Friday, August 01, 2014

The Legacy of Group Thinking

1. The Culture Wars — Semantic authority — Who is anybody to tell me what to call myself? 2. The non-Marxist left — Two cheers for the cultural left — Communitarians against liberalism — The bad metaphysics of the unencumbered self; 3. The sources of multiculturalism — The authoritarian structure of group thinking — Rhetorical groups vs. actual groups — The "I" become "Aye!"; 4. What words I should use — Individuals as ends in themselves — Opting into and out of communities; 5. Autonomy and trauma — Racial wisdom — Thin and fragile communities — The instruments and conditions for autonomy; 6. Pride and Why hope? — Separatism and semantic authority — Shared practices and confidence schemes; 7. Antiauthoritarian adolescence — Who are you to tell me when my trauma is over? — Adults without confidence are a moral problem


1.      In the ‘80s and ‘90s, two parallel discussions enveloped a good part of our time in American political discourse, their energies both sometimes denoted by “the culture wars.” At the national level, debate revolved around affirmative action practices and policies. To see the connection to the term “culture,” one must recognize how “political correctness” as a term of abuse was part of the same debate. While political correctness was attaining infamy, the less abusive “multiculturalism” denoted the more parochial “culture wars” in American universities. The idea behind affirmative action practices was that, for example, systemic forms of racism had become embedded in all kinds of American practices (e.g. in the education system or governmental hiring practices or university admissions processes) and that only by active affirmation of equity could these systemic forms of disadvantage based on racial classification be corrected. As an extension, political correctness was the idea that our language is a practice that performs some of this embedding. When minority groups began requesting (or demanding) semantic authority over themselves, the post-Civil Rights milieu was inclined to hear them. So, as an example, within a short space of time accepted parlance went from “colored” to “Negro” to “Negro-American” to “Afro-American” to “African-American,” with the stock of “black” rising and falling randomly.

Now, I said “accepted parlance,” but some instinct in most of us is going to prompt, “accepted by whom?” If I’d said “approved,” then the siren certainly would’ve gone off. Who is handing out this “approval,” judging the “correctness” of our language? I was talking to a friend recently when for some reason this issue of the shift in what to call black people came up. He’s black and was born in the early ‘60s, and so lived through some of these shifts. With impatience he said, “I grew up saying ‘negro,’ but then I was told ‘black.’ Fine. And then I was told ‘African-American,’ and I said, ‘fine,’ but who cares? Why does it matter? I was born on Long Island, not in Africa.” A little while after that, I was talking to an eminent scholar of African-American literature about Ralph Ellison, and we stumbled into that area as well. I told him about my friend, and he related an old quip that someone made in the ‘80s—that only an academic could’ve come up with “African-American.” We laughed. But this is a nexus of the two cultural wars. My friend is no academic by any means, and he votes Republican. His instinct comes out of the American self-reliant tradition. Who is anybody to tell me what I should call myself? And what does it matter? The scholar and I, however, laughed from ironic self-deprecation, at the pieties of academe. For the reason why “African-American” is ensconced in public discourse is in large part because of its enforcement in the cultural sphere of the university, which permeates laterally other intellectually-minded spheres and longitudinally multiple generations of the college-educated.

2.      There are many relics of the cultural wars, of which Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) is probably the most famous. But that book, like the right-wing hatchet jobs that abut it (Profscam, Tenured Radicals), doesn’t interest me in the long-term. What do interest me are the books by those on the non-Marxist left. During this time period, the term “liberal” was used to refer to this left, just as “radical” was used for the kind of leftist that generally preferred a post-Marxist, highly theoretical vocabulary for talking about politics, a left that also had a very negative attitude toward America, sans phrase. Two of these books that I’ve kept close to heart for many years are Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country (1998) and Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (1994). Fish’s book has a more complex relationship to the attitudes and situation of that era, as our own, but Rorty’s book simplifies the issue by splitting the two lefts into the liberal “reformist left” and the radical “cultural left.”

This latter term Rorty picked up at a conference at Duke on liberal education, in the midst of the wars, from a comment Henry Louis Gates, Jr. made about the “Rainbow Coalition of contemporary critical theory.” Rorty thought that this left deserved at least “two cheers,” as he put it in the title to his contribution to that conference. What they were doing in focusing our attention on cultural issues of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and in particular how our language ramifies those things, was an important step in the history of moral progress. The only problem with this left is that it seemed as if they forgot about the money. Class, as a defining concept in one’s politics, seemed to get left behind, and it was hurting the politics of the left at the national level. And when you see the culture wars against the background of the Nixon/Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush sequence, one can see the prescience of thinking that the parochial-level conversation was, perhaps not hijacking, but obscuring what was happening in national-level politics.

I have great sympathy for this point of view, for I tend to think—in my naifish way—that money would solve a lot of problems. [1] However, David Bromwich doesn’t seem to think that the cultural left even deserves two cheers. Bromwich, a friend of Rorty’s and an English professor at Yale, went after the cultural left, not on political grounds for forgetting about class and producing a skewed and losing political strategy, but on the cultural grounds itself. In Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (1992), Bromwich argues that the forces at work in multiculturalism are undermining the liberal customs and traditions that support the practice of democracy. I have a lot of sympathy with this trajectory of thought as well, for debates in political theory at the time of the cultural wars were of the thought that the very concept of tradition was at irreducible odds with liberalism. Thus there was that motley crew of “communitarians”: Michael Sandel’s trenchant attack on Rawls in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Michael Walzer’s alternative model in Spheres of Justice (1983), Alasdair MacIntyre’s sweeping story of descent into moral unintelligibility in After Virtue (1983), and Charles Taylor’s equally sweeping story in Sources of the Self (1989).

A lot of the debate with communitarians was extremely productive—at the level of theory. The only thing they all have in common is that they are anti-Kantian, and what Rorty and Bromwich have in common is an equally anti-Kantian attitude toward politico-moral philosophy. [2] The master argument of the communitarians was that liberal political philosophy grew in the bosom of Kantian moral philosophy. Kant argued that “the moral” was produced only by a will that willed actions built on the categorical imperative. These were actions that came from no particular interest—interests are contingent features of your empirical self. Moral action only emits from the transcendental self, which is a will not built out of any particular feature of yourself you may have picked up from your environment of individual growth. This is the form of argument Rawls translated into the “original position” argument: pretend you’re behind a veil of ignorance and know nothing about your own features—what kind of just society would you construct for everyone, including yourself?

Sandel suggested that the nature of the self this politico-moral philosophy imagines is peculiarly “unencumbered.” Thinking of yourself this way, as unencumbered by any relationships to the past, future, or the people around you, then dovetails really quite nicely with a libertarian economics that has produced some really bad socioeconomic disparities. The communitarians, riding high on a crest of anti-Kantian argument, said that the philosophy is unworkable, and without that justification, liberalism must fall apart. Additionally, it has produced a uniquely introverted culture with no tradition of coherence to fall back on because it imagines itself without tradition. As Emerson put it, we are endless seekers with no past at our back. So when Rorty and Bromwich turn to the communitarians, there response is roughly: “No, you’re right—Kant produced a terrible philosophy for liberalism. But political liberalism is a practice and tradition, and it doesn’t stand or fall by its philosophical articulation. What we will do—and the grounds upon which you should debate us—is articulate both a better philosophy that agrees with all your anti-Kantian positions and a sense of what liberalism’s practices and traditions are to help repair what we agree is an increasingly introverted public culture.”

3.      What bound the communitarians together was the effort to work from a post-Hegelian tradition of philosophy. This, thus, brought them close to the wisdom post-Marxists wielded. Multiculturalism, however, had quite other sources than Hegel, or even Marx—what motivated and gave it shape was, not the experience of reading a certain tradition of books, but the life experience of individuals shaped by their categorization as an X. [3] By this I mean, not that a person is a woman, or black, or homosexual, but that the person is reduced to being only that category. If you were a typical white man in 1830 and you saw a man walking down a road in the South, then if that man was black, you knew all you needed to know about him as you approached. “Who do you belong to? Where are you going? Where’s your master?” Multiculturalism was the large-scale implementation of the tactic embedded in the slogan “black is beautiful.” The slogan gets its significance (and efficacy) by rubbing against the practices of treating “black” as if it weren’t—e.g., practices of hair straightening and skin lightening. Multiculturalism was the movement of saying, “it’s okay to be a member of the group you’re identified with.”

The trouble is that that wasn’t all multiculturalism turned out to be. What “multiculturalism” obscures, like every -ism, are the boots on the ground translating the -ism into practice. Bromwich retails a few of these actions, translating them—as every good intellectual must—into allegories for the theoretical and practical commitments at work. Bromwich is very effective in showing how what underlies both the cultural left and the cultural right (e.g., William Bennett and Bloom) is an authoritarian structure. The Hegelian conceptual priority of community to the individual, pace Popper, isn’t inherently authoritarian, but when translated from the arid sphere of political theory to the practical politics of the post-Civil Rights left, emphasis on the embeddedness of the individual in a community produced a line of thought Bromwich calls “group thinking.” An example of its linguistic habits might be seen in my earlier formulation of what happened beginning with the Civil Rights movement: “When minority groups began requesting (or demanding) semantic authority over themselves....” But the concept of a “group” here obscures an ambiguity, for it isn’t like all black people got together, signed a petition of request to be referred to as “African-American,” and then delivered it to white people (a parallel group-designation to go with the first). “Minority group” here is a hypostatization, a rhetorical device to cover the thoughts, feelings, and actions of a number of individuals. The problem is that, unlike the President of the United States who has the authority to speak for Americans in foreign affairs because he received the most votes in an election, there’s no equivalent method for determining who has the right to speak for these rhetorical groups. Thus, when individuals begin formulating their thoughts unreflectively with these kinds of locutions—using the rhetorical “we” as a proxy for oneself and an implicit usurpation of semantic authority—Bromwich says they stop real thinking. [4]

