Matt Kundert's Pirsig Affliction

Do We Need a Center, or Generalities?

2011-10-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

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By 1980, Richard Rorty had added to his argumentative script the notion that Anglo-American philosophy was splintering into closed specialties that threatened a certain kind of inconversability. Different philosophy departments promoted different paradigms of what good philosophy looked like, based largely on what kind of problems and approaches to take seriously, and this of course produced different kinds of professional training. "The best hope for an American philosopher is Andy Warhol's promise that we shall all be superstars, for approximately fifteen minutes apiece." [fn.1] Rorty's was not, however, a nostalgic lamentation. The further along his career went, and the more acquainted with the situation of other humanities departments he became (particularly English departments), the more the notion that fashionableness was a good marker of disciplinary health rose to the forefront. "Fashion" was a good epithet for Rorty's angle of vision, for by using it as a commendatory term in reference to disciplines, he could at once recognize the utility of curiosity and newness in the intellectual life, while at the same time marking their transitoriness in the face of "the long view"--the view he often took, and the view up in flames from our currently fashionable faith in particularity.

One of reasons I am writing, however, is to wonder: is my sense that this is the case, about our current fashions, even right? More and more I get the feeling that fashions are fast-disappearing ghosts, and not because they are constructed out of our imaginations and flare for only fifteen minutes apiece. Fashionable Foucauldianism aside, culture being a function of the social imaginary makes its products no less real. No, what I have been struck by the idea is that for even the notion of a "fashion" to be applicable, there must be a center to the discipline, a center that judges "what is in fashion." These "centers" and "judgings" will always be wavering, disputed territory--we've learned that much from our theoretical sophistication about the notion of disciplines and communal self-weavings. But the material, disciplinary conditions that made this territory even possible might be disappearing. What made, for example, changes in fashion in Anglo-American philosophy possible was that one could chart those changes. How? By reading what people were writing--but not all of it counts. The notion of "fashion" does include having a periphery (and being "out of fashion"), and as such one judged fashions by looking to the journals that functioned as centers of influence, as gate-keepers to high quality, and thus to fashion. If you wanted to be in the know, philosophers in the middle of the century nearly all read some combination of the Journal of Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, Mind, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Rorty once commented that professionalization, when he was coming of age, consisted in being in "the pre-print loop"--seeing what established people were concentrating their energies on, and thus being able to "get in on the conversation" to thus show your own ability to people who could judge it.

This is disappearing, I think, largely because of the rise of specialization. Our awareness of this fact is not new. But I think we may finally be far enough along the process that we can begin to see what its effects may be. Specialization, the population increase within disciplines, and the "publish or perish" method of advancement have created a disciplinary world in which we may not have a center, nor need one. The one fear of this process for a long time, however, has been that nobody will talk to each other anymore. And the further along the track we have gone, the more I think this is panning out as a truth. That's my sense, at least, and I stand in general curiosity as to its truth. But is it bad, even if it's true? Is the conversational model, the lens with which to perceive disciplinary health, outmoded? What do we replace it with?

As more and more scholars born between 1890 and 1940 die, we get more and more reflections by their most immediate students about the death of the long view at the hands of specialization. Edward Said was already lamenting in the 70s the death of scholars on the model of Auerbach, Spitzer, and Curtius: people who seemed to know everything, read everything. But that kind of thing seems impossible today, and for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that there is simply too much to read. [fn.2] So, if scholarly specialization is, as I believe it to be, on the whole a good thing, what happens to our ability to not just talk to each other, but take that long view, to saying something general? Foucault seems to suggest this is a fading intellectual type, and that that might be a good thing, but should we be suspicious of Foucault, as he was, after all, a mighty generalist?

Walter Jackson Bate, that tremendous critic, scholar, and intellectual historian, was reflecting on something like the above problem when he wrote this in 1982:

The truth is that, with the fading of the Renaissance ideal through progressive stages of specialism, leading to intellectual emptiness, we are left with a potentially suicidal movement about "leaders of the profession," while, at the same time, the profession sprawls, without its old center, in helpless disarray.

One quickly cited example is the professional organization, the Modern Language Association.... A glance at its think program for its last meeting shows a massive increase and fragmentation into more than 500 categories! I cite a few examples: "Deconstruction as Poltics," "Lesbian Feminist Poetry in Texas," "The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature," or (astonishingly) "The Absent Father in Fact, Metaphor, and Metaphysics in the Middle Generation of American Poets." ... Naturally, the progressive trivialization of topics has made these meetings a laughingstock in the national press.

So, now we know Bate is additionally a snobbish prick. But is there nothing of value in the above lamentation? That passage was quoted in the book that happened to prompt me to these reflections, Barbara Johnson's A World of Difference. It was not finding the Bate, but reflecting to myself, "Why did I even buy this? Does anyone even take Johnson seriously anymore?" The trouble is that I don't even know where to turn to get a sense of how I should answer that question. The more time goes on, the more I get the feeling that the answer to such questions is both, and disturbingly, "Yes, you should care; and no, don't worry about it." I don't think the answer used to be that, back when there was a center, and this might be for the good: the sense of letting a thousand flowers bloom. But when you are job hunting, I suspect the answer is still, "Yeah, you don't wanna' take stock in the passé." But there's no center anymore to tell us what's passé and what fashionable.

But more than that question is the fading of the Renaissance view, the fate of the generalist, being able to take the long view. I'd like to think such a thing still desirable. But we can't read everything, and there's no center anymore to tell you what to read to assure yourself of a job, so splintering forces your head further into very local power structures (i.e. of your narrow specialty), and the force of "publish or perish" is such that nobody will get ahead taking the long view. Is that line of reasoning right? Is there anything to be done? Should we be worried?

I might, in the end, not say that I'm worried, but I wonder about the notion of generality being a specialty. I think it always was, but what's coming to the fore is how it might be becoming impossible to have more than one specialty. Whereas, one used to be able to cut their teeth on a specialty while keeping up on other intellectual pastimes, so that on the backside of one's career, aging in tenure, one could take the long view without worrying about professional advancement (and have enough logged reading and research to be able to take that longer, more comprehensive view), now I'm not sure we have the time to both make inroads on a specialty and keep up on anything else. Even if this is a confession of personal limitation, it has to be an increasing reality for more and more. And if it is, that means we will lack a community to be able to judge general assertions. For who will know? That's the Hegelian model of intersubjectivity at work. That is an actual possibility. And that is what strikes me as fearful: it's the inconversability fear again, but I'm wondering if put this way, it's less snobbish than fearing the death of the heroic, Renaissance übermensch. And the fact of the matter, I think, is that right now there is no professional outlet for specializing as a generalist. And that means no one will be able to do it in the future I'm imagining, and imagining as possible.

Endnotes

[1] Consequences of Pragmatism, 216

[2] Another to think about is the capabilities of our education systems. Auerbach, Spitzer, and Curtius knew absurd numbers of languages, and while we know this kind of continued diversity is possible, in Europe for example, I wonder if part of its possibility derives from the compact space that houses these different language groups. And if global homogenization continues apace, which we have no reason to doubt, then this condition will disappear as well. It isn't, in other words, just that Americans are absurdly exceptionalist, thinking everyone should just speak English. It's also a function of having other languages around, impacting your daily life. The only other route is forced entrenchment through public schooling, and not only is their no will for that, I wonder about its desirability (despite it being likely the only solution).

Rorty's Metaphilosophy

2011-08-13T08:00:00.003-07:00

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Rorty was hounded for the last half of his career with a reputation for having given up on arguments. It began when Richard Bernstein, one of Rorty’s more perceptive critics, noted that “although [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature] is filled with arguments, many of which are brilliant and ingenious, Rorty at several points warns against the love of argument that has characterized one strand in philosophy ever since Plato. What is unsettling and disturbing about Rorty’s argumentative style is that he refuses to play the game…, he doesn’t seem to be primarily concerned with carefully stating issues in such a manner so that one can proceed to develop the strongest arguments in support of a correct ‘position.’”[fn.1] “Style” is a good word here, as is Bernstein’s notion that Rorty has an overall “strategy” that argues at one point, but not at another. This strategy transformed itself into Consequences of Pragmatism’s suggestion that “the really exasperating thing about literary intellectuals, from the point of view of those inclined to science or to Philosophy, is their inability to engage in such argumentation—to agree on what would count as resolving disputes, on the criteria to which all sides must appeal. In a post-Philosophical culture, this exasperation would not be felt.”[fn.2] As this stands, it is slightly misleading to Rorty’s point, for it is not the case that literary intellectuals have an inability to engage in argumentation—it’s just that such argumentation is usually out of point when the main activity is “the inconclusive comparison and contrast of vocabularies” (xli). For, as Rorty goes on but eventually ignores the better wisdom of occasionally in his rhetorical flourishes, “in such a [post-Philosophical] culture, criteria would be seen as the pragmatist sees them—as temporary resting-places constructed for specific utilitarian ends. On the pragmatist account, a criterion (what follows from the axioms, what the needle points to, what the statute says) is a criterion because some particular social practice needs to block the road of inquiry, halt the regress of interpretations, in order to get something done” (xli, second emphasis mine).

