tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-241526392024-03-05T07:39:05.572-07:00Matt Kundert's Friday ExperimentSpace where I can write about what I read
<p>-- Current Reading --</p>
<p><i>Robert Frost</i> (Library of America), <i>Selected Letters</i> (Ralph Ellison), <i>Public Moralists</i> (Stefan Collini), <i>Sandman</i> (Gaiman), <i>Collected Journalism, etc.</i> (Orwell)</p>Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comBlogger191125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-32045281288123142332016-10-07T12:23:00.000-07:002016-10-07T12:27:36.640-07:00The Legacy of Group Thinking, IV<b>“Race and the Limits of the Rhetoric of Fiction“</b><br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> Matthew McKnight recently took up the position David Bromwich occupied facing multiculturalism, but now facing the much more politically energized and organized force of the Black Lives Matter movement. BLM is in fact the eruption of the stance that underlied ‘80s and ‘90s multiculturalism, just as multiculturalism was the diffusion of the energy that underlied ‘60s and ‘70s black nationalism. If there is an important difference with BLM, it might simply be that the accessibility and fluidity of social media has made the reality of police brutality to non-white persons inescapable. You didn’t have to tell African-Americans growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s about that reality, but too often it didn’t escape the communities where it existed. Like gossip, it was an immutable code of operation for some and an easily dismissed apparition for others.<br />
<br />
It is the ghost of American slavery that we are still haunted by, and it is that ghost that McKnight and Bromwich—like everyone else on the left—want to exorcize. The difference between those like McKnight and Bromwich and those energized by multiculturalism is, from one perspective, a matter of means. McKnight draws a parallel between BLM’s success in using video taken of police brutality and Frederick Douglass’s use of the burgeoning technologies of photography. McKnight notes that the “national attention” BLM has focused “on police injustice is a commendable achievement. However, for all its dynamism and appeals to moral goodness, the movement shares a foundational belief with Douglass: the ideology of race as a natural fact.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iv.html#fn1">[1]</a><br />
<br />
McKnight sees affirmation of the existence of race, which he thinks a fiction and created by the use of concepts like “race” and “racism,” to be the wrong move when facing the destructive force of white supremacy. He follows Karen and Barbara Fields, in their <i>Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality</i> (2012), in thinking that racism “always takes for granted the objective reality of race,” and that the latter demands “the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iv.html#fn2">[2]</a> This ideology of race, however, is a fiction—“No operation performed on the fiction,” the Fieldses say, “can ever make headway against the crime.” The conceptual field of race is a bear trap, and to acknowledge the reality of its grasp is to amputate part of yourself as the only response. McKnight, like Bromwich, sees individualism as the worthy end that lies beyond race, racism, and group identity. Individualism is the hope that, as McKnight puts it, “you and I might be able to define ourselves by individual and ever-expansive terms.” Group thinking reduces us. “An individual,” McKnight acknowledges, “might be compelled to contend that it’s her individual choice to identify as black, or that being black is a matter of culture, not race—but those are just different, perhaps more consoling, points of entry into the same trap. An individual who proclaims an identity based on diffuse general terms begins the work of erasing herself.” <br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> Just like Bromwich’s, this is a powerful, Emersonian argument that I have much sympathy for. But if McKnight and Bromwich represent the Emersonian left opposed to the Hegelian left of multiculturalism, then I still find myself reaching for Hegelian philosophical weapons to repair the equally Emersonian individualism I want to affirm. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iv.html#fn3">[3]</a> McKnight makes the unfortunate choice of exchanging what we might call Reality Depth Charges with what he calls the ideology of race. Racism takes the “objective reality” of race for granted—but it’s just a fiction, fake, not there! McKnight’s rhetoric of fiction (as well as ideology) implies that the objective reality is, rather, not-race. It requires, at the level of theoretical hygiene at least, some sort of epistemological defense of that claim, some sort of argument for thinking you’re seeing reality objectively and the other person fictionally.<br />
<br />
From the perspective of philosophical pragmatism, this is a tactical misstep, but it is one that obscures the real power of multiculturalism and BLM. McKnight cites Nikole Hannah-Jones as an example of falling into the trap of the ideology of race:<br />
<blockquote>How do you explain the visceral and personal pain caused by the killing of a black person you did not even know to people who did not grow up with, as their legacy, the hushed stories of black bodies hung from trees by a lynching mob populated with sheriff’s deputies?</blockquote>McKnight comments, “The reader, here, is assumed to share a belief in the tenets of racecraft: that race is genetic, that one can know how another might think and behave based on the presumption of race, and that the order of our society is fixed.” McKnight’s attribution <i>far</i> outstrips the actual work of that sentence. The only thing required by that rhetorical question is the participation in a community that exchanges those “hushed stories.” McKnight overreads Hannah-Jones at this point because he’s operating under the assumption that the concept <i>race</i> requires geneticism. The benefit of the Hegelian stance that community precedes concept is that one can avoid the trap of thinking that concepts come <i>necessarily</i> with <i>any</i> conceptual baggage. Rather, words are learned in communities and communities teach them for particular historical reasons to respond to particular situations. You can’t short-circuit the task of understanding a community by jumping straight to conceptual implication.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> I don’t mean to imply that McKnight is not the sensitive cultural critic he actually displays himself to be in “Black as We Wanna Be.” But his argument that racecraft is as illusory as witchcraft (which is the analogy the Fieldses designed) is the kind of cavalier attitude that masks an acknowledgement of the courage actually required to abandon race as cultural category. McKnight gets this, but still fudges the difference when he says: “We’ve lived with racecraft for so long that the mere thought of abdicating one’s colorness can feel like being asked, in a duel, to lower your gun first.” That’s just the problem—it <i>feels like a duel</i> because <i>it is a duel</i>. We can’t just wish the gun away when there are <i>real consequences</i> to not being conscious of the color of one’s skin in certain situations. Conceptual pragmatism is a kind of philosophical idealism in which we create the world in which we live—there is no reality to be seen clearly to correct our concepts, no reality that we can just get everyone to wake up to all at once. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iv.html#fn4">[4]</a> McKnight cites Douglass’s own pragmatism (rather than any ideology of race as natural fact) when Douglass says, “All subjective ideas become more distinct, palpable and strong by the habit of rendering them objective.” Douglass is describing an activity of making what one thinks the reality that others have to operate in. Douglass, McKnight, Bromwich, the Fieldses, and BLM all want to replace one reality with another, but it won’t be accomplished by hoping our long, national nightmare is like the Salem Witch Trials.<br />
<br />
McKnight is right that “in the face of what often feels like a siege against all of the people who identify and are identified as your kind, self-preservation is a powerful impulse.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iv.html#fn5">[5]</a> He’s also very right that “self-preservation alone cannot lead us to a more equal society, because self-preservation would never let you put the gun down.” This perfectly characterizes the moral courage actually required in our cultural situation, as opposed to pretending the gun doesn’t exist. While I’ve tried to identify <i>something</i> cavalier in McKnight’s argument, that is not how I would characterize McKnight’s stance as a whole. I think the stakes are just as he describes them, on the “intellectual and spiritual plane.” The fact that <i>The Nation</i> carries this conversation among leftists is a tribute to the vitality of leftist debate. Though the Emersonian left is often overshadowed because it unsettlingly echoes the right’s magic words of “individualism” and ”choice,” the still too-Marxist intellectual left in America needs to be reminded of its own implicit agreement on what the America they want to achieve looks like: a just freespace of self-definition.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> All quotations of McKnight are from “Black as We Wanna Be,” <i>The Nation</i>, Oct. 10, 2016.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> Quoted in McKnight.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> For some context for this vocabulary of discussion, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec2">sec. 2 of “The Legacy of Group Thinking.”</a><br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> A clear moment of fudging the difference between having courage and being cavalier is when McKnight says, “Neither have we healed from racism’s trauma; neither have we awoken from racecraft’s spell.” It takes courage to grow from one’s trauma; it’s cavalier to think that trauma is just a hypnotic sleep we can be snapped out of. See my own use of “trauma” to talk about Bromwich’s cavalier stance in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec5">sec. 5 to the end of “Legacy.”</a><br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> I think one should emphasize “are identified” much more, which was the major argument I took to Bromwich’s book in "Legacy." See sec. 5’s argument about “racial wisdom,” especially with footnote 9.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-89413883225551482092014-08-22T04:00:00.000-07:002014-08-22T12:56:35.076-07:00Lit Crits Reading Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity<b>0.</b> The main bits of what follows (along with some other bits I’ll post about Rorty soon <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn1">[1]</a>) were written during my last re-reading of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> with a reading group I’d convinced some colleagues to participate in a couple summers ago. I produced the below as a general introduction to Rorty and to analytic philosophy generally for an educated audience with no background in it—specifically, however, for graduate students in English departments. I’ve decided not to mess with the intended audience, so some of it isn’t generally applicable. So what you’ll find below is this: Part 1 is a little background and a general pitch to read Rorty (largely, my imagined audience is lit crits for this section). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#sec2">Part 2</a> is a summary of its (table of) contents. Parts 3 through 6 are a motley crew of diverse topics based on my sense of what objections to reading Rorty without knowing him come up, along with different potted summaries of important philosophical elements: <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#sec3">“On Rorty’s Interpretations,”</a> <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#sec5">“On Pragmatism,”</a> <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#sec7">“On Antirepresentationalism,”</a> and <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#sec12">“On Argumentation.”</a> In large part, these sections are extended summaries of both historical and conceptual background to Rorty’s positions so that a reader of Rorty can be in a better position to accept or reject what he’s talking about. Since I think criticism of Rorty has been lacking in acute understanding of what he means and of the implications of what he says, this has seemed to me important. (And in the case of my defensive background to antirepresentationalism, it’s somewhat on the other side of what Rorty says.) I’ve also included two appendices. One is a <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#appendix1">select bibliography</a> for post-linguistic turn pragmatism. The other is an itemizing of the main riffs of the book—like a more <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#appendix2">detailed table of contents</a>. This might be the most useful thing in the post, ultimately.<br />
<a name=sec1></a><br />
<b>1.</b> During the 1970s, Rorty came to prominence as an “analytic philosopher,” a designation used loosely to identify Anglo-American philosophers who read Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and symbolic logic with more avidity than Nietzsche, Heidegger, and intellectual history. During the 1980s, Rorty—rightly or wrongly—became known as a traitor to his faith because of his book <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i> (1979), which was read with far more avidity by those outside American philosophy departments than those in it. It purported to hoist analytic philosophy by its own petard, an insider’s account using the most insidery of authorities and lines of argument to call into question the mission and purpose of those on the inside—and those on the outside, having been annoyed by the closed club, tended to agree that it succeeded in doing so. Rorty’s betrayal coincided with his rise in popularity with literary critics, as he wrote more and more often about literary theory and the topics and people literary theorists talk about.<br />
<br />
<i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> (1989) is the central text of Rorty’s career—all of his work before moves towards it and all of his work after extends out from it. It sketches a philosophy of language, an epistemology, a political and moral philosophy, a literary theory (-ish, of sorts), and a story about the history of Western metaphysics and moral progress. And maybe a few other things as well.<br />
<br />
There are two general reasons for a budding literary scholar to dabble in Rorty’s book today: 1) to better know from the inside a prominent conversation partner from the heyday of literary theory (which I take to be the ‘80s and ‘90s) and 2) to strengthen one’s own theoretical scruples against a comprehensive viewpoint (though just what “comprehensive” would mean for Rorty is one of those things widely misunderstood). Rorty is a stringent antifoundationalist, and his monomaniacal attempt to think through what philosophy and theory should look like after one swallows that pill—taken from any number of the heroes that cast their shadow over English departments: Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, post-structuralism, New Historicism, post-colonialism, cultural studies—can be a useful test to exercise one’s own philosophical instincts. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn2">[2]</a> Or to help you find some.<br />
<br />
There are two further reasons to read Rorty, depending on your specialty. If you are a romanticist (British, German, American, French, whatever), Rorty sees philosophical pragmatism as a submovement to the larger Romantic movement. His picture of language, the self, and community can be seen as an interpretation of what’s living in Shelley’s “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” (If you are a modernist, Rorty once said that postmodernism in philosophy and theory was just philosophy catching up to literary modernism.) If you are an Americanist, pragmatism as America’s indigenous philosophical movement has been gaining more attention lately as literary scholars try to identify the larger intellectual currents at work, which one can find in not just philosophers, but other cultural performers (since, as I implied earlier, the philosophers themselves aren’t about to do it). This has had a lot to do with Stanley Cavell, but if Cornel West is right, and I think he is in <i>The American Evasion of Philosophy</i>, then the philosophical movement that begins with Peirce, James, and Dewey and continues to Rorty, Putnam, and others has its roots in Emerson. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn3">[3]</a> Rorty didn’t talk much of Emerson until the very end of his career, but it isn’t difficult to see the genealogy.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> This is the outline of the book<blockquote>Part I: Contingency<br />
1) The Contingency of Language<br />
2) The Contingency of Selfhood<br />
3) The Contingency of a Liberal Community<br />
<br />
Part II: Ironism and Theory<br />
4) Private Irony and Liberal Hope<br />
5) Self-Creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger<br />
6) From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida<br />
<br />
Part III: Cruelty and Solidarity<br />
7) The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty<br />
8) The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty<br />
9) Solidarity</blockquote>Part I sketches the basics of Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy, as both epistemology and political philosophy. Its highlights are his account of metaphor as the basic unit of language, his attempt to efface the final remains of Platonic essentialism from Romanticism, and his account of left-liberalism in the face of Marxism (a particular highlight here being his deft schematization of Habermas and Foucault—the former is “a liberal unwilling to be an ironist” and the latter “an ironist unwilling to be a liberal”).<br />
<br />
Part I culminates in the fourth chapter, the first of Part II. It is here that Rorty outlines his infamous figure of the “liberal ironist.” He also begins to say nice things about literary critics and outlines the utility of the classic liberal distinction between private and public spheres as a means of dividing up lists of books—the first are books good for self-enlargement and the second are books good for holding a community together. This then divides the second movement of the book, which includes the last two chapters of Part II and the first two of Part III.<br />
<br />
Chapters 5 and 6 give an account of the “end of metaphysics” sequence of Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida by suggesting that their importance is to those who were already caught up by the power-dreams of Plato—Plato’s dream of ruling the world with his mind. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn3">[3]</a> The account is particularly intended to suggest that this sequence does not have any particular consequences for how we think about life together with each other—that any moral or political consequences of their work (their <i>anti-metaphysical</i> work) can be brushed off. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn4">[4]</a><br />
<br />
Chapters 7 and 8 concentrate on books good for public morality. Since Rorty follows Judith Shklar in defining the liberal as one for whom “cruelty is the worst thing one can do,” the books he suggests bring out that thematic. His chapter on Nabokov focuses on <i>Lolita</i> and <i>Pale Fire</i> as about heightening our awareness of how we are privately cruel to each other (through obsession), and attempts to balance against that Nabokov’s own aestheticism (his hatred of “topical trash” that helped public morality). Rorty’s chapter on Orwell focuses on <i>1984</i> as a scenario about what intellectuals would do in a world given an antifoundationalist picture of culture—conceptual humiliation. O’Brien is a picture of what is latent in all of us who are smarter than others. (And balanced against this picture of Orwell is Orwell’s own sense that “truth” <i>is</i> an effective weapon in the nightmare of <i>1984</i>, which Rorty argues is not an available position for thorough-going antifoundationalists.)<br />
<br />
And Chapter 9 just kinda’ sums things up.<br />
<br />
In the rest of this space, I will talk about some of the special issues that can come up in reading <i>Contingency</i>, and try to fill in some special gaps in philosophical background one might have in approaching the book. One might first, though, peruse my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/05/introduction-to-rorty.html">“Introduction to Rorty.”</a><br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3. On Rorty’s Interpretations</b> When Rorty says at the beginning that “parts of this book skate on pretty thin ice – the passages in which I offer controversial interpretations of authors whom I discuss only briefly. This is particularly true of my treatment of Proust and of Hegel – authors about whom I hope someday to write more fully. But in other parts of the book the ice is a bit thicker” (xi)—take him seriously, but ask yourself what this means in terms of our responsibility as readers and writers. For the professionalization of the humanities has meant increasing specialization, as big problems are broken into smaller and smaller problems, which begin accumulating their own histories, as the scholarly literature on a subsubsubject stretches further and further into the past. Being a <i>scholar</i> in part means knowing your way around the major players and arguments of your field, but the difficulty of this in an age of specialization was already being felt in <i>1938</i>, when A. O. Lovejoy—often marked as a <i>progenitor</i> of the history of ideas as a subdiscipline—said, “…it is now plain that the scholar who wishes to understand sufficiently the material within almost any one these divisions [of subfields in intellectual history, e.g. history of science or literary history] must take account of material lying, according to the conventional boundary-lines, in other—often in several other—divisions. But no man, obviously, can be a competent original investigator in many provinces even of history.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn5">[5]</a> <br />
<br />
I point this out first because one important criticism of Rorty has been not only on the accuracy of his interpretations—a category he quite nearly (and misleadingly) abjures—but on his moral irresponsibility in promulgating them. One of the implicit lessons of <i>Contingency</i> is the importance of having a <i>large view</i>—a large synoptic account of the history of, well, everything. Or if not that, a large view that engulfs your own activities—a view in which you can situate yourself. Rorty was fond of Wilfrid Sellars’ definition of philosophy: “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term.” But this clearly borders on professional irresponsibility, for who could specialize in that? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn6">[6]</a><br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> But do it we must, and a good way of thinking about taking the long, large view of history and thought is as inherently philosophical—taking a big view automatically means you are taking a stance on today’s conceptual issues by which you narrate the path to those views. Taking a big view means waging philosophical war—and that means you have to gird yourself with the right equipment. Whether it’s the history of literary criticism (a history of the tools the critic uses), the history of literary conventions (a history of the author’s tools), or the history of other stuff, like the history of philosophy, or politics, or class warfare—you can’t be a specialist in all of these things, but you might need to have a view of them. And doing so means picking out <i>one</i> thread among many—and argument about that choice will be philosophical, insofar as it is inconclusive because about guiding assumptions, rather than about how to work out the implications of agreed upon premises.<br />
<br />
Rorty’s “other stuff” would be primarily filled in by the history of philosophy. Though Rorty doesn’t officially make a distinction between the genres of poetry, philosophy, and the novel, he is yet specifically concerned with generating <i>philosophical views</i> from his readings, which is different than other concerns one might have doing literary criticism, or other things more generally. However, I think it is important to see that for Rorty, there is nothing inimical to Rorty’s procedure in the impact of other concerns on the meaning of a text (e.g. economic or political history). People often criticize Rorty for, essentially, not talking about what they want to talk about, but that’s a social faux pas, not an argument. But—say you understand Rorty well enough to reply, “wait, but doesn’t Rorty think that the only real thing to do against assumptions and premises you don’t want to use is to change the subject, not argue against them?” (See CIS 8-9) He does think that, but if one has come round to it, then one should also see that the real faux pas wasn’t <i>Rorty’s</i>, but the critic for tactlessly formulating their objections as direct arguments—for whining that he isn’t talking about you. The only way out of this circle of offense is an easygoing ecumenicism—there is room for many concerns. That doesn’t mean we abjure entirely the activity of being critical of each other’s concerns, but it does mean we carry that activity on in a different manner.<br />
<br />
As for what even Rorty thought of as his particular, slanted interpretations of individual thinkers, I leave the last word to Daniel Dennett, a reply to the paper Rorty cites in CIS 13n4:<blockquote>I find Professor Rorty’s bird’s-eye view of the history of philosophy of mind both fascinating and extremely useful, full of insights and provocation, and, of course, flattering [it was a progressive history that ended in Dennett’s lap]. Rorty proceeds by deliberate and knowing oversimplification – often a useful tactic – and since it is useful on this occasion, it would be particularly counter-productive for me to succumb to the powerful temptation to plow <i>seriatim</i> through his account restoring all the complications he has so deftly ignored. My first reaction, though, is that the momentum he builds up in the course of his interpretations leads to a certain overshooting of the mark. Also, like many other revolutionaries before him, Rorty has trouble deciding whether to declare victory, declare that victory is inevitable, or implore you to join in a difficult and uncertain struggle against the powers of darkness. I ask myself: Am I a <i>nominalist</i>? Do I declare the death of theories of the mind? Am I – or should I be – a Village Verificationist after all? [All imputed notions by Rorty.] I always seem to want to answer: <i>not quite</i>. Since I, as an irremediably narrow-minded and unhistorical analytic philosopher, am always looking for a good excuse not to have to read Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida or those other chaps who don’t have the decency to think in English, I am tempted by Rorty’s performance on this occasion to enunciate a useful hermeneutical principle, <b>the Rorty Factor: Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742</b>. After all, if Rorty can find so much more in my own writing than I put there, he’s probably done the same or better for Heidegger – which means I can save myself the trouble of reading Heidegger; I can just read Rorty’s PMN and come out about 40% ahead – while enjoying the reading at the same time. … Balancing the <i>prima facie</i> presumption in favor of authorial authority is the well-known fact that people battling it out in the trenches seldom have a clear perspective on what they’ve accomplished, or even what the deeper point of their skirmishes might be. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn7">[7]</a> (bold is mine)</blockquote><a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5. On Pragmatism</b> One of the most important formulas for coming to grips with what Rorty takes pragmatism’s core to be is <i>belief is a habit of action</i>. For Rorty, the fundamental identity of pragmatism is the reversal of Plato’s attitude that theorists should dictate to the world—it instead amounts to saying that <i>praxis</i> has priority over <i>theoria</i>. This fundamental orientation emits into the social-practice theories we associate with Dewey in particular, and then Sellars, Rorty, and Robert Brandom, though it goes back to Hegel (and thence to Marx in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” in a different genealogy). Every theory is grounded in practice; every saying is a doing, such that not only can you give an account of what you are doing by what you say (such as Austinian speech-act theory), you should (must) be able to give an account of what it is for a doing to count as a saying—that would be a pragmatic, Wittgensteinian account of language such that “meaning is use,” emitting in an inferential semantics <i>grounded</i> in a normative pragmatics (à la Brandom).<br />
<br />
Four good precursor moments are these: <br />
<br />
The idea itself about beliefs being treated as habits of action should be traced to Alexander Bain: a belief is “of that which a man is prepared to act” (<i>The Senses and the Intellect</i>, 1855). Peirce and James encountered Bain through Nicholas St. John Green in the Metaphysical Club, the famous group of mid-19<sup>th</sup> century intellectuals.<br />
<br />
Peirce said in his pragmatist tract, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), that belief is “the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a <i>habit</i>.” This is the central articulation of pragmatism about belief. (He also said in the same paragraph that belief “is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life,” which makes me think of Kenneth Burke: “the symbolic act is the <i>dancing of an attitude</i>.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn8">[8]</a>)<br />
<br />
James uses this idea in “The Will to Believe” (1896): “The maximum of liveness [from James’s criteria of a genuine option for thought as forced, living, and momentous] in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.” And then see, more famously, James’s articulation of what he calls “Peirce’s principle”: “To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all” (“What Pragmatism Means,” 1906).<br />
<br />
But if the formula about belief comes most directly from Bain, one must still compare Emerson: “The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action” (“The American Scholar,” 1837).<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> One important element in Rorty’s understanding of pragmatism that is connected to the priority of practice to theory is his construal of language as a <i>tool</i> rather than as a <i>medium</i> of representation. Here are three nice precursor passages to Rorty’s argument:<br />
<br />
Wittgenstein: “Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn9">[9]</a> <br />
<br />
James: “Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic <i>words</i> have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. … That word names the universe’s <i>principle</i>, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. … But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be <i>changed</i>. <i>Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest</i>.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn10">[10]</a><br />
<br />
Dewey: “Speaking from the standpoint of anthropology Franz Boas says: ‘The two outer traits in which the distinction between the minds of animals and man finds expression are the existence of organized articulate speech in man and the use of utensils of varied application.’ It is antecedently probable that sole external marks of difference are more than external; that they have intimate connection with such intrinsic differences as religion, art and science, industry and politics. ‘Utensils’ were discussed in the last chapter, in connection with the useful arts and knowledge, and their indispensable relation with science pointed out. But at every point appliances and application, utensils and uses, are bound up with directions, suggestions and records made possible by speech; what has been said about the role of tools is subject to a condition supplied by <b>language, the tool of tools</b>.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn11">[11]</a> (bold is mine)<br />
<a name=sec7></a><br />
<b>7. On Antirepresentationalism</b> If fundamental pragmatism is in some manner the priority of practice to theory, then how does one apply that to <i>theory</i>, to philosophy? Rorty thought that pragmatism’s role in the history of thought was the codification of a certain set of philosophical views that had accrued to the attempts to do philosophy in the Platonic manner. Central to this orientation is the idea that life is an inquiry and refinement of our attitudes and beliefs. If that has priority—like in the Socratic mode of living an examined life—then one will find it easy to swallow Peirce’s maxim that “one must not block the way of inquiry” (“The First Rule of Logic,” 1898). Rorty followed Dewey in often deploying Locke’s conception of the philosopher as an underlaborer, moving out the conceptual debris that accumulates after special disciplines blow the rock out for new pathways of thought. The main concern here is that <i>old</i> modes of thought can make new ones difficult to hew. So Rorty’s main targets in philosophy are Platonic artifacts, since Rorty takes the moral of the last 2500 years of inquiry to be that Platonic philosophy has become outmoded. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn12">[12]</a><br />
<br />
This being the case, the priority of this orientation to philosophy assures that the <i>specific</i> theses that a philosopher might hold as a pragmatist are up for grabs. Eventually, many of the positions that the classical pragmatists held and promulgated might be found wanting on specific kinds of ground. This irony is embodied in the joke so often made by critics of pragmatism about the so-called “pragmatist theory of truth”—that its definition, “truth is what works,” must be false because it doesn’t work. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn13">[13]</a> For some time during the 20<sup>th</sup> century, pragmatism was thought to stand or fall on its theory of truth, as if that was centrally what it was or had to contribute. Rorty’s suggestion that pragmatism doesn’t, popular conception to the contrary, even <i>have</i> a theory of truth was one way that Rorty tried to make this point about pragmatism. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn14">[14]</a> Pragmatism is, in this sense, first a <i>meta</i>philosophy. What the priority of <i>praxis</i> to <i>theoria</i> means for philosophy is that specific theses must be picked up one at a time and tested on their ability to pass the pragmatist test—what’s the difference that makes a difference? <br />
<a name=sec8></a><br />
<b>8.</b> Since in philosophy it can often be hard to see what practical difference follows from a theoretical position, and even just what would count as a practical difference, pragmatism often functions as a set of negative dialectical devices—a set of “anti-”s employed against currently identified Platonic ghosts, still haunting our attempts to make our way about the world. Pragmatism as a tradition, in this sense, is the accumulated wisdom of anti-Platonism. One of these is <i>antirepresentationalism</i>. However, before talking directly about it—since Rorty does most of the elaboration of it in <i>Contingency</i>—I think it’s useful to begin with C. G. Prado’s remark:<blockquote>“Teaching Rorty is difficult. Students respond favourably, but superficially, to his critique. They consider it iconoclastic and exciting, but few of them have had the time to feel the grip of what he rejects. They may appreciate in an abstract way that it is unproductive to do epistemology but few can feel <i>liberated</i> by Rorty’s critique because they have not been captives of [Richard] Bernstein’s ‘Cartesian Anxiety’.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn15">[15]</a></blockquote>Prado’s point is that one won’t understand the point of pragmatism unless one feels the force of Platonism, just as one won’t see the point of a Road Clearing Service unless one sees the debris blocking the highway.<br />
<br />
“Cartesian Anxiety” was Bernstein’s helpful name for the peculiar epistemological trouble that Descartes imprinted upon modern philosophy. You won’t feel Cartesian Anxiety just because you’ve been burned a few times about what is the case in the world— <i>doubt</i> of some current beliefs is not enough to induce the specific kind of doubt that Descartes represents. You need <i>additional collateral commitments</i> to fall into a global skepticism about <i>all</i> of your beliefs, or what Peirce lampooned as “fake doubt.” As Bernstein says of Descartes’ <i>Meditations</i>, “the specter that hovers in the background of this journey [of the soul] is not just radical epistemological skepticism but the dread of madness and chaos where nothing is fixed, where we can neither touch bottom nor support ourselves on the surface.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn16">[16]</a><br />
<br />
Ultimately, what induces Cartesian Anxiety is commitment to a theoretical project aimed at accounting for the relationships between persons, words, and the world. This general theoretical project—<i>philosophy</i>—can be broken down into <i>a lot</i> of smaller projects trying to do smaller things. The image here is of philosophy as the origin-inquiry, a tree growing out of the ground of life, and when a branch of philosophy falls off, it sometimes grows its own roots in the ground, becoming a special science of some kind. When these special disciplines, like physics, break off from philosophy, they typically take the problems they work on with them—this narrows what philosophers do as other people successfully specialize. As more and more special disciplines arose, the fewer things philosophers thought of as their purview.<br />
<a name=sec9></a><br />
<b>9.</b> Cartesian Anxiety is a <i>modern</i> manifestation of a broader current: commitment to explaining how knowledge works plus <i>respectful fear of an infinite regress</i>. Pressing the claim “How do you know?” eventually pushes a conversation toward attention on the verbs doing the work of articulating the activity involved in framing the claim—this inevitably makes the conversation about how knowing works. Respect for the problem of the infinite regress is a commitment to the idea that one should justify each claim—but since each justification is itself a claim, this could go on indefinitely, thus committing you to a life of nothing but self-justification. Special disciplines don’t care about the infinite regress—when pressed about how they know a certain claim of theirs is true, they eventually stop and say, “because I’m a physicist—that’s how I know there’s gravity.” Physicists aren’t required to have a general account of how <i>knowledge</i> works; they only need an account of how particles and waves work, just declaring at the end that they’ve added to our knowledge. Fear of an infinite regress, however, makes one edgy about just how that knowledge composes itself. The primary response mechanism in European philosophy has been <i>foundationalism</i>—the attempt to stop the regress upon something hard, stable, and unjustifiable, er, self-justifying.<br />
<br />
Foundationalism begins with Plato’s notion of the “land beyond hypotheses.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn17">[17]</a> Plato understood that claims are moved forward by <i>supposing</i> a P and working out its inferential consequences in Q and thence to R. You have to <i>hypothesize</i> the truth of P to get an inferential chain off the ground, though, because else you’ll spend the rest of your life moving backwards, justifying P with O, O with N, on and on. Aristotle’s notion of the “Prime Mover” picks up the same idea, dealing not with the conceptual-epistemological realm of reason but the material-metaphysical realm of <i>cause</i>—what was the finger that flicked the first domino? Modern foundationalism begins when Descartes turns the infinite regress into a weapon—follow the rabbit down the hole until you reach the bottom: What can I <i>not doubt</i>? This made <i>answering the skeptic</i>—who doubts ever claim you throw out, always asking, “How do you know?”—the problem that took priority in doing epistemology, and thus structuring the inquiry.<br />
<br />
So—modern epistemological foundationalism is a function of the theoretical project of accounting for how knowledge functions and of the fear of an infinite regress posed by the skeptic: this is tantamount to making <i>certainty</i> central to one’s epistemological problematic rather than any other concept (authority, belief, truth, justification, etc.).<br />
<br />
But—doesn’t that make <i>foundationalism</i> and not <i>representationalism</i> the Platonic ghost?<br />
<br />
Yes.<br />
<a name=sec10></a><br />
<b>10.</b> Philosophical theses are bound up with one another, and themselves bound up with metaphors and images we use to articulate the structure of those theses—for example, a <i>foundation</i>, like under a house. However, the metaphors themselves don’t intrinsically carry with them philosophical theses. For example, if I were asked for the <i>grounds</i> of my claim (“on what grounds do you believe that?”), despite the fact “ground” belongs in the same family as “foundation,” the question is perfectly non-foundationalist—I’m simply being asked for my <i>justification</i>.<br />
<br />
It’s important to remember this point every time Rorty talks about rejecting metaphors or images—it’s the cloying attachment of philosophical theses born out in traditions of thought that makes Rorty nauseous. <i>Representationalism</i> is a philosophical family of theses that treats language’s primary purpose to be the accurate representation or mirroring of or correspondence to the world. This is largely an epistemological issue, and since it has most recently been fought out on the turf of philosophy of language, this accounts for Rorty’s particular modes of elaborating the pragmatist position. Different Platonic enemies would have called for different modes of being anti-Platonist.<br />
<br />
But as philosophy became increasingly focused on how language functions, it has opened up new vistas upon which to think about the idea of representation. For example, on the <i>semantic</i> score, representationalism—because it focuses on the relation between person and world <i>via media</i> (ideas, words, etc.)—has centered on “aboutness”: how something is <i>about</i> something else (e.g., a word about the world). Rorty has been accused of relishing a spirit of free play by authorizing a relinquishing of concern about the world in his abjuration of representationalism (mainly because of his early paper “The World Well Lost”). The argument is that by getting rid of representation one is getting rid of <i>constraint</i> imposed on one’s practices <i>by</i> the world—there’s nothing on the other end of the “about,” no object to check against what you want to say <i>about it</i>. But Rorty will often say that there’s nothing in antirepresentationalism that speaks against using the word “about.”<br />
<a name=sec11></a><br />
<b>11.</b> And then there are all the other kinds of representation—<i>literary</i> representation, <i>political</i> representation, <i>geographical</i>. Typically so-called “symbolic” modes, as in the first two cases, seem more obviously unaffected by Rorty’s polemics: the strike against representationalism is a strike against <i>realisms</i> that say the world tells us how things should be described. But <i>maps</i> seem to bring us around to the problem again by forcing us to seriously consider <i>how exactly we redescribe relevant modes of discourse</i>—we draw the lines on the map, but we didn’t put the mountain on the earth. So—not only how do we describe modes that seem to have obvious forms of isomorphism with “the world” (maps, “the cat is on the mat”), but how do we precisely describe <i>differences</i> in modes?<br />
<br />
<i>Any and every</i> theoretical collapsing move you encounter (“Xs are really nothing but Ys”) is in the <i>service</i> of some purpose. Since there is more than one purpose with which to service speech acts (and therefore descriptions, distinctions, and entire modes of discourse), having a fine grained sense of <i>when to give a shit about antirepresentationalism</i> can be as important as trying live by its consequences.<br />
<a name=sec12></a><br />
<b>12. On Argumentation</b> One of Rorty’s most provocative positions is on the utility of arguments, and certainly his most provocative moment (for philosophers) is when he says at the beginning of <i>Contingency</i> that he isn’t going to offer any. One of the reasons Rorty thinks of arguments as subsidiary to interesting philosophical work is because he thinks of interesting philosophy as <i>world-disclosure</i>—this is like hanging things together, but throwing out some new stuff to hang together during the process. In this mode, his early dictum that “any philosophical position can be made impervious and self-coherent with enough time and ingenuity” suggests that a clever enough visionary can always add the necessary epicycles to refine his account and make counter-arguments fall flat. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn18">[18]</a><br />
<br />
So the question to ask about argumentative holes is <i>not</i> “can the position be saved?” <i>but</i> “how seriously should I take this objection?” This latter question is the more difficult one of assessing the motivations of the objection and the history of cultural production that has produced them. This is the problem of <i>vocabulary</i> choice, which occupies most of Rorty’s attention. It is not that arguments are unimportant, it is that they are <i>abbreviations</i> for visions—<i>internal</i> arguments with members of your own party affiliation are disputes about how best to get the vision in working order. <i>External</i> arguments, while pointing out holes that need addressing, are also <i>dismissive</i> in the sense that they are meant to induce you to drop the vocabulary entirely. So assessing an (external) argument is partly an assessment of whether <i>you</i> the philosopher take it seriously for a reason you haven’t made explicit to yourself and that just might override your current vocabulary choice—but it <i>wasn’t the argument</i> that overrides, it was the <i>vision</i> that you in the end decide is better or more important.<br />
<a name=sec13></a><br />
<b>13.</b> An important notion to understand here is what Rorty means when he says arguments are <i>parasitic</i>. What he means is that logical inference functions on this model of the syllogism:<blockquote>Premise 1 P<br />
Premise 2 If P, then Q<br />
Conclusion 1 Q (because of modus ponens, which is Latin for “how a conditional locution works, dumbass”)<br />
</blockquote>On this model, you have to <i>assume</i> two things as your premises before you can draw the conclusion, or prove it or justify it. “Why ‘Q?” “Oh, because ‘P’ and ‘If P, then Q’.” “Oh, I see, you’re assuming P. But I don’t think P is actually a good claim at all.” Ah, but for the purposes of the inference, it is assumed. But now you are being asked to defend P, which makes you move backward in the constellation of your claims.<blockquote>Premise 1 R<br />
Premise 2 If R, then P<br />
Conclusion 2 P</blockquote>But what if your interlocutor questions R? This could go on <i>ad infinitum</i>, and indeed this problem is what motivated Plato and Aristotle to be concerned about infinite regress and suggest foundationalism for how argument works: all good arguments <i>actually</i> rest their back on the foundation whether we as of yet know it or not, and if we could find this foundation, then we’d be able to sort out which arguments are good or bad. So Rorty sees that the attack against foundationalism is an attack on how arguments (are thought to) work.<br />
<a name=sec14></a><br />
<b>14.</b> Starting with John Stuart Mill, the idea that the premises in arguments are actually <i>self-reinforcing</i> became a rising star in logic. (Notice the “actually”: is this a metaphysical noise?) Mill said in his System of Logic that “if logic did not contain real inferences, all deductive reasoning would be <i>petitio principii</i>, a begging of the question.” <br />
<br />
Rorty is essentially denying that there are these things called “real inferences” because it is Platonic: a “real inference” would work from a “fact,” and not from the definition of words, and that fact is what would make the inference real and not question-begging. (If you are familiar with the idiom, a real inference would be synthetic and its opposite analytic, and Mill is saying that some of our inferences <i>have</i> to be synthetic. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn19">[19]</a>) Thus Rorty’s polemic against facts, which all have to be stated in a vocabulary: words that reinforce each other. (Look in a dictionary for an example of how words reinforce each other.) So if you abjure the vocabulary a fact is stated in, then you are abjuring all those things the people who use the vocabulary call “facts.” But: are you denying the facts or the ability to <i>state</i> those facts?<br />
<br />
When Rorty calls arguments parasitic, he’s saying that an inferential argument against the facts—to deny those facts—has to be stated in the vocabulary that created those facts. But to deny the vocabulary denies the ability to even state the facts, and thus begs the question because you’ve denied the person the ability to say what he wants to say because you’ve <i>assumed</i> that starting that way is the wrong way. I say “assumed” because if a vocabulary is self-reinforcing—in the manner that if you had above asked for justification of R, I would have given you a proof that assumes Q, thus running around in a nice circle—then there’s nothing to break reinforcement except for not entering the whirlpool.<br />
<a name=sec15></a><br />
<b>15.</b> What Rorty does with this point is to say that what we need, then, is a new constellation of self-reinforcing commitments—i.e., a new vocabulary. He’s abjuring argument <i>now</i> because he has to put in place the new commitments that will argumentatively reinforce each other <i>later</i>.<br />
<br />
Another way to put this is to make a distinction between two types of claims: there are entitlement-claims that <i>justify</i> a commitment and there are commitment-claims that <i>express</i> a commitment. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn20">[20]</a> One reason why we need to make a distinction between the two is to avoid a practical infinite regress: if we in practice did not make a distinction between the two, then a person’s mouth would open and then never close (“I believe P because Q because R because S because...”). So, because this is obviously not the case, we in practice make a distinction between entitlement-justifying-claims and commitment-expressing-claims. What Rorty’s announcing in his abjuration of arguments is that he will be making claims (and so stating “how things are”), but they will be commitment-claims and <i>without</i> (largely) their attending entitlement-claims. The reason why he thinks he needs to do this is because “vocabulary,” in his vision, equates to “commitment-claims,” and so he needs to lay out a bunch of commitment-claims and show how they hang together before he can start plausibly <i>using</i> those commitment-claims to justify the other one’s in the constellation (see Ch. 4 on “final vocabularies”). In other words, he thinks you need a bunch of the commitment-claims out there before you can start plausibly <i>converting</i> them into entitlement-claims. And this would be what “holism” demarcates, or the “hermeneutical circle.”<br />
<a name=sec16></a><br />
<b>16. Conclusion?</b> This has been an odd exercise in writing, and I’m not terribly sure it was a good one. It wasn’t really a summary of Rorty’s book, so I’m not really sure if any of the last sections are useful to someone who hasn’t read any Rorty before. One reason I’m confused, as a writer, is that I was finished with everything I was going to say at the end of the last section—but it clearly didn’t feel like an ending.<br />
<br />
So, let me just close by saying: some people don’t like Rorty because of the way he sounds. Some people don’t like Rorty because of the philosophical positions they think he takes. Some people don’t like Rorty because they think he’s an irresponsible scholar.<br />
<br />
I like Rorty. I have a personal relationship with the voice embedded in his writing. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn21">[21]</a> A friend of mine read a little of Rorty and thought he was arrogant. I have nothing to say to that. It’s like when someone recommends a band to listen to—if you hate the band, you might wonder why the friend ever suggested you’d like it. Sometimes it’s because the friend is piously trying to get everyone to like what they love. I don’t have that interest. I have an interest in defending Rorty’s philosophy, because it’s pretty much the place where I begin mine, but I don’t care if everyone has the same experience reading him as I do. One can have a philosophy that corresponds to all the tenets I think important to hold without having read Rorty, or any pragmatist for that matter.<br />
<a name=sec17></a><br />
<b>17.</b> But if one thinks one disagrees with Rorty’s philosophy, it’s important to bear in mind just how trashed an image he has—trashed by, basically, gossip. I don’t mean something risqué, like de Man’s anti-Semitic writings or a cuckolding. I mean how people make claims about Rorty’s philosophy when they are easily refutable by citing Rorty’s work. I take as an example somebody who could not possibly be taken for a virulent critic of Rorty (though there are many I would count as those): Ian Hacking. Hacking is a wonderful, clear, powerful philosopher in Rorty’s generation. I don’t know Hacking’s corpus the way I do Rorty’s, but I can’t think of anything important they might disagree about. In fact, this must be widely perceived, because Cheryl Misak, one this generation’s more important analytic pragmatists, hounded Hacking to write a contribution to her collection of articles from powerful contemporary pragmatist(ish) voices, <i>New Pragmatists</i>. So he wrote one, with due apology, called “On Not Being a Pragmatist.”<br />
<br />
In that paper, he says<blockquote>I have recently been deeply influenced by Bernard Williams’s last book, <i>Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy</i>. This has received a pretty lukewarm reception, like Colin McGinn’s. If we may take Richard Rorty’s review as expressing the neo-pragmatist reaction, then this book shares almost nothing with pragmatism. … Williams takes <i>truth</i> to be timeless, to have no history, to be part of the structure necessary for human linguistic communication. … In contrast, Williams takes <i>truthfulness</i> about a subject matter to have a history and to have a beginning. … I had the good luck to express the idea correctly in 1982: “although whichever propositions are true depends on date, the fact that they are candidates for being true is a consequence of historical fact.” … These ideas of truth, truthfulness, and objectivity are foreign to neo-pragmatism.</blockquote>I have the deepest admiration for Hacking’s work as a philosopher, but this made me sad. Williams comes close to being a virulent critic of Rorty’s, but I’ve come to think of him as more of a friend than an enemy. Williams has some detailed things to say about Rorty in that book, but I think they are ultimately negligible. (And answerable, though I’ve yet had the opportunity to work it out.) For if Hacking’s right in his broad-brush characterization of the upshot of Williams’s book, then Rorty’s totally on board. “Williams takes <i>truth</i> to be timeless”—Rorty says, “Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn22">[22]</a> “I had the good luck to express the idea correctly”—Rorty uses Hacking’s notion of a “truth-value candidate” in <i>Contingency</i> to express the historical quality of vocabularies (or in Hacking’s vocabulary, <i>styles</i> of reasoning). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn23">[23]</a> Hacking says that from Rorty’s review, Williams’s book must having nothing in common with neopragmatism: then why does Rorty praise the historical, last half of <i>Truth and Truthfulness</i>?<br />
<br />
What bugs me when this kind of thing happens between two powerful philosophers (like whenever Hilary Putnam opens his mouth about Rorty) is that really interesting differences are avoided—worse, the <i>real issues</i> that should be talked about aren’t allowed to be brought up. From reading Rorty’s polemical use of Williams as a realist in the essays on the philosophy of science in <i>Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</i>, I had initially thought of Williams as a “bad guy”—a realist, a Platonist, a representationalist, a metaphysician in the vocabulary of <i>Contingency</i>. After reading more Rorty on Williams and Williams himself, I’ve come to think of Williams as very odd—a perfectly compatible moral philosophy (i.e. historicist, anti-Kantian, and Nietzschean) with a realist epistemology/philosophy of science. Whether or not Rorty’s philosophy of science <i>is</i> compatible with the moral philosophies staked out in Williams’s books is a good question, and it would clarify just what the major philosophical commitments are in play. But that’s not what we usually get.<br />
<a name=sec18></a><br />
<b>18.</b> One of these real issues in the background is about Rorty’s scholarship. I raised the issue in my comments about Rorty’s interpretations. Williams denounced Rorty’s scholarly abilities in his scorching review of <i>Contingency</i>. But I think Rorty’s writing fulfills an important function for the scholar, even if I would concede they don’t take a scholarly form. For example, I have for years been unable to trace Hacking’s notion of a “truth-value candidate” that Rorty from time to time refers to—all uncited. Sometimes Rorty is being allusive, but sometimes you don’t remember—the <i>scholar</i> (and it has to resound in your head with a deep, slow lilt) would never write something that wasn’t properly researched and cited. But the mode of writing Rorty is involved in has somewhat different standards. It’s hard to specify what they are, but it is certainly more relaxed. I think the idea is “though I can’t remember where he says this, you should trust me that he does, because the important thing is to keep the conversation going.” It’s a style we sometimes see referred to as “unforced erudition.” It’s something we don’t get to see much these days from many of our academics, but you can still find it in venues like the <i>London Review of Books</i>. These are venues where scholars can say fresh things, sometimes timely things, without needing a dense forest of books in a bibliography that appear in long, pointless endnotes that are just lists of books the author half-read. Maybe it makes sense, then, that the first three chapters appeared in 1986 in the <i>LRB</i>.<br />
<br />
(See—doesn’t that feel just a little bit more like an ending?)<br />
<br />
<a name=appendix1><u>Appendix 1</u></a><br />
<b>Select Annotated Bibliography of American Pragmatism for Lit Crits</b><br />
<br />
This is just a short list of books that might be useful for tracking down features of American pragmatism. There are three categories that I use to talk about pragmatism, the first two being traditional designations. One is <i>classical</i> pragmatism—the late 19<sup>th</sup>, early 20<sup>th</sup> century originators (Peirce, James, Dewey, but also F. C. S. Schiller, George Herbert Mead, and perhaps others). The other major label is <i>neo</i>pragmatism—this is almost always used primarily to designate mid- to late 20<sup>th</sup> century practitioners that took the “linguistic turn.” However, throughout the period of neopragmatism there have been what we might call “originalists” who disdained analytic philosophy and the linguistic turn, and who mainly contented themselves with being scholars of their classical heroes (e.g., John McDermott). Recently, though, there has been a resurgence of mainstream philosophers who wish to “turn back the linguistic turn.” This has bolstered the confidence of pragmatists who disdain analytic philosophy and allowed them back into the main centers of discussion. I call these <i>retro</i>pragmatists. I mainly ignore the retropragmatists. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn25">[25]</a><br />
<br />
The best introduction to the core philosophy of classical and neopragmatism:<br />
<b>John P. Murphy, <i>Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson</i></b> – terribly difficult to find, but well worth it. It is the pithiest and most effective pedagogical tool to bootstrap yourself into the core philosophical issues that stretch through this particular, selected canon (Peirce, James, Dewey, Quine, Davidson, Rorty). Since Murphy died before it could be published, it includes a short introduction by Rorty (since he was asked to complete the task of getting it ready).<br />
<br />
The best introductory philosophical history of pragmatism:<br />
<b>Cornel West, <i>The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism</i></b> – What makes West’s story most interesting is that he spends the first three chapters hammering out pragmatism’s roots in Emerson, before taking us through Peirce, James, and Dewey. And second, after finishing Dewey he takes us through W. E. B. DuBois and Lionel Trilling before getting to Quine and Rorty. It’s an illuminating tour that requires no previous knowledge of the subjects—West’s style is less critical-analytical than one might hope for, but he supplies large, sweeping quotations of passages, which makes it a good introductory read. Another good book along these lines is <b>Russell B. Goodman’s <i>American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition</i></b>.<br />
<br />
Self-identified neopragmatists would have to include: Morton White, C. I. Lewis, W. v. O. Quine (first gen); Richard Bernstein, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty (second gen); and Robert Brandom and Huw Price (third gen). Because of the story that some of these pragmatists tell about pragmatism and what counts as pragmatism, the honorary list has been extended to include: Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars (ancestor and first gen), and Donald Davidson (second gen). There are also two important hangers-on: Stanley Fish and Jeffery Stout.<br />
<br />
The first generation is probably negligible, except for the honorary Wittgenstein. He’s interesting for all kinds of reasons for literary critics (e.g., his highly idiosyncratic <i>style</i> of doing philosophy). However, if you really want to read some Quine, Sellars, and Davidson, here are the important bits for seeing their pragmatism:<br />
<br />
<b>Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”</b> in <i>From a Logical Point of View</i><br />
<br />
<b>Sellars, <i>Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind</i></b> – originally collected as a long essay in <i>Science, Perception, and Reality</i>, the edition that stands alone is a <i>must</i> for a non-philosopher because it includes an introduction by Rorty and, most importantly, a Study Guide by Brandom. Sellars was notoriously dense and difficult to read for even insiders. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn26">[26]</a> <br />
<br />
<b>Davidson</b>, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in <i>Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation</i> <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn27">[27]</a><br />
---, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” in <i>Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective</i><br />
---, “The Myth of the Subjective” in same<br />
---, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” in <i>Truth, Language, and History</i> <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-contingency-irony-solidarity.html#fn28">[28]</a><br />
<br />
A very good, though hard to find, systematic introduction to Davidson is <b>Bjørn T. Ramberg’s <i>Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language</i></b>.<br />
<br />
For Wittgenstein, indispensable is the <b><i>Philosophical Investigations</i></b>. Much good scholarship, however, has gone into discovering just what’s going on in there (against, for example, some early interpretations). So, equally indispensable is as a first step, I think, <b>Stanley Cavell’s “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”</b> in his <i>Must We Mean What We Say?</i><br />
<br />
<b>Hilary Putnam, <i>Reason, Truth, and History</i></b> – Putnam was at the center of many of the most interesting philosophical conversations of hardcore analytic philosophy. This book is something like his turning point (much like, and in which he is most like, Rorty’s <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>), and so dives into the middle of technical analytic controversies and comes out with Hegelian, pragmatist positions. His books before it are technical and difficult. His books after are in large part collections of essays, and I’ve found many of them too light. However, one might also try <i>Pragmatism</i> and <i>Beyond the Fact/Value Dichotomy</i>. (I might, however, just have a personal grudge against Putnam given the way he treated Rorty in writing.)<br />
<br />
<b>Richard Bernstein, <i>Beyond Objectivism and Relativism</i></b> – this might be the best introduction to the philosophical concerns and figures that surround Rorty’s move from just analytic philosophy to include continental philosophy. It mints the idea of “Cartesian Anxiety,” which I find indispensable in describing foundationalism, and considers the very idea of anthropology (through Peter Winch, who applied Wittgenstein to social science), the philosophy of science (by rehearsing the storm of controversy that erupted after Kuhn’s <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>), and then turns to a critical engagement with and synthesis of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Rorty. (I should add that Bernstein is one of the few writers on Rorty that is any good. Among that number is also Stout, Ramberg, and Brandom. He and Rorty were born just one year apart and had nearly identical educations (same BA, MA, and PhD)—the only difference, as Bernstein likes to put it, is that Dick B. discovered the importance of Dewey at the <i>beginning</i> of his career, rather than the middle of it as Dick R. did.)<br />
<br />
<b>Stanley Fish, <i>Is There a Text in This Class?</i></b> – if you want a social-practice version of interpretation (which is to say, a pragmatist one), then this is it. (Rorty’s two pithiest essays on this specific subject are “Texts and Lumps” in <i>Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</i> and “The Pragmatist’s Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation” in <i>Philosophy and Social Hope</i>). Two other good essays for approaching Fish as a pragmatist are:<br />
<b>“Rhetoric”</b> in <i>Doing What Comes Naturally</i><br />
<b>“Truth and Toilets”</b> in <i>The Trouble with Principle</i><br />
<br />
<b>Jeffery Stout, <i>Democracy and Tradition</i></b> – this book picks up, and substantially thickens, the kind of political philosophy Rorty articulates in <i>Contingency</i> and in <i>Achieving Our Country</i>. Stout is a philosopher of religion, and through partly criticizing Rorty’s extant engagement with religion, Stout has elaborated a sophisticated philosophy of democracy for the <i>here and now</i>: meaning the United States as we find it now, with terrorism and evangelical conservatism. What I love most about this book is its first two chapters: “Character and Piety from Emerson to Dewey” and “Race and Nation in Baldwin and Ellison.”<br />
<br />
<b>Louis Menand, <i>The Metaphysical Club</i></b> – this is the now standard book to historically situate Peirce, James, and Dewey.<br />
<br />
<b>David Hollinger, “William James and the Culture of Inquiry”</b> in his <i>In the American Province</i> – works excellently with James in his historical context. Hollinger is an American intellectual historian, and the other essays in this volume are also useful for our literary concerns (e.g., one on modernism and another on Perry Miller). Another important essay, when it comes to the history of pragmatism, is <b>James T. Kloppenberg’s “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?”</b> (collected in several places, including <i>The Revival of Pragmatism</i>, mentioned below).<br />
<br />
<b>Robert B. Westbrook, <i>John Dewey and American Democracy</i><br />
Alan Ryan, <i>John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism</i></b> – both excellent books on Dewey and American political-intellectual history generally.<br />
<br />
<b>Richard Poirier, <i>Poetry and Pragmatism</i></b> – this book anchors an important beginning for a research paradigm into the nature of pragmatism. Poirier identifies pragmatism as “linguistic skepticism”—a notion that I think makes Poirier’s pragmatist nearly identical to Rorty’s ironist. Poirier then discusses Emerson and Emerson’s influence on William James, before using the fact that James taught Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein to broaden our understanding of the genealogy of pragmatism. Rather than a genealogy focused on theoretical theses, Poirier articulates a tradition of <i>practice</i>—a peculiar practice of writing that should be identified as pragmatist (so goes his argument).<br />
<br />
<b>Joan Richardson, <i>A Natural History of Pragmatism</i></b> – published in 2007, this book is at the forefront of the current conversation, begun in earnest by Poirier, about expanding our histories of pragmatism to include more than just parochial American philosophy professors. Other literary critics involved in this expansion might include Jonathan Levin, Andrea Knutson, James M. Albrecht, and Paul Grimstad.<br />
<br />
The last book makes clear that, especially for literary critics, we will want to pay attention to our own people and their influence on something called “pragmatism.” I think the most important person in making the pre-history of pragmatism relevant to philosophy is <b>Cavell</b>—who does <i>not</i> consider himself a pragmatist. But in thinking about “philosophical literariness”—or whatever you want to call thinking philosophically with a text while not caring what genre the text is—his books <b><i>The Senses of Walden</i></b> and <i><b>In Quest of the Ordinary</b></i> are indispensable (he has a book of essays on just Shakespeare, too). (His <i>The Claim of Reason</i> is his opus, and one might think of it as a very Wittgensteinian version, in both form and content, of <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>.)<br />
<br />
<b><i>The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture</i>, ed. Morris Dickstein</b> – this must have been an amazing conference. It’s from 1998, so its essays are fairly up-to-date (as scholarly things go). Almost every contributor is a heavy-hitter: Rorty, Putnam, Cavell, Kloppenberg, Westbrook, Bernstein, Nancy Fraser, John Patrick Diggins, Richard Posner, Poirier, Menand, David Bromwich. And more.<br />
<br />
<a name=appendix2><u>Appendix 2</u></a><br />
<b>Analytical Table of Contents of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i></b><br />
<br />
<b><i>Part I</i></b><blockquote> <b>Ch. 1</b><br />
3-5 – scientist vs. poet as hero<br />
5-7 – sentences vs. vocabularies<br />
7-9 – redescription vs. argumentation<br />
9-11 – Davidson against “medium”<br />
11-13 – vocabularies as tools<br />
13-16 – passing theories, intentional stances, and there’s no such thing as language<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
16-17 – nonteleological view of intellectual history<br />
17-19 – Davidson on metaphor<br />
19-20 – Nietzschean/Darwinian history of culture<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
20-22 – against the priestly function<br />
<b>Ch. 2</b><br />
23-25 – tracing home the blind impress<br />
25-29 – poetry vs. philosophy; confronting contingency<br />
29-30 – the will to self-overcoming<br />
30-32 – de-divinizing the self<br />
32-34 – against reason-as-faculty and return to the concrete<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
34-35 – dull vs. interesting, Kant vs. Nietzsche<br />
35-37 – every life as a poem<br />
37-39 – “genius” is what catches on<br />
39-40 – the power of redescription and “the world”<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
40-43 – strong poet as parasitic<br />
<b>Ch. 3</b><br />
44-45 – foundation vs. redescription<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
45-47 – against relativism<br />
47-51 – rationality as <i>internal</i> to a vocabulary<br />
51-52 – truth is the upshot of free and open encounters<br />
53-54 – poeticized culture<br />
54-56 – philosophy is not neutral<br />
56-57 – post-Marxist suspicion vs. pragmatic muddling<br />
58-60 – principles as abbreviations for practices<br />
60-61 – reform vs. revolution<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
61-63 – Foucault vs. Habermas vs. Rorty<br />
63-64 – against Foucault: the benefits outweigh the costs<br />
64-65 – against the longing for total revolution<br />
65-66 – against Habermas: don’t fear world-disclosure<br />
66-68 – against “communicative reason” as foundation<br />
68-69 – from epistemology to politics</blockquote><b><i>Part II</i></b><blockquote> <b>Ch. 4</b><br />
73-74 – final vocabularies, irony<br />
74-78 – common sense/metaphysics vs. ironism/nominalist-historicism<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
78-79 – Hegel and philosophy as a literary genre<br />
80-82 – literary critics as moral advisors<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
82-83 – irony as irresponsible<br />
84-85 – take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself<br />
85-88 – objection: irony will dissolve social glue<br />
88-90 – objection: irony is illiberal, humiliates<br />
90-91 – irony doesn’t empower<br />
92-93 – morality as skill at imaginative identification<br />
94-95 – theory as private perfection/literature as social hope<br />
<b>Ch. 5</b><br />
96-98 – ironist theory<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
98-100 – rearranging little mortal things<br />
100-101 – theory and dialectical progression<br />
101-102 – exhausting possibilities, apocalyptic novelty, prophecy<br />
102-103 – debunking authority<br />
103-105 – the Problem of Self-Conscious Theory: How do I end my book?<br />
105-108 – beauty vs. sublimity<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
108-109 – demands of theory and of self-creation<br />
109-110 – <i>Being and Time</i> as transcendental project<br />
110-112 – “history of Being” and exhaustion, a vocabulary both serious and ironic<br />
112-114 – elementary words<br />
114-116 – letting sound matter<br />
116-117 – necessity of <i>bildungsromans</i>, house vs. tools<br />
117-119 – litany vs. narrative, public resonance<br />
119-121 – duty to self and duty to others<br />
<b>Ch. 6</b><br />
122-123 – Derrida against Heidegger<br />
123-125 – Rorty against American deconstructionists<br />
125-126 – fantasy as endpoint of ironist theory<br />
126-127 – <i>The Post Card</i> and idiosyncratic obsessions (especially metaphysics)<br />
127-130 – Plato, Socrates, and sex<br />
130-131 – Freud and Heidegger<br />
131-133 – “Fido”-Fido, Searle<br />
133-134 – poetry as “off the hook from bad questions,” against method<br />
134-137 – why is Derrida different? What is he good for? Is it philosophy?</blockquote><b><i>Part III</i></b><blockquote> <b>Ch. 7</b><br />
141-144 – four categories of books across two distinctions: private/public, familiar/unfamiliar<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
144-146 – aesthetic bliss and topical trash<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
146-149 – Nabokov saving Dickens from “participative emotion”<br />
149-152 – running together literary and personal immortality<br />
152-154 – Platonic atemporalism and anti-Platonic sensualism<br />
154-156 – an oversized sense of pity and hope for future generations rather than immortality<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
156-158 – Nabokov as cruel aesthete (between Kinbote and Shade)<br />
158-160 – the vice of incuriosity and the fear that ecstasy and kindness swing free of each other<br />
161-164 – the monster of incuriosity in <i>Lolita</i><br />
164-167 – the monster of incuriosity in <i>Pale Fire</i><br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
167-168 – summary: a private mythology of a special elite<br />
<b>Ch. 8</b><br />
169-171 – topical trash: sensitizing to a set of excuses for cruelty<br />
171-172 – redescribing communism and inventing O’Brien<br />
172-173 – Orwell as a metaphysical realist<br />
173-175 – in search of some new political scenarios<br />
175-176 – O’Brien: not Thrasymachus, but a rogue elephant<br />
176-177 – if we take care of freedom, truth can take care of itself<br />
177-179 – psychological torture as breaking one’s final vocabulary<br />
179-180 – the object of torture is torture<br />
180-183 – the fantasy of endless torture—the <i>really scary</i> part<br />
183-185 – on the psychological implausibility of characters<br />
<i>*Act Break*</i><br />
185-187 – ironists need to talk<br />
187-188 – O’Brien as last ironist in Europe<br />
<b>Ch. 9</b><br />
189-190 – fundamental premise: a belief can still regulate action even if caused by nothing deep<br />
190-192 – taking the sting off of “we vs. they”<br />
192-195 – against the Kantian moral obligation tradition<br />
195-196 – fuzzy but inspiring <i>foci imaginarii</i><br />
196-198 – philosophy in the service of democratic politics</blockquote><br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Next week, as “Some Other Bits I’m Posting about Rorty.”<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> A newer -ism on the scene is posthumanism. See my discussion <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html">“Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization”</a> for an application of a Rortyan antifoundationalism. <br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> If you’ve read some Derrida, you’ll probably have no problem seeing Plato as power-mad, but perhaps the best expression of this same dream as it lives today was given by Robert Nozick in his <i>Philosophical Explanations</i>: “The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are <i>powerful</i> and best when they are <i>knockdown</i>, arguments <i>force</i> you to a conclusion, if you believe the premisses you <i>have to</i> or <i>must</i> believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much <i>punch</i>, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, <i>forces</i> someone to a belief. … Wouldn’t it be better if philosophical arguments left the person no possible answer at all, reducing him to impotent silence? Even then, he might sit there silently, smiling, Buddha-like. Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he <i>dies</i>. How’s that for a powerful argument?” (4)<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> This had a certain urgency at the time because of the controversies/scandals surrounding Heidegger and Paul de Man. Heidegger, of course, was a member of the Nazi party, and when Heidegger started to become popular in English departments, a more general push against his philosophy on political grounds arose (or at least got more press). The intellectual historian Richard Wolin is an important figure in this regard. When de Man died, it came out that he had published some anti-Semitic articles in his youth in occupied Belgium. Because de Man’s work was seen as almost a direct extension of Derrida, this was thought to have a bearing on that American product, deconstructionism. The de Man scandal included some other things as well, and still has not died—cf. Peter Brooks’ review of Evelyn Barish’s recent biography of de Man in the <i>New York Review of Books</i>, “The Strange Case of Paul de Man” (April 3) and his exchange with David Lehman in the May 8 issue.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> This was from Lovejoy’s “The Historiography of Ideas,” collected in his <i>Essays in the History of Ideas</i> (quote on page 7). One might note his use of “original” and wonder whether originality matters in a professional, specialized inquiry. It’s always struck me that there’s an underlying tension, in the idea of “original scholarship,” between the Good and the New. It scares up your intuitions on the problem if you ask, “Would you rather be right or say something never before said?”<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> I’ve talked about some of these problems with regards to literary criticism in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2011/10/do-we-need-center-or-generalities.html">“Do We Need a Center, or Generalities?”</a><br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> From Dennett’s “Comments on Rorty,” 349-50 in <i>Synthese</i>, November 1982<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> See my discussion of this line and its pragmatism in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html">“Literature as Equipment for Living and as Spiritual Exercise,”</a> esp. section 3.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>, §11<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> “What Pragmatism Means”<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> <i>Experience and Nature</i>, Ch. 5<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> A good summary of Rorty’s stance, combined with his stance about argument, is from his introduction to <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>: “Pragmatists follow Hegel in saying that ‘philosophy is its time grasped in thought.’ Anti-pragmatists follow Plato in striving for an escape from conversation to something atemporal which lies in the background of all possible conversations. … I do not know what would count as a noncircular metaphysical or epistemological or semantical argument for seeing them in either way. So I think that the decision has to be made simply by reading the history of philosophy and drawing a moral” (174).<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> This orientation of pragmatism’s is the focal point of my pithy introduction to pragmatism, <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-pragmatism-is.html">“What Pragmatism Is.”</a> The joke about pragmatism’s theory of truth comes up a lot when I talk about pragmatism and truth, but it is essentially the background of my somewhat eccentric <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/05/rhetorical-universalism.html">“Rhetorical Universalism.”</a><br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> This was the way Rorty put it in the opening of his intro to <i>Consequences</i>. A good example of reticence by analytic philosophers to think of pragmatism any other way is Donald Davidson, whom Rorty greatly admired. Rorty continually tried recruiting Davidson into the pragmatist canon because he thought Davidson’s writing about language and truth were the right way to think about them, but Davidson always resisted because he couldn’t be convinced that pragmatism should be treated as having a disquotational theory of truth as opposed to a reductionistic assertional one (e.g. Dewey’s treatment of truth as warranted assertibility). I should also add here that Rorty’s attempt to scrape off the damning criticism of pragmatism’s theory of truth isn’t the only mode of trying to recontextualize the understanding of it by emphasizing other elements of the classical pragmatists. One way that has been steadily gaining steam over the last 30 years has been to give priority to their metaphysical construal of experience, e.g. making James’s radical empiricism the proper context in which to understand James’s pragmatism. I’ve discussed this mode under the moniker of “retropragmatism” in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html">“Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism.”</a><br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15]</a> Alan Malachowski quotes Prado’s remark, from the latter’s <i>The Limits of Pragmatism</i>, in a helpful appendix to his collection <i>Reading Rorty</i> entitled “On Teaching Rorty.”<br />
<a name="fn16"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[16]</a><i>Beyond Objectivism and Relativism</i>, 18. This book, which came out in 1983, is Bernstein’s <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>. Those two books should be read side-by-side to get a clear picture of what advanced post-positivist pragmatism should look like.<br />
<a name="fn17"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[17]</a> <i>The Republic</i>, 510b<br />
<a name="fn18"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[18]</a> This dictum is from the beginning of “Recent Metaphilosophy” (<i>Review of Metaphysics</i>, 1961), one of the fascinating early essays not included in Leach and Tartaglia’s recent anthology of Rorty’s early work (see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html">my discussion</a>). That being the case, I reproduce a large part of Rorty’s sweeping definition of metaphilosophy:<blockquote>Metaphilosophy maybe defined as the result of reflection upon the following inconsistent triad:<br />
<blockquote>(1) A game in which each player is at liberty to change the rules whenever he wishes can neither be won nor lost.<br />
(2) In philosophical controversy, the terms used to state criteria for the resolution of arguments mean different things to different philosophers; thus each side can take the rules of the game of controversy in a sense which will guarantee its own success (thus, in effect, changing the rules).<br />
(3) Philosophical arguments are, in fact, won and lost, for some philosophical positions do, in fact, prove weaker than others.</blockquote>The most obvious resolutions of this inconsistency are perhaps the following three:<br />
(a) One may say that (3) is false, and that it has an appearance of truth only because some philosophers are too dumb to make use of the device of changing the rules. If one takes this view, one will emphasize (2), and insist that any position which states itself in sufficiently general terms will be able to make itself impregnable. For any philosopher who is charged with, e.g., generating an infinite regress or arguing in a circle should, with a bit of ingenuity, either be able to invent suitable distinctions which will cut the regress or break the circle, or else be able to distinguish between good from bad regresses and vicious from fruitful circles. With the examples of Aquinas and Hegel before him, any philosopher who can neither distinguish away, nor <i>aufheben</i>, his opponent’s heuristic terms may fairly be judged to be incompetent. The existence of such incompetence, which is the only conceivable reason for ever losing a philosophical argument, is no more relevant to a discussion of the nature of philosophy than the existence of mistakes in calculation is relevant to a discussion of the nature of mathematics. I shall call this position metaphilosophical <i>scepticism</i>. …<br />