If a group of individuals all start speaking for the group, everything is fine as long as everyone says the same thing. But as soon as there’s dissension—“hey! that’s not what I think!”—then the group will talk amongst themselves about what the group thinks. The thinking, you’ll see, happens before the next speaking of “what the group thinks.” But “black people” isn’t a real group in the same practical sense because there’s no place they all meet on Fridays to decide what they think and what they’ll bind themselves to, take responsibility for. So what happens when there’s dissension in a rhetorical group? Implicit rejection—by dissenting, and individuating yourself with the “I,” you’re automatically on the outside from all the other voices still saying the same thing. Bromwich’s argument is that this kind of rhetorical “we”-ing produces a covert norm of conformity, because once the habit of chanting begins, you’ll notice when someone stops, and if those people with the habits take control of actual groups—i.e. institutional apparatuses with practical levers of control (e.g. firing a person)—then you’ll have incentive to beware calling yourself out. Every “I” will become an affirmational “Aye!” [5]

The cultural left wanted to be antiauthoritarian, but its implementation in an institution—which without authority is not—created the situation in which a black person can be told what they should call themselves because they are black. [6]

4.      But who are you to tell me what words I should use? Who am I, indeed—that line of thought cuts very deep, much deeper than we often allow it to. That question is antiauthoritarian in impetus and demands not only an account of authority, but an account of the moral stance generally—the question undermines our ability to use the word should or ought. Bromwich senses the practices of conformity underlying the emphasis on individuals being embedded in demarcated groups, and this is why he smartly suggests Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” as a spiritual antidote: “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” But who is Bromwich, or Emerson, to tell us who we should, ought, must be? In the polemical context, this kind of Idiot Questioning can get old fast, but if we’re going to take Descartes’ idiocy seriously, why shouldn’t we this? In other words, just as Descartes demanded an account of knowledge, so do we still need an account of authority. [7]

This is the problem Bromwich faces: The political project of a democratic community, which the United States was formed to embody, values the individual as an end in itself. Political liberalism says that the point of a community is to produce individuals who are differentiated from the community that produced them. Multiculturalism thus seems regressive for seeing individuals as identified with communities (hence, “identity politics”). The problem isn’t that you shouldn’t identify with a community—Bromwich agrees with Rorty that the left’s inability to identify with the American liberal political tradition is harming their ability to be an effective force in American national politics. The problem is that people aren’t given a choice in which communities they can identify with—if you’re born black, then you just are part of the black community. You might be born in America, and thus be part of the American community, but the entire reason Bromwich and Rorty are compelled to argue that the cultural left should act like it is because they have obviously chosen not to so act. There’s no practical mechanism there to make a person identify with the country and its traditions the person was born into. And if there were—like taking a loyalty oath by affixing a flag pin to your lapel—then it would be as dumb or disastrous as it sounds. [8]

For political liberalism, the idea is that individuals can opt into communities if they wish, like being a cheerleader or going to church. The good point to respond with is that there are some communities you don’t get a choice in, and the analogy here is with family: you don’t choose your family. And likewise, one doesn’t choose what country they’re born into, what genitals they have, what color their skin is, who they like having sex with, or for that matter what church they go to growing up. The point of liberalism, however, is that part of becoming an autonomous adult is growing up and choosing whether to remain in the communities one was “born into” because of who your parents were. Maturity is identified on this scheme with autonomous choice.

5.      I find the identification of maturity and autonomy completely persuasive—after all, nobody on any side of American political debate believes in authoritarian political structures. But because socialization requires authoritarian structures, we differentiate between the rights and responsibilities afforded adults as opposed to children in any number of different contexts, thus endorsing a concept of maturation in the life of the democratic community. However, while I think that’s true, I also think that the history of treatment of individuals based on certain attributes (e.g. gender, race, sexual desire, genealogy) has left a mark on the processes of socialization still felt today. In an individual’s growth, this kind of mark is called “trauma” and I think that concept, as many have used it before, is well-suited for talking about the effects of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and hereditary elitism. When the individual is reduced to a group against their will, it traumatizes and arrests their growth into autonomous individuals.

The best way to see this is to recur to the imagined encounter in 1830s Alabama: one must see that one effect of the white man seeing the black man and knowing all he needs to know is that it produces a mirrored response in the black man—as soon as the black man, walking alone on a deserted thoroughfare in Alabama saw a white man, he knew all he needed to know. For if he didn’t realize that he needed to hide in order to avoid those threatening and physically dangerous questions, then he wouldn’t survive 1830s Alabama. If he’d acted like an autonomous Kantian will, behind the veil of ignorance and unencumbered by the consciousness of being black skinned, then he would’ve stumbled into the very real and very dangerous encumbrances of racism. So part of the practical wisdom that had to be passed from generation to generation for blacks was racial categorization—forgetting that the masters think of you in some respect as all alike could lead to death. Indeed, this racial wisdom becomes self-enforced as the community suffers the effects of one individual’s forgetting of it. [9]

This is why “black is beautiful.” It is an outgrowth of a community forced to be a community by the flimsiest of attributes—one. It doesn’t seem to matter which one; if there’s wisdom in the last 200 years of moral reflection on this, then it might be that the difference between “thin” and “thick” conceptions of moral community might be almost literally quantifiable, and that thin communities might not be durable enough to last and fragile communities might be dangerous to themselves. I’m not convinced of that line of thought, but it seems a profitable direction of inquiry. [10] “Black is beautiful” is the kind of slogan needed to give self-esteem to people who have been traumatized because of a flimsy but dangerous reduction of self. Racism and the other ugly reductions dug a hole for those it affected—and you can’t just levitate out of that hole or pretend you’re not in it; you have to fill it in.

Self-esteem has gotten a bad rap in the last 30 years because—and in fact during this same time period of the initial culture wars—Americans have been found to have too much of it. The favored statistic is the difference between how good we think we are and our test scores that are supposed to quantify and validate how good we are. It has become a consistent fact that we think we’re better than we are. The rugged individualists of America (and people who so self-identify are often on the right politically these days, for whatever reason, with venerable exception for the late George Carlin) were right to laugh and denigrate the “Everyone’s a winner!” movement. Their instinct is that a win isn’t really a win if you don’t earn it. But what they weren’t fully cognizant of is the depth of the problem they still face as parents (and citizens, for that matter) with respect to self-esteem. For self-esteem is in the same family as pride, courage, confidence, dignity, self-respect, self-trust, and self-reliance. These are needed for individual autonomy, and every person in a liberal democracy has a right to the instruments and conditions for autonomy; for every individual has a right to grow and mature into an adult. So this is a practical problem of balance. You have to trust yourself to stand on your own, but Emerson realized that true self-trust is difficult, and cannot be treated as easy: “And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster” (“Self-Reliance”). But you can’t brutalize a growing self either—we’ve all seen the horrors of that in portrayals of competitive sports families. Shame is the mechanism at work in learning the difference between winning and losing, correct and incorrect, but you can’t shame a person into the Stone Age without destroying the fertile ground out of which autonomy can grow.

6.      Rorty understood these difficulties, and so began his Achieving Our Country with a brilliant summary of the relevant balances:
National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one’s country—feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies—is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame.
The relevant problem that Rorty confronts is: what do we do when shameful acts seem to outweigh meritorious ones? The title of Rorty’s book is from a famous line in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963): “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” During Baldwin’s meditation on America, he goes to meet Elijah Muhammad, prophet of the Nation of Islam. Muhammad is essentially a separatist, who cannot hope that America might be able to change. Rorty says of the two:
I do not think there is any point in arguing that Elijah Muhammad made the right decision and Baldwin the wrong one, or vice versa. Neither forgave, but one turned away from the project of achieving the country and the other did not. Both decisions are intelligible. Either can be made plausible. But there are no neutral, objective criteria which dictate one rather than the other.
I take this to mean that there is no answer to “Why hope?”—no knockdown argument to force people into the position of being unentitled to give up on a group loyalty. For as I intimated before, being a citizen of a nation is already a rhetorical grouping on all fours with the ones Bromwich is concerned about, of race, gender, or sexual identity. The problem Bromwich cogently faces is the interaction between these latter groupings and the former. For while they are all rhetorical groupings, the rhetorical grouping of national identity also has practical mechanisms for control. That makes an important difference.

The problem Rorty considers, however, is the role such separatism as Muhammad’s plays in the life of individuals negotiating a world in which all are not in control of how they are grouped. Rorty didn’t discuss this kind of problem very much in his work, but it shows up in his major essay on feminism, “Feminism and Pragmatism” (collected in Truth and Progress). [11] Taking a cue from Marilyn Frye’s book, The Politics of Reality, Rorty says that “individuals—even individuals of great courage and imagination—cannot achieve semantic authority, even semantic authority over themselves, on their own. To get such authority you have to hear your own statements as part of a shared practice. Otherwise you yourself will never know whether they are more than ravings, never know whether you are a heroine or a maniac” (TP 223, emphasis Rorty’s). This is where the interesting friction with Bromwich’s book occurs. The concept of “semantic authority” articulates “control over meaning.” We cannot just define words as we wish—words are public items that ping-pong between users, and thus can be imbued with significance a single individual has no control over. The problem for oppressed groups—individuals who are forced to belong to a rhetorical grouping because of the flimsiest of attributes: one—is that their language has been colonized. (And now you can see how these reflections can be extended even further.)

Language is the instrument of self-definition. The problem Bromwich skirts is that you cannot just declare yourself self-reliant. Self-reliance is earned, but in addition to being an attitude, it is also earned linguistically. Being reliant upon a self you have created from public linguistic materials poses the Idiot Question: are you really reliant upon a self you’ve created and not simply conforming, if unconsciously, to the movements of the herd? You can be confident of such authority when you can “hear your own statements as part of a shared practice.” But what if you’ve historically been disallowed from sharing in the practice? Can you be confident that the practice isn’t just foisting on you thoughts and feelings that are actually detrimental to your well-being, that the practice isn’t a confidence scheme, that you aren’t being conned?

