible, and is quite probable, but the same thing can be said for saying, “Good job!” when a small child has done something desirable. Without that positive reinforcement, how would the child know if he was doing something wrong or good? We give such positive (and negative) reinforcement to develop a moral standard. However, after such reinforcement is handed out, we still tend to label children and dogs as being good or bad based on their past patterns of behavior.

So what we have in Table 1 is a discrepancy. How can dog A and insane person B be held responsible for killing X, while performing a non-voluntary action, and person C not be held responsible, even though he also performed a non-voluntary action? Why the discrepancy? I would argue that there must be another variable in play. The difference between dog A and insane person B and person C is that person C has the ability to exercise voluntary control over his actions, while A and B do not.

Table 2: (AV=ability to exercise voluntary control)

The Killer: -- CR? -- AV? -- VA? -- MR?
A ------------ yes --- no ---- no ---- yes
B ------------ yes --- no ---- no ---- yes
C ------------ yes --- yes --- no ---- no
D ------------ yes --- yes --- yes --- yes

Table 2 bears out a more accurate sketch of moral responsibility than Table 1. We hold dog A and insane person B morally responsible because they had no ability to exercise voluntary control. We, presumably, do this because they cannot control their actions, so we might as well. However, if you do have control over your actions, as person C did, it is presumed that you would not have performed the undesirable action had not extenuating circumstances intervened. Person C could have chosen to take a bullet to the head instead of killing person X.

Normally it would seem unreasonable to ask someone to die instead of performing action Y, which is why, in Table 2, we did not hold person C morally responsible. If action Y had been, say, kicking person X, it certainly does seem unreasonable to ask person C to choose to die. However, it is not quite as clear-cut in the case of person C killing person X. For instance, if person C is driving down the road and person X jumps in front of person C’s car from out of nowhere, thereby killing person X, our legal system wouldn’t convict person C of first degree murder, but possibly of manslaughter.[4] The point is that we find person C answerable for what he has done, though possibly not as responsible as the person who intentionally runs down person X.

This cleaving of moral responsibility into varying degrees of responsibility based on, say, freedom of action or intentionality, is based on the notion of being “answerable, though not fully responsible.” This notion is based on the fact that we conceive of moral responsibility as beginning first with causal responsibility. All of this, however, rests on any particular conception of a moral standard. A moral standard could, theoretically, have absurd reasoning such as “If thou shalt kill a Bob, thou must kill a Roger” which would totally ignore causal responsibility in identifying moral responsibility. While possible, this is clearly not how we reason.

In this short investigation, I hope to have sketched out, in very broad terms, the way in which we normally reason morally. The first step is seeing that moral responsibility rests on a moral standard. The second is that, within a “normal” paradigm of moral reasoning, causal responsibility is the first consideration of moral responsibility. Free will or voluntary action fits into moral reasoning first as “the ability to exercise voluntary control” and only secondly as “the exercising of voluntary control.” This displacement of the consideration of the freedom of the will makes moral reasoning possible in deterministic systems and frees moral responsibility from being necessarily connected to free will making for a more accurate portrayal of how we reason morally.

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[1] Cornman, Lehrer, and Pappas

[2] Dennis Stampe in a handout for Philosophy 530 Freedom, Fate, and Choice.

[3] There is one objection to causal responsibility as the beginning of moral responsibility and it runs along these lines: A may be morally responsible for B’s condition even though it had nothing causally to do with it. For instance, the United States is morally responsible for poverty in Africa (assuming for the sake of argument that the United States had nothing to do with poverty in Africa). Our morality says that we should help the poor in Africa. This, though, is best understood as a moral obligation as opposed to a responsibility. We are not responsible for the poverty in Africa, but we are obliged to do something about it. If we do do something about it, then we are morally responsible for what we did i.e. we can then be rewarded or punished.

[4] Though our legal system may not be a good source of sound moral reasoning in every case, it is a good guide of how we might typically reason in some cases.

Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Reason

Note: I wrote this in 2000, for a class on the history of science. I've done little editing and I still think it does a decent job in setting a certain pallet, a way of perceiving the history of philosophy (that I was already imbibing from Pirsig, but later drank more fully from Rorty).

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In the history of Western thought, the possibility (or impossibility) of change was a question that pushed early thinkers to some of the most important philosophical distinctions of their time period and ours. These distinctions would leave their mark on philosophical inquiry and would not be fully taken up until the Modern era. Some of the most important distinctions were defined by the Eleatics (led by Parmenides), Plato, and Aristotle. While all three theories of change did not grow out of a vacuum, Parmenides more or less followed the force of his own logic, Plato kept Parmenides’ conclusions close at hand, and Aristotle’s theory grew in direct response to both of them. All three also used reason as the primary gateway to knowledge. But in their responses to the problem of change, each one integrates the material world more than the last. This integration allows more satisfactory models, but poses significant problems in itself. Parmenides never runs into these problems because he rejects the material world outright as an illusion. So to address these problems in Plato and Aristotle we must first identify Parmenides’ answer to the problem of change and its consequences: to both change and to the use of reason.

Parmenides’ argument is easily constructed in an analysis of the statement “A becomes B.” In this statement, it can be seen that A is not B because if A=B then there would be no need for change: A is already B. As it is, A is not B and so “A” can be replaced by “not B”. The statement “not B becomes B”, though, does not make sense to Parmenides. A cannot become B unless A has some of B already in it, but for Parmenides this would violate its essential not-Bness: A cannot have any of B in it because A is not B. It is through this kind of argument and logic that Parmenides says that change is impossible and that A does equal B, which equals C ad infinitum. As David C. Lindberg, in his magisterial history of Western science, says,

“What does one do if experience suggests the reality of change, while careful argumentation (with due attention to the rules of logic) unambiguously teaches its impossibility? For Parmenides and Zeno, the answer was clear: the rational process must prevail.”[1]

And so Parmenides declares that all change is merely an elaborate illusion and the underlying reality is a completely stable, unchanging monism.

Enter Plato. The force of Parmenides’ argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is truly stunning, but not quite satisfactory. Plato agrees that the underlying reality must be unchanging, but disagrees that this must be all that reality is. It is here that Plato enunciates the first great metaphysical distinction, between appearance and reality, which Parmenides had used, but not in a systematic way. It is encapsulated in Plato’s divided line, which he elaborates in The Republic. Plato designates the underlying reality as the Realm of Forms. The Realm of Forms is incorporeal, perfect, eternal, insensible, and changeless. In contrast to the Realm of Forms is the material world. It is everything that the Realm of Forms is not: corporeal, imperfect, transitory, sensible, and changing. The divided line separates the two. Plato says that the material world is a reflection of the Realm of Forms and that while the Realm of Forms is completely stable and unchanging, the material world, the reflection, does change as can be plainly seen in everyday life. In this way Plato supplies a rational, fixed underlying reality while still allowing the material world some relevance.

One challenge to this argument would be to question how the Realm of Forms interacts with the material world. How can things that are corporeal interact with things that are insensible? Plato answers this in two ways. First, through a series of arguments, Plato shows that, while we cannot sense the Forms now, our souls were in the Realm of Forms before they were placed in material bodies. We can gain access to the Forms, then, by a process of anamnesis or recollection. Through contemplation we are able to recall the Forms. (Plato does this notably in the Meno by showing how he can teach even a slave the basic mathematics: something that clearly only could be done if a Realm of Forms existed.)

Plato also answered this challenge in the form of the Allegory of the Cave. In summary, the Allegory describes people whose only known reality is the back wall of a cave where they can make shadow puppets. One day, one person ventures outside and discovers that the cave and the shadow puppets are not all that exists. In fact, he realizes that the shadows are really only reflections of the sun. It is through this analogy that Plato shows that the Forms (specifically the Form of the Good) represented by the sun, “illuminates” the material world. Without the Forms, the material world would not, could not exist.