“In order to get something done”—this is what ultimately explains a lot of Rorty’s wishy-washiness about philosophy, the activity he was trained to do and continued to do through-out his life, before and after his supposed Kehre in PMN. For Rorty never could become completely convinced that there was something pressing to be done by philosophy. So he couldn’t himself be bothered long enough to work out some of the criteria for “carefully stating issues” in order to “develop the strongest arguments in support of a correct position.” Why would you work hard at developing stronger and stronger arguments for a position that will be aufgehoben tomorrow because (and this is important) the “specific utilitarian ends” to which the position served have passed away? And so, as Rorty felt more and more alienated from his former colleagues at Princeton and more and more welcomed by “literary intellectuals,” this plausible stopping-point turned into his most infamous passage on argumentation: “On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the ‘intrinsic nature of reality.’ … Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to try to make arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace.”[fn.3] A few perceptive (and apparently kind, though for simply being more clear-sighted) commentators have noticed that there are, like in PMN, more than a few arguments, and good ones to boot. Rorty’s disaffection got the better of him, but his procedure was still the same as it was to remain throughout his career. Berstein calls this “a two-stage strategy” in which the first stage is to offer familiar kinds of dialectical arguments, which are as Rorty points out “parasitic upon” (CIS 9) the entrenched vocabulary you wish to displace,[fn.4] in order to “soften up” (Bernstein’s phrase) the reader for the second stage, which is to account for the historical origins of the entrenched vocabulary.

The controlling motif that underlay Rorty’s philosophy from beginning to end was the sense of philosophy as an on-going conversation. Rather than Whitehead’s metaphor of “footnotes to Plato,” for Rorty philosophy—all inquiry and writing for that matter—is more like a game of telephone: Parmenides said something to Plato who told Aristotle something it turns out is not quite what Parmenides meant. A “science” that has criteria and can argue, then, is something that can only arise if you can get everyone on the same page—say, if Plato had gotten Parmenides right before passing it along to Aristotle. But—why should Plato be required to get Parmenides right? What if Plato’s accidental mishearing and misreporting works better for what Aristotle wants to do? The idea of philosophers wanting to do different things is why Rorty once said that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules.’”[fn.5] If you don’t want to play Parmenides’ Sorry anymore, you change the rules so you’re now playing Aristotle’s Monopoly (a game which lasted quite a while). Philosophy for Rorty is a game of Calvinball in which the philosopher of the present is Calvin and the future is Hobbes. Calvin could never win against Hobbes because Hobbes was always better at making up rules than Calvin, keeping one step ahead of him.[fn.6] If you view philosophy like this, why would you want to play? This feeling comes out of Wittgenstein, too, and has recently come to be called various kinds of “quietism.”[fn.7]

Given this kind of abuse one gets from actually participating in the game of philosophy, always risking becoming outmoded by the next generation, Rorty pulled further and further back from the game. Pulling back from philosophy to make it your object of analysis used to be called “metaphilosophy.” The trouble with metaphilosophy is that it is still philosophy: metaphilosophy, like aesthetics and metaphysics, is just one more venerable subactivity in the larger form. So there’s a sense in which Rorty has continued to play the game. The question is: by what rules has he been playing by? Rorty’s bad reputation largely comes from the idea that he really did give up on arguments and that arguments are essential components of good philosophical activity. After all, so goes this line, if philosophy really is a conversation, isn’t the right thing to oppose to an asserted claim a counterclaim backed by a justifying argument? Isn’t there something pernicious about not meeting arguments with another argument, something that amounts to plugging your ears and squawking “la-la-la-la-la-la-la!” Rorty has struck some philosophers as wanting his cake and eating, too: remaining in the game without playing by the rules. “But whose rules?” replies Rorty. However, that being said, if Rorty is to commend his own philosophy, there does need to be some sort of explicatable standard according to which he can be shown to not be violating. This is the hard thing to do.

“Philosophy is a conversation” was the first metaphor introduced so let us tangle with its implications first. The notion of a “conversation” gives off a sense of dynamism that’s missing when you read one article or book, but gets re-introduced once you start putting articles and books side by side, “in conversation with each other,” as we say. However—these are still all just theories in a certain sense, a sense James gives when he says: “theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”[fn.8] Instruments for what? It is paramount that we answer: both for problems outside of philosophy and problems within philosophy. It is hard to keep these two things in view at the same time, and James, Dewey, and Rorty struggled their entire careers to articulate a conception of philosophy that balanced both in a single vision. James and Dewey—because this was against the understanding of the times—typically overemphasized problems outside of philosophy. This was Dewey’s sense of philosophy arising from our contact with the world, in all of its manifestations, for example the story he tells in The Quest for Certainty. Philosophy cut off from the world’s problems, then, is what creates scholasticism, the pointless counting of angels on pinheads. But since all responses are responses to the world in some fashion—even that terribly narrow portion of reality called “philosophy books and the conundrums you’ll find therein”—philosophers cut themselves off from the work of other philosophers at the cost of seeming to play a game by themselves.

This can be fruitful—what, after all, is a philosophical treatise other than, on our first metaphor, a monologue? As I said before, there’s something static about just one vision being articulated, but as Michael Walzer once said, “there are times when we need to listen to a sustained argument, a linear discourse.”[fn.9] This is what Rorty’s detractors feel is missing from Rorty’s later work: there’s no sustained argument. Rorty’s student, Brandom, spent nearly 700 pages articulating a philosophy of language. That’s a long time by yourself, but the game Brandom wanted to set up was intricate and he needed a lot of space, a lot of time alone. So Brandom spent a long time by himself, cut off from other philosophers (in a fashion), and set up his own game to play. What’s Rorty doing? He doesn’t want to set up his own game, he says, but he continues to spend time with other people’s games. What kind of game is this if you do spend some time by yourself (in essays), but it’s primarily with other people’s larger, more intricate games?

Rorty, like his predecessors James and Dewey, wanted philosophy to be a response to life. The principal slice of life Rorty spent his life responding to was philosophy. Uncertain about what was worth standing behind that was philosophical, what was worth pouring energy into creating and strengthening that wouldn’t look like wasted effort tomorrow (when Hobbes the Future changes the rules), Rorty…quit Princeton and moved to Montana to ride horses? No, he spent his life writing about and defending pragmatism, a big fat something if there ever was. So what kind of game is pragmatism and how does one play it?

Rorty’s answer was always that it wasn’t, properly speaking, a game at all, not like say Brandom’s systematic philosophy of language. This is his emphasis that pragmatism—under whose banner he gathered a large number of his favorite philosophers, from Gadamer and Derrida to Dennett and Arthur Fine—only makes negative points against positive programs.[fn.10] But if pragmatism is to be a coherent object at all—something that deserves a single name, even if it is more like a family name than it is a single individual’s—there must be a central vision around which can be identified rules that can come under violation: you need to be able to know whether you are a pragmatist or not outside of the fact that Rorty says you are. Rorty has run the range of derision to teasing about his lists, appropriations, and self-conscious ignorings of his “heroes.”[fn.11] But there is a central vision—why can’t this be the game, the system, the positive program?

“What kind of game is a list of negatives?” Rorty might say. What kind of game is a list of “don’ts” rather than a list of “shoulds or cans”? Every game comes not only with a list of things to prepare for the game (where to sit, what to have like dice, etc.) and a list of rules for how play proceeds (“if you land on a Chance space, draw a card and follow its instructions”), but also the all-important “Getting Started” section. Pragmatism is like a game with a list of things you can’t do, but nowhere does it tell you how to even get started with the game. And that is a horrible way to teach people how to be philosophers, for it tells you nothing about what to philosophize about. In fact, the answer is something like “anything you want,” but what if you philosophize about stuff nobody cares about? Playing solitaire gets kind of boring after a while.