7.      This is the existentialist motif of antiauthoritarian instincts, and teenagers often get to this point in their development. We adults say, “trust me: this is yet for your own good—you aren’t being conned.” And, in fact, adolescent rebelliousness is a requisite stage for autonomy. It might not always take the form we’re used to associating with rebellion—nose rings, tattoos, dyed hair—but if you don’t eventually rebel from an authority figure, then you won’t set off on the course of reflection required for making decisions on your own. [12] So demanding semantic authority looks like adolescent behavior to an adult facing an adult—“take it,” is the response, “I thought you already had it.” But the problem of semantic authority is more difficult than that. This is why the concept of trauma is useful. The problem isn’t “Why don’t you grow up?”; it’s “Who are you to tell me when my trauma is over?” No one can just wish it away, and everyone lives with the consequences. Who are we to tell people to grow up, when—as William James said in another connection—it feels like a fight? In the context of a family, growth and parental figures are part of a neutral, necessary structure of authority. But in the rest of life, treating someone like a child is infantilization and “Ah, grow up!” is fightin’ words. That’s the dilemma right there. Adults without confidence are a moral problem. Telling someone to grow up is cruel. Treating them like a child is equally cruel. Cruelty, as Rorty defined the liberal ethos echoing Judith Shklar, is the worst thing we can do. But we live in a world in which historical conditions have made it difficult to produce autonomy. Worse, even without the weight of history, we don’t know any sure-fire methods of education for producing it. Our only consolation is that the value of autonomy is a relatively recent invention—hopefully we can figure this out.




Endnotes

[1] For example, I still maintain to friends that money would pretty much solve our problems with K-12 education, something I became convinced of after reading Jonathan Kozol’s book, Savage Inequalities. My conviction remains unshaken, even after hearing some very good points from friends on the inside of the situation and debate. Whatever the utility of Horace Mann’s vision of education for the commercialist agenda of turning us into good little drones that mindlessly consume, books like Dumbing Us Down just don’t provide a viable long-term solution.

[2] Some of them were more anti-Kantian than others. Bromwich, for example, feels comfortable with enlisting Kant into the articulation of his point of view, whereas Rorty’s distrust of Kant was so deep that he would never do so, even when he could recognize his compatibility on a particular score.

[3] We shouldn’t, for that reason, underestimate the importance of especially Marx to the theoretical self-understanding of this movement, particularly given the importance of the Communist Party in Chicago and Harlem between the World Wars. (And that’s not to mention the importance of Marx to our current overtheorized left.) One should also mention the importance of Hegel to Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks.

[4] Anyone familiar with Rorty, and particularly Rorty criticism, will wonder how this fits together with Rorty’s practice of using the rhetorical “we”: “we pragmatists,” “we historicists,” “we liberal ironists.” The rhetorical “we” is a flexible device, I think; my instinct is to say that Rorty’s “we” does not occlude thought the way Bromwich suggests can happen with the “we,” and of which people have implicitly suggested about Rorty’s “we.” But as this is the most interesting and original line of argument in Bromwich’s book (that I’ve perhaps taken some liberty in reconstructing), I haven’t been able to think through all of its ramifications. For I also still believe, with Rorty, that you need to say “we” to construct a tradition and a community. (For a discussion of this facet of Rorty and the issues it involves, see my “Two Uses of ‘We.’”) So some serious thinking still needs to be put into how to say “we” without forming group thinking. How do we avoid that? What practices and habits do we need to have in place to make sure sheep don’t just start bleating back to us what we want to hear? It’s not enough to say “practices of self-reliance” because what are those? As long as power and authority are in play in the world, and on theoretical grounds I don’t think it’s possible to get rid of them, then the issue of telling between sheep, shepherds, wolves, and autonomous individuals will seem always to be in the air. Could this be the democratic equivalent of epistemological skepticism? Not the Problem of Other Minds, but the Problem of Autonomous Minds?

[5] I discuss some abstract problems with the “we” prompted by Rorty’s work in “Two Uses,” cited in note 4, but see especially Section 3, when I turn to the question I turn to below in the next section. Also, one might compare my discussion of Brandom’s Enlightenment notion of a “norm of commonality” that he invokes to distinguish Truth from the Good, which is at the base of his distinction between commitments to believe and commitments to act—see “On the Asymmetry,” esp. section 9. Perhaps I should add in this note that, despite my rhetoric in this paragraph about “real groups” and “actual groups,” when it comes to the metaphysics of this, rhetorical groups are as real and actual as these other kinds of groups. But we must make a distinction somewhere, rooted in differences in practice (in this case, practical control), even if it shouldn’t be at the level of ontology. And for my current purposes, we needn’t think it through any further. However, if one wanted a taste of the direction I would go, see an old discussion of Rorty and metaphysics in “Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Common Sense.” That paper moves through a discussion of Socrates, Plato, Robert Pirsig and Rorty on how to define philosophy, and what is distinctive about it regarding my shift in thinking and approach, is that it tries to translate problems in metaphilosophy into practical problems of behaving in the world. The discussion of Rorty is toward the end, starting with a paragraph that begins “Rorty treats professional philosophers the same way.”

[6] The saddest story to my ears was, of course, about the professor: in this case, the black political scientist whose class on black politics was boycotted by the black chairman of the Black Studies department because the latter thought the former “might not sufficiently represent the Afro-American point of view.” See Politics by Other Means, 23-26. What’s sad about it, I think, is not that the chairman had a view about the class—the proliferation of opinions and views and their friction with each other is the essence of Milton’s hope that truth will win in a free and open encounter—but that he led the particular boycott he did, meaning he lobbied the undergraduates in his own class to drop out of the other or get involved in protesting and pressuring other undergrads. (And in the environment we should have the highest expectations for creating a free and open encounter—if not the university, where?)

That’s the same kind of subtle coercion at work as we see at issue in cases like Town of Greece v. Galloway, the recent Supreme Court case where an atheist and a Jewish citizen of Greece, NY sued the town for opening every town meeting with a Christian prayer. During oral arguments, Douglas Laycock—arguing for Galloway and Stephens—suggested there was coercion involved when all are asked to bow their heads or rise to their feet for prayer. Justice Scalia scoffed, saying someone who didn’t want to participate could just stay seated. Laycock responded: “What’s coercive about it is it is impossible not to participate without attracting attention to yourself, and moments later you stand up to ask for a group home for your Down syndrome child or for continued use of the public access channel or whatever your petition is, having just, so far as you can tell, irritated the people that you were trying to persuade.” (See page 37 of the transcript of the oral arguments, found here. An audio version with background of the case can be found here. My knowledge of the case is indebted to a student of mine that did excellent research on it.)

Students in the university need to be able to trust that an instructor’s politics, or other extraneous opinions other than the subject of the course, will not interfere with the student’s ability to take the course and do well. It’s one thing, I think, to let your views about such things filter in through the course in various ways; it’s quite another to begin persuading your students to act on your views. It’s the second that transforms the university space from one of inquiry into one of political persuasion—and political persuasion is coercive if you can be punished for not being persuaded. (I should be honest, though: I have from time to time made a plea for students to pay attention to politics, and to make sure to vote. It’s more or less extraneous to any courses I teach, but I figure I have some sort of civic responsibility to do so.)

[7] Since my concerns are philosophical and not polemical, I’ll add here that Bromwich understands this problem, though he wasn’t largely concerned with it in the space of his book. Bromwich was concerned with the effect of multiculturalism on our practices of higher learning, and particularly the practices of literary study, and not about offering an abstract account of authority. He does, however, have all the resources for one in his chapter “Reflection, Morality, and Tradition” and mounts a short version of it in Ch. 5 with respect to aesthetic judgment, and otherwise does nothing to undercut the possibility of pulling a more elaborate one together. (I don’t here pull one together, but I think Robert Brandom has made available the conceptual resources to do so. In sections 2 and 3 of “On the Asymmetry” (cited in note 5) I give an outline of the main notions at work.) The line of thought I’m interested in is, taking for granted that an Emersonian account of authority is possible, how does that affect our assessment of the situation Bromwich faced? For Bromwich, it is clear from the tenor of his book, was deeply embedded in his polemical situation—i.e. he was very angry and concerned about literary study in America. But as we all know, emotion can fade—and it is helpful for it to fade for us to make reflective historical judgments about whether we should still be angry, or whether we should’ve been angry.

A case in point is Bromwich’s treatment of Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Ch. 5. I’ve grown to think of Smith as a pragmatist ally on the plane of epistemology, and Bromwich’s treatment of her Contingencies of Value is, perhaps not unfair, but at least unkind. It is in that chapter that Bromwich formulates the thrust of Smith’s book’s argument’s response to an expert community’s judgment: “who are we, after all ... who are we to dismiss the person who judges the game or the work quite differently?” I’m trying to give, in this brief space, a sketch of who the “we” is that produced multiculturalism and whose claims have a certain equal standing to the expert community. I think Bromwich is right about Smith, that if she turns her epistemological pragmatism into Idiot Questioning with a political point, then she’s undermining the very idea of expert communities—which is disastrous. However, I also think that a better understanding of just what the issue is that divides the Emersonian Bromwich from the Marxish multiculturalists can give us a better idea about what the real problem is.

[8] Bromwich discusses the equivalent of a loyalty oath in English departments on 26-29. I should say here that there’s another, slightly different point that Bromwich agrees with Rorty on here, and that’s the view that the cultural left seemed to think that by doing their academic work they were doing political work. So, if one spends one’s days deconstructing a text (in class or at the computer), exposing phallogocentrism by showing how Woman is in a marginal position, or if you spend it uncovering the capitalist ideology that is really the motivation of a character in a story—then you needn’t attend a rally protesting the very idea of “forced rape” (is there another kind?) or signing a petition for raising the minimum wage. In the words of David Hollinger’s slogan that Rorty liked, “you gave at the office.” See Bromwich’s discussion at 223-25.