It is important to notice here that Plato is continuing with Parmenides’ placement of reason as the pinnacle of knowledge. The process of anamnesis can also be called “reason.” It is through reason, which Plato made into a method called the “dialectic,” that we can reach the Forms. Plato merely adds a material world to account for the change of our senses. The change is real, but not as important as the unchanging, reason begotten by the Forms.

There is one other important distinction to make before we move to Aristotle. It is the distinction between the General and the Particular. The distinction has actually already been made. The General can be equated to the Realm of Forms and the Particular to the material world. This is important because the difference between Plato and Aristotle can be termed a difference in orientation to the General and the Particular. Plato believes and argues that what is real is the Forms or the General and statements about what is real are found in the material world or the Particular. Aristotle, on the other hand, is just the reverse. What is real is the Particular and statements about what is real is the General. With this distinction in hand we can turn to Aristotle.

Aristotle believes that what is real is the material world and all that the material world is contingent upon. To Aristotle, the Realm of Forms are really just properties possessed by the material Particular, or substance. And like Plato and Parmenides, Aristotle designates that the ultimate reality be unchanging. But how do we account for change now, if the material world, represented as substance and properties, is now unchanging?

To account for change, Aristotle goes back to Parmenides. Parmenides made a distinction between Being and non-Being. Aristotle sees this and says that Being can split into two different types of Being: Potential and Actual Being. So Aristotle agrees with Parmenides that a thing cannot move from non-Being to Being. However, when change occurs, Aristotle says that it is Potential Being changing into Actual Being. Take an acorn and a tree for example. In Parmenides’ model, an acorn (non-tree) cannot change into a tree. In Aristotle’s model, however, an acorn (potential tree) can change into a tree (actual tree) because the acorn houses tree-ness in the form of potentiality. So Aristotle also accounts for change and places an even greater emphasis on the material world than Plato.

What is important about these three philosophers is their use of reason. Each one placed reason on the highest pedestal, but Plato and Aristotle each successively put more and more emphasis on the material world and the senses. The question that arises then is why didn’t they question the use of reason? Parmenides used only reason and he found that change was impossible. He stuck to his guns and followed his own argument to its logical conclusion. But instead of looking around himself and seeing the fallacy of his conclusions, he declared that his use of reason had detected a flaw in the senses and that all the “evidence” to the contrary is illusory. But why does the flaw exist in the senses? Nothing in logic dictates that the flaw be placed upon the senses. It's just as logical to think that the flaw exists in the instrument of argumentation used: reason itself. Parmenides doesn’t think so and neither do Plato or Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle add the senses back into reality to some degree, but the philosophical question that arises out of the problem of change is “How much do the senses and reason play in reality?” Once you let a little in, who’s to say how much? And so the philosophical lines between the Rationalists and Empiricists of the Modern era, who would drag “reality” between these two polar points of reason and the senses, were drawn 2,000 years before the culmination point during the 17th century.

[1] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnnings of Western Science, University of Chicago Press: 1992, p. 33

What Pragmatism Is

The meaning of pragmatism as a tradition of philosophical thinking has been contested by those on the outside, and also intermurally by those within it.

I think the time has come for both sides, critics and purveyors, to move beyond the idea that "pragmatism" means "practicality." There are many linguistic landmines having to do with common usage, common sense, original usage, philosophical usage, etc. The classical pragmatists, Peirce, James, Dewey, amongst others (Schiller, Mead, etc.), surely had their reasons for using various rhetorical framings. But the core of pragmatism as it has been worked out through the years has nothing (and everything) to do with "practicality."

The parenthetical is there to remind people that the classical rhetoric isn't completely worn out. The insight they had was that things can only be said to be true or false in practice. Pragmatism is the thesis that theory, thinking, metaphysics, philosophy, academics, poetry, math, education, school, business, baseball, everything—everything is useful if it has a use. Tautological, yes, but notice the shift in focus: truth is what works, but what is it working for? What is its use?