But “anything you want” is the entire impetus behind pragmatism being a movement for putting philosophy back into the flow of life—you set your own agenda so that you can respond to the currents and corrugations of life. There is still this nagging problem for Rorty, though: his particular slice of life he’s chosen to focus on is still philosophy. This is like saying that his agenda is the management of “don’ts.” What are these “don’ts” and why should someone like Rorty be in charge of them? The core of Rorty’s answer emerged fully in his 1979 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the APA: “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 think one can decide between Hegel and Plato save by meditating on the past efforts of the philosophical tradition to escape from time and history” (CP 174). Rorty is in charge of the list of “don’ts” because it is a list built out of an experience playing with and looking-on over the games played by others. When a game breaks down or is superseded by another, there stands Rorty trying to figure out why. This “why” is then trotted out as an explanation for other breakdowns—if it works, then it is added as a “don’t”: a warning that if you try and set up your game in such-and-such a fashion, it will breakdown when it reaches such-and-such a point under such-and-such a pressure. One of the easiest examples is the Cartesian skeptic: he will always reply, when you think you know something, “how do you know?” To every response, he simply adds another, “So how do you know that?” The Cartesian game needs a reply to the skeptic that will get him to shut up. No reply, so thinks Rorty and a growing cadre of like-minded philosophers (e.g., Michael Williams), will shut the skeptic up because the criteria for shutting him up are impossible to fulfill. Once you allow the Matrix response as a serious, legitimate response—“what if I were to tell you that this is all a dream?”—to any particular phenomenological experience, then you’ve effectively made it appropriate and relevant to every experience. This is what the Cartesian problematic of beginning with methodological doubt does, so Rorty—following Peirce—says don’t start there.

One of the curious things about pragmatism, then of course, is that it is as much an experimental inquiry as any other. The list of “don’t’s” is grown out of watching experimentations in “shoulds.” The “don’ts” themselves, though, must be experimented on—fiat is not a good reason. “Don’t take things simply by authoritative fiat” we’ve learned through the course of history. Yet—sometimes you need to, like the parents who want to shut up their kid who’s doing his best impersonation of a Cartesian skeptic: “Why? Why? Why? Why?” We don’t have all the answers all the time, so sometimes we have to stop, to block the road of inquiry so we can go on to do something else, and one does that by fiat—one gains legitimate authority for such measures by wielding them only when appropriate. So pragmatism’s list of “don’ts” come with an elaboration of circumstances for appropriateness. As Fish has said, the pragmatist’s principles are “rules of thumb.”

I’d like to go back now to Rorty’s argumentative strategies and the rules of the game he plays and why it’s legitimate. The game of pragmatism, so far stated, consists in a freescape impinged only by a list of “don’ts.” This, on its face, doesn’t seem right, unless “don’t kill people” is suddenly a specifically pragmatist principle. So, the game of pragmatism is first and foremost a philosophical game. As a philosophical game, it doesn’t need to have explicitly rules from other games, it only needs to be able to account for their possibility (recurring to Sellars’ definition in [fn.2]). So there’s a weird sense in which philosophical games are one among many, and yet contain the others within it. The game of pragmatism’s mantra is something like: “get back to life!” which is all those other games. However, this isn’t a disparagement of philosophy, merely the principle that if you can’t make your philosophical game relevant to other games, then you’re doing it wrong. So the philosopher who wants to be a pragmatist has one of two choices: they can either fiddle around with other games in relationship to their philosophical game (i.e. the game of seeing how things hang together) or they can fiddle around with other philosophical games in relationship to their philosophical game. It is this latter practice which is the game of managing the list of “don’ts” by which other hopeful pragmatists keep an eye on in their freescaping. Since philosophical games are both responses to life and tools for improving life, one set of philosophical tools should consist in improving your philosophical tools so they don’t make your life worse. Pragmatism is the game of making sure your philosophical tools are working properly by making sure you can get back to other games with them. (For example, if you can’t shut the skeptic up, you may never have enough confidence that there is an external world out there, and never make it to the In-N-Out you're dying for.)

This doesn’t yet get to Rorty’s own form of list-management. The model I want to suggest for understanding the distinction between philosophy-as-freescaping and metaphilosophy-as-list-management is of war. This is an old metaphor certainly, but what needs to be highlighted is the difference between articulating a strategy and enacting a strategy. On this model, philosophy is what happens when battle is joined between real, live opponents. Metaphilosophy is the devising of strategies for what you would do if a particular kind of opponent appeared before you. Outside of actual war, of course, is peace and all the other kinds of activities one could be doing if one weren’t in the middle of a war. We might say that Rorty’s career, on this model, went something like this: a grunt fighting in the trenches (60s and 70s—e.g., “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” and “Incorrigibility as a Mark of the Mental”) to a captain managing a squadron (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) to a general on the field (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) to a Professor of Tactics at West Point, teaching the grunts, captains, and generals what they should probably do if they get caught in certain kinds of situations (I’m thinking particularly of the series called “Hope in Place of Knowledge” in Philosophy and Social Hope).

Saying that, however, skews the point of making philosophy a freescape that anyone can do because philosophy is a response and tool for life and we are all living. What we should rather say is that the grunts are all of us in our daily lives, dealing with live, flesh and blood people, and all of us dealing with problems (some of which arise from dealing with each other). The captains we might call “intellectuals,” the kind of person that has gained a reputation—for whatever reason: town elder, supernerd, academic, journalist, therapist, parent—for being able to help with other people’s problems. The generals, on this model, are philosophy professors (I should just say “readers,” but nearly the only people who concentrate hard on books from the philosophy shelves are professional philosophers). They are this because of what Rorty said: they deal almost entirely with the people who keep changing the rules of the game. The difference between clarifying a problem and changing it so you can deal with it better is negligible when you reach this height, overlooking the game of life. And then there’s Rorty: the Tactics Professor, retired and not even on the playing field anymore. What rubs people the wrong way is that Rorty seems to want to tell people how to play the game without anymore playing the game.

“Playing the game” in this sense is giving arguments. The trouble for this prima facie criticism of Rorty is that he does give arguments. What he doesn’t do is sustain them for very long, giving off a sense of being more and more distant from the feeling of being involved in philosophical controversy. And this because of the sweep with which Rorty wishes to encompass, a sweep built less out of an ambitious philosophical gaze (like Brandom’s) and more out of impatience for getting back to things that are probably more important. I say “probably” because I don’t think Rorty ever did shake the sense that meeting philosophical opponents wasn’t a good thing to do. Rorty was glad that Brandom did the things he was able to see him do. He didn’t keep doing philosophy because he needed to pay bills or had nothing better to do (though I imagine some days it felt like it), he did it because he wanted pragmatism to win. He wanted his game to triumph. He did have a horse on the battlefield (to mix metaphors even more quickly than I have so far).

So how, finally, do you manage a negative system? Rorty’s rhetorical pattern—from nearly beginning to end—was to talk about something bigger than himself: whatever ism he was promoting that day. What this allowed him to do was forward arguments that were depersonalized: like generals moving pieces on a Risk board. Rorty wanted to win, but you’re able to relax a little bit more and learn more when you take a little of your pride out of it by such a depersonalizing maneuver. You are not your theories, though there isn’t much more to you than that (at least once you expand the notion of a “theory” to the size that James used). We make growing easier through such an attitude. The second pattern that attached itself to the first was to talk of strategies: the strategy strategy. For pragmatists, beliefs are habits of action. Philosophy is the refinement of belief, not through experimental action to see its consequence, but through projection based on similarity of past cases of action. When you philosophize, you tinker with your habits, which themselves are in place to guide your action when the moment arrives. And when you think about philosophy as first and foremost a dialectical encounter with other philosophers, then you’ll talk about what you would do and say should you meet another philosopher. This is the form that system-building takes for a series of negatives: a list of hypotheticals. If such-and-such a condition is met, then I would do such-and-such.