(b) [this position denies (2) and erects itself as basically representationalism—<i>facts</i> about terms determine how terms <i>must</i> be taken]<br />
(c) finally, one may deny the truth of (1), and say that, on the contrary, philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of “changing the rules.” </blockquote>Rorty goes on to say some things about studying the patterns by which rules are changed—this is also where he first formulates his famous notion of “conversation” that played an important role at the end of <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>: “Metaphilosophers of this [(c)] stripe see the function of philosophy as making communication possible…. Since communication is the goal, rather than truth (or even agreement), the prospective infinite series is a progress rather than a regress: it becomes a moral duty to keep the series going, lest communication cease. To keep communication going is to win the game….”<br />
<a name="fn19"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[19]</a> To be more precise, Rorty wants to reject the premise that suggests that there are only two options: either there’s a fact in the area or the truth is definitional (like “All bachelors are single” seems to be). Not being more precise, however, is why pragmatism has always seemed to court idealism.<br />
<a name="fn20"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[20]</a> This is Brandom’s vocabulary. For an introduction to it, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec2">“On the Asymmetry between Practical and Doxastic Commitments,” section 2 and 3</a>.<br />
<a name="fn21"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[21]</a> See my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html">“Touchstones”</a> for some reflection on this kind of orientation in reading.<br />
<a name="fn22"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[22]</a> <i>Truth and Progress</i>, 2<br />
<a name="fn23"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[23]</a> CIS 18<br />
<a name="fn24"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[24]</a> I have to confess, though, that it drives me bananas in Harold Bloom—who, as far as I can tell, has never cited a single thing in his life (except, perhaps, under duress). Even David Bromwich, who is a master of easy erudition, sometimes drives me crazy.<br />
<a name="fn25"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[25]</a>For a discussion of Rorty’s relationship to their main ideas, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html">“Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism.”</a><br />
<a name="fn26"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[26]</a> For a philosophical background to Quine and Sellars, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html">“Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn.”</a><br />
<a name="fn27"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[27]</a> For a philosophical introduction to this essay, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html">“Davidson’s ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.’”</a><br />
<a name="fn28"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[28]</a> Minus “Myth,“ these can be found in <i>The Essential Davidson</i>.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-17186533232676571172014-08-15T04:00:00.000-07:002014-08-15T04:00:09.303-07:00The Legacy of Group Thinking, III<b>“From Philosophy to Cultural Politics”</b><br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> This is something like a conclusion to <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html">“The Legacy of Group Thinking”</a> and its addendum, <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html">"Probability, Community, and Criteria."</a> Whereas the addendum was closer to a reworking of the same set of issues in the microcosm of two particular examples Bromwich uses in <i>Politics by Other Means</i>, this piece gets to the point of wanting to formulate an answer—what is the legacy of what Bromwich disparages as “group thinking”? Because if I’m right in the first two, then thinking should be more complex in relationship to group identification and one’s community of origin then Bromwich at times lets on. And moving toward that assessment raises the larger question that lurks in the background of discussion of “political correctness” and affirmative action policies—how do you change people?<br />
<br />
Rorty gradually came to identify philosophy with what he called “cultural politics.” Rorty’s attack on what he referred to as the Cultural Left in <i>Achieving Our Country</i>—the tenured post-Civil Rights generation that transformed, in particular, English departments—cannot be understood properly until one makes the connection between his dismay over their abdication of money as an issue and his sense that all philosophy has ever really been is cultural politics. One way to see why Rorty entitled his last collection of essays <i>Philosophy as Cultural Politics</i> is a characterization I first encountered in Alan Malachowski’s book on Rorty. At the close of his introduction, he has a short section called “Philosophical Propaganda” that draws a parallel between Madhyamika Buddhism and the position Rorty had been trying to establish with the idea of “edifying philosophy” in <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i> and his ostensible abjuration of argument in <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn1">[1]</a> The idea is that explicit, premise-matching-premise argument won’t get you far in debating deeply held commitments. The only thing to do is to try and explain why your own commitments are more attractive than your cultural opponents, which is kind of like propaganda. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> There are two thoughts underneath this position about philosophy as cultural politics: 1) that any conceptual position, given enough time and ingenuity, can be made coherent with the rest of one’s beliefs; 2) we should make a distinction between long-term utopic dreaming and short-term political reform. Since the first, in particular, is contentious, I should like to give a little plausibility by outlining the kind of options that Rorty is thinking of. Let’s say argument/non-argument and long-term/short-term mark two axes. The different combinations would give us a box diagram like this<br />
<br />
<TABLE BORDER CELLPADDING=5>
<COL>
<COL ALIGN=RIGHT>
<COL STYLE="color:red">
<TR> <TH></TH> <TH>Short-term</TH> <TH>Long-term</TH> </TR>
<TR> <TH>Argument</TH> <TD>Political Debate</TD> <TD>Philosophical Debate</TD> </TR>
<TR> <TH>Non-argument</TH> <TD>Political Propaganda</TD> <TD>Philosophical Propaganda</TD> </TR>
</TABLE><br />
This is helpful to have up front before thinking about Rorty’s point coherence, because it is linked to his thinking about argument. It importantly involves the conceptual point that a <i>conclusion</i> only follows as a consequence if one <i>accepts</i> the premises of an argument. One, then, is always free—argumentatively speaking—to reject the premises of the argument an opponent wields to wriggle free from a conclusion. Then the task is to make sure your rejection of the premise is consistent with all the other things you want to say. This sounds sophistical because one isn’t supposed to reject premises <i>simply</i> because one doesn’t like the conclusion. But I suspect it’s more complex than that given this problem: when <i>are</i> you supposed to know when to reject a premise? Do you just naturally <i>know</i> a false premise when you see it?<br />
<br />
I suspect the latter is not the case, but it’s hard to spell out why without running into all kinds of philosophical choices. The main issue is that I don’t think people just walk around with a bag full of premises they endorse that they can then check against when confronting an argument. Inferential <i>thought</i> works via syllogisms with premises and conclusions, but <i>thinking</i> doesn’t. So I think a perfectly reasonable cue for “hearing a note of falseness” in an argument, as one might say, is reaching a conclusion you’re violently opposed to from premises that are innocuous. Like inferring from “Thomas Jefferson is the best” and “Thomas Jefferson was white” to “white people are the best”—it’s okay to get to the conclusion and think that something has gone awry.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> So, say something sounds wrong with Rorty’s conclusion in (1), and you withhold acceptance of the full point that, given enough time and ingenuity, any conceptual position can be made coherent with the rest of one’s beliefs—we don’t actually need the full point to see the point of having the four boxes. Let’s say that Philosophy is, broadly speaking, the attempt to make all of your beliefs coherent—to make them all explicit and laid out and systematized so there are no contradictions or tensions between beliefs. Reflecting on the point that Philosophical Debate in the European tradition has been going on for 2500+ years—somewhat arbitrarily marking it with the Ionians—with hardly a true death for any particular philosophy, it seems safe to concede that the attempt to make yourself coherent is a process more prone to the death of participants than positions.<br />
<br />
It’s different for Politics. Whereas Philosophy is about Thoughts hooking up to other Thoughts, Politics is about Thoughts hooking up to Actions. Democratic politics has a terminus—whatever agreed-upon point at which debate ends, and people vote for one action over another, with the stipulation that everyone in the debate abides by the vote. Of course, as we know, you don’t have to <i>agree</i> with the action, but the institutional apparatus has been empowered to act. Debate might be taken up again, at a later point, to act differently—but this simply marks the difference between Thought and Action. Action is radically contextual in a way that Thought is not. Whereas it might always have been, and always will be, true that the United States should not have entered Iraq under the always false auspices of weapons of mass destruction, it’s not true that you can just sit around and wait for all the facts to be turned in before you act—just look at Philosophy. If you waited around to get all of your philosophical ducks in a row, you’d never do anything.<br />
<br />
The claim that Action is radically contextual in a way that Thought is not should, indeed, seem contrary to pragmatism, which teaches that thoughts are themselves actions, and therefore always contextual. And the point can be made from a different direction as well, since conclusions are only binding in the context of endorsed premises. But this claim seems to be what underlies Rorty’s distinction between short-term and long-term, which I think is ultimately the thought that underlies the rejection of Peircean, truth-is-at-the-end-of-inquiry pragmatism. Perhaps truth is only there, but by Peircean strictures that <i>means</i> absolutely nothing since it couldn’t possibly make a difference to how we act. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn3">[3]</a><br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> But what if you <i>need</i> to believe that truth is at the end of inquiry to <i>reach</i> the truth at the end of inquiry? Who would know the answer to this but those at the end of inquiry? I think this is the really difficult question that binds short- and long-term together, and it is why Rorty characterizes Philosophy as cultural <i>politics</i>. Philosophy in the long-term, Philosophical Propaganda, is like prophecy—it’s about spelling out a vision of future possibility. Philosophy in the short-term, Philosophical Debate, is system-building and making sure the details of the vision can be produced and fit together. But the system and the details can only be worked out if you choose a vision—so how do you do that? This choice is why William James, in “The Will to Believe,” described faith in terms of a <i>hypothesis</i>—you fill in the <i>if</i>, and hope then the living of the if works out in some manner. James’s great argument was that <i>everyone <b>makes</b> the choice whether it’s self-conscious or not</i>. Living a life means living out a choice of if, a vision of life, a movement toward a possible future. Because Philosophical Debate is dependent on philosophical vision, Philosophy is more about the long-term: don’t ask for pragmatic consequences <i>now</i> because, like theoretical physics, we won’t know what those might be until far into the future.<br />
<br />
<i>But a choice <b>we</b> must make</i>. <b>We</b> have to decide <b>now</b> what if to start working and acting on, and that’s the tough problem, and what cultural politics is about. Politics is first of all, unlike Philosophy, about the first-person plural, not the first-person singular. You don’t need to wait around for everyone to agree with you before moving on and pulling out more philosophical consequences from the philosophical position you’ve taken—but in Politics, you need enough people on board. Additionally, Political Debate is about deciding what action we should take <i>now</i> about some short-term problem that needs a solution—and because the problem is narrow, local, and particular <i>argumentative debate</i> is the obvious form to use. On short-term problems, all we have are our current assumptions and values, since that’s what we currently are, so let’s try and work through what those assumptions and values should make us choose to do. The great long-term problem, on the other hand, is What assumptions and values should <i>we</i> have? What we should we be? Propaganda, in the sense I’m using it, outlines assumptions and values. If long-term is about the future and <i>should</i> and short-term is about the present and <i>is</i>, then Political Propaganda is rightly regarded as dangerous because all it does is use fear that our current values are at risk somehow—for why else would you tell people about the values they already know they have? <br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> Sometimes, perhaps though, that is something you need to do—it’s hard to be a progressive in America and not think that people have forgotten what it means to be an American. And that’s why this form of propaganda (style dimension) and philosophy (temporal dimension) is cultural politics. It’s about what future culture you want to persuade everyone to think we should all try to work to achieve. It’s visionary but tied to action; it’s debatable but hard to debate. Rorty thought that you just have to keep nudging people—but how do you do that to have an effect on the world? If two people with different values and assumptions technically beg the question over each other if in debate, then what does persuasive nudging look like?<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> In the United States, persuasive nudging often takes the form of <i>law</i>. Lawyer up and sue, or shove a new piece of legislation through a broken-backed Congress. It seems like this mode began to really assert itself after the Civil War, as the federal government tried to fix racism with Reconstruction, the South fought back, and the moral energies of Abolitionism got redirected into the Temperance movement, culminating in Prohibition. Americans are known the world over for being litigious, and Judith Shklar gives a good explanation for why: rights in America seem inherently legal. Shklar suggests that the development of Abolitionism preceding the Civil War developed with it “a doctrine of justice which can be summed up in the expression <i>equal protection of the laws</i>, that is, in the demand that laws be applied equally to all, … which finally became, in modern times, the foundation of civil rights, that is, the idea of equal liberty for all citizens.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn4">[4]</a> Shklar calls this a “liberalism of rights,” and “even though one still believes in natural rights in the United States, one knows perfectly that despite the Declaration of Independence they are not self-evident. They are constitutional rights, and the courts decide what they mean in practice. … Equal protection of the laws … [should be understood] as the political and legal realization of the idea of natural rights” (121).<br />
<br />
But 150 years on, Americans are <i>tired</i>, so tired of the constant legal battles, and grandstanding, and high-handing, by Congress and the Supreme Court. Rorty once lamented how the Rehnquist Court was destroying the reputation of the last branch of government that could claim to be more than just naked politics, but when you look from the other direction—and at how Rorty talks about legal pragmatism—it can be hard to muster a distinction between the activism of the Warren court of the Civil Rights era and the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts of the renascent right-wing. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn5">[5]</a> I have to believe it can be done—I hope it can be done—but I couldn’t tell you how to do it off the top of my head. It’s this difficulty, telling the difference, that fuels the attrition to everyone’s psyches. <br />
<a name=sec7></a><br />
<b>7.</b> What became pilloried as political correctness codes was an outburst of this fatigue. Leftish stand-up comics, in particular, had an easy time tapping into a common reservoir of exasperation. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn6">[6]</a> Bromwich opens <i>Politics by Other Means</i> with an example of code-enforcement that does seem over the top. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn7">[7]</a> A college student—what we would now call a “bro”—put several <i>Penthouse</i> centerfold pictures on his dorm room door. The dorm supervisor cited him for “lewd and indecent behavior,” calling the centerfolds “degrading and abusive to women.” The bro fought back, saying it was a free speech issue. Bromwich’s reading of the case, as usual, is acute—he points out that “the usual standard of moral surveillance enforceable today in America” was the bro, by his actions, having “established that he was a vulgar young man.” Indeed, and Bromwich terms the active dorm supervisor’s charge a mark of “rhetorically upping the ante,” a common tactic for the new, explicit and codified standard of moral surveillance.<br />
<br />
Bromwich thinks we should stop short of saying that the pictures themselves, or the bro’s act of hanging them on his door, are degrading and abusive. I think he might be right. Bromwich calls the old standard of moral surveillance <i>manners</i>:<blockquote>Thus far, we may seem to have been occupied in the realm of manners: such debates go on in any culture, over what people think it is proper to advertise or to restrict, to endorse or to reprobate. But when the stakes for approval are high enough, the subject matter of such debate can incite the energy necessary for devising explicit codes of conduct: prescriptive, and not merely general and negative, guidelines that aim to control what can and cannot be said. (8)</blockquote>I think Bromwich is right to call this a matter of manners, and I think he is right later when he says, “Manners are in this sense more than the costume or outward expression of morals. They are themselves a source of morality” (146). But I think Bromwich is wrong about the case, and about the (for Bromwich, future) legacy of the Cultural Left on America. Should the dorm’s RA be allowed to force the bro to take down the <i>Penthouse</i> centerfolds? Sure—why not? It’s gross to have to look at that in public. Bromwich says the supervisors weren’t speaking for the same community that let’s newsstands sell <i>Penthouse</i> on the street, but he elides the crucial difference—if you can’t walk around the street with your dick in your hand, then you shouldn’t be allowed to show a gaping vagina either.<br />
<br />
If you were offended by <i>my</i> language just then, all that tells you is that I’m right—your sense of propriety was stung by the image my words painted. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn8">[8]</a> But was my language <i>abusive</i>? Was the way I put my point inherently an abuse of women? That I have more difficulty in seeing. As the true heir of the Carlin tradition, Louis CK, said, “There are a lot of words, they’re not bad words, but some people start using them a lot to hurt other people and then they become bad.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn9">[9]</a> Intention, I think, can and should matter, though at the same time it isn’t a universal exculpatory method. The problem underneath the charge of abuse is sadism. And I think Rorty is right, in <i>Achieving Our Country</i>, that the Cultural Left has made the public arena less casually sadistic. “Especially among college graduates, the casual infliction of humiliation is much less socially acceptable than it was during the first two-thirds of the century. … The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at as ‘politically correct’ has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago” (81, writing in 1998).<br />
<a name=sec8></a><br />
<b>8.</b> What Shklar calls “legalism” may indeed have had a role in helping to break apart the crust of propriety that it then needs to compensate for—but the problem is that the manners weren’t working for whole classes of citizens in the first place. And since words are tied to thoughts and thoughts to actions, it’s hard not to think that our manners of speaking help create the milieu in which terrible actions take place. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn10">[10]</a> But we still can’t legislate manners. People can’t be locked up for being assholes. So how do you change people?<br />
<br />
Rorty’s moral sentimentalism fills in this hole, but it’s an abstract fill. When the issue of argumentation comes up in relationship to morals, Rorty occasionally transmuted it into the question: How do you answer the Nazi? There is no knockdown argument to answer the Nazi with, Rorty said, but whereas I don’t know how to argue down a consistent, committed, and clever Nazi without begging the question, I do have some ideas on how to <i>convert</i> him—tell him sad stories of mothers having children torn away, Jewish mothers like your Nazi mother.<br />
<br />
But this is tougher than it seems. For one, we aren’t dealing with Nazis all the time. So the tools of conversion aren’t all the time obvious. What’s the analogue for anti-choice protestors? Worse, since what we’re talking about is commitment conversion of all kinds, what’s the analogue for climate deniers? Another problem is cynicism—if everyone’s trying to change your mind all the time, what stops the heart from hardening? The difference between having your heartstrings tugged and being manipulated is hard to tell. It’s impossible, I dare say, to watch Sarah McLachlan’s dog PSA, the one with “Angel”—you know what I’m talking about—without getting a little sick at its heavy-handedness. Reaching for pathos all the time can produce the opposite effect intended.<br />
<a name=sec9></a><br />
<b>9.</b> Even worse is an argument of Stanley Fish’s in <i>The Trouble with Principle</i>. In a sort of capstone chapter, “Beliefs about Belief,” Fish articulates a pragmatist model of the self. For the pragmatist, the self is a Quinean web of beliefs in which any particular belief is the sum of its relations to the other beliefs—like a dot on a graph, which is nothing but its spatial coordinates. The main argument Fish pursues in that chapter is that one’s belief about belief—one’s theory or model of the self and its constitution—has no effect on your beliefs. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn11">[11]</a> The subargument is that every belief will have internal to it a reason for its own revision. Since Fish agrees that beliefs aren’t discrete marbles in a bag, the “beliefs” here are largely invisible to us. They <i>are us</i> so we’re constantly acting out of them, but we aren’t self-consciously aware of their every dimension all of the time. (Think about it: if a belief is a spatial node, then there are an infinite number of potential relations to know about.)<br />
<br />
To concretize his argument, Fish gives an example of a former white supremacist telling his story of conversion. One day the supreme supremacist was rattling off all the people that would be carted off, and on the list were a number of “defectives,” including people with cleft palates. It so happens that the now suddenly former white supremacist has a daughter with a cleft palate, so that was that, and off he goes to write an exposé. Fish draws two morals from the story. The first is my point about the Nazi conversion: it’s so particular, how do you make any generalizations about how to change beliefs? It’s the second, though, that makes belief change mysterious:<blockquote>[I]t needn’t have turned out as it did. It would have been perfectly possible for the devoted father to have said to himself, “Well, I really love Mary, but the cause is the cause and I guess she’ll have to go.” After all, remember Abraham and Isaac and the demands of faith. It is only in retrospect that we can construct a cause-and-effect account of how this or that change of mind came about, and that account will tell us nothing about what might happen next time. (282) <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn12">[12]</a></blockquote>Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, right? The flipside of course is that you won’t know if you’re going to die until you live, or become a murderer until God quickly tells you it was a sick joke. We won’t ever know whether our beliefs are strong and stable or precarious and weak until testing day—and the problem is that the only way to be sure that a belief is <i>currently</i> strong is to continually test it. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn13">[13]</a> But we’re now sure that that’s probably sadomasochistic—I must constantly be tempted to be sure I can resist temptation! That’s just to say evil must exist so that I can be good.<br />
<br />
Fish must be right about the retrospective nature of knowing the mechanisms of belief change, but does that mean there’s <i>nothing</i> to be generalized about how to change people’s beliefs? Fish’s mystery-mongering overshoots the mark in its correctness because what we’re interested in is the <i>via media</i>.<br />
<a name=sec10></a><br />
<b>10.</b> To help focus this final area, and pull together a number of threads from “The Legacy of Group Thinking” series, I find it helpful to think about a story David Sedaris tells. I’m going to quote a bit of it, but Sedaris is not only one of the finest comedic writers working today, he’s also a considerable wisdom-writer. In the larger story, “Something for Everyone” in <i>Naked</i>, Sedaris works as a housepainter for an anti-Semitic Lithuanian named Uta.<blockquote>Jews and Jewesses were a big thorn in Uta’s side. She tried explaining it to me once, but I found the story difficult to follow after hearing the date 1527. According to Uta, Adolf Hitler was completely misunderstood, “as most great thinkers frequently are.”…<br />
<br />
She left to run a few errands, and I started bubbling the paint off the kitchen door. While working I listened to the radio, a local AM station that broadcast old serials and comedy programs every Saturday. I enjoyed both <i>Suspense</i> and <i>The Shadow</i> but when <i>The Life of Riley</i> began, I found my mind beginning to wander. William Bendix plays the sort of predictable, good-natured idiot guaranteed to get his finger stuck in a bowling ball the night of the big fellowship dinner. He’s a garden-variety doofus who seemed to set some sort of standard for generations of succeeding television programs featuring overstuffed closets and family dogs who snatch the holiday turkey off the table while everyone’s eyes are closed in prayer. In real life you’d beat a dog senseless for pulling a stunt like that, but instead, these are the sort of characters who sit down to a meal of frankfurters and stuffing, pretending they’ve learned the true meaning of Thanksgiving. This was a world where people were enlightened by a single word or deed. Lessons were learned and lives were changed over the course of twenty-three minutes. Even as a child I had trouble accepting the concept of such rapid spiritual growth. If it were that easy to change people, surely I would be sitting upon a padded velvet throne before a nation of willing servants. Who didn’t want to change people? When Uta spoke of the Jews, I’d done nothing more than stare down at my feet. I could have named countless Jews who didn’t fit her bill, but that wouldn’t have changed her opinion, as her mind had been made up a long time ago. The most you could do with a woman like Uta was to change the subject to a medical mishap, hoping that a good turn to the stomach might shut her up for a while.<br />
<br />
I once worked as a runner on a construction site and lost my job when the head carpenter, a fully grown man with a Sir Lancelot haircut, discovered I was a homosexual. We’d gotten along fine all summer, but the moment I questioned his thirst for beating up transsexual prostitutes, he came at me with a hammer. The foreman had let me go as gently as possible, explaining that if he ever hired an all-girl crew, I’d be the first person he called. For a long time afterward I thought of this head carpenter, always placing him a position of grave, physical danger. The walls of his cell were closing in. A train was headed for his bound-and-gagged body. A bomb was set to go off and only one person could save him. “But first you have to take it all back,” I imagined myself saying. “And this time you have to say it like you really, really mean it.” I fantasized about it for a few months and then moved on to something else. My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for <i>who</i> I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for <i>what</i> you are and you’re likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out. (213-215)</blockquote>When the white supremacist heard “cleft palette,” his life changed, irrevocably, but we do know precisely what Sedaris means here in being skeptical of such rapid spiritual growth. The hope for a silver bullet is what stymies much political action because problems in life are often more complex than something that has a single, quickly applied remedy.<br />
<br />
But what should we do, then? What I like most about juxtaposing Sedaris’s story with Fish’s is the space of agreement they share over change. Fish has argued for years, most recently in <i>Save the World on Your Own Time</i> (2008), that teachers should focus on their discipline and not try to affect moral or political change in their students—there’s no way to judge the latter, and its unlikely to happen anyway, so focus on your job. What I find disturbing about Fish’s argument about teaching—though the space of agreement he shares with Bromwich in <i>Politics by Other Means</i> would have surprised Bromwich, and I agree with Bromwich—is that it seems antithetical to the idea of a liberal education. A liberal education is about spiritual growth, not a body of knowledge. What I like about facing Sedaris to Fish is the irony introduced: Sedaris is professedly lazy, greedy, and egocentric, a tried and true navel-gazer. Just look at the passage: I don’t think it’s a mistake that Sedaris’s emblem for turning from political action is <i>aesthetic</i>. And when he fantasized about the single word? The prize wasn’t “world peace” but “an army of sycophants.”<br />
<br />
These are vintage Sedarisian moments, and his wisdom is of a distinctively 19<sup>th</sup>-century kind: the horrors of egotism. His humor is almost entirely self-deprecatory, and his inability to act gets him in trouble at the end of this particular story. The complexity of the scene lies in one of the reasons why we laugh at his joke about the political pins—is <i>that</i> doing any real work at political change? The person he’s pointing at is the poseur, wearing the equally aesthetic garb of politics. We know those kinds of people. (Well, if you don’t, hang out at colleges or non-Starbuckian coffee houses more.) They are, in fact, the parallel of the target of Bromwich and Rorty’s barbs at the Academic-Cultural Left who, in David Hollinger’s phrase, “gave at the office.”<br />
<a name=sec11></a><br />
<b>11.</b> How do we change people? How do we persuade people to let go of deeply held beliefs, particularly if you can’t legislate them with law or education? Sedaris’s moment of “say it like you really, really mean it” matches not only the skepticism of Bromwich about “political correctness,” but Fish’s skepticism about Rorty’s optimism at increased civility. I think Rorty’s right, it has gotten better and partly because of the efforts of the Cultural Left, but Fish is also right in <i>There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech</i> when he says that racism has just gone underground.<br />
<br />
How do we change people? Some we try and find the commitments we share in common, what we think is best about ourselves, like our kindness, and try and get them to apply it to areas they aren’t used to, like economics. Argument can work here, but activating those commitments often is the effect of storytelling and other indirect methods. Philosophical propaganda, cultural politics, I think is done best with a mix of honest reflection on the outer limits of your own ideas with as much imaginative, intellectual sympathy for the ideas you find backwards. Never pretend, never condescend, never manipulate or pose—just think as hard as you can and try to get others to think as hard as they can. That’s the Emersonian pose of the American Scholar, avoidant of “group thinking” as Bromwich defined it and attracted to the difficulties of true interchange with ones fellows, what Emerson called thinking in circles.<br />
<br />
Some we try to reach and talk to. Some can be changed, though you might never know it; some simply need to be understood, though they won’t think you do. Some we just need to outlive. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#fn14">[14]</a><br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Rorty indirectly endorsed Malachowski’s point years later in his reply to Jaroslav Peregrin’s essay in Rorty’s entry in the <i>Library of Living Philosophers</i>. He approved of Peregrin’s citation of Wittgenstein’s claim that he was “in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another” (PRR 247).<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> A lot has hinged on just what “attractiveness” is supposed to mean here.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> Ironically, both of these thoughts are stated clearly in Peirce’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” The pragmatic maxim for meaning is at the end of section two: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” And then half way through section four, Peirce says, “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.” Though many pragmatists, including Rorty, have been lulled into defending a version of Peircean explanations of truth, Rorty came to think of this as like explaining why opium puts people to sleep with “because it has dormitive power. And rocks fall because they have falling power, and helium balloons rise because they have rising power, etc., etc.” Molière’s trope is a favorite of Rorty and other philosopher’s for disposing of the non-explanation explanation. For a defense of pragmatism that rejects the Peircean view using Robert Brandom’s sophisticated notion of a “pragmatically mediated semantic relation,” see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html">“Better and the Best.”</a> One might consider how the relationship between the possible and the actual functions there and how it functions at important moments in the “Legacy” series—see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-iii.html#sec9">section 9</a>.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> Shklar, <i>Redeeming American Political Thought</i>, 117<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> For Rorty’s legal pragmatism, see his two essays on law in <i>Philosophy and Social Hope</i>. It’s fairly typical, I think, for us on the left to have a pretty dim view of the neoconservative judges’ respect for the law as an independent body from politics. It’s hard to not see a pattern in five Catholic judges—five!—continually chipping away at <i>Roe v. Wade</i>. It’s hard to read Chief Justice Roberts’s decision in the abortion clinic buffer zone case of <i>McCullen v. Coakley</i>, as when he essentially describes yellers of “baby murderer” as petitioners not protestors and writes that “petitioners wish to converse with their fellow citizens about an important subject on the public streets and sidewalks…. If all that the women can see and hear are vociferous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively stifled the petitioners’ message”—to read that and not think Roberts either is an idiot, lives in a cave, or is barely trying to cover his opinion about abortion. However, David Cole’s recent article, “The Anti-Court Court” in the <i>New York Review of Books</i> (Aug. 14, 2014), is an interesting antidote to this gut reaction. Reviewing several recent books on the Roberts Court, the consensus is that “simple partisan politics cannot explain the Court’s results.” Indeed, particularly illuminating is the conclusion of a book about Scalia—that Scalia, despite his acerbic and powerful pen, has in fact been one of the most impotent of Justices.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> The best of these, as in most things comedic, is George Carlin: “When it comes to changing the language, I think [feminists] make some good points. Because we do think in language. And so the quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language. So maybe some of this patriarchal shit ought to go away. I think ‘spokesman’ ought to be ‘spokesperson.’ I think ‘chairman’ ought to be ‘chairperson.’ I think ‘mankind’ ought to be ‘humankind.’ But they take it too far, they take themselves too seriously, they exaggerate. They want me to call that thing in the street a ‘personhole cover.’ I think that's taking it a little bit too far!” (<i>Doin’ It Again</i>, 1990) Carlin’s premise is why he is one of the premier philosopher comedians, as well as a tremendous close reader of our cultural habits.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Most of the story happens on 4-6.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> I’ll concede—it’s not the <i>only</i> thing it tells you. I have to admit that I have a lot of flexibility when it comes to “watching my language,” as one is told by one’s parents, and am not the kind of person who swears for the principle of the thing—as if my sense of what’s right is the only thing that counts. I’m about to mention sadism, and violating people’s proprieties on purpose is also a kind of sadistic thrill. (Louis CK makes this noise in most of his routines, saying something he calls “terrible” or “the worst.” Why? As he says in, I think, <i>Hilarious</i>, he just likes making the audience uncomfortable.) I’ll also add that I have difficulty with the word “offended” in all of these contexts. I have a hard time saying why, but I have trouble using it to describe something I’ve ever felt. I can be grossed out, made uncomfortable, or horrified at bigotry—but offended? It’s just not part of my emotive lexicon. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s a concept that’s outdated, part of a puritanical interpretation of manners that should be an artifact of pre-democratic days. But I don’t know.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> This is from the beginning of <i>Chewed Up</i> (2008), in a bit that is probably the culmination of Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. One should also see it in the context of CK’s later reflection during the poker game scene in episode two of the first season of <i>Louie</i>.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> A recent example I heard on the radio is the conviction of Theodore Wafer for the murder of Renisha McBride. Wafer, on the stand, argued that he was in fear of his life when he opened the front door of his house and shot the unarmed McBride with a shotgun. He said, “I drew first, that’s how I see it.” We can’t make necessary or sufficient causal connections between the idioms we use and the actions we take, but I find this disturbing and telling. Our self-image does have something to do with how we behave.<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> This is a corollary of the type of stance Rorty took in relation to philosophy, that philosophical theses, like the philosophical problems they are directed toward, are not natural, insofar as that means “universal and inescapable to the mind.” Once one drops the notion that some problems have the potential to arise for any particular mind simply by reflecting, it is a short step to dropping the idea that people have implicit metaphysical theses operative in their daily lives, simply by existing. Once one takes these steps, the relationship between philosophical activity and other activities becomes <i>much</i> more complex. However, this is a deep problem, inasmuch as it was already hard to tell the relationship between the mind/body problem and cooking eggs, so what we’re being told here is equally hard to tell. <br />
<br />
For example, Fish is technically wrong that beliefs about belief have no effect on beliefs for the simple reason of his own argument. Fish says that any particular belief only has particular mechanisms for its change, and no general explanation of mechanics is going to affect a particular mechanism, just as the theory of gravity didn’t affect how rocks fell (see especially 280). As Fish suggests, though, the activity of “general explanation” is its own particular activity with particular mechanisms that connect to each other, just as Newton’s theory didn’t affect rocks but did affect Aristotle. So what Fish needs is to argue that one peculiar set of particulars <i>cannot</i> be connected to other sets of particulars. He could do that, but notice he’d no longer be <i>explaining</i>—and thus taking the external view like Newton and rocks—but <i>intervening</i> into how people put together particular beliefs with particular beliefs, an internal view like Newton’s argument with Aristotelians. If a person did believe that Platonism about the self required them to believe in God (for whatever reason), then if Fish converted them to pragmatism it would threaten their belief in God. Fish could wave around his hands and say, “Naw, there’s actually no connection!” but if it is also the case that the <i>only reason </i>they believed in God was the Platonism (as hard as that is to imagine), then it’s just hand waving—the damage has been done if the person can’t find another reason for belief in God. <i>That’s</i> why the relationship between pragmatism and life is complex and Rorty ends up being a little more right than Fish about it. (See, e.g., Fish’s criticisms of Rorty in “Almost Pragmatism: The Jurisprudence of Richard Posner, Richard Rorty, and Ronald Dworkin” in <i>There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech</i>.)<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> Dave Chappelle has a brilliant version of this in the premiere episode of <i>Chappelle’s Show</i>.<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> Compare my discussion of Bromwich’s use of this problem in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html#sec2">section 2</a> of “Legacy, II” and its relationship to probability in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html#sec4">section 4</a>.<br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> <i>That’s</i> what keeps me up at nights—the premise of the movie <i>Idiocracy</i>. Unfortunately just a passable movie overall, considering the premises for the jokes themselves are all funny, the first five minutes are really quite good and chilling in their likelihood: what if the jocks outbreed the nerds? Poor Luke Wilson wakes up from a deep freeze to wander a desert hellscape in which they water plants with Gatorade because the Gatorade slogan tells them it’s the best at quenching thirst. And aren’t the plants thirsty? The great punchline of the movie is when Wilson finally convinces them to use water to save the planet from starvation. The only explanation they’ll understand for <i>how</i> the water does this? Magic.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-82078123887519868282014-08-08T04:00:00.000-07:002014-08-08T04:00:04.042-07:00The Legacy of Group Thinking, II<b>“Probability, Community, and Criteria”</b><br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> This is an addendum to my earlier <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html">“The Legacy of Group Thinking,”</a> which goes through some of the major issues I find at work in trying to think through our inheritance of the Culture Wars—in particular, through our inheritance of David Bromwich, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish as they negotiated the cultural-political landscape of the ‘80s and ‘90s. In the earlier piece, I didn’t talk much about Fish, but he appears in Bromwich’s <i>Politics by Other Means</i> a couple times getting the sharp end of a point. The main reason Fish is singled out the way he is—in particular for aiding and abetting a myth about the history of literary criticism (which I’m not sure he did)—is because, after Fish became chair of Duke’s English department, he assembled the most star-studded faculty of its time, vaulting Duke into a position of prominence. In particular, the faculty became a hotbed of the kind of cultural criticism that Bromwich takes aim at in his book.<br />
<br />
Somehow, Fish is identified by Bromwich as a “right-wing pragmatist,” which I’m not sure is true. Fish’s politics are notoriously difficult to pinpoint, and he delights in hiding them. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html#fn1">[1]</a> However they may be, it is something like a lesson from Fish’s playbook that I applied in “Legacy.” My attempt to reframe the merits of multiculturalism in terms of the historical psychology of autonomy (see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec5">sec. 5</a>) is basically just the application of Fish’s main point against neoconservative claims of “reverse racism.” He makes this during a debate tour he took with rising-star neocon intellectual Dinesh D’Souza in 1991-92. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html#fn2">[2]</a> Neoconservatives were gaining a lot of ground against affirmative action by claiming it was just racism against white people. Fish, in his prepared remarks (collected in <i>There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech</i>), cites President George H. W. Bush’s admonishment of the United Nations for equating Zionism with racism, for the equation forgets history—ignored, as Fish glosses the logic of the argument, “is the <i>historical</i> difference between them, the difference between a program of genocide and the determination of those who escaped it to establish a community in which they would be the makers, not the victims, of the laws” (60).<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> There is another point at which Fish’s pragmatism, particularly as it is articulated in that book, seems relevant to Bromwich’s argument, and it is this I wish to work around to in this addendum. The first chapter of Bromwich’s book, “The New Fundamentalists,” attempts to outline the problems he sees at work in the implicit agreement the left- and right-wing seems to have had to focus on cultural issues, and mainly group identity. He goes through several examples taken from “the headlines,” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html">[3]</a> and his reading of them is always smart, but one section made me wrinkle my brow.<br />
<br />
Bromwich takes up two cases about acting. In the first, he relates the story of <i>Miss Saigon</i>’s trip from West End to Broadway. Wildly successful in England, when the producer took the musical to America, he took two of his leads with him—however, one of them was Jonathan Pryce, who created the role of the half-Vietnamese pimp, and is white. There was an outcry from The Committee on Racial Equality of the theatre actors’ union, Actors’ Equity, who “voted to bar Pryce from performing the role on the ground that a special search had not been conducted for Asian-American actors who might act the leading role” (11). Bromwich takes the brouhaha to make the point “that in art, the suitability of person to role is a matter of strength of imagination—only that” (12). The entire idea of artistic creation is that something that wasn’t there is made to be there. What is an acting role but a cavalcade of thoughts and attitudes and behaviors that the actor has to make appear? So if you can manifest those things, what else should matter <i>qua</i> acting?<br />
<br />
This, I think, is a good point. Bromwich says these controversies compose themselves as tensions between culture and art, and that cultural genesis or identity is given priority when in conflict. The idea Bromwich is suspicious of is that <i>being</i> an X gives you a “natural” authority over <i>expressing</i> an X. It is the “natural” we should be suspicious of—Emersonians make the good point that some people just aren’t good at expression. But the Committee on Racial Equality has another argument: “In an ideal world … any artist can play any role for which he or she is suited. Until that time arrives, artists of color must fight to retain access to the few roles which are culturally and racially specific to them” (qtd. 12). Bromwich calls the last sentence “sophistry” on the grounds that “the only index of having truly obtained access on this scheme is to obtain the role,” but I think that’s narrow. This is the arena of affirmative action, and Bromwich’s correct point is that statistical analysis of what races have gained what roles would not tell you whether or not they deserved the roles. And yet, Bromwich seems to be posing naïve here—I find it doubtful that casting agents uniformly disregard race or ethnicity when making their decisions for roles that call for this or that specifically. Until they judge based purely on acting “merit”—more about which in a moment—then I think it is perfectly justified for a group to demand first consideration for their small cross selection of roles. And, I might add, I suspect that the only reason a casting agent wouldn’t disregard race or ethnicity is not because <i>they</i> are racist, but because <i>audiences</i> aren’t ready to judge purely based on acting talent.<br />
<br />
Think about it: push the underpinning of the “natural authority” argument to its limit, and in a biopic the only person who would be suitable to play, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson would be the very dead Ralph Waldo Emerson. Wouldn’t he have the most authority to express himself? (There’s a hidden conundrum about identity here: what gives him that authority? After all, isn’t the old Emerson different than his younger self? So why would the elder have authority over expressing the younger?) Yet, push Bromwich’s point to the limit, and wouldn’t audiences struggle with a black Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840s Concord? Could you blame them?<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> The previous issue, however, is a point about our current sociopolitical milieu (then as now). I want to ignore that issue to take up Bromwich’s good point that will lead us into his second casting case. Bromwich’s point about artistic creation or expression, I think, is solid. It is about the “strength of imagination” one needs to manifest a pattern of thoughts, attitudes, and behavior. Because this ability to manifest—expression—is necessarily independent of what one is, there is a tension between the desire for better expression and for equality of opportunity. That is how the “tension between culture and art” plays out on that score.<br />
<br />
Conceding that expressing is necessarily independent from being, though, is it <i>completely</i> independent? To put it another way, if the idea of expression requires it <i>not to be dependent</i> on what one is, does it follow that there are <i>no connections</i> between the two?<br />
<br />
Bromwich’s second case takes August Wilson’s 1991 op-ed as its text. Wilson “brought before the public his case for finding a black director to make a film of his play <i>Fences</i>” (13). Wilson didn’t want a black director <i>merely</i> because he was black, but he also did want a black director. Bromwich characterizes Wilson’s choice as between talent and race. He quotes Wilson saying,<blockquote>At the time of my last meeting with Paramount, in January 1990, a well-known, highly respected white director wanted very much to direct the film. I don’t know his work, but he is universally praised for sensitive and intelligent direction. I accept that he is a very fine film director. But he is not black. He is not a product of black American culture—a culture that was honed out of the black experience and fired in the kiln of slavery and survival—and he does not share the sensibilities of black Americans. (qtd. 14)</blockquote>Bromwich notices an ambiguity here in the word “sensibility.” On the one hand, it is functioning as a consciousness-term, as meaning the “experiential sensitivity of a black person” (14), which is, in an important sense, incommunicable. On the other hand—as Wilson’s use of it in “sensitive and intelligent direction” indicates—it also functions as a term of aesthetic judgment. The more sensitive you are in this sense, the more likely you are to catch the nuances and gradations of texture in an experience because you are more imaginative. This second notion of sensitivity, however, must be communicable if it is to function as a criteria at all in one’s ability to produce art. It is on this basis of the distinction between the two on the score of communicability that Bromwich says “something changes … as one passes from a call for life-experience to a call for art-experience” (14).<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> Bromwich’s sensitivity to words is keen here, but I think Wilson might have expressed his point better. Bromwich characterizes sensibility in the art-experience sense as when “a secret comes to be known by many who were not originally ‘in it’” (14). The experience of the product of art is the communication of something the artist put there—the artist created the possibility of one’s experience of the artwork. Notice that Bromwich has left out of his characterization the crucial moment as one passes from life-experience to art-experience—the moment of art-creation. Bromwich is right, as a function of his point in the <i>Miss Saigon</i> case, that creation is independent of experience. But isn’t the real issue here <i>who is <b>more likely</b> to create the art-experience that communicates the life-experience</i>?<br />
<br />
Bromwich avoids this issue of probability, and in part by avoiding the issue of whether or not the artist wants to communicate a life-experience or create a new experience entirely. We can desire artwork that does one or the other, or both. But the former is a matter of accuracy—and who gets to judge the accuracy of an art-experience to a life-experience? For the same reason of the independence of imagination from experience housed in people’s varying levels of <i>sensitivity</i> to texture and nuance, we cannot say <i>only</i> those with the life-experience get to do the judging—but it’d be weird if only white people were judging the accuracy of movies about black people to the experience of black people, right?<br />
<br />
Part of this weirdness comes from our awareness of the history of stereotypes—we have a lengthening history of inaccurate assessments of one group by another group. And Euramericans seem to have had an egregious problem with this. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html#fn4">[4]</a> <i>Technically</i> there’s nothing at odds with one group judging accurately another group. And the judged-group <i>could</i> all meet to get their story straight in order hide any perceived “faults” of the group. But what are the odds? Might you not be increasing the likelihood of creating an art-experience that is accurate to some sort of perceived black life-experience by having someone who has had a black life-experience?<br />
<br />
There are innumerable problems here—for example, not all black people have had the same life experiences. But this is why Bromwich’s choice in example is so interesting in highlighting the issue—he’s telling <i>the artist</i> who <i>he</i> should hire to create <i>his</i> product. Who is Bromwich to tell Wilson who should direct his movie? <i>Not</i> because Bromwich is white and Wilson black, but because Wilson is the artist and Bromwich the viewer. Bromwich seems to have a notion of “strength of imagination” as like a magical elixir that allows you to do anything equally well, transcending limitation. But that’s like thinking “athleticism” has the ability to make a Michael Jordan as good at baseball as he was at basketball. Would you rather have Jordan in right field than <i>me</i>? Sure, but it seems clear that you’d also rather have Darrin Jackson, who you’ve never heard of, than Michael Jordan.<br />
<br />
Wilson’s judgment about who he wants to select seems to me this—when you <i>hire</i> someone to create an artistic product, just as when you hire anyone for a job, you are making an <i>initial</i> assessment on the <i>probability</i> that they will <i>later</i> be able to fulfill <i>your</i> expectations. That may not have been precisely what was on Wilson’s mind, but it’s how you defend the validity of the practice against Bromwich’s argument. Wilson’s judgment of the well-known white director seems perfectly reasonable if Wilson has suspicions that the black life-experience he would like to see portrayed might be more likely actualized be someone with those life experiences. The reason the Wilson case is different from the <i>Miss Saigon</i> case, on this score, is because the white Jonathan Pryce had already (presumably) successfully portrayed the half-Vietnamese pimp—so if you are just concerned about portrayal, why not go with the high probability of previous success? [5]<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> The ideal world the Committee spokesperson was referring to in the <i>Miss Saigon</i> case in section 2 was the one in which there was already equality of opportunity. Bromwich, I’m sure, does not believe that that is not an issue in the world. So while calling the “access” claim a sophistry is too strong, what Bromwich is thinking of is true enough: how do we tell when there is equality of <i>possibility</i> when the only way to tell is through who <i>actually</i> gets what?<br />
<br />
This is a version of the very real and very problematic question I closed “Legacy” with in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn7">section 7</a>—who are you to tell me when my trauma is over? Who decides when there is equality? This is where affirmative action policies come from—they are an attempt to install additional criteria of <i>relevant merit</i> so that communities can weigh all the considerations they should attend to. This, of course, sounds weird—is it meritorious to be black? This weirdness is what Fish responds to in <i>There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech</i>, particularly in the introduction. Fish’s master argument for his theoretical pragmatism—what drove him from reader-response criticism to interpretive communities to his interventions in politics and law—is that criteria are relative to the communities in which they are applied. So, for example, there’s no such thing as free speech because what <i>counts</i> as speech—or is it gibberish?—is always up to a community, so <i>ipso facto</i> what counts as <i>free</i> speech is likewise constrained by the community. (The most obvious example in American First Amendment law is Holmes’ citation of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.) In the case of affirmative action policies at universities, the complaint is that they put a backseat to “merit”—Fish’s point is not only did the policies not do that, but wasn’t it also the right of the community (in this case, the university and/or federal government as representative of the American people) to decide what package of criteria it wants in order to create the kind of community it wants?<br />
<br />
I think this can be applied to an artist creating the kind of art that is communally created—anything that requires the participation of people other than the artist. There’s nothing <i>special</i> about being black or Vietnamese or poor or tall or athletic or pretty—except for all the myriad ways that those attributes change a person’s experience of the world. This is just another way of saying that every person’s experience is unique. That doesn’t mean everyone will be able to produce great art, but it does mean that the materials that could be drawn from by a person’s strength of imagination are going to be different.<br />
<br />
The irony I found in this thread of argument in Bromwich’s book is that, not only do I know that Bromwich treats with some reverence the autonomy of the artist from having “responsibilities” to anything other than the vision the artist hopes to articulate—and of which I’ve suggested he runs somewhat afoul of—but this idea of having different raw materials upon which to work the imagination is ultimately an Emersonian idea of experimentalism. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html#fn6">[6]</a> Bromwich’s argument, when thought through, erases all of that material in favor of the blank power of imagination—but no creation is <i>ex nihilo</i>. What precisely makes art so interesting is to see that power wielded upon and out of so many different kinds of material. The texture of art is variegated because every person is different, and the apotheosis of imagination one finds in romanticism only works with a proliferation of artists with which to have the space to perform. There isn’t just one standard called “great acting” to which Jonathan Pryce or an Asian-American cleave to, nor one called “great directing.” A white director might make different choices than a black one, and it is the hope of some producers that, given the chance, those black directors might make something never seen before. And isn’t that what we really want? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking-ii.html#fn7">[7]</a><br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> This particularly comes through in <i>The Trouble with Principle</i>, where at the end he does disclose some substance political stances.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> I don’t really think D’Souza is an intellectual, but I feel bad that the neocons don’t really have any respectable ones. Bromwich, for example, makes short work of George Will. Are we really going to count William Bennett? But maybe I’m a little blinkered in this regard. There are always the Straussians, like Allan Bloom and Harvey C. Mansfield. Or how about Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama? (Though, Fukuyama had the decency to come to his senses about the Iraq War, the scales falling from his eyes about his friends in the Bush II administration.)<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> I talk about one of them, with my own gloss on the event, in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn6">“Legacy,” footnote 6</a>.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> I refrain from saying why because I’m not sure. My experience in the world and with books has given me a good sense that every group develops stereotypes about other groups—it’s not just white people. There’s more to be said about the conceptual underpinnings of that, but I also don’t think that the nations and cultures of European descent are often singled out, as I have here, simply because they’ve conquered so many other cultures, and so are more in the air—as if, had other cultures simply had more guns and beat back European colonists, it would be more clear that every culture would be on a par when it comes to its stereotyping behavior. I think there is a link between imperialist tendencies and greater stereotyping. But since a lot of bad writing and inferences have gone on with this topic, there’s nothing short to be said about it. The best I can do is to suggest reading Chinua Achebe’s <i>Things Fall Apart</i> (1958). It was the first international best-seller by a native African, and it is one of the most sensitive representations of the moral dilemmas of cultural friction I have ever encountered. At its center is the initial encounter of the Igbo with European civilization, in particular through the encounter with Christian missionaries. But what isn’t easily clear is that the Christian missionaries are wrong in all of their convictions—for one of the practices of the Igbo is to throw twin babies into the forest to die because they are abominations. One of the leitmotifs of the book, though, is the Igbo’s relationship to other cultures and how different it is from that emblematized by the Christian missionaries.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> There is a theoretical underpinning to what is happening here. Robert Brandom’s account of normativity suggests how, while normative behavior is not <i>reducible</i> to natural behavior, it is rooted in it. His Sellarsian account of natural events as “reliable differential responsive dispositions” allows him to distinguish between, in his favored examples, iron rusting in the presence of water or parrots squawking “Red!” in the presence of red, on the one hand, and a person saying in English “hey, that table is red” in the presence of a red table, on the other, on the basis that the latter is within “the game of giving and asking for reasons,” which means the person is reliable <i>and</i> correct, whereas the parrot is simply reliable. Given that is the case, people’s responses to the world can be judged according to reliability—like always responding “4” when asked “What’s 2 + 2?”—which is how we can construe a certain class of artistic expressions.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> The former is an Emersonian attitude in Bromwich’s argument as well, and came out in my earlier “Legacy” argument as “Who are you to tell me what words to use?” See the end of <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec3">section 3</a> to section 4.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Apropos my conclusion, and running in the other direction, I recall Gabriel Byrne once saying (I think in an extra feature for <i>The Usual Suspects</i>) that his acting technique, in complete contradistinction to method acting, is to play a better version of himself. This strikes me as interesting because I have friends that consider it a damning indictment of an actor that “they’re just playing the same thing” (say, Johnny Depp for the last ten years or Robert de Niro for last twenty). Variety is wonderful, but must the variety be in each actor? I’m vexed by the question of whether acting power should be determined by flexibility or not. Isn’t it like asking Jordan to be a great baseball player as well? “Oh, Tiger Woods—he’s a great golfer, but terrible at baseball. Did you see his swing?” Why can’t we praise Woods or Depp for doing whatever it is they’re doing really well? Sure, you might get <i>bored</i> with golf or Depp’s performances, but is that the same thing? At the core of this problem, I think, is the distinction between the Good and the New, which do not dovetail.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-28905303420409263522014-08-01T04:00:00.000-07:002015-12-01T09:38:51.203-07:00The Legacy of Group Thinking<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. The Culture Wars — Semantic authority — Who is anybody to tell me what to call myself? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec2">2. </a>The non-Marxist left — Two cheers for the cultural left — Communitarians against liberalism — The bad metaphysics of the unencumbered self; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec3">3. </a>The sources of multiculturalism — The authoritarian structure of group thinking — Rhetorical groups vs. actual groups — The "I" become "Aye!"; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec4">4. </a>What words I should use — Individuals as ends in themselves — Opting into and out of communities; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec5">5. </a>Autonomy and trauma — Racial wisdom — Thin and fragile communities — The instruments and conditions for autonomy; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec6">6. </a>Pride and Why hope? — Separatism and semantic authority — Shared practices and confidence schemes; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec7">7. </a>Antiauthoritarian adolescence — Who are you to tell me when my trauma is over? — Adults without confidence are a moral problem<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> There are many relics of the cultural wars, of which Allan Bloom’s <i>The Closing of the American Mind</i> (1987) is probably the most famous. But that book, like the right-wing hatchet jobs that abut it (<i>Profscam</i>, <i>Tenured Radicals</i>), 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 <i>Achieving Our Country</i> (1998) and Stanley Fish’s <i>There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech</i> (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.” <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html">[1]</a> 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 <i>Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking</i> (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 <i>tradition </i>was at irreducible odds with liberalism. Thus there was that motley crew of “communitarians”: Michael Sandel’s trenchant attack on Rawls in <i>Liberalism and the Limits of Justice</i> (1982), Michael Walzer’s alternative model in <i>Spheres of Justice</i> (1983), Alasdair MacIntyre’s sweeping story of descent into moral unintelligibility in <i>After Virtue</i> (1983), and Charles Taylor’s equally sweeping story in <i>Sources of the Self</i> (1989). <br />
<br />
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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn2">[2]</a> 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 <i>particular interest</i>—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? <br />
<br />
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 <i>is </i>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.”<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> 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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn3">[3]</a> By this I mean, not that a person is a woman, or black, or homosexual, but that the person is <i>reduced </i>to being <i>only </i>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.”<br />
<br />
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, <i>pace </i>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 <i>all black people</i> 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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn4">[4]</a> <br />
<br />
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>I</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 <i>real group</i> 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 <i>rhetorical group</i>? 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 <i>actual groups</i>—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]<br />
<br />
The cultural left <i>wanted </i>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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn6">[6]</a><br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> But who are you to tell me what words I should use? Who am I, indeed—that line of thought cuts <i>very deep</i>, much deeper than we often allow it to. That question is antiauthoritarian in impetus and demands not only an account of <i>authority</i>, but an account of <i>the moral stance generally</i>—the question undermines our ability to use the word <i>should </i>or <i>ought</i>. 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, <i>must </i>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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html">[7]</a> <br />
<br />
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 <i>community </i>is to produce <i>individuals </i>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 <i>choice </i>in which communities they can identify with—if you’re born black, then you <i>just are</i> 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 <i>should </i>act like it is because they have obviously chosen <i>not </i>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]<br />
<br />
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 <i>growing up</i> and <i>choosing </i>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. <br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> 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 <i>against their will</i>, it traumatizes and arrests their growth into autonomous individuals. <br />
<br />
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 <i>produces </i>a mirrored response in the black man—as soon as the <i>black </i>man, walking alone on a deserted thoroughfare in Alabama saw a <i>white </i>man, he knew all <i>he </i>needed to know. For if he <i>didn’t</i> 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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn9">[9]</a><br />
<br />
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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn10">[10]</a> “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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>every </i>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 <i>true </i>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.<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> Rorty understood these difficulties, and so began his <i>Achieving Our Country</i> with a brilliant summary of the relevant balances:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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 <i>The Fire Next Time</i> (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:<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Truth and Progress</i>). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn11">[11]</a> Taking a cue from Marilyn Frye’s book, <i>The Politics of Reality</i>, Rorty says that “individuals—even individuals of great courage and imagination—cannot achieve semantic authority, <i>even semantic authority over themselves</i>, 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 <i>language has been colonized</i>. (And now you can see how these reflections can be extended even further.)<br />
<br />
Language is the instrument of self-definition. The problem Bromwich skirts is that you cannot just <i>declare </i>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 <i>really </i>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.” <i>But what if you’ve historically been disallowed from sharing in the practice?</i> 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 <i>confidence scheme</i>, that you aren’t being conned?<br />
<a name=sec7></a><br />
<b>7.</b> 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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#fn12">[12]</a> 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 <i>feels </i>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.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> 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, <i>Savage Inequalities</i>. 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 <i>Dumbing Us Down</i> just don’t provide a viable long-term solution.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> 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.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> 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 <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> 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 <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html">“Two Uses of ‘We.’”</a>) 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?<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> I discuss some abstract problems with the “we” prompted by Rorty’s work in “Two Uses,” cited in note 4, but see especially <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#sec3">Section 3</a>, 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. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec9">section 9</a>. 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 <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/05/philosophy-metaphysics-and-common-sense.html">“Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Common Sense.”</a> 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.”<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> 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 <i>Politics by Other Means</i>, 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 <i>the undergraduates in his own class</i> 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?)<br />
<br />
That’s the same kind of subtle coercion at work as we see at issue in cases like <i>Town of Greece v. Galloway</i>, 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 <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/12-696_6j37.pdf">here</a>. An audio version with background of the case can be found <a href="http://www.oyez.org/town-of-greece/">here</a>. My knowledge of the case is indebted to a student of mine that did excellent research on it.) <br />
<br />
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 <i>act </i>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.)<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> 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 <i>should’ve been</i> angry. <br />
<br />
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 <i>Contingencies of Value</i> 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.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> 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.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> 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, <i>Uncle Tom’s Children</i>. 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 <i>Black Boy</i> 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 <i>Invisible Man</i>.) 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 <i>Shadow and Act</i>, 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 <i>Selected Writings, 1950-1990</i>, with its two retrospective addendums from 1969 and 1990.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> 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 <i>The Interpretation of Cultures</i>). 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 <i>Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad </i>(1994).<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> 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.<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> 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).Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-2119310945781017062014-07-25T04:00:00.000-07:002015-11-29T16:19:34.101-07:00Touchstones<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Arnold's touchstone theory — Deaf and dumb cultural conservatism <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec2">2. </a>Arnold, Eliot, and New Criticism — The Theory Revolution — Humanism at the scene of instruction; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec3">3. </a>Touchstone practices of reading — Personal relationships with texts; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec4">4. </a>Monumental reading — The necessity of close reading — Two touchstones cross the same commons; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec5">5. </a>The figure — Dramatic reading — Imaginations haunted by spectral figures; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec6">6. </a>Four objections — Objection 1: Esotericism — The elitism of strenuous study — Objection 2: Hero-worship — Knowingness and theories of human motivation; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec7">7. </a>Objection 3: Whitewashing history — Conflict: You can only fight whitewashing with elitish strenuous study — Creating the historical sacred; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec8">8. </a>The common reader and scholarship — Objection 4: Figuralizing violates technical niceties — Anti-romanticism: A land without heroes; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#sec9">9. </a>Afflictive reading — Obsessives can be annoying, though — Critical thinking and instruments of self-enlargement<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> <blockquote>Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. ... [W]e shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. (Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry”)</blockquote>David Bromwich calls this Arnold’s “touchstone theory,” and it’s the <i>locus classicus</i> of the neo-cultural conservative’s idea of the “Western canon.” I don’t think there have been many actual mandarin cultural conservatives who have wielded this obviously silly theory—not even Allan Bloom, I should think—but one does find it in any number of the jingoistic defenders of “culture” that pass for American neoconservative intellectuals. I suppose it is not hard to tell how little use I have for them. The silliness is encapsulated in “infallible”—really? Do no wrong? Worse than thinking, like your child or your guru, that anyone or thing could be infallible is the epistemological problem scared up by the application of the concept: if infallibility is the prize, how does one get to <i>be </i>one of these touchstones? The trick is that if there were independent criteria from the touchstones, then we wouldn’t need the touchstones. So the problem is precisely how to pick out a touchstone when all you have as criteria are your touchstones. At <i>best</i>, that’s a deaf and dumb cultural conservatism that no one has ever followed, even if it’s what comes out of their mouth.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> Matthew Arnold’s legacy somehow got bound up with T. S. Eliot’s cultural and political conservatism, and both of them with what literary critics call New Criticism. Both Arnold and Eliot are more interesting than the Theory Revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s gave them credit for, and New Criticism generally got a bad rap. The effect of this triple rejection was to make reading an impersonal activity. This is ironic, given that Arnold’s touchstone was there precisely to correct against personal taste in favor of disinterestedness. However, the Theory Revolution was in part an attempt to correct against the un-disinterested blocking of candidates to the “canon of great literature” such as, say, women, blacks, gays, etc., etc. It was Anti-Old White Dude. And because the touchstone theory so obviously blocked from view any actual criteria for induction into the canon, universalist and unhistorical criteria of all kinds became suspicious. This was how formalist New Criticism came to be rolled up in this. New Criticism was supposed to be just you and a poem, performing an act called “close reading,” but the Theory Revolution said, quite rightly, that you and the poem are always against the backdrop of historical circumstances. Texts are <i>always </i>in contexts—we cannot shut our eyes to it as the New Critics advise.<br />
<br />
But with the Theory Revolution, the combined effect that some onlookers have put in different ways was to subordinate the text to the context—to make the <i>context </i>the primary object of investigation. This was largely an unintended consequence, but it’s why when you obligatorily study literary theory now, you learn theories as different modes of unpacking texts. Many of these courses are taught with one central text, and then each section you learn and apply alternately Freud, Lacan, Derrida, de Man, Kristeva, Greenblatt, Foucault, etc. This is fine as far as it goes, but what happened in the journals was that the focus became the jockeying of modes. Battles over interpretations became implicitly battles over theories (or even, over one’s favored theory-guru), rather than battles over readings of texts. The texts themselves got lost. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn1">[1]</a><br />
<br />
What happened with Arnold, Eliot, and New Criticism is a tempest in a teapot. The only reason it might be of concern outside of the discipline of literary studies is because of a phenomenon Harold Bloom crystallized years ago in a passage Richard Rorty liked to quote:<blockquote>The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction, leaving the bewildered teacher of literature alone at the altar, terrifiedly wondering whether he is to be sacrifice or priest. (<i>A Map of Misreading</i> 39)</blockquote>I take it Bloom means that the torch of humanism, or “liberal education”—i.e. the reason why you have to take General Education credits—is now being held by only denizens of English departments. The 400 meter relay has turned unexpectedly into a dash. Rorty quoted the passage in <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i> in 1979 because he thought he was witnessing (or rather, had witnessed) the unfortunate abdication of this responsibility by his colleagues in philosophy. What he didn’t realize was that literary studies was heading in the same direction. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> The problem with the state of literary studies as it relates to wider responsibilities to the community is that English departments teach students sets of <i>reading practices</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn3">[3]</a> They still do, but these practices are different than the ones they used to teach, and it seems to me that many of them are arcane. One of the bits of useful wisdom flattened out from Derrida—or really, the general milieu of mid-20<sup>th</sup> century French theory—was that the world is usefully seen as a text, and our relationship to it as one of reading. One thing this highlights is the importance of <i>assumptions </i>in guiding reasoning, for those assumptions can give rise to different interpretations of the same phenomena. Once we flatten reading out this way, however, then all the humanistic disciplines, and really, all the disciplines generally, teach students different sets of reading practices, practices with which to read the world around them, practices that help shape and give meaning to the world. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn4">[4]</a><br />
<br />
My concern here is with something like a “touchstone practice of reading.” This is something I think was much more natural to previous generations, and is something like what we meant by “erudite.” We don’t get it anymore from our English departments because too often we aren’t encouraged to have a personal relationship with the text. It’s too analytical. Who cares about analyzing the (obviously sexist) gender dynamics of Richardson’s 18<sup>th</sup>-century novel <i>Pamela</i>? It becomes an exercise in telling you something you already know—though maybe you didn’t. One can find wisdom this way, but it’s an indirect search for historical distance that then becomes the true object of the exercise. And it’s that very indirectness that attenuates the probability of learning the lesson and of (impatient undergraduate) students having the patience required.<br />