[9] One of the best reminders of this historical experience with its attendant racial wisdom is Richard Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” which appears as an introduction to his collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children. One way to understand the differences between Wright and the two other major post-Harlem Renaissance writers, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, is by the differences in their geographical experience. Wright grew up in the deep South; Ellison in the marginally southern Oklahoma City; Baldwin in Harlem. Wright’s pessimism about being black in America—epitomized in his unforgettable description in Black Boy of it as the “essential bleakness” and “cultural barrenness of black life”—was taken issue with by Baldwin and especially Ellison. Both Baldwin and Ellison sound the polemical notes—Baldwin in his scorching “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and Ellison in “Richard Wright’s Blues”—of autonomous maturity as against what they take to be Wright’s short shrift of black prospects. But it’s possible to see this difference in perspective as one of different experiences—Ellison in particular never experienced the harshness of the Southern experience of being black. Growing up black anywhere in America produced trauma, but it’s important to distinguish between the different kinds of experiences in the different regions that inform those experiences. (I should also add that Ellison’s different experience didn’t stop him from producing an equally unforgettable literary epitomization of Southern black experience in the opening chapters of Invisible Man.) The fight that occurred between Ellison and Irving Howe in print about this issue in the early sixties is probably one of the most enduring polemical exchanges between great minds I know of. Polemic usually causes writings to date themselves, but as Howe suggests in his wonderful reflections on the exchange, their attitudinal differences and the problems raised by both pieces have remained, and prove immensely useful to think through ourselves. Ellison’s piece, “The World and the Jug,” was collected in Ellison’s Shadow and Act, and was a response to Howe’s defense of Wright against Baldwin and Ellison, “Black Boys and Native Sons.” The latter should be read as it has been collected in Howe’s Selected Writings, 1950-1990, with its two retrospective addendums from 1969 and 1990.

[10] I’m not going to try to unpack the significance of the thin/thick distinction. It has played an increasingly prominent role among a series of thinkers and I think we’ve only begun to understand the distinction’s utility in conceiving the relationship between conceptual thought and politico-moral community. Thin/thick attempts to play the role once played by abstract/concrete, but in an attempt to avoid some of the dialectical seesaws of nominalism and platonism. The idea was seeded by Clifford Geertz in his famous essay, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” (1973; included in The Interpretation of Cultures). It has lived a life in many, but the most important for my purposes are Rorty’s use of the distinction in CIS to articulate the concept of “final vocabularies” (see 73) and Walzer’s usage in his little book Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (1994).

[11] I think this is one of his most visionary essays that we’ve yet to mine completely of insight. Much of Rorty’s later work, as he readily admits, was repackaging of earlier ideas for different audiences. Only occasionally does Rorty find himself in a position to formulate a new insight in this kind of work, since a good portion of it was also carrying further conversations with old interlocutors (e.g. Putnam, Habermas, etc.) or unimaginative ones (e.g. the many responds-to-his-critics books that Rorty took time to do). (I don’t mean to devalue either kind of work, particularly the latter; garden work is important to do for both sides—you can’t always be breaking new ground.) But the essay on feminism puts him into many interesting, new dialectical positions that produce some interesting reflections on pragmatism. One will find the general form of the argument I’ve made above about an individual’s self-esteem on TP 219.

[12] Against the background of his infamy as the supposed leader of a rebellion against analytic philosophy, Rorty once recalled that “my parents were always telling me that it was about time I had a stage of adolescent revolt. ... They were worried I wasn’t rebellious enough” (TCF 4).

21 comments:

  1. Matt,

    I just finished reading your three "Group Thinking" essays (along with several others on your site) and have found them to be outstanding. I've had very similar thoughts, but have never pulled it all together as you have so eloquently done here. I don't interact in philosophical circles, so the best I can do is literally "bouncing some of the books [I] have read off the rest of the books [I] have read." This leads me to always wonder if I am "mad" in the sense that you describe in one of your essays because I could never share my interpretations with anyone. After reading several of your essays, I guess I'm not (at least in this respect) :)

    I do have a couple of questions and comments though.

    1. Why do you separate propaganda and argument in your matrix for the 3rd essay? I think you begin to answer this question, especially with the section on Sarah McLachlan, but I'm not sure you explicitly do so. If all arguments are unjustifiable and contingent positions, then aren't all "arguments" just propaganda by a different means/name? In other words aren't arguments (which can't be "ultimately" justified) just another form of propaganda to get people to change over to your side but done in a language/way which is seen as more acceptable? I grabbed a thesaurus and the only antonym to the word propaganda is "Truth." So in the context of contingency/nonrepresentationalism/etc the division seems to collapse because everything is contingent truth and not "Truth" as commonly understood.

    2. At the end of essay three, you share some thoughts on bringing about change. You say "think as hard as you can and try to get others to think as hard as they can." You don't ever mention a sharing of your opinions or thoughts. Is the goal just to get people to think about their own ideas or would you also want to share your own ideas and add them to the mix? I don't mean to argue for your position (as you've mentioned that is likely both impossible (any position can be undermined) and useless (arguing with people is unlikely to change their position)). But would you add your beliefs to the conversation?

    3. "Some we just need to outlive" in essay three, reminded me of some works in philosophy of science, where several people have suggested that science doesn't move forward by evidence, but by the old guard dying and the new guard taking over. Interesting parallel I thought.

    4. In the 1st "Group Thinking" essay you quoted Rorty as saying: "I do not think there is any point in arguing that Elijah Muhammad made the right decision and Baldwin the wrong one, or vice versa. Neither forgave, but one turned away from the project of achieving the country and the other did not. Both decisions are intelligible. Either can be made plausible. But there are no neutral, objective criteria which dictate one rather than the other." If I understand your and his position, then if there were 2 rallies in Washington DC, and Rorty were so inclined, he would go to Baldwin's rally because it would be in line with his larger "contingent" beliefs about the kind of society that should exist (aka his liberal society which tries to see more people as "we" or "us" instead of "them")?

    Thanks again for so many great essays.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. First, I wish to thank you for the generous and considered attention you’ve given to the stuff you’ve found here. If everyone could experience what being read with great care feels like, I think it might raise the bar considerably in our public discourse, particularly in cultural politics. It’s not a feeling I get very often, and though this feels like gossip, I think anyone on the inside of academic life would concur that it’s unfortunately not had very often there either, though one would think that’d be the place.

      I’ll just take up your short response sections one by one:

      (1)—“If all arguments are unjustifiable and contingent positions, then aren’t all ‘arguments’ just propaganda by a different means/name?” I think there’s premise here that Rorty wanted to disabuse us of—that we should think of “justifiability” as gone because “ultimate justification” was a Platonic myth. Rorty did not want us to think that way, which is to think globally rather than locally (to use a distinction that Robert Brandom uses to talk about this kind of thing). Just because a position is contingent, Rorty wanted to argue, doesn’t mean it’s unjustifiable. It just doesn’t (and never did—consider the bit on holism in your reply to “Lit Crits Reading CIS”) receive its justification from an “ultimate ground.” As I say in “Lit Crits,” a common usage of “asking for the grounds for one’s claim” is just synonymous for asking for one’s entitlement (see section 10). This is a perfectly comprehensible request and activity, and whose metaphor does nothing to scare up the spectre of philosophical foundationalism. All that is being denied is the idea that the only way for those entitlements/grounds offered to be legitimate is for them to eventually find their way back to a final (or “ultimate”) ground, a ground one needs no entitlement for. Rorty thinks this is a Platonic myth (the “land beyond hypotheses”). He does, however, think that the regress of entitlements eventually, practically, grounds out in blank stares, shrugged shoulders, and inarticulate noises. The only difference between Rorty’s “final vocabulary” and Plato’s land beyond hypotheses is that Rorty thinks this land is a function of a conversational impasse, not a land of magical, mute, intuitive knowledge. You reach this place not by reaching beliefs you cannot doubt, but by reaching beliefs you don’t know what else to say about.

      continued...

      Delete
    2. ...continued

      Your comment, however, is perceptive, because Rorty does equivocate on what he thinks about argument, particularly in its efficacy. In CIS, it seems like he’s saying arguments rarely work, so why bother? Friends like Brandom and Jeffrey Stout, though, think that’s false—arguments work all the time, maybe not as often as they fail but as often as anything else that works. (And so I do not mean to say, as you say in (2), that persuasion by argument is “likely both impossible (any position can be undermined) and useless (arguing with people is unlikely to change their position).” I think it is a fact that any position can be undermined, but I think that makes argument neither impossible nor useless.) Though Rorty might be right that different conversational areas find different forms more or less efficacious, and speculating about the reasons for this might be useful, Stout especially thinks Rorty’s over-dramatizing the point about argument, as well as eliding the distinction between acceptable forms of persuasion and unacceptable ones. Calling argument “just another form of propaganda,” as you do, runs that risk as well. It is important, in this area of discourse, to itemize and discuss the criteria we use to distinguish what is, as you say, “more acceptable” as a mode of persuasion—because at the other end are unacceptable modes (like, say, torture or brainwashing or blackmailing).

      So, my contextual distinction between argument and propaganda (in “Legacy, Part III”) was between “explicit, premise-matching-premise” discourse, on the one hand, and explanation of “why your own commitments are more attractive than your cultural opponents,” on the other. The reason why the commonsensical distinction between propaganda and truth breaks down, as you say, is because what we call the “truth” in this area is precisely what’s contested. The sense in which argument is an extension of propaganda is this: persuasion is an attempt to reach consensus in belief, but belief can function in two different ways in reasoning—as premises and conclusions. It’s important to distinguish these two because conclusions are a function of held-premises, but premises are a function of contingency. So while conclusions can serve as premises (thus making “conclusion” look like a species of “premise”), not all premises are conclusions of reasoning—some of them you’re just “born with.” So, if argument is a kind of discourse that moves from commonly held premises to normatively forced conclusions, then propaganda is the kind of discourse that is about which premises we should hold true, where nothing like the normative force of the “better argument” seems in play.

      continued...