Rorty’s later writings, when they were philosophical, had the simplifying and unsustained quality they did because he was thinking of the future: his goal was to teach the dialectical techniques and gambits that are, while not being themselves sophisticated (because a sophisticated technique spells several pages), in relatively good working order as first responses. I don’t think Rorty ever expected his shorter and shorter arguments to end argument. He wanted, rather, to display some of the tactics that come in handy and chart what, if an actual encounter should find you victorious, the consequences are having used such gambits. If you doubt the veracity of someone’s claim, you might say, “How do you know?” What Rorty wanted to make sure people knew is when pressing that claim turns into a monster and how you might avoid creating that monster, or believing that the monster really exists whether you created him or not. Is such a mode of philosophizing frivolous and disingenuous? Only if introductory manuals are. Only if kindergarten is. People have to start somewhere, and Rorty made the ambitious, courageous, and unenviable attempt to try and write for people who weren’t philosophy professors. It’s much easier to talk to people in your clique, where you don’t need to explain why you do the things you do. What made philosophers peeved at Rorty was that his simplifying maneuvers ended the argument before they wanted to see it closed. So it always must if you wish to move on to something else—Rorty’s mistake, if you will, was to continue to read, appreciate, and haggle with the top guns in the field and try and make them too-quickly-relevant to the other problems Rorty wished to discuss. I’m not sure this is irresponsible. It would only be irresponsible if people thought that a philosopher’s duty was to foreclose on argument—to end the argument. But Rorty only wished to move it further. The trick to understanding Rorty’s accomplishment in his later phase might be in considering them as advanced introductions—or rather, introductions for advanced thinkers. The sophisticated can become stale tramping around in their tired patterns and circumlocutions, and understanding Rorty’s thought might be to understand Emerson’s notion of self-reliance as a mature youth.

Endnotes

[1] Bernstein, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind” in Philosophical Profiles, 23. I cannot quite figure why Bernstein has quotes around “position” and not “correct.” The standard ironic handling of, from their point of view, philosophically circumspect notions that Bernstein and Rorty share would suggest this was a mistake, but it is in the original printing of the article, too. The only real suggestion I can give about the semantic alteration if they are scare-quotes is that Bernstein is suggesting that Rorty finds the notion of a philosophical position as suspect as (and/or part and parcel with) argument. This is plausible, though out of joint with where Bernstein is in his elaboration and, I think, ultimately misleading about Rorty. To suggest that Rorty’s attempting to conceive of a positionless position is absurd on its face, but the difficulty of finding a comfortable position in a given array of positions that all look uncomfortable is a real motif that came out of PMN.

[2] Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xli. The capitalization in “Philosophy” is due to Rorty’s distinction earlier between a nonprofessional “philosophy,” which at best is captured by Wilfrid Sellars’ definition “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term” (xiv), and professional “Philosophy,” which centers around “interlocking Platonic notions” whose conceptual shape is taken from the impetus to ask “questions about the nature of certain normative notions (e.g., ‘truth,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘goodness’) in the hope of better obeying such norms” (xv, emphasis mine).

[3] Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8-9

[4] The claim of “parasitism” has a submerged history in Rorty’s argumentative arc that is too much to excavate here. However, it would trace itself through Rorty’s peculiar understanding of Kant’s transcendental argument, in which Davidson’s argument in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” eventually becomes cast as the “transcendental argument to end all arguments” (in “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” in Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. Peter Bieri et al., 1979, 78), to his notion of irony in CIS which is first experimented with in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP). The two aforementioned papers were written about the same time, when PMN was in its final stages of composition.

[5] Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy” in Review of Metaphysics Dec. 1961, 301

[6] There’s actually quite a lot to be made of Calvinball as an analogy to life, particularly insofar as one focuses on Calvin’s need to follow the rules as Hobbes makes them up and compares that to Kant and Hegel on the bindingness of norms, particularly as Robert Brandom explicates them.

[7] Quietism is essentially an outgrowth of the idea of philosophy as therapy that Wittgenstein pioneered. For some of Rorty’s thoughts about recent terminology and the struggle over Wittgenstein, see “Naturalism and Quietism” and “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics. While siding with quietists in the former, he makes a distinction between “Wittgensteinian therapists,” the quietists, and “pragmatic Wittgensteinians,” and sides with the pragmatists against the quietists. This is an interesting move that would pay for more thought, especially given the movement between his appeal to Davidson’s “passing theory” argument in CIS (14) and his later criticism of that same section of Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”: “In the case at hand, they wonder whether the ability to cope with Mrs. Malaprop need be described as the ability to converge with her on any sort of theory, any more than the ability of two bicyclists to avoid collision is an ability to agree on a passing theory of passing” (“Response to Donald Davidson” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom, 75). The “they” opposed to Davidson in that passage are “Wittgensteinians,” and specifically “therapeutic Wittgensteinians.” Given Rorty’s career-long loyalty to Wittgenstein and Davidson as philosophical heroes, ferreting out the ratios of difference given shifted terrain in these instances would give us a good picture of Rorty’s philosophical instincts.

[8] James, “What Pragmatism Means” in Pragmatism

[9] Walzer, “A Critique of Philosophical Conversation” in Thinking Politically, 30. This is a fascinating article, principally about various kinds of ideal-speech theories wielded for political purposes (in particular Habermas). Walzer is that exemplary kind of political philosopher who keeps very well before him the distinction between theory and the real world, the unquestioned need for both, and the unquestioned primacy of the problems of the real world.

[10] For example, after block-quoting Peirce, Derrida, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Foucault, and Heidegger all in a row on the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, Rorty says, “This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new and exciting has recently been discovered about Language—e.g., that it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors cited are making only negative points” (CP xx).

[11] I’m thinking of, in particular, Deweyans who point out that Rorty violates a significant portion of Dewey’s corpus. See the exchanges in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, as a representative selection of criticism and how he responds to it. On the teasing end, there’s my favorite from Dennett: “Since I, as an irremediably narrow-minded and unhistorical analytic philosopher, am always looking for a good excuse not to have 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, the Rorty Factor: Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742. 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 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and come out about 40% ahead” (“Comments on Rorty” in Synthese 53 (1982), 349-50). Dennett, like Rorty, is his own kind of bizarre philosophical character, and this short piece has some very interesting insights into Rorty’s procedure, all the more so because of their disagreements about how to express themselves metaphilosophically.

What Is Literary Theory?

2011-06-07T12:00:00.001-07:00

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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The underlying intuition to first condition this question is that what is picked out by the word “philosophy” is basically the same as what is picked out by “theory.” “Theory” is whatever part of a discipline that reflects on the tools that discipline deploys to do its work. Thus, for example, “theory” is what is being done when a sociologist reflects on what is picked out by “society” or “group” or an anthropologist on “culture” or “ritual.” Almost every discipline these days has its own theory department, and no longer farms out the work to philosophy. (This didn’t used to be the case.) This has been a problem for philosophy, insofar as it has been harder for it to justify itself, but just insofar as it’s a problem for philosophy, it is—often covertly to those independent disciplines asking philosophy to justify itself—also a problem for the disciplinary theory-heads. The reason for this is that the experience of philosophy for 2500 years has been with abstract concepts and their relationships to each other. It has dabbled in concrete stuff from time to time, but every time it gets on a roll, the group of people in charge of the inquiry become full of themselves and secede from the union (a typical origins-story about disciplines from philosophy’s point of view). Without a doubt, every discipline has its own special problems that it needs its own special tools for, and for the most part it is best that a discipline make and improve its own tools (though outright stealing works, too). However, when it comes to seeing the relationship between those special tools and the special tools that other people are using, no one has any special province. The closest you can get is philosophy—that group of people with 2500 years of experience dealing with that kind of thing.

If you start with this understanding of “philosophy” and “theory,” the relationship between literary criticism and literary theory becomes a little clearer. It’s really the relationship between practical criticism of literary texts and theoretical reflection on the tools you use in those practical contexts. When you read Hawthorne through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis or Melville through the lens of Derridean deconstruction, you’re doing practical criticism when the primary goal of your train of thought is reading Hawthorne or Melville. If you’re trying to make a comment on psychoanalytic theory or deconstruction using whatever insight you may have pulled from reading Hawthorne or Melville, the comment itself is theory and besides the point of reading Hawthorne or Melville. Getting the theory right is a different context than using it to read other texts. It’s important to understand this. In the act of writing, one can attempt to do many things. But to know you’re doing many things, or to just do one thing and not those other things, one needs to see how to differentiate between different activities. And in the terms I’ve laid out, “getting theory right” means doing philosophy, which means attending to the problems generated in a different disciplinary sector than that of getting the literary text right.