We can probably isolate two main, contemporary reactions to pragmatism. The first is felt more by laypersons, non-academic appreciators of philosophy and is connected more with the classical pragmatists, particularly James. This reaction revolves around the rhetoric of “practicality,” which produces the suspicion in some that not everything under the sun should be judged according to how practical it is. Is going to church on Sunday mornings practical? Is it practical trying to read Spenser’s Faerie Queen, spending 10 minutes a stanza on just deciphering its archaic English? However, wouldn’t our lives be impoverished somehow if we didn’t do these things? This negative reaction revolves around the mood produced by the rhetoric of practicality.

The second reaction, almost entirely relegated to professional, academic philosophers, is partially connected with the classicals, but also with their children, the neopragmatists, especially (or only, depending on your frame) Richard Rorty. In the first instance, the professionals are concerned about the so-called “pragmatist theory of truth”: truth is what works. Their concern is that this theory of truth itself does not work and, even further, leads to relativism. In the second instance, academic philosophers are concerned with a kind of “end-of-philosophy” rhetoric, a concern that hardly needs further enunciation—what the hell sense does it make for a philosopher to end philosophy?

The first reaction is entirely understandable. When confronted with the notion that truth bows down before practicality, our noses may wrinkle a bit when we consider all the idiosyncratic things we do for pleasure or spiritual fulfillment. Is watching football all day really a practical use of our time? Is reading trashy romance novels? Is re-reading Michael Crichton’s Congo? Is praying, when there’s no sure way of telling whether there’s any use to it? Is meditating practical, or is it just sitting there, thinking about not thinking? And what’s the use in that? Is it really practical that I buy a copy of Sir Phillip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, adding another to the growing pile of books I’ll probably never get around to finishing, when you can find the poem online? Is it practical to spend my time writing blog posts revolving around philosophy, no less a philosopher like Robert Pirsig that no one reads as a philosopher, when no one will probably read them, or else take them all that seriously—indeed, should I given that whether they should be taken seriously by anyone is closer to doubtful?

Maybe none of these things are practical. So why do we do them? Why, indeed—why is the question. Why do we do the things we do? This is the immediate question that even a poor, first reaction to pragmatism should cause because, if our response is that there is more than just practicality, if we bite the bullet and say, “Yeah, watching football all day isn’t practical, but I still like to do it,” then we’ve already gone so far as to distinguish between the need for practicality and the need for something else, and it is to the defense of that need, that purpose, that one has already at the least begun by the very act of countenancing it. In other words: the very act of being suspicious of pragmatism forces one to consider that there are different reasons and motivations for doing things.

It is my contention that that is actually what lays at the heart of pragmatism—the forced act of considering why it is we do the things we do, and wondering if we should continue doing them—and not necessarily about how practical an idea or activity is. The central idea of pragmatism is that everything is grounded in practice, indeed, everything we do is a practice. Pragmatism grew as a tradition within the philosophical community, as a response to the philosophical community as it was largely composing itself, because one of the pervasive inheritances bequeathed us by Plato was the idea that there was a difference between theory and practice, the distinction between theoria and praxis.

Theory was supposed to be an arena of contemplation uninfected by practice, by the conflicted affairs of people. Socrates looked around himself and saw people behaving as if they knew why they were doing things, people like Euthyphro who thought they were doing pious actions—but did they really know what piety was? Socrates took the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” and made it into a way of life: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates wanted us, all of us, to not live our lives without considering why we do the things we do, without examining our motivations and purposes, without knowing the consequences of our actions.

What happened next is complicated and much debated, but the happening was Plato. In an effort to honor Socrates’ memory, Plato took up his mantle and his cause, writing about why we do the things we do and exploring better ways at going about them. We should perhaps distinguish, though, between the way of life embodied by Socrates and that codified by Plato. Socrates was what we lovingly refer to as a “philosophical gadfly,” somebody who’s always picking at us, making us think about what we are doing. As a way of life, we can see it as a sort of skeptical attitude towards what is happening around you, a kind of looking askance, always with an eye out for perhaps a better way of doing things. Socrates wandered around making people think, and that’s a cultural practice we would do well to continue.