      Delete
    3. ...continued

      This does make argument seem like a species of propaganda, but it does not reduce argument to propaganda because Rorty has no interest (as some have thought) in denying the existence of that curious “normative force” called “reasons” that the Greeks became so interested in (as Brandom likes to put it). What’s more, if you imagine what propaganda is supposed to be on my Rortyan formulation, “why your own commitments are more attractive than your cultural opponents,” one might be able to glimpse one important mode of doing this—explaining how your beliefs fit together with each other, how you are coherent (that’s in the “why” bit). Contradiction and other forms of inferential impropriety are ugly, on this model, and a reason for re-thinking. The very important function this explanation serves, additionally, is to supply reasoning for those premises you were “just born with”—in other words, making those premises look like conclusions. They may not originate as conclusions to arguments, but to supply (further back) premises to make them look like it is to say, “I may have just found myself with this belief (in God, or America, or whatever), but this reasoning is why I continue to endorse the belief.” If you can’t offer a good line of reasoning for the belief, then that may also be a reason for re-thinking.

      So one reason why I distinguish between argument and propaganda, in my taxonomy, is because we need to distinguish between moving forward in an argument (toward a conclusion) and moving backward (toward invisible, implicit contextualizing premises). Moving forward is to argue about whether or not we’re reasoning right. But to do that, one has to already concede the premises (and become a “we”) that are being collided with each other to produce the reasoning. Moving backward, then, is the much weirder experience of arguing about which premises we should hold true or not in the first place. It’s weirder because “to argue” is a forward-moving experience (from premise to conclusion), which means the experience is as arduous and cyclical as paddling up stream—you eventually make progress, but only by moving in both directions at different moments.

      It’s a penetrating question, you asked, and I had to produce some fresh thinking for it, so thank you. I hope it made some sense.

      (2)—“You say ‘think as hard as you can and try to get others to think as hard as they can.’ You don’t ever mention a sharing of your opinions or thoughts. Is the goal just to get people to think about their own ideas or would you also want to share your own ideas and add them to the mix?” I actually didn’t mean to imply that sharing wasn’t included. I envision the whole paragraph as advice for a practice of cultural politics, and for “some” arguments will work, but not for all. But for all, the finding of common ground will have to operate in some manner, even if it’s by analogy via the imaginative leap into other people’s lives that storytelling can do. But I think your perception may be right about my own bias—there seems to be something solipsistic about this picture, at least right there where I appear to be giving a summary formula. “I’ll think as hard as I can, over here, and you’ll think as hard you can, over there.” Is this the Enlightenment bias, that if we just thought hard enough, we could think our way out of this problem? Maybe, but I think it’s more the Socratic bias—that our own lives are vastly under-examined. This risks the Emersonian bias, that if we think hard enough about ourselves, it will turn out that we all think the same thing. I certainly do not think that, and so do not want to think self-examination a panacea for our problems. And so the honest exchange of sincerely held beliefs is essential to this process.

      continued...

      Delete
    4. ...continued

      I think I was, at the time, under the influence of Jeffery Stout’s reply to Rorty’s “Religion as Conversation-stopper.” He says there what I think is a good description of how our most difficult cultural debates need to happen.

      “There are many circumstances in which candor requires full articulation of one’s actual reasons. Even if it does lead to a momentary impasse, there is no reason to view this result as fatal to the discussion. One can always back up a few paces, and begin again, now with a broader conversational objective. It is precisely when we find ourselves in an impasse of this kind that it becomes most advisable for citizens representing various points of view to express their actual reasons in greater detail. For this is the only way we can pursue the objectives of understanding one another’s perspectives, learning from one another through open-minded listening, and subjecting each other’s premises to fair-minded immanent criticism.” (Democracy and Tradition 90)

      Yet, while all that is true, I still find myself deeply ambivalent about the stress to a person’s system needed to disrupt the beliefs that are at the core of cultural divisions I think in need of remedy. I’ve been troubled for a long time by the appearance of intellectual arrogance, and it turns my stomach whenever I see it. So whenever it comes to moments of, as it were, plunging the knife, I pull away for fear of twisting it (at least, in person). I suppose my style is in the mode of bringing to water without forcing to drink. But then, I teach 18-year-olds, and they are unfinished, dense, spirited, and fragile in all the ways that makes for the most delicate and ultimately unknowable teaching experiences.

      (3)—“Some we just need to outlive.” If I remember right, that’s a Deweyan thought that Rorty repeats, and me after—though my guess is it originates from any number of older directions. (What do they call that in movies? Parallel development?) My bet is that Kuhn made that popular in philosophy of science, considering how antithetical to science’s typical self-image it is.

      (4)—“if there were 2 rallies in Washington DC, and Rorty were so inclined, he would go to Baldwin’s rally...?” At first, I wasn’t sure if I understood the import of your question, but am I right in thinking that it’s just directed toward an opacity on who Rorty would side with? I looked at the section where I talk about Rorty, hope, and separatism, and I now realize I never really said that Rorty sides with Baldwin and hope. That makes the transition to separatism a little confusing. That’s a compositional fault of mine. What I wanted to sketch is the problem of hope that Rorty has a sense of, and then his sense of the moral shape of the separatist political impulse, based on a conceptual understanding of language-use. I think this is one of the most interesting moral issues at work in our lives. In working with Emerson, I’ve come to think that hope undergirds his incipient pragmatism, and is thus an original impulse for pragmatism generally. And Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is as profound a meditation on this problem as I am aware of.

      Delete
  2. ***WOW Matt, these are tremendous responses! I’m not sure how to structure my replies and thoughts in a legible way, so I’m going to put “snippets” your replies first and then my thoughts after the ***

    First, I wish to thank you for the generous and considered attention you’ve given to the stuff you’ve found here. If everyone could experience what being read with great care feels like, I think it might raise the bar considerably in our public discourse, particularly in cultural politics.

    ***Likewise for your extensive, detailed, and considerate responses. I think you are granting me a great deal of good-will and forgiveness with your responses, thanks! I also don’t want to disabuse you of the high regard you seem to have of me by opening my mouth again either, but I’ll throw my replies out there as best I can and see what happens :)

    It’s not a feeling I get very often, and though this feels like gossip, I think anyone on the inside of academic life would concur that it’s unfortunately not had very often there either, though one would think that’d be the place.

    ***I’m sorry to hear that such conversations are just as rare in academic life, it was in fact my belief that such discussions were the norm. I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad about their rarity in my own life.


    (1) “He does, however, think that the regress of entitlements eventually, practically, grounds out in blank stares, shrugged shoulders, and inarticulate noises. The only difference between Rorty’s “final vocabulary” and Plato’s land beyond hypotheses is that Rorty thinks this land is a function of a conversational impasse, not a land of magical, mute, intuitive knowledge. You reach this place not by reaching beliefs you cannot doubt, but by reaching beliefs you don’t know what else to say about.”

    *** This sounds similar to how I sometimes envision a conversation between two postmodernists whose main goal is to undermine each others positions simply to demonstrate the lack of a foundation. It just ends up leading nowhere useful (just like Platonic discussions for ultimate foundations; same useless outcome but for different reasons). I can better see why Rorty wants us to escape this quest and your comment that Rorty believes that this is a waste of time seems apt here.

    Your comment, however, is perceptive, because Rorty does equivocate on what he thinks about argument, particularly in its efficacy. In CIS, it seems like he’s saying arguments rarely work, so why bother?

    ***That was definitely my impression as well. After reading some of his earlier works, in CIS he really just seems to give up on arguing altogether and just presents his beliefs at face value.

    I think it is a fact that any position can be undermined, but I think that makes argument neither impossible nor useless.

    ***Why is it useful then, what is it for? I usually find explication and imagination to be more to my taste when trying to persuade others or bring them together. There’s lots of research that shows that people will “double-down” on their positions if their positions are attacked in an argument (I’ve also seen it many times). And, as Rorty says, if the only thing keeping people from reconfiguring their beliefs to absorb any challenges is time and effort, then what does argument accomplish with people who are deeply set in their positions?

    continued...

    ReplyDelete
  3. ...continued

    Calling argument “just another form of propaganda,” as you do, runs that risk as well. It is important, in this area of discourse, to itemize and discuss the criteria we use to distinguish what is, as you say, “more acceptable” as a mode of persuasion—because at the other end are unacceptable modes (like, say, torture or brainwashing or blackmailing).

    ***That makes sense. Calling it "just another form of propaganda" is a problem because it dissolves the potentially useful distinctions between different modes of persuasion.

    So, my contextual distinction between argument and propaganda (in “Legacy, Part III”) was between “explicit, premise-matching-premise” discourse, on the one hand, and explanation of “why your own commitments are more attractive than your cultural opponents,” on the other. The reason why the commonsensical distinction between propaganda and truth breaks down, as you say, is because what we call the “truth” in this area is precisely what’s contested. The sense in which argument is an extension of propaganda is this: persuasion is an attempt to reach consensus in belief, but belief can function in two different ways in reasoning—as premises and conclusions. It’s important to distinguish these two because conclusions are a function of held-premises, but premises are a function of contingency. So while conclusions can serve as premises (thus making “conclusion” look like a species of “premise”), not all premises are conclusions of reasoning—some of them you’re just “born with.” So, if argument is a kind of discourse that moves from commonly held premises to normatively forced conclusions, then propaganda is the kind of discourse that is about which premises we should hold true, where nothing like the normative force of the “better argument” seems in play.