Literary theory as a phenomenon in English departments in the United States is the product of the confluence of five things:

1) concern over how interpretation works
2) concern over what interpretations we should give
3) foundationalism
4) the dearth of Continental philosophy in the American university system
5) Baby Boomers flooding the market and looking for a way of distinguishing themselves for tenure and seeing this new thing to do (thus flooding journals and presses with articles and books about it)

The last two are sociological, external to literary-critical practice as such (which is not to discount the impact of the external, e.g. coming from wealth, going to an Ivy League school, being white, etc.). The last in particular I shall pass over without comment, and about Continental philosophy I will say one thing: while Continental philosophy’s seemingly sudden vogue requires more extensive treatment on just why it and not something else (one prima facie reason is that it was more “humanistic,” in a non-technical sense, than analytic philosophy had become), the conjunction of (5) with the lack of an established conversation about post-Hegelian philosophy in the United States produced the need to establish one. So professors in English departments started bootstrapping themselves in. The trouble that we are now seeing, however, is that no one is teaching it. Someone needs to teach it, because we should be reading it, and if it has to be English departments, while being weird and ironic (say it with me: English departments), then so be it—but they need to do a better job at teaching it in-house. Right now it is scattershot at best, and even then hit-or-miss as to quality, but the pressure of the discipline is that you do need to know something about it. I think the pressure is abating, which is a good thing for the discipline in the long run, but it isn’t clear to me that we shouldn’t yet have a better quality baseline education in it.[fn.1]

(1) through (3) are all theoretical, but it has been the conflation of these three distinct things that has produced the most theoretical trouble for literary theorists over the last 50 years. (3) is a distinctively philosophical issue, produced by thinking about “how one knows” isolated from any actual practices of knowing (it’s the isolation that makes it distinctively philosophical). The last 100 years of philosophy has produced a pure antifoundationalist strain of philosophical thinking. Philosophers of an antifoundationalist bent (which we can find all the way back in the Sophists and up to Hume and Hegel) finally reached self-consciousness about foundationalism being an actual problem to focus on in Nietzsche and the American pragmatists, and since then have produced a purer and purer polemic against that particular problem. The most confusing thing of all about the history of literary theory in the United States is that “literary theory” became self-conscious as a subgenre at the same time as the vogue of Continental antifoundationalism—which at the time was comfortably synonymous in many quarters with anti-theory (because “theory,” consciously or unconsciously, was nearly synonymous with “offering a foundation”).

The reason this could happen is that the dominant theoretical paradigm in English departments in the first half of the 20th century was “New Criticism.” New Criticism prided itself, however, on not being theoretical. The New Criticism achieved dominance in English departments, roughly, in part because of the pressure to discipline the discipline of literary studies (which itself was still being born as a university department in the first place), and so lose all the extraneous concerns in being a generally cultured person. What New Criticism combined, we can now see in hindsight, was the practice of “close reading” with foundationalism. To create a distinctive discipline, they claimed plausibly that the practice of close reading was what they did, implausibly that this was the only way one should read, and wrongly that this was the only way one could read. The first two claims are disciplinary claims for literary critics, and so can properly coalesce into a distinctive kind of thing called “literary theory.” The plausibility of their claims is, of course, a judgment by a disciplinary member on the far side of New Criticism’s hegemony. The third claim—the one called “wrong”—is the philosophical claim of foundationalism, where the moral “should” of the second claim turns into the stronger “could” of metaphysical necessity. (I’m not going to articulate and argue for why the vocabulary of correctness is, or rather should be, in play for the philosophical question as opposed to the disciplinary questions.)

I haven’t specified what close reading is as a practice, but granted that it does pick out something one can do, what you don’t want to do is confuse that practice with the question of how interpretation works—concern (1). The first claim of New Criticism is that there is a practice called “close reading,” a practice that can be differentiated from other practices of reading. To many people, this now seems quite plausible, and the first step towards plausibility is to understand that close reading is a kind of writing.[fn.2] But the New Critics sometimes treated it like simply reading, which makes it more plausible to think that what you are theorizing about is the uptake of conceptual information, i.e. interpretation. When you think of it as a kind of writing, the output of conceptual information, you’re more likely to see what you are doing as offering an interpretation—concern (2). The difference between the two is that when one theorizes about the former—interpretation qua interpretation—the focus is on a general human activity: the uptake of conceptual information is something everyone does all the time. One interprets, in this sense, a painting, the newspaper, or a stop sign as much as Hawthorne or Melville. This kind of theorizing will, indeed, be about the metaphysical necessity of how, exactly, one processes concepts and uses them in communication. As concern (1), put into full swing by Kant, philosophers of language from Austin to Brandom to Habermas have a lot that is relevant to say, but literary theorists have also said many relevant things (from Hirsch to Eco to Fish). However, what one should not do—to repeat—is make the mistake Fish acknowledges having made in his early, career-making books Surprised by Sin and Self-Consuming Artifacts: to confuse a reading with reading.[fn.3]

The only way to glue together concern (1) and (2) is with (3): foundationalism. This is how Descartes gets from the New Science to knowing in general (the logical positivists, too) and it’s the only way to get from a practice like close reading to reading in general. What you do is take one practice and claim that it is the foundation-practice upon which all others rest. This is close to what Kant does, but the transcendental maneuver is slightly different: it doesn’t take an object and “privilege it” (in a phrase still often used for antifoundationalist purposes), it asks what makes the object possible. It is essentially a mechanical question: what needs to be the case for this thing to work as it does? Close reading privileges, in the dirty sense, one kind of literary text: short ones. However, the practice of close reading can be used on anything, it’s just easier on short stuff. What made the New Criticism’s practice of close reading foundationalist is that they first gave a bad answer to how interpretation works (the central move is that it works on a text that is fundamentally isolated from the world—much easier to do on a lyric poem than a historical novel) and then claimed that any other kind of interpretation (e.g., through the use of biography, myth, class consciousness, etc.) is not true interpretation (usually qualified in some way to make “true interpretation” a gateway to the other, now extraneous activities—the other readings aren’t fake, they’re just irrelevant).

What happens when you get rid of foundationalism? Apparently what happens is that you spend another 50 years trying to figure out what getting rid of it means. The Continental philosophy imported in the 60s was all resoundly antifoundational in tenor, yet many foundational-esque habits continued. Some, like Fredric Jameson, tried to be upfront about it. But post-Foucauldian theory—which is something like a confluence of the political sensibilities of Marx with the antifoundational tendencies of Derrida—has struggled, to my mind, in shrugging off foundationalist theory because it feels the impulse to amp up the moral claims of “we should read this way” to “we need, nay, must read this way.” If you read “must” expressively, there’s no problem, but often the “must” comes with a battery of theoretical concerns about the nature of representation. “Representation is socially constructed,” we hear over and over again well after it was something that titillated us, “and therefore we must practice deconstructive criticism because showing how meaning is impossible is the only way to short-circuit the hegemony of European power.” If the vague reference to European power seems a stretch, all you need to do is remind yourself that “semantic authority” over descriptions that pass as true—and that passing as true is the only kind of true you get in this life—is what is produced in what we call “education.” And showing that meaning is impossible would indeed short-circuit such semantic authority (ignoring for the moment how one would have understood the meaning of that sentence). But it seems like a non sequitor from “this is the way representation works” to “we have to read this way.” It is basic to the is/ought dichotomy that Hume pointed out, and if you feel the need, as any form of antidualist, to blur that distinction, if you are also a critic of bourgeois liberalism and its ideology, then you’ll want to remind yourself that blurring that distinction is exactly how the liberal ideologists used their so-called essentialism to move from “I think liberalism is good” to “my cultural representations are the way the world works so I need to destroy everyone else’s.” The movement from is to ought has to be treated as a conversational non sequitor for the very idea of progressive change to be possible. If the necessity was understood to be a purely moral concern, a concern about how the practice of literary criticism should move forward, then the theorist would understand that repeating the lesson about how representation works is not an argument directly for the practice of deconstruction, but merely the preparation for clearing the field of old foundationalist dogma. Once the dogmas are clear, there are still a lot more questions about how one should read—or rather, what kind of readings one should offer.