<br />
Having a personal relationship with a text means being allowed the space to not get anything out of it. This is the problem with teaching literary studies in the educational setting: you have to give grades, which means you need to have assignments, which means you need to assign them tasks to complete. That inherently turns the relationship with the text into a pragmatic, utilitarian relationship: “okay, text: I need something from you—so please hand it over.” That’s not a great way to begin a friendship. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn5">[5]</a> <br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> What I have in mind as a touchstone practice of reading comes in three different species. The first is roughly the one Arnold professed: “have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters.” This species (unbelievably) is like what Bloom had in mind when he defined antithetical practical criticism as “the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn6">[6]</a> For this species, the practice of close reading is very important. I’ll call this <i>monumental reading</i>—passages fall off from the textual whole, fragmenting themselves, and landing like epitaphs to considerations one finds by the way-sides. Typically, these passages stick in your craw; they generally find you, not the other way around. Sometimes a great reader will show how a passage sticks; great readers help you read by making inroads, showing off the difficulty while at the same time making it easier. These aren’t keys to locks, but more like maps to difficult terrain—you are still called upon to travel the distance. The trick with great readers is that their fragments become yours, though the fragment <i>feels </i>as if it was always yours.<br />
<br />
The practice of close reading is important because the only way to turn on a touchstone fragment is to read it. In the process of reading it one calls out the power one sees working in it—a thought, an image, a theme, a feeling, an argument. The reason one seeks such power, of course, is to use it. But this isn’t the pragmatic, externally imposed use one finds in exams (though great teaching plants the seeds of this internalized use). Touchstones help you think, often by antagonism. Take Emerson’s “one can’t spend the day in explanation” (“Self-Reliance”). This bugs me deeply. One <i>can’t</i> spend the entire day explaining yourself, but couldn’t this turn into a copout? The problem with the fragment is that it is covering just the bit that seems so deeply subversive: Emerson’s heroic plea for solitude—<i>whim</i>. “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” Nothing poses the problem of genius so distinctly. What you do <i>best</i>, your vocation, your calling, your inner self—all of your explanations and defenses of your withdrawal from your responsibilities could amount to nothing more than a whim, to caprice, to a conceited fantasy that is a fig leaf covering naked desire and mere wish-fulfillment. But what else <i>is </i>there to do? You can’t spend the day in explanation.<br />
<br />
In monumental reading, the power that is pulled is put to use on either yourself or another fragment. All that is required for monumental reading is that the two touchstones cross the same commons. And this generally happens unexpectedly, and only after much practice. Do readings like the above riff on Emerson happen the first time around? Generally not, not on call, or a whim. It’s because the passage has been bouncing around my head, and <i>against </i>other passages, for so long. And this “bouncing” is <i>writing</i>. The transition from reading to writing is where the power occurs—the process of reading <i>and </i>writing, the friction between the two, is what generates the power. Otherwise the text will sit inert. It is during that process of transitioning a text from something read to written that allows other fragments to flow in. It is only by reading the fragment above that a break might open up and, in this case, a Freudianism might slip in. Will it pay off? Will Freud help me understand Emerson better, or the two of them to understand genius or explanation or the balance between solitude and society? Perhaps. But only if I move to read Freud.<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> The second species of touchstone reading is located in the notion of the <i>figure</i>. I adapt the concept from crossing Rorty with Lionel Trilling. Here’s Rorty on the literary ironist’s contextual definition of a figure:<blockquote>We ironists treat these people not as anonymous channels for truth but as abbreviations for a certain final vocabulary and for the sorts of beliefs and desires typical of its users. The older Hegel became a name for such a vocabulary, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have become names for others. If we are told that the actual lives such men lived had little to do with the books and the terminology which attracted our attention to them, we brush this aside. We treat the names of such people as the names of the heroes of their own books. We do not bother to distinguish Swift from <i>saeva indignatio</i>, Hegel from Geist, Nietzsche from Zarathustra, Marcel Proust from Marcel the narrator, or Trilling from The Liberal Imagination. We do not care whether these writers managed to live up to their own self-images. What we want to know is whether to adopt those images – to re-create ourselves, in whole or in part, in these people’s image. We go about answering this question by experimenting with the vocabularies which these people concocted. We redescribe ourselves, our situation, our past, in those terms and compare the results with alternative redescriptions which use the vocabularies of alternative figures. We ironists hope, by this continual redescription, to make the best selves for ourselves that we can.<br />
<br />
Such comparison, such playing off of figures against each other, is the principal activity now covered by the term “literary criticism.” (CIS 79-80)</blockquote>I think one can see how everything I said about reading and writing gets reapplied in this context. The reason why this form of abbreviation makes sense is because Rorty thinks of individuals as “incarnated vocabularies” (80). I want to call this species of touchstone reading <i>dramatic reading</i>. These are tales of the mighty dead doing battle with each other on the stage of your imagination. This is one reason why having a personal relationship with the book is important: it’s how the stage gets set up in the first place. And though we might always reserve the right to have personal favorites, our pets and darlings, Trilling’s criteria are important for rendering the imaginative space of the ironist:<blockquote>Instructed and lively intellects do not make pets and darlings and dears out of the writers they admire but they do make them into what can be called “figures”—that is to say, creative spirits whose work requires an especially conscientious study because in it are to be discerned significances, even mysteries, even powers, which carry it beyond what in a loose and general sense we call literature, beyond even what we think of as very good literature, and bring it to as close an approximation of a sacred wisdom as can be achieved in our culture. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn7">[7]</a></blockquote>“Spirit” seems to me a very precise word in this context. Turning an author, or character, or any individual for that matter, into a figure is very much a process of spectralization—our imaginations are <i>haunted </i>by these spectres. And very often we don’t know why at first. People are figures in another very precise sense as well—the names are <i>figurative</i>, they are symbols, tropes, metaphors. That’s why the author’s actual life matters little in this kind of reading, for their afterlife is in our minds—and in, I should add, how we use them to change the world.<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> There are four things that speak against dramatic reading that I think are important to retail. (Some of these apply equally to monumental reading, though I won’t specify which and how.) Three of them are important. Two are tied to one’s opinion of the intellectual current we still call romanticism. The third is a pragmatic concern about the process. The fourth is technical, and important only in regards to how we are taught literature today, for it only makes sense in the context of some opinion about romanticism.<br />
<br />
To disentangle what I regard as four separate objections, it will be helpful to note that Rorty’s notion of a “figure” is derived from Trilling. (So, I’ve really crossed Trilling with Trilling.) Rorty quotes the above passage from Trilling at the end of “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>. The essay is an important precursor to <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>, and in it Rorty identifies the proclivity to figuralize with romanticism, and notes that Trilling distrusts this tendency. This distrust, Rorty says, comes from an instinctive democratic attitude. It’s the same Rousseauvian attitude that motivated Kant’s understanding of morality. <i>Everyone</i>, Kant thought, could act morally because morality was relatively simple. You didn’t need to study for it. So the idea that there’s “a sacred wisdom which takes precedence over the common moral consciousness” (CP 158) repulses people like Kant and Trilling. The elitism in the figularizing process is located in the “conscientious study” bit, what Trilling calls “the redemptive strenuosities of the intellectual life.” This makes whatever it is the “instructed and lively intellect” is after an esotericism, the kind of thing that breeds priesthoods. <br />
<br />
The democratic attitude’s anti-esotericism is one source for being suspicious of figuralizing, and thus dramatic reading. Another, slightly different source is suspicion of hero-worship. One can see in hero-worship a kind of elitism, but the suspicion of heroes is more general than anti-esotericism. The Founding Fathers aren’t priests, though their image seems sacred. Esoteric priesthoods arise in response to the sacralizing process. You need a hero first, then you can have a priest. Because this suspicion of heroes is more general it has manifested itself in different ways. One important way is the movement by historians of different grades to “expose” the Founding Fathers and the myths that have clothed them. Another way, typically found in the academy, is the attitude of knowingness. Rorty calls knowingness “a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn8">[8]</a> In the academy, this knowingness often attends having some theory of human motivation: utilitarian, Freudian, Marxist, Foucauldian, etc. You always know why people <i>really </i>do things when you have such a theory. But sometimes it manifests itself as ironic detachment—sometimes numbed, sometimes haughty, but always <i>dry</i>. <br />
<a name=sec7></a><br />
<b>7.</b> The suspicion of heroes that attends the historian’s exposés is motivated by a good fear of whitewashing history. The figuralizing process does move you away from the “what happened” to something we can just call “significance.” Good history needs to make that move or else all one has is a chronicle, like early tablatures of how much grain was taken in by taxes. But if you get caught up in the significance of events, you can sometimes lose your hold on those events, like a balloon having its tether cut. This is the third objection, which is pragmatic. Recall Rorty’s description of the figure as an abbreviation of a vocabulary. The pragmatic concern is that the figuralizing process tends to whitewash events and persons because you forget (or never learned) how you got to the abbreviation.<br />
<br />
This is a real concern, just as the threat to our democratic attitudes is and heroes turning into gods are. The pragmatic concern, however, is where we see the first two concerns come into conflict. Because the only way to make sure heroes don’t turn into gods is to make sure that the historical tether stays in place. But we don’t have those tethers at our finger-tips—it requires historical work, <i>conscientious study</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn9">[9]</a> And so generally, returning to dramatic reading, the only way to fight against whitewashing is to <i>read again</i>. Rorty was often criticized for taking liberties with his figures, and I think rightly so sometimes. Sometimes you need to stop and unpack that abbreviation to make sure it’s the thing you say it is. Dramatic reading requires conscientious study because it’s the only way to form the <i>historical sacred</i>: heroes with warts, mysteries that aren’t mysterious because ineffable (and thus watched over by priests) but because they are <i>difficult </i>(and thus to be worked on by honest inquirers).<br />
<a name=sec8></a><br />
<b>8.</b> Trilling’s concern was that books were being taken away from what Virginia Woolf called the “common reader.” This concern has been resurrected by anti-Theory Revolution literary critics like Harold Bloom, Robert Alter, Andrew Delbanco, and Bromwich. Trilling was worried that academic knowingness was creating distance between the books and nonacademic readers, the uninitiated. This is what’s behind my lament in section 3 that we aren’t encouraged to have personal relationships with books anymore. As scholars, we need, quite rightly, to <i>know </i>things about texts. But this can get in the way of why we should read the text in the first place. And this is how the unimportant technical objection to the figuralizing process comes up. It’s unimportant because it can be brushed aside, but it is important insofar as English professors are the only ones at the Altar of Humanism in the Scene of Instruction. Before I got into all this, I knew someone who’d dropped out of UW-Madison’s first tier literature program. Why? “Because I didn’t enjoy reading anymore.”<br />
<br />
The technical objection comes up when you recall Rorty saying that ironists “treat the names of such people as the names of the heroes of their own books. We do not bother to distinguish Swift from <i>saeva indignatio</i>, Hegel from Geist, Nietzsche from Zarathustra, Marcel Proust from Marcel the narrator, or Trilling from The Liberal Imagination.” Perhaps there is no problem with Swift, Hegel, or Trilling, but identifying an author with a narrator is a <i>big </i>mistake we teach all students in Literature 101. The author is not the narrator, the poet is not the speaker. An older style of criticism often didn’t care, and made such identifications willy-nilly. But, technically, we need to pause before making those inferences. “The speaker” is a technical device for referring to the voice out of which the poem emits, and it’s important because identifying traits of that voice is terribly important to figuring out what the poem is about. But if you too quickly assume that the voice is the <i>poet’s</i>, you might import all kinds of things you know about the poet into your understanding of the poem—and it might be wrong. What if a male poet wanted to write from a female point of view? What if a typically optimistic poet wanted to write a poem that is ironically tragic, but you miss the irony because you too quickly assimilate the poem to your assumed picture of the poet? <br />
<br />
“Narrator” and “speaker” are useful devices to check your entitlement to inferences about the author or poet from material found in their books. Rorty says the ironist is blithe about this, but the devices are important to the figuralizing process insofar as the Hawthorne of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> might be a different figure from the one of <i>The Marble Faun</i>. They aren’t really, I would assert, but you won’t know that until you <i>do the work</i>. The trouble with many academicians, though, is that they use the technical point to implicitly block the process of figuralizing, to stop dramatic reading. Dramatic reading is difficult, and requires time, but its excesses need room to spill so the seeds of a love of reading can be sown. Getting bogged down in technical details can strangle it in the crib. It’s the how while forgetting the why, the inverse of the problem of figuralizing. This implicit blocking only makes sense in the context of an anti-romanticism. And indeed, all-too-knowing exposers of the past have run rampant over many of our studies, as if the reason to study Emerson was to expose some of the racist attitudes that still attended the prophet of self-reliance. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn10">[10]</a> The knowing attitude wants a land without heroes, and perhaps only demons. Dramatic reading is antithetical to that.<br />
<a name=sec9></a><br />
<b>9.</b> If monumental reading is about identifying with pieces and parts and dramatic reading is about identifying with the whole, then the last species of touchstone reading combines the two. I’ll call it <i>afflictive reading</i>. This is the kind of reading and writing that is marked by an obsessive return to the pieces and parts of a single figure. For whatever reason, returning again and again to read and relate the writings of this figure helps you identify who you are and where you are. Afflictive readers aren’t necessarily group-worshippers; they might never want or need to talk to others about their obsessions. Their imaginations are simply haunted, afflicted by the presence of this other imagination, for good or for ill, as demon or hero. Sometimes the obsession takes the form of an implicit inquiry, an extended, attenuated etiological investigation to discover just what that reason is for the obsession.<br />
<br />
Afflictive readers, like all obsessives, can be really annoying. Talk about anything, and their obsession is bound to come up. When I was young, my High School Sunday School teacher asked us to think about what the difference was between a cult and a religion. His answer was that being in a cult meant being a member of only one group, at its limit. If Erin—our representative cheerleader—was <i>only </i>a cheerleader, then you might say she was in a cheerleading cult. But no, she’s a cheerleader, a Christian, a member of the Hill family, etc., etc. The spiritual affliction of a single figure can become cult-like in this way—you might only have <i>one </i>hero, one affliction. The best remedy for this is to read widely. Maybe you continue to return over and over to the same person or thing, but you will at least have the perspective to see better why your obsession is worth obsessing over. Hero-worship is best if it’s pantheonistic. Even if you have a Zeus, you’ll only understand why he’s Zeus by comparison with Apollo and Athena. <br />
<br />
I’d like to think that touchstone readers with their obsessions are in some way better off than those without such obsessions. But my democratic fiber resists the thought. In colleges, we like to think we’re there to teach “critical thinking,” but when it comes down to it, critical thinking isn’t ours alone. But still...there must be value in some people being capable of long chains of inference, in some people devoting themselves to conscientious study to make sure the tethers stay in place. Jefferson and Hamilton thought education to be massively important to the democratic process, and the laments of the academic class about our continued illiteracy have to be understood as Jeffersonian expressions. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/touchstones.html#fn11">[11]</a> The fear some of us have about literature is that a formerly important instrument of self-enlargement might be passing with no replacement. It isn’t all the English professors’ fault, but some of them aren’t helping.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> I’ll add that this made critical battles essentially philosophical battles. And philosophical battles fought by people untrained in philosophy are dangerous—like giving automatic weapons to people who haven’t been to the firing range, innocent bystanders and users alike are going to get hurt. The great always rise to the top—Stanley Fish, for example, is as philosophically sophisticated as they come, with no philosophical training. But so much of it is dreadful, and written with a brazen self-confidence that one finds awkward if one has read any philosophy at all.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> There are, however, hold-outs everywhere. I had several professors of history at UW-Madison as an undergrad who I would count as having held that torch, but they were largely old. Indeed, there were several political theorists in the Poli-Sci department that I would also count. The theorists were anomalous (and all fled or retired), but my experience with history professors leads me to think that history hasn’t quite left the altar. Bernard Bailyn, an eminent and aging historian, in a short pamphlet recording an extended interview, <i>On the Teaching and Writing of History</i>, gives me hope that undergraduate history education is happening as he teaches and thinks about it—after all, he has had many graduate students.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> There’s something also to be said about the production of K-12 English teachers from university English departments, and thus the relationship of what has happened at the university level to K-12 education. But my sense of this is dim, and it is further mediated by my sense that K-12 education has in general much bigger problems having to do with funding. In my experience in a School of Education, though, my sense was that the prospective English teachers—who were, after all, only going to have a B.A. in English—hardly knew who Derrida or Foucault were, and didn’t care if they did. But if you were going to get a job at the university level from 1980 on, you had better. The relationship between lower and higher education is less like trickledown than it seems like some cultural conservatives feared in the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s. (For more on the Culture Wars of recent memory, see my forthcoming “The Legacy of Group Thinking.”)<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> For two good statements by Rorty of what happens when you treat everything, including fossils and other lumps, as a text (and how unradical at a disciplinary level such a redescription is), see the third section of “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in CP) and “Texts and Lumps” (in ORT).<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> There’s something further to be learned about the type of person that does, then, go in for academic, humanistic study. After all, if it’s the utilitarian and pragmatic reader fulfilling short-term goals that is rewarded at the lower levels (writing papers, finishing a class), then since there are no short-term goals fulfilled by going into it as a business (i.e. <i>money</i>), who is it that is going into humanistic study? What kind of profile do these graduate students have? I think one answer that goes a long way to explaining why all these kinds of post-Theory Revolution alternatives to humanistic reading took off is <i>power</i>—some people enjoy the feel of <i>dominating </i>a text. (It’s similar to the feel of winning an argument.) Power is the impulse at work in the strong poet of Rorty’s <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>, which for Rorty is the Shelleyan unacknowledged legislator of the world. So one explanation is that these theory-gurus started purveying strategies for dominating texts (some more unintentionally than others). The theories appear difficult on the outside, but once you get the hang of deconstruction or Foucault, it becomes easy to endlessly reapply to texts—thus, each time, giving you that high of domination. Combine that with the mid-range reward of a <i>job </i>for being able to do this easy thing, and you have what happened to English departments. It happened to philosophy as well, when logical positivists declared that philosophical problems were really linguistic problems—thinking that dissolving the philosophical problems would be really easy after that. However, in both cases, what gets you high easily at first becomes more difficult after a while if you take too much of it. If that isn’t precisely the case at the individual level, it is at the institutional level, with people increasingly wondering whether there’s a larger point to the activity besides the ephemeral power-high.<br />
<br />
Power, too, seems antithetical to being friends, and that’s a deep question Rorty’s perspective opens up on the practices of reading. There’s nothing friendly about the strong poet’s approach to opening up new vistas of thought (though it <i>is </i>quite personal). But must we all be strong poets, and thus unfriendly? Must we be strong all of the time? The patterns I outline as touchstone reading below are something I believe are useful to all readers, and especially the amateur connoisseur who has no interest in power (or, very little at least). One might, however, in response to the impulse of power located in Rorty’s conception of the strong poet, deny the premise that power, and thus cruelty, is at the heart of our creators of new vistas of thought. The denial of this premise can be found in many post-Marxist utopic visions (those that turn away from Marx’s violence), but it is especially common in feminist thinkers. This is the line of thought in Dianne Rothleder’s book, <i>The Work of Friendship: Rorty, His Critics, and the Project of Solidarity</i> (1999). As I hope I’ve suggested, I take this to be a very fruitful line of thought to take to Rorty’s work. For example, Annette Baier’s feminism, praised by Rorty, could be brought into closer contact, like her work on the concept of <i>trust </i>and its masculinization through its assimilation to the <i>contract </i>rather than the personal relationships of a family. <br />
<br />
However, Rothleder takes the easy route of criticism, rather than pushing Rorty to his limits. She says, “What we need to ask is why the ironist would want to redescribe others in terms that, if made public, would humiliate?” (64) The answer implicit in her discussion is <i>power</i>—we would do it because it makes us feel powerful. And we <i>need </i>that power, in Rorty’s vision, to overturn the bad in the world. Rothleder, I think, avoids saying “power” out loud, though, because she isn’t convinced that power is needed for the work of revolution (whether conceptual or political). The ironist would risk humiliating because what the ironist really wants to be is a strong poet. (Rothleder conflates the two, but that’s mainly Rorty’s fault for having deployed the terms somewhat inconsistently.) But Rothleder avoids facing the problem of utopic change without power by calling the strong poet’s impulse the “Bloomian desire to destroy otherness in order to be original” (64). That’s true, and self-centered, but that originality and cruelty might have great public utility is left unsaid. So Rothleder needs to deny the premise that change requires power, and is thus in some sense a cruel act. Instead, Rothleder focuses on the terms of cruelty and humiliation, and their forced semi-privacy in Rorty’s utopia, saying, “what is sad about the reasoning here is that the desire not to be cruel seems to come not from a goodness of heart, but from a fear of one’s own suffering” (64). Rothleder is correct here, and cites CIS 91 for evidence, but she again avoids the more promising avenue of reflection, which is that this idea isn’t Rorty’s, but the feminist political theorist Judith Shklar’s. Shklar didn’t think this was sad, but the centerpiece of liberal thinking about politics—the “liberalism of fear” (from the essay of that name, collected in her <i>Political Thought and Political Thinkers</i>). Rorty’s line of thought about this, whether heart or fear, is in fact more complicated than Shklar’s seems at times, because of Rorty’s commitment to moral sentimentalism. (See especially “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in <i>Truth and Progress</i>.)<br />
<br />
What further stunts Rothleder’s take on Rorty is that she misses Rorty’s own tenderness over and against the power-mad strong poet. The image of Proust is juxtaposed with the power-strong Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida sequence in order to talk about the difference between a tender focus on “beauty” and a tough focus on “the sublime.” It is these passages in CIS that have gone underrecognized in attempting to understand Rorty’s strong poet and ironist, and they bear directly on practices of reading, for beauty is to friendship what sublimity is to power. Read this discussion about power against my discussion of Rorty at the beginning of <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html">“Asceticism and the Fire of the Imagination,”</a> and particularly thinking of the line “a lyric which you recite, but do not (for fear of injuring it) relate to anything else.” I don’t talk about power there, but perpendicular issues across these central passages.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> Bloom, <i>The Anxiety of Influence</i>, 96. Bloom did not mean just allusion, or a narrow definition of it, but something much more pregnant and difficult to make out. Reading through Arnold is one way of putting this dark line to use, though I do not think it travels as far into the darkness as Bloom wished.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> “Why We Read Jane Austen” in <i>The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent</i>, 519<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” in AOC, 126<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> You might wonder about the rejection of heroes entirely, which came in two flavors. I regard the form of knowingness that attends theories of human motivation as anti-democratic esotericism (did you understand Foucault right off the bat?), and so disregard them because what I’m concerned with is the attempt to be anti-esoteric with regards to people. The problem, I’m suggesting, is that it takes quite a bit of work to get to know people.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> Edgar Dryden lamentingly retails some of these attitudes in the recent history of Americanist criticism at the beginning of his <i>Monumental Melville</i>.<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> I’ve learned most about Jefferson and the other Founders from Judith Shklar. For a review of her use of Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#sec5">“Shklar’s Vision of American Political Thought,” sections 5 and 6</a>. What’s most interesting to me about the antithesis of Jefferson and Adams on education is how education comes out—as it has here—as anti-democratic in some manner, though in Hamilton’s sense education and information is what makes things more democratic. And indeed, that seems a core American democratic value—the right to education as egalitarian.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-87517448929704454472014-07-18T04:00:00.000-07:002015-11-29T10:54:48.482-07:00Absurdity and the Claims of Others<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Every once in a while . . . <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/absurdity-and-claims-of-others.html#sec2">2. </a>What if everything seems absurd? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/absurdity-and-claims-of-others.html#sec3">3. </a>Louis CK on the web of life — Camus and the dilemma of modernity — Christ? Or fleshy neighbors?; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/absurdity-and-claims-of-others.html#sec4">4. </a>Accepting fragility — The claims of others<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> Every once in a while, I receive an email from people who have read one of my Pirsig essays at moq.org, every one of which have an “author’s note” in the header that gives my email and a playful request for all forms of feedback. Often I have to explain that I wrote them many years ago, and no longer think many of the things they contain. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/absurdity-and-claims-of-others.html#fn1">[1]</a> The essay, bar none, that I receive the most emails about is one I wrote on Camus for a philosophy class on existentialism, “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life.” Usually, the people have no interest in Pirsig because they found the essay by typing in the relevant keywords into google. I have gotten many different kinds of response to this essay. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/absurdity-and-claims-of-others.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> I recently received a response that touched an interesting chord. It consisted simply of a quoted passage from the essay—a passage from Camus and then my response—and a series of rhetorical questions. (No salutation, no closing signature; one of the oddities of internet life I’ve had to grow accustomed to.) Like so:<blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”</blockquote>In this way Camus seems to be merely pointing out the absurdity of some people’s lives. I can think of several people in my life that don’t fit into this simplistic mold. My sister, for example, prefers to live her life as something of a free spirit. She works when she needs money, sleeps rarely, and parties a lot. This isn’t quite Camus’ point, however. Camus would certainly argue that my sister is indeed in a pattern that could easily be questioned. Why party all the time? Why not work instead? Why anything at all? This last question is what Camus is driving at. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/absurdity-and-claims-of-others.html#fn3">[3]</a></blockquote>What if we have to support our family? <br />
What if we are bored of life? <br />
What if we have no hope to live? <br />
What if everything seems nothing but absurd? <br />
What if you have no one to love you?</blockquote>I found this very interesting, because it struck me that there was a tension in the questions. Some of the rhetorical questions point to an answer in the Cosmic Christ, and given my mysterious writer’s email handle, I suspect that was the intended effect. What if you’re bored, what if there’s no hope, what if everything seems absurd, what if you have no one to love you? Jesus Christ can do all of those things for you—He can love you, give meaning to your life, enter you into an exciting project to structure your earthly time. He is the substance of hope, the evidence for things unseen.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> The first question, however, doesn’t fit that pattern: “What if we have to support our family?” I like Louis CK’s version:<blockquote>Whenever single people complain about anything, I really want them to shut the fuck up. First of all, if you’re single, your life has no consequence on the earth. Even if you’re helping people aggressively, which you’re fucking not, nobody gives a shit what happens to you. You can die, and it actually doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. Your mother will cry or whatever, but otherwise, nobody gives a shit.<br />
I can’t die; I got two kids and my wife doesn’t fucking work, so I don’t get to die. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/absurdity-and-claims-of-others.html#fn4">[4]</a></blockquote>I think what this points to is a different pattern of possible answers to those other rhetorical questions: finding a place in the web of life that makes up the connections we have with others is a way of giving meaning, finding hope, and structuring your earthly time. If you’re looking for love, you can find it in your fleshy neighbors.<br />
<br />
And <i>this</i>, now, is the philosophical response I would give to Camus. The problem I took up in that paper was produced by the intersection between the seeming absurdity of our day-to-day processes of living and the death of God. Camus saw that there was a problem riven into modern life. God once played the role of framing life, of being the framework in which meaning was constituted—no longer. And the increasing mechanization of life, symbolized (and literalized) by the clock, produces the feeling of a succession of days without success, unending—up goes the boulder, and down it goes for tomorrow. In effect, these two patterns of answer—my interlocutor’s answer of Christ, my answer of fleshy neighbors—are simply two different attempts to grasp one horn over the other of the dilemma of modernity, so structured. He doubles down on Christ, denying God is dead; I double down on day-to-day life, denying it is absurd.<br />
<br />
Camus thought the ultimate philosophical question was of suicide: why shouldn’t I commit suicide? Louis CK suggests quite plainly how taking seriously your obligations to others answers Camus’ question—his entire act is almost a concession to the absurdity, which heightens the sense of moral responsibility and obligation we continually flout but must find within ourselves if we are to be good people. Even if I <i>wanted </i>to die, Louis CK says, I don’t <i>get </i>to.<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> Denying that life is absurd and finding meaning in the arms of others is a much more fragile pattern of answers, given that people can betray you, and no one is entitled to love from any particular person. We might be able to say that every person is entitled to love, but that does not mean that any person is entitled to fulfill that as their unique obligation.<br />
<br />
Love from fleshy others takes work. Claiming the attention of others is as delicate a dance as the practice of reason, of the giving and asking for reasons, the exchange of assertions and claims about why you do or think a thing. Jesus’ love isn’t like that; He loves you no matter what. That, I think, speaks to the continued pull of Christian teachings. But it doesn’t speak against pouring your heart into others as opposed to the absurdly easy love of Christ.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> You can find a list of those essays and my grading of them <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/p/moqorg-essays.html">here</a>.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a>One particularly weird one I had fun with I wrote about in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-not-to-start-philosophical.html">“How Not to Start a Philosophical Conversation.”</a> For an earlier autobiographical reflection on the “Absurdity” essay, in which I rain on my earlier self’s parade, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/12/second-thoughts-on-existentialism.html">“Second Thoughts on Existentialism.”</a> It has perhaps the greatest pun I’ve ever made (though “How Not to” has a good one, too).<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> The Camus is from <i>The Myth of Sisyphus</i>, and the passage is from the beginning of the section of “Absurdity” entitled “Life Is Absurd.”<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> This is from <i>Shameless</i>. You can listen to a clip of this joke <a href="http://splitsider.com/2013/02/the-annotated-wisdom-of-louis-c-k/">here</a>. I agree with the makers of that website—Louis CK is one of the most philosophically substantive comedians working today.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-52845354554375790332014-07-11T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-11T14:50:25.166-07:00On the Asymmetry between Practical and Doxastic Discursive Commitments<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. MIE, Ch. 4.4.3 — Getting the hang of it — Meaning and use; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec2">2. </a>Inference, not reference — Pragmatics over semantics — Circumstances and consequences; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec3">3. </a>The social scorekeeping game of giving and asking for reasons — Responsibility and authority — Testimony and deference; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec4">4. </a>Thought and action, doxastic and practical commitments — An asymmetry between thought and action; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec5">5. </a>Desire makes the good relative as truth is not — Commands and permissions aren’t basic; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec6">6. </a>Inheritance of entitlement — The Enlightenment tradition of practical reason — The default and challenge structure of entitlement; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec7">7. </a>Rorty’s suspicion of Brandom — Brandom’s tweeking of Rorty — Morality and prudence; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec8">8. </a>Taking over being — Obviousness as conformity with the past; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec9">9. </a>The Enlightenment’s ill-fated theoretical project — Wilde and vocabulary-choice; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec10">10. </a>Vocabulary-choice as corresponding to desire — Deferring to common sense or to visionary incomprehensibility; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec11">11. </a>Decisionism — There is no willy-nilly — Explicitation forces us to take responsibility, including responsibility for the vocabulary we were socialized into <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> If you’re reading this, you have either a masochistic curiosity for jargon, or recognize the title as an allusion to Chapter 4, Section 4, Subsection 3 of Robert Brandom’s <i>Making It Explicit</i>. Either way, you need help. (Enjoy the pun.)<br />
<br />
I intend for this to be a note on a hinge in Brandom’s systematic philosophy of language. There are many hinges, to be sure, as a quick look at the index will indicate: Brandom has a separate entry for “distinctions,” retailing 53 of them, from “acknowledging/attributing” to “weak/strong/hyper-inferentialism.” Brandom’s skill at systematization is somewhat breathtaking, requiring many stops along the way. But Brandom is also a genius of public relations. Brandom’s work, like Foucault’s, requires stubborn persistence. One reads either only by “getting the hang of it” through sustained practice, both in the reading and through writing—by trying to apply appropriately the concepts at work in the reading. Their vocabularies are strange enough to require a certain know-how through practice, but dense enough for a payoff. The only difference between the two is that Brandom was intentionally writing a system, whereas Foucault was simply a strange writer. Foucault’s vocabulary wasn’t created to fit entirely together, and many a critic has profitably broken off pieces for use. (Many more have experimented and failed, and far, far too many have emulated Foucault and ended up just writing thin ice.) <br />
<br />
Brandom, however, has mastered the technique of imperceptible repetition—only if you’re paying very careful attention will you realize that he repeats himself quite a lot. I think one reason you don’t tend to notice this is that, given a sufficiently intricate and foreign vocabulary, you’re always welcoming to reminders of what, e.g., the importance of the difference between deontic statuses and attitudes are, or how commitment and entitlement combine to produce a third deontic status of incompatibility. (Plus the book is 700+ pages long, so who’s going to remember?) What is particularly masterful about Brandom’s strategy is that it mimics the content of the theory. For Brandom, semantics is beholden to pragmatics, meaning to use. That means that “meaning” is a cream you skim off the top of the usage of a word, a pattern that forms after seeing a large quantity of uses of a series of marks or noises. Understanding someone’s meaning is, for Brandom, a matter of being able to deploy their vocables in just the way the other person would. Understanding a person is getting the hang of them. Reading systematic philosophy is, in other words, a lot like Weirdo Comedies—if you just hang in there with Zach Galafianakis, the movie promises, you’ll find him quite likable and a real nourishment to your soul.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> What I’m going to do in the next three sections is introduce and arrange a few of Brandom’s main ideas in order to reach the alluded to moment in which Brandom shows an asymmetry between practical commitments to action and theoretical commitments to belief. While an analogy between the two allows for an elaboration of a number of key elements of how reason and agency hang together, Brandom hangs on this asymmetry a distinction between how we think about Truth (of our beliefs) and the Good (of what we do). In the final sections, I will speculate about motivations, philosophical and otherwise, and take issue with the asymmetry, suggesting that in the background is a dispute with his dissertation advisor, Richard Rorty, but whose consequences have to do with the soul of pragmatism. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn1">[1]</a><br />
<br />
Brandom calls his philosophy of language <i>inferentialism</i>, and its primary benefactor is Wilfrid Sellars. The key thought here is that <i>inference </i>is the concept that needs priority in figuring out how language works, not <i>reference</i>. Reference has gotten a lot of play because of the relative triumph of empiricism over rationalism—since Kant essentially conceded that empiricism is the unguarded philosophy of science and regular life <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn2">[2]</a>—and the seemingly intuitive appeal of thinking that whatever is true corresponds (i.e. <i>refers correctly</i>) to the way the world is. Our understanding of how words refer, or as Brandom puts it, the <i>representational dimension</i> of language, has been unduly influenced by British empiricism. Sellars’ famous attack on the Myth of the Given is what results when one wants to displace reference in order to get a better picture of how reference works in concert with other important dimensions and concepts as inference, meaning, language-use, truth, perception, and action. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn3">[3]</a> The trick is to see that our distinctive form of negotiation with the world (as opposed to a beaver’s or a rock’s) is discursively constituted—necessarily mediated by our language-use. The world isn’t just <i>given </i>to us through the senses; one way we respond to the world is with the linguistic mechanisms programmed into us by socialization into a community.<br />
<br />
Brandom’s pragmatism comes out in the form of his Wittgensteinian defense of the priority of pragmatics over semantics. Language-use is what gives rise to meaning, rather than meaning determining use. Our handle on a word, however, is normative—there are correct and incorrect uses of words and concepts. If there weren’t a pattern of conformity somewhere in the usage of a word, how would we communicate successfully? Since we obviously <i>do </i>successfully communicate from time to time, Brandom takes a central project of philosophy of language to be the explanation of how the trick is done (or rather, as he smartly reframes it, what would <i>count </i>as doing the trick—since, again, we obviously know <i>how</i>).<br />
<br />
One important angle from which this pragmatism comes out, for our present purposes, is in Brandom’s adaptation of Michael Dummett’s two-aspect model of meaning. A word means what it does given “the inference from the circumstances of appropriate employment to the appropriate consequences of such employment” (MIE 117). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn4">[4]</a> If you know how to use the word correctly and know what correctly follows from having used it, then you can be said to know what the word means. That means only saying “red” when in the presence of red (and not blue), and knowing that if you are in the presence of red, you are <i>ipso facto</i> in the presence of a color. In other words, understanding meaning is in the first place understanding a word’s inferential role—what inferences it licenses, what it commits you to, and what is incompatible with it.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> I’ve now deployed Brandom’s three major “deontic statuses”: <i>entitlement </i>(what you are entitled or licensed to infer from correct usage), <i>commitment </i>(what you are committed to inferring from previous, correct usage), and <i>incompatibility </i>(what you are barred from entitlement to given certain other commitments). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html">[5]</a> (Don’t ask what a “deontic status” is, for now—it doesn’t matter.) These statuses are like markers in the social scorekeeping game of giving and asking for reasons. We <i>attribute </i>to others commitments based on their behavior (in particular, saying sentences) and keep track of their entitlement to those behaviors. This is the same for our scorecard of ourselves: a “self-attribution” is simply the <i>avowal </i>or <i>acknowledgment </i>of a commitment of your own. The philosophical concept of <i>belief</i>—as in, the one that appears in the JTB formula for knowledge—is replaced in Brandom’s conception by <i>commitment</i>. This makes it clearer that, by and large, you are responsible for being <i>justified </i>or <i>entitled </i>to your commitments. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn6">[6]</a> A belief or commitment is something you <i>take to be true</i>—that’s just what it is. Beliefs, your commitments, simply by being that status, are in what Wilfrid Sellars called “the space of reasons.” They must be justified...at some point.<br />
<br />
This is the really important bit that distinguishes Brandom’s inferentialism from many rationalisms that are, like his, genealogically tied to the Enlightenment. Brandom thinks that the key moral concept of <i>responsibility </i>is interlocked with another concept that often has trouble fitting into post-Enlightenment ethical frames: <i>authority</i>. Authority has seemed to Enlightenment traditions a social concept that can only become part of our moral thought if it ties to a foundation made up of nonsocial concepts. God’s law, natural law, and Kantian principles are all ways of constituting this nonsocial space, a space unmediated by social activity. The social contract tradition that Hobbes initiated is an attempt to move, as J. B. Schneewind puts it, “toward a world on its own” by trying to create the nonsocial out of the social—rather than found the latter on the former, thus requiring one to <i>find </i>the former prior to the latter—but it got sidetracked by utilitarianism’s insistence that some hedonistic end is the only end possible, on the one hand, and Kantianism’s insistence that the only contract that can rise above the social is one universally applicable, on the other. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn7">[7]</a> Brandom has tried to fill out our conceptual notions of responsibility and authority with an entirely social base: the space of reasons is the social game of giving and asking for reasons.<br />
<br />
This filling out of what rationality is has meant a repolishing of the concept of authority. The best way to see this is in the role of <i>testimony</i>. Say Don claims that there’s a dog dish in the kitchen. Chris challenges the claim, asking, “how do you know?” Given the way we currently play the game of giving and asking for reasons, it is perfectly acceptable for Don to entitle his commitment by replying, “Because Dan just came from the kitchen and said that Fido was in there eating out of his bowl. What are you, deaf?” Don is justifying his claim, which he takes to be true, with Dan’s testimony: “Dude, your dog is totally chowing down in the kitchen...the food is <i>everywhere </i>around his bowl!” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn8">[8]</a> In other words, Don is <i>deferring </i>to Dan’s <i>authority </i>as a reliable reporter of how things are via his perceptions.<br />
<br />
<i>Deference </i>then goes together with <i>inference</i>. When justifying a claim, it is in general permitted to either display your inferential warrant or defer that warrant to another. This is also how <i>citation </i>works in intellectual matters. We permit people to cite the work of others in order to justify an inference. There are many (many) things to say about the particular reason-giving and consuming games we play—how sometimes it <i>isn’t</i> permitted to simply rest on the authority of another—but these are species of the larger genus in which deference is an intelligible possibility. This shows that people who like to deploy the saying “I have to see things for myself” are perhaps unduly restricting themselves and what they can claim to know.<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> The last item to deploy before turning to Chapter 4.4.3 is the relationship between perception and action to inference, to the game of giving and asking for reasons. This is another area in which Brandom’s pragmatism comes out, given pragmatism’s concern with action and consequences. Brandom’s interest in Chapter 4 is to give an account of rational agency. In Section 2, above, I briefly alluded to the linguistic turn that Sellars and Brandom make with regard to thought—our negotiation with the world is inherently discursive, and hence linguistic. When Sellars demolished the Myth of the Given, however, he wasn’t suggesting that we don’t have nonlinguistic experiences—as if rocks couldn’t exist without “rock.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn9">[9]</a> Sellars was trying to get us to see that perception’s authority can only be constituted <i>within </i>the social game of giving and asking for reasons, and as such can only be articulated inferentially and linguistically, even if the perception itself isn’t linguistic.<br />
<br />
To that end, Brandom follows Sellars in talking of “language-entries” and “language-exits” to talk about how perception can begin an inferential chain and how action can end one. In the passage I will shortly focus on, Brandom also talks about the parallel between <i>practical </i>and <i>doxastic discursive commitments</i>. A practical commitment is a commitment to <i>act </i>in a certain way; a doxastic commitment is a commitment to (ahem) <i>believe </i>in a certain way. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn10">[10]</a> I find it helpful to think of these two as belief-action relations and belief-belief relations. The former is modeled in the practical syllogism: given two premises related to each other, a certain action ought to follow.<blockquote>A1. It’s raining outside.<br />
A2. If it’s raining, then you shouldn’t go outside.<br />
A3. You shouldn’t go outside.<br />
</blockquote>Doxastic commitments, or belief-belief relations, then, are modeled on a regular syllogism whose outcome is a commitment to take a certain thing to be true: a taking-true, as Brandom sometimes puts it.<blockquote>B1. It’s raining inside. <br />
B2. If it’s raining inside, then you are crazy. <br />
B3. You are crazy.<br />
</blockquote>Why did I say “you <i>are </i>crazy” and not “you <i>should think</i> you are crazy”? After all, that would make the two syllogistic models parallel. This asymmetry, I think, matches the asymmetry Brandom highlights in the passage I will finally get to. Notice that all the premises and conclusions are takings-true as they are, and that all the lines in <i>only the second premises</i> (A2 and B2) would be takings-true if the “ought” were added, but that if the “ought” is removed from the first syllogism, it doesn’t make any sense. “If it’s raining, then you do not go outside.” “You do not go outside.” You can’t just take the conclusion to be true; you have to verify whether or not it is true. And that’s because they are empirical claims, at best. <br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> Now, I think, we are in a position to understand Chapter 4.4.3, “Asymmetries between Practical and Doxastic Discursive Commitments.” This is the first asymmetry that Brandom explicates:<blockquote>The first way in which the structure governing the attribution of entitlements to practical discursive commitments differs from that governing the attribution of entitlements to doxastic ones is that there is nothing corresponding to the authority of testimony in the practical case. The issue of entitlement can arise for practical commitments, as for all discursive commitments. But the (conditional) responsibility to vindicate such commitments is, in the practical case, exclusively a <i>justificatory </i>responsibility. Default entitlements aside, it is only by exhibiting a piece of reasoning having as its conclusion the practical commitment in question that entitlement to such commitments can in general be demonstrated or secured. (MIE 239)</blockquote>To discharge your responsibility for entitling yourself to an action, you have to <i>infer</i>, e.g. by producing explicitly a syllogism like the above, not <i>defer</i>. The reason Brandom says this is so is because you have to have a <i>desire </i>for an action to make sense. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn11">[11]</a> That is missing from my examples above. It would read: A2ʹ “If it’s raining, <i>and if you don’t want to get wet</i>, then you shouldn’t go outside.” If you press for symmetry, what’s the corresponding desire missing in premise B2 of “If it’s raining inside, then you are crazy”? It is this inability to produce a corresponding desire that leads Brandom to claim that “committing oneself to a claim is putting it forward as <i>true</i>, and this means as something that everyone in some sense <i>ought </i>to believe” (239), whereas putting something forward as <i>good</i>, because it is relative to desire, is not necessarily something for everyone. As he puts it later, “That there is no implicit normative commitment that plays the same role with respect to desire (and therefore intention and action in general) that truth plays with respect to belief consists simply in the absence (in the structure according to which entitlements to practical commitments are inherited) of anything corresponding to the interpersonal dimension of testimony and vindication by deferral” (240).<br />
<br />
This is where things get clearer and inkier by the same measure, as it is this supposed inability to produce a corresponding desire in the B syllogism that will prove to be at issue. What began my whole rumination on this paragraph was re-reading it with a marginal comment I had left the last time I read the book (two years ago). Next to “exclusively a <i>justificatory </i>responsibility,” which is the bit about inference, I had written, in quotation marks, “she said I could.” Cryptic—how would that be a riposte? It seems like justification, but it doesn’t seem like “exhibiting a piece of reasoning.” Reading the passage again is when I realized what I was pointing to: doesn’t “she said I could” play the role of testimony?<br />
<br />
This set me abuzz, and I immediately sat down to start writing this. Literally—for as I puzzled over Brandom’s terminology, making sure that I’m reasoning through it properly, I eventually read further on: “It is of course possible to add an interpersonal dimension of practical authority as a superstructure to the basic game of giving and asking for reasons for actions” (240). These are commands and permissions. Well, that set me adrift (though at least I was using Brandom’s terminology correctly), but it leaves the question: okay, so if we <i>can </i>do it (and obviously do), then why isn’t it part of the basic makeup, and instead merely an epiphenomenon?<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> I’m inclined to think that there are asymmetries in the area, one of which, Brandom points out, is the fact that claims, assertions, takings-true, seem in general to be inheritable by anyone, though commands or permissions are not. You have to be a citizen of the United States to have permission to vote, but there aren’t similar restrictions on who can claim “There’s a dog dish in the kitchen because Dan said so.” Likewise, if Don makes the latter claim, there’s nothing that can stop Chris—who didn’t hear Dan, if you remember—from extending the chain further, inheriting Dan’s testimony: “There’s a dog dish in the kitchen because Don said Dan said so.” However, a deputized civilian cannot themselves deputize more civilians. If I’m the teacher, and I allow one kid to go to the bathroom, the kid then doesn’t have authorization to allow some second kid to go just because <i>he </i>was allowed. As Brandom says, “assertion ... is an egalitarian practice in a sense in which commanding and giving permission is not” (241-42).<br />
<br />
This last comment, I think, reveals a little above the ankle of why Brandom doesn’t think commands and permissions are part of the basic makeup of the social game of giving and asking for reasons. Brandom perceives himself as an inheritor of a distinctively Enlightenment tradition of practical reason. By this I mean that, though he leaves behind the faculty psychologies that hypostatized “R”eason and the foundationalisms that reified “P”rinciples, he traces his Sellarsian inferentialism and Wittgensteinian pragmatism through not only key passages of the <i>Kritiks</i>, but most prominently (and repeatedly) through Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?”—a short tract written for a periodical that summarizes in a brilliant piece of rhetoric pretty much what people have in mind when they talk about the Enlightenment. Its message is “think for yourself and build an egalitarian world-community.”<br />
<br />
Does this mean Brandom’s Enlightenment hopes cause him to <i>bias </i>his account in favor of egalitarian practices? Has he cooked the books in this regard? Or, in another direction, does he use the egalitarian nature of assertion to entitle himself to assertions about how we are all beholden to this implicit egalitarianism at the political level, ala Habermas?<br />
<br />
I don’t think he does either. Brandom’s account is too sane and intuitive at all the right places. For example, part of the extreme end of Enlightenment rationalism was the demand for justification—you always have to be able to justify your assertions. But if one <i>actually </i>pursues this injunction, it will produce an infinite regress, as each justification is an assertion, and so equally in need of justification. In order to soften this demand, Brandom introduces the notion of the “default-and-challenge structure of entitlement.” This structure embodies the notion that commitments are entitled by default unless challenged. And since challenges themselves are something like assertions, this means that <i>challenges to produce entitlement need to be themselves entitled</i>. You don’t always need to answer your child’s question, or Descartes’. I believe this is actually a quite radical innovation in theoretical philosophy, for not only does it seem to better describe the way we actually behave, it’s produced by the pressure of a theoretical consideration—the problem of the infinite regress. And with Habermasian appeals to the nature of “communicative reason” as dictating to social institutions, the very fact that he shows how commands and permissions can be constituted shows how Brandom’s pragmatist priority of <i>taking </i>(a thing to be a certain way) over <i>being </i>(a certain way) goes very deep. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn12">[12]</a> The world can be taken to be a pretty shitty place, and that’s on us—as Rorty loved to paraphrase Nelson Goodman, there is no Way the World Is to push back on us in this regard.<br />
<a name=sec7></a><br />
<b>7.</b> For his part, Rorty did think his former student at Princeton sounded a little <i>too </i>sane. It <i>sounds </i>a little too close to Habermas. Rorty’s whipping post was Brandom’s reconstitution of the concept of <i>fact </i>as being a “true claimable.” Rorty thought this attempt was of a piece with his attempt to recuperate the word “representation” despite the fact that Brandom was the guy who coined the word “antirepresentationalism” in order to better whip the metaphysical realist that Rorty spent his whole career tirelessly running to the ground. When Brandom says that part of his project is to show how pragmatism can incorporate the “representational dimension” of thought and talk, Rorty thinks he’s conceding too much to the realist, for all Brandom is showing is how we (have to) use the word “about.” In a lot of ways, Rorty concedes, this is just a verbal matter of terminology—but, he insists, “rhetoric matters.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn13">[13]</a><br />
<br />
I too think rhetoric matters, and I think significant Brandom’s occasional, ironic use of a highfalutin Platonic vocabulary. These moments—as when he calls us at the beginning of the book “speakers and seekers of truth”—I think are tweeks of Rorty’s nose, winks in his direction. Rorty was infamous for enjoying his ironic tweeking. Whereas Rorty used to love shocking the metaphysically-inclined with little aphoristic hyperboles, I think these were meant to shock <i>him</i>, the shocker. But how do you do that, how do you shock the impious? You act out by appearing reactionary, saintly. And at just the moment Brandom is making his case for asymmetry, there appears nose-tweaking.<blockquote>Talk about belief as involving an implicit commitment to the Truth as One, the same for all believers, is a colorful way of talking about the role of testimony and challenge in the authority structure of doxastic commitment—about the way in which entitlements can be inherited by others and undercut by the incompatible commitments they become entitled to. The Good is not in the same way One, at least not if the focus is widened from specifically moral reasons for action to reasons for action generally, so as to include prudential and institutional goods. (MIE 240)</blockquote>It is this that I think cues us to Brandom marking his territory as against Rorty. For Brandom tweaks at the same time as he makes a distinction that Rorty wanted to deny in order to work out the consequences of pragmatism on moral philosophy: Rorty denied the Kantian distinction between morality and prudence. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn14">[14]</a> Why would Brandom suggest we can make that distinction at the same time he’s flouting Rorty?<br />
<a name=sec8></a><br />
<b>8.</b> He does it because he’s too calm and sane. If we get our back up about this, Brandom can just calm us down by reminding us that we are pragmatists—hence, we assert the conceptual priority of <i>taking </i>over <i>being</i>. Thus, if we <i>take </i>a reason for action to be one that <i>should </i>be pressed on everyone universally, then we just mark off that quadrant of actions and reasons-for-actions as those distinctive of the “moral realm.” It’s not a difference in kind, just a difference of how far we are willing to extend the “should.” Prudence, then, is just the kind of thing that we go easy on people about—some people just like plain, old vanilla. No need to force chocolate on them and ruin the dinner party.<br />
<br />
The problem with this bit of sanity is that <i>it is a really good point</i>. Why can’t we keep pushing that point about practical commitments over into the “ought” governing the doxastic commitments? The reason Brandom can’t see how to is because of the intuition he throws up in our face, the one that came up in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#sec5">section 5</a> and that I riffed on in the first paragraph of 6: the truth of claims seems obviously inheritable in a way actions are not. The other way I put this intuition, in section 5, is that there doesn’t seem to be anything corresponding to <i>desire </i>in a doxastic syllogism (viz. premise B2 of “If it’s raining inside, then you are crazy”).<br />
<br />
It is at this point that we have to remind ourselves that philosophers, particularly radical game-changers like Plato, Newton, Jefferson, and Hegel, don’t have to give a damn about our “intuitions.” They are just conformity with the past, which is what our radical intellectuals would like to precisely change. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn15">[15]</a> And look at the rhetoric I’ve been mirroring from Brandom in this whole discussion: “only by exhibiting a piece of reasoning...such [practical] commitments can <b>in general</b> be demonstrated” (239); “a claim is putting it forward as <i>true</i>...as something that everyone <b>in some sense</b> <i>ought </i>to believe” (239). What sense <i>is </i>that? Does the restriction of sense in which “truth” is something everyone ought to believe mirror the anomalous pocket we find in the sphere of reasons-for-action <i>in general</i>, which Brandom follows tradition in calling “moral reasons”?<br />
<a name=sec9></a><br />
<b>9.</b> I think it must be, and I’m compelled to push back against Brandom’s summoning of the Enlightenment spirit, for I think it is only that <i>too</i>-rationalist spirit that is operative in Brandom’s assigning of weight to the asymmetry between practical and doxastic commitments, Truth and the Good. Here’s Brandom’s most explicit conjuration:<blockquote>We come with different bodies, and that by itself ensures that we will have different desires; what is good for my digestion may not be good for yours; my reason to avoid peppers need be no reason for you to avoid peppers. Our different bodies give us different perceptual perspectives on the world as well, but belief as taking-true incorporates an implicit norm of commonality—that we should pool our resources, attempt to overcome the error and ignorance that distinguish our different sets of doxastic commitments, and aim at a common set of beliefs that are equally good for all. (240)</blockquote>This is the implicit commitment he thinks missing from practical commitments. And put this way, it almost seems like a slap in the face of the Enlightenment <i>political </i>project in favor of its ill-fated <i>theoretical </i>project to destroy superstition—after all, it is just the rhetoric of that hyper-rationalism that provided cover for Europe’s imperialist dominations: “let us help you overcome your ignorance and superstitions...just...let go...of the reigns of....control, ah!, there—now, we’ll just run things until you figure all this out.”<br />
<br />
Rhetoric matters, but it isn’t the rhetoric that concerns me here. I trust that Brandom’s on the side of the angels; he just feels the need, perhaps rightly, to fight the demons of Derrideans. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn16">[16]</a> Rather, I want to know what Brandom would say to Oscar Wilde. Dear Bob,—was Wilde in error or ignorance when he was tried for blasphemy?<blockquote>One can only refuse to employ the concept, on the grounds that it embodies an inference one does not endorse. (When the prosecutor at Oscar Wilde’s trial asked him to say under oath whether a particular passage in one of his works did or did not constitute blasphemy, Wilde replied, “Blasphemy is not one of my words.”) (MIE 126)</blockquote>The Wilde anecdote is a favorite of Brandom’s whenever he discusses this point about the appropriate circumstances of concept-deployment. This point embodies his assent to Rorty’s point about the primacy of <i>vocabularies</i>—it is only in the context of a vocabulary that we can utter true sentences. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn17">[17]</a> Brandom seems to clearly make the point that we do <i>not </i>have an implicit norm of commonality governing our choice in vocabularies or concepts. And religious vocabularies are merely the most obvious candidate to push back against Brandom’s asymmetry. Is committing yourself to a religious claim putting it foward as true, and <i>thus </i><b>in some sense</b> as something that everyone <i>ought </i>to believe? Maybe; but that “in some sense,” it seems to me, is working very differently than the one I quoted in section 5. <br />
<a name=sec10></a><br />
<b>10.</b> What I’ve been driving at is that I don’t think Brandom is entitled to think that the Truth is One in any sense in which the Good is not. In the abstract air of metaphilosophy, the reason we shouldn’t expect them to be different is because pragmatism gives explanatory priority to pragmatics over semantics, use over meaning, action over belief. Brandom’s lead way of working this out in <i>Making It Explicit</i> is to say that “norms implicit in practice” have priority over “norms explicit in rules” (see Ch. 1.3). One way to rewrite Chapter 4.4.3 to reflect this is to say that there <i>is</i>, appearances to the contrary, an implicit desire at work in our doxastic discursive commitments. Here’s the full practical syllogism with the implicit desire-commitment in italics:<blockquote>A1ʹ It’s raining outside.<br />
A2ʹ If it’s raining, <i>and if you don’t want to get wet</i>, then you shouldn’t go outside.<br />
A3ʹ You shouldn’t go outside.<br />
</blockquote>Here’s the doxastic syllogism with a corresponding implicit desire-commitment filled in:<blockquote>B1ʹ It’s raining inside. <br />
B2ʹ If it’s raining inside, <i>and if you want to use the vocabulary of “crazy,”</i> then you are crazy. <br />
B3ʹ You are crazy.<br />
</blockquote>It’s not as intuitive as the implicit desire at work in the practical syllogism, but that’s why my reminder about what “intuitions” really are came up at the end of section 8. Rorty and Brandom both understand the awkward balance between old and new they are forced to straddle. Rorty understood that part of the appeal of pragmatism was its commonsensical attitude, almost folksy in the hands of James, but what attracted Rorty was its prophetic, visionary side. This is the side that would rather toss away the old wineskins and let the new wine eke through our fingers than capitulate to our current ability to handle it. But there must be some sort of rapprochement made for the radical innovation to be more than eccentricity, let alone incomprehensible gibberish.<br />
<br />
This is what Brandom is at work doing for the radical ideas of Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Rorty in the arena of philosophy of language. For years, (the later) Wittgenstein was received as making systematic philosophy impossible. Brandom says, No. For years, Sellars’ dense prose and historical breadth made his ideas impenetrable. Brandom says, See? And one of Rorty’s most important ideas was what Brandom calls “the vocabulary vocabulary.” Rorty was considered by analytic philosophers (among other things) a relativist. The vocab vocab is one site where this occurs. Ch. 4.4.3 is one site where Rorty’s shadow gets riven with the shadow futurity casts. Brandom takes the future to need the half that falls toward intuition. I think it will need the other half.<br />
<a name=sec11></a><br />
<b>11.</b> The radical idea is that we “choose” what vocabulary we use. If you read <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>—or have any sense of how education works—then that will seem silly. There’s a reason Robert Pirsig jokingly called education “mass hypnosis.” One no more chooses one’s vocabulary than one chooses one’s parents. We’re thrown into the world, as Heidegger would put it. So how do we find ourselves back with decisionism, the trace of which Rorty bemoaned in his earlier <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>? Decisionism is the name used to mark that terrible idea common to Sartre and the boot-strapping American neocon: you, and <i>only you</i>, make who you are, so if you’re a psychopath (or poor), you only need decide to be good to be good (or rich to be rich).<br />
<br />
But life isn’t like that. Every choice we make <i>feels </i>like the right choice, and even if it feels like the wrong one, whatever is calling out that “feeling” is clearly the loser in the battle between whatever psychic entities one cares to spell out: reason, passion, conscience, id, better angels, vice, heads, tails. We only <i>do </i>what we ultimately feel <i>compelled </i>to do, in some sense. Even behaving as if for no reason is acting for that very reason. One doesn’t just, willy-nilly, <i>choose</i>.<br />
<br />
Of course, you can blind yourself in various ways. Some choices we make, the assessment is so daunting that we go cross-eyed. Sometimes we forget why we did something, and fill in a different syllogism. But this isn’t the problem Brandom is after. Brandom is after a picture of how the mechanism must work to <i>count </i>as working. The most important Enlightenment idea he feels champion of is the idea that making the commitments of our ideas and actions explicit will allow them to be argued over and, following Milton, in a free and open encounter the Truth will take care of itself. The notion that vocabulary-choice fills the spot in a doxastic syllogism where desire operates in a practical one is simply one more explicitation mechanism. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-asymmetry-between-practical-and.html#fn18">[18]</a> It’s the moment where one can, and is <i>made </i>to, perhaps, by challengers, acknowledge one’s adopted vocabulary. And in acknowledgement, we have to <i>take responsibility for it</i>. And if one wasn’t conscious that there were other options available, then Win for Enlightenment. As the G. I. Joes say, “knowing is half the battle.”<br />
<br />
(The other half is smacking Cobra Commander’s mask off once you’ve found him out. So even if you can’t coax old vocabs into early retirement, at least you will know where the bodies are buried.)<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> This piece also got much longer than I anticipated. It is not breezy, particularly in some sections. But Brandom’s vocabulary is worth tussling with, and the general esoteric nature of most analytic philosophy causes me to respond with volume. For two earlier pieces that set the stage for the return to pragmatism that Rorty is the primary protagonist in, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html">“Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn”</a> and <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html">“Davidson’s ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.’”</a> For two earlier attempts to put Brandom’s vocabulary to work, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html">“A Spatial Model of Belief Change”</a> and <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#sec5">“Better and the Best,” sec. 5</a>.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> “Unguarded” because Kant split the difference with rationalism by insisting against British empiricism that, as the formula goes, only a transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. Empiricism wins the day with common sense, but philosophers must be more sophisticated than that. Rationalism turning into transcendental idealism provides the pre-history to inferentialism that Brandom retails in <i>Tales of the Mighty Dead</i>, while discussing the turning point of Kant and Hegel in <i>Reason in Philosophy</i>.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> I’ve tried to discuss Sellars’ Myth of the Given in the context of pragmatism and the linguistic turn in “Quine, Sellars.” I’ve also discussed Quine’s related attack on the Two Dogmas of reductionism and the analytic/synthetic distinction (as a prelude to understanding Davidson’s attack on the Third Dogma of the scheme/content distinction) in “Davidson’s” (for both see note 1).<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> I’m trying to suppress as many unneeded aspects of Brandom’s philosophy as I can for this exposition, and two of them that are useful to bear in mind is Brandom’s endorsement of two more theses one can attribute to the Wittgenstein of the <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>. Not only the priority of use to meaning, but Brandom also endorses the notion that a <i>concept </i>is but a <i>word </i>and that <i>sentences </i>have priority over <i>words </i>in constituting meaning. While the former is linguistic turn common sense, the latter is a serious problem in the philosophy of language requiring quite a bit of theoretical machinery to explain, viz. how do words get meaning from sentences, since it seems so intuitive how sentences get meaning from words? Brandom’s two most technical chapters, “Substitution: What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any?” and “Anaphora: The Structure of Token Repeatables,” aim to supply the detailed backbone for a Wittgensteinian approach to subsentential expressions. As an outsider to the discipline, they are very difficult though surprisingly interesting. I suspect, though, that they are the most important chapters for actual analytic philosophers of language. Rorty for years had gotten a bad rap for dealing in atmosphere rather than nuts and bolts, but Brandom does the hard work Rorty could never convince himself needed to be done. (Since <i>Making It Explicit</i> was twenty years in the making—from dissertation to publication in 1994—and Rorty was an avid follower of his student’s career, it’s possible he was so relaxed just knowing Brandom was out there.)<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> Though I won’t go into it, Brandom’s inferential status of <i>incompatibility </i>does all the work for him that the logical status of <i>contradiction </i>does for most people. What Brandom is able to make better sense of, to my mind, is the psychological capability of self-contradiction. You <i>can </i>be committed to two contradictory things, you just aren’t <i>allowed</i>. Logical contradiction is subsumed, or skimmed off the top of, the social impropriety of being committed to one thing that precludes entitlement to another commitment you avow.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> The JTB, or “justified true belief,” conception of knowledge derives from Plato’s <i>Theaetetus</i> and has been durably used since then, though its sufficiency has been contested by in particular Paul Grice, opening up a small subfield in epistemology for the enumeration of further criteria for knowledge. Brandom has a number of interesting things to say about that conception, and his reconstrual. In particular, however, his discussion of the ambiguity of the concept of <i>belief </i>at MIE 195-96 is apropos.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> I’ve borrowed the phrase from the title of the third part of Schneewind’s <i>The Invention of Autonomy</i>, from which I’ve learned much about the history of what I just potted together. Schneewind’s story is about the rise by fits and starts of a morality of self-governance—culminating (though not ending) in Kant—as opposed to a morality of obedience, the special dispensation of moralities with God at the conceptual center. What Rorty would insist upon is that the nature of <i>Kant’s</i> first version of a morality that does not need God, and thus has humans in a world they govern themselves, is still a morality of obedience because of the way he constitutes the sphere of the moral (which importantly stands conceptually outside social behavior). Kantian principles have authority that is distinctly <i>not</i> a social authority.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> One might note my inconsistencies of expression: these illustrate Brandom’s notion of meaning as inferential role. Because if you didn’t know that “bowl” in that context was interchangeable with “dog dish,” then we would be entitled to thinking you don’t know what those words mean. (Brandom calls that a “substitution inference,” and it’s one of the cornerstones of his explication of the representational dimension of thought and talk.) However, if Stanley Cavell were here, he might wonder if I, acting as the philosopher and using one of the most common tools of the trade—the thought experiment—actually understood how a conversation works. Reflect on how the scene I constructed, properly sequenced, plays out:<blockquote>[Dan walks into the living room, and sits down on the couch between the reading Curtis and Don, who is staring at the ceiling]<br />
Dan [to Don]: “Dude, your dog is totally chowing down in the kitchen...the food is <i>everywhere </i>around his bowl.”<br />
Don [still staring at the ceiling]: “There’s a dog dish in the kitchen.”<br />
Chris [looking up from the <i>Meditationes de Prima Philosophia</i>]: “How do you know?”<br />
Don [rolling his eyes and turning his head halfway toward Chris’s end of the couch]: “Because Dan just came from the kitchen and said that Fido was in there eating out of his bowl. [looking back up toward the ceiling] What are you, deaf?”<br />
Chris: “Screw you, <i>Don</i>. What kind of stupid <i>non sequitor</i> was it to say so in the first place?”</blockquote>Indeed, why <i>did </i>Don make that claim in the first place? Was it to screw with Chris, who he knew had been reading too much Descartes lately? But if it was a trap, why did he roll his eyes? Just to be a dick? It would be like laying a bear trap and rolling your eyes at the howling bear, at his stupidity. (<i>His </i>stupidity—<i>your</i> what for laying it?) And why <i>are </i>Chris and Don on opposite sides of the couch?<br />
<br />