Plato, however, produced something a little different. Whereas Socrates looked at actual activities, actions, and tried to make us think about what we were doing, Plato thought that what Socrates embodied was a whole new thing, called “philosophy,” that lay to the entire side of all individual activities, actions. Plato envisioned philosophy as an activity that was pure of all the muddiness that Socrates asked us to examine, an activity that could then inform us as to the proper practice of any particular, individual activity: the division between theory and practice. Plato created a way of life that could, in effect, rule on all other ways of life—the philosopher-king.

On the story the pragmatists tell, in particular Dewey in The Quest for Certainty, that was the beginning of the end of a good idea. The 2500-year-long tradition of philosophy, the ironing out of what it means for theoria to pronounce on praxis qua praxis, as opposed to particular suggestions built out of the individual practices themselves, has led to scholasticism, to quarrels that don’t mean a whit to our lives. This was the point of James’ formulation of the “pragmatic method”: what is the difference that makes a difference? Only if an idea, a stand on a particular philosophical issue, makes a difference to the living of our lives can that idea, that issue, be considered important enough to spend time on thinking about. James, in his lectures on pragmatism, then famously took up a couple of classic problems and attempted to show how it doesn’t matter whether you believe, for instance, in free will or determinism—we still behave as if we need to make decisions.

James liked to talk, in this regard, about the “cash value” of an idea. That kind of rhetoric is just what puts some people off—the whole idea that an idea or practice has a marketable, public value that goes up and down according to what other people think is just pure crap: I watch football because I love football, the gods be damned if they or anyone else likes it. An idea is true whether people believe in it or not. A fact is a fact.[1]

There is, indeed, something here that needs a little clarification, something the professionals have been going on about, but before I leave off for that discussion, I want to remark that James’ idea of “cash value” isn’t really about a public market of wares that we can pick from willy-nilly. It is about consequences, what are the consequences of thinking this or that. To what use is a belief that we hold to us—what is it doing for us, what does it mean to us?

James’ Pragmatism is famously dedicated to John Stuart Mill, father of utilitarianism and modern liberalism. I believe the heart of utilitarianism is as often misunderstood as pragmatism, and I think the core of them are basically the same, promoted in similar, perhaps worn out ways. In the opening short chapter of Mill’s Utilitarianism, he says,

“All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient. When we engage in a pursuit, a clear and precise conception of what we are pursuing would seem to be the first thing we need, instead of the last we are to look forward to. A test of right and wrong must be the means, one would think, of ascertaining what is right or wrong, and not a consequence of having already ascertained it.”

I see in these lines what James was thinking of when he dedicated his general philosophy to Mill’s ethical one. The opponent of these lines is the same opponent Socrates had: one who would carry out judgment, action, mechanically without ever considering whether the end, the purpose, was a good one. Mill’s opening remarks pave the way for his second chapter, “What Utilitarianism Is.” I take James’ second lecture, after his own opening remarks on the present state of the philosophical scene, “What Pragmatism Means,” to be itself a remark on Mill and what their common endeavor was. When we confront a statement, and we aren’t sure how to take it, we ask, “What does it mean?” Pragmatism is the philosophy that asks after meaning, the one that wants to know how this idea effects how we behave, “What does this idea, this philosophy, mean to us, what does it mean to believe, how does it change us?” It is the philosophy that doesn’t stop in its pursuit of wisdom, but continues, always wondering after meaning.

“But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

“Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”

The professional may, at this point, interject that this setting into the flow of life the consequences of our philosophical positions might all be very well and good as a goal. But the fact of the matter is that, in practice, pragmatism’s theory of truth, “truth is what works,” doesn’t itself work. And worse, all this rhetoric about the malleability of reality is damaging to our sense, our correct sense, that reality isn’t something to be just pushed around—we can’t just make up any damn thing we want, get people to agree with it, and call it true.