The lesson I’ve tried to articulate in the above is that if you keep “how does interpretation work?” separate from “what interpretation should I offer?” you will find yourself in the proper disciplinary province of literary theory—reflection about the tools of literary criticism. Having some kind of idea about how interpretation works is, in this understanding, philosophical because interpreting linguistic phenomena is a general human activity and not distinctively literary-critical. This is not to say that philosophers are better at understanding interpretation qua interpretation than literary critics, but the questions and problems peculiar to it (as opposed to problems peculiar to interpreting Hawthorne or Melville) come up with more disciplinary regularity in philosophy than literary criticism (if only because the philosopher spends more time focused just on those abstract questions, and if only because all the special disciplines have forced such focus on the philosopher by making special disciplines around all the more concrete questions). Literary theory should be about what kind of interpretations we should be offering, but they shouldn’t turn on notions of metaphysical or epistemological necessity, for the only kind of reading those kinds of general necessity motivate are compositional—questions about rhetoric and clarity and such. Important questions, to be sure, and part of the province of an English instructor, but not special to literary criticism. Once we scrub Marx of his “science” and Derrida of “one cannot escape the discourse of philosophy,” then what we are left with are a number of tools—tools that can be refined by further reflection—and questions about what purposes we would like to fulfill by forwarding such-and-such a reading.

Endnotes

[1] My treatment of literary theory here, of course, is very schematic and far too generalized to count as good history. Still the best single account of how we get from the beginning of the 20th century to the end is Vincent Leitch’s American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (the central movement with the aid of a little imaginative extrapolation), but for the purposes of understanding why French and German philosophy caught on and not, say, John Dewey, Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, or Wittgenstein, Leitch doesn’t make a good answer explicit. Analytic philosophy is introduced almost solely so that one understands that “Continental philosophy” is the other thing that was in fact popular. I don’t think Leitch’s account suffers much at all, but there is a smaller story to be told, one with curious outliers like Hans Frei’s legendary book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, published in 1974. In the preface, Frei acknowledges three major intellectual debts: Erich Auerbach, Karl Barth, and Ryle. The first two are nearly obvious for a book of this sort, but Frei says of Ryle that “anybody interested in hermeneutics has special reason to be grateful to [Ryle’s The Concept of Mind] for its demystification of the concept of intentional personal action, and the author’s steady refusal to divide intelligent activity into separate mental and external components. It is a lesson well applied to the way one views written statements and hence also how to read them” (viii). Frei in fact commends Ryle over the Continentals in doing what he regards as the similar activity of overcoming philosophical dualism. So why did Heidegger and Derrida catch on and not Ryle? Again, there are a few obvious, superficial answers having to do with tone, and Leitch does canvass some of the external motivating factors, but once one gets down to how the superficial facets like tone connect with externalities like the general tenor of American intellectual life and the internal workings of the conceptual dynamics (e.g., what’s attractive about Husserl’s notion of a lebenswelt), as soon as you realize that the conceptual dynamics are more or less the same as those produced somewhere else, you are kicked back to the level of superficialities and externalities. It’s not that superficialities and externalities cannot or do not (or should not) have an impact on the course of history—it’s that what we want out of a good intellectual history is a story that does more than lay down those three different things in parallel tracks and make the gesture “and these three things impacted each other.” I think part of the problem in producing this story is that some are not convinced, as a matter of theory, that the story can or should be told (e.g., Foucauldians) and that for those that are, we still don’t have a simple model of what that kind of historical ligature looks like, and that because—again, at the level of theory—we haven’t a good model of how the material-practical impacts the conceptual-semantic through the mediation of the communal-social (the kind of model people like Ryle and Heidegger were moving toward, and people like Habermas and Brandom have nearly completed).

[2] For an argument about academic reading generally being a kind of writing, see my "Reading Academically." What is articulated there is a special theory of composition attached to the commitment of writing about other writing (this being analogous to the special theory of relativity's relationship to the general one). What is implicit in this kind of composition (i.e., academic) is a practice of reading that readies the uptake of textual information for the output of textual information. "Close reading" is a further kind of special compositional form that requires something like an analogous special reading form. The best theoretical formulation I've heard articulated about the practice of close reading (by Ed Dryden) is that one takes a block of text and treats it is a synecdoche for the rest of the text. Another way of putting it is that you take one passage from, say, The Scarlet Letter and then treat it as a paradigm for reading the rest of The Scarlet Letter. This allows you to say, "By explaining what this passage means and how it works, I've explained what The Scarlet Letter means and how it works." Clearly, then, this kind of model works really well for when you can fit the whole of a text within the whole of the model: when the part you're treating as a whole (synedoche-style) is actually the whole of it. This is why the New Critics were so fond of lyric poetry. The model becomes attenuated when you apply it to longer texts, but the practice of working out the conceptual dynamics of a single passage (my definition of "close reading") still works well for generating the meaning and mechanics of larger texts, even if these larger texts are more complex because sheer size makes it possible to do more textual things (a fact you can grant even if you wish to argue that poetry is semantically more dense than prose: just think of a novel as a prose-poem). If you want to make a claim that The Scarlet Letter, for example, does three things, the compositional way of arguing for this is to generate each particular thing from three particular emblematic passages that do that thing really well. Once you've generated an understanding of "the thing," you can then apply it at will in writing about other passages of the text, relying on your earlier argued-for-claim-backed-by-evidence. What is important to see, however, is that this is a particular model of reading: you are seeing the text differently because you are looking in the text for something specific—emblematic passages. The ends of writing do alter the means of reading (a point made generally in the opening of "Reading Academically"). This kind of reading doesn't work very well on certain kinds of texts and certain kinds of textual phenomena (e.g., narrative action). Despite the fact that generating textual evidence for a written argument will always look something like close reading, close reading isn't always the best foot forward in reading a text.

[3] See the introduction to Is There a Text in This Class?, where he describes the evolution in his thinking, from a thesis about Paradise Lost to a full-blown critical methodology to seeing that that wasn’t right as a methodology (though yet as a specific reading) to finally his theory of interpretive communities.

Lit Crit Stuff Archive

2011-06-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

These are a bit dated (for various reasons).

Literacy as Symbol and Material Means in Douglass

Wright and the Figures of Slave Narrative

Necessity of Adapting to Present Circumstances

One of the Most Important Chapters in the Entire History

Uncertainy, Reason, and Trust in "Young Goodman Brown"

Love Poetry, Pain, Distance, and Romance

The Representation of Animals

Bloom and Criticism

Longing for the Apocalypse

Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia

Modernism and After in The Art Lover

Eliot, Forster, and Experience

Lewis and Ulysses

James and Woolf

Of Mere Being

Order in Stevens

Phaedrus, the Woolf

Stuff in Intellectual History Archive

2011-06-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

These posts are a bit dated (for various reasons).

Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Reason

Plato: The Immortal Soul: Given or Proof?

Primitivism in Rousseau

Spinoza: God: Now 100% All-Natural

Machiavelli and Humanism

Socrates and Relativism

No More, Please: A Parody for Parity

Various Philosophers and Authors Archive

2011-06-06T16:55:00.000-07:00

These posts are a bit dated (for various reasons).

Danto: Voice, Mind, Heart, Spirit

MacIntyre: Epistemological Crises and Dramatic Narrative

Taylor: The Diversity of Goods

Baier: Doing Without Moral Theory?

Austin Gets Rhemed

Oakeshott's Rationalist

Dworkin and Rawls on Liberalism

Putnam and Pirsig

Marjorie Grene

Writings on Religious Topics Archive

2011-06-06T16:49:00.000-07:00

These posts are a bit dated (for various reasons).

Cult Followers and Free Thinkers

Verificationism and the Shibboleth Problem

The Myth of Buddhist Peace

Absurdity of Getting High and Having a Mystical Experience

Other Philosophy Stuff Archive

2011-06-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

These posts are a bit dated (for various reasons).

Are You Irrational or an Asshole?

Pirsig, Ad Hominems, and the Three Rhetorical Archetypes

Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics

Free Will and Determinism: The Contours of Moral Responsibility

Just Bitching

How Not to Start a Philosophical Conversation

A Theory of Rhetorical Overindulgence

The Difference: Conversion and Articulation

On Richard Rorty Archive

2011-06-06T16:32:00.001-07:00

These posts are a bit dated (for various reasons).

Rorty: Cartesian Epistemology, or Incorrigibility as the Mark of Something

Rorty: Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?