Cavell has a very unique, existential approach to philosophy, and took such inquiry into our examples and hypotheticals to reflect something about the nature of philosophy, which induces the philosopher to create such bizarrely remote, half-idiot conversations. (Wittgenstein, Cavell thought, was a genius at this kind of inquiry.) I’ve even thematized philosophy into the thought-experiment, here the emblem of philosophy, to make the inquiry more conducive to such generalizations.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> This was the trouble Derrida got linguistic-turn philosophers like Sellars in for what Sellars called his “psychological nominalism”: “all awareness is a linguistic affair.” For Derrida’s slogan that “there is nothing outside the text” sounded like pure, trapped-in-the-head idealism. Sellars’, however, is much closer to Kant’s, which abides by the slogan, “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” For more on this, see my discussion in “Quine, Sellars,” cited in Note 1. A problem in this area is the concept of <i>experience</i>, which Brandom thinks, like belief, is ambiguous and overworked in the history of philosophy. Like “belief,” “experience” just isn’t one of Brandom’s words. I’ve dubbed “retropragmatists” those pragmatists, unlike Rorty and Brandom, who think the concept of experience is <i>ineliminable</i>. These pragmatists, like David L. Hildebrand, often criticize linguistic-turn pragmatists (and analytic philosophers generally, for that matter) for excising <i>experience itself</i> from philosophy. I consider this exceptionally misleading, and a red herring, for it creates a straw man—how could one possibly eliminate one’s experience of the world from one’s thinking? Retropragmatists who pursue this line too often think that that’s why the linguistic turn is an obvious <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>, but I think it’s equally obvious that <i>reductios</i> based on obvious facts mean that the premise at issue is elsewhere. For an attempt to reconstruct Rorty’s stance on this issue, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html">“Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism.”</a> In it, I double down on the point I make in “Quine, Sellars”—that Sellarsian psychological nominalism is philosophically identical to Jamesian radical empiricism because it dissolves the same Platonic problem—by moving in a direction the retropragmatists often pshaw: the idea of specifically <i>linguistic </i>experiences, i.e. reading experiences, the experiences of reading books. (For an earlier discussion of Hildebrand, which crosses through my involvement with Robert Pirsig and his coterie of philosophical readers, one in particular, one could read <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/10/dewey-pirsig-rorty-or-how-i-convinced.html">“Dewey, Pirsig, Rorty, or How I Convinced an Entire Generation of Pirsigians that Rorty Is the Devil: An Ode to David Buchanan.”</a> The beginning is a narrative of my transference of power from Pirsig to Rorty, so one could skip down to the link that stands out in blue, “Prof. Hildebrand's short pieces about Rorty,” without much loss.)<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> This infelicity of expression is the culmination of my pedagogically useful, though inaccurate suggestion that Brandom replaces “belief” with “commitment.” Technically this isn’t true, and precisely because he needs the distinction between (at least) these two different kinds of commitment which the concept of <i>belief </i>obscures.<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> You don’t, however, have to display the desire in a syllogism, as Brandom makes clear in 4.5.3. This banks on a number of issues I’ve left suppressed, namely the importance of the implicit/explicit distinction in Brandom’s quest to redescribe logic from a canon of rationality into a tool of expression. In fact, my syllogisms don’t even need the premises with the conditionals. Brandom follows Sellars in thinking that all one needs is “1. It’s raining outside. 2. You shouldn’t go outside.” They call this a <i>material inference</i>. Formalist logic understands such an inference from (1) to (2) as good only if one supposes there is a suppressed conditional premise. Expressivist logic understands the conditional premise as optional, as helping to make explicit the implicit reason for why the inference from (1) to (2) is good. If this is your first time in the cow pasture, you’ll wonder at this point what the difference is between the formalist’s “suppression” and the expressivist’s “implicit.” It seems nit-picky, but Brandom makes an interesting case for a lot to be hanging on it. Brandom’s main discussion of the merits of his “inferential materialism” (a wonderful oxymoron if you remember your history of 19<sup>th</sup> century idealism) is at 2.4.2.<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> Though I don’t discuss Habermas’s use of the nature of reason to justify egalitarian practices, in “Better and the Best” (cited in Note 1, and esp. sec. 3) I do show how the first point in this paragraph (about justification) is construed by Habermas to fill out the nature of reason (as “universal validity” or “transcendent moment”), followed by Rorty’s argument against it (the “Village Champion Argument”).<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> TP 132. For Rorty’s criticism of Brandom, see that essay in <i>Truth and Progress</i> and his “Response to Robert Brandom” in <i>Rorty and His Critics</i>. Brandom continues that part of the conversation in “Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Antirepresentationalism” in his <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>.<br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> The most forward statement of this is in “Ethics without Principles” in PSH.<br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15]</a> Rorty’s first good defense of this point is in the introduction to <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>.<br />
<a name="fn16"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[16]</a> This is oblique, but the only time Derrida and Foucault appear in Brandom’s work is so that Brandom can take pot shots at them for being “irrationalists.” Brandom means this in a quite specific sense, and not in the usual flat-footed way many analytic philosophers wield the epithet at Continental philosophy, but it is another way in which he sends messages to Rorty.<br />
<a name="fn17"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[17]</a> Rorty makes this point in the first chapter of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>.<br />
<a name="fn18"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[18]</a> Brandom, in fact, does make this point about the expressive role of broadly evaluative vocabulary like “prefer,” “obliged,” and “ought” in 4.5.3. What is missing, then, is just where the expression of our evaluation <i>of the vocabulary</i> we’re using occurs. This seems to me a central element in the basic make-up of the social game of giving and asking for reasons, as it was put at the end section 5, even if commands and permissions are not. All the arguments Brandom gives for his modified Davidsonian notion of a “complete reason” should apply equally to the adoption of a vocabulary to express that reason.<br />
<br />
To put it another way, Brandom seems to suggest in 4.5.4 that he would call my strategy a mode of supplying “suppressed” premises in order to assimilate, as I have, practical and theoretical reasonings. (It comes up in the context of his differentiation of different kinds of practical reasoning, but the point applies.) Brandom thinks this is a kind of optional reductionism. But I don’t think my strategy elicits a suppressed premise anymore than Brandom’s treatment of unconditional or institutional ‘ought’s (which he suggests are different from prudential, desire-relative ‘ought’s). By using a vocabulary, any vocabulary, one is implicitly committing oneself to its inferential structure, and this implicit commitment is analogous to the role desire plays and is incompatible with an “implicit norm of common belief” (250), at least one unrestricted by choice in vocabulary. For if Rorty’s right, the only way to get some people on the same page—like Wilde and the Christian perse-, er, prosecutor—is to burn the pages they are holding so that the only one’s remaining are the one’s you’re holding. When Brandom says that inferences that are “truth-preserving are one, while those practical inferences that are underwritten by desires are many,” what he’s forgetting is that all inferences are underwritten by the vocabulary they are stated in. Vocabulary-choice is perhaps not best put into terms of desire, but it is something implicitly done and seems to vary people’s sense of what is a truth-preserving inference in the same way having different desires varies the practical inferences one would endorse.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-65242411187176807322014-07-04T04:00:00.001-07:002015-05-05T09:18:50.550-07:00Shklar's Vision of American Political Thought<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Rawls the hedgehog, Shklar the fox — Shklar’s inversions; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#sec2">2. </a>History shapes our conceptual resources — Traditions of commentary — Political <i>praxis</i> over political <i>theoria</i>; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#sec3">3. </a>Versatile stories, different angles — Jeffersonian education, Jacksonian fairness — Political rights without natural rights?; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#sec4">4. </a>Tradition as mythology — Heroes with warts; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#sec5">5. </a>Madison: democracy as political grind — Hamilton: democracy as fact hungry; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#sec6">6. </a>Jefferson: democracy as self-government — Adams: democracy as dangerously self-destructive — Our two aboriginal forces: hope and evil <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> With John Rawls, Judith Shklar will be recognized as one of the two most important politico-moral philosophers of the last half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn1">[1]</a> In 1971, Rawls published the definitive statement of liberal political philosophy in <i>A Theory of Justice</i>, and it not only revitalized the then widely recognized defunct discipline of political theory, but has defined its problems up to the present. Rawls the hedgehog spent the rest of his career restating, reshaping, and extending that powerful, central vision. Shklar the fox, however, while working in the adjacent department to Rawls at Harvard, left behind a fascinatingly variegated corpus of work behind. The most important to posterity, it seems to me, will be <i>Ordinary Vices</i> (1984) and <i>The Faces of Injustice</i> (1990). The latter inverts the traditional role of the political philosopher, fulfilled most grandly by Rawls, thus opening up a vast new space to be filled by theorists: instead of putting <i>justice </i>at the center of a systematic theory, she puts <i>injustice</i>, and she attempts to show how doing so requires us to reprioritize our conceptual resources.<br />
<br />
Even more interesting, perhaps though, is the intellectual context in which <i>Ordinary Vices</i> appears. The traditional mode of political thought that puts justice at the center is also largely a Kantian enterprise (to which Rawls did much to give historical shape to). Rawls’s big enemy in <i>Theory</i> was the then-dominant tradition of politico-moral philosophy, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism and Kantianism had been the two overwhelmingly dominant traditions of thinking for nearly two centuries. No sooner had Rawls’ book appeared, however, then did a revival of Aristotelian-edged virtue ethics appear on the scene, rejecting the seesaw between means-end utility and deontological principle. Virtue ethics has been the most fertile tradition, it seems to me, in pure moral philosophy—but no sooner did it get its spurs, then did Shklar invert its paradigm. Reviving Montaigne’s inversion of Renaissance virtue ethics (which was before Kant and Bentham had blotted out virtue-oriented ethical systems like Shaftesbury and Mandeville <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn2">[2]</a>), Shklar makes an interesting case for placing vice at the center of one’s philosophy if one is committed to liberal democracy.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> Central to both Rawls and Shklar’s work was an understanding of the historical line of thinkers that give shape to our conceptual resources. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn3">[3]</a> Most of Rawls’ work on history was relegated to his lectures on political and moral philosophy that he gave at Harvard, and that have thankfully been published. Shklar wrote important studies on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu, in addition to a whole series of essays on individual thinkers (most collected in her posthumous <i>Political Thinkers and Political Thought</i> (1998)). And part of Rawls and Shklar’s enduring importance will be because of the students they spread into the world, most of whom take very seriously indeed our intellectual inheritance. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn4">[4]</a><br />
<br />
Shklar’s life was cut tragically short, and among the work she left unfinished was a bit of writing on the specifically American political intellectual tradition, which has been published as <i>Redeeming American Political Thought</i> (1998). As Dennis Thompson, one of her former students who writes the forward to the collection, reports, Shklar taught the subject many times, but resisted writing a book on it because, she once said, “the subject is too hard” (vii). Thompson cogently notes the irony of this from someone who’d mastered Hegel (let alone everything else she’d written on). But reading her efforts to wrangle American political theory into an explanatory pattern, one begins to not only understand why she thought so, but believe her. Thompson suggests that “the difficulty lay not in the theorists themselves but in the interpretations that commentators had laid upon them” (vii). However, Shklar was never much of a polemical writer, preferring the mode in which the coherence and power of one’s own vision sustained interest, rather than a self-conscious situating in the current conversational milieu. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn5">[5]</a> Lack of polemic characterizes these essays as much as elsewhere, which leads me to think that the difficulty didn’t lie in scraping off (sometimes deeply embedded) traditions of commentary.<br />
<br />
Implicit in her approach is an attempt to balance numerous conditions and factors in eliciting American political thought. Above all, it seems that what makes American political thought difficult is that its founders were also the founders of American political <i>practice</i>. And this is significantly different than our European traditions. Whatever the brilliance of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel, they didn’t create a constitution and run for president. The fact that Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton created American political <i>praxis </i>didn’t itself make American political thought unique, and in fact Shklar looked somewhat suspiciously, as Thompson points out, at theses about American exceptionalism. After all, other countries have now tried democracy in various forms and have obviously had their own creators of political <i>praxis </i>that have touched off conversations about its functioning. But the flipside to exceptionalism is parochialism, and that has been an accusation about American political theory and Shklar does find it annoying. (See the beginning of “The American Idea of Aristocracy.”) Between exceptionalism and parochialism are the complex relationships Shklar tried to chart between an abstract, theoretical conversation and the historical practices it was intimately bound up with. It was this binding that seemed much more in force than in Europe. Implicit, I think, in Shklar’s book is a thesis about American political thought being itself implicitly an assertion of pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic priority of <i>theoria </i>to <i>praxis</i>.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> One of the unique features of the book is that it tells what is essentially the same story over and over, from different angles. For some this might be annoying, and if she’d gotten the chance to get this work to press, I’m certain Shklar would’ve eliminated the repetition. But angular overlap, done right, is a strength of the essay as a genre. In fact, it seems a stylistic parallel to James’s pragmatist idea, in “What Pragmatism Means,” that thoughts are instruments and beliefs habits. And the trick about instruments and habits is that you apply them over and over in new, technically unique situations. That’s how you know it is a good instrument or habit—for if it broke down, you’d get a new instrument or habit. Likewise for developmental stories—the more versatile the story, the better equipped it is to explain phenomena, the more likely it is that that story touches on something real and operative.<br />
<br />
Shklar’s story moves through three basic stages: the Revolutionary Era that establishes the basic pattern of American political thought; the second generation of antebellum Jacksonian democrats that heroically failed to face the moral problem of slavery; and the post-war rise of the social sciences. The focus of most of the essays is on the first two stages, and hardly move out of the 19<sup>th</sup> century. The book is split into two, with the first on individual (or grouped) thinkers (like “Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science” or “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson”) and the second on specific topics (like “The Boundaries of Democracy” or “Democratic Customs”). The first section is more polished and overlaps less than the second because most of the second half of the book is the unpublished material. However, the second half contextualizes the first—it’s the larger story that the individual thinkers move in. For example, “An Education for America” begins, “Do we really know what sort of schooling is most likely to make students into good citizens? ... How does American democracy educate its citizens or help them to educate themselves?” (65) It wasn’t until the second section that I understood how the chapter was implicitly answering a Jeffersonian question that Shklar felt attuned to. For “Jefferson promoted a plan for what he called a ‘natural aristocracy’ through a system of education,” effectively “replacing politics with education” (“The American Idea of Aristocracy,” 150). The Jacksonians, despite using “aristocrat” as a term of political damnation, carried the mantle of Jefferson, because for them “education was looked at entirely as an aspect of citizenship” (“Democracy and the Past: Jefferson and His Heirs,” 183). Indeed, it is during the Jacksonian period that the moral point of view of democracy becomes explicit, if looked at and defended differently by our founding traditions of political thought. For when Shklar says in “Democratic Customs” that “voting and education are marks of dignity, not means to other ends,” she’s invoking a very unpragmatic rhetoric, and quite purposefully I take it. She says that for the Jacksonians, “it was ‘special’ privilege and ‘idle’ wealth, not their very existence, that aroused their sense of injustice. It was a struggle for recognition for them, the right to a dignified status as workers and citizens” (193). This polemically moral vision, she says in her presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “Redeeming American Political Theory,” expresses itself as “fairness [being] the very essence of their notion of justice” (99).<br />
<br />
“Justice as fairness” is the (very famous) slogan that was the centerpiece of Rawls’s politico-moral philosophy. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn6">[6]</a> Its appearance shows how Shklar viewed Rawls’ contribution to the larger frame she generates. But it unfolds <i>legally </i>in American political practice, which she takes to be distinctive. She notes that Tocqueville had already noticed that “all political problems in the United States become legal problems” and says, “since all our rights are inscribed in the Constitution, every citizen can and must claim his or her rights before the judiciary. American political culture is radically legalistic and focused on the courts” (112). If you take a class on human rights, they will find it important to distinguish between natural rights and political rights. Shklar’s point suggests that American political practice makes the notion of “natural rights” moot in working out justice in the American system. This strikes me as another important site for work to be done, for does it mean that we can just do away with the notion of natural human rights? Or does the presumed existence of natural rights motivate the debate about political rights? Can we chuck the metaphysics and just subsist on our “human rights culture,” which Rorty commended, or do we need the rhetoric of “natural” in some more robust form? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn7">[7]</a> And is “justice as fairness” an inherently legalistic doctrine, or a moral conception of some kind? Since Rawls tried making a distinction between moral conceptions and the neutrality toward moral conceptions of his theory of justice, the last has seemed a pressing question in trying to understand liberal notions of tolerance. Shklar helps remind us what it means for these ideas to be embodied and acted upon, however we end up botanizing them.<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> Shklar says of John Adams that he sometimes took history to be “a source of mythology” (189). There is something of the mythological, I think, in all forms of <i>tradition</i>—the live workings of the past in the present made self-conscious. The primary reason intellectuals like Shklar dig so deeply into the past is to make us aware of the roots that are providing our nourishment—and so that we can then make an informed decision about whether it is really nutrients we are getting, or rather poison, thus precipitating a self-conscious choice in what traditions we continue to perpetuate.<br />
<br />
One thing that commends Shklar’s political intellectual mythology over others is that it is a polytheistic pantheon, not a unified whitewashing of differences. One thing our cultured despisers of the American democratic experiment have too easily gotten off on is the exposing of the warts on the Founding Fathers. Politically and culturally motivated historians through the 19<sup>th</sup> century are indeed guilty of promoting halos in their pictures through overexposure, which tends to also blot out many defining details. Perhaps American political culture was still too overinfluenced by the divine right tradition of aristocracy, which didn’t like its blemishes noticed and punished those who did. (A culture influenced, I suspect, by the Christian traditions of impiety and blasphemy.) But can we not have heroes, then? Do all pictures of heroes suffer from a whitewashing that is, on this account, a necessary byproduct of the hero-making process? Shklar would think this nonsense. If we had a more Greek mode of tracing our traditions, then we needn’t worry about manipulating the past. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn8">[8]</a><br />
<br />
Shklar very resourcefully turns Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton into an in-fighting clan of begetters who disseminated active elements in our current political makeup, both good and bad—or rather, ineffectual when pure and by themselves, but generative when together and conflicting. “Redeeming American Political Theory” might have been the prospectus for the book she didn’t have a chance to write, and it is there she pulls together three of these threads, saying Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton founded “three political sciences in America”: “Jefferson’s was speculative and physiological. Madison’s was institutional and historical, and Hamilton’s was empirical and behavioral. None were perfect, all were prophetic” (94).<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> Madison, who Shklar talks the least of in these essays, “devised a profound theory of political rationality.” Madison is probably best known for <i>Federalist #10</i>, which suggests that we shouldn’t fear the ability for change to quickly sweep a democratic system because factionalism will produce a tug-of-war grinding reform to a creeping minimum. As Shklar says, Madison had a “deeply functional view of democracy.” What attracts Shklar, however, is the bit that we rarely notice—how the experience of this political grind will affect the individual political agent. Madison thought that individual agents will “learn to appreciate the necessity of limiting their interests in response to the rights of other. ... The individual political agent learns to adapt and is forced to become more public-spirited as he accepts and follows the procedures that institutions compel him to follow” (96-7).<br />
<br />
Hamilton responded to the “radical democratization of political theory” implied by the Revolution by seeing that “how to assess the behavior and attitudes of the anonymous many who compose the electorate was a wholly novel intellectual task.” What Hamilton set in motion was the assessment of the “tortuous and long road from the individual voter to the public policies of the federal government” (4). Hamilton was no particular fan of democracy—he was the Founder, you’ll recall, who wanted to import a king—and didn’t have a very high opinion of the voters, but he understood that “the modern state ... depended on information.” As Shklar says, “constitutional democracy is inherently a fact hungry political system, in which both those who govern and those who are governed yearn for solid information” (98).<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> If Madison’s political sociology of interest groups and Hamilton’s political science of electoral politics seem the most of interest to a tough-minded political science, Shklar’s tender-minded spirit is most interested in the star-crossed friendship between Jefferson and Adams. The speculative element in Jefferson is what makes him the most admired by Shklar of the four. Time and time again Shklar returns to Jefferson’s dream of “replacing politics with education,” an education that would produce what he calls a “natural aristocracy” (150). Preceding the Jacksonian fear of aristocracy was Adams’s belief that <i>any </i>inequality, separating the few from the many, would turn itself into an oppressive regime. Adams was Calvinistic in this way, being deeply pessimistic about the ability of humanity to side with virtue against corruption. Jefferson and Adams pair nicely with the twin founts of American Romanticism: Emerson and Hawthorne. Jefferson is optimistic in the same way that Emerson was that the American citizen was “capable of self-government” (150), i.e. autonomy, self-reliance. But Adams and Hawthorne were too oppressed by history and their own sense of the self-destructive psychology of the individual to share that optimism.<br />
<br />
Thompson suggests that if Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson, then her head was with Adams. I can accept this formula, and it captures quite well how we need to balance these two aboriginal forces in the American spirit: hope and evil. If you hope with your head, that’s when you end up with theological nonsense like the eschatological, providential future-perfect “this <i>will </i>happen—everything <i>will </i>end up for the best.” Likewise, no amount of intellectual evidence can tell you when to or not to hope—you either find it in your heart or not. Conversely, if you believe in the ultimate depravity of humankind with your <i>heart</i>, as Calvinism instructs and as Adams’s great-grandson, Henry Adams, seemed to find himself, then hope may prove impossible, turning a healthy skepticism into a paralyzing nihilism. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/07/shklars-vision-of-american-political.html#fn9">[9]</a> But understanding, in an intellectual way, that evil indefatigably exists in the world is a mode of tempering one’s optimism about outlook, keeping one tethered to the ground. Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson because she believed ultimately in the autonomy that education promised, and that is why Emerson, Hawthorne, and so many other pieces of literature appear in this and other of her books. Shklar did not believe, with Jefferson, that a natural aristocracy would or should arise, but as indicated by the title of “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson,” she took very seriously the idea that the democratic citizen had much to learn from books specifically, and their authors’ intellectual struggle with the experience of democracy.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Important caveat: only partly due to ignorance, that assessment excludes (generally) all Marxist thinkers. This is because in part thinkers working in the Marxist tradition have (largely) excluded themselves from the conversation surrounding what liberal democracies should do, including the philosophical conversations to which Shklar and others were a part of. Anyone who holds that the “system” is irrevocably corrupt or faulty, and that the only thing to do is get a new system (what Bernard Yack calls the “longing for total revolution”), will inevitably fall back on the activity of diagnosis divorced from proposed action—there's nothing left to do, at that point, but endlessly point out how irredeemable everything is going on around you. And since I believe that Marxism in these forms will fade away because of their inutility, that is another reason why I don't feel bad for my relative ignorance or think it will mar my prediction about Rawls and Shklar. Some thinkers, though, like Foucault and Frank Lentricchia, who fall under this category are nevertheless quite useful. Habermas is so concerned with the functioning of liberal democracies that he hardly counts as being in the Marxist tradition. And there is one branch of what could be thought of as post-Marxist thought—in America known as “communitarianism”—that in the main combines with hope for democracy (even if it would quibble with the qualifier “liberal”). Of these, I suspect Michael Walzer, an important interlocutor of Shklar's and long-time editor of the, roughly, communitarian and thus non-Marxist, leftist rag <i>Dissent </i>magazine, will have the most enduring value.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> J. B. Schneewind, in <i>The Invention of Autonomy</i> (1998), tells the most complete story I’ve seen of moral philosophy from the end of the Renaissance and Reformation to Kant. His principle beginning point for modern moral philosophy is Montaigne, but on the revival of virtue (which figured so importantly to, for example, Machiavelli) see Ch. 14, on the now-neglected figures of James Harrington and Shaftesbury. (On Harrington’s importance to British and American political thought, see J. G. A. Pocock’s <i>The Machiavellian Moment</i> (1975).)<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> The importance of this feature of their work should be entertained in the context of Anglophone philosophy’s general neglect of history. I would ultimately (and unsurprisingly) blame this on Plato. For some relevant finger-pointing on this score, one might see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-happened-to-political-philosophy.html">“What Happened to Political Philosophy?”</a> and maybe also <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html">“On Literature’s Accidents.”</a> <br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> It’s possible I’m more partial to Shklar’s students because, unlike the Kantian Rawls, they are more interested in literature and things American. I think the two most notable of Rawls’ students are Christine Korsgaard, who though an unrequited Kantian, has done much to help the general thinking-through of the conceptual requirements of normative autonomy that Kant and Hegel initiated (see, e.g., <i>The Sources of Normativity</i> (1996)), and Susan Neiman, whose <i>Evil in Modern Thought</i> (2002) is an exceptional non-epistemology centered story of modern philosophy and whose <i>Moral Clarity</i> (2008) is an important, nonspecialist book on liberal American moral problems. Foremost among Shklar’s students for me (exempting the unbelievably useful, though not well-enough known, work of the already mentioned Bernard Yack) is George Kateb, whose work on Emerson has been widely recognized by Americanists.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> In a number of disciplines, this is beginning to be frowned on as unscholarly, though really it’s a matter of instrumental self-analysis. Richard Rorty described this mode as “strong misreading,” though “misreading” might be misleading in this context. In a precursor piece to <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>’s more famous use, Rorty describes his theft of Harold Bloom’s term this way: “The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (“Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>, 151). The key is the reversal of priority of the purposes for which the author wrote for instead the purposes of the reader. The scholar knows a lot about why an author wrote, but the only way to think <i>with </i>a figure from the past is to have purposes of your own. In Rorty’s more careful moments, he distinguishes this as a philosophical mode as opposed to a historical mode. (See his “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” in <i>Truth and Progress</i>.) The trouble with this mode, barring the scholar’s anxiety of it being bullshit, is that anyone can <i>try </i>and be a strong misreader and simply read a text as one wants—there’s just no assurance at an audience who will care for it. So, to compensate for a lack of self-trust (or for the accurate assessment of limitation), a writer might try and engage his compatriots’ views on the subject in the discipline. But such limitation shouldn’t lead us to resent the strength of others. It is, in the end, a gamble, for as Emerson said, “we hope it is more than whim at last” (“Self-Reliance”).<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> The slogan first appears as the title of the 1958 paper that eventually was transformed into the first chapter of <i>A Theory of Justice</i>. It appears prominently in his major revision of his stance, <i>Political Liberalism</i> (1993), and its the title of the final slim book (2001) that was to serve as both restatement and primer (edited by Erin Kelly, as Rawls fell ill before he could make final revisions and expansions).<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> See “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in TP. Rorty took the term from Eduardo Rabossi. Shklar wrote twice on this issue, in <i>Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials</i> (1964) and <i>American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion</i> (1991). One of her students, Rogers M. Smith, wrote a massive book on the latter’s issue of citizenship in <i>Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions on Citizenship in U.S. History</i> (1997). (Given the nature of writing big books, Smith had been already working on the project when Shklar began her set of lectures that became her book, and the two talked over their work often before her death.)<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> See Rorty’s related use of “polytheism” in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” in PCP.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> There is a “book review” of <i>The Education of Henry Adams</i> Shklar wrote in the collection, but it is somewhat out of place with the rest. For Henry Adams, as Thompson says, “nearly defeat[s] her effort to find something of value in every thinker” (xiii). She was not a big fan of his alienation and irony directed toward the democratic experiment.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-24696785646317412902014-06-27T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-04T09:30:52.267-07:00Literature as Equipment for Living and as Spiritual Exercise<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. What is a literary scholar, critic?; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec2">2. </a>Kenneth Burke, literary critic — And his idiosyncratic vocabulary; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec3">3. </a>Sociological criticism — Naming a situation strategizes it — Literature as alembicated naming; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec4">4. </a>Acts of distillation — Warehouses of equipment; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec5">5. </a>Life as adventure — Beliefs as habits of action; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec6">6. </a>Spiritual exercises — You only know what you can remember — Cycling through pathways of belief — Reflection as detour from action; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec7">7. </a>Literature as self-help? — You don't only believe what you can remember — The self as equipment; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec8">8. </a>Complex literature and simple assertions; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec9">9. </a>Exercise with the narrative form — A longing for shapeliness; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec10">10. </a>The experience of reading — Acting through literature; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec11">11. </a>Literature is difficult — Not everything should be difficult — Democratic humanism <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> In my English department, the graduate students have formed a small colloquium that regularly meets to discuss someone’s work in progress. What has increasingly become pressing to me as a scholar-in-training is the question of what a scholar is, of my self-image as a literary critic. And this partly because it’s obvious that we grads all individually seem to have different ones, have an increasing variety available to us as critical tradition extends itself, and don’t have a space in which we can reflect together on this kind of self-reflection. There are literary theory courses, but rarely an opportunity to talk together about what it is we do. So I delivered the following as a talk to provoke a discussion about our own, individual self-images as literary critics. I framed the discussion around the two slogans in my title, in part because what I find helpful is to talk about alternative images or metaphors or distinctions for self-definition.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> “Literature as equipment for living” is a slogan of Kenneth Burke’s. A friend of mine in the department had asked me what I had been reading this past winter break, and I said excitedly, “Kenneth Burke’s <i>Attitudes Toward History</i>,” and my friend scrunched up her nose and mouth like she’d eaten a stink bug and replied, “ugh, the rhet-com guy?” Rhetoric and Communications is a growing subdiscipline in English Departments around the country, and rhetoric as a disciplinary study has taken Burke to be the father of contemporary rhetorical theory. There’s often an amusing, though sometimes churlish, rivalry between these two halves of English Departments, but let me say, once and for all, that Burke’s main vocation was literary criticism, and not as a founder of rhetorical theory. In fact, reading his work, it’s hard to imagine a school formed out of it at all. (Side note: Richard Rorty once said to an interviewer asking about Rorty’s criticisms of Paul de Man, “I can imagine being grateful for de Man’s obsessiveness, that is, his habit of reducing to nothingness any given text he reads. When de Man does it it’s interesting, but when you get … thousands of de Man clones, it’s merely formulaic. I don’t think anyone would have objected to de Man if he had been a kind of Kenneth Burke figure, not training up generations of students.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn1">[1]</a> Rorty, apparently, wasn’t acquainted with the other side of some English Departments.)<br />
<br />
The idea of literature as equipment for living has its seed in <i>Attitudes Toward History</i> (1937), a book that is part Emersonian-pragmatist in affirming the Optimistic, part speech-act/genre theory (the kind of thing you get out of an Ortega or Lukács or Bakhtin), part quasi-Marxist history, and part idiosyncratic dictionary of a critical vocabulary (things like “alienation,” “transcendence,” “efficiency,” “casuistic stretching,” “character-building by secular prayer,” “being driven into a corner” and—my favorite—“heads I win, tails you lose”). “Equipment for living” is a metaphor that Burke regularly employs, like the pragmatist habit of asking for the “cash-value” of an assertion or how one would “cash out” a metaphor. What follows is an attempt to spell out how I cash out his metaphor, but I begin by taking it to be his master-trope for the relationship between language and action. Here is a characteristic way Burke talks with it—in his discussion of William James, he begins by saying:<blockquote>For his philosophic trinity [James] proposed ‘rationality, activity, faith.’ Faith invigorates the power of action; rationality provides method for the act. And since by rationality is meant a willingness to consider all available evidence, it should shape the act by tests of completeness and consistency. All of his fundamental assertions were designed to equip him and others for living. He ‘accepted’ the universe by admitting any faith (in progressive evolution, in God, in the benefits of prayer) that enabled him to have the sense of moving towards something better. … And so strongly did he need the concept of <i>Better </i>rather than the concept of <i>Best</i>, as a way of equipping himself for action, that he rejected absolutism always, preferring even the asymmetry of ‘pluralism,’ a doctrine that outraged his form-loving colleagues. (5-6)</blockquote>One will notice that this is fundamentally a pragmatist stance because it treats language—in this case, assertoric prose—as having an ethical function that swings free of truth. Indeed, by foregrounding <i>assertion </i>as having a function that is not truth-affirming, he risks outraging the same pieties the classical pragmatists did in their own instrumentalism about truth, potted in the misleading formula “truth is what works.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> But literature is not assertoric prose—it does not make assertions, at least not explicitly. Or rather, not explicitly by the author. So we have at least two different pragmatic contexts with which to judge the metaphor. Before I get to talking about what that might mean for us, I want to just keep plunging ahead with literature. In 1938, a year after <i>Attitudes Toward History</i> was published, Burke published an essay entitled “Literature as Equipment for Living,” codifying his thoughts about this metaphor and the orientation it implies for the literary critic. (You can find it in his <i>Philosophy of Literary Form</i> (1941), a book whose first few pages has a line poets love, “the symbolic act is the <i>dancing of an attitude</i>” (9). To understand that line’s formal dimension, you have to read it against Yeats <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn3">[3]</a>, but its embodiment of pragmatism I’ll return to momentarily.)<br />
<br />
In the essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Burke suggests that what he is up to in his work, and his selection for key critical terms “purpose” and “motivation,” is a “sociological criticism of literature” (293). To unpack this, he takes up the notion of proverbs and says that what they do is <i>name </i>“typical, recurrent situations” in the life of a culture. We then “find” ourselves, as it were, in the proverb and are directed in our thinking by it about our own situation. So, as examples, Burke lists off proverbs for consolation (“The worst luck now, the better for another time”), for vengeance (“fools tie knots and wise men loose them”), for foretelling (“keep your weather eye open”), and for wise living (“first thrive, than wive”). “Proverbs are,” Burke says, “<i>strategies </i>for dealing with <i>situations</i>” (296). And playing off the war metaphor of “strategy,” Burke says as against a baffled interlocutor, that “surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images…. One seeks to ‘direct the larger movements and operations’ in one’s campaign of living” (298). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn4">[4]</a><br />
<br />
And so, Burke says, “each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary” for one can think of novels as “the strategic naming of a situation.” They “single out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often <i>mutandis mutatis</i>, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it” (300).<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> This might be a good place to stop and collect our thoughts and codify some of the issues in play. I like the idea of taking books to <i>name </i>situations and provide the resources for thinking through them. It first of all requires an act of distillation on our part—these acts can be exceedingly useful, even outside the exam structure. What they provide is the framework of a perspective on how the book is to be read, the pattern in it to be called to the fore. For example, I could say that Henry James’s <i>Portrait of a Lady</i> displays the difficulties a woman faces in searching for autonomy in the face of both a culture of monogamy that infantilizes female choice and an aestheticist culture that flattens the moral parameters of autonomy. And what this distillation does is coordinate the ratios between paradigmatic moments in the text that provide the lens with which to read the other moments—for example, Mr. Touchett telling Isabel that “fortunately ladies are not obliged to give reasons,” Isabel telling Mr. Goodwood that she wishes to be free even to commit some atrocity, and Ralph hoping with delight to see what Isabel will do with her money. From this perspective (spoiler!), Isabel going back to Osmond is the inevitable tragedy precisely because it is the attainment of a robust moral autonomy wherein one takes on the burden of one’s choices.<br />
<br />
What we don’t need to say is that a novel names only one situation—I think we can wipe away that possible implication from Burke’s formulation and say that novels, like life, are made up of an indefinite number of patterns of experience. And this, in fact, is what makes them such treasure troves for our equipment for living. For while I say “indefinite,” and really do mean it, novels really don’t present something so unmanageable as all that for the precise reason Burke says: they are concerted mobilizations of a finite range of textual phenomena. No matter what future interpretive lens comes down the pike, Isabel Archer will be a woman. Maybe someone will argue someday (or probably already has) that Isabel Archer is not the “lady” of the novel’s “portrait,” but it had better be the case that Goodwood’s got the penis and Isabel the vajj.<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> Now, after Burke’s suggestion about naming there’s the actual image of “equipment for living.” “Equipment” suggests to me a wider metaphorical value than the more narrow war metaphor of “strategy.” I think Burke should absolutely be read against Nietzsche in “Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” but both should be drained of their violence to establish the underlying <i>adventure </i>of life—and no adventurer ever leaves home without his or her equipment, as every D&D player knows. Without your equipment, you are naked and vulnerable. And this equipment, in this case, is language. This, again, dovetails with a certain philosophical pragmatism about language. The central strain of pragmatism from Peirce, James, and Dewey to Rorty and his student Robert Brandom—they all follow Alexander Bain, the American psychologist and, as it happens, rhetorician, in defining <i>beliefs </i>as <i>habits of action</i>. Our beliefs are not just indicators of but also shapers of our actions in the world. Our linguistic formulations are as much a technological development as anything wrought of iron or wood.<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> This leads me to a partial segue to the second term of my title: “spiritual exercises.” This is a term established by Ignatius of Loyola’s 17<sup>th</sup> century book of that name, but it has been resurrected by Pierre Hadot to talk about a mode of philosophy. Hadot was a colleague of Michel Foucault’s at the Collège de France and was one of the major scholars of ancient philosophy at the end of the last century. (I cannot more highly recommend the English translation of his 1995 book, <i>What Is Ancient Philosophy?</i> as an introduction to Greek philosophy, both for its readability, scope, and erudition.) In an essay entitled “Spiritual Exercises,” and reprinted in his <i>Philosophy as a Way of Life</i>, Hadot suggests that Ignatius’s Jesuit practices were built out of the resources of the earlier Stoic tradition, which had its own traditions of spiritual exercises (if perhaps <i>avant la lettre</i>). Hadot says that “attention (<i>prosoche</i>) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. … Thanks to his spiritual vigilance, the Stoic always has ‘at hand’ (<i>procheiron</i>) the fundamental rule of life: that is, the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” And this for the Stoic, he says, “frees us from the passions, which are always caused by the past or the future—two areas which do <i>not </i>depend on us” (84-85).<br />
<br />
If you’re like me, you might say, “well, that sounds wonderful—even bypassing the suspicious idea that the future doesn’t depend on me—but how does this spiritual vigilance <i>work</i>? How do I make sure that my self-consciousness is always awake? You can’t just <i>want </i>something or think you <i>are </i>a certain way for it to be the case.” And this is where I find Stoics to be pragmatists <i>avant la lettre</i>, for one important practical measure is the repetition and memorization of linguistic formula:<blockquote>The exercise of meditation allows us to be reading at the moment when an unexpected – and perhaps dramatic – circumstance occurs. … We must confront life’s difficulties face to face, remembering that they are not evils, since they do not depend on us. This is why we must engrave striking maxims in our memory, so that, when the time comes, they can help us accept such events, which are, after all, part of the course of nature; we will thus have these maxims and sentences ‘at hand.’ What we need are persuasive formulae or arguments (<i>epilogismoi</i>), which we can repeat to ourselves in difficult circumstances, so as to check movements of fear, anger, or sadness. (85)</blockquote>In the oral noetic economy—which is a fancy way of saying how the activity of knowing works in pre-literacy cultures—you only <i>know </i>what you can <i>remember </i>(a formula codified by Walter J. Ong somewhere). I think this goes for us, too, when we are away from our books, trying to figure out what to do at any given moment. If beliefs are habits of action, then reflection is a matter of cycling through your pathways of belief.<br />
<br />
The idea of beliefs being but nodes on a spatial graph of interrelating lines is in part a metaphor given substance by Hans Blumenberg, a friend of Hadot’s and one of the great German intellectual historians of the last century, rivaling Heidegger and Habermas for both philosophical depth and acuity. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn5">[5]</a> Blumenberg, in a little known but incredibly insightful essay on rhetoric, suggests that rhetoric be in part understood as a form of detour. It is a detour from action. This produces the old trope of the “man of action” and the “man of thought,” Achilles vs. Odysseus, or worse Socrates, who would stop Euthyphro from acting against his father for impiety with all his pesky little questions like, “do you even know what impiety is?” But consider how reasoning works—by inference. We infer one proposition from another, which means you transition from one sentence to another. In justifying your action, you take the time of multiplying sentences, which is time taken away from acting. Clearly for the Stoic this isn’t a bad thing—they want to mute action entirely in some cases, relieving us of our passions that form the fundamental motivations (hello Burke) for acting.<br />
<a name=sec7></a><br />
<b>7.</b> Turning back to Burke and “literature as equipment for living,” I pull out one way of thinking about it in terms of using remembered pieces of literature to think through life’s situations. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn6">[6]</a> And one way of doing this is by formula—either your own distillation of memorable narrative moments or catchy aphorisms of the text itself. Literature, in this way, becomes part of your armament as you meet the demands of life on the field of battle.<br />
<br />
You’ll notice, however, that this has made literature into an assertion-generating enterprise, at least as it relates to one’s life, in the form of these maxims or formulas. But, as I noted in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#sec3">section 3</a>, literature isn’t assertoric prose—aren’t there other ways we might relate to literature that might also be important to living? And also: this is kind of making literature sound like self-help. Before turning this last screw, I want to take up a deficiency in the “equipment for living” metaphor that punches up, I think, one of the most important ethical issues of our time. On its surface, “equipment” suggests—like my description of the body naked and vulnerable without it—that there is an inner or essential or at any rate some self beneath the language that articulates it. This is an image from Romanticism, in part codified by M. H. Abrams’ “lamp,” and it is one pragmatists, at least, have to reject. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn7">[7]</a> There is no hidden, ineffable self deep down—it is language all the way down, rhetoric all the way down, equipment all the way down.<br />
<br />
And while this might spark a metaphysical argument, I want to first note that a shift from “equipment” to “spiritual <i>exercises</i>” helps articulate the pragmatist perspective. Our linguistified self is better thought of as a <i>muscle</i>, and though you only <i>know </i>what you can remember, you don’t only <i>believe </i>what you can remember in the same way that while you may not know that you have a particular muscle, you use it just the same—however, of course, wanting to throw the baseball harder and knowing what operates the humerus may lead you to pounding those pecks a little harder. (Recall Burke’s “dancing of an attitude” formula.) <br />
<br />
But secondly, “equipment all the way down” suggests a new handle on the old fears of relativism and the infinite regress. If it’s equipment all the way down, and the point of equipment is to protect your “self,” then it’s just equipment protecting other equipment. While relativism’s fear is that there’s no non-relative basis upon which to judge one’s values, equipment protecting equipment might produce the more radical fear that one was born into the wrong tribe, given the wrong education. Relativism goes fishing for the bottom of the inferential detours, but this perspective sees that we stop all the time to use the equipment we have, whether or not we <i>know </i>there’s a foundation for it. And in a less radical case, equipment protecting equipment produces the problem of knowing which is the means and which is the end—what is a tool that could be discarded for a better one and what is an essential part of what it is to be me.<br />
<a name=sec8></a><br />
<b>8.</b> So, now, back to assertions and literature—as my reintroduction of “spiritual exercises” indicates, one of the reasons why I like books like <i>Portrait of a Lady</i>, <i>Howards End</i>, and <i>Middlemarch</i>, is that they are obviously produced by an extraordinary intelligence working through a complex situation. Solutions are, unlike in philosophy typically, not to the fore here, and one thing I like is thinking through the situations with the author, either via their intermediaries in the form of characters or their tropes via the complex functions of their narrators. This does not, let me hasten to add, work for every book (as my lengthening train of books I have trouble reading attests) as not all books are best named by this meta-perspective.<br />
<a name=sec9></a><br />
<b>9.</b> However, there is another more recent use of the term “spiritual exercises” that goes some way to opening a window on another use of literature. My way to it is to first go back to Hadot and ask for <i>his </i>reason for choosing the word <i>spiritual</i>:<blockquote>In the first place, it is no longer quite fashionable these days to use the word ‘spiritual.’ It is nevertheless necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the other adjectives we could use – ‘psychic,’ ‘moral,’ ‘ethical,’ ‘intellectual,’ ‘of thought,’ ‘of the soul’ – covers all the aspects of the reality we want to describe. Since, in these exercises, it is thought which, as it were, takes itself as its own subject-matter, and seeks to modify itself, it would be possible for us to speak in terms of ‘thought exercises.’ Yet the word ‘thought’ does not indicate clearly enough that imagination and sensibility play a very important role in these exercises. For the same reason, we cannot be satisfied with ‘intellectual exercises,’ although such intellectual factors as definition, division, ratiocination, reading, investigation, and rhetorical amplification play a large role in them. ‘Ethical exercises’ is a rather tempting expression, since … the exercises in question contribute in a powerful way to the therapeutics of the passions, and have to do with the conduct of life. Yet, here again, this would be too limited a view of things. …[T]hese exercises in fact correspond to a transformation of our vision of the world, and to metamorphosis of our personality. The word ‘spiritual’ is quite apt to make us understand that these exercises are the result, not merely of thought, but of the individual’s entire psychism. (<i>Philosophy </i>81-82)</blockquote>This, I think, moves us a long way, especially with its emphasis on metamorphosis, self-transformation, transcendence. However, in the Stoic exercises themselves, the emphasis on maxims moves us back to putting <i>thought </i>first in priority, as does Hadot’s own formula that the exercises are “thought which takes itself as its own subject-matter and seeks to modify itself.” Is there another kind of exercise, one which the narrative form is peculiarly adapted to supplying?<br />
<br />
In Rorty’s late essay, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn8">[8]</a> Rorty says that<blockquote>the term ‘spiritual development’ is usually used only in reference to the attempt to get in touch with the divine. But it is occasionally used in a broader sense, one in which it covers any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one’s sense of what matters most. In this broader sense of the term, I would urge that the novels of Proust and James help us achieve spiritual growth, and thereby help many of us do what devotional reading helped our ancestors do. (404)</blockquote>Rorty says that “aesthetic” and “moral” won’t do in this context because “beauty” and “moral” importance seem too narrow of categories to describe the sense of exaltation that James and Proust cultists feel when reading them. “This sense of exaltation is not the same thing as being bowled over by the sheer rhetorical or poetic power of one’s favorite passages. Such passages play the role that their favorite passages in sacred scripture play for the religious. They become mantras, and reciting them brings very present help in time of trouble.”<blockquote>The sense of exaltation I am trying to describe is, instead, a result of reading books as wholes, of following plots through to the end, rather than with being rendered momentarily delirious by a startling poetic figure, a perfectly crafted couplet, or a splendidly balanced antithesis. … Following such careers [as Isabel Archer’s or Christian’s in <i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i>] lifts up the heart by letting the reader hope that she herself might eventually overcome the immaturity, the confusion, and the incoherence of her days. … For the intellectual who finds James and Proust exalting, it is the hope that she will be able someday to see her life in this world as a work of art – that she will someday be able to look back and bring everything together into some sort of pattern … into a coherent story of maturation. It is the hope for rounded completion and self-recognition, and is more like a longing for shapeliness than like the ambition of transcendence. (405)</blockquote><a name=sec10></a><br />
<b>10.</b> The experience of reading these books is an analogue to a religious experience—you don’t exactly come away with any new beliefs or formulae. “It is the experience of reading the novel,” Rorty says, “that makes one into a different sort of person, not the utility of a belief one might have acquired by various other means.” And the reason novels are good at this seems clear: they can <i>show </i>maturation. As a form, prose narrative seems better suited for showing it and thus producing that affective conduit that floods our motivational channels with that vague, life-giving substance we call “hope.”<br />
<br />
Seeing various forms of literature as spiritual exercises is seeing them as acting on you and as you acting through them. Novels, especially those like Henry James’s or Conrad’s or Faulkner’s, are difficult forests that seem to have to have paths hewn through every time. I find poetry like Dickinson’s and Stevens’s to be spiritual exercises that I respond to, even if I find myself tripping and stumbling, my muscles distorted at angles they normally don’t find themselves in. What do they equip me for? I don’t know always. But I do like making the effort at spelling it out.<br />
<a name=sec11></a><br />
<b>11.</b> But not always. Burke, in his essay on equipment, alludes to his era’s “inspirational literature” and how “it is a strategy for easy consolation” (298). Burke does not shy from this aspect of the sociological approach to rhetorical and literary forms. When I had the chance to teach a course on American Romanticism, on the first day I read them a famous bit by William James in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” whose punchline, after James shows how ignorant he was of the lifeways of po’ Appalachian folk—“losing,” as he says, “the whole inward significance of the situation”—the punchline is: “I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn9">[9]</a> I then posed to my students what I took to be the real problem before us: “how do you, the student, who is likely not going to become an English major let alone become a professional literary critic—how do you negotiate a class like this, what with ‘my strange indoor academic ways of life’?”<br />
<br />
It seems natural to me to see this as implicitly a question about literary value, or “what is literature?” I confessed that I had no idea how to define literature or the literary, and instead suggested a distinction between works that challenge and those that don’t. To be properly democratic about “taste,” we can be snobs in our private lives, but not in our theories of the public good—you are <i>not </i>a “better person” for enjoying <i>Moby-Dick</i> over <i>Harry Potter</i>; different books have different purposes, and it isn’t clear that non-challenging works aren’t serving a good purpose (relaxation, for example, or derisively, “escapism”). An example is my inability to watch challenging movies, including most dramas—I rationalize it by saying it’s probably because I read challenging books all day, but either way, I’d much rather laugh to Will Ferrell or watch <i>The Bourne Identity</i> for the eighth time than try and watch Cronenberg or <i>Twelve Years a Slave</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/literature-as-equipment-for-living-and.html#fn10">[10]</a><br />
<br />
The idea behind the occasional elitist stance toward books, and the idea that every democratic humanist believes intimately, is that it is <i>good </i>to be <i>challenged</i>; it is a <i>primary social good</i> to be challenged; it is an <i>intrinsic </i>good to be challenged occasionally. Notice I say “occasionally,” because it cannot be good to be <i>constantly </i>challenged because then you wouldn’t get anything done—this is the intimate relationship between <i>thought </i>and <i>action </i>that I was early talking about under the heading of beliefs as habits of action and detours. But it <i>is </i>good to be challenged sometimes—that’s the problem of sycophants, “yes men”—but where, when, by whom? Who do you <i>trust </i>to challenge you? I take it to be a mark of freedom that every person gets to decide for themselves when they want to be challenged—though in public matters I take it to be much <i>less </i>up to individual choice about <i>when </i>one can be challenged. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to sample a broad array of areas, avenues, ways of challenging oneself. And that’s pretty much it as far as the root of the humanities goes, and so the idea behind a literature class is to put some books under a student’s nose that I enjoy being challenged by and that maybe they will, too. The title of department under which a course is being offered merely tells you what kind of book you’ll most likely encounter in the course, though all bets are off in the actual course.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> “Worlds or Words Apart?” in TCF 137<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> On classical pragmatism’s occasional instrumentalism about truth, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-pragmatism-is.html">“What Pragmatism Is”</a> or the later <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/05/rhetorical-universalism.html">“Rhetorical Universalism”</a>. An earlier discussion of truth in the history of philosophy that I still like is <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/07/absolute-truth.html">“Absolute Truth.”</a><br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> <blockquote>O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,<br />
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?<br />
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,<br />
How can we know the dancer from the dance? <br />
- Yeats, “Among School Children”</blockquote><a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> Compare this passage to Nietzsche’s most famous passage on truth: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” trans. Kaufmann).<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> I’ve also deployed it to discuss Brandom’s philosophy of language in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html">“A Spatial Model of Belief Change.”</a><br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> For more on this line of thought about using literature, see my forthcoming “Touchstones.”<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Abrams’s book <i>The Mirror and the Lamp</i> (1953) is a still standard study of the intellectual tradition of Romanticism’s revolution in understanding how the mind relates to the world via those two metaphors. Rorty’s <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i> does for philosophy what Abrams did for the intellectual traditions of the 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup> centuries. (It’s important, in relating those two books and their purview, to remember that people didn’t distinguish the activities of philosophers and poets the way we do now. Abrams’ study is more wide-ranging in its historical depth than Rorty’s, but Rorty’s has more depth in the philosophical significance of the major philosophical figures from Plato to ‘70’s professional philosophy.) Central to the second chapter of Rorty’s <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> is this point that Romanticism, despite making the important shift away from mirror metaphors (which create representationalist epistemological models like Plato’s and Descartes’), still retains a metaphysically pernicious model of an ineffable self.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> Collected finally in <i>The Rorty Reader</i> (2010), eds. Volparil and Bernstein, though it had been available as a manuscript-file for many years at Rorty’s website.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> From <i>Talks to Teachers and to Students</i>, in <i>Writings: 1878-1899</i>, 843.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> I did try once to rationalize my love of the form of comedy found in Ferrell-Apatow-Stiller by analogizing it to Romanticism. See <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2007/12/just-bitching.html">“Just Bitching.”</a>Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-12188964552911927802014-06-20T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-03T15:25:56.437-07:00Rorty's Early Work<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. 1979 — What was actually radical about eliminative materialism; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#sec2">2. </a>“The Limits of Reductionism” — The rhetoric of moves — The metaphor of conversation; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#sec3">3. </a>Why republish the early work? — The technical conversation of philosophy; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#sec4">4. </a>So much missing — In this age of access — Where are the lectures? <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> At the end of his career, Richard Rorty was known as a stylish, philosophical crossdresser and stout reformist liberal who was the prime reason for the renaissance in pragmatism that occurred at the end of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. In 1979, though, Rorty wasn’t known for any of this. Rorty’s reputation at that time was as an innovator in the philosophy of mind, and for being widely identified with the phrase “the linguistic turn.” The combined effect of the publication of <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i> and his delivering the APA Eastern Division Presidential Address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in 1979 was to wipe out memory of that early work. From then on, for those inside the analytic philosophy establishment he was known as the betrayer, and for those outside...well, they didn’t need to know anything about it precisely because he’d betrayed it. In particular, philosophy of mind could get on without him because his innovation—dubbed “eliminative materialism”—was being carried on by people more radical than he anyways, namely the Churchlands.<br />
<br />
This neglect has seemed a pity, particularly as the Churchlands’ “eliminative materialism,” as Robert Brandom notes, has nothing much to do with what Rorty pioneered. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn1">[1]</a> However, it makes a certain kind of sense since it is also true, as Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia note in their introduction to the new posthumous collection of Rorty’s early analytic work, <i>Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy</i> (2014), that Rorty’s philosophical stance changed remarkably little when viewed from the right angle. Indeed, Brandom shows quite well how Rorty’s eliminative materialism quite naturally leads to his mature position on the contingency of social practices, and thus the optionalness of vocabularies. Rorty’s eliminative materialism was the idea that the mind/body distinction is based on the fact that we use two different vocabularies to describe what goes on between our ears, and that we could plausibly phase out the one that refers to it as “the mind” given certain changes in our technical ability to manipulate the brain, the centerpiece of the other vocabulary we use.<br />
<br />
The Churchlands took that point—based on Rorty’s view of our <i>practices </i>of observation and reflection—and made it a reductionist claim, that we <i>should </i>eliminate the Mentalese vocabulary and the folk psychology that goes with it as quickly as possible in order to better talk about the world and ourselves, since, after all, all that’s between our ears is <i>really </i>just a brain. As Rorty’s point was simply that it was <i>possible</i>, going the next step and arguing we should make it <i>actual </i>does have the ring of a more radical step. But from the vantage of his later work, one can see how this is regressive—the Churchlands’ claim is just one more metaphysical claim about Xs really being Ys, and that knowing the Truth will help us say more true things. But thinking of Materialism as the Truth just reifies that particular vocabulary, freezing it into the place where we had before thought only Mentalese could exist. Rorty’s thought flowed from the Nietzschean thawing, the realization that <i>all </i>vocabularies are mortal, and thus all should be judged on their own merits for getting a particular job done, not on the false enthronements of a divine right of philosopher-kings.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> That Rorty was working his way toward this Nietzschean stance can be seen much more clearly now that Leach and Tartaglia have made Rorty’s early work more widely available. The absolute gem, “The Limits of Reductionism,” (1961) is a wonderful piece of metaphilosophical reflection on philosophical argument, one of a trio of his earliest full essays. He begins with the brazen move of implicitly suggesting that wielders of the epithet “Reductionist!” know not what they wield, for the “general procedure” of inferring from “X has the property of Y” to “X is nothing but Y” is constitutive of abstract thought itself: “all abstract thought takes selected aspects of a subject matter as paradigmatic and ignores other aspects. Thought is reductionistic or nothing, and the criticism only makes sense if it is narrowed down” (39). The idea here is that thinking necessarily uses the “is” to predicate properties, and that rational inquiry can only function if it is legitimate to narrow your inquiry to a single kind of object, with kinds being delimited by the predicate you use to pick it out. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<br />
What Rorty is concerned with in the essay is philosophical conversation, how philosophical arguments are traded and for what purpose. Thus the rhetoric of “moves” I’ve already deployed, as in “moves made in a game,” is central to Rorty’s stance and discussions in this early period. What it yields is not only a useful bird’s-eye view of a number of different sites of contention (realists vs. idealists, logical positivists or Marxists or Freudians on the attack, etc.), but an interesting, contextual definition of philosophy. Rorty identifies the three great patterns of argument in the history of Western philosophy as the appeal to simplicity, the appeal to fact, and the appeal to self-referential inconsistency—the latter of which is what the antireductionist is really wielding. What the antireductionist is concerned about is that “the result of the reduction does not permit an account of the reduction itself,” and is thus self-referentially inconsistent.<blockquote>This treatment of philosophizing as itself a fact in need of explanation is the metaphilosophical attitude <i>par excellence</i>. It is the rhetorical device which moves discussion up to the level on which the questions “Necessary for what?” and “When is a fact not <i>really </i>a fact?” must be raised explicitly. The acceptance of this gambit might indeed be taken as the defining characteristic of that species of discourse which we call “philosophy.” For it is precisely when the gambit is <i>refused</i>, and the reductionist replies that his concern is with a certain delimited subject matter which does <i>not </i>include his own activity of inquiry, that a given type of inquiry is liable to separate itself from philosophy and to set up shop as science. (41)</blockquote>This, I think, is a tremendous insight with significant ramifications for our understanding of inquiry and its relationship to social institutions. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn3">[3]</a> From the beginning, Rorty was concerned with metaphilosophy—thinking about why and how we do philosophy—an attitude impressed upon him most by his teacher at Chicago, Richard McKeon. This collection makes available another gem, “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (1967) This is usefully read as a follow up to “Limits,” focusing now on the specific conversational state of analytic philosophers who took the “linguistic turn” and their older colleagues who resisted the turn by continuing to speak of “essences” and “experience.” Rorty again displays his technique of <i>ad hoc</i> botanization, splitting philosophers into the categories of “critical,” “speculative,” and “empirical,” and though this tempest is largely missing from the teapot these days, it is still instructive to watch Rorty go through his motions. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn4">[4]</a><br />
<br />
And it is interesting to see how the man identified with the linguistic turn never really felt comfortable with what it denoted, denying in the essay the usual ways of cashing out the differences between the two putative sides. There are many biographical nuggets like this in these essays, and it’s a little disappointing to see Leach and Tartaglia’s editorial criteria cut Rorty’s “Recent Metaphilosophy” (1961) from being collected. That essay begins with more interesting botanization, the analogy of philosophy to a game, and the first major instance (in, again, one of his first essays) of his deployment of the concept of <i>conversation </i>that he became so identified with in his post-PMN phase, though <i>avant la lettre</i>. Declaring that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules,’” Rorty goes on to draw the conclusion that the goal of philosophy must be communication, then. ”Since communication is the goal, rather than truth (or even agreement), the prospective infinite series is a progress rather than a regress: it becomes a moral duty to keep the series going, lest communication cease.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn5">[5]</a> But as the essay moves on to minute discussion of two philosophers lost to time, it’s understandable that it wasn’t reproduced.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> But biographical nuggets and removing the tarnish from Rorty’s reputation isn’t reason enough to publish the collection. The only people who would care about those two things are people already motivated enough to find the originals (as I have). After all, we already have several complete bibliographies of Rorty available, so the difficulty of finding far-flung essays is reduced. And digital archives make getting essays from the <i>Review of Metaphysics</i> or the <i>Journal of Philosophy</i> easier than getting a copy of the book—so long as you have access to a major research library. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn6">[6]</a> But who else is going to be interested than those already with such access?<br />
<br />
Leach and Tartaglia’s reasoning, and their view of why Rorty’s early work should be more widely available, is that it has something to say to the current conversations of philosophy. (Daniel Dennett—a contemporary of Rorty’s and a continuously major figure in late 20<sup><sup>th</sup></sup> century philosophy of mind—says so as well, in his short preface to the volume.) The editors have two basic categories: Rorty’s metaphilosophy and his stuff on language and mind. His reviews have already been cut (this isn’t a “collected works” project), as well as two (excellent) articles in the 1967 <i>Encyclopedia of Philosophy</i> and one essay on Whitehead. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn7">[7]</a> But what are his essays on mind and language going to add? A lot of it—in particular “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” and “Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth”—was superseded by <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>. (And some of them, like “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn’” (1962) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1970), just aren’t that interesting.) And again: people working on the technical problems of anglophone philosophy are going to have access to research libraries with databases to throw pdfs right onto your iPad from home.<br />
<br />
Essays collected in a book work differently on our psyche, though, that I cannot deny. But the principles the editors used, I think, should’ve been modified. They say they stopped at 1972 because Rorty began his <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i> collection in 1972 with “The World Well Lost” and that he could’ve, presumably, selected later essays like “Criteria and Necessity” (1973) if he had wanted to. But this is specious as against the designs of their project because this is about the technical conversation of philosophy—and the reason Rorty says in CP that he doesn’t collect them is because they were technical. So instead of “Realism and Reference” (1976), which is referred to (and thus implicitly “up to date”) in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP), we get the utterly dispensable “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn8">[8]</a> But more importantly, we’re missing “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” (1979), a great piece of metaphilosophy that bookends nicely “The Limits of Reductionism.”<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> I don’t know what I would’ve done. The criteria Leach and Tartaglia use are kind of arbitrary, but you have to end a book somewhere. When you look out over Rorty’s corpus, though, there are gems everywhere that should be more widely read. The trouble is that there’s no net to capture his career-making (and still fascinating) “Mind-Body Identity, Categories, and Privacy” (1965), the encyclopedia article “Intuition” (1967), “Searle and the Special Powers of the Brain” (1980) in <i>Behavioral and Brain Sciences</i>, “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (1982), “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” (1982), and “Against Belatedness” (1983)—and this is just a variegated group up through 1983. ”Mind-Body” has historical interest, “Intuition” is interesting, “Searle” is polemical, “Contemporary” is technical, “Hermeneutics” is about education, and “Against” is a book review of Hans Blumenberg. The four basic editorial choices of criteria for inclusion of Influence, Subject, Audience, or Form cannot get all those pieces in the same book, but they all should be read...by somebody.<br />
<br />
I assume somebody’s working on a chronological Collected Works edition of his stuff, ala Dewey’s, or at least it’s an obvious enough idea that somebody at the right moment will put it into motion. In this Age of Access, though, I wonder how needed it is after you get a complete bibliography. I already own copies of all of Rorty’s published material. Granted, some of it I was lucky (finding a copy used of some obscure Catholic Association conference proceedings for the one year Rorty was there—can you imagine the odds?) and then not, in one case; I still have not been able to locate <i>The American Peoples’ Encyclopedia</i> with all the high-powered databases at my library. But what do we really need a Collected Works edition for? If the scholarly apparatus doesn’t add a whole bunch of use-value to it (for example, tracking some of Rorty’s sometimes obscure allusions), then I don’t see why we would. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/06/rortys-early-work.html#fn9">[9]</a> What I would like, however, are his lectures. That would be new, and that would be interesting. I see all these collections of lectures by like John Rawls and Stanley Cavell—Rorty taught for years; was it all extemporaneous? They must be hiding in a file folder somewhere at UC-Irvine. Maybe I’ll be the one to have to drag them out.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> See the beginning of Brandom’s essay “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism” in his <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> This move is the first instance of a move that Rorty would later use in discussing the antiessentialism common to, e.g., Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson. Derrida’s attack on “logocentrism,” which foregrounded the presupposed center/margin distinction implicit in the project of metaphysics, produced in certain crowds (mainly harboring English departments) the repetitious parroting of “binary thinking!” every time a distinction was made. Rorty claims that Derrida and Davidson are “antidualists,” but “this does not mean that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions” (PSH 47).<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> For if the Kuhnian perspective is right, that disciplines arise around common sets of problems, but those problems are not “natural” in the sense that the metaphysical tradition has used the term to describe what Reality impresses on us whether we like it or not, then what’s to stop every person from being entitled to set up shop for themselves and work on whatever problem they’ve delimited for themselves? The implicit object-Meinongianism here breeds inquiry-Meinongianism, whereby all it takes for a new one-person discipline to arise is a refusal to answer another person’s question. One might take this to be a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>, and people have, but I think it forces the right kind of metaphilosophical reflections on the two sides of pragmatism, the Emersonian and the social practice traditions.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> I’ve discussed this essay previously in my own <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/05/do-analysts-and-metaphysicians.html">“Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?”</a> (I consider it juvenilia, but it mainly presents the content of the essay, so could prove a useful summary.) <br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> “Recent Metaphilosophy,” <i>Review of Metaphysics</i>, Dec. 1961, 301-302. Compare that to “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (PMN 377). Also, read it against note 2, above. David L. Hall’s excellent critical introduction to Rorty’s thought, <i>Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism</i> (1994), first dug out this early essay and made much of this line for the continuity of Rorty’s philosophy (see 77).<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> *NOTE ADDED MAY 2015* In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's not that hard to discover that the bibliographies aren't quite complete. Rorty wrote a couple short reviews for the <i>Review of Metaphysics</i> in grad school, run as it was out of Yale and partly by his friend Richard Bernstein. (His first was in 1955 on Nelson Goodman's instantly famous <i>Fact, Fiction, and Forecast</i>.) Also, it is unfortunate that Leach and Tartaglia didn't discover the errata for "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" in the <i>Review of Metaphysics</i>, June 1971. One is a partial misquote of James Cornman on 203, but the other is an entire missing line on 203. It kind of made sense, so it's not too surprising that the original editors of the <i>Review</i> and then Leach and Tartaglia missed it. Here's the sentence reprinted: <blockquote>Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."</blockquote>Here's what it should read:<blockquote>Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language <b>we use. To say that "X's appear to us as F" is merely to say that </b>"We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."</blockquote>As you can see, it doesn't really change anything interpretationally. And besides, of the essays reproduced, "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" is the most negligible. If I could fault the editors for anything, it would be reprinting it in the first place.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Though another essay on Whitehead is included, presumably because the latter, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” isn’t just exegetical. Whitehead is just not part of the current conversation (“we judged that one paper about Whitehead would probably suffice,” say the editors in a footnote on 7), though those still talking about him did reprint “Matter and Event” (1963), the dropped essay, in 1983.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> To be fair, I have no idea what’s happening in the technical conversation of contemporary philosophy professors. (I hope this isn’t too much of a frightening reveal.) My suspicion is that Dennett is being generous when he says that the papers he earmarks should be “required reading” for up-and-comers. But despite my lack of definite knowledge about what current philosophy professors are taking seriously, based on the trajectory of it from the 60s to 90s, which I might claim some know-how with, I doubt that these professors are going to find useful, for example, Rorty’s essay on Kant, “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument.” There’s much to be said about the importance of that essay on a number of different fronts, but none of them seem relevant to what I imagine an aggregate of philosophy professors spend their time on. But maybe analytic philosophy has taken a good turn, back to the concerns that Rorty was speaking to. (Though, come to think of it, that would mean philosophy hasn’t gotten any further than they were 50 years ago. Great for my hero; so much wasted time for philosophy. Or not—if this is all a kind of inquiry, then wasted time is never wasted time because you won’t know which tunnel is a dead-end until you reach it, turn around, and say, “Gee, that was a waste of time.”)<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> I’ll just add here my general unhappiness with Leach and Tartaglia’s introduction. They largely limit themselves to biographical context for each of the essays as they are chronologically published, and this is sometimes useful for somebody who hasn’t read all the interviews or Neil Gross’ book. (See my review <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/04/waiting-for-more-gross-and-rorty.html">“Waiting for More: Gross and Rorty.”</a>) And they make a few good connections between some early parts and Rorty’s later work, and add some useful bits of historical context. But their critical patter is too often genuinely misleading for an amateur acolyte like myself not to be annoyed. One example: during a discussion of his first paper, a compare-and-contrast of Peirce and Wittgenstein, Leach and Tartaglia say that “Peirce was the classical pragmatist for whom the mature Rorty had least sympathy owing to the former’s lack of concern for moral and social issues, a worry foreshadowed here in an ambivalent footnote” (5). I don’t think there’s anything ambivalent about the footnote. After noting that “renewed interest in pragmatism has led to a new interest in Peirce, who somehow seems the most ‘up-to-date’ of the pragmatists” (16), Rorty footnotes, “perhaps because he was neither as concerned with religion and morality as James, nor as interested in social and political issues as Dewey.” This strikes me as ironic, but not ambivalent. The irony is that <i>analytic philosophy </i>can’t countenance James or Dewey because of those commitments, and so they focus on Peirce. It’s an arrow at the analytic establishment’s aridness, not Peirce’s. The reason Leach and Tartaglia’s comment is misleading about the later Rorty’s reason for lacking sympathy in Peirce is because 1) he stated in <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i> that it was because Peirce was too Kantian and, more importantly, 2) he’s not entitled to have lack of political utility as a reason for lack of sympathy (at least, consciously—but Leach and Tartaglia’s “owing” is ironically ambivalent in articulating which is their claim). The thrust of Rorty’s understanding of the relationship between those sides of a philosopher’s work is that of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>: some people are useful for politics, some aren’t. And indeed, Leach and Tartaglia even use Rorty’s use of that idea on Heidegger (i.e. that Heidegger’s politics is irrelevant to our reception of his philosophy) in their introduction just two pages before. It would be strange for Rorty, who was a huge fan of Sellars’ and Brandom’s very unpolitical work, to hold that against Peirce.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-16518076164942094852013-08-23T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-03T09:05:02.576-07:00Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Getting Davidson better press — Talking about your own problems; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#sec2">2. </a>Pragmatic holism — Words are not stilts — Idealism — Linguistic holism; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#sec3">3. </a>Avoiding idealism; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#sec4">4. </a>Incommensurable paradigms — Smells like idealism; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#sec5">5. </a>Close reading the conclusion of “Very Idea” — Empiricism motivated by realism — Conceptual relativity; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#sec6">6. </a>Truth is between sentences — On the very idea of mediation <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> <blockquote>Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s writings are not easy for the nonspecialist to grasp. Neither are those of Kant and Hegel. But the work of original and imaginative philosophers such as these, in the course of generations, gradually comes to have an influence on the entire culture. Their criticisms of our intellectual heritage change our sense of what it is important to think about. A couple centuries from now, historians of philosophy will be writing about the changes in the human self-image that Donald Davidson’s writings helped bring about. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn1">[1]</a></blockquote>Richard Rorty, who was a personal friend of Davidson’s, wrote this shortly after Davidson’s death. So this strong claim has two strikes against it: 1) friendship often colors and 2) interesting prophesies are often wrong. But as amplification, and from someone deeply immersed in intellectual history, it’s a striking thing to say about a philosopher no one outside of small coteries of isolated individuals—called Anglophone Philosophy Departments—has heard of. Not so with Wittgenstein, who gets good press amongst other departments, even if there aren’t many who <i>really </i>know what he was on about. However, Wittgenstein was an eccentric person and carried out his philosophy eccentrically—he just <i>seems </i>more interesting, and so attracts the mind at a more superficial level. Davidson, so far as I know, led a quiet life carrying out a philosophical project amongst a group of fellows who increasingly separated themselves from the life of other disciplines.<br />