This brings us to contemporary reactions to pragmatism, the technical working out of the pragmatist theory of truth and pragmatism’s seeming road to relativism. The web of debate surrounding truth is thick, but I believe the proper response for pragmatists is the one Rorty has taken: pragmatism’s “theory of truth” isn’t really a theory at all, but the suggestion that we avoid one. (This has the added bonus of avoiding, in my current exposition, the technical tangles.) Pragmatism always got into trouble because it formulated this avoidance in ways that suggested it had a theory about when and where we can find truth, a way of circumscribing the area that would certify our thinking something is true. For instance: “‘The true’ … is only the expedient in the way of our thinking….” So James doesn’t out and say, “this is my theory,” but we can see where the trouble began.

The trouble comes from the fact that the pragmatist formulations seem to reduce truth to justification. If truth is justification, then what is true is relative to a particular audience because we justify things in front of people, to people. But the whole point of truth, as opposed to justification, was that it was supposed to be the same for everybody. This is why people start to smell relativism. Who are we to say that the Greeks were wrong to hold slaves? After all, they were able to justify it to themselves.

The best move for pragmatists is to just admit that truth is separate from justification: truth is an absolute notion, whereas justification is relative. What pragmatism suggests, however, is that our practices of justification do just fine in guiding our action, in giving us grounds for believing this or that to be true—we don’t need an extra practice, the search for a working theory of truth, that certifies practice itself. The continual act of justification, of justifying old and new practices to new and old audiences, is the process by which we get our current resting positions. Might I be justified, but wrong? Sure, but admitting that doesn’t spell out how there might be something else we could do other than our normal processes of justification. It isn’t clear how one could short-circuit the path to truth by going around practices of justification and it isn’t clear what else we need to do.

This leads us back around to Plato again. Rorty picks up the story that Dewey and others tell about how Plato attempted to create a super-practice, theory, that would certify the effectiveness of a particular, individual practice. But 1) a super-practice is a practice, so what certifies that? And 2) if our practices are already effective, if the theory doesn't itself add to the justification, then . . . tell me why, again, they need to be certified? If they are already working, then…what?

Since a dominant theme in philosophy since Plato has been the working out of the search for absolute certainty, the search for a foundation upon which to set the scaffolding of our thought, Rorty—as incautiously as his predecessors—has suggested that philosophy may have played itself out. (Or rather, Rorty himself occasionally admits to such an incaution in the final pages of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which is funny considering the final paragraph of the book begins, “Whichever happens, however, there is no danger of philosophy’s ‘coming to an end.’”) What is meant is that a certain kind of philosophy, sometimes called foundationalist epistemology, has shown itself to be a waste of energy. Rorty’s work in particular has been to question, in true Socratic spirit, the use of some of our energies, particularly the amount of energy we pour into the pursuit of, what could otherwise be called, a justification for the fact that we justify.

The pragmatist spirit, its function, has been to wonder, for instance, about the use of trying to solve the problem of free will and determinism. Without a doubt, there is a purpose, there is an end. But like Socrates being suspicious of Euthyphro’s certainty in carrying out the demands of piety, pragmatists wonder if the philosopher chasing after the perfect solution to free choice in a world of cause and effect might be doing it for the reasons they say they are. The specter of relativism makes us afraid of the consequences of giving up certain quests, and fear is a true motivator—but should that be the reason we do something? Out of fear?

There’s a lot more to be said about the various philosophical positions individual, self-identified pragmatists have taken against their opponents. But the central insight of pragmatism is not that everything has to be practical, but that everything is a practice carried out in real time, these practices have histories, these practices can be made better and better, and that everything gets grounded out in our experience of life.

Everything is relative to a purpose. Theory and philosophy have uses. They are true, they are worth keeping, if we can figure out to what purpose they are useful for. Pragmatism is antithetical to Kant and Plato and essentialism because they deny, not the thing-in-itself, but the thing-for-itself, like Aristotle’s Prime Mover, contemplating itself.[2] Everything is related to something else and how it relates are the questions we should ask and answer. No wheel spins entirely free of life, but the question is not “does it spin,” but “should it spin?”