    ***This distinction and explanation are great! They also tie into the importance of distinguishing between different forms of persuasion as you mentioned above. Perhaps it also explains why some topics are more amenable to argument than others. People with shared premises can argue over the conclusions of those shared premises (ie what does our meaning of individual liberty (premise) actually look like in our society (conclusion)), but arguing with someone over the premises of individual liberty vs communalism (not sure about this example) would likely be ineffective and that's where "propaganda" as an "explanation of why your own commitments are more attractive than your cultural opponents” comes in.

    ***In reviewing my reply, I was struck by the idea that it seems like most of what is commonly thought of as “argument” is really just establishing and defining premises (aka propaganda)? And since all those premises are tied to forms of life and other premises, the discussion is rarely, if ever, between two people who actually agree on and have the same premises. So the bulk of the work is what you call propaganda? The argument part seems tiny in comparison. Once all those “premise ducks” are in a row, it seems like the conclusions and agreements would be fairly apparent. If we all agreed on what “decency” MEANT, then it would be fairly easy to articulate what our lives would look like according to that definition? So your distinction does hold, but to assume that “local” inherently means “premise agreement,” is my error? Our “cultural opponents” are all around us so to speak, even if that’s not initially obvious? Especially in our global cosmopolitan civilization.

    continued...

    ReplyDelete
  4. ...continued

    This does make argument seem like a species of propaganda, but it does not reduce argument to propaganda because Rorty has no interest (as some have thought) in denying the existence of that curious “normative force” called “reasons” that the Greeks became so interested in (as Brandom likes to put it).

    ***I had envisioned Rorty as having given up on reason and that's why he had given up on argument and that's why I had suggested that argument is useless because it can be so easily undermined. But these distinctions you are drawing have greatly changed my understanding of him. It’s at the local level that argument is useful, not at the global or cultural level of premises. (but see my clarification above)

    What’s more, if you imagine what propaganda is supposed to be on my Rortyan formulation, “why your own commitments are more attractive than your cultural opponents,” one might be able to glimpse one important mode of doing this—explaining how your beliefs fit together with each other, how you are coherent (that’s in the “why” bit).

    ***I really like this and it's what I often try to do during discussions, finding connections and bringing the various viewpoints together through even the smallest perceived similarity. But now I have a better understanding of what it might be that I'm doing.

    The very important function this explanation serves, additionally, is to supply reasoning for those premises you were “just born with”—in other words, making those premises look like conclusions. They may not originate as conclusions to arguments, but to supply (further back) premises to make them look like it is to say, “I may have just found myself with this belief (in God, or America, or whatever), but this reasoning is why I continue to endorse the belief.” If you can’t offer a good line of reasoning for the belief, then that may also be a reason for re-thinking.

    ***That's fascinating. So the purpose of reasoning towards a justification (or what was previously called a foundation) for your contingent beliefs is to demonstrate to yourself and others why those beliefs should be held. You are creating a backstory of propaganda for your contingent premises. Amazing.

    So one reason why I distinguish between argument and propaganda, in my taxonomy, is because we need to distinguish between moving forward in an argument (toward a conclusion) and moving backward (toward invisible, implicit contextualizing premises). Moving forward is to argue about whether or not we’re reasoning right. But to do that, one has to already concede the premises (and become a “we”) that are being collided with each other to produce the reasoning. Moving backward, then, is the much weirder experience of arguing about which premises we should hold true or not in the first place. It’s weirder because “to argue” is a forward-moving experience (from premise to conclusion), which means the experience is as arduous and cyclical as paddling up stream—you eventually make progress, but only by moving in both directions at different moments.

    ***Yes, I think I understand that now.

    It’s a penetrating question, you asked, and I had to produce some fresh thinking for it, so thank you. I hope it made some sense.

    ***Wow, that's very flattering :) I think I got what you meant.

    continued...

    ReplyDelete
  5. ...continued

    (2) for all, the finding of common ground will have to operate in some manner, even if it’s by analogy via the imaginative leap into other people’s lives that storytelling can do. But I think your perception may be right about my own bias—there seems to be something solipsistic about this picture, at least right there where I appear to be giving a summary formula. “I’ll think as hard as I can, over here, and you’ll think as hard you can, over there.” Is this the Enlightenment bias, that if we just thought hard enough, we could think our way out of this problem? Maybe, but I think it’s more the Socratic bias—that our own lives are vastly under-examined. This risks the Emersonian bias, that if we think hard enough about ourselves, it will turn out that we all think the same thing. I certainly do not think that, and so do not want to think self-examination a panacea for our problems. And so the honest exchange of sincerely held beliefs is essential to this process.

    ***That’s section sounds funny, as you try not to fall into one bias and then another to justify your position, I often find myself in the same boat :) (is this an example of what might be called postmodern paralysis in action?) “The honest exchange of sincerely held beliefs is essential to this process” sounds about right to me, what else can you do? That’s what I thought you meant based on your other writings, but I got confused when it wasn’t explicit in your summary paragraph.

    I think I was, at the time, under the influence of Jeffery Stout’s reply to Rorty’s “Religion as Conversation-stopper.” He says there what I think is a good description of how our most difficult cultural debates need to happen.

    “There are many circumstances in which candor requires full articulation of one’s actual reasons. Even if it does lead to a momentary impasse, there is no reason to view this result as fatal to the discussion. One can always back up a few paces, and begin again, now with a broader conversational objective. It is precisely when we find ourselves in an impasse of this kind that it becomes most advisable for citizens representing various points of view to express their actual reasons in greater detail. For this is the only way we can pursue the objectives of understanding one another’s perspectives, learning from one another through open-minded listening, and subjecting each other’s premises to fair-minded immanent criticism.” (Democracy and Tradition 90)

    ***I like this a lot. I’ve always felt that in order to move forward, past our differences, and into a new place together, conversation, no matter how slow, is most likely to achieve that, through extensive and ongoing explication and imagination.

    Yet, while all that is true, I still find myself deeply ambivalent about the stress to a person’s system needed to disrupt the beliefs that are at the core of cultural divisions I think in need of remedy.

    ***Yep, especially if as Rorty says, we can always plug any holes in our beliefs, it’s just a matter of how important we think it is to plug those holes. And as you say in the next section, it’s almost an act of violence to do so, because those aren’t “just beliefs,” they are whole ways of life integrated into communities, families, lifestyles, etc.

    I’ve been troubled for a long time by the appearance of intellectual arrogance, and it turns my stomach whenever I see it. So whenever it comes to moments of, as it were, plunging the knife, I pull away for fear of twisting it (at least, in person).

    ***“Pull away for fear of twisting it” and “intellectual arrogance” also connect deeply with me. They seem like attempts to silence others who are different and to shut down the conversation in favor of one’s own position. If I understand you correctly, would Richard Dawkins be a “poster boy” of this?

    continued...

    ReplyDelete
  6. ...continued

    But then, I teach 18-year-olds, and they are unfinished, dense, spirited, and fragile in all the ways that makes for the most delicate and ultimately unknowable teaching experiences.

    ***Funny, I teach 18 year old too. The more I read your works, the more I find us to be very similar; “bringing to water without forcing to drink” is one of my favorite lines. Perhaps that’s why we both felt so favorably towards each others commentary; not just the content but even more importantly the attitude and approach?


    (4)—“if there were 2 rallies in Washington DC, and Rorty were so inclined, he would go to Baldwin’s rally...?” At first, I wasn’t sure if I understood the import of your question, but am I right in thinking that it’s just directed toward an opacity on who Rorty would side with?

    ***Basically. I am kind of curious about how he would take a side and what it would look like and how he would justify it, considering his philosophical points. I was just thinking how interesting it would be to see him come down on one side or the other of such a practical point and to see his thinking about it. I would like to hear him get into it with the “other side” just to see how he does it. Does he just change the subject when challenged by the separatists or does he actually engage them in their own terms for example?

    I think this is one of the most interesting moral issues at work in our lives.

    ***If you mean separatism vs inclusion I would agree, it is quite a perplexing issue.

    Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is as profound a meditation on this problem as I am aware of.

    ***Great book.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Nathan: I have some scattered comments below

      1) “I’m sorry to hear that such conversations are just as rare in academic life, it was in fact my belief that such discussions were the norm. I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad about their rarity in my own life.” Ah, see, now I feel like I’ve bad-mouthed my friends. So, let me be a little more precise. I’ve never had more intellectually interesting conversations than during my time here in grad school. What doesn’t happen as often is to be read with great care, at least in volume. There are a lot of reasons for that, some understandable, some less so (like, the difference between being a graduate student, as I am, and a professor). But, I also probably have a lot of transference issues right now, and anything on this topic is easily read as sour grapes. But this I do know: everyone who graduates in the humanities now needs to become a specialist of some kind to get a good job. Given the lengthening of history, this makes specialties narrower and narrower. That means the actual number of people who can discuss your work in any depth and detail can be quite small. That means you’re usually communicating with people who, even if encouraging and enthusiastic, suffer a comprehension gap (i.e. the people you see daily, in your department). The best, as colleagues who share and as those who read, transcend this problem easily. But, think about it: it used to be there were a handful of scholarly journals. You could read all of it, and then add to a determinate (written) conversation/inquiry. You could say things like, “Recently, people have started writing a lot about ‘incorrigibility’” and mean something substantive by “a lot.” Now—no way. Any reference to what’s hot or what people are taking seriously right now is just hand-waving. (There’s probably a bit of it on here, partly because it’s a compositional and intellectual habit I can’t break out of.) Because in the absolute ocean of scholars and intellectuals who are out there now, with their own thoughts about what’s important and who are writing in the insane number of organs of publication, it just can’t be taken seriously as an empirical marker of anything. All it is is a declaration of what one person thinks is important, and maybe a few others, along with a flexing of intellectual authority as if to say, “And you’d better think this is hot/important, too, or you’ll be on the margins of the profession.” Nobody, I think, has malicious intentions about this—as everyone has to have opinions about what is important and what the profession should think is important—it is just that, combined with a number of other institutional mechanisms (related to job-getting and -keeping), it has produced some very curious intellectual consequences (at least, so I’ve come to think).