<br />
I’m not a specialist, but I’ve picked up some things about anglophone philosophy, and I tend to think Rorty was probably right about Davidson’s significance. So what I’d like to do is just provide a little of the context that I understand to be at work to make one of Davidson’s most famous essays more accessible to the layreader, especially students of literature. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn2">[2]</a> Davidson once told Rorty “that he had never tried to solve anybody else’s problems, never discussed an issue simply because others were talking about it.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn3">[3]</a> This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can aid in the avoidance of the entropy that sets in quicker for those whose writings are <i>too timely</i>. Most of us are doomed to be only understood within the claustrophobic space of our immediate situation—you <i>could </i>understand what our remarks mean if you knew more about the history of the conversation we were taking part in, but why would you <i>want </i>to? In the hands of a thinker of genius, however, such ignoring of your context can give a freshness because if you know beforehand that these are just <i>your </i>problems, then you are usually more careful to make sure your reader knows what you’re concerned about. Davidson has this freshness, based on his idiosyncrasy, but he is also not <i>completely </i>idiosyncratic—he is taking part in the Conversation of Philosophy, and sometimes in setting up <i>his </i>problems, it’s not always apparent how to situate him in philosophical space. <i>You have to know something about the history of a conversation to understand any conversation.</i> These are just a few notes toward that end.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> The first thing to know is that if you haven’t already read Willard van Orman Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), there is <i>no point</i> in reading Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974). Davidson generally should be seen, in many aspects, as extending certain basic Quinean ideas, and in “Very Idea” he is pursuing an argument that extends the basic <i>pragmatic holism</i> that underlies that earlier paper. The basic gist of that extremely influential essay is that the empiricist project of analysis—“linguistic analysis” being built into the self-image of anglophone philosophers since Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap—is fundamentally flawed if is based on two very bad ideas. “One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are <i>analytic</i>, or grounded in the meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are <i>synthetic</i>, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is <i>reductionism</i>: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn4">[4]</a> The second dogma represents the specific manifestation of empiricism as a core philosophical project after the linguistic turn. If, as empiricists since Locke have maintained, we are born <i>tabula rasa</i>, a blank slate, then everything is learned and thus rooted in experience. This means you have to <i>build backwards</i> to experience if you think there is anything at a distance from it. This is a kind of <i>atomism</i>, where the goal is to give an account of our conceptual activity by constructing complexities out of simples that can be tied directly to their origin in our immediate experience of the world. Words are like stilts—they each are grounded in the world, and if they aren’t, you’re just floating in the air, unconnected.<br />
<br />
The linguistic turn in anglophone philosophy, however, made an important move away from the realm of philosophical action that had animated 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup>-century philosophy—the mind. Experience, for most empiricists, happened <i>in </i>the mind, which is also where conceptual activity occurred because before the linguistic turn, <i>ideas </i>were concepts, not <i>words</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn5">[5]</a> Tired of the Hegelian Absolute Idealism of the preceding generation of British philosophy, Russell and G. E. Moore said sucks to that—skip the ideas and go to the only manifestation we deal with. “Philosophical analysis is linguistic analysis” became a kind of fighting faith as this kind of metaphilosophical, methodological viewpoint swept Philosophy Departments. However, part of the motivation for rejecting the Bradleys and the McTaggarts was to move away from a wooly-headed spiritualism and towards an embrace of the natural sciences. The hard, tough natural sciences are <i>empirical</i>, and the founding of analytic philosophy also marked the resurgence of empiricism in philosophy. But empiricism—rooting everything in experience—poses a problem for a philosopher who also thinks that the natural sciences are the best at doing that kind of thing. What’s left for philosophy to do? <br />
<br />
Linguistic analysis! We’ll study words and meaning, and how they mean. However, the only way for this to be a distinct project that <i>can’t</i> be taken over by a science is if some of our words <i>aren’t</i> rooted in experience in the requisite way. So the analytic/synthetic distinction took hold as a means to keep something distinctive for philosophers to do, helping the scientists with their words, if you will. The iconic example to establish the plausibility of <i>analyticity</i>—the notion of a statement that depends for its truth <i>only </i>on the meanings of the words composing it—is “A bachelor is an unmarried man.” That statement is true and the shenanigans of married and unmarried men matter not a whit to that judgment. So <i>definitions </i>are a paradigm of the analytic, as opposed to a synthetic statement like “That rock just fell on my foot,” where you’d have to check my foot for a bruise and the vicinity for a proximal and culpable rock.<br />
<br />
Against the atomism of trying to give an account of simples connected to experience being put together to create complexes and trying to separate out the “just language” parts from the “experience decides the truth” parts—which the project was foundering on—Quine substituted a holistic picture of our interaction with our environment:<blockquote>The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, 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. … But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn6">[6]</a></blockquote>This is, essentially, the picture that holists like Davidson, Rorty, and Robert Brandom all wish to remain loyal to. The only difference is that all three are <i>a lot</i> less likely to conflate what Quine elsewhere calls the “web of belief” that is described here with “total science.” With that metaphor of the <i>self </i>as a web of belief, Rorty and Brandom in particular take the further step of thinking of <i>belief </i>as Alexander Bain did—as a habit of action. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn7">[7]</a> In this case, one of the most relevant habits of action here is the action we take to <i>articulate </i>a belief in words. The core idea here is that our beliefs, and the sentences we use to articulate them, mean what they do both because of their relationship to each other and the <i>whole </i>of them to the environing world. The use of any <i>particular </i>word or sentence is underdetermined by the world by itself. “Snow is white” might be true, but why use <i>it </i>instead of “La neige est blanche”? Both are true, but <i>only </i>in relationship to their home language in English or French and the world doesn’t tell you which one to use. The picture here is of a self as a kind of amoeba, whose permeable sides can be crossed in specific ways. On the inside are linguistically articulable beliefs and on the outside is the organism’s environment. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn8">[8]</a> What Brandom calls <i>language-entries</i> (i.e. “perception”) and <i>language-exists</i> (i.e. “action”) are fundamental to how this self interacts with its environment. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn9">[9]</a><br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> One problem this picture has incurred is of avoiding the charge of <i>idealism</i>. The problem of idealism in philosophy in the last 200 years is the problem of avoiding Cartesian solipsism. Descartes inaugurated the problem by means of his radical doubt—if I can doubt everything but that I’m doubting, then <i>at least I know that</i>. The premise of this line of thought, of course, is that a certain primacy is given to <i>knowing</i>, or epistemology. Idealism, however, first got off the ground as a corollary of <i>empiricism</i>, not the rationalism of Descartes. Berkeley felt that the consequence of a thoroughgoing empiricism, an effort to put experience first, led to the belief that the only thing you really <i>know </i>then is <i>your experience</i>—the stuff happening in your own mind. This is the connection between empiricism and phenomenalism, the 20<sup>th</sup> century manifestation of the notion that the <i>appearances </i>just <i>are </i>the reality.<br />
<br />
This is troubling, for it seems like admitting that the only thing you can really be sure of is in your own mind, and <i>that is reality</i>. Kant’s transcendental argument, about what we think of as empirical reality <i>needing </i>the categories of the mind, hoped to avoid this problem of idealism, so that as the old formula has it, only a transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. But given his descendents in German Idealism, who had other agendas, idealism has remained the bugbear of realists, those who demand a robust sense of a world <i>out there</i>. When you look at Quine’s holistic picture, it seems nice, but realists want to know an awful lot about why there’s such radical underdetermination and how one defuses the problem of connecting to reality attendant to the relative independence of the inside of one’s web of beliefs.<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> These are the problems Davidson concentrated some of his most original work on. For in the time between Quine’s “Two Dogmas” and Davidson’s “Very Idea,” a revolution had occurred in the philosophy of science, which given the fighting faiths of analytic philosophy was a very important subground. Thomas Kuhn’s <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> was published in 1962. In it Kuhn made the argument that scientific theories and experiments were elaborated within in what he called <i>paradigms</i>. A paradigm for Kuhn is essentially the guiding assumptions that undergird the conceptual content of those theories and experiments. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn10">[10]</a> Given the nature of the relationship between assumptions, inferences, and conclusions, however, this means that if you change your root assumptions, it doesn’t make sense to say the old conclusions are false—you simply can’t draw them from your new assumptions. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn11">[11]</a> Kuhn drew from this kind of consideration the conclusion that different scientific paradigms were <i>incommensurable</i>, that <i>paradigm shifts</i> in scientific activity—such as the shift from geocentric, Ptolemaic astronomy to the heliocentric, Copernican—are not <i>logical </i>transitions from the falsification of assumptions, but <i>rhetorical </i>transitions by simply <i>replacing </i>one set of assumptions with another. But this means, then, that proponents of alternative paradigms <i>beg the question</i> over each other in argument because they are working from different assumptions. Paradigms are incommensurable because from each standpoint one cannot attain a position in which to even judge whether the other is true. And thus Kuhn was led to his most regretted line, that “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn12">[12]</a><br />
<br />
“Works in a different world”—smells <i>just </i>like idealism. It’s against this background that Davidson intervenes, collecting together the linguist-anthropologists Sapir and Whorf, the calm Kuhn and the fiery Feyerebend, and his mentor Quine—quoting the passage I pointed to above as the holistic picture—as all suggesting a picture of different conceptual schemes organizing a world that is otherwise a <i>blank </i>without such organization. The criterion that seems to be implicitly at work in all of them to tell when we actually have different conceptual schemes at work is <i>failure of translation</i>. This philosophical perspective then infers from this failure an <i>inability </i>to translate between them.<br />
<br />
Davidson doesn’t think there’s a “between” here. He thinks that whatever the picture of language is that has given rise to what Hilary Putnam called the “cookie-cutter view of reality” is false. He calls the scheme/content distinction, that between “organizing system and something waiting to be organized,” “a dogma of empiricism”—“the third, and perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn13">[13]</a><br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> The above should put you in a better position to read the essay. (I’m not confident enough to think it’s sufficient, but it might be a good start.) The view of Davidson articulated above is pretty much that of Richard Rorty. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn14">[14]</a> In what follows, I’d like to close read Davidson’s conclusion in order to bring out how the above interacts with his specific mode of articulation. The final paragraph of “Very Idea” runs like this:<blockquote>In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn15">[15]</a></blockquote>As I’ve tried to suggest above, in the program of empiricism as a motivation for analysis, the idea was to reduce words to nonwords, to get back behind the complex mechanics of semantic meaning to the atomistic simples directly tied to reality or experience, the individuated things that <i>made </i>some sentences true and not others. If there was not some “uninterpreted reality,” empiricists thought, then we’d have no hold <i>on </i>reality for it would just be a morass of relativism—words pointing to words in a nightmarish Cartesian solipsism. This is empiricism itself motivated by realism. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn16">[16]</a><br />
<br />
The thing to understand in this context is how this is empiricism through the looking glass of Kant. What Davidson is saying in the first two sentences might be paraphrased as “you might think that we are giving up on objectivity if we give up the idea of an uninterpreted reality and thus sink into relativism [first sentence], but it is <i>that very idea</i> of an ‘uninterpreted reality’ that <i>produces </i>the possibility of relativism.” That’s what Davidson means when he says “<i>this </i>kind of relativity goes by the board”—i.e., we can’t even make sense of this vulgar relativism without the dogma, so none of its considerations, objections, concerns, or arguments are relevant.<br />
<br />
In the <i>rest </i>of the paragraph, then, Davidson is trying to reconstrue what we should mean by conceptual relativity and objectivity. At this point, it is important to <i>not </i>construe Davidson as having identified language with conceptual schemes. At the beginning of the essay, he says, “We may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn17">[17]</a> But what Davidson is doing at the beginning of the essay is leading us dialectically through the inside of this line of thought. We might paraphrase his mode this way: “we <i>may </i>accept this hypothesis about how to understand language, so <i>if </i>we do, this is how it would have to work...oh, it doesn’t work the way we need it to...guess we have to reject it.” (Obviously there are two points at which the mechanics of the argument might be criticized, then: whether Davidson has correctly gotten a handle on <i>how </i>it has to work and whether he’s identified things we <i>need </i>to be done by the theory.) Everything at the beginning leads up to his famous line about the third dogma. He’s attempting to show how contemporaneous discussions of “incommensurability,” then white hot because of Kuhn and Feyerabend’s explosive fight with the Popperians, run back through Quine’s gauntlet of the two dogmas, and how Quine then <i>isn’t enough</i> to show what the problem is with radical incommensurability of languages/schemes/vocabulary.<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> So here’s the last two sentences again: “Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” To understand what Davidson is saying here I find it helpful to think of Alfred Tarski’s Convention T (which Davidson, I think, has in the back of his mind). “Claim ‘P’ is true if and only if P.” Here’s the famous example: “The claim ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” (I’ve thrown in the shorthand of “if and only if.”) This is now sometimes called the disquotational theory/definition of truth: take off the quotes to find out what needs to be the case for the sentence to be true. (Lately this is also called the deflationary theory of truth.)<br />
<br />
Davidson is saying here, first, what Rorty repeats in <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>: truth is a property that only holds <i>in </i>languages, between sentences (“relative <i>to </i>language”). So, there is a kind of relativity here, since I might say “Snow is white” or “I think snow is white” or “La neige est blanche,” all of which might say the same thing. However, these three claims are as objective as can be, Davidson thinks, because we <i>already know how</i> to judge their truth by the way the world is. Snow is white if snow is white; likewise, since the French use their sentence in exactly the same contexts as our English one, we can say the two sentences say exactly the same thing, talk about the same world. “I think snow is white” <i>can </i>express the same thing as the first two, but Tarski shows us that it might also tell us something slightly different: “The claim ‘I think snow is white’ is true iff I think snow is white.” And depending on <i>who </i>is using that sentence, you might come up with different answers, unlike “snow is white.” For why would we say that the claim “I think snow is white” is true <i>tout court</i> just because <i>I</i> happen to think so? (“I” is what they call an <i>indexical</i>, like “here” and “now”—they refer very differently depending on context, and thus can radically change truth-values.)<br />
<br />
When Davidson says “unmediated touch,” what he’s saying here is the same as when Rorty rejects the metaphor of thinking of language as a medium. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn19"></a> Davidson shouldn’t have said “reestablish,” for his real point is that we couldn’t possibly be in a position where we weren’t in contact with the world in such a way that our common modes of adjudicating the truth of sentences might globally be suspicious. (This the Cartesian threat of skepticism.) Rorty’s argument goes backwards to Hegel, whose attack on “immediacy” in the <i>Phenomenology of Spirit</i> is the first attack on the Kantian framework that Davidson is, we could say, rephrasing in the analytic idiom. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn20">[20]</a> Rorty wants to say that language is more like an arm than it is a veil (or a map). That means “snow” is just as connected to snow as your hand.<br />
<br />
There are a number of more general problems scared up by this discussion, most especially how we are to understand Davidson’s argument’s relationship to Kuhnian notions of radical conceptual shifts. Kuhn is ostensibly a target, so does Davidson’s argument require us to reject Kuhnian paradigm shifts? I will return to these problems.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Richard Rorty, “Out of the Matrix,” Oct. 5, 2003 in the <i>Boston Globe</i><br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> I should add that literary critics have not remained <i>completely </i>ignorant of Davidson’s work. (And putting it that way, I hasten to add, makes it sound like it’s their fault, when it isn’t. Really, it isn’t anybody’s fault—and that’s despite the tone in the body, above, where it sounds like I’m sliding blame in the direction of the philosophers. That’s a rhetoric I’ve more picked up from Rorty than I should feel entitled to. In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly tired of people complaining about how <i>their particular hero</i> has been “ignored” or someone else’s hero was “anticipated” by theirs—and you can probably find me making such complaints, but I’d really rather weed that out. They sound so uncouth in others, so why should I keep it up as well? In our lengthening age, who actually has time to stay abreast of everyone? Why can’t we learn to lay off the horn, and just show people why we happen to like so-and-so and leave omniscience to the gods? Scholars have an interest in promulgating a sense that there are certain things you <i>need </i>to know to be considered in the club—the problem is that there are <i>a lot</i> of different clubs now, and generally this is a good thing. I have more thoughts about this in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2011/10/do-we-need-center-or-generalities.html">“Do We Need a Center, or Generalities?.”</a>) There is a very good collection of essays edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock, <i>Literary Theory After Davidson</i>, and though a philosopher, Samuel Wheeler III’s book, <i>Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy</i>, is of inestimable value for literary critics desiring an approach to Davidson because of their general familiarity with Derrida and de Man.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> “In Memoriam,” 318 in the <i>International Journal of Philosophical Studies</i>, 2006<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 20 in his <i>From a Logical Point of View</i><br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> I say “most empiricists” because many pragmatists would like to include pragmatism within the ranks of empiricism. In particular, for James and Dewey, <i>everything </i>was experience—they collapsed the distinction between experience and world that is needed to constitute the idea of a mind radically distinct from the world, and thus create the possibility of being out of touch with it, a problem hovering in the background of all of this. For a different version of this story about the foundation and demolition of analytic empiricism at the hands of Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty that discusses its relationship to the pre-linguistic turn maneuvers of James and Dewey, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html">“Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn.”</a><br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> Quine, “Two Dogmas,” 42-43<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Brandom, as he likes to cutely point out, technically does not believe in belief. In his systematic philosophy of language, he avoids it in the official account, though provides the means of seeing how to move back and forth between various common ways of understanding the concept of “belief.” See in particular his <i>Making It Explicit</i>, 195-6. He’s also proud of the fact, and his Ph.D. dissertation advisor Rorty is as well, that “experience” does not appear once in that massive book, though that is tangential to the issues here.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> When did this web of belief become a biological construct? Sleight of hand, given that it would take me too far afoot to justify the suitability of this picture for humans, though clearly it won’t work, say, for actual amoeba who have an environment but no language. This is a problem that needs an account, and some of Brandom’s best work goes some way in justifying the analytic’s fighting faith in thinking that it’s a good idea to just avoid talking about “mind” and “experience” given how other animals probably have them and instead find a way of talking about the <i>specific </i>problems that arise for us language-users. Brandom calls this the <i>demarcation problem</i> and it is terribly important, particularly for various ecologically-minded intellectual movements, e.g. forms of “posthumanism.” (I apply this Brandomian insight to posthumanism and give the example of one particular treatment of intentionality in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#sec3">“Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization,” sections 3-5</a>.)<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> Rorty gives a Davidsonian account of this kind of thing—with a picture!—in his “Non-reductive Physicalism” in <i>Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</i>.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> They are much more interestingly complex than this—for example, the nature of an <i>exemplar </i>in Kuhn’s vocabulary points in a particularly pragmatic-attitudinal direction, as opposed to my reduction of the paradigm to a semantic-conceptual essence—but for my purposes this may suffice.<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> Say you have an argument like this:<blockquote>Assumptions: P and If P, then Q<br />
1. P<br />
2. If P, then Q<br />
3 Q</blockquote>This codifies in symbolic notation the inference from the two premises, (1) and (2), which are <i>assumed to be true</i>, to the conclusion (3). But what if you had a different set of assumptions?<blockquote>Assumptions: P and R<br />
1. P<br />
2. R<br />
3 …</blockquote>There is no inference to be drawn from just P and R. Does that, then, make Q false? Nope—it doesn’t, in fact, say anything at all about Q or the conditional If P, then Q.<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> Kuhn, <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>, 3<sup>rd</sup> ed., 121. A new fourth edition, with a long essay by the most important philosopher-historian working after Kuhn, Ian Hacking, has recently come out, and the pagination is near-identical to the 3<sup>rd</sup>, but not quite. (Note: I’m not counting Foucault in that evaluation because he worked out of a different tradition than Kuhn. Interestingly, however, Hacking is the heir of both Kuhn and Foucault, being one of the earliest and still most cogent commentators and appreciators of Foucault’s project.) There are significant differences in pagination from the 3<sup>rd</sup> to the earlier ones.<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in <i>Inquires into Truth and Interpretation</i>, 189<br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> One of Rorty’s more infamous essays, “The World Well Lost” (in <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>), is in fact an excited extrapolation of the argument Davidson makes in “Very Idea,” except that Rorty published it a year before Davidson got around to publishing his. (Rorty, similarly to Kuhn, later regretted the rhetoric of that essay.) Rorty’s most thorough treatment of what he takes the importance of Davidson to be is his “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth” (in <i>Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</i>).<br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15]</a> “Very Idea,” 198<br />
<a name="fn16"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[16]</a> In <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/davidsons-on-very-idea-of-conceptual.html#fn5">Note 5</a>, I suggested that James and Dewey considered themselves empiricists of a different stripe, and talking about motivation—the connections and relative priority given to different doctrines—is another way of articulating kinds of difference within camps marked out by isms. For example, one might think of James and Dewey as empiricists who aren’t realists and Davidson and Brandom as kinds of post-linguistic turn, analytic philosophers who are neither empiricists nor realists.<br />
<a name="fn17"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[17]</a> “Very Idea,” 184<br />
<a name="fn18"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[18]</a> See CIS 4-5<br />
<a name="fn19"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[19]</a> See CIS, Ch. 1, esp. 10-13<br />
<a name="fn20"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[20]</a> An earlier important attack on immediacy in the Hegelian tradition was Sellars’s in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-209813930815399722013-08-16T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-03T07:37:20.528-07:00Autonomy and the Problem of Control in Moon<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Spoiler alert! — Sam Rockwell is really quite charming; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#sec2">2. </a>Freedom vs. control — Freedom of the child vs. freedom of adulthood — Mechanism and humanity; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#sec3">3. </a>Cultural control — Decency — Puppets in power’s show <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> <i>Moon </i>is not exactly a mystery, so I hesitate to preface by "spoiler alert!" For one would be hard pressed to describe what is meant to be discovered that doesn’t follow easily and conventionally from its defining, generic premises (like the powerful corporation doing whatever it can to reduce overhead and increase profit margins). It is, after all, only 20 minutes into the movie before we hear, albeit scrambledly, GERTY scolded for “los[ing] a harvester and employee,” which only precedes the second Sam showing up by 10 minutes. However, this is precisely what makes it a wonderful movie, for by a kind of philosophical austerity, the movie is able to call for a more subtle appreciation of what are subtle problems. By quite nearly resting its entire overt success on Sam Rockwell’s ability to charm the viewer (a good bet), the film eschews the troublesome pretensions the typically follow from auteurs who think they’re going to break new ground in a well-worn genre and instead encodes slivers of wedges into a few moments that can be opened to great profit.<br />
<br />
This is what roughly happens: Sam Bell (played by Rockwell) is the lone human employee on a space station on the moon in charge of harvesting it—it seems the corporation he works for has found a way of turning moonrock into serviceable energy, which has solved a number of energy problems back home. Sam pines to return home, but before he can do so, he crashes his mooncruiser. He wakes up in the sickbay with no memory of what happened, but GERTY—the computer employee with limited robotic abilities—helps him get back on his feet. What with one thing and another, though, Sam finds the crashed cruiser with himself inside. Thus begins a series of discoveries about how the corporation runs its operation—but mainly a series of existential conversations between Sam-1 and Sam-2.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> In a classic representation of the evils of autocratic power—whether its manifestation in kings, fascists, or CEOs—it is Freedom that opposes Control. “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom,” as <i>Braveheart </i>puts it. Whether in the <i>1984</i> version of fear-control or the <i>Brave New World</i> version of pleasure-control, what is seen as being lost is our “negative liberty” to do what we want. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn1">[1]</a> “Negative liberty” is Isaiah Berlin’s phrase for the kind of freedom realized when one is not <i>blocked </i>or hindered from doing what one wants. The flipside of negative liberty is <i>positive liberty</i>—the sheer <i>ability to do</i> something one wants. One registers a gain in positive liberty when an institution <i>enables </i>one to do something, while a gain in negative liberty is registered when an institution is hampered from getting in the way of what one wants to do.<br />
<br />
When movies focus on negative liberty as the opposite of the evil of Absolute Control, they tend to represent the feature of the heroes that is the Evil Controller’s undoing to be their <i>free will</i>. “You can tell me what to do, but at any time, I can resist you because deep down, I am free.” This then represents the feature of the hero as a kind of <i>unlawfulness</i>, for freedom can only be flexed by breaking the despised rules. <i>Moon </i>can be understood on this model, but I think it treats us to a more subtle understanding of what the problem of corporate control really is. For the beginning of Sam-2’s self-consciousness is his breaking of GERTY’s corporate-dictated stricture against leaving the base (thus precipitating his discovery of Sam-1). However, the reason <i>why </i>Sam-2 breaks the stricture isn’t perfectly assimilable to his being hindered in doing what he wants. It is not as if Sam just wants to go outside—he wants to go outside <i>to do his job</i>. So instead of the hero’s free will being the downfall of the Evil Controller, it is more like a specifically Kantian-Hegelian sense of autonomy that proves the corporation’s downfall. The Kantian-Hegelian sense of autonomy is that one gains freedom <i>by binding oneself</i> to norms, rules, laws. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn2">[2]</a> By binding himself to his job, Sam requires the freedom to do his job as is required by the job itself. That this is what’s going on in Sam-2’s rebellion against the stricture is evidenced by his initial reaction to being told he can’t go out to do his job: “I don’t appreciate being treated like a child” (0:24:10ish). Autonomy, on the Kantian-Hegelian model, is the freedom of adulthood, not the freedom of the child, who can play and do as they wish. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn3">[3]</a> Autonomy, at its root, is positive liberty gained by taking on responsibilities. Autonomy requires trust, and Sam-2 did not appreciate the sudden distrust in his ability to cope with the problems he was asked to cope with as part of his job.<br />
<br />
Seen this way, Kantian-Hegelian autonomy lies at the heart of the difference between <i>mechanism </i>and <i>humanity</i>. What the corporation wishes for is a mechanism that perfectly carries out its desires, but what it has at its disposal is basically a form of sub-contracting—a “job” is created in lieu of the creator’s ability to do a thing him- or herself. However, by subcontracting, one creates a role with responsibilities that must then be given <i>control-free space</i> for the subcontractor to carry them out. Hence, the more an institutional body itemizes the sequence of success in a responsibility, the more <i>automated </i>the role, and hence more mechanical. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn4">[4]</a><br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> This is pretty much all basic, Marxist stuff. On the story Foucault tells about bio-power, it is our increasing <i>ability </i>to extend <i>successfully </i>our control into domains we previously did not know how to that gives the specific cast to modern power. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn5">[5]</a> Increased technological control has made us <i>able </i>to itemize responsibilities more effectively. And it would be a lie to say that something like this mechanization isn’t at the heart of the Greek dream of reason—what was <i>always </i>wanted was increased <i>control</i>. However, one wouldn’t have guessed from Foucault’s story that we’ve had certain progressive gains at this same time that we’ve made ourselves more dangerous. The Greek dream of control was born of <i>getting killed all the time by nature</i> (which, as it has often been signified, might be just a stand-in for “something we can’t control yet”). The Greeks dreamed of reducing <i>luck’s</i> grasp on our lives. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn6">[6]</a> That doesn’t, on the surface, seem like a bad idea. And part of our ability to reduce luck has been in exerting <i>cultural control</i>—getting people to believe in some ideas (e.g., gravity) rather than others (e.g., witches). So was it a good idea for us to believe in witches? If one thinks not and also concedes Foucault’s point that knowledge is power, then one will receive the full brunt of the crowning irony of <i>Moon</i>. Sam-2, responding to GERTY’s casual remark about rebooting himself and the next Sam to replace Sam-2 after he’s gone: “GERTY—we’re not programmed; we’re people” (1:28:35). Unlike almost every other sci-fi movie with the robot/human distinction in play, this line doesn’t go over like a lead balloon exactly because of its philosophical austerity. But what is the difference then? Programming gives us rights, and power is programming—does that invalidate the rights? So what does Foucault tell us about our humanity? Is the question confused, or outmoded? <br />
<br />
There might be a sense in which the question is outmoded, so long as what Foucault did for knowledge is assimilated to Darwin—he shows us that we are just one more species doing its best to survive, knowledge being just one more power-grab against that which puts us at risk. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn7">[7]</a> But what does Foucault tell us about Sam-2’s remark to GERTY before the final irony? When GERTY tells Sam-2 that for Sam-2 to succeed, he’ll have to reboot himself, Sam-2 says endearingly, “you okay with that?” We might call that decency, or humaneness, but one of the remarkable things about Foucault’s story is how little he regards the efficacy of powers in the classic liberal story of progress. For example: “As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise—and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings—made it more and more difficult to apply the death penalty.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn8">[8]</a> People being <i>decent </i>to each other plays no role in Foucault’s account, and here we get a sense of the disdain he feels toward typical liberal accounts. And indeed, there is something a little too pat about most upbeat stories about the triumph of liberal democracies (at least, maybe 40 years ago, though still for any story you hear outside of a university setting). <br />
<br />
What’s missing from this articulation, however, is the cautiousness we found in <i>The Order of Things</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/autonomy-and-problem-of-control-in-moon.html#fn9">[9]</a> Power is not only anonymous, it is also an <i>agent</i>. “How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life to order” (138)? One could substitute GERTY in that sentence and get a similar conundrum to the one GERTY found and Sam-1 and Sam-2 were able to take advantage of. But GERTY, as Sam-2 suggests, is more like a person—an agent, entrusted with powers and responsibilities, that makes decisions about how best to carry out those responsibilities. Is power like that? If, to adapt William James’ famous phrase, the trail of the power serpent is over all, then Power as an agent is as bad as Humanity in all those awful liberal stories of progress, where Providence is seen acting through all kinds of strange puppets. Power, in the sense Foucault seems to deploy it here, is more like the dream of Perfect Mechanical Control that the autocratic villain always wishes for to carry out perfectly its desires. In Foucault’s picture here, we’re just puppets in Power’s show. <br />
<br />
But this is a bad historical account unless one is willing to dismiss the reasons <i>why </i>people do the things they do in favor of Hegel-like Hand-of-God treatments of the Real Actors in life’s drama. And all of this just leads us back to the question: what kind of actors are we? Part of the charm of <i>Moon </i>is the simple <i>humanity </i>displayed by the Sams—the little ways in which they behave, none of which have the hyperbolic magnitude needed for a hero, the kind usually hoped for in dystopias. It might be chilling to think that all Sam-2 wants to do is go to Hawaii when he returns to Earth—his lack of rage at the inhumanity with which he has been treated—but such a reduction of scope makes the problem equally manageable for us real, non-hero people. The brief torrent of media chatter we get at the close, most of which articulates outrage at the corporation, emblematizes how not all institutions are facing one way—Power’s way.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> I should add that what is at stake in both dystopias is our ability to <i>want </i>to do certain kinds of things, and that what makes <i>Brave New World</i>, in the end, scarier than <i>1984</i> is its more plausible account of how to eliminate <i>fully </i>one’s desire for certain kinds of goods (like reading Shakespeare). If the reason <i>1984</i> is scary is that it pictures “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” then the horror of <i>Brave New World</i> is its ability to more plausibly actualize the “forever” (specifically by not being a “stamping”).<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> I’ve learned how to understand Kantian-Hegelian autonomy most from Robert Brandom’s first three chapters of <i>Reason in Philosophy</i>.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> The interesting comparison to make in this regard is the veneration of youth in Emerson and American Romanticism generally. This has tended to make Emerson’s legacy on our moral atmosphere a kind of <i>willful self-assertion</i>, something more analogous to “knowing with your gut,” as Stephen Colbert put it in his parody of George W. Bush’s political rhetoric.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> This is why Annette Baier takes trust to be the most important virtue in modern liberalism, for trust is the social relation at the forefront of a relationship in which responsibilities and discretionary powers of action are conferred. And as she says, “one thing that can destroy a trust relationship fairly quickly is the combination of a rigoristic unforgiving attitude on the part of the truster and a touchy sensitivity to any criticism on the part of the trusted” (<i>Moral Prejudices</i> 103). Trust requires room for the entrusted to play the role that’s been asked of them. My emphasis here is on the Kantian tradition’s understanding of autonomy, and I take one very interesting line of investigation to be the rapprochement of the Hegelian and the Humean in their respective critical attitudes to the Kantian model of moral philosophy. For Baier conceives of herself as distinctively anti-Kantian, but as I’ve just intimated, there’s a certain space carved out conceptually that a Humean interest in social-psychological atmosphere can fill. I suspect Brandom, who was a colleague of Baier’s for many years at Pittsburgh, will move us some ways to not only a rapprochement of Hegel with Hume, but with Richard Rorty as well in his (long awaited) forthcoming book on Hegel’s <i>Phenomenology</i>, <i>A Spirit of Trust</i>. (The projected final chapter is entitled “From Irony to Trust: Modernity and Beyond.”)<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> “Bio-power” is currently one of the hottest pieces of jargon on the market, and it does have significant conceptual resonance (<i>bio</i> is Greek for “life”), even if as a concept it just turns into a mush of noise in many of the attempts to handle it and put it to use. Bearing in mind the Baconian notion that knowledge is power, and how fond pragmatists are of that formulation, Foucault’s introduction of the term makes immediate sense: “one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (<i>The History of Sexuality</i>, vol. 1, 143). Foucault’s theorization of the complex interactions between knowledge and practice, and how something new happened in the birth of the social sciences in the 19<sub><sub>th</sub></sub> century, dovetails interestingly with Judith Shklar’s suggestion that the genre of <i>utopia</i>, until the end of the 18<sub><sub>th</sub></sub> century, was largely an “intellectualist fantasy” that, while sometimes harshly criticizing, in no way reflected any sense that things could be changed. And likewise, “the end of utopian literature did not mark the end of hope; on the contrary, it coincided with the birth of historical optimism” (<i>Political Thought and Political Thinkers</i> 167).<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> My understanding of the Greeks here is deeply indebted to Martha Nussbaum’s fascinating early book, <i>The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy</i>.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> “Just one more species doing its best” is the slogan-title of Rorty’s July 25, 1991 London Review of Books essay-review of a handful of books on Dewey.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> <i>The History of Sexuality</i>, vol. 1, 138<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> Compare the dismissal of sentiment as having a historical role to: “Can a valid history of science be attempted that would retrace from beginning to end the whole spontaneous movement of an anonymous body of knowledge? Is it legitimate, is it even useful, to replace the traditional ‘X thought that . . .’ by a ‘it was known that . . .’? But this is not exactly what I set out to do. I do not wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes. It is simply that I wonder whether such descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of scientific discourse, whether there do not exist, outside their customary boundaries, systems of regularities that have a decisive role in the history of the sciences” (<i>The Order of Things</i> xiii-xiv). For a brief discussion of the downside of the rhetoric found here, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html">“Foucault’s Rhetoric and Posthumanism.”</a>Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-9421575895673050022013-08-09T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-02T10:33:53.021-07:00“I’ve Never Been Modern? Why, that Changes Everything…”<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. We have never been modern — What we <i>thought</i> was modernity wasn’t; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#sec2">2. </a>Social Darwinism, primitivism, pyrrhonism — Fear vs. lack of imagination; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#sec3">3. </a>I've always never been modern — The metaphysics of modernity; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#sec4">4. </a>Does doing require thinking? — Entangled lives; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#sec5">5. </a>Application: I've always never been human — Conceptual reform; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#sec6">6. </a>Intellectuals and technical vocabularies — Theoretical decongestants for stuffed up practices <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> Latour finds himself in a very awkward position in <i>We Have Never Been Modern</i>: while emphasizing, at the close of his second chapter, the point of his title, he nevertheless wants to historically chart the birth of the modern. The two claims strike me as perfectly commensurable if one sorts out what one is doing and claiming properly (in order to avoid your own paradoxes in your own philosophical Constitution). “Constitution” is, of course, Latour’s idiom for developing his account of modernity. This is the gist:<blockquote>The hypothesis of this essay is the word “modern” designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by “translation,” creates mixtures between entirely new types of being, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by “purification,” creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. Without the first set, the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless. Without the second, the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out. The first set corresponds to what I have called networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical stance. The first, for example, would link in one continuous chain the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, scientific and industrial strategies, the preoccupations of heads of state, the anxieties of ecologists; the second would establish a partition between a natural world that has always been there, a society with predictable and stable interests and stakes, and a discourse that is independent of both reference and society. (11)</blockquote>Latour’s selection, in 1991, of climate change as a network to be studied is a good indication of why people have found Latour’s work in the philosophy of science increasingly useful. Latour’s formulations, however, strike me as still too paradoxical by half, as in this early formulation (admittedly rhetorical for his dramatic narrative): “And what if we had never been modern? Comparative anthropology would then be possible. The networks would have a place of their own” (10). If modernity is what disallowed a space for networks, and we’ve never been modern, then networks have always had a place of their own. That’s the central paradox Latour awkwardly confronts. He wants to say (rightly, I think) that modernity never existed and to say (also rightly) that realizing this will enable us to do something new, thus ushering in a new moment in our history. But at the close of Latour’s second chapter, he goes to some lengths to say that he is not claiming “that we are entering a new era” (47). Latour’s probably right: “era” would be too strong. Latour, however, is trying to usher something new in, but because of the state of philosophy and politics at the time, he finds it difficult to say so out loud. Latour’s formulation should be: “what we <i>thought </i>was modernity was never actually the case, and realizing this will enable us <i>to do better</i> things we’ve already been doing, and perhaps for some of us something new.”<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> In order to isolate the context Latour finds himself awkwardly in, we might look at the four-part schematic in its opening pages. After contextually defining the two modern desires as ending humanity’s exploitation of itself and increasing humanity’s control over nature, Latour lists the two different “antimodern” reactions: “We must no longer try to put an end to man’s domination of man, say some; we must no longer try to dominate nature, say others” (9). These are still two recognizable responses, and we might accord them the status of being the radical right and radical left, respectively. However, I think Latour is smart in not so doing. These responses should not be reduced to political orientation (like conservative/liberal, right/left) because political orientations are linked too directly to choices in political action—a “political orientation” can only manifest itself within some local politico-power grid (like the Beltway, or the Democratic Party, or the Arizona 2<sub><sub>nd</sub></sub> District, or the Printer Icon Department at Microsoft). So what we need are labels that express a guiding motive, or orienting principle, that can then be transformed into a political orientation (and thence action) given a planting in some local institutional context. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#fn1">[1]</a> The two antimodern reactions might be described fairly easily as, respectively, “social Darwinism” and “primitivism.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<br />
The first two then quite easily slide into a right/left manifestation in most current “Western” political landscapes. But Latour’s second two responses are harder to place, both in their attitude and their potential political manifestation. The third possibility Latour calls “postmodernism” and says it is an “incomplete scepticism” that causes people to “remain suspended between belief and doubt, waiting for the end of the millennium” (9). We might call this “pyrrhonism,” after the ancient form of skepticism about the possibility of making knowledge claims (and thus the problem of basing action on them). But while <i>some </i>(certainly not all) postmodernist theorists behave like millennialists (there were probably more during the ‘70s and ‘80s, the context Latour was confronting), it’s certainly no requirement for a pyrrhonism to so compose itself. This makes Latour’s theoretical art less useful, for its utility is based on the sense of his having placed his finger on the pulse of the times—and so better able to manifest a good alternative. This becomes worse, it seems to me, in his last option: those who double down on modernity and “carry on as if nothing had changed” (9). Latour shapes this option as those who put their head in the sand, willfully plugging their ears to their better angels. But this seems terribly ill-suited as a description for any responsible intellectual. And this also seems to be the only option available for those who, while hearing the angels, don’t have any better ideas than striving for political emancipation and better technological control in order to improve man’s estate (in the Baconian phrase). But sticking your head in the sand seems a very different quality from being out of ideas. The first manifests fear; the other lack of imagination. What I think Latour’s schematic in the last instance hinges on is his implicit definition of modernity as unmitigated, Chicago-style anarchic-market economic expansionism—the “clever trick” (9) the West hopes to export. But this must be considered a <i>narrow </i>definition of the modern, for what do you do if you do think there is some interesting difference between “the West and the Rest” that you yet have an imperfect faith in?<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> The difficulty here seems to be in denying a plausible position for those who are <i>already behaving as if we’ve never been modern</i>, but just didn’t realize it. Because we should ask ourselves of Latour’s schematic—who is he talking about? Theorists? Intellectuals? Politicians? Educated people? Car mechanics who don’t read newspapers? This is the conundrum for the intellectual—how do I attribute motivations to people who wouldn’t understand what I’m attributing to them? What I’m pointing at, I think, is just a matter of Latour’s rhetoric getting in the way of his real point—he’s staging himself as a revolutionary in a field (which he is) while at the same time saying that <i>everyone </i>is hooked up to this field where he is a revolutionary. <i>But they are and are not</i>—everyone’s hooked into networks, but not everyone is in Latour’s disciplinary field (studying networks). It seems like we must make a distinction between intellectual and plebeian, for this seems a corollary of denying we’ve ever been modern, which was after all an intellectual’s fiction—say, of Boyle and Hobbes (his primary emblem). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#fn4">[4]</a> The “modern Constitution” Latour draws up fills a role in inferential patterns that <i>not everyone might ever stumble down</i>. We have to say this to deny the Platonism of principles ruling practices, rather than practices being summarized by principles: the former idea helps to produce the tripartite structure of separation in Latour’s Constitution (principles rule practices, meaning realms are <i>separate </i>and playing by their own rules, hence all you need to do is isolate a practice and formulate its rules, rather than studying the jumble of practices), and the latter helps to show how discourse, the social, and the real (one of Latour’s several formulations) are wrapped up into each other.<br />
<br />
Latour’s graphical representation helps see what the paradox amounts to:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimF07u_TZ2sTiFHdacaNM4Xg8SIpoz_cOS9F9zz6qpNAgaYnpz559USBrJrCzjsmwupPnqsB36XhQlavpIfSzebcLOCBhZwzzSpPNGqvHE7E8_rrKVzp5IH-_P3cAGi6wpu0VwDg/s1600/Latour+Modern+Constitution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimF07u_TZ2sTiFHdacaNM4Xg8SIpoz_cOS9F9zz6qpNAgaYnpz559USBrJrCzjsmwupPnqsB36XhQlavpIfSzebcLOCBhZwzzSpPNGqvHE7E8_rrKVzp5IH-_P3cAGi6wpu0VwDg/s640/Latour+Modern+Constitution.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The trick to seeing the paradox is asking what is being translated in the hybrid networks. In the Modern Constitution, it is Nature and Culture. But that means the Work of Translation <i>requires </i>the dichotomy of Nature and Culture. That’s why Latour marks it as “the first” (though if you look at his summarizing paragraph above he calls “purification” “the second”), but where does the dichotomy come from? <i>The Work of Purification</i>—that means all those hybrid networks conceptually require the work we’ve become suspicious of. So what, in the end, does it in fact mean to reject the Modern Constitution?<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> The way through, I think, is to distinguish the <i>metaphysics of modernity</i> from the practices we are surrounded by. We might think of metaphysics as a kind of conceptual explanation of our practices and how they work. What Latour is saying is that the Metaphysics of Modernity is incoherent, and in fact needs to be to get on with the work the Metaphysics in part is designed to explain. But we shouldn’t go that far—what we shouldn’t do is think that the work <i>requires </i>the metaphysics. It is an explanation and perhaps a justification, but nuclear bombs do not <i>require </i>any particular metaphysics to work. They only require that you <i>do </i>a certain thing, not <i>think </i>a certain thing.<br />
<br />
The reason it appears that nuclear power also requires us to think a certain thing is that it seems absurd to think that hunters and gatherers could perform the requisite tasks to create a nuclear weapon without having, for example, learned that e=mc<sub><sub>2</sub></sub>. Our ability to <i>do </i>certain things does require us to be able to <i>think </i>or <i>say </i>certain things—we shouldn’t deny that. But <i>what certain things?</i> That is the open question. Latour and many others wish to argue that there is something <i>irrevocably </i>paradoxical about modern life (and sometimes, just human life in general—like Camus). However, this claim requires that the <i>only </i>way to get on with some practice (say, the Work of Translation) is via this other particular practice that actually contradicts the first. But this claim will only ever be justified based on experiment—<i>trying out other ways of getting the good practice to work</i>. In other words, I see no reason to think that the bad metaphysical dualism between Nature and Culture is required to get the Work of Translation done. Much good philosophical work that goes under the banner of “pragmatism” has been trying to work out alternative idioms for understanding the entangled lives we find ourselves thrown into without trying to <i>erase </i>the entanglement. For what pragmatists have learned over the course of philosophical history—a history marked by attempts to purify our categories of understanding—is that some categories are entangled in each other, but that isn’t itself a paradox. <i>Entanglement is okay</i>. It’s only the ghost of Plato that would tell us otherwise.<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> One way of applying the lesson above is to debates about humanism and posthumanism, especially as Latour has been picked up by many who consider themselves as working out posthumanistic idioms. From a Latourian point of view, I would think the theoretical lesson is that we’ve never been human(istic)—“humanism” never existed in the way it thought itself to. The trouble here, however, seems to be that some posthumanism composes itself as, from this vantage, distinctly <i>anti</i>-humanistic—it doesn’t just wish for the erroneous self-conceptions of humanism to disappear, but for vast tracts of practices that “gave rise to humanism.” <br />
<br />
My scare quotes denote the problem of identification that is at issue. For if practices proceed conceptions of practices, then what we are talking about when we want to get rid of humanism <i>is </i>an expulsion of practices—but <i>which </i>are the practices that are at issue? The trouble of cultural evolution is that we are <i>complex </i>to a degree we sometimes forget in analysis. Our conceptions, built out of practices, are only a problem if they double back into bad practices. The problem of institutional reform, as Latour points out, is that if you uproot a practice without uprooting the <i>real cause</i> of the practice—which is another practice—then you will create a “return of the repressed” situation (see 8). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#fn5">[5]</a> So the problem of conceptual reform is the same: identifying correctly a conceptual practice that really does enable a particular bad practice. The trouble of conceptual reform is that <i>a lot</i> of different premises can lead you to the same bad action. Conceptual reform is about disabling the premises in our practical syllogisms that lead us to perform some unwanted action. On this model, there’s a certain slipperiness in conceptual reform. Not only do we sometimes misidentify the culprit, but people have a tendency to replace other premises in their syllogisms if <i>they don’t agree</i> that the object-action is unwanted (the problem we’ve been facing in reforming out of existence racism).<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> This means the real question for intellectuals is—how much time should we really be spending on haggling over conceptual reform? The stance of both Latour and Shapin is that practices come first, then concepts. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/ive-never-been-modern-why-that-changes.html#fn6">[6]</a> So how much dog should we have in the fight over concepts? <i>Who</i>, in fact, are we fighting? Intellectuals have a habit of attributing beliefs and concepts to people who have no idea what they are talking about. This is effectively the same maneuver that physicists perform—do rocks understand the laws of gravity? (If you want to say yes, then you’re simply using a slightly different notion of “understanding”—and how much should we really haggle over this definitional asymmetry?) The real problem is not exactly, it seems to me, bridging back and forth between science, politics, and discourse (which is something like how Latour pictures the problem). The problem is bridging back and forth between experts and non-experts. This isn’t simply a problem of non-experts not understanding technical vocabularies, it is more especially the problem of convincing non-experts that the technical vocabulary should be given authority over our conceptualization of problems (and the experts trusted to be working through the correct inferential consequences—after all, how could a non-expert provide a peer review, or as we used to say in math class, “check your work”?). Latour’s battle is with other experts in his field (which we might label as, in this particular book, philosophers). So how much time should Latour spend in convincing laypersons—scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, <i>politicians</i>, <i><b>car mechanics</b></i>—that if they take his perspective, the world will become a little better (i.e., we’ll be able to handle better some of our pressing problems, like climate change)? Because just so long as there are experts resisting Latour, these on-looking laypersons will feel uneasy about giving their trust (this being the very obvious strategy in the debate about climate change). And if there are more direct paths of arguing about these pressing problems, more direct than arguing in a technical field before arguing about the bridge between that field and the public, then this makes Latour look like a detour to action.<br />
<br />
So what is the point of all this for debates like those about posthumanism? In turns out not much, because if it is really true that all these systems and practices and networks (or whatever other name one wants to give to the layered and shifting sediment of nature-culture) have always been there, then it doesn’t exactly <i>devalue </i>what the technicians are doing in their respective spheres (even if it is from one vantage seamless). After all, as a layperson, I do tend to think Latour is right in nearly every way as a philosopher of science. If the above is right, then a Latourian revolution in conception <i>just might</i> make the world a little better. Likewise, whatever one thinks of as a “posthuman revolution” just might. But the farther one gets from actuating premises in practical syllogisms—the premise that <i>then </i>kicks out the requisite action—the more nebulous the possible effects changing those farther back premises will have on the object-action one’s eye is really on. All that this suggests is that as <i>scholar-intellectuals</i>, we make a short-term/long-term distinction between the different practices we might take our time up with: practices that will have an immediate effect on the world (voting, teaching), practices a little more distant (writing for newspapers, rabble-rousing), and practices that <i>may </i>only have an effect on the world in the distant future (having babies, writing treatises about conceptual change). As a plea, it is simply about orientation, or about what to remind oneself occasionally while obsessing over one’s area of interest. But it may affect our work as well, for it is possible that a practical orientation like an engulfing messianic fervor might be an actuating principle behind some of our worst practical syllogisms—that our ism-work often looks like silver-bulletism, turning our theoretical work into a practical problem. We have to remain aware of when our theory stuffs up our practical syllogisms, which then requires a theoretical decongestant like Latour.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> These labels are at a remove from this “local” context, but no less contextual for that. I think our theoretical discourse has still not yet come to terms with how to formulate the abstract/concrete distinction across the global/local distinction—for we still too often feel moved to call abstraction a “decontextualization,” when we should rather think of it as moving from one context to another. To think of abstraction as a process of decontextualization is to be modern—and we’ve never been modern.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> For a brevity I will already fail at, I won’t elaborate why these two labels. But suffice it to say that at other moments in history, these attitudes might have transformed into different orientations. For example, our great modern primitivist is Rousseau, and he mobilized his in order to emancipate humanity, not to not dominate nature. Rousseau’s screeds against modern luxury and the like had as their priority his project of political emancipation, not the ecological project of nature emancipation.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> The “unmitigated” plays an important role here, for the American non-Marxist, Reformist Left’s hope is that European “social democracies” provide a model for how to have market economies whose tendencies for imperialistic expansion are curbed.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> Latour uses Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s groundbreaking 1985 book, <i>Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life</i>, to discuss the theoretical implications of the historical digging done in that book: that Boyle, to create the material-scientific “object,” had to deny the framework of thought that allowed Hobbes to create the moral-political “subject,” and vice versa for Hobbes. I do something similar to Shapin’s later <i>The Scientific Revolution</i> in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html">“A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”</a> <br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> What’s a “real cause,” especially in this complex game of interlocking practices? The same thing it is in the physical sciences—the condition that produces the effect. The great problem of cultural reform is that there are a multitude of conditions—in fact, given the problem of redescription in object-conceptualization (e.g., are you talking about the same object if you describe it differently?), there are an <i>infinite </i>number of conditions potentially. This makes our practices of description (i.e., “theory”) terribly important for picking out practices to be reformed, but it also means that a deep theoretical skepticism necessarily abides in all of our attempts at cultural reform—even <i>if </i>we successfully extirpate an unwanted effect (say poor people or greed) by reforming or removing an isolated and defined practice, we <i>will not ever know whether or not that removed practice was <b>really </b>the cause of the bad effect</i>—unless, and only unless, the bad effect returns. Only when we are wrong do we attain certain knowledge (the Hegelian <i>via negativa</i> crossed with Popperian falsifiability—an amusing cross-fertilization). This form of (Cartesian) epistemological skepticism is only debilitating if one hasn’t previously put one’s faith in the “experimental method”—the defining quality of which is the belief that it is only by trial-and-error that we shall apprehend causes, i.e. a real cause can never be found by theoretical fiat (though it will only appear under a theoretical edifice). The trick for making sure this faith in experiment doesn’t turn back into the Platonism that dogmatically, and by fiat, declares it really has found the real cause, and we can therefore cease inquiry, is to combine Baconian experimentalism with <i>fallibilism</i>—the idea that inquiry will never end because we’d never know it if we’d reached it. The trouble, here again, for this sort of orientation toward cultural reform, rather than physics reform, is that when you reform physics, the only losers are physics professors (until a physical discovery blips our universe out of existence—a real fear attaching to the activities at CERN for some). But for cultural reform, more lives are at stake, and hence “inquiry” into real causes of cultural problems has effects we might not always wish to risk. This, and only this, is what provides the intellectual justification for political conservatism, the attitude that a given change will put at risk things we wish to keep.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> Following Robert Brandom, I call this Shapin’s “fundamental pragmatism” in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html">“A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”</a>Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-24421740310016827152013-08-02T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-02T09:10:53.003-07:00A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. A history of concept-making practices — Checking the historian’s predicament; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#sec2">2. </a>Backward-looking history — Forward-looking imagination; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#sec3">3. </a>Imagination and hypothesis — How do we curb the vision of mechanism? <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> In <i>The Scientific Revolution</i>, Steven Shapin evinces what Robert Brandom has called “fundamental pragmatism,” “the idea that one should understand knowing <i>that </i>as a kind of knowing <i>how</i>.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn1">[1]</a> For philosophers, this has been a very difficult idea to assimilate ever since Plato distinguished the knowing of philosophers from the doing of artisans, thus making ideas—<i>idea</i>, <i>eidos</i>—unchanging elements to be contemplated, epitomized in Plato’s Realm of the Forms. Fundamental pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic scale of methodology is associated in the analytic tradition with the later Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, now sometimes called social-practice theorists of language, and who would applaud Shapin’s attempt to write “a history of concept-making practices” (4). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<br />
One feature of practices is that they do not come into being randomly or without reason—practices are created <i>for </i>something, to <i>do </i>something. Shapin’s book is shaped to show how the efforts of the past were geared into the concerns of <i>their </i>present. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn3">[3]</a> This is, itself, a historiographical lesson. History-writing has been the site of extraordinary theoretical pressures in the last 50 years. One effect has been the greater awareness of the dangers of writing Whiggish histories of progress. Such histories require that one posit in the past the seeds of a phenomena one wishes to praise in the present. This gives a lopsided view of how the past is, however, how it was in its wasness, as things unassociated with the contemporary <i>telos </i>you wish to explain the origins of are pushed from view, things that were possibly quite important to the actual historical actors. Such pessimism about stories of progress give way, however, to a more pervasive doubt about one’s ability to even <i>select</i> the phenomena you, the historian, wish to write about without corrupting the data with your contemporary concerns.<br />
<br />
Shapin, in effect, shows how to diffuse this worry, what he calls “the historian’s predicament” (10). His explicit answer is a brusque “it is foolish to think there is some method … that can extricate us from this predicament” (10), before talking about such theoretical shibboleths as “respect [for] the vast body of factual knowledge we now have about the past” (10) and “the desire to make endless qualification to <i>any </i>generalization” (11). These are beside the point to the predicament Shapin has scared up, particularly as any revisionist historian—as Shapin, in the end, does aim to be—bloody well better not respect “the vast body of factual knowledge” we have, at least not if they truly want to change what we think that knowledge is. What Shapin runs up against here is what the earlier philosopher of science Norwood Hanson called the “theory-laden” nature of facts. If a historical fact is only constituted as such within some historical story, then “respect for the facts” can’t play a role when the problem is competing stories. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn4">[4]</a> The theory-laden nature of facts simply restates the historian’s predicament. Shapin’s implicit answer is that it won’t do us any good to pose our anxiety at the level of <i>epistemology</i>—at the level in which we attempt to understand our concepts of concept-making. And so Shapin’s implicit answer to the worry about contemporary interests running rampant over the selective process used to tell the story is to take seriously the interests of the historical actors themselves. This is the check on the historian—not “the vast body of factual knowledge,” but sensitive treatment of the historical actor as having concerns of their own, of <i>doing </i>things <i>for </i>reasons that might not be <i>our </i>reasons for developing and employing a practice. Shapin’s selection of the “Scientific Revolution,” indeed as it is commonly understood and talked about, is a mark of his own contemporary interests—“how we got from there to here” (7)—but it is his third chapter that checks the encroachment of too much here into there.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> What is interesting about the story that Shapin tells is how it parallels the lesson I’ve just pulled out of Shapin’s practice as a historian, thus making Shapin’s story an adjunct to a larger story of cultural development. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn5">[5]</a> Shapin gestures toward this larger story at the very opening of his third chapter, whose presence is intended to largely account for the book’s “originality.” Shapin says,<blockquote>Seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers attempted to discipline, if not in all cases to eliminate, teleological accounts of the natural world. Yet as ordinary actors they accepted the propriety of a teleological framework for interpreting human cultural action, and with some exceptions so do modern historians and social scientists: the very identity of human action—as action rather than behavior—embodies some notion of its point, purpose, or intention. (119)</blockquote>The unspoken implication of this passage, which is simply a segue into Shapin’s check against his selection process, is that what he’s selected is somehow antithetical to contemporary wisdom about the selection process. I believe there is no contradiction here, not even for one who thinks that the mechanistic model of nature has been and still is a boon to scientific study, but it does invite the telling of another story.<br />
<br />
The shape of the conceptual story is this: Shapin’s third chapter is the specifically <i>backward-looking</i> moment in his story. It doesn’t matter if we care about theological problems or not—<i>they </i>do, and that’s all that matters for getting the history right. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn6">[6]</a> However, Shapin’s juxtaposition of Descartes and Boyle in that chapter gives us a picture of how to be <i>forward-looking</i>. Here is the crucial passage that sharpens the distinction:<blockquote>On the one hand, Descartes proceeded by imagining a hypothetical natural world that God <i>might </i>have created, a world wholly amenable to mechanical explanation: this was the world the natural philosopher was to explain. On the other hand, such writers as Robert Boyle and John Ray were concerned to trace the evidence of God’s purpose and design in the world he <i>did </i>create. That is why they were comfortable with the philosophical propriety of giving explanations in terms of purpose when, as they reckoned, the evidence of nature unambiguously supported such conclusions. (156)</blockquote>Shapin’s account of Descartes here displays, whether Descartes intended to or not, <i>how </i>to be a visionary, looking forward to a time not fully comprehended: “by <i>imagining </i>a <i>hypothetical </i>natural world.” The irony of this situation is that the English are known for being philosophical empiricists as opposed to those on the Continent being rationalists in this time period, <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn7">[7]</a> and it is empiricism that is so often thought synonymous with science and scientific method. However, in this juxtaposition we see Descartes the visionary pursuing the outer limits of this new metaphor’s effects on human understanding, whereas it is the English who stop at the limits of common sense, which is whatever is denoted as “obvious” or “unambiguous.”<br />
<br />
What is at work to create this irony is what philosophers like Wittgenstein and Sellars have now told us about how language works. Underlying the empiricist framework is what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given”—that sense-perception <i>gives us</i> a conceptual content that is unaffected by our interpretive apparatus, e.g. words or theories. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn8">[8]</a> If we follow Sellars in thinking that this is a philosophical myth, and that our facts are always already theory-laden, then the “evidence of nature” that Boyle and Ray think obvious and unambiguous is a function of <i>loyalty to the past</i>. For if social-practice theorists of language are right, then <i>facts </i>are a function of the language we’ve been taught to state them in and the <i>force </i>of facts is a function of the authoritative hold <i>we still accord them</i>. <br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> The convenience of Shapin’s language in the above passage on Descartes is that it bridges the gap between <i>imagination </i>and <i>reason</i>. Still to this day in philosophical stories, the two are opposed. The distance, however, is not as great as we might imagine. The notion of the “hypothetical” has a history, but the short way to my point is to first point out that in Kant’s time, he still referred to the logical connective we call the conditional (the “if, then”) as “hypothetical judgment.” The conceptual shape of what Descartes was suggesting was the fantasy of <i>supposing </i>X to be true, and then working out its consequences (“if X, then Y”) <i>without regard for whether X was actually true</i>. The axe comes down on the distinction between imagination and reason when we note, with Sellars and Brandom, that the conditional is the basic unit of inference, of reasoning. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn9">[9]</a><br />
<br />
What Shapin’s story suggests is <i>why </i>Boyle and Ray followed what we might call an “intellectually conservative” strategy toward mechanism. It is not that they cared more for preserving God’s province, though that is a plausible candidate and a viable motive in respecting the authority of past reasoning. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn10">[10]</a> I take it that Shapin’s comment on Newton displays it: “it was not philosophical, but its opposite, to ‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses, even and especially mechanical causal hypotheses, when the senses and the intellect could not securely discover them” (157). The enemy here, the foe to be curbed, is the Poet of Book 10 of Plato’s <i>Republic</i>. With the conceptual understanding I’ve unfolded in hand, one sees that neither “the senses” nor “the intellect” securely discover anything by themselves. For so gerrymandered in Shapin’s gloss on Newton, all the senses tell you are what you’ve already been programmed to say in response to perceptual stimuli and all the intellect tells you is what you’ve already been programmed to concede as consequences once you’ve disallowed new possible premises in reasoning—which is what is ruled out by “‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses.”<br />