Pragmatism doesn't destroy philosophy, nor does it let the Nazi's win. Pragmatism is the core of Socrates' message, it cuts out the bullcrap created over the last 2500 years and gets back to the reason Socrates started up his cross-examinations in the first place: know thyself; the unexamined life is not worth living. At the core of pragmatism is the call to examine the purposes to which we perform various activities. Know why you are doing them. If it serves no purpose, cut it out. If it does, could anything serve it better? Is the purpose it serves a good one? Might there be better purposes?

Pragmatism is a return to philosophy as it should be done. Pragmatism returns us to the practice of life, to the experience of life. There are many purposes that aren't "practical," not at least in the common usage of the term. When James said that truth is the expedient in the way of thinking, he added, “Expedient in almost any fashion….” We just need to be cognizant of what is being made expedient. Pragmatism isn't simply about being practical, it is about knowing why we do things. It is about asking, "Okay, it works. But for whom?"

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[1] Pirsig suggests this kind of dissatisfaction towards the end of Lila.

[2] As Pirsig taught us, everything is value and value is always relative to something valuing it. (See, for example, Pirsig's redescription of causation in Lila, 119: B values precondition A.)

Reading Pirsig as a Philosopher

Let me begin with a division: there are two kinds of readers of Pirsig--those who are attracted to Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and those who are attracted Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. While being imperfect, as all such generalizations are, it has the benefit of highlighting one particular tension in Pirsig's works, that between literature and philosophy. The two are often opposed in the philosophical tradition, so it becomes a sort of standing question for all to attend to as to why Pirsig chose the route he did in presenting his philosophy the way he did. The kinds of answers deployed by fans and interpreters range from the more practical, utilitarian (e.g., "you can't write a dissertation for the mass the way they are written for PhD supervisors") to the more theoretical, conceptual (e.g., "he was making a point about the distinction between philosophy and literature"). But either way, we are confronted with the particular ways in which Pirsig deployed his philosophy and, either way, the literary quality of Pirsig's books make for the pulling out of philosophical theses difficult and dangerous work. And what's more, I think that's intended.

When I read others about Pirsig, I find less interesting the attempts to reconstruct the systematic structure of the MoQ. Questions asked about the layout of the levels of static quality, about the interrelation of the social and intellectual levels, about how exactly Dynamic Quality functions in relation to static, these questions can be important, or at least reach a level of some importance, but I question the desire to construct a systematic metaphysics out of Pirsig's writings. Pirsig's writings are the way they are precisely because Pirsig doesn't want to simply create a metaphysics. That would simply be at the intellectual level, to use Pirsig's own terminology, when the point of both books is to present all the facets together to show that all of them are needed.

To hearken back to that old cliche, about losing sight of the forest in the midst of the trees, I fear in study of systems of propositions the loss of sight of the forest of life. We are the entire forest of static patterns, inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual, not just a metaphysics, not just a thirty-thousand-page menu. Pursuing philosophy, which we can broadly call the pursuit of wisdom and seeing how things hang together, fits naturally with the forest metaphor: seeing how our forest hangs together brings us wisdom, particularly as we try and change the forest (which is the DQ/SQ dynamic).

So, pursuing simply a Metaphysics of Quality may be helpful, but it isn't the whole thing (as many would, and certainly should, acknowledge). The whole thing is the living of life, which the breaking into parts, pursuing philosophy, analysis, a metaphysics, may help us to see. When we write about Pirsig as a systematic metaphysician, I think we tend to lose sight of the pragmatic effect of metaphysics. What might be called "literary reading," on the other hand, tends to be more self-consciously contextual then the kind of writing that Pirsig describes in ZMM: "The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance." (ZMM, 172) We should read Pirsig with all their rhetorical tools and tropes and metaphors and analogies and excavate their meaning and significance that way (which is