Rorty: Heidegger, Dewey, Pirsig

Rorty: Heidegger, Dewey, Pirsig II

Rorty: Genres of Writing

Map of PMN

Rorty's Myopia

On Robert Pirsig Archive

2011-06-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

These are posts that are a bit dated (for various reasons).

Language, SOM, and the Pathos of Distance

Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual

Excavating SOM

Towards a Narrative of SOM

Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig

Begging the Question, Moral Intuition(s), and Answering the Nazi

Pirsig, the MoQ, and SOM

Philosophy and Biography

Quality as Archimedean Point

Suggestions About Morality and the MoQ

Midwestern Megalomania

Notes on Mysticism: Madness, Directness, Tears, and Contingency

2011-01-07T13:00:00.002-07:00

*NOTE* The internal page links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

I.	Madness
II.	Menus and Maps
III.	Tears
IV.	At a Loss for Words
V.	The Feeling of Reality
VI.	Madness and Directness as Contingency
VII.	Spiritual Exercises

Madness
I would like to add a few notes about the surface of mysticism, which is to say the language and discourse that surrounds the mystic experience. The rhetoric of mysticism has often dovetailed with the rhetoric of madness. “Enthusiasm,” often used in older ages to describe the Western mystic, comes from the Greek entheos, which means quite literally “full of God,” and is often interpreted as “divine madness.”[fn.1] The rhetoric of mysticism also often uses the diction of directness, such that our common, conventionally appreciated reality is really an appearance behind that which is the real reality (think of maya from the Hindu tradition). A direct appreciation of the real reality, then, will appear mad or crazy to those still within the conventional modes of appreciation. This creates a problem, for we use the epithets “insane,” “mad,” or “crazy” to identify exactly those who are out of touch with reality. So who is right?

So direct of an antithesis is there between the two that rather than go straight at this question, we should perhaps first contemplate their agreement: variance with conventions. Reality or madness lies beyond conventions—perhaps such a consequential gulf embodied in this disjunct is what creates a sometimes thrilling anxiety. Since at least Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (though Freud’s description of neurosis surely got the ball rolling), Western intellectuals have become increasingly aware of how the position of an “outsider,” specifically in this case the “crazy person,” is created by how we count “insiders”—the conventional canons of inclusion. In order to approach the problem of what’s beyond conventions, I should like to briefly investigate how we break conventions, and thus occlude ourselves.

Menus and Maps
To do this, I will recur to two analogies used by Robert Pirsig. Pirsig’s most famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), did yeoman’s work in bridging typical Western divides between mysticism, art, science, and technology. Its success lay in combining a sophisticated genealogy of the modern scientific mind back to the Greek logos (in the vein Heidegger pioneered) with a down to earth mapping of that mind in the everyday lives of us passive technological consumers. Part of his success, in fact, lies in the fact that he is not a pioneer in any of the vast areas he rambles through, but rather in his vast powers of distillation, synthesis, and communication, using tropes that have floated through the public consciousness but now become welded together as part of a single thematic. As Emerson said, “the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men.”[fn.2]

The two analogies I should like to use come from Pirsig’s second book, Lila. The first establishes for Pirsig the mystic sense of reality he seeks to do justice to, which is difficult because for mysticism “the fundamental nature of reality is outside language”—“Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food” (72). What is nice about this figure is that it illustrates how the menu can get between you and the food. It also illustrates nicely the linguistic feature of what is between us and reality, and hooks up with the anxiety Plato inaugurated between onoma (name) and eidos (form) in which the lack of a link between the two eventually led to Saussurean declarations that language is conventional and thus arbitrary (because the names are instituted by us and not by reality).

Pirsig shifts his hold on this structural motif by moving to a second analogy: the map. Pirsig’s purpose in Lila is to create an alternative metaphysical understanding of reality (a “Metaphysics of Quality,” or MoQ) to the dominant understanding, which he calls the “subject-object metaphysics” (SOM). One problem with SOM is that it can’t recognize itself as conventional, and thus cannot have an alternative. The SOM version of the history of inquiry is a gradual unfolding of the single, correct understanding of reality. Pirsig doesn’t want to avoid the notion of a “gradual unfolding,” but he does want to say that our metaphysical assumptions are due for an upgrade:

“saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. A map with the North Pole at the center is confusing at first, but it’s every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Artic it’s the only map to have. Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation.” (114-5)

Pirsig, following a conceptual move prepared for by Mill and James, implies rather that it is the utility of particular conventions that should weighed, instead of thinking of an omnivorous Convention that is whatever is correct. The latter leads to the unhelpful circular logic of “whatever is correct is the Convention; and the Convention is correct, so you must be wrong.” This short-circuits inquiry, for every trendsetter was wrong before they set the new right.

Tears
Pirsig’s alternative seeks to include both conventions and mystic reality (which we might define simply and antithetically as “not conventions”). It has to do so in something like this manner: “this conventional understanding of reality includes both an understanding of conventions and of not-conventions, but because understanding is conventional, it can only indicate obliquely where not-conventions are, i.e. at the breakages.”

This is where the power of the map analogy comes into its own, for the notion of a map moves to alleviate anxieties about arbitrariness by tying us to a surface. In Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality is the primordial, mystic reality from which all unfolds. After the unfolding begins, the locus of any individual object as this particular object is defined as a static pattern of Quality—a rock is an inorganic static pattern, a person an entire rainforest of patterns, at the top of which are our intellectual patterns of conventional understanding. These intellectual patterns are our map. The map qua map does not respond to its environment, the person does. And the person has a pencil, and can keep erasing and adding topographical marks to better negotiate the environment as the person sees fit given the person’s experience.

In the Kantian version of this analogy that Pirsig aims for, however, though we are reacting to the environment, our face is always planted in the map—our mind is conventional, constituted by/as intellectual patterns. So how does one account for the mystic reality, for not-conventions? Not-conventions, in Pirsig’s vocabulary, are Dynamic Quality. Following the old mystic saw about pointing at the moon, think of the mystic reality’s inclusion as the words “Dynamic Quality” written on the map with an arrow pointing at a tear in the map it is next to. This gives us a way of interpreting the diction of directness: when you “look” at Dynamic Quality, perceive the mystic reality, you are actually looking through the map at the ground below. This is one way of describing how Dynamic Quality helps one change the map to evolving circumstances: it describes how we must perceive a hole in which we can fill in new conventions. No tear, nothing new; nothing new, no evolution. On the analogy of maps, one central concern of Pirsig has been to write into our maps a notion of change, of openness, of the element that will always escape Platonic encapsulation (what I've previously called "Quality as an anti-essence").[fn.3] Pirsig wants to bring back down to earth the notion of mystic experience, and one way to do this is to begin the rapprochement at the level of what we all do everyday without thinking: occasionally modify our habits of interaction with the world according to a world that is not our habits.

If this seems to eliminate a lot of the spice of mysticism, I’d like to move back the other direction by considering two basic kinds of tear in the map: perceptual and conceptual. By “perceptual” I mean considerations of reaction based on a novel stimulus from our nonlinguistic environment. Western mysticism has filtered down to us in large part through the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, which is more or less analogous to Pirsig’s reaction to SOM. Consider the similarities between Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Pirsig’s apotheosis of nature and the landscape (Pirsig carries, in fact, on his trip in ZMM a copy of Walden). The modern notion of “aesthetic sublimity” developed by Edmund Burke and Kant came about at the same time as the rise of landscape art as a popular medium. As artisanal technological grasp increased, alongside the spread of democratic egalitarianism (which consequently led to the rise of a customary, polite society), anxieties over a mechanized, conventional life increased. In reaction, we began to conceive of “nature” as an alternative.[fn.4] Though this has had a long tradition in the West, encapsulated by Plato’s antithesis between phusis (nature) and nomos (convention) and Virgilian pastoral, our specifically modern notions are nearer in development. Nature was to be both loved and feared—the sublime, as Burke and Kant conceive it, is scary for the exact reason that it spills over our conventions. “Wild” nature can still kill you. And we can easily see what they mean. Consider the Grand Canyon: the common experience of it is as a “blowing away,” leaving a person “at a loss for words,” “stunned.” These are conventional indications of how the experience of nature can evacuate your sense of how to respond, overflow or tear what Dewey called the “crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.”[fn.5]