<br />
To put it in an idiom I can only suggest, the conservative intellectual impulse is here created by a fear of romanticism, a kind of generic romanticism we can trace back to the ancient Greeks. To try and pull together some of these threads, we can see Shapin’s stance toward science—as a sociological phenomena, which is an outcome of what I called his fundamental pragmatism—as the outcome of an ongoing search for <i>how to curb the vision of mechanism</i>: <i>not </i>by how <i>they </i>in Chapter Three did it (God knows), but by how he views effective historical explanation. Effective explanation of <i>action </i>requires us to use a concept of purpose, <i>telos</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn11">[11]</a> And since the shape of the story of the Scientific Revolution Shapin tells is in broad terms designed to show the unresolved conflict between mechanical explanation and teleological explanation (which takes its final form in the beginning of modern philosophy, Descartes’ dualism between <i>res extensa</i> and <i>res cogitans</i>), there is a larger story to be told about just what we <i>should </i>do with the metaphor of mechanism. This larger story, I can only suggest, is that romanticism takes the place of religion in a conflict with scientific empiricism, and that romanticism’s successor on the plane of philosophy is first pragmatism and then social-practice theories of language. This makes Shapin’s theoretical views about how to write history the heir of Descartes’ rationalism, which is what saved him from the Boyle-Ray empiricist attempt to curb the visionary expanse of a new metaphor. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-lesson-between-lines-teleology-and.html#fn12">[12]</a><br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Brandom, <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>, 9<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> Social-practice theories of language also distinguish the kind of Hegelianism pragmatists like Brandom and Richard Rorty are willing to countenance. “Postmodern theory” has made a bad name for itself by promulgating such slogans as “all we have is discourse.” I think it’s important to distinguish what Shapin, Brandom, and Rorty are saying from this. This slogan has led to too many pratfalls by theorists (e.g., deconstructionists who want to say that meaning is impossible) and too many openings for hostile critics (e.g., “There is no thing other than a text? Really?”). The problem with both is poor communication, where whatever good point was meant to be made gets bogged down (e.g., the foolish idea that Derrida was some Berkeleyan idealist).<br />
<br />
The good point of the slogan “all we have is discourse” is that meaning only occurs within language, so if you have “thing,” you have a “discourse.” However, people like Shapin, especially, want to go one step further. They want to say that not only are “things” embedded in “discourses,” but “discourses” are embedded in practices. The reason why this is an important move to make, philosophically, is because it closes the loop between you, your community, and the world. Stopping at “discourse” makes one look like an idealist, which makes some people fear we’ve lost the world for the sake of philosophical laziness (for it is hard to make a realist theory of truth-as-correspondence work—i.e., no one’s done it satisfactorily). “Practices” puts us back in touch with the world in a very obvious sense. It also helps move us closer to why material emblems like clocks weird us out when we wonder whether the clock is a symbol for time or is time itself. Like chasing the horizon, such gestalt hiccups merely punch up how entwined meaning is with practice, semantics with pragmatics.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> Shapin says that “if there is any originality” in his book it “flows from its basic organization” (12).<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> I take it that Shapin himself isn’t nearly this naïve, and this theoretical lacuna is a result of his writing a book suitable for non-professionals.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> Though, admittedly, size is relative to perspective.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> I use the literary present tense, “they <i>do</i>,” partly because I think it is helpful to think of the “other in the past” as a conversation partner, much like we do a contemporaneous other we wish to talk to and understand, such as an Australian aborigine, French political operative, or Arizona Diamondbacks fan. I suspect that this has been common sense for historians for some time.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> It might suffice for this old doxographical chestnut to point out that the Three Great Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, are all from the British Isles and that the Three Great Rationalists are Descartes (French), Spinoza (Dutch), and Leibniz (German).<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given is from his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” which one can find in his collection <i>Science, Perception, and Reality</i> or as a standalone book from Harvard UP with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Brandom.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> Technically the conditional is the basic unit of <i>self-conscious</i> reasoning, but that is part of a much different story.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> I think this is true in Descartes’ case—I take it that, even from just the evidence Shapin displays, that Descartes was a true believer and wanting to display loyalty to God as much as Boyle. However, in terms of possible motivations, concern about one’s relationship to established Church practices and patterns of thought is certainly a distinct possibility in a way that, for example, it wasn’t in Athens in the first century or most intellectual centers in the United States in this century.<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> For an articulation of the difference between action and behavior in the context of a discussion of what intentionality is, see Section 4 of <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#sec4">“Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization.”</a><br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> This larger story isn’t as kooky as it seems when it’s just kind of thrown out there. It is roughly coordinate with the kind of story M. H. Abrams tells about romanticism in <i>Natural Supernaturalism</i>, Leo Marx tells about American romanticism in <i>The Machine in the Garden</i>, Rorty tells about pragmatism in <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>, and Brandom tells about social-practice theories of language in <i>Tales of the Mighty Dead</i> and <i>Reason in Philosophy</i>. The interesting conclusion of Brandom is that some of the roots of the pragmatist philosophy that Rorty espoused went back to not only Kant, but Leibniz and Spinoza. For a discussion of Brandom's reinsertion of rationalism into pragmatism and his relationship to romanticism, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html">“Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”</a>Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-16756362143407880732013-07-26T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-02T08:57:59.964-07:00Foucault's Rhetoric and Posthumanism<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Can't we say “we”? — Philosophical presuppositions; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#sec2">2. </a>Foucault’s rhetorical questioning — We are only a recent invention; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#sec3">3. </a>Philosophical presumption — Attitudes, Words, Theses <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />“I am afraid that we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar . . .”<br />
—Nietzsche <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn1">[1]</a><br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> At the beginning of his introduction to the anthology <i>Posthumanism</i>, Neil Badmington makes a rhetorical maneuver that is more common than it should be. While saying “‘We’ cannot live with [-isms] (why else would ‘we’ need to keep inventing new ones?), but neither can ‘we’ live without them (why else would ‘we’ need to keep inventing new ones?),” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn2">[2]</a> he adds a footnote to the first “we” that reads, “I place this term in quotation marks because, as William V. Spanos has pointed out, the ‘naturalised “we”’ is one of the hallmarks of humanism.” The implication of this footnote, I want to suggest, is that our language comes not only with philosophical presuppositions, but distasteful ones. For we (“we”?) should distinguish this case from the case of the philosopher of language who wishes to offer an account of how particular linguistic phenomena work. For example, Robert Brandom, in his large treatise <i>Making It Explicit</i>, attempts to give a reasonably comprehensive account of how language has to function for it to function the way it does. Given the problem of rhetorical presentation, Brandom’s book is filled with IOUs for lumber he hasn’t paid for yet, but will in some other section. This kind of theorist’s project is to only build out of conceptual resources one has justified warrant for. Badmington, however, appears to think there is not ever warrant for this kind of “we,” yet feels helpless to use it. So what is going on here?<br />
<br />
Structurally, there is a similarity between the conceptual demands implied by Badmington’s footnote and Brandom’s IOUs which goes something like this: “my use of X presupposes Y.” In Badmington’s case, it is that “we” presupposes humanism. If Brandom had written that footnote, on the other hand, it would have been, “my use of ‘we’ requires an account of how the first-person plural works.” What is strange about Badmington’s footnote is that it suggests that humanism is the only account that validates that use of “we,” but that account is bunk. Someone like Brandom would be moved to offer an account that works, but Badmington isn’t so moved. Why not?<br />
<br />
The short answer is that he feels licensed for the idea that some philosophical presuppositions are both inescapable and bad, in this case humanism (and thus the bad “we” he must use). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn3">[3]</a> However, one of the specifically philosophical theses Brandom would wish to advance is that <i>not all linguistic phenomena have philosophical presuppositions</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn4">[4]</a> To display more easily the dialectical ground, we might take an extreme rendering of what Badmington might mean: he is suggesting that the first-person plural becomes suspicious once one finds humanism suspicious. For many, this is just plain absurd. Why on earth should “We are driving down the street towards the mall” become suspicious once I’ve begun thinking that the seemingly natural ethical priority of humans to non-human phenomena (animals, plants, ecosystems, etc.) should perhaps be rethought? This rebuke by a commonsensical attitude, however, is sometimes just taken to be evidence of the depth at which the presupposed phenomena in question is embedded. And so it is, but any careful interlocutor will be quick to point out that while incredulity tells you about depth, it still doesn’t tell you what kind of deeply embedded phenomena you’re facing—in this case, grammatical or philosophical.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> Since, as Thomas Kuhn taught us, part of what it is to work in a discipline is to use precursors as models of how to do your work, <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn5">[5]</a> I think Foucault licenses, in a manner, this rhetorical pattern in post-Foucauldian theorists. Foucault, of course, is far more circumspect than his less careful followers. His forward to the English language edition is a model of rhetorical deflation and intellectual modesty. A good example for my purposes is:<blockquote>Can a valid history of science be attempted that would retrace from beginning to end the whole spontaneous movement of an anonymous body of knowledge? Is it legitimate, is it even useful, to replace the traditional ‘X thought that . . .’ by a ‘it was known that . . .’? But this is not exactly what I set out to do. I do not wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes. It is simply that I wonder whether such descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of scientific discourse, whether there do not exist, outside their customary boundaries, systems of regularities that have a decisive role in the history of the sciences. (<i>The Order of Things</i> xiii-xiv)</blockquote>For my purposes, it does not matter whether Foucault had something very precise and exact in mind by “systems of regularities” and how that role hooks into all the other roles (played by people, theories, concepts, and themes). His rhetorical presentation is one of open-minded questioning—he is simply wondering whether there might not be another character being played in the background that our current researches are leaving untouched in their account of the drama of life (or perhaps more specifically, the history of the sciences). This gesture, made by the rhetorical questions, the wondering, the not-exactly, and the not-wishing-to-deny, creates the appearance of simply opening up a grayspace in which many may come and experiment in. And in this, I think Foucault was very sincere and very successful. Foucault’s boldness of imagination combined with his hope for, if not a joint inquiry, then a space in which many can all inquire and help each other with their varied inquiries—this made Foucault the towering intellectual father he has become for many. And one thing intellectual fathers do, as we all are quite aware after Derrida, is disseminate their intellectual DNA via their progeny. To make this quasi-metaphor more concrete, we might think of the kind of intellectual dissemination that figures like Foucault perform as casting off dimly understood hypotheses that require more work with to process and confirm. That Foucault must be a godfather for whatever is meant by “posthumanism” must be obvious for the person whose book became synonymous with “man is only a recent invention” (xxiii), “and perhaps nearing its end” (387).<br />
<br />
The question <i>must </i>be for us progeny: how are we to understand that? The drive of this reflection is that Foucault’s work opens up a number of possibilities, and I do believe it is pointless to look back to Foucault for definitive guidance (that would be a form of intellectual biography). One of these possibilities is that Foucault is describing the birth and (hopeful) death of a certain self-image that humanity has of itself, a self-image that expresses itself in many different activities, only one of which is the activity of articulating a self-image (call that activity “philosophy”). One activity just might be the use of the first-person plural, for it is difficult for fans of Foucault to forget Nietzsche’s remark that we’ll believe in God as long as we believe in grammar. One can find nourishment from Foucault for this experiment by triangulating the spaciously ambiguous “man is a recent invention” with “an anonymous body of knowledge” and his transition from the first-person variable “X” to the pronominal third-person in “it was known that.”<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> Would Foucault have thought that “we” should get rid of the first-person plural, “we”? I doubt it, but he was, on the other hand, the philosopher “who writes in order to have no face.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn6">[6]</a> More especially, however, I’m not sure Badmington even thinks we should get rid of the “we.” I suspect that the problem with “the naturalized we” is the presumptive homogenization that occurs by saying that such-and-such is our problem, when the drift of leftist theorizing in the last 50 years has been to try to not be so presumptive about what community, what “we,” people come from and therefore would have the same problems. But is this presumption really tied to the self-image of humanism, which is at the very least a cultural complex that includes philosophical theses? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn7">[7]</a> But more importantly, is every use of “we” presumptive? For if this were true, that would make the very idea of community presumptive, or at least the attempt to communicate what you think “we” in your community think. It is the slide between an attitude (“presumption”), a linguistic usage (“we”), and a set of quasi-philosophical theses (“humanism”) that, I think, produces loose talk about a humanism that “forever rewrites itself as posthumanism,” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucaults-rhetoric-and-posthumanism.html#fn8">[8]</a> which suggests that the ostensible problem doesn’t in fact have a solution. And this should just suggest we rethink what the problem is.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> <i>Twilight of the Idols</i>, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” sec. 5<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> <i>Posthumanism</i>, ed. Badmington, 1<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> I suspect this idea has been disseminated most by Derrida in our literary theorists, but cannot develop the point here. Badmington evinces this idea when, after introducing Derrida, posthumanism ceases to be a historical phenomenon and instead becomes the necessary conceptual counterpart of humanism, which is forever rewriting itself.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> This is not the space to provide evidence for this claim about what Brandom thinks, for it only needs to be the case for my purposes that this is a coherent thing to think.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> This is part of what Kuhn meant by “paradigm” in <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>. See Ian Hacking’s introduction to the 4<sub><sub>th</sub></sub> edition for an excellent historical review of the reception of that very important book, including the incredibly misunderstood notion of a “paradigm.”<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> <i>The Archaeology of Knowledge</i>, 17<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Richard Rorty has developed this point about philosophical presuppositions in regards to political liberalism in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” (in <i>Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</i>), which I’m coasting behind in all of this. The harder problem for Rorty was, after disentangling the philosophical presuppositions of “we,” if you will, dealing with other attendant problems in using “we,” especially the presumption. See my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html">“Two Uses of ‘We.’”</a><br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> <i>Posthumanism</i>, ed. Badmington, 9Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-10315763103056957462013-07-19T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-02T08:45:02.961-07:00Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Belatedism — Reductionism — Ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#sec2">2. </a>General problem of antiessentialism — From ethics to epistemology and ontology — Living in the flux — Essences as stabilities — Making distinctions; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#sec3">3. </a>Taking humans for granted — Taking humanism for granted — Special problem of demarcation — How to make a human less special; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#sec4">4. </a>Bennett on actants and assemblage — Giving out intentionality — Doing an action, causing an effect; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#sec5">5. </a>What intentions are for — Global problem of anthropomorphism — Properties vs. attributions; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#sec6">6. </a>Instrumentals rationality — Tools of our tools — Ancient science as spiritual exercise — Knowledge as depersonalization — Theoretical practices <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> “Posthumanism,” in the last 20 years, has become the latest popular entry into our post-’60s craze for being <i>after </i>something, usually some “ism.” Also in the last 20 years, nearly all promulgations of isms come attached with increasingly anxious qualifiers about the promulgator not wanting to <i>reduce </i>the perceived proponents of the ism to his or her formulation, or not wanting to suggest the <i>essence </i>of what the ism is. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn1">[1]</a> I find such hand-waving pointless—partly because I take any good reader or listener to have the good sense to feel free to disagree at any point without the author’s encouragement—but this anxiety plays a special role in my topic because of the way reductionism and essentialism have been tied by theorists into a story about the degradation and oppression of humanity—and, of course, now <i>more </i>than just humanity.<br />
<br />
In what follows, I’d like to perform two services: 1) I hope to clarify three problems that any posthumanist theorist will encounter in articulating their view: the general problem of antiessentialism, the special problem of demarcation, and the global problem anthropomorphism. What all three of these problems revolve around is the <i>practical </i>aspect of living the theories we propound. Since many posthumanist perspectives articulate themselves in terms that are inherently paradoxical, I hope by clarifying these three problems to point in the direction of a nonparadoxical mode of articulating the central motive of posthumanism—ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction. 2) I will re-tell a familiar story of the last 300 years as a means of bring into focus the problem of our <i>practices </i>as the primary object of our ethical inquiries. Posthumanism is nothing if not ethically motivated, so when posthumanist theory finds itself moving away from ethics to epistemology or ontology, it behooves us to reexamine our priorities and their interrelationships. The basic problem central to the “scientific revolution” of the European 17<sub><sub>th</sub></sub> century—which typically stands in as the moment the dam broke, flooding our landscape with instrumental rationality—is the <i>assertion of <b>purely </b>egocentric interests</i>. Working through this conceptual and historical exercise, seeing posthumanism’s broader concern with purely <i>human </i>interests, will put us in a position of seeing a larger project of thinking through <i>ethical authority</i> in a world structured only by material, as opposed to supernatural, agencies.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> If the central motive of posthumanism is to cease treating “human” as a term of <i>ethical </i>distinction, then one of its central moves has been to cease treating “human” as a term of distinction <i>at all</i>. This shifts the central theoretical terrain from ethics to epistemology and ontology, from how we <i>treat </i>X to how we <i>know </i>what X <i>is</i>. The primary theoretical current that this move draws power from is the antiessentialism common to Heidegger, Sartre, the American pragmatists, and the Continental poststructuralists. We might embody it in Sartre’s slogan that “existence precedes essence.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn2">[2]</a> By overturning the ultimately Platonic relationship that envisions the flux of lived appearances as conceptually beholden to an order of stable essences, antiessentialism emits a panrelationalism—things are not what they are <i>in themselves</i>, but only as they relate to other things. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn3">[3]</a> This dissolves any particular thing into a web of relations, and can ultimately cause a fear for stability—how does the antiessentialistic reversal not just flip us into a nasty flux of relations with no footholds for understanding? I think it is fairly clear that no person actually lives their life as if there were no foothold for understanding, as if they did live a flux like a tempest (as opposed to a flux like an oscillating fan). Sartre’s word for this was “metastable.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn4">[4]</a><br />
<br />
If this seems to dissolve the problem surrounding antiessentialism, why am I calling this a general problem for posthumanism? The reason is that though <i>practically </i>we have no problem living in the flux, our <i>theoretical </i>descriptions still tend to contort themselves when describing this practical situation. At root, I think, is the suspicion that existence <i>only </i>precedes essence, that essentialism will always reconstitute itself in the process of understanding. This comes out as a sense that <i>definition</i>, i.e. giving conceptual <i>shape </i>to any particular X, is essentializing. (Need I add “is essentially” or “by definition” to complete the contortion?) This suspicion can largely be traced to origins in poststructuralism, and is best embodied by Gayatri Spivak’s resignation about the state of affairs we must find ourselves in that demands her notion of “strategic essentialism.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn5">[5]</a> Because of the history of oppression through conceptual means that an entire host of cultural critics in the last century have been busily excavating, what was once Plato’s fear for stability has turned into a fear of stability—that any stable entity is covering over the oppression required to achieve that stability. If at one very real extreme is the actual use of linguistic categories to justify the continued oppression of cultural groups and persons, then at the other extreme is the absurdity of thinking that my body’s stable existence at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates is papering over my body’s right to exist at every over set of coordinates. There are stabilities, and then there are stabilities. What we need—but what theorists like Spivak are conceptually unable to provide resources for—is the ability to distinguish between the range of stabilities on that ethical scale. So the general problem of antiessentialism is: <i>how do you de-privilege one distinction without harming your ability to make <b>any </b>distinctions?</i> The way to do this, I think, is to replace Sartre’s existentialist formula with a pragmatist formula like, “practice precedes theory.” This turns all theoretical conundrums back to their origins in practice. This makes one’s fear of stability negotiable by turning the suspicion of a <i>particular </i>stability back to the practice being enabled by it—still suspicious given any kind of oppression, but hardly suspicious at all given a body’s continued existence at a set of spatiotemporal coordinates <i>qua </i>continued existence (though the <i>why </i>for, e.g., the prisoner’s continued existence in the jail cell might be up for grabs).<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> I suspect, as I somewhat suggested before, that theorists have no problem resolving these theoretical problems of definition and essence in practice as persons or citizens (rather than as theorists). But working through the general problem of de-privileging can give us a handle on a second, special problem that emits from the first: how do we demarcate humans from other things? The problem of antiessentialism and the fear of stability are marks of a desire to not <i>privilege anything</i>—but now how do we tell the difference between us and other animals? The amused self-consciousness that accompanies most articles about posthumanism is, I think, <i>not nearly nervous enough</i> about this <i>as </i>a problem. Most theorists of the posthuman seem to take it for granted that we can just tell the difference, but what their work needs to do is provide some handle for how to tell the difference between a human <i>res </i>and a nonhuman <i>res </i>so as to keep the critical edge of their polemic while not resting on either an unarticulated practical grasp or a paradoxical run around wherein we find, ultimately, that we have to ask some portentous “question of the human” every time we want to articulate the difference between a human and a beaver. The former is antithetical to the project of theorizing and the latter I suspect has become popular because 1) people like imitating Derrida, but more importantly 2) they are beholden to the fear of stability that produces the problem of antiessentialism.<br />
<br />
Posthumanists do much better when they state their opposition as “humanism,” or “liberal humanism,” or “liberal subjectivity.” What they want to pick out and contest are <i>particular ways</i> in which the human subject is picked out of a crowd. As my use of “<i>res</i>” indicates, we are going to be led back to Descartes—since he distinguished between <i>res cogitans</i> and <i>res extensa</i>, “the mind” has too often been used as the repository for our dreams of difference. But as Rorty retails in his opening chapter of <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>, there are as many ways to pick out what demarcates the mind—and thus the human—as there are fingers on your hands. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn6">[6]</a> The typical approach of posthumanism has been to select one of these marks and reappropriate it for <i>res extensa</i>, thus making the human a little less special. So the special problem of demarcation (which is really just a species of the more general problem of antiessentialism) is: <i>how do you make the human less special while retaining the conceptual ability to tell a human from a nonhuman?</i> Darwin’s naturalism made it possible for Nietzsche to think of us as a <i>diseased animal</i> precisely because of our desire to be special, <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn7">[7]</a> but the flipside of Nietzsche’s cynicism is John Dewey’s suggestion that Darwin made it possible for us to really get to the bottom of our human cultural practices: “the influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition….” Dewey saw Darwin as making possible antiessentialism, as overturning “the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final” and finally alleviating our desire to “lay hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn8">[8]</a><br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> In order to see better how the blurring motions of antiessentialisms can make it hard to see what makes humans, if not <i>special</i>, at least their own peculiar selves above and beyond physiology, we might turn to Jane Bennett’s recent book, <i>Vibrant Matter</i> (2010). Bennett wouldn’t call herself a posthumanist, but her book works in the same vein, and its utility lies in how thoroughly Bennett wishes to rethink our ontological assumptions—Bennett pushes to the limit certain strategies commonly used by posthumanist theorists, in particular an effort to rethink ontology with ethical implications. Bennett’s ontology centers on the attempt to reinscribe “things” with a “power” she says they’ve been denied by Kantian accounts of agency, thus giving “the force of things its due.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn9">[9]</a> She does so by using Latour’s notion of “actants” as a way of inscribing <i>intentionality </i>in the nonhuman-thing so as to gain a better picture of the “human-nonhuman assemblage” (her term taken from Deleuze and Guattari). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn10">[10]</a><br />
<br />
What this power amounts to, however, doesn’t seem much more than being an active force in the material world. Bennett feels this as a point of resistance that deserves the edge of her polemic because of the old notion of the “passivity of matter.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn11">[11]</a> But what extra power is gained by intentionality, alongside <i>causal </i>power, is unclear—and nobody has denied the material world’s causal ability to blot us from existence. Bennett says that “the question is whether other forces in the world approximate some of the characteristics of intentional or purposive behavior on the part of humans” (29), but this makes the mistake of thinking we <i>know what intentionality is</i>. By assuming she already has a conceptual grasp of intentionality, Bennett is able to show how other things have it, too. But this doesn’t seem very hard. Giving out intentionality is easy—just do it, and you’ve done it. Thinking the rock intended to fall to the floor is enough for the rock to have intentionally fallen to the floor. Who, after all, is going to contradict you (except for theorists <i>not </i>assuming we already know what intentionality is)? <br />
<br />
Intentionality is simply things behaving <i>as if</i> other things are behaving intentionally. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn12">[12]</a> The problem is that the rock behaves the same way whether we attribute intentionality to it or not—or whether the rock attributes intentionality to <i>us </i>or not. So the only question is whether it is useful to attribute intentions to any particular X. To answer this question about a rock falling, we might compare it to a hand going up in a classroom. If the person whose hand goes up gets “called on,” it is because of a practice the caller-on (and all those who expected the person to get called on) is embedded in. If the person was “lifting their hand” rather than “raising their hand,” we can say that the person “unintentionally <i>raised </i>their hand”—we need this locution to distinguish between <i>doing an action</i> (intentionally lifting a hand to get called on) and <i>causing an effect</i> (lifting a hand and unintentionally getting called on). The movements are the same, but only when embedded in a practice can the movement have a certain effect. So, returning to the rock, what is the added bonus of saying the falling rock intentionally crushed my foot if the <i>effect is the same</i> whether I ascribe an intention to the rock or not? <br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> The moral of this story is that one reason we attribute intentions is because by making actors aware of the effects of their actions, we can get the actor to <i>not </i>perform the effect-causing action. This, at least, is not the case with the rock, though it might be with the person who dropped it on my foot. It is clear that Bennett wishes her new ontology to have an effect on our moral discourse. She gives a series of imperatives toward the end of her book that punches up this problem of intentionality: “Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate” (116). But what could it mean to engage <i>civilly </i>with rocks? Do rocks respond differently if you are rude to them? While behaving more strategically and subtly with rocks might make sense, civility would seem to only be in play if you could change the rock’s behavior by doing so. But what the analogy is for politely dropping a rock and it not crushing my foot <i>because </i>I treated <i>the rock </i>civilly rather than rudely isn’t clear.<br />
<br />
This brings us to the final, global problem of anthropomorphism. Bennett sees clearly that she must face the problem of whether she’s anthropomorphizing non-anthropo-stuff by, for example, attributing intentions to stuff we might normally withhold it from. The global problem of anthropomorphism is: <i>how do you use categories of understanding that are <b>not </b>human categories</i>? Bennett sees that what she calls her “vital materialism” seems to “entail a performative contradiction”: “‘Is it not, after all, a self-conscious, language-wielding human who is articulating this philosophy of vibrant matter?’ It is not so easy to resist, deflect, or redirect this criticism” (120). However, there would only seem to be a performative contradiction if you haven’t been able to provide an account for what separates humans from nonhumans. More particularly, it is by treating intentionality as a <i>property </i>instead of an <i>attribution </i>that heaves Bennett’s project into paradox when she admits she has no separate method for ascertaining the properties of rocks except for the regular human one’s we’ve always employed.<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> Bennett’s confrontation with anthropomorphism, like Spivak’s confrontation with essentialism, emits a general helplessness—for, almost all admit, we can only use human categories. But why should we feel helpless? The reason I think we find ourselves to be <i>helpless </i>or <i>stuck </i>in the position of humanity, rather than, say, <i>thankful </i>or <i>unashamed</i>, is because of the way scientific innovation, technological development, economic consumption, and liberal democracy have all dovetailed into a story about instrumental rationality. This is the story, familiar to us from Germany—be it the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, et al or Heidegger—that the history of the West is the history of Reason increasing our ability to control stuff, including ourselves. In its initial form, the concern seemed to be primarily with us, with succumbing to a “blindly pragmatized thought [that] loses its transcending quality.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn13">[13]</a> Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern was that, not only was our thought simply a <i>means </i>to carry out preexisting and unreflectively held <i>ends</i>, but that the end or purpose of thought had simply become the increased efficiency of means. Unreflectively held purposes dovetails with Heidegger’s discussion of the rhetoric of mathematics and method that took over the natural sciences in the 17<sub><sub>th</sub></sub> century and was encroaching on the social sciences at the end of the 19<sub><sub>th</sub></sub>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn14">[14]</a> But what’s worse is that, in Thoreau’s phrase, “men have become the tools of their tools.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn15">[15]</a> The central idea is that we are caught up in the practices we’ve created and have become beholden to them, and that these practices are working out a destructive teleology. And since the increasing obviousness of the consequences of global industrialization, this sensed destruction has become both to ourselves and nonhuman nature. As should be clear, this is a pessimistic narrative that implies that we no longer have the hope of changing (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Heidegger’s conclusion) or that we no longer have the desire to (Thoreau’s fear).<br />
<br />
I think it is something like this story that stands behind most posthumanisms. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn16">[16]</a> Without it, it's hard to make sense of why we should go in for all the arid metaphysical talk. And while I think there is sufficient plausibility for Thoreau’s fear, I want to quickly sketch an alternative narrative about our theoretical practices that takes the edge off the <i>conclusion </i>that we are now hopeless. This story is drawn from Hans Blumenberg’s account of the transition from ancient and medieval cosmology to modern. Central to this account is the notion that for the ancients, theoretical descriptions of the nonhuman were <i>spiritual exercises</i> meant to relieve the pressures of theory itself. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn17">[17]</a> For example, as Blumenburg writes, Epicurus’s “atomistic physics was not meant to satisfy a theoretical interest in reality but rather to argue for the <i>irrelevance </i>of the physical answers to the shaping of life in the world.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#18">[18]</a> “Only insofar as physics could be thought of as producing real human power over nature could natural science potentially serve as the instrument by which to overcome the new radical insecurity of man’s relation to reality” (155). Only when science could demonstrate its practical mastery over life, its “real human power,” could science serve as a mode of overcoming. But overcome <i>what </i>turns out to be the real question. It behooves us to make a distinction between our increased mastery over nonhuman forces indiscriminately killing us off and other forms of overcoming—overcoming our parents, parts of ourselves we dislike, our political enemies, precursor poets, etc.<br />
<br />
The upshot of Blumenberg’s story is that we should make finer distinctions among the different projects and practices we’ve put into play over the course of cultural history in order to better grasp why we <i>originally </i>created them so as to better understand why we might <i>continue </i>them. One of the central distinctions Blumenberg makes about the outcome of the 17<sub><sub>th</sub></sub> century scientific revolution is that philosophers took two divergent paths, that of Cartesian “self-foundation” and Baconian “self-assertion” (see 181-203). <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#19">[19]</a> As Blumenberg understands it, the mode of self-assertion preceded self-foundation because the central cultural concern they both had eschew was the authority of the ancients (as read by the Scholastics). Thus we find Bacon bashing idols and Descartes retreating to his fireplace. However, as Steven Shapin notes, there was an intense suspicion that accompanied this “intellectual individualism and the rejection of trust and authority.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#fn20">[20]</a> At this point, it is helpful to make a distinction between the <i>personal </i>and the <i>individual</i>. The individualism common to Bacon and Descartes states that knowledge <i>begins </i>with an individual’s <i>personal </i>experience. The concern, then, is how to make this knowledge portable, <i>intersubjective</i>. This produces different practices intended to <i>depersonalize </i>the knowledge gained firsthand. As Shapin suggests, this amounts to the elaboration of different “practical procedures” (93) such as Boyle’s recommendation “that experimental reports be written in a way that allowed distant readers—not present as firsthand witnesses—to <i>replicate </i>the relevant effects” (107). But another method of depersonalization lies in Descartes’s search for a foundation to knowledge in indubitable certainty. If one could once establish the foundation upon which all knowledge <i>must </i>repose, then one can gain the assent of all inferences from it as common to all because of the necessity created by the demonstration.<br />
<br />
It is now generally agreed that Descartes’s foundationalism is an off-shoot of Platonic essentialism, what Dewey called “the quest for certainty” grounded in a “search for the immutable.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/posthumanism-and-depersonalization.html#21">[21]</a> What I articulated as the problem of antiessentialism is the problem of searching for replacement practices for the specific theoretical practice of hunting down immutability. Thus this problem becomes paradoxical only if one thinks that a certain set of theoretical practices inevitably ties us into a certain set of self-descriptions and problems—e.g., thinking linguistic practices are necessarily essentializing or thinking intentionality necessary for ethical consideration. Seeing these practices in the light of history, however, can give us a sense of their continuity with other practices motivated for similar purposes and their contingency as practices that can be altered given new situations that require new purposes.<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Two examples—N. Katherine Hayles, a major figure (displaying only slight anxiety): “What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety of sites. It is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive)” (<i>How We Became Posthuman</i> (1999), 2); Neil Badmington, writing an introduction (displaying acute anxiety): “What would it mean to view this as an example of <i>posthumanism</i>? The use of such a term is, of course, far from straightforward. Writing in 1947, Martin Heidegger drew attention to the paradoxical status of an ‘-ism,’ observing that…[etc., etc.]. Was I in danger of giving currency to yet another ‘-ism’ devoid of clarity, coherence and credibility” (<i>Posthumanism</i> (2000), ed. Badmington, 1)?<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> “<i>L’existence précède l’essence</i>” is from Sartre’s essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (translated in Kaufmann’s <i>Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre</i>—see 348). I pass over the irony of using this essay in this context, though the kernel of my reply is embodied in my discussion of anthropomorphism below.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> This is the lesson Richard Rorty draws from “philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michel Foucault” (“A World without Substances or Essences,” in <i>Philosophy and Social Hope</i>, 47). Rorty immediately goes on to say that being an “antidualist,” which is how they articulated their antiessentialism, does not mean “that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions. It means rather that they are trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality.”<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> <i>Being and Nothingness</i>, 90. In the context of Sartre’s discussion, metastable seems to connote something closer to instability. But see Rorty’s use of Sartre in <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>: “Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort ‘ironists’ because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called ‘meta-stable’: never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change…” (73-74). Something being <i>subject </i>to change is much different than something ceaselessly changing. I think the lesson is that Sartre’s term is a good description of the terrain of antiessentialism, though it originally had to be deployed with more of the polemical edge of flux.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a virtuoso performance showing how ethical and epistemological issues are bound together. Spivak’s term, however, comes from the fact that she does not believe there is any alternative to essentialism, or rather that language is in its nature essentializing. For philosophers like Rorty, as I articulated in note 3, this would be like saying that Platonic dualisms were at the heart of language and unavoidable.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> See PMN 32-37. Rorty distinguishes nine different marks of the mental and groups them into three different problem-piles: the problem of consciousness, the problem of reason, and the problem of personhood. I take such refinement of distinction to be the first step toward wisdom in this area.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> See <i>On the Genealogy of Morality</i>, 3.28: “If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the <i>animal </i>man, has until now had no meaning. This existence on earth contained no goal…. Precisely <i>this </i>is what the ascetic ideal means: that something <i>was lacking</i>, that an enormous <i>void </i>surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he <i>suffered </i>from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a <i>diseased </i>animal…” (117).<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> From "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy" (1909).<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> VM, 29<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> See ibid., 9 for Bennett’s introduction of Latour’s “actant”; her second chapter discusses the “assemblage.”<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> See ibid., vii.<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> I am blithely taking on board Daniel Dennett’s mode of discussing intentionality, principally from <i>The Intentional Stance</i>, as if it is obvious, but clearly this is contentious for philosophers of mind. The general idea is that intentionality is a holistic game that a community weasels its way into by members attributing intentionality to each other. This is how functionalists avoid the Cartesian problem of Other Minds—intentional minds are created when all the members attribute them to each other, and there is no deeper problem than that. What is interesting is that, on Dennett and Rorty’s understanding, Dennett is the heir of Darwin and it is only theorists who wish to retain the mind as a mark of humanity’s specialness that resist Dennett’s functionalism.<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> Horkheimer and Adorno, <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i> (1944), xiii. I’m quoting from the John Cummings translation, though Edmund Jephcott’s recent translation is likely to become canonical. This line in particular just rings better in Cummings’ translation, though I have no other reason for choosing it.<br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> See Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (in <i>The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays</i>) especially of the notion of a “procedure” being a “fixed ground plan” (118). This kind of rhetoric about math and method is charted succinctly by Steven Shapin in <i>The Scientific Revolution</i>—see especially 57-64 on the problematic notion of the “mathematization of the universe” (63) and 89-96 on the notion that “method was meant to be all” (90). Shapin’s comment that “there is much to commend a revisionist view that formal methodology is to be understood as a set of rhetorical tools for positioning practices in the culture” (95) might be expanded to include the use of mathematics. See also the opening section of Rorty’s “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in <i>Consequences of Pragmatism<i></i></i>) for a pithy polemic about what the philosophical upshot of the scientific revolution should have been.<br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15]</a> <i>Walden</i>, Ch. 1<br />
<a name="fn16"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[16]</a> My use of Thoreau is partly intended to lend plausibility to this narrative standing behind Bennett. Bennett has a previous book on Thoreau as a political philosopher.<br />
<a name="fn17"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[17]</a> “Spiritual exercises” is a term taken from Pierre Hadot. See, for example, his <i>Philosophy as a Way of Life</i>.<br />
<a name="fn18"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[18]</a> <i>Legitimacy of the Modern Age</i>, 181<br />
<a name="fn19"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[19]</a> My understanding of self-assertion owes much to Rorty’s use of Blumenberg. See, e.g., his “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” (in <i>Essays on Heidegger and Others</i>), especially where he calls Bacon “the prophet of self-assertion as opposed to self-grounding” (172).<br />
<a name="fn20"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[20]</a> <i>The Scientific Revolution</i>, 72<br />
<a name="fn21"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[21]</a> “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable” is the second chapter in Dewey’s <i>The Quest for Certainty</i>, which attempts to locate a tradition of philosophical inquiry—specifically metaphysical and epistemological—in our historical and existential condition as beings in the world.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-82019649269494649052013-07-12T04:00:00.000-07:002015-05-11T14:49:41.367-07:00Two Uses of "We"1. We who agree with me – We as community; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#sec2">2.</a> Like herding cats – Foucault’s <i>oui</i> – Initiating vs. justifying; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#sec3">3.</a> Deliberating as a group – Whose heritage? Which <i>communitas</i>? – You are a function of we – You cannot reason your way to hope; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#sec4">4.</a> The we-initiator is prophetic – And arrogant – Emerson’s Sayer: too confident? – Ellison’s Emersonianism – Carlin’s Millian liberalism<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> One of the things Richard Rorty was taken to task for most often—from teasing to anger—was his rhetorical use of “we.” It was also one of the earliest things his late-coming to moral and political philosophy was criticized for, particularly by those on the left, and here as in most relevant criticism of Rorty, it was his old friend Richard Bernstein: “Rorty frequently speaks of ‘we’ – ‘we liberals,’ ‘we pragmatists,’ ‘we inheritors of European civilization.’ But who precisely constitutes this ‘we’? Sometimes it seems as if what Rorty means by ‘we’ are ‘all those who agree with me.’” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn1">[1]</a> This would, indeed, be disastrous if that is all Rorty meant by “we.” However, it is important to recognize that sometimes you <i>do </i>want to talk to just those “who agree with me,” though it couldn’t be “about <i>all </i>things” because you wouldn’t need to talk then (unless it were simply to remind everyone of the things y’all agree on, which isn’t as silly a task as you may think, but one I shan’t talk about for now). This “relevant we” is a <i>community</i>—all questions, assertions, positions are made and taken in front of some particular group.<br />
<br />
In Rorty’s original response to Bernstein, he concedes that he has to spell out better who he means by “we,” and so begins his reply with a “political credo” in order to specify “the audience I am addressing.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn2">[2]</a> This wasn’t, however, exactly Bernstein’s problem with those “we’s,” and I want to slowly bring out the back and forth because both angles the two are standing at are important. Rorty is concerned with the ability of political philosophers—or, really, people generally—to <i>identify </i>with a community in solidarity in order to propose reforms. Perhaps this is an ability to stand shoulder to shoulder, if only metaphorically, with an established political party in order to get things done—this kind of solidarity is exclusionary insofar as the solidarity you have is <i>not </i>with the opposing party(s). However, to get reforms for the <i>whole nation</i>, the kind of solidarity we are talking about is larger—identification as an <i>American </i>in order to convince everyone that the reforms of your party are what’s best for everyone. So you are <i>addressing </i>Americans while also acknowledging that they, obviously, do not agree with you about everything.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> Rorty, here, was doing something even more narrow—addressing a subset (“the people whom I think of as social democrats”) of a national-political set (the American left) part of the larger array of America. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn3">[3]</a> But Rorty thought that thinking in terms of solidarity was necessary for thinking in terms of getting stuff done. The reason one talks to subsets of various kinds is to get people pointed in the same direction, to add force to force to counteract opposing forces. The old cliché of getting leftists to agree on anything is like herding cats is apropos. And so Rorty criticized Foucault through the ‘80s for never being able to quite countenance himself inside of some solidarity group. “[Foucault] forbids himself the tone of the liberal sort of thinker who says to his fellow-citizens: ‘<i>We </i>know that there must be a better way to do things than this; let us look for it together.’ There is no ‘we’ to be found in Foucault’s writings, nor in those of many of his French contemporaries.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn5">[5]</a> Foucault, in I believe his last interview, replied to this particular point during his conversation with Paul Rabinow:<blockquote>Rorty points out that in these analyses I do not appeal to any “we”—to any of those “we’s” whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated. But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result—and the necessarily temporary result—of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn6">[6]</a></blockquote>Rorty thought it was very important to respond to this point. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn7">[7]</a> Bernstein quotes this passage, and Rorty responds to it in a footnote after his concession, earlier discussed, that he needs to be more specific about “we”:<blockquote>I agree with Bernstein that I need to spell out the reference of “we” more fully. I think that this is best done by reference to a view of current political dangers and options—for one’s sense of such dangers and options determines what sort of social theory one is able to take seriously. However, I cannot figure out what Foucault meant when he said (in the passage Bernstein quotes) that “the ‘we’ must not be previous to the question.” With Wittgenstein and Dewey, I should have thought that you can only elaborate a question within some language-game currently under way—which means within some community, some group whose members share a good many relevant beliefs (about, e.g., what is wrong, and what would be better). Foucault seems to be envisaging some sort of simultaneous <i>creatio ex nihilio</i> of vocabulary and community. I cannot envisage this. As far as I can see, you can only describe or propose radical social change if you keep a background fixed—if you take some shared descriptions, assumptions, and hopes for granted. Otherwise, as Kant pointed out, it won’t count as <i>change</i>, but only as sheer, ineffable difference. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn8">[8]</a></blockquote>Rorty picks out precisely the bit in Foucault’s passage that is most problematical because of the two roles “we” can play: “we” as <i>initiating </i>a community and “we” as <i>justifying </i>an act. The latter is what Foucault finds so offensive about “we,” and this is what he means when he says he doesn’t want to appeal to the “we’s” “whose <i>consensus</i>, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought.” If it had just said “consensus,” Rorty may have not bucked the point in the way he did because the idea that some shit’s gotta’ change is <i>based </i>on the idea that the current consensus needs reconfiguration. But including “values” and “traditions” in his formulation of what he wishes not to appeal to is why Rorty suggests that Foucault envisages some “simultaneous <i>creatio ex nihilio</i> of vocabulary and community.” The whole point of the first half of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> is that you can’t just make stuff up—you have to use the tools you were acculturated with. Why? Because there is no <i>you </i>until you’ve been acculturated. This is a Hegelian point. And Foucault’s response is just a little too decisionistic, the meta-ethical stance that suggests that you are an empty toolbox that should look around and put the good stuff in. Meta-ethical decisionism is the heart of right-wing individualism and accounts for the left-wing communitarian backlash in the ’70s and ’80s. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn9">[9]</a> “The problem is, precisely, to decide if it is in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts.” Who is this <i>one</i>? What are <i>you </i>made of, that can recognize and make decisions, if you’ve emptied out all the values and traditions?<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> So, first there’s the conceptual Hegelian point that Rorty wants to press back, and then the rhetorical-political point that I made earlier—that to effect change in this world you’re going to need to form a solidarity group. Foucault finds insidious the consensus because when you use a consensus to <i>justify</i>, you necessarily <i>exclude </i>the dissenters from counting in the justification. Republicans still have a Democratic president even though they may not have voted for the person. But that’s the way democratic politics has to work, right? Well, what if you’ve been excluded from the <i>deliberation</i>? <i>That’s what’s really the problem</i>. And Americans, especially, should be sensitive to the problem of somethingsomething without representation. A “we” that gets too close to the justifying sense can seem like an act of exclusion if you use it in the middle of a debate. And this was Bernstein’s problem when he quoted Foucault:<blockquote>At times … Rorty seems to be insensitive to the dark side of appealing to ‘we’ when it is used as an exclusionary tactic…. Rorty criticizes those versions of ‘realism’ that appeal to a ‘fact of the matter’ that is presumably independent of my (or our) interpretations. Yet he fails to realize that when he appeals to our shared beliefs and our common historical heritage, he is speaking as if there is at least a historical fact of the matter. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn10">[10]</a></blockquote>Bernstein is summoning the outrage the oppressed who have been excluded from the <i>process </i>of creating those “shared beliefs” and “common heritage” have when they are told that “this what ’Merca ’sabout.” It’s not <i>their </i>heritage.<br />
<br />
But whose heritage should we have? Yours? Who are you? If you aren’t American, why should Americans have your heritage? That’s the conundrum if you don’t form that large kind of solidarity group—the intellectual sword wielded in pointing out the exclusion doesn’t simultaneously let you back in. So what does? Rorty thought the only thing that lets you, any you, into the democratic <i>societas </i>is a liberal <i>communitas</i>—liberalism is an ethics of inclusion. In his second run at Foucault’s point, in <i>Contingency</i>, Rorty says to Foucault’s formulation of the problem, as deciding whether or not to take part in the old community or form a new one, that “this is, indeed, the problem. But I disagree with Foucault about whether in fact it is necessary to form a new ‘we.’ My principal disagreement with him is precisely over whether ‘we liberals’ is or is not good enough.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn11">[11]</a> This is because his “hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs,” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn12">[12]</a> and this because “expanding the range of our present ‘we’” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn13">[13]</a> is central to the liberal <i>communitas</i>.<br />
<br />
So—after the Hegelian point that <i>you </i>are a function of a <i>we</i>, while taking on board the point that you are not thus <i>reducible </i>to that we, and the rhetorical-political point that you have to justify yourself in front of some community and form solidarity groups to affect change, there is still the problem of historical exclusion (or, <i>continued </i>exclusion). How do you decide whether or not to be part of the actual American community when it continues to fail regularly at the inclusionary image it prides itself on? Rorty didn’t think there was anything to say to this. You either hope, with James Baldwin, that the American common project of inclusion might be made, if not <i>new</i>, at the very, very least <i>much better than it is currently behaving</i>, though its dreams are more or less the same, or you cast off America as hopeless as Elijah Muhammad and many others have, both alienated intellectuals and working class folks who actually feel the brunt of the exclusions still left in America’s leaky ship so much more often than the leisured intellectuals. There will never be a <i>deciding factor</i> when it comes to deciding whether or not one should hope, at least no factor that will ever be portable. We, each of us, <i>should </i>have reasons for our belief or disbelief in a community, but reason will never decide the issue. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn14">[14]</a><br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> But how should we use “we” then? Sometimes I think people like Bernstein we’re being too hard on Rorty because how else do you decide what a group should do then a bunch of people saying things like “<i>We </i>should no X” “No! We should do Y!” “No, Z!”? Rorty followed Wilfrid Sellars in thinking of these as “we-intentions,” and since communities don’t speak, only individuals do, somebody has got to speak up and suggest things the community should do and think. I think Bernard Williams may have given all the answer Rorty ever needed in his response to this problem in his <i>Shame and Necessity</i>:<blockquote>More than one friend, reading this book in an earlier version, has asked who this ubiquitous “we” represents. It refers to people in a certain cultural situation, but who is in that situation? Obviously it cannot mean everybody in the world, or everybody in the West. I hope it does not mean only people who already think as I do. The best I can say is that “we” operates not through a previous fixed designation, but through invitation. (The same is true, I believe, of “we” in much philosophy, and particularly in ethics.) It is not a matter of “I” telling “you” what I and others thinks, but of my asking you to consider to what extent you and I think some things and perhaps need to think others. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn15">[15]</a></blockquote>As I said before, there are two uses of “we”—the we-initiator and the we-justification. The we-justification <i>counts </i>and uses that count as a reason for a belief. “We, in Wisconsin, counted up <i>our </i>votes, and give our electoral votes to Candidate X.” “Indeed, and there’s reason to believe that we in Wisconsin are beginning to go liberal because exit polls show that the margin X lost by in rural districts diminished, showing a rising left tide.” “Well, then we in Wisconsin should have liberal policies. Let’s furnish some.” You cannot, however, <i>add individuals</i> to get a we-community. You need to initiate it somehow. Declare a border or give yourselves a name—“Cubs fans” or “pragmatists” or “humans.” Like Foucault’s question, the we-initiator is prophetic—it proposes a community we could all belong to though we might not yet. It prophesizes an ideal community we should live in by thinking we do and beginning to behave like it (and criticizing each other when one of us doesn’t). It is a request, an invitation, and as Williams points out, it is an invitation to help think through what we are all about.<br />
<br />
The reason people still get miffed about “we” is because it is <i>arrogant</i>—<i>you </i>propose to speak for <i>me?</i> Well, no, not exactly, but kind of. <i>Somebody </i>has got to speak for we. This risk of arrogance is at the heart of Emersonianism, for self-expression is the most important general trait of humanity, but not everyone was given equally to it. Emerson was right to imply that the Sayer, above the Doer and Knower, was king in a democracy, but Emerson’s sense of Providence was far too strong. He saw the <i>agon </i>that was a necessary consequence of self-reliance, but he said, “Don’t sweat it. Just ‘speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn16">[16]</a> It <i>shall</i>? How? Emerson has no answer for that except his confidence, his optimism, which is to say his faith that Providence will make sure that everyone’s <i>latent conviction</i> (not those false, external ones) is in harmony (and never mind how we tell the difference between the truly latent and the falsely societal). So I take it that Ralph Ellison’s modulation of Emersonianism at the very end of <i>Invisible Man</i> speaks volumes about what we’ve learned is right and wrong about liberalism’s ethics of inclusion and its Emersonian need for everyone to act their own part:<blockquote>Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?</blockquote>Who knows?—we will all only know when each of us looks inside and speaks what we find there. There’s a lot on the surface that divides us, but maybe there’s some kind of agreement lower down that needs articulation for us all to realize how much we do hold in common, and how we will need to hold it. And if not—well, there’s always George Carlin’s articulation of Millian liberalism: “Live and let live, that’s my motto. Anyone who can’t live with that, take’em outside and shoot the motherfucker.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/two-uses-of-we.html#fn17">[17]</a><br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” in his <i>The New Constellation</i>, 246-7. This paper was original published in <i>Political Theory</i>, Nov. 1987, where Rorty’s reply, “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” was simultaneously published (which I shall be quoting from shortly).<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 565<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> In fact, it’s more complicated than that, for the subset he is addressing in “Thugs and Theorists” and, say, <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> is international—he’s addressing not just Bernstein and Irving Howe, but Charles Taylor of Canada and Jürgen Habermas of Germany. However, in <i>Achieving Our Country<i></i></i> he is specifically addressing the American left.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> This isn’t, in fact, much of a criticism for Rorty, who attempts to have a much more nuanced set of terms with which to praise and criticize. The burden of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> is, after all, the attempt to convince people to treat those with different <i>tasks </i>differently, and not test them all with one thermometer. So, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while getting F’s for political views, get A’s for attempting to achieve autonomy from Plato. Likewise, Orwell and Habermas get A’s for politics, but maybe B’s for philosophy. Rorty’s criticism of Foucault basically amounts to unfortunately running together his attempt for private perfection with a dominating concern for the welfare of others. What makes Foucault curious in this regard is that unlike, say, Plato whose running together of those two things emitted a totalitarian-like fantasy, Foucault’s attempt to do both at once had very few adverse effects on the public utility of his best works. This comes out best in Rorty’s essay “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault” in <i>Essays on Heidegger and Others</i>. The lesson he drew from it was, roughly: “[My] critics on the left … think of themselves as standing outside of the sociopolitical culture of liberalism with which Dewey identified, a culture with which I continue to identify. So when I say ethnocentric things like ‘our culture’ or ‘we liberals,’ their reaction is ‘who, we?” I, however, find it hard to see them as outsiders to this culture; they look to me like people playing a role – an important role – within it” (<i>Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</i> 15).<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” EHO, 174<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> “Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in <i>The Foucault Reader</i>, ed. Rabinow, 385<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> I say this because of the timing of the essays. Rorty published “Habermas and Lyotard” in 1984, to which Foucault responded in 1984 (just before his death). Bernstein quotes the passage at Rorty in 1987, to which Rorty responds in 1987 in “Thugs and Theorists” (as I will presently elaborate). However, the exchange with Bernstein is <i>after </i>Rorty’s Northcliffe lectures of 1986, which were published that year in the <i>London Review of Books</i> (and Bernstein had already read when he wrote his essay). Those lectures were to become the first three chapters of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>, but not before Rorty could <i>add </i>the last section of “The Contingency of Community,” which juxtaposes Habermas and Foucault, and begins with a reconsideration of how to respond to Foucault’s point.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> “Thugs and Theorists,” 575n4. Rorty continues: “Attempts at ineffability can produce private ecstasy (witness Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) but they have no social utility. A lot of Foucault’s admirers seem to think that he (or he taken together with Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on) showed us how to combine ecstasy and utility. I cannot envisage this either.” This last points in the direction of Rorty’s concerns in CIS.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> A backlash that happened amongst intellectuals, and only some of them, mind you (roughly, those that considered themselves “political theorists” or read <i>Dissent</i>). My right and left contrast here should have obvious resonance in our current American political climate, as it did then, and has in fact throughout the 20<sup>th</sup> century. However, one should never forget that many of the debates that ebb and flow in academic journals only rarely spill out into the wider political area. It’s often and usually the other way around.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> Bernstein, “One Step, Two Steps,” 247<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> CIS, 64<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> CIS, 63<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> CIS, 64n24. This footnote is Rorty’s reconsideration of the passage from Foucault, in which he emphasizes that he agrees with him “that the constitution of a new ‘we’ can, indeed, result from asking the right question. … But forming new communities is no more an end in itself than is political revolution.”<br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> For a reapplication of this line of thought to the "culture wars" of the 1980s and ‘90s, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html">“The Legacy of Group Thinking,”</a> esp. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-legacy-of-group-thinking.html#sec3">sections 3 and 4</a>.<br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15]</a> <i>Shame and Necessity</i>, 171n7<br />
<a name="fn16"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[16]</a> The (second) quoted bit is from the beginning of “Self-Reliance.”<br />
<a name="fn17"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[17]</a> One of the early jokes from <i>Carlin on Campus</i> (1984).Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-51861700288474101432013-07-05T09:00:00.000-07:002014-08-10T13:13:08.023-07:00Better and the Best1. Practical stance against the Best – Platonic prophecy as theory – Romantic prophecy as poetry; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#sec2">2.</a> Theoretical stance against the Best – Evaluative platonism and robustness – Possible betters vs. actual best; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#sec3">3.</a> The Village Champion argument – Truth and justification; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#sec4">4.</a> Sloughing off the relativist with self-referential arguments – Contradiction is a practical infelicity; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#sec5">5.</a> Practical attitudes should be allowed to trump theory – Absolutes are parasitic, not autonomous – Sellars’ parasitism argument about ‘looks’-talk on ‘is’-talk; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#sec6">6.</a> Is ‘best’-talk parasitic on ‘better’-talk? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#sec7">7.</a> You can’t say what’s best without saying what’s worse – Self-justifiers as platonism – Closing aperçu<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> In an interview toward the end of his life, Richard Rorty was asked if he thought that advocates of black reparations had valid and serious arguments. Rorty responded that:<blockquote>There are valid and serious arguments, but there are also valid and serious arguments for taxing the citizens of the First World down to the standard of living of the average inhabitant of the Third World, and distributing the proceeds of this taxation to the latter. But since neither set of arguments will lead to any such action being taken, I am not sure how much time we should spend thinking about them, as opposed to thinking about measures that have some chance of actually being carried out. It would be better to think about what might actually be done than to think about what an absolutely perfect world would be like. The best can be an enemy of the better. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn1">[1]</a></blockquote>The stance Rorty is here taking is a <i>practical </i>stance against the Best. Rorty is not against thinking about what the world should be like, as utopic and prophetic thinking is central to how Rorty conceives of the intellectual’s role in democratic culture. But what he is suggesting here is that we cannot spend the day in imagination. Rorty’s conception of prophecy is romantic, not platonic. A platonic conception of prophecy got off the ground when Plato began using metaphors of <i>sight </i>to articulate his sense of philosophy—“theory” derives from <i>theoros</i>, or “onlooker,” “spectator.” Plato’s transformation of the common Greek word for an audience member of a festival is what produced Dewey’s attack on the “spectatorial account of knowledge,” and when <i>theoria </i>was Latinized by <i>contemplatio</i>, it became invested with our derived word “speculation” from <i>speculum</i>, or mirror. Hence Rorty’s devastating attack on platonism in <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>.<br />
<br />
The romantic conception of prophecy, however, is different—it gains its sense, not from <i>theoria</i>, but from <i>poiēsis</i>, “making,” which we get “poetry” from. Rather than <i>seeing </i>something already there, the romantic conception of prophecy rests more on the Renaissance trope of building “castles in the air.” While the platonic conception gains a sense of urgency from its positing of a Best behind a veil that, if only we could just see it, we’d have our blueprint from how to order the world—the romantic conception loses that urgency, but in compensation we get a picture of how toying with castles too far off in the sky can distract us from the reality around us.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> What undergirds Rorty’s practical stance toward the Best is his <i>theoretical </i>stance against the Best, which is to say against platonism. For Rorty’s stance at the level of theory is that the Best is a mirage because it is circumscribed by our fallibility and our lack of method—for any X said to be the Best, we have to admit something better <i>might </i>come along. Such an admission of fallibility is what then produces the search for a method with which one could <i>know certainly</i> that one has in fact found the Best. Dewey and Rorty thought that this Quest for Certainty showed a lack of maturity, and that we should rather face up to the contingency of our assertions of what is the best.<br />
<br />
The problem for this line of thought is that a new form of platonist has come along that suggests that you can’t have a notion of what’s better if you don’t have a robust notion of the Best. Rorty wants to deny needing one. This new version is a particular species of the more general form of what I will call <i>evaluative platonism</i>. There are many species, but the basic form is that if you don’t have the Best in mind as a sort of ideal to shoot for, you won’t progress toward anything. The industrial strength version is a full-blooded Platonism, which posits an Absolute Good that can be reached (at least in theory—you can see the Sun outside the Cave, even if you can’t reach it). There are, however, important knock-off brands, the most important of which for my purposes are Peircian end-of-inquiry notions which suggest that one needs a robust <i>focus imaginarius</i> to make sense of inquiry—these are important precisely because of the range of agreement Rorty shares with these other pragmatists. Rorty’s romantic notion isn’t robust enough because it simply expands our repertoire of <i>possible betters</i> without narrowing one of them as the <i>actual best</i>. Since the traditional enemy of the platonist is the relativist, it should be no surprise that that is the epithet pragmatists like Hilary Putnam wield at Rorty for continuing to resist attempts at robustness. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> To get a sense of how Rorty responds, we might turn to his Village Champion Argument against Jürgen Habermas, another pragmatist admirer of Peirce. Rorty sets the stage by contrasting the Peircian strategy with what I’ve called “full-blooded Platonism”:<blockquote>Instead of arguing that because reality is One, and truth correspondence to that One Reality, Peircians argue that the idea of convergence is built into the presuppositions of discourse. They all agree that the principal reason why reason cannot be naturalized is that reason is normative and norms cannot be naturalized. But, they say, we can make room for the normative without going back to the traditional idea of a duty to correspond to the intrinsic nature of One Reality. We do this by attending to the universalistic character of the idealizing presuppositions of discourse. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn3">[3]</a></blockquote>To “naturalize reason” in this context is to reject the utility of the concept of <i>truth </i>when attempting to figure out what is and is not knowledge—instead, naturalizers argue, <i>justification </i>is all that does any real work. Rorty does not want to <i>collapse </i>the distinction between the two, however, only argue that the T in the JTB conception of knowledge, exactly like the B, does not play an operative role in the determination of what people know. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn4">[4]</a> Peircians think that the T <i>does </i>play an operative role, a transcending moment in which more than justification is had. Without the ability to transcend the moment of justification, they think, everything would be relative to a particular audience. Rorty continues:<blockquote>Habermas’ doctrine of a “transcendent moment” seems to me to run together a commendable willingness to try something new with an empty boast. To say “I’ll try to defend this against all comers” is often, depending upon the circumstances, a commendable attitude. But to say “I can successfully defend this against all comers” is silly. Maybe you can, but you are no more in a position to claim that you can than the village champion is to claim that he can beat the world champion. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn5">[5]</a></blockquote>Rorty later glosses this argument:<blockquote>When we have finished justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant (perhaps our own intellectual conscience, or our fellow-citizens, or the relevant experts) we need not, and typically do not, make any further claims, much less universal ones. After rehearsing justification, we may say either “That is why I think my assertion true” or “That is why my assertion is true,” or both. Going from the former assertion to the latter is not a philosophically pregnant transition from particularity to universality, or from context-dependence to context-independence. It is merely a stylistic difference. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn6">[6]</a></blockquote>I hope it is apparent how the Village Champion Argument, and therefore the relationship between justification and truth, bears on the relationship between the better and the Best. To claim that X is “the best,” you are asserting the truth of the claim “X is the best.” Rorty’s point is that these assertions are necessarily always in front of some particular audience, and therefore the pragmatic power of any particular claim is relative to an audience.<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> I think we can be a little more precise than Rorty’s usual mode of sloughing off the relativist as something he needs not be concerned with. The Village Champion Argument carries a lot of force, but there is more in the area than <i>just </i>a stylistic difference. The pattern of Rorty’s mode is set in his infamous APA presidential address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” There he says, succinctly and some might say too perfunctorily, “‘Relativism’ is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps <i>any </i>topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinion on an important topic are equally good.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn7">[7]</a> The reason he wishes to dispose of the relativist quickly is because he thinks, rightly, that it hides the real issues at work behind the conflict between pragmatists and platonists. So he says that “if there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute. One would merely use some variant of the self-referential arguments Socrates used against Protagoras.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn8">[8]</a> The argument is like this:<blockquote><b>Protagoras</b>: Every view is as good as any other!<br />
<b>Socrates</b>: Does that include yours?<br />
<b>Protagoras</b> [sensing already the end]: Er, well, yes, it must, then hunh?<br />
<b>Socrates</b>: Okay, so if your view that “every view is as good as any other” is as good as the view that “not every view is as good as any other,” why should we adopt your view over the ones that say yours is shit?<br />
<b>Protagoras</b>: Because…it’s true?<br />
<b>Socrates</b>: Yah, okay, but what grip do you have on truth that is independent of your relativism about goodness? Isn’t goodness in the way of views just truth? How can you have a view that is itself true where others are false, but the false views are just as good? Doesn’t that just make truth an idle curiosity, and therefore your own view idle as well? Can you give me no reason for adopting your view?<br />
<b>Protagoras</b>: I…will…get back to you on that one…<br />
<b>Socrates</b>: Yes, Miss Palin, please do.</blockquote>Since pragmatism is heir to a discernible Protagorean tradition, we are, in fact, better positioned to get back to Plato on this issue. The first step is recognizing what underpins self-referential contradiction arguments. The invalidity of contradiction is the foul incurred when you say both “X” and “not X.” But this is just to say that in the <i>practice of saying</i> thou shalt not incur such violations of the rules of that practice. Following Wittgenstein, one has to think, here, of practices on the analogy of games. You don’t get to count as playing the game of football, as practicing football, if—as many turd to third football comedies have underscored—you jumpkick the quarterback. In some definable Practice of Saying, it is against the rules to hold contradictory claims. (This isn’t to say that there are other practices that involve words in which it is okay to do this. Poetry and lying are the most obvious examples, which is why Plato thought poetry was a form of lying.)<br />
<br />