      Ugh, that’s enough inside baseball.

      2) “After reading some of [Rorty’s] earlier works, in CIS he really just seems to give up on arguing altogether and just presents his beliefs at face value.” I want to say, “yeah, I guess…,” but that’s only because I’ve been fighting something like that impression for a while. (I probably said as much in the “Lit Crit” bit on argumentation.) There is a shift in his style, and a shift in his procedure, but I’m still not sure it’s best put in terms of argumentation. But then, I’m writing about this right now for my dissertation, so I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find a new way to be precise about it, and that’s not something an impression needs to account for (especially given that the impression is formed in part by what Rorty says about what he will ostensibly do in the book). And, come to think of it, you kind of “argue” yourself out of this impression when you wonder later how much in argument is really argument, anyways (if you catch my drift). I’ll wonder with you in a moment.

      Continued…

      Delete
    2. …continued

      3) “Why is it useful then, what is it for? I usually find explication and imagination to be more to my taste when trying to persuade others or bring them together. There’s lots of research that shows that people will ‘double-down’ on their positions if their positions are attacked in an argument (I’ve also seen it many times).” As Comment (2) illustrated, there’s an ambiguity in the way we use “argument” that is creating an obscurity in this area. So, let’s distinguish, first, between being “in an argument”—like a fight—and “using an argument,” like an instrument. I think we can see immediately that a lot of the “double-down” phenomenon is attributable to being “in” one—it’s direct confrontation that produces this. However, the instrument does its work in this, too, because it is importantly a direct instrument. What it doesn’t need to be, I think, is used confrontationally. If we think of the instrument of argument on the model of a syllogism, then I think we’ll want to say that “explication,” as you outlined, is itself done in part by argument—to directly explicate what you believe and why is to show all the premises and inferences related to each other in the right way, i.e. in a way that avoids contradiction or bad inferences. The syllogism (or “argument”) is a wonderful means for making sure you’ve gotten everything straight. But, explication isn’t confrontational, which is why I take it it is more to your taste. This might help us to a better position to understand the utility of this instrument of argument. But, let me also say, then, that the mode of argument that Jeffery Stout called, above as I quoted, “immanent criticism” seems both necessary, direct, and somewhat confrontational. Perhaps the “somewhat” here is what allows some users to be more successful in avoiding the double-down phenomenon. Or maybe we should call it the “raised-backs phenomenon”—it’s when people “get their back up” and shut down, as it were, that they double-down on what they’ve already said.

      4) “People with shared premises can argue over the conclusions of those shared premises (ie what does our meaning of individual liberty (premise) actually look like in our society (conclusion)), but arguing with someone over the premises of individual liberty vs communalism (not sure about this example) would likely be ineffective and that's where ‘propaganda’ as an ‘explanation of why your own commitments are more attractive than your cultural opponents’ comes in.” I think those are good examples in the abstract, for the purposes of your point. If I might speculate on your hesitation, though, it might be because of how abstract they are--so many other things probably condition such a discussion that you’d probably be at “propaganda” as much as anything. So, maybe we need to think about concreteness as well when it comes to argument. If I might share a startling definition of “concrete,” though, because pragmatists should be chary about the concrete/abstract distinction: “concrete” as it relates to “shared premises” is a function of how many more premises one has to actually articulate to get a discussion off the ground. If you have to articulate too many (and thus maybe ruin the possibility of having “shared premises”), then the issue was perhaps not concrete enough. (Notice: what’s startling is that, by my definition, one can have a concrete debate about “abstract” philosophical issues.)

      continued…

      Delete
    3. …continued

      5) “…it seems like most of what is commonly thought of as ‘argument’ is really just establishing and defining premises (aka propaganda)? ... Once all those ‘premise ducks’ are in a row, it seems like the conclusions and agreements would be fairly apparent.” Yeah, I think this is what gives the lie to our usage of “argument,” what punches up the obscurity in it I suggested above. I’m not sure it’s useful to narrow down what we call “argument” to such a point that it almost vanishes. That’s why I redescribed “explication” above. But also, there’s the obvious irreality of “if we could just get our premises right, then everything else will follow….” But let me redescribe the consequence of this irreality from your quasi-paranoid so-to-speak of “my cultural enemies are all around me!” You’re right, and also that this isn’t initially obvious, but all this is is a function of our lives being poorly described in terms of “premises.” As pragmatists, we can’t forget that in the background is the Great Defining Premise of Philosophical Pragmatism: beliefs are habits of action. As I say somewhere else, our beliefs are not like marbles in the bag of our “self.” A belief should be thought of as a point-mass, which is to say a hypothetical construct we make up in order to do apply math to physics (or here, logic to life). We might say that an explicit belief only comes into being when we are forced to account for something in our immediate environment—after that, it submerges itself back into the roiling mass of our habits. (Compare: you aren’t always aware of your habit of scratching your nose when you have four aces—principally because you aren’t always playing poker.) This means that the reason agreement can be so difficult sometimes is because there are so many possible (hidden) habit/belief/premises that condition a person’s thought that might come up at any moment. Take your example of “if we all agreed on what ‘decency’ meant…”—that is a perfect example of something not concrete enough, as I defined concreteness above. Because as Wittgenstein points out about all rules, a rule needs a fresh interpretation every time you apply it, and there’s no controlling what that interpretation will be except another rule, but then that rule would need a rule controlling its interpretation…. Here the point becomes: there are so many intervening habits that can come into play when applying a principle/premise upon one’s action that discussion of what to do about this might not be best done in terms of principles (like “be decent”). And maybe this is why your inclination toward “explication” in discussions with fraught natures (like political discussion) makes sense—it’s a way of showing your habits and how they fit together and how they lead to actions you want to convince others are a good idea.

      6) “So the purpose of reasoning towards a justification (or what was previously called a foundation) for your contingent beliefs is to demonstrate to yourself and others why those beliefs should be held.” Yeah; I like “demonstrate to yourself and others.” It’s important, I think, that we sometimes stop ourselves from saying “this is the way I am” to wonder if this is the way I should be. Or, to put it in a weirder way, to not just be who you are, but that you should be who you are. That can be weird because we often treat it as a fact that we are who we are. But adulthood needs to be some sort of normative endorsement of ourselves as we take responsibility for who we are from our parents.

      Continued…

      Delete
    4. …continued

      7) “That’s section sounds funny, as you try not to fall into one bias and then another to justify your position, I often find myself in the same boat :) (is this an example of what might be called postmodern paralysis in action?)” Heh, I should hope not. I don’t know what to call what I was doing there, stylistically, psychologically, or philosophically. Whatever it was, though, must be all three at once. I think it owes a lot to Stanley Cavell’s mode of philosophical introspection, though any number of my favorite writers display attitudes and written modes that contribute. I think what sounds weirdest is the “maybe”—that’s something I’ve tried harder and harder to deploy when I really mean it. I think it’s hard for us, and philosophers in particular, to think in terms of what may be, especially about ourselves. It’s hard to find our way to those points at which we feel genuinely, and maybe should feel genuinely, ambi-valent (as Kenneth Burke would’ve emphasized the word). But those might be the most philosophically important points. (Notice, you’re right: if you’re genuinely ambivalent, then that produces paralysis in action, and as you say, is, oxymoronically, paralysis in action.)

      8) “If I understand you correctly, would Richard Dawkins be a ‘poster boy’ of [intellectual arrogance]?” Oh, yeah. I don’t care much for Dawkins. He’s lately the worst of what Dewey derided as “militant atheism.” I don’t see much cause for it. One can point to the wars and cruelty clothed in religion all one wants—it’s still just clothing. Take care of power and religion will take care of itself.

      continued...

      Delete
    5. ...continued

      9) “I am kind of curious about how [Rorty] would take a side and what it would look like and how he would justify it, considering his philosophical points.” Do you mean how Rorty would take a side against the separatists, like against people like Elijah Muhammad who have given up on the possibility that America might be made better for everyone? Ah, that he did frequently because he viewed the post-Marxist cultural left as having given up on America. That’s what AOC is all about, so that’s the book you would want. You presented the question this way: “Does [Rorty] just change the subject when challenged by the separatists or does he actually engage them in their own terms for example?” I think the way to think about his quarrel with them is to think of him as denying the premise of the question, that those are the only two options. As I think of it, he was saying in the bit I quoted in “Legacy” above that there are no terms in which to engage over the question of whether to have hope. He’s not changing the subject, though. For example, someone who has given up hope on America will say, “look at the terrible things it has done, and the terrible things it still does.” Rorty will say, “Yep.” He concedes all of it where it’s true. They will say, “to reform the system is to just keep with the status quo, and to buy into reform means you are just being duped by the American dream.” Rorty will say, “Maybe, but do you have any other options?” (That’s a genuine “maybe.”) They will say, “the only way to change these terrible things is through a revolution of the system.” Rorty will say, “That’s unrealistic, or bloody and undesirable.” We could keep on like this, but it will just go around in circles, though I’m not sure it changes the subject. It’s ultimately just a bet on what will more likely produce the vision of an egalitarian society that the Enlightenment gave us hope for. There’s something good to be said about either bet. The problem, perhaps, was that Rorty couldn’t imagine a bloodless revolution of institutions (let alone a successful one in thought, whatever that might mean), nor that a bloody revolution of the United States was likely to produce anything better. Bloody revolutions, as history has shown, are crapshoots. America already got pretty lucky, especially when compared to the French Revolution, so why risk all those lives? And what would a bloodless revolution even look like, if not some long, painful process of reform? So, if reform is the only real option, then hopelessness is counter-productive. That’s what he says in AOC, in the third chapter, basically. It makes perfect sense to feel hopeless. It’s just a terrible feeling that probably won’t help your situation.