This first step gets us onto pragmatist ground: there’s nothing <i>inherently </i>wrong with saying X and not-X. There are many contexts in which it is fine, like when you say the latter with your fingers crossed or in the context of saying the sentence before this one. Contradiction is, then, a practical infelicity of a special kind. And once this has been identified, we can see the point in Habermas’ notion of a “performative contradiction.” This is part of the idea that you can’t <i>say </i>one thing and <i>do </i>another. And this displays the larger genus that the species of self-refutation falls under with regards to relativism, for it has often been accepted as a refutation of relativism (and nihilism, for that matter) that when someone <i>says </i>“peeing standing up is as good as sitting down” and they then pee sitting down, to say, “if they are both just as good, then on what grounds did you make the choice?” For giving <i>any </i>grounds at all is grounds enough for identifying criteria being used to adjudicate truth from falsity, good from bad. And having done <i>something </i>is <i>ipso facto</i> having made a choice. So the <i>doing </i>contradicts the <i>saying</i>.<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> So what underlies Rorty’s blithe rejection of relativism as a real concern is the pragmatic understanding that to behave at all is to refute the very idea that grounds of choice are all made equal. And while this is true, that our everyday practice refutes every day the theoretical thesis of relativism, it does not refute it at the level of theory. Rorty’s <i>attitude </i>tells us that we shouldn’t care about that, that we cannot, as Emerson says, “spend the day in explanation.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn9">[9]</a> And I think this is true as well, that our practical attitude toward the world should be allowed to trump pressures at the level of theory. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn10">[10]</a> However, at the level of theory, it <i>should </i>be possible to show how relativism and platonism go the wrong way at things.<br />
<br />
Robert Brandom, I believe, has shown how we might go at this. The charge of relativism leveled by platonists is motivated by the idea that you cannot talk about “betterness” without the Best, whereas heirs to Protagoras think all claims are of the form “X is better than …” with the ellipsis being filled in by specific claims. Brandom, in his notion of the <i>pragmatically mediated semantic relation</i>, has shown us how charges of relativism leveled at the pragmatist can be refuted by showing how Absolutes, like the Best, are <i>parasitic</i>, and not autonomous.<br />
<br />
To understand this argument we need to understand the basic form of Wilfrid Sellars’ master argument in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” against the Myth of the Given and elsewhere. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn11">[11]</a> For one example, one project in what Brandom calls the “empiricist core program of the classical analytic project” is to establish <i>phenomenalism</i>. Think of phenomenalism on the model of Berkelyan idealism, whose commitment to empiricism was so powerful that unlike Locke who thought our knowledge <i>starts </i>with our individual experience, he thought all we could <i>know </i>was our individual experience. This gets transposed into the analytic idiom as a reductionist program—the attempt to <i>reduce </i>talk about how things are to talk about how things seem or look. If that reduction can be shown to be successful without remainder, then we’ve shown how we don’t need to talk about how things <i>are</i>, but only about how things <i>seem</i>. (Consider the analogous materialisms about supernatural entities—we can do without talk about witchcraft because we can get along fine in explaining what happens by talking about bad mushrooms. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn12">[12]</a>) Reductionism in the analytic idiom is a <i>semantic relation</i>—when you explain what you <i>mean</i>, you are relating your first misunderstood statement with a second, hopefully better understood statement. So when you suggest that when you talk about tables what you are <i>really </i>talking about are clouds of electrons at particular spatialtemporal vectors, you are suggesting a special form of paraphrase. “When you say ‘table,’ you really mean ‘cloud of electrons.’” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn13">[13]</a> <br />
<br />
So this is what “autonomy” means in this context—if you attempt to <i>explain away</i> a particular vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things are”), you are suggesting that <i>all the work</i> can be done by a different vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things seem”). For this reduction to work, the alternative vocabulary must be <i>independent </i>of the target vocabulary you are reducing into nothingness. If it isn’t, if you need the target vocabulary to use the alternative, then the reduction was misguided because you have a remainder (that being something you <i>need </i>but now can’t explain the existence of or how you do it, etc.). So if you can show that a marked for demolition vocabulary is needed to use the alternative, then you can combat the reductionism. Brandom says that Sellars’ argument “turns on the assertion of the <i>pragmatic dependence</i> of one set of vocabulary-deploying practices-or-abilities on another” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn14">[14]</a>:<blockquote>Because he thinks part of what one is <i>doing </i>in saying how things merely appear is withholding a commitment to their actually being that way, and because one cannot be understood as <i>withholding </i>a commitment that one cannot <i>undertake</i>, Sellars concludes that one cannot have the ability to say or think how things <i>seem </i>or <i>appear </i>unless one also has the ability to make claims about how things <i>actually are</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-and-best.html#fn15">[15]</a></blockquote>Sellars argues that ‘is’-talk is pragmatically dependent on ‘looks’-talk because you wouldn’t be able to <i>do </i>(i.e. deploy) the latter without being <i>able </i>to deploy the former. So while you might not be <i>actually deploying</i> ‘is’-talk when you say, “There seems to be water over there,” you are implicitly relying on your grasp of the difference between “there <i>is </i>water over there” and “oh, there only <i>seemed </i>to be water over there—it’s actually a mirage…too bad we’re gonna’ die now.” If you didn’t have a grip on this implicit distinction, and all you had was ‘seems’-talk, then you’d have to say that “there seems to be water over there” <i>was false</i> when it turned out to be a mirage. This would impoverish our ability to say true things, though, for with the distinction in hand I can say two potentially true statements (“there is…” and “there seems…”) while without I can only say one. Now, <i>what that one statement is</i> is a good question, for the way ‘seems’ is <i>being used</i> appears to be the way ‘is’ is normally used—after all, the cases of falsification are exactly the same between “there is…” in our current modes of speech and “there seems…” <i>within </i>the reduced language-game (where “there is…” isn’t used).<br />
<br />
To review: a reductive semantic relation can be refuted if it can be shown that the target vocabulary to be reduced is needed to use correctly the alternative vocabulary. If so shown, we will see that the alternative vocabulary is <i>parasitic </i>upon the target vocabulary and so the latter not a suitable candidate for reduction. And what we will have shown is that the semantic relation between the two vocabularies is pragmatically mediated. The relationship between saying “seems” and saying “is” is that saying “seems” is mediated by your <i>ability </i>to say “is.”<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> It is beyond my powers to show that what I called evaluative platonism can be so refuted, so the best I can do is suggest the path to be taken. The problem here is that it is beyond my ability to <i>show </i>that the reconstructed versions of platonists that follow Peirce are suggesting a reduction of ‘better’-talk to ‘Best’-talk. That is, roughly, what Plato was after when he set up his divided line between the parasitic world of shadows and the autonomous Realm of Forms, with the <i>Good </i>(i.e., the Best) being most autonomousest of them all (being the sun that produced all the shadows). But we need to acknowledge that Habermas and Putnam need not be suggesting this when they level their criticisms at Rorty for not having a robust enough notion of betterness to make inquiry function right. All they <i>need </i>to say is that ‘better’-talk is intertwined with ‘best’-talk, and Rorty seems to be suggesting that ‘best’-talk can be reduced away without remainder to ‘better’-talk. In other words, the arguments I’ve just elaborated could be the ones used <i>against </i>Rorty to hit back against the Village Champion Argument.<br />
<br />
I don’t think this will end up being the case. My suspicion is that the only way to get the robustness criticism to stick is to reconfigure in such a way that one would <i>ipso facto</i> fall within the bounds of the reductive form of platonism. (That was the form of Rorty’s criticism of Putnam’s labeling of him as a relativist: if I am, so are you!) Further, it is also my suspicion that ‘best’-talk is in fact parasitic upon ‘better’-talk, though I cannot see how to refute the idea that ‘better’-talk is <i>also </i>parasitic upon ‘best’-talk. If they are both parasitic, then they are intertwined, neither being autonomous of the other. So the best I can do is suggest that you can’t get rid of ‘better’-talk.<br />
<a name=sec7></a><br />
<b>7.</b> For saying something is “the best” is pragmatically mediated by your ability to say what is better. The Best is parasitic on the better because you can’t specify what is <i>best </i>without specifying what is <i>worse</i>. This is the effect of having to answer “how do you know?” by <i>justifying yourself</i>. And since everyone agrees that the ability to justify is parasitic on the selection of a community, ‘best’-talk is as relative as ‘better’-talk, as much as you may wish that your claim about what is the Best transcends the community it is directed at. For it is simply not the case that your claim “X is the best!” is <i>ipso facto</i> better than “X is better than Y.” Perhaps you <i>mean it more</i>, but then by the same token you’re being less cautious and perhaps more dogmatic. But either way, when did caution or dogmatism tell us anything about the truth of the statements? People can have a terrible attitude and still be right.<br />
<br />
Say we back up, though, and say that you won’t specify <i>worse </i>things in justifying the Best. We will concede that justification happens in front of communities, but we’ll avoid the implication of relativism by confining ourselves to an interlocking set of <i>self</i>-justifying things (principles, forms, whatever)—in other words, the community the justification is happening in front of is itself (and we just happen to be onlookers). This is the form of those fuller platonisms. If your justification for the Best, however, is another Best, then you generate a regress, for given the form of the Best, I will want to know what it is better than. “You say ‘the best’—the best <i>of what</i>?” What <i>set </i>does the Best reign supreme over? (Itself? Now it seems like a useless phrase.) So an interlocking set of Bests will generate an infinite regress, and so hence the easy, unanswerable skepticism we can apply to any claim about what is <i>the Best</i>. “How do you know that’s the best? Are you able to survey all possible counterclaims and pronounce upon them beforehand?” To say you can is to pronounce yourself Village Champion, and we all know how quickly such hubris can make you look like the Village Idiot.<br />
<br />
The only way to stop the regress is to accept the relative justification as sufficient, and this amounts to rejecting platonism and taking “the best” as expressive of “that I know of”—we might call that a transcendental fallibilism. The warrant for this redescription of what “the best” expresses is the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between the best and the better. You can’t do the best without doing better, but you might be able to do better without doing the best.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> <i>Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself</i>, 105<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> See, e.g., Putnam’s “Realism with a Human Face” in his collection of that name and Rorty’s response, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” in <i>Truth and Progress</i>. Rorty’s reaction in that essay boils down to: “We seem, both to me and to philosophers who find the view of both of us absurd, to be in much the same line of business. But Putnam sees us as doing something quite different, and I do not know why” (59). I suspect Putnam’s long-standing use of Rorty as a punching bag has more to do with Rorty standing too close to Derrida and the events of the 1979 Eastern Division APA meeting than any thesis he’s ever promulgated. That’s my suspicion, at least, though I have no particular evidence for judging Putnam’s attitude in the latter case. (His remarks about the French littering his corpus I consider enough for the former.) The best description I’ve come across of what actually happened at the infamous APA meeting is Neil Gross’s description in <i>Richard Rorty</i>, 216-227.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> “Universality and Truth,” <i>Rorty and His Critics</i>, 5<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> The JTB—“justified true belief”—conception of knowledge derives from Plato’s <i>Theaetetus</i>, and most epistemologists have accepted it as the <i>beginning</i>, though not the end, of wisdom in regards to knowledge. For a somewhat embroidered discussion of the relationship of pragmatism to the distinction between truth and justification, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2010/05/rhetorical-universalism.html">"Rhetorical Universalism."</a> I say that <i>belief </i>doesn’t play a role in the determination of knowledge because all the belief concept tells you is that it is a claim being held by some person. And if you test that claim by wondering whether a claim being held doesn’t tell you <i>something </i>about its plausibility—like a show of hands, one being better than none—then you need to consider the fact that <i>authority </i>is a structure built into the nature of <i>justification</i>, and so a claim being actually held lending it therefore credence already has the conceptual shape of justification.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> Ibid., 6. Rorty is discussing Habermas’ <i>Between Facts and Norms</i>. Though Robert Brandom, who I will be discussing shortly, tells us the title of <i>Between Saying and Doing</i> comes from an old Italian proverb ("between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out"), I think there’s a felicitous ratio with Habermas recorded there—for though Habermas considers himself an heir to American pragmatism, the difference between Habermas’ objects and Brandom’s gerunds suggests a greater commitment to the priority of pragmatics over semantics.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> Ibid., 56<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>, 166<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> Ibid., 167<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> Emerson, “Self-Reliance”<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> Every person tired of an interminable conversation with a deaf and dogged interlocutor knows this to be true, but again, only at the level of practice. By this I mean that when the deaf dog retorts that you’re being dogmatic because you haven’t answered <i>their </i>objections, the rules of open inquiry we’ve venerated (explicitly) at least since the Enlightenment demand that we grant their point. However, only recently might we be able to work out the theoretical entitlement for allowing attitude to trump reason-giving, and the overarching reason is why Brandom says that in pragmatist philosophy of language, semantics must answer to pragmatics. Something of this orientation is elaborated in what follows, but on this particular point, at the beginning of <i>Making It Explicit</i>, Brandom justifies it via Wittgenstein’s regress argument about rules, which is roughly that if every statement needs rules to regulate correct interpretation, and those rules need to be stated, then the rules need to have rules—and then those rules need rules, etc. (see 20-23). What stops this regress from being infinite? Nothing, not at least if you haven’t fixed things so that <i>normative attitude</i> precedes <i>normative rule/reason-giving</i>. The trick here is seeing that we do, obviously, <i>have the power</i> to stop regressing. Platonism, in this area, is a form of intellectualism that says that rules precede attitudes, and thus nothing <i>should </i>stop the regress (except for something rule-like, which is where the idea of self-evident principles comes from). So one way to think about pragmatism is as the orientation that accepts our power to stop the regress as not in itself illegitimate, but rather seeks to investigate when it should and should not be. For example, notice how much leeway is in Rorty’s notion of “justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant”—who determines relevancy? That’s a question that would keep platonists up at night, though pragmatists understand that such relevancy is hashed out in the course of inquiry as people determine their attitudes to various communities. Is every attitude that determines our relationship to a community kosher? No, as every angry parent knows. But what about the black separatist, or black radical demanding reparations? That’s justifiably more complex in America. On that particular complexity, of being African-American in America, still the best negotiations are Ralph Ellison’s <i>Invisible Man</i> and James Baldwin’s <i>The Fire Next Time</i>. For Rorty’s interesting discussion of Baldwin and Elijah Muhammad, see 11-13 of <i>Achieving Our Country</i> (whose title comes from Baldwin’s book).<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> Brandom elaborates this master argument in “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism” in <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>. This particular argument about phenomenalism is the one Sellars forwards in his essay “Phenomenalism,” written around the same time as the more famous attack on the Myth of the Given.<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> This was, of course, Rorty’s first famous argument in the philosophy of mind, striking an analogy between talk about the <i>mind </i>and talk about <i>demons</i>. Brandom suggests in “Vocabularies of Pragmatism” (in PP) that that argument hinged on the social pragmatism that he would later become famous for, there isolated on a social practice account of minds.<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> If you noticed a wobble in my vocabulary in this last passage, you’re probably smarter than I am. And hopefully the wobble isn’t pernicious. Given the precision with which analytic reductions have been deployed, I technically slid between the <i>semantic relation</i> between what two things <i>mean </i>and an <i>ontological relation</i> between what two things <i>are</i>. Sloppy, I know, but when you work in the analytic idiom—where “how things are” is, because of the linguistic turn, always paraphrased as “<i>talk about </i>how things are”—it’s easy to do. However, the larger philosophical commitment pragmatists like Rorty and Brandom (if not Peirce, James, and Dewey) are in favor of keeping might be thought of as specifying that the category of “ontological relations” be reduced to another idiom, which is in part semantic. (This would take me too far afoot, but they are not committed to reducing everything to language, the linguistic idealism critics keep foisting on Rorty and Brandom. Brandom thinks they are only committed to what he calls “the entanglement thesis,” which in this context I understand to be the entanglement of pragmatic relations of nonlinguistic bodies with semantic relations of linguistic bodies.) For a recent discussion of Rorty's relationship to anti-analytic pragmatists, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html">"Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism."</a> For a discussion of the relationship of language to experience after Quine and Sellars, see <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html">"Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."</a><br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> In <i>Between Saying and Doing</i>, Brandom develops a very sophisticated apparatus for talking about talking. One area of underdeveloped territory he takes on is beginning to talk about the <i>practices </i>necessary or sufficient for deploying a <i>vocabulary </i>and, conversely, the <i>vocabularies </i>necessary or sufficient for deploying a <i>practice</i>. However, while Brandom favors talk of social practices, his aim in the book is to abstract away from that particular commitment, and so he speaks of (social) practices or (individual) abilities.<br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15]</a> BSD 12; this first chapter of his Locke Lectures also appears by itself in <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>, this passage at 169.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-67459812053330257482013-06-28T04:00:00.000-07:002013-07-26T14:42:20.232-07:00Emerson's Development1. He who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet — The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing — But in the third stage the great question begins to bore you — Searching for the inner dialectic; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#sec2">2. </a>Philosopher: one whose art of living is bound up with theory — Whicher on Emerson: acquiescence — The Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#sec3">3. </a>The tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life — How do you reconcile the inner turmoil with the outer production? — Lapsarian accounts: right about biography, wrong about philosophy; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#sec4">4. </a>The Principle of Mood — Emerson’s dualism between monism/dualism — Assertion is relative to the mood in when we make them; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#sec5">5. </a>Juxtaposing “The Poet” and “Experience” — Nature loves to hide — Dream delivers us to dream — Romanticism’s promise of power as a dream to be actualized; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#sec6">6. </a>Whicher and Mumford — Self-preservation and self-transformation — Transformation and resistance, continuity and change<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> Harold Bloom once said that “critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn1">[1]</a> One of the things Bloom meant about critics is that they are like metaphysicians, philosophers—these are the kinds of chaps who look for the <i>meaning </i>of things, for a <i>reason </i>why X happened and not Y. This is, pushed to the extreme, reduction which leads to monism. The things disappear beneath the meaning you’ve extracted, and do that enough times and you’ll be left with one thing—Meaning/Reason. (This is why <i>logos </i>is the enveloping term in Greek idealism.) <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn2">[2]</a><br />
<br />
A more practical version of this is the scholar’s dismay at the fox. As Isaiah Berlin reminded us, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” For Berlin, this was a distinction between those with “a single central vision, one system” and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn3">[3]</a> Scholars like to connect things; they like to explain why X was written. And it is, honestly, much easier if the writer is a hedgehog, because then you can keep drawing connections back to the central thesis that you’ve sussed out on behalf of the writer. This becomes particularly important as a tool of efficiency if the writer in question wrote material over a long period of time—first book or last, juvenilia or marginalia, hey, wouldn’t you know: it says the same thing.<br />
<br />
Life (sigh) is never like this, though it’s difficult to imagine why we’d want to spend so much of our time as scholars on such imagined repetition. But we do like <i>order</i>—we like it when a writer does things for reasons that form a pattern. We don’t like it when those reasons are boring. Why did John Grisham write <i>The Firm</i>? To make money? Yawn. Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe write <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</i>? To fight racism? Okay, that’s more interesting; I can work with that. Why did Heidegger turn away from <i>Being and Time</i>? Because he realized that the goal of metaphysics was to both do it and transcend it and so had to work out a way of realizing both his own ambitions for conceptual mastery and desires for mystical silence? Now we’re talking. We like people like J. M. Coetzee, who described this hoped-for hedgehogginess thus:<blockquote>One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labour away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn4">[4]</a></blockquote>(The third stage, of course, is back to Yawnsville, but then I think that might be precisely the point.)<br />
<br />
When we fail at coming up with a single ambition or vision that a writer adheres to, we like just as much the challenge of showing how a writer unfolds via an inner dialectic. “Ralph was bored so he asked himself a different question” isn’t good enough—doesn’t really seem to merit attention (by itself). But how Richard Rorty’s first famous article, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965), displays the central conceptual move that leads to <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i>, and from there to <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>, but equally that that first article is not Rorty’s answer to the mind-body problem, nor is <i>Mirror </i>Rorty’s final answer about philosophy—that is interesting. It takes time to show, and to show it is to shed new and needed light on what Rorty was really doing. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn5"></a><br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> This search for an inner dialectic works quite well when approaching the central American Romantics, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. It’s easy to tell a “death of the imagination” narrative with Hawthorne and a “retreat to private expression” narrative with Melville. Emerson’s tale of development was established definitively by Stephen Whicher. Whicher’s <i>Freedom and Fate</i> (1953) is the beginning point for any serious scholarly work on Emerson, <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn7">[7]</a> and especially any work on Emerson as a philosopher. For Whicher’s book is about Emerson’s “inner life,” and Emerson’s inner life was taken up by the obsession with intellectual problems. Whicher shows how Emerson is a philosopher in Alexander Nehamas’s sense, someone whose art of living is bound up with the propounding of theoretical theses. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn8">[8]</a><br />
<br />
Whicher’s central story is one of “acquiescence” (xvi). The general gist goes like this: Emerson’s first stage was the impress of the typical New England heritage of a Calvinistic belief in God’s Providence. However, do to the watering down of “the white-hot core of the original Calvinistic piety” (8) in Unitarianism, Emerson became susceptible to Humean doubt. This doubt laid waste to all the <i>underpinnings </i>of his faith in Providence, without actually touching the faith itself. This meant that natural, rational, and supernatural paths of justification were out for Emerson, but what saved him was the realization that God was within him—Emerson turns the original Protestant Reformation into a full-blown revolution. “The rock on which he thereafter based his life was the knowledge that the soul of man does not merely, as had long been taught, contain a spark or drop or breath of voice of God; it <i>is </i>God” (21).<br />
<br />
So the first two stages of Emerson’s development, that take us to the resignation of his post in the Unitarian Church, give us the interaction of two fundamental principles to understand Emerson: 1) his faith in God’s Providence becomes Emerson’s Principle of Compensation which is then supplemented by 2) the God-within which becomes the Principle of Self-Reliance. The story that Whicher tells is that in the third stage the Principle of Self-Reliance expands into a kind of power madness, “that when Emerson found a basis for the assertion of unconditional good, in his discovery of the God within the soul, the law of compensation slipped into a subordinate place in his thoughts” (39). Finding God within gave Emerson the sense that all of our shackles were man-made, and thus paled in comparison to the power we had when we relied instead on God for support. Mad with his belief that he could do anything, Emerson’s Principle of Self-Reliance quite naturally collapses under its own weight, from the unbalanced ratio between claims-of-power and evidence-for-power. The more the world “remained obdurately independent of his will” (60), the more he saw that the Principle of Self-Reliance was clearly not all there was. So in the fifth and final stage, the Principle of Compensation returns in order to circumscribe the power announced by Self-Reliance. And so the promise of freedom Emerson felt with the discovery of the God within is diminished as he acquiesces to the encompassing demands of fate.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> There is something very powerful and importantly right about Whicher’s narrative. However, there are two interlocked problems that should lead us to dissent from the conclusions Whicher draws about Emerson’s philosophical attitude. The first is the condensation of the proposed shift between all five stages at the very beginning of his career. The evidence Whicher accumulates doesn’t point at a steady development, but that the major movement of acquiescence has already occurred by <i>Essays, First Series</i> (1941). <i>Nature </i> (1836) is, without a doubt, a bewildering text that does not see Emerson at the height of his powers, but everyone affirms that all the action is in his first two books of essays. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn9">[9]</a> How can his most powerful moments be an acquiescence?<br />
<br />
Given that the evidence of the interplay between the Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance is present at minimum in seed form even at the beginning of his career as writer, it is equally easy to mark not a sharp break but a gradual unfolding of the essential elements of his mature thought. The difference between the two is that what Lawrence Buell calls Whicher’s “tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn10">[10]</a> doesn’t do well in suggesting that Emerson has a coherent philosophy. In essence, Whicher explains away incoherence as biographically legible conflict that is, indeed, conceptually bunk. This treatment, of course, is given industrial strength justification by Emerson himself, his most famous line being “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”).<br />
<br />
So the second problem that leads from the first is that Whicher’s account doesn’t precisely help us read the final product. The reason is simple: there’s a reason that Emerson’s journals were raided for the final product of his polished essays and that things appeared as they did, and other things (from the journals) disappeared as they did. The question is <i>what </i>those local reasons were, something that would aid our ability to interpret how the essays hang together as they stand. We should <i>not </i>use the journals to explain away the need for us to think hard about what Emerson was meaning to do in the essays. Barbara Packer, in her book which we should see as an extension of Whicher’s account, summarizes the scholarly problem well in relation to <i>Nature</i>: the problem is in “finding a stylistically sensitive way of reconciling a diachronic account of the book’s genesis and growth with a synchronic account of its structure.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn11">[11]</a><br />
<br />
The main thesis I would forward is that Whicher-Packer lapsarian accounts are broadly right about Emerson’s biography, but wrong about his philosophy. I think such biographical sleuthing has been successful in establishing that Emerson’s initial, cosmically high hopes about the power that could be unleashed within each of us were tragically dashed—what I don’t think they’ve done as well in is in suggesting what Emerson <i>did </i>with that tragedy in constructing his philosophy. In particular, formulating the account <i>as lapsarian</i> gives us exactly the wrong handle on the heart of Emerson’s thought. Emerson may have thought in such biblical terms as the Fall of Man, and mythologized the paradox of having infinite power within while continuing to fail without in those terms, but the central strain of Emerson that faces the future breaks radically with these modes of thought, and so to interpret him according to them is to darken precisely what is most enlightening about him on our problems. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn12"></a><br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> Whicher’s problem, I think, is that he doesn’t ascribe enough importance to what I shall call Emerson’s Principle of Mood. I think the hidden message of Emerson’s trajectory is not the fundamental importance of the struggle between the optimistic power of Self-Reliance against the pessimistic power of Fate (which has significant <i>prima facie</i> evidence in the trajectory to <i>The Conduct of Life</i>), but the struggle between the promise he felt in Self-Reliance and it’s ephemerality in the face of changing moods. The Principle of Compensation, which is always overinfluenced by Emerson’s faith in Providence (which is quite cheery), gives way to Mood as the most important element waging battle against Emerson’s optimism. It isn’t optimism vs. pessimism, but optimism vs. optimism/pessimism.<br />
<br />
The conceptual source of Whicher’s rhetoric of acquiescence is his sense that Emerson is trying, and failing, to find a way to live in the Power of His Soul <i>all the time</i>. I think all of the following summarizing moments go wrong on precisely the point I’m addressing, and they mount in a steady progression (italics are all mine): “Though not quite ready himself to give up to the soul beyond the possibility of a quick self-recovery, the thought then central to his mind was of a new state of life, a state of greatness and freedom beyond anything in human experience, into which, <i>if he could only hit upon the password</i>, he and all men might at any moment enter” (48); “If freedom lay only in the <i>total </i>self-trust of greatness, and if in fact he could be great only in inceptions and not in act, how did his new faith free him?” (70); “Even if we drop the question of action, and seek on ‘Reality,’ the problem still remains, How is such wholeness to be won <i>and kept</i>?” (83-4); “But the radical defect of man, the creator in the finite, is his incapacity to maintain his creative force. ‘The only sin is limitation’—<i>but this is original sin beyond the power of grace</i>” (97); “Man is promised the world—a promise perpetually renewed and <i>never kept</i>” (111). You can tell Whicher’s account begins to lose explanatory power when he perversely construes Emerson’s exuberant redescription of sin as a lapsarian tragedy. He may, biographically, have been looking for a password and totality, but the philosophy we get in its finished form is not like this. Emerson’s tragic optimism lays precisely in his giving up of the desire for completeness—not as a lost hope, but as a <i>dumb </i>hope. (And this, to me, seems perfectly consistent with having to be reminded oneself about how dumb one’s hopes might be.)<br />
<br />
I think we can find this sense of duality—between the elated promise of independence and the depressed realization of its fragmented nature—in his published work, from beginning to end. Less than a year after the publication of <i>Nature</i>, Emerson writes in his journal “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn13">[13]</a> For Emerson, Unity is the essence of God and thus Self-Reliance’s promise of power, and thus duality is a fragmented deflation of that promise. What I think we find in Emerson’s writing is a dualism between monism/dualism—depending on <i>mood</i>, he sees the world through one lens, and then another.<br />
<br />
The importance of the circumscription of mood is that it creates a radical positionality to the Emersonian utterance. And this is how we are to understand Emerson’s hobgoblin—for while it makes sense to say that you cannot hold both “there is a god” and “there is no god,” what sense does it make to say that you cannot be both happy and sad? Oh—at the <i>same time</i>, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to say that a person is being incoherent when they wake up in the morning happy and end the evening sad. Emerson’s radical thought is that <i>our assertions about the world are equally relative to the mood we are in when we make them</i>. And this then makes conceptual coherence a more complex affair to adjudicate the importance of. This means that to understand the most important syntactical unit in the Emersonian corpus—the sentence—you have to ascribe a mood, and that way mount a picture of coherence relative to the kinds of moods. The Principle of Mood is essentially the claim that it is rhetoric all the way down, that we are always contextually and rhetorically defined—but more, for it points the way toward a <i>necessary </i>expansion of our conceptual accounts to include the emotions, passions, temperament, <i>attitude</i>. So while the last half the 20th century has pretty much seen the rhetorical stance become common sense for the intellectuals, we still have Emerson sitting beyond.<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> On the surface, the necessity of understanding the text in context seems so obvious in terms of understanding <i>anything </i>as having one particular meaning as opposed to another that to invoke it to justify apparent contradiction looks suspiciously convenient (which is what many of Emerson’s contemporaries thought—Melville, for one). So I’d like to give one example that illustrates how Emerson <i>uses </i>this thought in a constructive mode. Emblematic of this general train of thought is the first two essays of <i>Essays, Series Two</i>: “The Poet” and “Experience.” These two essays <i>cannot </i>be read separately without giving a very misleading picture of Emerson’s vision. “The Poet” gives us a predictably up-beat picture—by this time, even to his contemporaries, Emerson was The Optimist. “The poet is the sayer, the namer … a sovereign, and stands on the centre.” “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” “Poets are thus liberating gods.” But in “Experience,” Emerson uses the death of his son, Waldo, to establish the much darker tone of the piece, offering this disturbing reaction:<blockquote>In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.</blockquote>I don’t intend to here attempt to read this passage, which continues to shock our sensibilities. (I should add that Emerson’s grief in his journal is overwhelming—if there is anything in his published work that needs to be understood according to the Principle of Mood, it is this passage.) For now I simply offer the above two cross selections to establish the tenor of the essays as a whole. What I want to instead compare are two examples of a more specific procedure that Emerson uses to great effect in these two essays. Compare these two passages, and ask yourself—which essay does it come from?<blockquote>I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.<br />
<br />
For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love.</blockquote>If you guessed I would be tricky and put the second essay first and the first second, you’d be right. The mood of the two passages are so starkly opposed—the first depressing while the second, though speaking of the sad nature of the poet to be useless in society, makes it sound great. What I want to punch up are the two lines that express <i>the same conceptual thought</i> but in two precisely different attitudes, like an apple being looked at from two different directions. “Nature does not like to be observed” and “Thou shalt lie close hid with nature.” This is an allusion to an aphorism of Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide.” In the darker essay of “Experience,” Nature’s tendency to hide from us is really our fault, the “most unhandsome part of our condition.” But from a different direction, the poet is who transcends this condition (and thus liberating gods for it) though at the expense of being lost to social intercourse. (“To be great is to be misunderstood,” as Emerson says in “Self-Reliance.”) One more:<blockquote>That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.<br />
<br />
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem.</blockquote>Again, the moods are so clearly juxtaposed. The poet, drunk on his power to <i>say</i>, would sell off everything else—which is precisely the dark fringe to this dream, the nightmare hanging off in the wings: <i>What if it is all an illusion?</i> If it’s an illusion, then getting drunk on it seems to just double down on a shitty hand. Emerson’s early life took Humean skepticism very seriously, and these two passages perfectly illustrate Emerson’s constructive use of that early encounter. Emerson conceptualizes romanticism’s promise of power as a dream, which is both its best and worst feature. Progress is contingent on our ability to actualize the dream in the world, but what then is the world but an endless succession of particular people’s dreams? This is how you make the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume practical again. (Something, I should add, Hume I think already began to do if Annette Baier’s reading of him is right in <i>A Progress of Sentiments</i>.) For the output of this line is not paralysis, as a practically lived Cartesian skepticism would be—if you are self-conscious enough about mood circumscribing speech acts, as I think Emerson is, then the mood in which you become depressed about mood circumscribing speech acts and how it just shows it all to be a sham, an illusion, “so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn14">[14]</a>—then you’ll also recognize that sometimes you <i>aren’t</i> in that mood. And this suggests to me that the point of this juxtaposition of moods on the metaphor of dreams is that what we must really beware is not the act of saying <i>tout court</i>, but the drunkenness of dogmatism—self-reliant saying can forget its fallibility in its moment of power, of changing the shape of the world by changing what it is possible for us to dream of.<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> Since Whicher supplies all the evidence needed to modulate his case, I think it’s easy to see the slant he puts on it as an unfortunate Mumfordism. While above I attempted to show what the conceptual source of the rhetoric of acquiescence was, it’s nearest historical source is Lewis Mumford’s groundbreaking and very influential <i>The Golden Day </i>(1926). With Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, they composed the “Young American” critics, a group of wide-ranging intellectuals and cultural critics whose central philosophical preoccupation in the early 20th century was an attack on John Dewey and pragmatism for, essentially, not being radical enough. After Mumford’s chapter on the central American Romantics (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville), “The Golden Day,” follows his chapter on William Dean Howells, Twain, and William James, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence.”<blockquote>What is valid in idealism is the belief in this process of re-molding, re-forming, re-creating, and so humanizing the rough chaos of existence. That belief had vanished: it no longer seemed a genuine possibility. … It was an act of grand acquiescence. Transcendentalism, as Emerson caustically said, had resulted in a headache; but the pragmatism that followed it was a paralysis. This generation had lost the power of choice; it bowed to the inevitable; it swam with the tide; and it went as far as the tide would carry it. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn15">[15]</a></blockquote>I don’t wish to whitewash Mumford’s complex relationship to James, Dewey, and pragmatism, but his view of it was perhaps a little overinfluenced by Santayana’s criticism of Emerson through James as “the genteel tradition.” For it’s not hard to see how Emerson himself led to the situation—the divine providence that became Emerson’s Principle of Compensation later became what Emerson called “fate.”<br />
<br />
Rather than confuting Mumford’s particular interpretation of pragmatism, I want to close by offering this more general observation about the conceptual resources of James and Dewey’s pragmatism. What I think Mumford and Whicher misunderstand about Emerson and the pragmatists is the importance of romantic self-transformation. They saw the essentially conservative character of “reality” and instrumentalism, but didn’t see how the Emersonian tradition was attempting to unlock a radically different orientation to a necessary recognition of the crossed axes of self-preservation and self-transformation. When Whicher sees Emerson try to assimilate the world’s resistance to the Poet’s Self-Reliance by his Principle of Compensation, he thinks Emerson has sold the pass to inevitability. In instrumentalism, we see how ends must first be <i>fixed </i>before deciding on what means or instruments one uses to carry out those ends, and thus how it doesn’t provide the opportunity to <i>change </i>those ends. But this understanding of Dewey’s instrumentalism completely ignores what Dewey tried to articulate in his notion of the means-ends continuum—that in the process of formulating a set of means to carry out a defined end we <i>alter </i>our sense of what end is desired, thus setting off a dialectic, as now new means are needed for the new end, the search for which will again alter the end-in-view, requiring new means, <i>ad infinitum</i>. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn16">[16]</a> If we think of romanticism as the movement of thought that apotheosizes the transformative character of human power, we will see that while Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatism plays down the importance of romanticism in pragmatism in favor of Emerson and Whicher’s interpretation of Emerson plays down the importance of romanticism in Emerson in favor of pragmatism (unfortunately, on this view), and that what we really need is a view of Emerson and pragmatism that integrates their views of transformation and resistance, continuity and change, future and past into a coherent conceptual account. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/emersons-development.html#fn17">[17]</a> It isn’t for <i>them </i>that we must do this, for it certainly may well turn out to be the case that we will have to reject some of their particular ways of understanding things—this is for <i>us</i>, for if Rorty is right, then figuring out how to get their conceptual projects to work is a way for us to understand how to get <i>our </i>conceptual projects to work.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Bloom, <i>The Anxiety of Influence</i>, 78<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> This is obviously a very particular understanding of what philosophy is, roughly romantic. For example, it’s the picture that is unveiled in my discussion of John Barth—see the <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#sec3">third section of "On Literature's Accidents."</a><br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> From the beginning of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which can be found in Berlin’s <i>Russian Thinkers</i> or <i>The Proper Study of Mankind</i>.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> Quoted in Christopher Tayler’s “Tables and Chairs,” <i>London Review of Books</i>, March 21, 2013.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> This was the burden of Robert Brandom’s “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” in his <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>. Rorty’s response was that Brandom’s paper gave him “a more flattering view of the course of my work than before. Brandom has suggested a coherence between my earlier and my later writings that had not occurred to me. I had not seen that there was a connection between the eliminative materialism I was urging in the 1960s and the private-public distinction I have been urging since <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>. My unconscious has been more cunning than I had realized” (“Response to Brandom,” 190n4, in <i>Rorty and His Critics</i>).<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> When you look at Hawthorne, you find a writer with a fairly stable vocabulary for tropes, an intense desire to make those tropes about troping, and an abiding concern about his ability to trope—so we can spot a trajectory wherein many of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches thematize the problem of writing within them, to his three vital novels—all in some manner internalizing the problem of writing, whether Hester’s needlework or Holgrave’s daguerreotyping or Coverdale the minor transcendental poet—to the final <i>Marble Faun</i>, all about death, representation, and the death of representation. Tack on Hawthorne’s inability to finish his final projects and you have a pretty good outline for a “death of the imagination” narrative. (If you want a display of what "thematizing the problem of writing" means, you might check out <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#sec2">section 2</a> of "Work and Idleness.") When you look at Melville, you find a writer fascinated by the act of storytelling, but struggling to find his real voice as a writer. All his books through <i>Moby-Dick</i> are first-person narratives, and after encountering Hawthorne’s work and its literary-conceptual gymnastics, Melville writes his Great Book, publishes it, begins writing the next, and as the bad reviews of <i>Moby-Dick</i> come out, we can see him transforming <i>Pierre </i>into something that seems designed to fail (gloriously, for the book is brilliant). And <i>The Confidence-Man</i>—there’s no protagonist, no narrative! (On the surface, only, of course.) After that he gives up prose entirely for poetry, never publishing another story (<i>Billy Budd</i> was unfinished and posthumous) and writing the longest poem in English (barring, I believe, <i>The Faerie Queene</i>), nearly 18,000 lines, and some other short lyrics in the last 30+ years of his life. This story, reading his increasing impenetrability as a form of private expression, is the burden of Edgar Dryden’s <i>Monumental Melville</i>.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Along with F. O. Matthiessen’s <i>American Renaissance</i> (1941), which obviously has a much larger scope. I hope to say something about Matthiessen’s book soon.<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> See the “Introduction” to Nehamas’s <i>The Art of Living</i>. Nehamas makes a number of other distinctions in approaching theory and philosophy, all of which are pertinent to understanding Emerson. In particular, as Nehamas himself notes, the kind of philosopher his study is in large part about (Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault) are often called “literary” because central to their act of philosophy is the process of self-creation that happens in the written medium. Additionally, Nehamas’s exemplars “do not insist that their life is a model for the world at large. They do not want to be imitated, at least not directly. That is, they believe that those who want to imitate them must develop their own art of living, their own self, perhaps to exhibit it for others but not so that others imitate them directly. Imitation, in this context, is to become someone on one’s own; but the someone one becomes must be different from one’s model” (10). The relationship to the Emerson who said “imitation is suicide” (“The Poet”) and the Thoreau who said “I would not have any one adopt <i>my </i>mode of living on any account” (<i>Walden</i>, Ch. 1) should be obvious. However, Nehamas has never given any attention to the relationship (genealogical or otherwise) between Emerson and Nietzsche, though everyone who works on either is well aware of it. Nehamas’s story in that book is structured by the obsession his three later writers had with Socrates (and, hence, Plato). And given that two major heroes and influences on Emerson were Plato and Montaigne, there might be an interesting story to tell about the refraction of ideas through all these prisms of intellectual power and self-reliance.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> Considering Emerson’s Principle of Transition, that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition” (“Self-Reliance”), an argument could be made about the nature of <i>Nature</i>’s power being based on its slippery fluidity. That is, however, not an argument I intend on making, nor will I discuss the Principle of Transition. <i>Nature </i>is great fun, but Emerson’s acme is in the 1840s work.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> Buell, <i>Emerson</i>, 98<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> <i>Emerson’s Fall</i>, 29<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12]</a> The argument I would make about Emerson’s central line of thought—which is clearly well beyond the space afforded here, and beyond my present grasp anyway—is analogous to the arguments Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Yack mount against philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin. The latter two basically formulate narratives in which today’s modern, secular problems are simply the revenging of old, religious problems because our secular terms are simply written over the palimpsest of religion. (This is sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” and Löwith’s <i>Meaning in History</i> is paradigmatic.) By contrast, Blumenberg and Yack in <i>The Legitimacy of the Modern Age</i> and <i>The Longing for Total Revolution</i>, respectively, attempt to show how some secular conceptual mechanics are genuinely new moves that produce new problems with no precursor in the older modes of thought. What I think is important in understanding Emerson are the reasons for his formulation of self-reliance as <i>self</i>-reliance, and <i>not </i>“God-reliance,” in Whicher’s very influential conflation (57). There’s no doubt in my mind that Emerson sincerely believed that God was within, and so that self-reliance was in some way God-reliance, but the conceptual work being done by his formulations of self-reliance were ultimately antithetical to belief in any and every form of God that is not found within—and this means that most forms of religion are behind the Emersonian curve. Furthermore, I think there’s a reason why his synonym for self-reliance in “Self-Reliance” is “self-<i>trust</i>” and not “self-<i>faith</i>” as well.<br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13]</a> May 26, 1837<br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14]</a> This is from the extraordinary close of Ch. 42 of <i>Moby-Dick</i>, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” I use it here as a placeholder for a larger discussion about the Melvillean and Emersonian strands of antirepresentationalism that I find pervasive in the central American Romantics. For in “Experience,” Emerson comes as close as he can get to the apocalyptic pessimism Melville displays in his mature work about the very possibility of representation, of there being any point to this pathetic negotiation we call “life.” Emerson articulates it—and somehow swerves back to optimism. I think of Melville and Emerson standing to each other as, in a manner, Derrida stands to Rorty. Rorty recognizes Derrida’s “arguments” as having an affinity to pragmatism’s antirepresentationlism, but equally that that rejection does not a pragmatist make. To make inroads on this angle, one should coordinate “The Whiteness of the Whale” with Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (in his <i>Margins of Philosophy</i>). Compare Ishmael’s rhetorical question, “is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” to Derrida’s thesis: “White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (213).<br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15]</a> <i>The Golden Day</i>, 83 of the 1957 Beacon Paperback edition<br />
<a name="fn16"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[16]</a> Brandom has reformulated Dewey’s notion of the means-ends continuum for Rorty’s notion of what Brandom calls the “vocabulary vocabulary”: “<i>Every</i> use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, <i>both</i> is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—<i>and</i> transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expression” ("Vocabularies of Pragmatism," <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>, 153). It's worth pointing out that here Brandom is attempting to assimilate some very specialized points in the philosophy of language with Rorty's taking up of the Mill-Berlin tradition of articulating a public/private distinction in order defend liberalism, but that given Emerson's own preoccupation with the distiction society and solitude, there might be some interesting resources in Emerson to think through this angle on pragmatism that Brandom has done so well in bringing to light. For a different application of Brandom's philosophy of language to the public/private distinction, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/spatial-model-of-belief-change.html">"A Spatial Model of Belief Change."</a><br />
<a name="fn17"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[17]</a> Despite the previous note, Brandom has rejected romanticism as an important genealogical root of pragmatism. See my discussion of this in <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html">“Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”</a>Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-75418675451973642772013-06-21T04:00:00.000-07:002013-07-19T16:03:24.976-07:00Work and Idleness in the American Romantics1. Perry Miller and the Puritan work ethic — Idleness as sin — Melville’s harpooners — Allegory — Melville’s nothing is really something; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#sec2">2. </a>Hawthorne’s Old Manse — Thresholds as thematic — Hawthorne’s prefaces — Romance as enchantment; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#sec3">3. </a>Veils and eagle-eyed reading — Idleness and enchantment; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#sec4">4. </a>Emerson: do your work; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#sec5">5. </a>Thoreau: converting experience into poetry — Don't be a tool — Ecumenicism and ineffability; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#sec6">6. </a>Indirection — Precision and drift<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> Ever since Max Weber, we’ve come to know a certain hard-headed dedication to self-abnegating <i>work </i>as “the Protestant ethic.” In America, we know this to be the <i>Puritan </i>work ethic. Perry Miller records it well:<blockquote>That every man should have a calling and work hard in it was a first premise of Puritanism. The guidebook for earthly existence, William Ames’s <i>Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof</i> [1643], confirmed his authoritative summary of theology, <i>The Marrow of Sacred Divinity</i> [1623], that even the man who has an income must work. Everyone has a talent for something, given of God, which he must improve. Although poverty is not a sin if it be suffered for causes outside one’s control, for any to accept it voluntarily is utterly reprehensible. God has so contrived the world that men must seek the necessities of life in the earth or in the sea, but the objects of their search have been cunningly placed for the finding. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn1">[1]</a></blockquote>There might be a lot of penetrating questions to be asked about the relationship between this theology and a functioning economy. The depth of resonance to our current political rhetoric I pass over as obvious, and Miller records his own sense of resonance to his times (his book was published in 1952) when he suggests that the Puritan clergymen’s jeremiads against the society they saw around them in the colonies, “taken in sequence … constitute a chapter in the emergence of the capitalist mentality, showing how intelligence copes with—or more cogently, how it fails to cope with—a change it simultaneously desires and abhors” (40).<br />
<br />
Whatever the real sources of this work ethic and whatever its relationship to the growth of an industrial economy, the fact is certain that in the mid-19<sup><sup>th</sup></sup> century, American intellectuals thought of this work ethic as tied to industrialization and as Puritan in spirit. The relationship of the American Romantics, however, to this work ethic was qualified at best. One interesting thread to be pulled out of the rich cloth of their commonalities is their use of “idleness.” Idleness is quite nearly the Puritan sin <i>par excellence</i>, a term embedded in their moral vocabularies in a way it isn’t today. For a boy to be called “idle” today—well, first, who on earth would call their child “idle”? We might say “lazy,” but even that word isn’t quite so charged as “idle” was. Idleness was an effrontery to God, in part. So whenever it appears in their work, it is done so self-consciously. It is not a mistake that at the end of the short chapter, “The Dart,” Ishmael says in <i>Moby-Dick</i> that “to insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.” This is one of those moments where <i>Moby-Dick</i> expands suddenly and seamlessly into its largest capacity as allegory, making the world an Ocean and every person a Whaleman.<br />
<br />
Is everyone a harpooner, though? I take it not, and I think Melville’s perception is enhanced when we don’t assume that every particular person is the object of his allegorizing (as we would in allegories like Bunyan’s <i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, where everyone is “Christian,” the protagonist). The Pequod embodies Man’s Mission through Life, both horizontally and vertically. On the horizontal side, there’s not only the fact that there are only men (not a mistake for either the ship or the allegory), but the distinction between crew—from the officers of the ship, all white, to their “squires,” the harpooners, all non-white. By casting Queequeg the Pacific Islander, Tashtego the American Indian, and Daggoo the “gigantic, coal-black negro-savage” as the harpooners, Melville is able to encapsulate the World from the white European’s perspective during the 19<sup><sup>th</sup></sup>-century’s Age of Imperial Expansion—“the native American [by which he means, not unironically, “white people”] liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn2">[2]</a> But not only this, for there are the many other whalemen on board, from the blacksmith to “Black Little Pip,” who will get lost at sea (physically and spiritually), and the common sailor, who blends into the background, to the “romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men,” who—“disgusted with the carking cares of earth”—find themselves at the topmast and completely forget to call out at the sight of whales, what with “the problem of the universe revolving” in them and all. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn3">[3]</a> Thus is Ishmael.<br />
<br />
I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ishmael, in a somewhat transcendental guise, is described here as, basically, idle. Melville considered writing, and primarily of the literary kind, “the great Art of Telling the Truth.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn4"></a> These harpooners of the World require rest—<i>subsidized </i>rest if you want your Truth. They <i>look </i>like they’re doing nothing, but it really is something.<br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> We see this in Hawthorne as well. At the close of “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne’s sketch of his abode in Concord (rented from Emerson), Hawthorne says this:<blockquote>In one respect, our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground, through which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City. The guests, each and all, felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell asleep in chairs, or took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through the boughs. They could not have paid a more acceptable compliment to my abode, nor to my own qualities as a host. I held it as a proof, that they left their cares behind them, as they passed between the stone gate-posts, at the entrance of our avenue; and that the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet, within and all around us. Others could give them pleasure and amusement; or instruction—these could be picked up anywhere—but it was for me to give them rest—rest, in a life of trouble. What better could be done for those weary and world-worn spirits? … what better could be done for anybody who came within our magic circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.<br />
<br />
Were I to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in my embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great want which mankind labors under, at this present period, is—sleep! <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn5"></a></blockquote>This is a tremendously resonant passage that illustrates well Hawthorne’s peculiar talents in compression. First, there’s the use of <i>thresholds</i>. Hawthorne returns over and over to a select number of tropes and images, and one of these is the “threshold,” perhaps best illustrated by the beginning of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, where Hawthorne’s narrator binds together the “prison-door” (also the title of the short chapter) with “the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal.” This binding not only turns us from the prison door as threshold-for-Hester to the first chapter as threshold-for-reader, but also to “The Custom-House” preface as threshold-for-reader—Hawthorne is delicately moving us into the enchanted precincts of his narrative. We started in real life, and then moved to reading the preface, where the “Hawthorne” we may have met in Concord or Salem or on the cover of the book is transformed first into “the intrusive author” who would “prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” After passing through the portal of the preface, this “I” suffers a further transformation into the narrator, which the pause at the “prison-door” (first chapter or physical prison door?) alerts us to.<br />
<br />
This is how, broadly, Hawthorne thought of his prefaces, and “The Old Manse” functions the same way. Notice the parallel between “Old Manse” and “Custom-House” as spatial locations, and further notice how “The Old Manse” begins: “<i>Between</i> two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone … we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash trees. … The glimmering shadows, that lay half-asleep between the door of the house and the public highway, were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which, the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world” (italics mine). The reader, moving through “The Old Manse,” parallels his own spectral self moving through the Old Manse’s gateposts, conducted by the narrator to the sights to be seen.<br />
<br />
The threshold we are crossing, as I’ve intimated, is into the enchantment of his story. Hawthorne conceived of romance as a kind of enchanting, and itself as a liminal space <i>between </i>“the Actual and the Imaginary,” as he put it in “The Custom-House.” The second set of figures I want to call attention to, then, are <i>mediums</i>—all objects of mediation held a special power for Hawthorne. From the “moonlight” (light from the sun mediated by the moon) that is “a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer” which prefaces his definition of romance, to the “glimmering shadows” we just saw between the highway and the Old Manse which function as a “spiritual medium” (and thus causing the Old Manse to hover between Actual/material and Imaginary/spiritual).<br />
<br />
Now, return to our original passage: “In one respect, our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground, through which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City.” The Old Manse here becomes a figure for romance, for Hawthorne’s writing. Not only are we primed by the echo of “glimmering shadows, that lay <i>half</i>-asleep” with “the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily <i>through the boughs</i>” (the italics keying two more liminalities), but by troping the Old Manse as the Enchanted Ground of <i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i> Hawthorne is able to: 1) make the Old Manse a liminal space (between beginning and destination, the Celestial City), 2) push the reader <i>further </i>into a literary, figural space (the first was the “spectralizing” I called attention to in beginning “The Old Manse” sketch, but if the reader was able to hold onto reality by considering it a <i>sketch </i>of a real place, and not a literary “making up,” now the reader’s spectral self is pushed through the literary wormhole of “like” and allusion into Bunyan’s narrative), and 3) make the reader into Everyman—just as Christian, the protagonist of <i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, is on the same journey everyone else is on, so too is the reader—and wouldn’t <i>you </i>like some rest?<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> So—Hawthorne is saying something a little different from Melville after all. (Wait for it.) Or is he? If you think of an author as a foe who secretes secrets into his text, then Hawthorne is the wiliest of opponents, and it is precisely what delighted Melville about him. One of Hawthorne’s favoritest of all tropes was the <i>veil</i>, which we’ve already met in the relevant context (in “The Custom-House”): “still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” Hawthorne repeats this in “The Old Manse”: “So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face.” So when Hawthorne (or should we say, “the Hawthorne figure”?) says in the passage we’re primarily focused on unpacking, “Others could give them pleasure and amusement; or instruction … but it was for me to give them rest,” should we trust him? Is this a pose? Part of his veiling of his real meaning? Melville thought so. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville mocks the idea that Hawthorne, as he was popularly thought, was “a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style,—a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated:—a man who means no meanings.” For Melville, however, the Truth <i>had </i>to be veiled as Hawthorne did, because Truth could not be approached directly and could therefore only be intimated “covertly, and by snatches.” And thus only “the eagle-eyed reader” was privy to the Truth.<br />
<br />
Hawthorne <i>says </i>his house is for rest and for sleep. But you can’t <i>stay</i>—you <i>want </i>to get to your destination, whatever the “Celestial City” figures for you. More than that, however, are those glimmering shadows “<i>half</i>-asleep” at the threshold of “The Old Manse.” Those shadows, which as a <i>medium </i>are a trope for <i>romance </i>and <i>enchantment</i>, are not <i>fully sleeping</i>. They too are in a liminal space, resting perhaps but also slightly agitated. This is what Melville understood. You <i>could </i>take Hawthorne for merely a pleasant respite from the carking cares of the world, but if you look with sharp eyes, you’ll enter that dream-state where you come back <i>affected</i> by the subtle conceptual vibrations.<br />
<br />
One of my reasons for reading Hawthorne so closely is to show how Hawthorne, like Melville, becomes the intellectual equal of our thinkers-in-prose. Literary patterning <i>can </i>just be for fun, but when you start pulling at the threads that make up certain literary writers’ tapestries, you’ll occasionally see far off elements respond to your pulling and open up to you with <i>why</i>—do the pyrotechnics <i>mean </i>anything? In this passage from “The Old Manse,” Hawthorne has thematized idleness into his writing. There is something essentially <i>idle </i>about falling under enchantment—that is part of its <i>work</i>. And this, Hawthorne thinks, is one of the things it is good for.<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> Hawthorne’s experience with work other than writing was debilitating for his writing. While working for the Boston Custom House, Hawthorne writes to his beloved Sophia—who he will not marry until he’s made enough money to support them—that his “fancy is rendered so torpid by my uncongenial way of life, that I cannot sketch off the scenes and portraits that interest me.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn6">[6]</a> After resigning, he joins Brook Farm, the most famous American utopian community of the 19<sup><sup>th</sup></sup> century. You can imagine how disastrous working on a farm was to his imaginative strength and output. Just four months into the experience he writes to Sophia:<blockquote>And joyful thought!—in a little more than a fortnight, thy husband [pet name—they were only secretly engaged at this point] will be free from his bondage—free to think of his Dove [another disgustingly affectionate nickname]—free to enjoy Nature—free to think and feel! I do think that a greater weight will then be removed from me, than when Christian’s burthen fell off at the foot of the cross. [allusion to Bunyan] Even my Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness: my mind and heart were freer. Oh, belovedest, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionably brutified. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn7">[7]</a></blockquote>“Free to think and feel!” With these sentiments, Hawthorne probably seems pretty aristocratic alongside Thoreau, especially, and Melville, who tried his hand at manly work at sea. Emerson felt a greater unease about his position, since unlike Hawthorne he didn’t have to work at all. Though Emerson did have some money troubles after he resigned his post in the Unitarian Church, he’d already laid the groundwork for his income through intellectual labor—writing and lecturing. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn8"></a> So though Emerson preached a Puritanesque ethic of work, it was carefully modulated to emphasize faith to one’s <i>calling</i>. “The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. … But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A must consider what a blindman’s-bluff is this game of conformity” (“Self-Reliance”). But even while Emerson believed we must hold true to what we were on the inside, he had deep doubts about society’s responsibilities for subsidizing people like he and Hawthorne to sit around and think all day. A few months before publishing his first book of essays, he referred to it in his journal as “a sort of apology to my country for my apparent idleness.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn9"></a> And just months after publishing “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. … Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. … To be great is to be misunderstood” (“Self-Reliance”)—four months later he records in his journal:<blockquote>If I should or could record the true experience of my later years, I should have to say that I skulk & play a mean, shiftless, subaltern part much the largest part of the time. Things are to be done which I have no skill to do, or are to be said which others can say better, and I lie by, or occupy my hands with something which is only an apology for idleness until my hour comes again. Thus how much of my reading & all my labor in house or garden seems mere waiting: any other could do it as well or better. It really seems to me of no importance—so little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with my universal life—what I do, whether I hoe, or turn a grindstone, or copy manuscript, or eat my dinner. All my virtue consists in my consent to be insignificant which consent is founded on my faith in the great Optimism, which will justify itself to me at last. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn10">[10]</a></blockquote>I won’t parse the last bit—discussion of Emerson’s faith in fate is beyond my powers yet. (Why, after all, is it faith in <i>optimism</i>? Faith in the attitude of faith, the providential optimism that all will work out for the best?) To be sure, though, what we see here is doubt about the value of his work.<br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> Part of this doubt, I think, stemmed from his suspicion that while he preached a message of <i>converting experience into poetry</i>, he didn’t really carry it out. For those who heard “The American Scholar” in 1837 and resonated with “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low,” there must have been a let down with the abstract discussions of the Law of Compensation and other “spiritual laws.” Thoreau, I think, thought this and his <i>Walden </i>is the outgrowth of carrying out the play Emerson only theorized. (While I like the trope of casting Emerson as the Theorist of the American Epic with Thoreau and Whitman as the authentic Emersonian Epic-Writers, I myself am not a fan of this criticism of Emerson. But that might be because I’m partial to abstract music.)<br />
<br />
For Thoreau, we <i>definitely </i>needed to revise our notions of work. Thoreau is our indigenous Critic of Industrialization, and while no economist as Marx was (and disastrously more naïve about the pastoral thematic in his utopic vision), he is at least if not more trenchant on the debilitating effects of a modern industrial commercial economy on a person’s spiritual life. F. O. Matthiessen cogently remarks that Thoreau “preached a gospel of leisure to Yankees” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn11">[11]</a> to offset the deeply ingrained Puritan ethic. His most famous line, of course, sets the tone for the point of the Walden experiment: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn12"></a> Why? Because we have become “the tool of our tools,” and if you don’t hear the contemporary resonance in “when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him,” then I doubt you’ve even heard of a loan.<br />
<br />
George W. Bush’s ironic summoning of the Puritan spirit on February 5, 2005 might be one of the greatest symbolic moments in American labor history—to a mother with three jobs, he says, “Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.” Rorty used to say quite often that poverty comes before cultural issues because if you’re working three jobs, then you have no time to think about what’s best for your family or yourself, let alone what kinds of spiritual exercises you’d like to pursue or of other people who aren’t your family.<br />
<br />
While that might be the most important relationship between work and idleness, there might be a more subtle relationship as well. Remember for Hawthorne that the best romance is halfway <i>between </i>the Actual and the Imaginary, “each imbuing itself with the nature of the other.” It is not pure fictionality that Hawthorne is after—not purely idle fancy. Likewise, Thoreau seems to have understood the problem of purity in either actuality or the imaginary. Despite his flare as a naturalist and eagle-eye for artifacts, <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn13"></a> Thoreau was wary of a too acute attention to detail. What Thoreau valued was a “sauntering of the eye.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn14"></a> And we can find the word’s resonance for him at the beginning of “Walking”: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for <i>sauntering</i>: which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country….’”<br />
<a name=sec6></a><br />
<b>6.</b> Emerson talks of “fatal perception” in “Self-Reliance,” by which he means sight of something one cannot avoid. This was Emerson’s conception of intuition, or the influx of divinity, or what it means to be truly oneself (which at the same time makes you like God, and everyone else). I think this strain in Emerson is at odds with an equally dominant thread of <i>indirection</i>, which we also find in Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. “An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us though its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author” ("The Poet"). For Thoreau, this idleness allows us to stray from the path—whatever direction we may have been accurately pursuing, it is not quite that now. “Rambling,” too, has this sense for all four. For Hawthorne, as we’ve seen, the veils reveal as much as they hide, for it is only through a medium that the ideal might imbue the real with its power. And Melville would not only agree with Emerson on reading, but Ahab is the iconic image for avoiding a <i>direct </i>relationship to reality and Truth—Ahab’s quest is for directness, and he unavoidably loses. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn15">[15]</a><br />
<br />
We work hard at being <i>precise</i>—at being in control. But perhaps a little idleness would do us some good. Maybe taking our hand off the wheel occasionally, adding in a little drift. It is perhaps against the Puritan ethic that idleness pops into the vocabulary of the American Romantics the way it does, but their thematizing of idleness as a necessary condition for Truth, however variously conceived, is a curious and provocative move. I’m reminded of a passage in Heidegger’s <i>Being and Time</i>: “Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along—a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn16">[16]</a> Since every good pragmatist—as I urge us all to be—is an antifoundationalist, we have to construe what “ground” we’re talking about here so it doesn’t sound so foundationalist-y. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn17"></a> One mode of approaching it is to say that the “ground” in question is <i>justification</i>—we’re only entitled to say things about the way something is if we’re on firmer ground than “because I said so!” But if Emerson and Rorty are right, then some one claim about how X <i>is </i>will be circumscribed by the vocabulary one states the claim in. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn18"></a> And if this is the case, then as Rorty said, you can’t <i>argue </i>your way into a new vocabulary—you have to jump in feet first. A sentence that doesn’t make sense in an old vocabulary can only be savored or spit out. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/work-and-idleness-in-american-romantics.html#fn19"></a> And savoring it, on this analogy, is giving yourself enough latitude to acclimate yourself to the new taste, i.e. creating the vocabulary within which the sentence makes sense. We have to allow our inference-crunching, justification-demanding brains to be idle long enough to both emit and savor immediately nonsensical things in order for those things to do their work in creating the medium through which they’ll make sense.<br />
<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24152639#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></span></span></span></a></div><br />
Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> <i>The New England Mind: From Colony to Province</i>, 40-41<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> <i>Moby-Dick<i></i></i>, Ch. 27<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> <i>Moby-Dick<i></i></i>, Ch. 35<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> This is from Melville’s essential “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” It can be found easily in the Norton 2<sub><sub>nd</sub></sub> edition, edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> Melville’s copy of <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i> has a number of marginal scoring marks toward the end of this passage, which suggest to me that he vibrated to the thought here being articulated.<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> May 29, 1840<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7] </a> August 13, 1841<br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8] </a>I should also add that a significant portion of his income at this time was an inheritance from the estate of his first wife, Ellen, who died in 1831. Given the nature of the money, being bound up with loss, I can only imagine what additional psychological impact it had on his thoughts about idleness.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9] </a>October 7, 1840<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10] </a>July 1841<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11] </a><i>American Renaissance</i> 92<br />
<a name="fn12"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[12] </a>Chapter 1, “Economy” of <i>Walden</i><br />
<a name="fn13"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[13] </a>Hawthorne even recounts in “The Old Manse” that Thoreau had “a strange faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them.”<br />
<a name="fn14"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[14] </a>From Thoreau’s journal, quoted by Matthiessen on 90.<br />
<a name="fn15"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[15] </a>And a story for another time, though perhaps meditate on Ishmael’s “key”: “And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all” (Ch. 1).<br />
<a name="fn16"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[16] </a>Macquarrie-Robinson edition, 212 (German 168)<br />
<a name="fn17"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[17] </a>This is what Robert Brandom carries out brilliantly in terms of his pragmatist project of inferentialism in “Dasein, the Being that Thematizes” (collected in his <i>Tales of the Might Dead</i>).<br />
<a name="fn18"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[18] </a>This is the line of thought that moves from Emerson’s “Circles” to Rorty’s “The Contingency of Language” (the first chapter of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>).<br />
<a name="fn19"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[19] </a>CIS 18Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-4097004159211083852013-06-14T04:00:00.000-07:002013-07-05T17:44:16.232-07:00Asceticism and the Fire of the Imagination1. The slow meander — Beauty in criticism; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#sec2">2. </a>Talking as injury — Talking as love; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#sec3">3. </a>Pater’s hard gem-like flame and the ironist — The strong poet’s fire; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#sec4">4. </a>Thoreau’s vital heat — Against obsession — Leisurely consumption and the art of chewing; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#sec5">5. </a>Romanticism of profusion — Asceticism and suffocation<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> In what is purportedly the last piece Rorty wrote for publication, Rorty quotes two snatches of poetry that he “had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by” while he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The first is from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:<br />
<pre><font face=Times New Roman><font size=3> We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.</font></font></pre>The second, Walter Savage Landor’s “On His Seventy-fifth Birthday”:<br />
<pre><font face=Times New Roman><font size=3> Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art:
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.</font></font></pre>Of these snatches, Rorty says this:<blockquote>I found comfort in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.</blockquote>I like Rorty’s perspective on poetry. It is a kind of aesthetic perspective that, oddly enough, I’m not really allowed as a professional literary critic, at least in my professional capacity. You get frowny faces if you say you don’t love the beauty of literature, but you also get frowny faces if you try and write about it. There are two reasons for this, I think. One is the simple reason that it’s terribly difficult to write about. Our profession has too many bad memories of early shitty writing about what makes X, Y, or Z beautiful. And when we began to professionalize, say around 1900, the crap gained a stamp of authority that legitimized it in a way it previously lacked. As critics began to feel queer about the personal nature of what was deemed beautiful, they either fell back on Kantian-style aesthetic inquiry or purged it explicitly in order to smuggle it in implicitly as the study of pure form—this was New Criticism. New Criticism and Kantianism began to be rejected in the ’60s, but for many different, not always compatible reasons. One of those reasons was my second reason for why the current profession frowns on beauty—the (re)rise of post-Marxist debunking. Many think of talking about beauty as taking part in an ideological regime, so specifically stigmatize it as a bourgeois conspiracy to keep the people down. That’s changing, thank god, and many of us—and this is where my department largely falls—have felt and feel like beauty is important somehow, but feel uncomfortable talking about it, let alone writing about it.<br />
<br />
<b><a name="sec2">2</a>.</b> However, that being said, Rorty once said something in <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> that fell a little odd on our instincts as literary critics. In a kind of concluding aphorism during his discussion of Heidegger, Rorty says that the only solution to the problem of how to properly treat Heidegger’s power-words (e.g., <i>noein</i>, <i>phusis</i>, <i>alētheia</i>), which are part of his attempt to speak Being without talking about beings, is: “do not put Heidegger’s works in any context, do not treat them as movable pieces in a game, or as tools, or as relevant to any questions save Heidegger’s own. In short”—and here’s the bit—“give his words the privilege you extend to a lyric which you love too much to treat as an object of ‘literary criticism’ – a lyric which you recite, but do not (for fear of injuring it) relate to anything else” (CIS 115).<br />
<br />
I thought this really interesting, and asked a friend of mine—who gets poetry in a way I do not—what she thought of it. She said it seemed really wrong. She expresses her love <i>by </i>talking about it.<br />
<br />
That has to be, in some way, right for us talkative literary critics. And yet, I still feel like <i>both </i>attitudes of expression are right. I’m not sure I fear injuring Emily Dickinson, but I do know that I love reading her poetry and hate talking about it. (Or, maybe that’s just because I hate looking foolish.) But my friend is right certainly in one sense—Rorty has no business, <i>qua </i>pragmatist, thinking words, i.e. harnesses of relating, <i>hurt </i>anything. That’s a rare moment of ineffaphilia for Rorty. In the context of “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” however, with its description of Rorty’s intensely “snobbish” and solitary love of orchids, we might get a finer-grained picture of what Rorty means by the private/public distinction—some private things we do with friends, but some we do only by ourselves. Sometimes we express our love by burning outwards, engulfing others; sometimes we hold the flame away from the buffeting winds.<br />
<br />
<b><a name="sec3">3</a>.</b> It’s not a mistake that I’ve recurred to fire imagery, for this last piece of Rorty’s I’ve been quoting from takes its title from that line of Landor’s: “The Fire of Life.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#fn1">[1]</a> I don’t know why, but Rorty never quoted from Walter Pater, though the most famous passage in <i>The Renaissance</i> pretty much sums up the romantic view of the strong poet that so fired Rorty’s imagination:<blockquote>To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotyped world; meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems, by a lifted horizon, to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#fn2">[2]</a></blockquote>Failure for Rorty’s ironist, hero of <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i>, would be to take too seriously his own final vocabulary, which is largely inherited through that form of mass hypnosis we call “education.” Beliefs, for pragmatists, are habits of action, and Pater here perfectly describes the fear ironists have—that they’ll <i>miss life</i> if they aren’t able to discriminate finely the gradations between each person’s, thing’s, situation’s unique quality.<br />
<br />
Rorty was caught by fire imagery at the end of his life. In “Philosophy and the Hybridization of Culture,” Rorty says that it might be sad if the ability to read ancient Greek and Latin died out, but if wouldn’t be a tragedy—“human creativity and diversity may flourish nonetheless. The human imagination may burn even brighter, even though many of the fuels that fed it are no longer available.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#fn3">[3]</a> This sense of <i>fire </i>as the imagination that destroys the material that keeps it alive is remnant of an earlier passage Rorty wrote for his contribution to a <i>festschrift </i>for Richard Bernstein, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre”:<blockquote>For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why a literary culture is always in search of novelty, always hoping to spot what Shelley called “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal. It is a premise of this culture that thought the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended forever. The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. It is an ever-living, ever-expanding, fire. It is as subject to time and chance as are the flies and the worms, but although it endures and preserves the memory of its past, it will continue to transcend its previous limits. Though the fear of belatedness is ever present within the literary culture, this very fear makes for a more intense blaze. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#fn4">[4]</a></blockquote>Here we get a sense of the strong poet’s self as a <i>bonfire</i>, needing to be fed more and more, burning hungrily through the materials we eventually run out of. There are certainly these Faustian types in literature and life, and there’s often a bit of melancholy surrounding Rorty’s treatment of the Hegels and Wordsworths, who outlived their brightest point, and a bit of embarrassed relief at the Byrons and Nietzsches, who didn’t. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#fn5">[5]</a> And, too, we get a sense of the strong poet’s self as a <i>forest fire</i>, taking on the Nietzschean accents wherein we get <i>cultural traditions</i> as the product of the burning of a poet’s imaginative exercises. And, of course, Nietzsche got that from Emerson: “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#fn6">[6]</a><br />
<br />
<b><a name="sec4">4</a>.</b> But does the self <i>necessarily </i>burn itself out? That’s a problem of imagery in the passage above—the imagination consumes, but what is the imagination if we abdicate the Kantian faculty psychology Rorty strictly forbids? There’s a weird hypostatization of imagination that Rorty rarely indulges in—<i>endlessly</i> consuming, subject to chance but <i>enduring</i>, it <i>will </i>continue to transcend. And if we turn back to those fragile lyrics, what does it mean for them to be <i>consumed </i>if we can continue to return to them?<br />
<br />
Pater’s sense of the ironist self as a “hard gem-like flame” gets at a self that is more relatable, I think, to the less self-destructive ironist than the strong ironist. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/asceticism-and-fire-of-imagination.html#fn7"></a> And here it’s helpful to turn to another user of fire imagery—Thoreau. In the opening chapter of <i>Walden</i>, Thoreau begins developing an extended metaphor around the notion of the “vital heat” necessary for life that should not be confounded with the tools we use to generate it and keep it.<blockquote>According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, <i>animal life</i>, is nearly synonymous with the expression, <i>animal heat</i>; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without,—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the <i>heat </i>thus generated and absorbed.</blockquote>Most of “Economy” is given over to railing against our having become beholden to the mere <i>things </i>we created to help us keep up our vital heat, life. What once kept us alive, now keeps us from living. “But lo! men have become the tool of their tools.” Sliding Rorty’s Deweyan-Wittgensteinian notion of language being a <i>tool </i>to help us get what we want over Thoreau gives us this: the fire inside not only destroys but creates—the trick is to not become obsessed with any particularly product for risk of starving your fire.<br />
<br />
I find Thoreau’s notion of the necessary “vital heat” in the self hiding behind the final paragraph of Rorty’s “The Fire of Life”:<blockquote>I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.</blockquote>To extend our metaphor: the fire inside destroys, consumes artifacts thrown into it, but in so destroying, it produces by an act of transformation. But how to describe that product? Rorty always recurred to Wittgenstein’s notion of throwing away the ladder after climbing it. But might we not want to remind ourselves of that act of transformation, <i>particularly </i>if we backslide? And now I picture Rorty, comfortably sitting back in a stairless 10th-story apartment, roasting chestnuts by an open fire. Or perhaps, roasting them in the pan itself: “we were put into our bodies as fire is put into a pan to be carried about…. [W]e are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it,” says Emerson in “The Poet.” We don’t precisely transform again by going over all our favorite aphorisms or lines of verse or favorite scenes of books or movies—but we do recapture something like that earlier moment. These chestnuts are <i>leisurely consumables</i>. And sometimes they surprise us—sometimes they flare to life again and teach us something new. (The best kinds, of course, are the ones that don’t burn down easily at all. This was the implicit definition of “universal” that I think Harold Bloom always had in mind in his late work—what we haven’t thought <i>through </i>because <i>it is still us thinking</i>. That’s a flame still burning on the fuel it was given. You might roll Landor around in your mouth for a bit, but Stevens’s “Of Mere Being” requires an awful lot of chewing.)<br />
<br />
<b><a name="sec5">5</a>.</b> There’s one surprising thing in this final passage from Rorty—his definition of what it is to be “fully human.” Rorty has as little business defining what it is to be human as he does suggesting words harm anything—pragmatists, and particularly Rorty’s pragmatism, abjures such theoretical positioning. The way to read this, I think, is as a last bit of cultural politics. It’s a rhetorical flourish, though certainly not a metaphysical definition of human nature. “Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human.” This is the Nietzschean romanticism of profusion, the form that finds most suspicious of all power-plays the <i>ascetic</i>. If the imagination is the engine of moral and intellectual progress, then a <i>full </i>mind with a polychromatic palette to paint with is the <i>most likely</i> to produce surprising patterns. The imagination needs material—fires need material to burn in them. An empty mind is just simply less likely to produce the bright flourishes that delight us and cause us to rethink our previous commitments and prejudices. That’s the main contention of Nietzschean romanticism. It is simply not the case that an ascetic form of life <i>cannot </i>produce moments of moral or intellectual progress. It’s just not likely. A mind that burns only one fuel is emaciated, and there’s nothing inherently special about an underfed mind.<br />
<br />
This is cultural politics because Rorty doesn’t want to suggest that asceticism is illegitimate in any strong sense—it shouldn’t be eradicated, for example, for the health of the state. Mill’s “experiments of living” forbids such a maneuver. But Rorty is pretty sure we shouldn’t encourage it. That being said, I don’t have anything better than Nietzsche to entitle myself to the idea that a full mind will have a higher probability of helping humanity. I know of no empirical studies, and I can’t imagine them being done. After all, to formulate the study-question is to beg the question against asceticism. All us romantic Nietzscheans have on our side is the sense that thinking about your inherited form of life is best when it’s <i>critical </i>and that to be critical is to take a standpoint outside what it is you’re criticizing. That means the more available “outsides” you have, the better opportunity you will have to be critical of your inherited assumptions and predilections. You might be able to breathe for a time on the assumed power of a favorite book, but a hermetically sealed tradition will eventually suffocate the fire of life.<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24152639#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></span></span></span></a></div>Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> This was published in <i>Poetry</i>, November 2007. It can be found online here http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/180185.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> From the Conclusion of <i>Studies in the History of the Renaissance</i>. <i>Studies </i>is the first edition, which was subsequently edited and rereleased in its iconic form as <i>The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry</i>. Current scholarship suggests that Pater was under some pressure to tame down the first edition, particularly the sexual connotations that so inspired people like Oscar Wilde, but however that may be, I certainly prefer the diction of the first edition in this passage.<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> Published in <i>Educations and Their Purposes</i>, eds. Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock, 2008, p. 44.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> Published in <i>Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment</i>, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, 2004, p. 12. This essay was reprinted with revisions in PCP, and the parallel passage is at 94, sans the Shelley (which is from <i>The Defense of Poetry</i>) and fire imagery. I suspect Rorty noticed he had too many metaphors going on. Happily, though, I've learned that Christopher J. Voparil, in his admirable collection <i>The Rorty Reader</i>, reprinted the original and not the cut PCP-version. Perhaps we could've lived without the fire metaphors, but there's a final section on Oscar Wilde and Rorty's vision of a literary culture that is excellent and now more centrally preserved.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> My favorite line of Rorty’s on Hegel is “What could he possibly do after the <i>Phenomenology </i>as an encore?” (Robert Solomon, in his <i>In the Spirit of Hegel</i>, reports that Rorty said this during an APA symposium on Derrida in 1978.)<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> From “Circles” in <i>Essays: First Series</i>.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> Rorty himself doesn’t distinguish between the ironist and the strong poet, a conflation in the book that gets him in a lot of trouble.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-77029834350107510252013-06-07T04:00:00.000-07:002014-07-19T16:31:00.124-07:00Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism1. Neo and retro — Rorty’s branding; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#sec2">2. </a>Pragmatism, radical empiricism, and the experience of life — Rorty’s 1<sup>st</sup> argument: why are we forced to use “experience”? — Myth of the Given and being forced — No force, no argument; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#sec3">3. </a>Rorty’s 2<sup>nd</sup> (non-)argument: “experience” is so <i>passé</i> — The linguistic turn did some good; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#sec4">4. </a><i>Varieties</i> and the metaphysics of feeling — Getting turned on by religious experience — Metaphysics and asceticism; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#sec5">5. </a>Making nonlinguistic bliss accessible — Bliss from reading — Ecumenicism and ineffability<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> I define “retropragmatism” as a recent species of pragmatism that hopes to help, in Barry Allen’s phrase, turn back the linguistic turn. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn1">[1]</a> I think such a term is helpful to differentiate it from “classical pragmatism,” which we should reserve for the historical moment now well past. For what usually marks retropragmatists is a disciplish veneration for the classical Peirce, James, and Dewey in contradistinction to their vehement dislike for the neopragmatists, particularly Richard Rorty. “Neopragmatism” was the term Morton White coined in <i>Toward Reunion in Philosophy</i> to house Quine in the pragmatist pantheon, and it has since come to be used to mark the rise of pragmatist theses in philosophers working in the analytic tradition, i.e. those taking the linguistic turn. The most famous, by far, of neopragmatists is Rorty, and the retropragmatists’ ire is markedly reserved for him, I think, principally because those outside of philosophy <i>identify </i>Rorty with the renascence of pragmatism and enthusiasm for James and Dewey—which those on the outside often identify with Rorty’s peculiar brand of James and Dewey. This pisses off those that had been toiling in the gardens of pragmatism these many years, particularly because Rorty’s version is certainly <i>not </i>the original.<br />
<br />
I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding by retropragmatists, more or less rightly resentful of Rorty’s undue influence on the branding of Pragmatism<sup><sup><sup><sup>TM</sup></sup></sup></sup>, of both Rorty and his position with respect to James and Dewey. On the side of the man, the emotions churned up by personal allegiance are, in the end I think, a necessary component of intellectual thinking. One might have expected someone in my position to say that such attitudes are “regrettable,” and they are in this case, but pragmatists have to think a little differently about the general role of such solidarity and <i>eros</i>. As Rorty glosses James, “there is no source of obligation save the claims of individual sentient beings” (PSH 148). I don’t think we’ve yet gotten to the bottom of what this claim entails, about only being obligated to each other, and particularly about the role of what James called “our passional nature,” but this isn’t the philosophical problem I want to address here. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn2">[2]</a> The reason I do, however all that, think resentment of Rorty on this score is regrettable is that Rorty was too humble a person for such attitudes to find a home. Rorty was happy that he could play a role in pragmatism’s rise at the end of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, but he was always deferential about what the gross effect was of his work. I don’t think he <i>wanted </i>people to think his brew of pragmatism was the one marketed by James and Dewey. I think, from beginning to end, he always felt awkward about accepting accolades for having done something people admired, and particularly for being pinpointed as an originator or powerful force of some idea or in some movement. Getting this sense about the man, however, requires rutting around in his writings for quite a while, and in the end—though as I shall be saying towards the end, this is actually not the case—our response to Rorty personally matters less than the position Rorty dug out in the pragmatist trenches. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn3">[3]</a><br />
<a name=sec2></a><br />
<b>2.</b> The best way of isolating the difference between retropragmatists and neopragmatists is wondering about the relationship between, as James distinguished them, pragmatism and radical empiricism. Retropragmatists generally see an indelible link between the two, whereas neos not so much. So while neos would rather dump the radical empiricism as an unnecessary (or even pernicious) adjunct, retros think that without radical empiricism, pragmatism has its kneecaps shot. This is the common way retros express their distaste for analytic philosophy, generally—where did the <i>experience of life</i> go? There’s a lot of that old-timey “love of wisdom” nostalgia built into many of these appeals to experience, or rather the demand that our philosophical vocabularies give pride of place to “experience.” Some of the differences between retros and neos are hard to repair because it seems somewhat attitudinal, or perhaps methodological. For example, retros would really rather insist on saying “appeal to experience.” However, the neos don’t know how to talk philosophy without narrowing in on the actual terms we use to erect our philosophies, and so insist that, rather than deciding the issue by how much one talks about “one’s experience” (whose experience? Yours? Mine? Do we need to do surveys? How do we make sure the all-important “experience of life” is injected in our philosophy?), we talk about the kind of vocabulary we use to do philosophy. So that’s why I say attitudinal and methodological—neopragmatists insist we not conflate the experience of life with something as expensive sounding as “radical empiricism,” and so debate the merits of the ism separately from other issues surrounding our philosophical performance, but retropragmatists are suspicious of conceding the point (probably because of the vague whiff of irony surrounding my earlier handling of <i>philosophia</i>), while yet eager to lock horns over that ism. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn4"></a><br />
<br />
Rorty’s only ever had two basic arguments to wield against radical empiricism, and so against retaining the term “experience” in one’s philosophical vocabulary (the modifier “philosophical” is important here, and often neglected in considering Rorty’s position). The first is implicit in “Dewey’s Metaphysics” (in CP), which begins with the citation of evidence that the master agreed with his rebellious disciple—Dewey’s late-stage hope, expressed in a letter to Arthur Bentley, to rewrite <i>Experience and Nature</i> as <i>Nature and Culture</i> and his regret about the earlier book: “I was dumb not have seen the need for such a shift when the old text was written. I was still hopeful that the philosophic word ‘Experience’ could be redeemed by being returned to its idiomatic usages—which was a piece of historic folly, the hope I mean.” Most of “Dewey’s Metaphysics” revolves around Rorty’s argument against <i>method</i>, and hence metaphysics-as-foundational. However, the piece of historic folly, I think, is created by Dewey’s hope to produce “a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into mental and physical.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn5">[5]</a> So the first argument runs like this: if Dewey hadn’t been looking for a set of “generic traits,” he wouldn’t have convinced himself that he <i>had </i>to include <i>any </i>particular this or that, let alone “experience.” This is not an attack on the attainment of a synoptic vision, though—Rorty’s favorite definition of philosophy, that vague activity, was Wilfrid Sellars’ “seeing how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term” and right down to the end of his career he was bemoaning its absence on the American philosophical scene. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn6">[6]</a> What Rorty rejects is the force of “had”—as a methodological point, we are <i>never </i>forced to use one term or vocabulary over another by anything <i>except </i>other people. So what neopragmatists need is a different argument for the use of “experience” than “you just have to because it’s just <i>there</i>, at the bottom of everything.” As David Lewis put it, incredulous stares are not arguments.<br />
<br />
The root of this point is the Sellarsian rejection of the Myth of the Given. “Experiences,” or any other term of art for an unconceptualized bit, cannot <i>force </i>you to think of them in any particular way <i>without </i>being plugged into a network of concepts (i.e. a vocabulary). Meaningful content being just <i>given </i>in an experience is a resurrection of foundationalist empiricism, which the classical pragmatists all rejected (more or less). So against the <i>demand </i>that we use “experience” in our philosophical vocabularies, Rorty flips one coin with two sides: 1) you can’t force me to use it without relying on a foundational epistemology and 2) why would you <i>want </i>a metaphysics of generic terms if you <i>aren’t</i> going to hook it up to a foundationalist epistemology? <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn7">[7]</a><br />
<br />
Why, indeed—there’s a good answer to that question, but I won’t trail around to it until the end. For now, it’s enough to see that since retropragmatists want to avoid the Myth of the Given as much as the neos, they shouldn’t be able to force the term on us by way of epistemology or metaphysics, about how we know or what we know. But we should notice here, then, that Rorty’s argument against radical empiricism <i>isn’t</i> that it violates pragmatism’s antifoundationalism—it’s that one needs a different kind of reason for taking it up so as to avoid that possibility. One needs an answer for (2). And at the same time, Rorty hasn’t forwarded an argument <i>against </i>radical empiricism at all—if anything, it’s an argument against one particular way of being against the linguistic turn.<br />
<a name=sec3></a><br />
<b>3.</b> The only other argument Rorty’s forwarded against radical empiricism is quite like the first—not really an argument against it at all. This is the argument in “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin” (in TP). It’s roughly this—“experience” is so <i>passé</i>. Some argument, right? For just as stares are not arguments, neither are yawns. Rorty notes in the opening pages of the essay, in a sociological manner, that “if one looks at the end of the twentieth century rather than at its beginning, one finds something of a renaissance of pragmatism, but no similar renaissance of panpsychism. The philosophers of today who speak well of James and Dewey tend to speak ill of Bergson. They tend to talk about <i>sentences </i>a lot, but to say very little about ideas or experiences…” (291). This is precisely what’s changing, but we still have here neither an argument for or against taking part in or resisting the shift. The reason Rorty thinks that “experience” is <i>passé </i>is because he thinks that the linguistic turn, on the whole, did some good for philosophy—that the linguistic turn played an important role in helping philosophers kick the incubus of representationalism. However, and this is key, Rorty does not perceive any <i>necessary </i>connection between talking about language and being an antirepresentationalist. He simply notes that Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson seem to have had an easier time turning the tide against an entire host what Dewey called “the whole brood and nest of dualisms” bequeathed us by the Greeks. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn8">[8]</a><br />
<br />
So what’s the deal? Where’s the juice? As we should be able to see, both of these arguments boil down to thrusting the burden of proof onto retropragmatists and urging them to answer, “what’s the difference that makes a difference?” I think the trick is to turn from Dewey to James. If one focuses on Dewey, I think it’s hard to see what all the hoopla is about. This is because a metaphysics of generic terms sounds so <i>boring</i>—how or why would we get fired up about that? <i>Only </i>if you thought you <i>had </i>to do it, but we’ve chucked that consideration. However, if we turn to James, we can get a better idea of what’s exciting. For Dewey, using “experience” feels like a purely intellectual measure; for James, it feels <i>experiential</i>.<br />
<a name=sec4></a><br />
<b>4.</b> This is what we get out of a book like <i>The Varieties of Religious Experience</i>. In his late paper, “Some Inconsistencies in James’s <i>Varieties</i>,” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn9">[9]</a> Rorty spends some time contrasting the James of “The Will to Believe” and Dewey of <i>A Common Faith</i> to the earlier James of <i>Varieties</i>, and particularly in retailing James’s ambiguities in how he uses “experience.” The main thing that comes out of the discussion, I think, is that what Rorty calls the “metaphysics of feeling” is the only good reason for thinking we need to risk the Myth of the Given (94). This is, essentially, Romanticism’s fire back across the bow of Enlightenment intellectualism. Rorty poses it as the corrective “to the metaphysics of cognition common to Hegel, [T. H.] Green, and Royce,” but rejects the idea that we need a metaphysics at all, a view about “what is real ‘in the completest sense of the term.’” The last phrase is from James’s conclusion: “so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but <i>as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term</i>” (italics James’s). This is a fairly typical formulation of a notion of direct experience that people like Rorty find it hard to understand in a non-Myth of the Given sense. But perhaps even more dangerous is the notion of “completeness” in this context: what could our leverage be for knowing when we have it? One would need a substantive epistemological criterion with an attendant method for telling the difference, and that’s what Rorty spent most of his career debunking.<br />
<br />
Rorty concludes by saying that if James <i>doesn’t</i> violate his own pragmatism by wielding “experience” as a weapon in metaphysical combat—something that would, because it is more “complete,” keep the slavering wolves of Freud and other external analyses of religious experience at bay—then this is tantamount to being “left wondering why we need bother with all those virtuosi” of religious experience that James elaborates in great detail, “whether the twenty Gifford lectures add anything to the twenty pages of ‘The Will to Believe’” (96). Why would we? Answering this question, I think, would be to move towards answering (2) above—why would we want a metaphysics of generic terms? Rorty, ironically enough, implicitly answers the question when he nevertheless “happily concedes” that <i>Varieties </i>“will continue to be read with profit for centuries to come.” Why would we read either <i>The Varieties of Religious Experience</i> or <i>Experience and Nature</i>? <i><b>Because they turn us on</b></i>. Rorty has repeatedly, throughout his career, articulated this ecumenical approach to life as a function of Mill’s formulation of “experiments in life” being the purpose of democracy in <i>On Liberty</i>. This is essentially an aesthetic attitude. However, it is an aesthetic attitude that is an <i>ethical</i> attitude, the same one Rorty urges toward James, that “exceptionally magnanimous man” whose <i>Varieties</i>, if read, “can help us become more like James, and thus help us become better people.” Why would we bother with all those virtuosi? Because “we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.” That is from the first chapter of <i>Varieties</i>, which Rorty quotes approvingly as the line of thought that would <i>not </i>have violated James’s pragmatism (91).<br />
<br />
Rorty can’t quite get to the point of suggesting <i>Experience and Nature</i> because it not only doesn’t turn him on, but he also thinks it feeds our ascetic impulses, the kind of masochism that leads to Platonism and that Nietzsche diagnosed as just another will to power. A metaphysics of generic terms would be a list you try and pare away to get as small as possible. But why? Who cares if it is small? To so care in this context would be to associate Occam’s Razor with a method to get at Reality as It Really Is. That’s why Rorty thinks of systematic metaphysics as a suspicious activity. But that’s a cultural argument about a certain type of <i>lebensform</i> and how much, on balance, good it has done and might continue to do. And that’s still not an argument against “experience.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn10">[10]</a><br />
<a name=sec5></a><br />
<b>5.</b> What I find most interesting about Rorty’s conclusion is that blind eye to James’s accomplishment in <i>Varieties</i>, which does not rest solely on the subtlety and generosity of the man’s mind and spirit. It <i>is</i>, as will become clear, an integral part of the achievement, but Rorty seems to suggest it’s the only thing interesting about it. However, what James does for a peculiar, modern <i>lebensform</i>—what Rorty variously calls “the ironist,” “the <i>litterateur</i>,” or “the intellectual”—is make an alternative, older though not quite incompatible <i>lebensform </i>accessible to it: James makes the nonlinguistic experience of bliss (what James, following the Romantics, calls “religious experience”) accessible to those who experience bliss primarily by <i>reading</i>. And what James, an extraordinary writer with an intense admiration for the ineffable, did for the capacious, aesthetic appreciator of mystic experience, someone in the future might do for the capacious, aesthetic appreciator of the multifarious forms of effing—call it, <i>The Varieties of Reading Experience</i>.<br />
<br />
Until that day, one might think we could console ourselves with reading someone like Harold Bloom, a voluminous reader who in the last half of his career turned to the “common reader” as the last bastion of secular spiritual autonomy. But this actually won’t help completely because Bloom decidedly and self-consciously is deaf to some forms of writing—if it isn’t written with one’s spiritual autonomy as a primary <i>foci imaginarius</i>, then Bloom doesn’t care much in talking about it. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-notes-on-rorty-and-retropragmatism.html#fn11">[11]</a> A true <i>Varieties of Reading Experience</i> would take us on a grand tour of literary history, and all the forms of writing and the experiences of reading adjunct to them, without apotheosizing any one particular form. It would be ecumenical to Homer, Euripides, Malory, Cervantes, Milton, Pope, Richardson, Radcliffe, Byron, Cooper, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Dreiser, Hemingway, Stevens—and if the point weren’t already too fine, I’d point out that we’d need to include Plato, Aquinas, Montaigne, Newton, Burckhardt, Pater, Freud, Weber, Bloom, and Richard Posner as well.<br />
<br />
One interesting point we can make about this fantasy, though, is that the ecumenicism demonstrated by James toward the various religious traditions he treats and that of my fantasized book are the exact inverse of each other, and possibly properly so. To be ecumenical to ineffable experience is to make all the experiences, in some sense, the same—but to be properly ecumenical to effable experience, one needs to attend to the boundless differences. This might, as well, point to a connection between attraction to the ineffable and asceticism (or <i>reduction</i>) and attraction to the effable and romanticism (or <i>proliferation</i>). And this might be the reason Rorty prefers Dewey’s slim <i>A <b>Common </b>Faith</i> to James’s fat <i>The <b>Varieties </b>of Religious Experience</i>. While Dewey merely <i>says </i>religion is romance, James <i>enacts </i>it. And Rorty doesn’t think we should tempt ourselves to the ascetic anymore by making it look so romantic and enticing. Whatever asceticism we should have should be in our relationship to <i>talking </i>about it—just enjoy the bliss and stop effing telling us to stop effing.<br />
<br clear="all" /> <br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24152639#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></span></span></span></a></div>Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> I say “help” because I get the sense that there is a much wider-spread movement to turn back the clock on analytic philosophy than just the species found in pragmatists. Since this is a broadly speaking “empiricist” reaction to analytic formalism, I cannot help but think that running parallel to a return to empiricist (foundational) metaphysics should make a pragmatist suspicious of the move, but then, an enduring tendency for pragmatists has always been to strike a more-empiricist-than-thou pose. I should also add that Allen, though formulating a number of powerful criticisms of linguistic-turn philosophy in his <i>Knowledge and Civilization</i>, wants little truck with a turn back to “experience.” Allen strikes a pose so reactionary that he’d turn us all the way back to before Plato formulated the quarrel between poets and philosophers—choosing instead the <i>artisan </i>as metaphorical unit for knowledge-production. This is a very interesting redescription of the philosophical landscape with powerful links to Dewey.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> Principally because I have only inchoate ideas about what to say about it as of yet. For an earlier discussion of Rorty’s “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” from which that line is drawn, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/02/rorty-religion-and-romance.html">"Rorty, Religion, and Romance."</a><br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> I would point to two things, however, to give <i>some </i>evidence, at least, of the claims I’ve just made. First, on the side of his deferential attitude, I don’t think Rorty was just blowing smoke in his “Comments on Sleeper and Edel” (1985) when, at a conference organized by the Peirce Society, he said, “I am grateful for the opportunity…, but I should begin by confessing that I am out of my depth in addressing this audience. Not only the people here with me on the platform, but practically everyone in this room has read more James and Dewey than I have, and read them more recently.” And secondly, on the side of his shyness about originality in particular, there’s the comment he makes shortly after in “Comments”—“I can only say that my references to pragmatism were an effort to acknowledge my own lack of originality rather than an attempt to make new bottles look good by claiming that they held old wine”—and his more interesting, personal reflection in the introduction to <i>Truth and Progress</i>: “Back in the sixties, when I was a thrusting young analytic philosopher, I heard an admired senior colleague, Stuart Hampshire, describe a star-studded international conference on some vast and pretentious topic – a conference from which he had just returned and the results of which he had been asked to sum up at the final session. ‘No trick at all,’ Hampshire explained, ‘for an old syncretist hack like me.’ At that moment I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up” (TP 10n5).<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> I should add that the relative merits of “experience” in our philosophical vocabulary is not the only general point of divergence Rorty, in particular, has with the classical pragmatists. The other basic one is about the relative merits of “method” in our philosophical vocabulary. However, since obsession over method never really went out of style in American philosophical life, it isn’t really all that retro to disagree with Rorty on that point as well. See Rorty’s “Pragmatism without Method” in ORT. (The irony of this footnote should be clear by the end of the piece.)<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> Dewey, <i>Later Works, Vol. 1: Experience and Nature</i>, 308; qtd in Rorty, CP, 73<br />
<a name="fn6"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[6]</a> Cf. “How Many Grains Make a Heap?” in the <i>London Review of Books</i>, Jan. 20, 2005.<br />
<a name="fn7"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[7]</a> For another, earlier take on Sellars and Quine in relationship to the pressures of the retropragmatists, see my <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/04/quine-sellars-empiricism-and-linguistic.html">"Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."</a><br />
<a name="fn8"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[8]</a> Dewey, <i>Middle Works, Vol. 12: Reconstruction in Philosophy</i>, 271. For this Rortyan argument, see for example his “Twenty-Five Years Later” retrospective to his 1992 edition of <i>The Linguistic Turn</i>.<br />
<a name="fn9"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[9]</a> In <i>William James and a Science of Religions</i>, edited by Wayne Proudfoot, 2004.<br />
<a name="fn10"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[10]</a> The attitude I have about the relationship between experience and language is essentially the same as Richard Bernstein’s, but the direction with which I’ve pursued the problem (of the relationship) is the exact opposite as his. Both of us are concerned to see this as <i>not a problem at all</i>, but Bernstein’s route in <i>The Pragmatic Turn</i> is to criticize Rorty (on behalf, you might say, of the retropragmatists) and mine has been to defend Rorty (against the retropragmatists). The basic defense amounts to saying that Bernstein overstates things when he says that “it is a slander to suggest that the pragmatic thinkers, who did so much to undermine all forms of foundationalism, were guilty of appealing to experience as some sort of foundation” (152). I don’t think Rorty ever prosecuted that case, though he did collect some evidence for it. I think Bernstein is not chary enough about the various uses the pragmatists put to that term, and that it’s only by understanding constructive philosophical efforts in the context of argumentative moves against opponents (though not only in this context) that we can see fully the relative merits of those efforts (as against other constructive efforts). (Rorty specialized in this kind of context-plumbing, almost to exclusion.) Neither one of us wants to be reductive about experience or language, and Bernstein, I think, would agree with me that the retros shouldn’t be attacking the linguistic turn <i>as such</i>—that language <i>is </i>exceptionally important in understanding our relationship to the world, and that analytic philosophers like Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Robert Brandom have increased that understanding because of their narrow focus. <br />
<br />
Perhaps, though, I’m being kind in not thinking Bernstein a retropragmatist himself, because his final paragraph of “Experience after the Linguistic Turn” dreadfully repeats the two basic sillinesses of the retropragmatist position against the linguistic turn as I understand it: that there’s any risk of “sliding into linguistic idealism” and that focusing on, say, “vocabularies” as your central philosophical term of art “severely limits the range of human experience (historical, religious, moral, political, and aesthetic experience) that should be central to philosophical reflection” (152). On the first, “linguistic idealism” is just the up-dated scarecrow the classical pragmatists were constantly fighting. All you have to do to avoid it is make sure to have thought through the consequences of what Davidson called triangulation, “the triangle that, by relating speaker, interpreter, and the world, determines the contents of thought and speech” (<i>Truth and Predication</i> 75). And Bernstein doesn’t recognize the extent to which Brandom, for example, does recognize the naturalized pragmatist notion of triangulation Hegel called <i>Erfahrung</i>. Bernstein, in setting up Rorty as a target at the beginning of his paper, mentions as an extension in a footnote that Brandom doesn’t even have “experience” listed in the index of his massive <i>Making It Explicit</i>—a fact Rorty had noted with some pride when talking about his former student (see TP 122). What makes this more complex than Bernstein acknowledges is that Rorty’s pride stems from the fact that he sees Brandom as “carrying through on the ‘linguistic turn” <i>by talking about social practices</i>—not “language.” (Bernstein otherwise does appreciate this—see <i>Pragmatic Turn</i> 213.) Bernstein, in the footnote, goes on to say, “Even though Brandom closely identifies his pragmatic project with Hegel, he fails to see the philosophical importance of the concept of experience (<i>Erfahrung</i>), which plays such a prominent philosophical role in Hegel’s <i>Phenomenology of Spirit</i>” (232n4). As far as I can tell, this was written/published in 2010, and by 1999 Brandom had in fact written an essay that amplifies Hegel’s notion of <i>Erfahrung</i> (published later as Ch. 7 of <i>Tales of the Mighty Dead</i>), which he refers to when discussing that notion in the classical pragmatists in his introduction to <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i> (2011). (And further, to say that Brandom didn’t recognize this in Hegel by the time he finished writing <i>Making It Explicit</i> might be wrong as well. He suggests in the preface to his <i>Between Saying and Doing</i> that he’d begun working on his “Hegel project”—the book that is to be, finally though still yet unpublished, <i>A Spirit of Trust</i>—by the end of the ‘80s.) <br />
<br />
However that may be, the more important silliness is the notion that talk of “vocabularies” might “limit the range of human experience” available for philosophical reflection. I have no idea how to limit the kinds of things we reflect about philosophically, and so have no real handle on how people who say this kind of thing wield it. I hear it all the time and am somewhat baffled. I can’t quite see how Rorty was limited, nor—more importantly—how his discussions of history and politics in <i>Achieving Our Country</i> or religion in <i>Philosophy and Social Hope</i> or aesthetic bliss in <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> were <i>in conflict</i> with his “linguistic idealism.” For that’s what you have to say if you wield this argument—that if the person <i>does </i>talk about a particular range of experience, they aren’t <i>entitled </i>to be able to do so. But nobody I’ve seen does argue this—they just say the target isn’t doing it, whatever “it” is. That’s the trouble—what does it mean to limit the range of experience? What does it mean to <i>exclude</i>, say, “historical experience” from one’s discussion of history? Then we might be able to get a handle on what it means to <i>include </i>it, and what it might be to construct a philosophy that perhaps allows for a division of labor between injecting the political experience of an age into a piece of writing and perhaps not but still having interesting things to say about the politics of that age. Because my hunch is that not even retropragmatists want or solely value one kind of writing on their favorite topics. After all, once you understand <i>reading </i>to be an experience—as one <i>should </i>given the logical amplification of the Hegel-pragmatist argument—then it would seem an impoverishment to the cultural experience of humankind if we said that we now only wanted writing on religion like James’s <i>Varieties</i>, Laozi’s <i>Daodejing</i>, and perhaps Kierkegaard’s <i>Fear and Trembling</i>, but not Sydney Ahlstrom’s magisterial <i>A Religious History of the American People</i> or Stephen Carter’s <i>A Culture of Disbelief</i> (because they are historical and socio-political, respectively).<br />
<a name="fn11"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[11]</a> Bloom is not a popular critic in the academy right now, and I often find myself cheerfully admitting my admiration in the face of frowns, but if one wants a taste for how self-conscious Bloom is about his blinders, and for his priorities as an intellectual, take a look at his introduction to Richard Wright’s <i>Native Son</i> in the Chelsea House <i>Modern Critical</i> series (collected in his <i>Novelists and Novels</i>).Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-66071975795135303072013-05-31T04:00:00.000-07:002013-07-05T09:33:25.523-07:00On Literature's Accidents1. Eben Cooke and two Jack Sparrows — “A clever man is never lost for long”; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#sec2">2. </a>Barth's shit jokes — Philosophy and literature; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#sec3">3. </a>Essence and accident — Nihilism and innocence; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#sec4">4. </a><i>Don Quixote</i> and the chivalric romance — Birth of the novel — Irony and the Cervantean tradition; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#sec5">5. </a>What is the point of literature? — Doing without certainty<br />
<br />
<b>1.</b> Ebenezer Cooke was in trouble.<br />
<br />
Newly named Poet Laureate of Maryland by the deposed and powerless Lord Baltimore, Ebenezer doesn’t let such a quibble as whether Lord Baltimore can <i>make </i>him Poet Laureate, rather than simply name him so, stop him from launching out for the New World. But Fie! ’fore he can go ten paces, he’s mired in political intrigue far above his pure heart and, sadly, head. Left to his own poetic devices at a bar by his worldly compatriot, teacher, and protector, Henry Burlingame—who’s gone off to squib a wench—Ebenezer is confronted by two Pirate Captains, Slye and Scurry, who in burlesque fashion are about to come to blows over who is the guest of whom, and so who shall chivalrously pay the tab (think: two Jack Sparrows, <i>avant la lettre</i>). Ebenezer, rational gentleman he is, can’t believe the argument, and in attempting to intercede, the two Pirate Captains train their guns at <i>him </i>and begin arguing who is the guest of whom, and so who shall chivalrously pump poor Eben with lead. Ebenezer responds by shitting himself and swooning like a gothic heroine.<br />
<br />
Burlingame thankfully saves Ebenezer any more embarrassment by taking him out to the stables, relieving him of his clothes (to be washed), and leaving him with this bit of wisdom to deal with his befouled fanny: “A clever man is never lost for long.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#fn1">[1]</a><br />
<br />
<a name=sec2><b>2.</b></a> John Barth has created this scene to…well, it’s difficult to say, as shall become clear in a moment, that Barth does anything for any particular purpose. Or rather, we shouldn’t limit his scenes to such formulas as I began with. For example, I was <i>going </i>to say, “to make a point about literature and the sources of wisdom,” but it’s quite clear that Barth also wrote the scene in order to make a bunch of shit jokes. Barth is just too funny to not also have had that as a primary purpose. But now we’re in the game of looking for primary purposes, and his scene clearly shoves that to the side.<br />
<br />
Barth’s <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i> is an elaborate parody of the 18<sup><sup>th</sup></sup>-century novel (though, again, saying that kind of misses the point), and as such it is about the late 17<sup><sup>th</sup></sup>-century. So when Ebenezer looks to his education, he distinguishes between the set Sir Philip Sidney did in his <i>Defense of Poesy</i>: history, philosophy, and poetry. Or nearly so, for Barth has helpfully updated the parlance to be <i>literature</i>—where shall wisdom be found? Ebenezer turns to history, but finds that “the eyes of Clio are like the eyes of snakes, that can see naught but motion” (172) and so naught of the timeless problems of humanity (e.g., shitting oneself for fear). And the philosophers must have “all shat syllogisms, that have nor stench nor stain,” all completely pure of “personal problems [except] insofar as they illustrated general ones” (173). So finally, with hopeful countenance, Eben turns to literature, whose “province [is] the entire range of man’s experience and behavior” (173). But, after recalling Gargantua’s wiping of his ass with a goose—and not seeing any geese around—Ebenezer concludes with heavy heart that literature “did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems” (173).<br />
<br />
However, after tumbling down the well of despair, Eben says to himself offhandedly (if portentously), “What hope hath he for other aid, whom wit and the world have both betrayed?” (174) With surprise, he recognizes it as a couplet—and a good one—and so casts about for his notebook to scribble it down. And then—bright as dawn, the answer to his problem: “two fresh and virgin sheets—and then two more—for the work, which, completed with no small labor, owing to the drying effect of the breeze, he turned into an allegory thus: the unused sheets were songs unborn, which yet had power, as it were <i>in utero</i>, to cleanse and ennoble him who would in time deliver them” (174-75).<br />
<br />
And so, literature did aid, if accidentally, with Ebenezer’s accident.<br />
<br />
<a name=sec3><b>3.</b></a> Is there a point here, aside from the multilayered fun being had in creating the situation? I take it we can move to one by applying the Aristotelian distinction between essence and accident to Ebenezer’s conception of philosophy and literature. The Aristotelian conceives of objects as being what they are by distinguishing between essential relations and accidental. Water is accidentally blue, for example, but essentially made of two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. But in dealing with “generalities, categories, and abstractions alone,” the fact that I used water in the example is accidental to the illustration of the general principle that objects have essences. And as the case then illustrates, philosophy’s essence is that it is always about itself, pushing you always to realize the same thing: the distinction between essence and accident.<br />
<br />
Having such a distinction in hand would make us ask what the essence of literature is—and since philosophy is about the essence of objects, that would make literature about the accidents of life, the inessential (yet the treatment of which seems, at the time, of the essence—ask Eben). Yet, just as philosophy is essentially centripetal and literature centrifugal, on this conception, it is just that which makes <i>both </i>essentially useless as guides to life if you are looking for the essential solution of a completely rendered problem. Life will ever be a series of unique situations, the record of which will never keep up in order to show you precisely what to do. Thus, if literature does help you, it is completely by accident.<br />
<br />
And yet, it is also literature that is going to be the only thing to turn to—a shot in the dark is still better than standing under the lamppost seeing, in perfect clarity, that nothing at hand within the lit area is going to help you. This cynical attitude toward philosophy-as-after-essence might be called “nihilism.” Nietzsche called it that, and so did Barth. Barth called <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i> the third of his “nihilist trilogy” with his first two novels, <i>The Floating Opera</i> and <i>The End of the Road</i>. In its essence, nihilism is the denial that Platonism’s search for purity by its aggressive use of invidious distinctions—such as between essence and accident—is a good thing. <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i> carries this out as a plot by casting Ebenezer as defining himself in essence as a poet and as a virgin—and a poet <i>because </i>a virgin (i.e. he drew his poetic power from his virginity)…and a virgin because a poet. (Letting “poet” here stand as a pun for “nerd,” which seems to me closer the case nowadays, is funnier to me than explaining why this is the case in the novel, though ironically one of the things Ebenezer learns on his journey is that “poet” in his day and age is synonymous with “manwhore.”) And by the end of the very, very (very) long journey, Ebenezer is chagrined to find that “the mere technical fact of his virginity” (628) has made quite a mockery of the Platonic-Christian veneration of Innocence.<br />
<br />
<a name=sec4><b>4.</b></a> But, of course, this couldn’t possibly be the point of the story—it doesn’t take 750+ pages to unravel the fact that the Christian sense of “innocence” ran on several different conflicting levels that seem somewhat absurd in our late age. We, by and large, already know such things. Even the philosophical point of nihilism wasn’t terribly new, and we are much more easily prepared for it than 200 years ago (though, written in the ‘50s, one could plausibly argue that we really hadn’t yet assimilated Nietzscheanism yet—or maybe even now). So what’s the point? Well, as one lover of stories puts it in the book, “’Tis a great mistake for a tale-teller to philosophize and tell us what his story means” (591). In fact, apropos unraveling any particular point, that same lover says delightfully that it is because life is knotted and bewildering “that a good tale tangles the better to unsnarl” (589).<br />
<br />
It is particularly the nihilistic strike against pulling a moral from your story that situates Barth in a literary tradition that stretches back at least to Cervantes. <i>Don Quixote</i> is centrally an inversion of the chivalric romance, a parody that ironizes the entire idea of the quest-romance—thus giving birth to the novel (so goes one of the stories critics like to tell themselves about the origins of things). One of the most important ironies is that in a quest, the knight-errant is supposed to encounter obstacles to be overcome, so that at the end of the journey the poet writing his epic can record the drama and heroism of his quest by showing what had to be overcome—how would we know heroism if there were nothing difficult to surmount? (This conceit—that the knight-errant plays to History—is nicely punched up by the minstrel following around Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot in <i>Monty Python and the Holy Grail</i>.) Well, one of the main obstacles Don Quixote seems to have to overcome is other people interrupting his quest with stories of their own.<br />
<br />
This digressive quality is embedded in two canonical 18<sup><sup>th</sup></sup>-century novels, Fielding’s <i>Tom Jones</i> and Sterne’s <i>Tristram Shandy</i>. George Eliot’s narrator digressively remarks in <i>Middlemarch</i> that Fielding’s “copious remarks and digressions,” particularly in the first chapters of the many books to his “history” of Tom Jones, are not for us “belated historians,” for “Fielding lived when the days were longer.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#fn2">[2]</a> This is funny, and funnier now considering how long <i>Middlemarch</i> is and how short we now like our books. Barth has said that when he set out to write <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i> his two goals were to write a plot as complicated as <i>Tom Jones</i> and a book fat enough for the title to be <i>across </i>the spine, and not down it. The sense of belatedness in modern novelists, though, has only become exacerbated since Eliot, and that was Barth’s response. Effectively, it was to double-down, and in the style of Cervantes, turn all on its head. The call of Romanticism was to make it new, but how many forms do we have to experiment with? That’s, centrally, the burden of the past Walter Jackson Bate traced. At a time when everyone was talking about “the death of the novel,” Barth pointed out that the novelists might respond by making it a virtue, and thus write “novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of the Author.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#fn3">[3]</a><br />
<br />
This imitation takes the form of ironizing past tropes, thus repeating but for “not it” purposes. As Alexander Nehamas has importantly argued, “irony” shouldn’t be reduced to meaning “the opposite of what is stated.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#fn4">[4]</a> Uses of irony have to begin—and occasionally end—with “well, <i>not </i>what he seemed to say.” And this opens up a lot of possibilities. One of those is, indeed, nihilism—the apotheosis of irony centrally turns over paradigmatic theses of the Platonic tradition. But <i>Cervantes </i>started this practice <i>at the beginning</i>—indeed, this is why Milan Kundera says that the Cervantean tradition runs precisely at odds against the European philosophical tradition. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-literatures-accidents.html#fn5">[5]</a> And the novel, of course, has had a mighty fine time thinking of things to write about since.<br />
<br />
Why did that fine time start to fall apart, then? Barth thought it was because storytellers had forgotten what their central occupation was: telling stories. Barth’s favorite figure for the novelist was Scheherazade, who had to tell stories to save her life. Fielding’s digressions were self-consciously maddening, but he did it for fun. Sterne, however, turned narrative digression into a principle of narration—he couldn’t tell a particular bit until he had set the stage juuuuuuuust right. (Tristram sets out to tell the story of his life by beginning with his birth, but can’t get around to being born for a couple hundred pages.) Barth harmonizes the Cervantean and Sternean into the plot of his Fieldingian <i>Sot-Weed Factor</i>. As irreverent as Fielding, the multiplicity of stories told end up knotting together in just the right way to afford both suspense <i>and </i>explanation—like Sterne, they had to be told in just the right order, and like Cervantes, the point of the stories was at the same time the stories themselves, only <i>seeming </i>digressions from the adventure at hand (though at the same time, turning the stories into the necessary obstacles to be overcome in the quest-romance—by poet-errant and reader alike).<br />
<br />
<a name=sec5><b>5.</b></a> What is the point of literature? After all, Barth can’t be writing about innocence and nihilism just for kicks, can he? Well—he can. But Barth also vies with Plato. If philosophy is centripetal and literature centrifugal, then Barth does have it as a central point that philosophy without literature is empty and literature without philosophy is blind. But to say this is just to say that the essence/accident distinction is best left to the side. It’s only binding ourselves to that distinction that produces the hard and fast rule that the only help in life is accidental. Literature does help you live life, and so does philosophy, but neither can do it if one has in mind to learn general principles that can be applied with perfect certainty of rightness, with a perfect, perspicuous correspondence between situation and appropriate action. And if learning to do without certainty is one of literature’s accidents, then it’s the only shit that matters.<br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24152639#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></span></span></span></a></div>Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> John Barth, <i>The Sot-Weed Factor</i>, 1987 Anchor Books edition, 172<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> In Chapter 15, or Book 2, Ch. 3<br />
<a name="fn3"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> “The Literature of Exhaustion” in The Friday Book, 72.<br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> See Part 1 of Nehamas’s <i>The Art of Living</i>, but especially Ch. 2.<br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> See Part 1 of Kundera’s <i>The Art of the Novel</i>.Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-60269358214899464702013-05-24T04:00:00.000-07:002013-06-22T17:54:56.009-07:00Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> 1. Phil 101 — Romanticism and religion; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#sec2">2. </a>Romantic roots, not scientific — Brandom and the second Enlightenment; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#sec3">3. </a>Rationalism as <i>reasons-for</i> — Irrationalism — Emerson, polychromatic mother of us all; <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#sec4">4. </a>James on religion, meet Rorty's romanticism — Dewey on religion, meet Hawthorne on romance — America's most powerful indigenous thinkers of the 19<sup>th</sup> century are not taught in American philosophy departments <br />
<br clear="all" /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><b>1.</b> Philosophy 101, and undergraduate programs in philosophy generally, still largely teach the history of philosophy as being about Platonism vs. Aristotelianism and then, for some reason a thousand years later, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, before being transcended by Kant who then bequeaths 20th century philosophy its central problems about the relationship between language and world, fact and value, analytic and synthetic. For students who take such classes, reading James’s distinction, in the first chapter of <i>Pragmatism</i>, between “tough-minded” and “tender-minded” onto the history of philosophy doesn’t make a lot of sense. Despite James explicitly aligning Rationalism with the tender and Empiricism with the tough, it’s hard for us on the other side of theoretical physics to understand what the relationship is between “abstract principle” and being a “man of feeling.”<br />
<br />
This is because Philosophy Departments still, by and large, do not know how to handle religion. Almost all Philosophy Departments feel it is their duty to teach the arguments, but regard religion, by and large, as a fallen foe. And this makes it difficult to breathe life into the animating commitments that made 19th-century philosophy the intellectual inheritor of the much-vaunted war between Religion and Science. And until Philosophy Departments learn how to write Romanticism into their pedagogical histories, they won’t be able to tell a very good story at all about how we get from Kant to Frege and Russell (the leapfrog they’d rather like to make). <br />
<br />
<b><a name="sec2">2</a>.</b> The weird wedding of James’s sensible distinction in temperament to the venerable distinction of pre-Kantian tradition is a function of the weird place pragmatism has in the history of philosophy, one the classical pragmatists did not wholly understand. For on the whole, it has been the wont of pragmatism’s receivers through most of the 20th-century to think of pragmatism as primarily leaning toward science and the tough-minded. This changed somewhat as generations of intellectuals at the end of the 20th-century became familiar with pragmatism from its most well-known, and infamous, espouser: Richard Rorty. Rorty, for better or worse, is known as the primary force behind the resurgence in attention to pragmatism. And beginning in essays like “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism” (in <i>Consequences of Pragmatism</i>) through <i>Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity</i> to late essays like the handily titled “Pragmatism and Romanticism” (in <i>Philosophy as Cultural Politics</i>), Rorty has tried his best to emphasize the romantic roots of pragmatism while minimizing its roots in reflection on science (best defined in pieces like “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in CP) and “Pragmatism without Method” in <i>Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</i>).<br />
<br />
It is against this backdrop that Robert Brandom provides an invaluable service to our understanding of pragmatism by reframing pragmatism as a “second Enlightenment” in his “Classical American Pragmatism: The Pragmatist Enlightenment—and Its Problematic Semantics” (in his <i>Perspectives on Pragmatism</i>). Brandom sees the pragmatists as inheriting empiricism via a Darwinian understanding of the holistic relationship between organism and environment and a statistical understanding of modal necessity. This primes them for throwing off the remnants of Platonism that Rorty so admires, but makes them susceptible to attack because of the unacceptable “instrumentalist” interpretations of, specifically, their theory of truth. This instrumentalism is the identification of <i>truth</i> with <i>success</i>. This Thrasymachean interpretation of truth—making it a mere power play—is heinous to any self-respecting philosopher, and it was anathema to the pragmatists as well. As Brandom puts it, the trouble with pragmatism’s articulation of a semantics is that they rarely moved beyond, in isolating the meaning of a belief, looking <i>downstream</i> to the consequences of that belief. Doing so, however, is one of pragmatism’s principle contributions in overturning the equally lopsided semantics of empiricism, which only looks <i>upstream</i> to the circumstances of belief.<br />
<br />
<b><a name="sec3">3</a>.</b> What makes pragmatism part of a second Enlightenment is in part its congeniality to a re-injection of—of all things—<i>rationalism</i>. This is Brandom’s unique contribution to pragmatism. Brandom has not only worked to undue Rorty’s emphasis on romanticism, but also his sense of Kant as a <i>bête noire</i>. Nobody talks about the rationalism of pre-Kantian philosophy as worth a hoot, whereas empiricism is still seriously touted as a respectable ancestor. Brandom, however, identifies a specific angle of thought begun in rationalism (specifically Leibniz and Spinoza) that is exploited and transformed in Kant and Hegel’s idealism—this he calls “inferentialism.” <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#fn1">[1]</a> The great modifier to empiricism that must occur is not simply in taking seriously consequences of belief, but also taking seriously <i>two</i> species of circumstances for belief. Empiricism identifies one: the <i>origin of</i> belief in a perceptual state. However, rationalism identifies a different one: the <i>reason for</i> belief in an inferential chain. For Brandom, a successful theory of how language works must combine the insights of empiricism, rationalism, and pragmatism, and it is to the merit of pragmatism that it is able to do so with very little tinkering to its core platforms.<br />
<br />
Pragmatism is a second Enlightenment because it extends two central tenets of Enlightenment thought: the naturalism birthed by the flowering of science and a distinctive apotheosis of reason. It is for this reason that Brandom denies Romanticism any significant role in the composition of pragmatism as a philosophical movement. He concedes that Romanticism performs many of the anti-Platonistic gestures that pragmatism wields as well against the pre-Kantian Enlightenment, but that its <i>irrationalism</i> is beyond the pale: “though the two movements of thought share an antipathy to Enlightenment intellectualism, pragmatism does not recoil into the rejection of reason, into the privileging of feeling over thought, intuition over experience, or of art over science” (PP 41).<br />
<br />
My principal suggestion is that Brandom is just wrong. Or rather, Brandom is here expressing one of his primary disagreements with his <i>Doctorvater</i>, Dick Rorty. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#fn2">[2]</a> This disagreement is about how to understand Derrida and Foucault: Brandom, unlike Rorty and like pretty much every other analytic philosopher, views fashionable French nonsense as a species of irrationalism. Unlike pretty much every other analytic philosopher, Brandom identifies irrationalism in a very precise way that makes an extraordinary amount of sense given his work on language. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#fn3">[3]</a> Being all that as it may, the <i>best</i> of Romantic thought is about as <span class="st">naïve as pragmatism when it comes to the antitheses Brandom marshals—i.e., if we are being charitable to the instrumental excesses of pragmatism, there’s no reason to be uncharitable to irrational excesses of Romantic thought—and, additionally and more specifically, one will get <i>nowhere</i> with Emerson—the great, polychromatic mother of us all—by thinking he <i>rejects</i> reason. <a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#fn4">[4]</a></span><br />
<br />
<span class="st"><b><a name="sec4">4.</a></b> If the culmination of the Enlightenment was Kant, as Ernst Cassirer has it, and Romanticism is specifically a counter-Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin has it, then pragmatism ties together in a coherent philosophy the best of the three worlds hiding inside: rationalism, empiricism, and romanticism. The best way to see this is to emphasize, as M. H. Abrams does in <i>Natural Supernaturalism</i>, that the historical movement of Romanticism was a replacement for religion. At the outset I suggested that we weren’t going to understand 19th-century philosophy very well until we wrote Romanticism into our philosophy textbooks, and its convenient that the ease in rebutting Brandom is by recurring to James and Dewey on religion.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br />
Brandom says that pragmatism doesn’t privilege feeling over thought, but this surely flies in the face of the central thesis of James’s “The Will to Believe”: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span class="st">Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, </span><span class="st"><span class="st">“</span>Do not decide, but leave the question open,</span><span class="st"><span class="st">”</span> is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. </span></blockquote><span class="st">I would certainly concede that what “passional nature” means here is obscure at best, and that what Rorty says in criticism of it in “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance” (in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy and Social Hope</i>) is largely sound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what James is pointing at here is what Rorty is pointing at with the notion of a “final vocabulary,” and while it may help to understand how language works to bracket questions of how the trick is done in favor of what the trick is, </span><a href="http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2013/05/pragmatism-as-enlightened-romanticism.html#fn5">[5]</a><span class="st"> it will not help our understanding of what it is we do, and what are legitimate doings, to abdicate an understanding of the role of attitudes other than the propositional—i.e., the role of emotions is woefully underdeveloped in pragmatist philosophies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They play an important but vague role in Rorty’s philosophy, and it’s clear that Brandom does not wish to discount them, but it seems clear to me that pragmatism’s stake in “the passions” is not simple enough to fit with Brandom’s warding off of romanticism.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">What is particularly disappointing in Brandom’s dismissal of romanticism is that he says nary of imagination, the most important piece of it to many, if not most, and particularly to Rorty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in order to solidify my ground against Brandom with Dewey, I want to point to a passage in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Common Faith</i> that parallels the thought of many American Romantics, and so open up a vista in a larger conversation than that of which just professional philosophers were having.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second chapter, Dewey gives this odd definition of “God,” one which Emerson would have recognized:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span class="st">We are in the presence neither of ideals completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For there are forces in nature and society that generate and support the ideals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">active</i> relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name “God.”</span></blockquote><span class="st">My parallel text is not Emerson, however, but Hawthorne.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In “The Custom-House” preface to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Scarlet Letter</i>, Hawthorne defines romance as “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a lot more to be said about the relationship between American Romanticism and pragmatism, and indeed, a lot more to be added to the conversation—already at work in tracing the Emersonian roots of pragmatism—about the relationship between the optimistic Emersonian strain of American Romanticism and the pessimistic Hawthornean-Melvillean strain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American philosophy, and intellectual life generally, is in a strange position regarding its 19<sup>th</sup>-century traditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike on the Continent, it is clear that until quite near the end of that century, there were no powerful American thinkers who were professional philosophers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this poses a problem for understanding American philosophy, when that century’s most powerful indigenous thinkers are taught in English departments.</span><br />
<br clear="all" /> <br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=24152639#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></span></span></span></a></div>Endnotes<br />
<a name="fn1"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[1]</a> Brandom tells a potted version of this historical story in the long introduction to his <i>Tales of the Mighty Dead</i>.<br />
<a name="fn2"></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[2]</a> I have to believe this willful writing out of romanticism is quite self-conscious, for Brandom even goes so far as to suggest that Rorty “thought that the biggest contribution philosophers had ever made to the culture more generally was the Enlightenment” (PP 108). This is quite a strong misreading, very much in the honorific Bloomian sense. For even if one emphasizes that Brandom said <i>philosophers</i>, you can’t miss the fact that Rorty thought Hegel one of the principal contributors to the flowering of romanticism. The philosophical anti-authoritarianism that Rorty articulated in his late writings, and Brandom traces to the Enlightenment, may be the first step, but Rorty would’ve demanded the second step toward the romantic apotheosis of imagination. It is not a mistake that in the same last volume of essays that includes “Pragmatism and Romanticism” there is no corresponding essay entitled “Pragmatism and the Enlightenment.” For better or worse, Rorty could not be convinced that there was enough to be redeemed in Kant (unlike Brandom), and felt that the Enlightenment philosophers were mainly, rather, responsible for our continued entrancement with Platonism, the original philosophical authoritarianism.<br />
<br />
Brandom’s best piece of evidence for Rorty’s sympathy with his misreading is Rorty’s 1996 Ferrater Mora Lectures, “Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics,” which Brandom attended—and Rorty never published together. One of those lectures was surely “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” which Rorty published in a French journal in 1999 and failed twice to publish in the two volumes of collected essays that came out from its time of composition until his death. And even in that piece, he calls the relationship between pragmatism and the Enlightenment a “useful analogy” and can’t help but mention the R-word in the same breath as Brandom’s E-word: “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved” (7). The rhetoric here is important, I think, in seeing the relative emphases between Rorty and Brandom, and the lines of misreading Brandom is involved in in displacing Romanticism for the Enlightenment. Not only can Rorty not but help inject “romance” into his qualified appreciation of the Enlightenment, but “required a more thorough-going version of secularism” doesn’t quite intimate the continuity of tradition that Brandom would like to establish between Kant and pragmatism. And further, what Rorty means by “the romance of democracy” is actually meant, I think, to establish a <i>distinction </i>between what Rorty referred to in his 1997 Spinoza lectures as the two projects of Enlightenment, one political and the other philosophical: “one was to create heaven on earth: a world without caste, class, or cruelty. The other was to find a new, comprehensive worldview which would replace God with Nature and Reason” (<i>Truth, Politics, and “Post-Modernism,”</i> 35). The first project—the Millian project of founding a democratic ethos—Rorty wants to defend, but the second to criticize, for he is one of those “who think that the Enlightenment philosophers were on the right track but did not go far enough. We hope to do to Nature, Reason, and Truth what the eighteenth century did to God.” There’s the idea Brandom is talking about, but in Rorty’s hands, I think, it was in the service of the <i>first </i>project that the 18th-century “did it to God.” The <i>political </i>project is the project of antiauthoritarianism, extended <i>into </i>philosophy as anti-Platonism. <br />
<br />
So the qualification that Rorty would make to Brandom’s formulation is that the Enlightenment philosophers did make a <i>huge </i>contribution to the larger culture, but it wasn’t <i>as philosophers</i>—more like as pamphleteers, as cultural propagandists. Voltaire is more important here than Kant, and though Voltaire was a <i>philosophe</i>, who is it who <i>isn’t</i> read in Philosophy Departments, again? Rorty’s conception of philosophy as cultural politics does make Voltaire a philosopher—and so validate Brandom’s assertion (<i>sans</i> “biggest,” again in deference to Romanticism)—but Brandom, I think, meant philosophy more narrowly. For while Rorty thought that there wasn’t anything that was <i>distinctively</i> philosophy, Brandom does think this, and what it does is precisely the form in which Kant’s contribution was made. Philosophy is concerned “to understand, articulate, and explain the notion of <i>reason</i>” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reason in Philosophy</i> 1), and what Kant did for us in the name of the Enlightenment political project is begin to show us that reason is a social-normative enterprise and not an authoritarian faculty. Rorty was never convinced by Brandom, whose “reinterpretation of Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of the practical is as charitable as it is ingenious,” that we shouldn’t rather emphasize the gaps between Kant and Hegel, instead of the continuities (“Some American Uses of Hegel,” 41). However that may be, I find Brandom’s strong misreading of Rorty and pragmatism very persuasive, so persuasive in fact that the only real response to it is to re-romanticize it.<br />
<a name=fn3></a><br />
<a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[3]</a> For example, Brandom says that the strand of irrationalism he identifies with Derrida “has its roots in the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It claims that giving and asking for reasons is just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one</i> game one can play with words, and that only a self-serving conspiracy of philosophers and scientists has convinced people that it deserves any privilege at all over all the other playful and artistically creative things one can do with language” (RP 144).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brandom has, to my mind, shown convincingly that Rorty’s rhetoric gets away from him when it seems he’s saying this—to get pragmatism to work in the philosophy of language, we have to repudiate, as Brandom likes to put it, Wittgenstein’s thesis that “language has no downtown”: it does, and it is the game of giving and asking for reasons (cf. RP 120).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rorty ran this direction because of his appreciation of the power of metaphor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the end, I think, Brandom’s rationalism has to be augmented by Rorty’s romanticism, for though Brandom carefully circumscribes the area of his project in order for others to fill in gaps he self-consciously avoids glancing in, there’s no reason to pigeon-hole Romanticism as a kind of dandyism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<a name="fn4"></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[4]</a> One might begin here by meditating on the parallels in themes, lines of thought, and verbiage between “Intellect” in the <i>First Series</i> and “The Poet” in the <i>Second</i>.</span><br />
<a name="fn5"></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="javascript:history.go(-1)">[5]</a> This is another favored way for Brandom to circumscribe his project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In describing the philosopher’s relationship to cognitive science, he says cognitive science is “concerned with the broadly empirical question of how the trick of cognition is or might be done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philosophers are concerned with the normative question of what counts as doing it” (RP 198).</span><br />
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="267"> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 7"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 8"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="toc 9"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="59" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Table Grid"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Placeholder Text"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Revision"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="List Paragraph"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Quote"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Emphasis"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" SemiHidden="false"
UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" Name="Bibliography"/> <w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
</style> <![endif]-->Matt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.com2