      Delete
  7. Hi Matt,

    Thanks so much for your replies! If this is becoming too drawn out though, please feel free to cut me off :)

    1) Thoughts on “inside baseball.” OK, I see what you were saying now. I’ve sometimes seen it referred to as “keeping up with the literature.” I’m not an academic, so I can take or leave whatever I want from the literature but even following a few research areas or journals and reading contents and abstracts is quickly overwhelming (sometimes I have to remind myself I’m not being paid to do it so I can let some of it go :) As an academic, that must be incredibly frustrating and I can see what you mean by “people who, even if encouraging and enthusiastic, suffer a comprehension gap.” It sounds very isolating.

    3) "“So, let’s distinguish, first, between being “in an argument”—like a fight—and “using an argument,” like an instrument.” “If we think of the instrument of argument on the model of a syllogism, then I think we’ll want to say that “explication,” as you outlined, is itself done in part by argument—to directly explicate what you believe and why is to show all the premises and inferences related to each other in the right way, i.e. in a way that avoids contradiction or bad inferences.”" ***Looking at "argument" as an instrument along the lines of a syllogism makes sense. This also ties into my other comment on the other thread and your response about "irrationalism." Basically, if you do have the "right" premises, but then your faulty reasoning leads to an incorrect conclusion, then you arrive at a "bad" outcome anyways despite your "right" starting point. And this would also connect to the means and ends of "immanent criticism." Interesting.

    4)"“concrete” as it relates to “shared premises” is a function of how many more premises one has to actually articulate to get a discussion off the ground. If you have to articulate too many (and thus maybe ruin the possibility of having “shared premises”), then the issue was perhaps not concrete enough. (Notice: what’s startling is that, by my definition, one can have a concrete debate about “abstract” philosophical issues.)" ***I like that way of putting it and it IS startling, but makes complete sense in this context. I can see how the concrete/abstract division would collapse.

    continued ...

    ReplyDelete
  8. ...continued

    5,6,7) Great comments in these sections. However, I want to respond to them all together because I see a theme running through all three of them, something I've noticed in Rorty (unspoken though?) and others too and wanted to ask about. In your comments there seems to be a tension between the immediacy of belief (self?) at any moment ("there are so many possible (hidden) habit/belief/premises that condition a person’s thought that might come up at any moment" and "an explicit belief only comes into being when we are forced to account for something in our immediate environment—after that, it submerges itself back into the roiling mass of our habits" and "a rule needs a fresh interpretation every time you apply it") and a belief system (self?) that is separate/transcendent from that immediate moment ("those points at which we feel genuinely, and maybe should feel genuinely" and "you should be who you are" and "adulthood needs to be some sort of normative endorsement of ourselves" and "this is the way I should be" and "you should be who you are"). I see the tension arising between a contingent/historical self that comes into being, exists, and changes from moment to moment and the desire for (belief in?) a coherent self that is maintained (transcends) across all moments? (I have more thoughts about this, but want to see your response before possibly drowning what might be an obvious point.)

    9) OK, that all sounds consistent with his position. It does strike me as humorously ironic that he takes such a philosophically revolutionary and anti-establishment position and then politically offers a very conservative and status quo position, but I do understand his reasoning and your comments that "there’s something good to be said about either bet" and that "bloody revolutions, as history has shown, are crapshoots."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Nathan: I have a quick initial reply to (9) that doesn't matter much, before I want to give some considered thought to (5-7):

      Very conservative and status quo! BLeh. (Hold on, let me compose my face.) I have three comments to that: 1) after CIS, Rorty was attacked by the right and left, and by the left for pretty much the reason you've stated (perhaps why I'm disgruntled); 2) I don't think you can call the rejection of revolution "politically conservative," not just because violence has been used by everyone on the political spectrum, but more because violence is the rejection of the premise of democratic politics; 3) more generally, I really think the left has got to stop flagellating itself by ranking leftists' conservatism when the question is about means, not ends. The left really needs a better vocabulary for talking about why, e.g., we should praise Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and be critical of Hillary Clinton and the TPP.

      Since you've shown interest in how Rorty fits his political views together with his philosophy, you really should read his autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids." Not only is it one of the finest of its genre, it also pretty much summarizes his whole career--it charts his trajectory to CIS, and it also is pretty much a summary of what he says in Achieving Our Country. And hey, I found it online (with typos like "post-modem" for "post-modern"): http://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html

      Delete
    2. Hi Nathan,

      In reply to (5-7), you are again perceptive. I don’t know if you’re aware, but you use a Kantian vocabulary to talk about it, too. Your distinction between the two selves mirrors in language a Kantian distinction between the “empirical self” and the “transcendental self.” The former is contingent and historical, whereas the latter is where (properly) moral claims come from. You’ve given a nice spin to it, so that the desire to be a unified self across the moments of your life can be given a Nietzschean answer: the desire is satisfied through the act of writing (that self). That’s where Rorty’s sympathies lie. (As well as Alexander Nehamas, in his fascinating The Art of Living.) It cannot, however, be a final answer. Since most of us are not writers, we need a more flexible description of these two selves.

      You’ve culled some good material to consider in trying to give this description, but I’m not sure I’m ready to give it. I don’t know how to describe yet all the layers you’ve brought to the fore. I’ve been working on it, in part you might say, via my work on Emerson. When you say, “the immediacy of belief at any moment,” I match that with Emerson’s “Our moods do not believe in each other,” which I believe is the key to understanding what Emerson really meant when he said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”

      I think there are at least two tensions in what you’ve put your finger on. One is the tension between the “immediacy of belief” that is a self in action and the “structure of belief” that is a self. The image of belief I outlined in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change” supplies an understanding of the structure side, but it needs to be modified by a sense of how beliefs are but posits to understand habits, and habits do not fit together in a structure. Not only that, but sometimes you “forget what you really believe,” which is to say, in a moment of action a relevant habit did not rise to the surface and cause you to behave in a certain way (i.e. in a way that observers who know you would’ve expected you to behave).

      A version of these two selves come together was given by Quine, in a description of the “web of belief” avant la lettre that might be a good place to build off of: “The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs . . . is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.” For “total science” substitute “self” and I think we have a good starting point. And as Quine points out in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” where this passage comes from, one of the consequences of this holism is that what adjustments are made to the interior are underdetermined by the impingements of experience at the exterior.

      That’s one tension, but the second is what you mainly focus on: the idea of an ideal self that we try to make over our empirical self to match. This, I think, is the way we need to think of “a coherent self”—given the nature of beliefs-as-habits, coherence can only be an ideal striven for, not an actuality. And this isn’t because we are conflicting, contradictory kinds of beings (though that is true)—it’s because the structure, like belief itself, is a posit, an image or metaphor we use to try to manage our actions (including our sayings) in the world. That’s why I like your substitution of “transcends” for “maintained”—it registers the family resemblance between the “ought” of an ideal we try to live up to (like a person we admire, or just being “good” or “ethical”) and the more pedestrian ideal of being consistent.

      And, that’s about all I can muster at the moment. There’s a lot to think through here.

      Delete
  9. Matt,

    ---Sorry these responses took so long. Two days after your last reply a large part of my life was turned upside down and I'm still picking-up the pieces. I'd already put together some thoughts which I've tried to complete, but "scattered" is my middle name at the moment. Hopefully I'm still making sense (here and in my comments on your essay "Two Uses of "We".").

    Very conservative and status quo! BLeh. ...

    ---Haha, I thought you might feel that way. I wasn't thinking of violence or the elimination of democracy though. He just seemed a little too comfortable with the way things were. Thanks for the suggestion of "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” It has clarified even more my political differences with Rorty and has saved us both from a multipage political response I was putting together in response to you both here and in your essay "Two Uses of "We"." :) I’ll just leave it as a difference of opinion and move on.

    In reply to (5-7)...

    ---I had no idea about the Kantian connection (never read him), I was just trying to put it all into words. Interesting that "the desire is satisfied through the act of writing (that self)." Besides the actual thinking required to write/create a coherent self, I imagine this is also in part due to something physically written having a considerable level of permanence that can be referred back to and that helps to give the illusion(?) of transcendent coherence due to that permanence? Even these discussions have forced me to clarify my own thinking while at the same time providing a record of that thinking which I can look back on to provide clarity later on and which allows me to believe/claim that I have some kind of personal coherence as a result of putting these words to paper and claiming they are “me.”

    You’ve culled some good material to consider...

    ---See my comments on your essay "Two Uses of "We"."

    I think there are at least two tensions in what you’ve put your finger on...

    ---I like this. I'd never viewed “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in this light and it's been A LONG time since I read it anyways. I address this more in my comments on your essay "Two Uses of "We"."

    That’s one tension, but the second is what you mainly focus on...

    ---This is definitely along the lines of what I'm thinking. I have some more thoughts in "Two Uses of "We"."

    Thanks,
    NathanK

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have one comment about your note about the desire for "transcendence" being satisfied through the act of writing as being in part because of the physicality of a piece of writing. I was more referring to, following Rorty and Nehamas, a Nietzschean desire for self-creation enacted in writing, which bares some relationship to the fact that a piece of writing is external to our fluctuating minds. The relationship between writing and thinking is, however, interestingly complex, and tying Nietzsche's very modern notion of self-creation to it seems dangerous ahead of more thought. But, ya' know, the idea of "literary immortality" is very old, as well as Plato's attack on writing in the Phaedrus. While Rorty, I don't think, had writing as a technology (that usurped primary oral cultures and all that) in mind, it's very useful to think about in considering how we use our thoughts on paper (or really nowadays, FacePage) to reflect back at us a self, one we don't always find very pleasing.

      Delete

Want to get in touch with me but are too scared to universalize and eternalize your comments for all everywhere and always to see? Just e-mail me: pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com