At a Loss for Words
We might call being “at a loss for words” the state of being unable to constitute linguistic meaning. Another kind of experience of the world aside from the perceptual, nonlinguistic variety is the conceptual or linguistic. If regular, conventional, routinized linguistic communication is based on the mutual, correct transference of “what I mean” to “I understand what you mean,” then we can understand a breakdown in communication as itself a kind of tear in the map of understanding. On the Eastern side, we might understand this as the purpose of a Zen koan, what the Greeks called an aporia (literally: “with no way out”). Socrates’ elenchus, his dialectical method of cross-examination, functioned by taking conventional meanings and driving a person using those meanings to their natural ends, where they crashed against walls of conflicting answers—and that was it. Our best accounts of Socrates are that he never moved beyond his professed ignorance, even if Plato did. Partly, no doubt, from his masterful and obsessive use of elenchus-directed-at-aporia, but partly too due to the mask of irony he always kept over him, one of the recurring descriptions of Socrates is of his strangeness: atopia, “being out of place.” Pierre Hadot says of Socrates, with adjectives every one of which link with what I’ve been talking about, “he is atopos, meaning strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, disturbing.” Hadot then quotes Theaetetus 149a: “I am utterly disturbing [atopos], and I create only perplexity [aporia].”[fn.6]

Socrates’ strangeness is distinctively in language. The tear in the fabric of the map that Socrates represents through irony is a linguistic tear—what has been described as his “silence” is a distinctive kind of linguistic silence, constituted only by the language that surrounds it.[fn.7] Alexander Nehamas heightens this tear when he emphasizes that the peculiarity of irony is that it does not simply “mean its opposite,” but rather more difficultly “not this.”[fn.8] Socrates will always remain a mystery because we will never know what he meant because he never came out from behind his mask. In fact, Nehamas argues that it is the irony—the mask that hides meaning—that produces his reality to us:

“Incomprehensible and opaque, to his author as well as to us, Plato’s early Socrates has acquired solidity and robustness few literary characters can match. That is why he appears more real than fictional. Plato’s implicit admission that he does not understand him, his amazing success in reproducing Socrates’ irony not only toward his interlocutors but also toward himself, is the mechanism that explains why generations of readers have inevitably returned to these texts, convinced that they provide a transparent window that opens directly onto the light of reality.”[fn.9]

The Feeling of Reality
How can this be? How can a conventional creation feel real? This conundrum for literary artists gives us a good window onto the general problem of conventions and mysticism. For “reality” becomes a creation. “Reality” becomes something people sense, and the pattern of that sense becomes the earmarks of a conventional understanding of reality. The gradual unfolding of a better conventional articulation of our sense of reality is partly what a metaphysics is for. As Nehamas points out, we have come to see that it is because Socrates is ultimately unclassifiable, which is to say something that will always escape classification, that we feel he is real, a “transparent window.” This gives us a sense of reality as unpredictable—Socrates lives like a real person because like them he will respond to you occasionally in ways you did not expect.

Frank Kermode charts something analogous to this in narrative fiction. Narrative fiction functions on plot, on the “transformation of mere successiveness” into a meaningful temporal unfolding. The latter is “our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future.”[fn.10] Mere chronicity, the mere succession of one damn thing after another (as the old bit about history goes), has no meaning: it is just one thing after another. What creates meaning is a tie between one thing happening and another, causal or otherwise. This creates a past, and as human life moves forward in time, we are always looking forward to another thing happening, and not just any thing (like the endless myriad of occurrences we don’t even register as happening to us everyday) but something we are tied to.

Plot, however, is something artists create: it is a convention. Human meaning, once again, becomes conventional. Kermode recognizes this pattern and calls chronicity, “mere successiveness,” our human sense of reality. As I said, the amount of things we don’t notice and tie are infinitely greater than that which we do, and those unnoticed parts are the overflow of reality over the borders of our conventions. As human culture has progressed, we’ve become more self-conscious about how we are creating the meaning, and this stage is “marked by an understanding that this play of consciousness over history, this plot making, may relieve us of time’s burden only by defying our sense of reality.”[fn.11] So our articulated conventions of meaning “will be humanly serviceable as models only if they pay adequate respect to what we think of as ‘real’ time, the chronicity of the waking moment.”[fn.12] At the same time, we cannot go too far the other way, and Kermode marks both with metaphors of madness. “Schizophrenics can lose contact with ‘real’ time, and undergo what has been called ‘a transformation of the present into eternity.’”[fn.13] This is the collapse of temporally demarcated moments into one single enduring moment, eternity. But too: “To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane.”[fn.14] To see no connections is to behave like no normal person, to function without meaning.[fn.15]

Madness and Directness as Contingency
Partly as a response to triumphalist stories of all kinds, especially of liberalism and its converse Marxism, Foucault theorized and attempted to write his intellectual histories in a way to emphasize the disjuncts, the radical ruptures, of history—to eliminate the connections other histories emphasized. In a Kuhnian vocabulary, this gave the sense of paradigms shifting from one to another for no internal reason (a misunderstanding once foisted on Kuhn that he always had difficulty rubbing away). In an Aristotelian vocabulary, it reinjected what were seemingly accidental features of the essence of a subject (like the history of psychiatry or jails) and showed how they played a live role in their constitution and evolution. In Rorty’s jargon, Foucault emphasized the contingency of events on vast vicissitudes that are only uncovered by the use of a particular vocabulary—and now, after years of recorded history, we can see quite clearly how these particular vocabularies come and go and uncover and recover (both senses) new and old things. Rorty once said that Foucault gives you “a kind of know-how, a way of looking askance and obliquely at contemporary institutions and practices.”[fn.16]

If we put together Kermode’s sense of “mere successiveness” as a kind of madness with this sense of contingency, I think we have a philosophical map for what directness is in the map analogy. What is often qualified as “brute” or “sheer” contingency is the impress of the unclassifiable—you have never encountered it before, but you must encounter it. A vocabulary, on the Kantian version of the map analogy, plots (topographically and in Kermode’s narrative sense) what you see, what you are aware of, but moments of evolution are moments when the map breaks down, when something tears itself through the map unavoidably into your sight.

All of this emphasis on the metaphor of vision will make many post-Heideggerians suspicious (a well-earned suspicion). If we shift from the mode of considering both perceptual and conceptual rifts in a vocabulary (in which it makes perfect sense to say that the sight of the Grand Canyon startles you), we can consider Rorty’s way of describing conceptual contingency: metaphor. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty famously follows Shelley in saying that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”[fn.17] Rorty expands this notion of poet (Greek for “maker”) to include any “person who uses words as they have never before been used.”[fn.18] This allows him to follow Nietzsche in seeing intellectual history as “the history of metaphor.”[fn.19] So—what is a metaphor? Rorty here follows Davidson in describing metaphor as sheer noise—complete meaninglessness.[fn.20] Pure noise is sheer contingency, a linguistically unclassifiable experience. You can talk about noises, of course, but they don’t mean anything in the sense that you can’t talk with noise. However: talking about the noises, and increasingly with them—as in using them for particular purposes—crushes the metaphor under the weight of intelligibility, thus eventually making it a “dead metaphor” (like the foot of a mountain or the mouth of a river or the purity of a soul). Metaphors, like irony, are linguistic silences, tears in the fabric of meaning, dynamic introductions into a static topography. In terms of our map analogy, the death of the metaphor is the sewing up of the tear in our map, the dynamic, new classification used to pattern our experience.

There’s a sense, then, in which we’ve now classified the mystic tear in reality, or in Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality. But what kind of classification is this? I called Quality an anti-essence before, and even in the limited Aristotelian sense in which we can still get mileage out of referring to irrelevant accidents, Quality is still an anti-essence: the sense of directness mystics are talking about is that sense in which your sense of relevance changes, in which you notice that which you had previously been blind to. Quality, in another way, is a pure metaphor: so new that it startles, but always just that—the new that startles, the new that calls for attention. If we have a handle on the reality the mystics are concerned about, it is only in the sense of knowing that it is out there, potentially just around the corner, waiting to leap out at us.

Spiritual Exercises
This leads me to the function of mystic practices, which include such sentential attitudes as Zen koans. These practices are what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” Hadot, in turn, links the notion of a spiritual exercise to the Greek Christian term askēsis, which means in that context (in Harold Bloom’s version) “self-purgation” or (in Hadot’s) “self-transformation.”[fn.21] In Bloom’s ratios of poetic anxiety-management, an askēsis is the willed curtailment of oneself. One does this, as a poet (always remembering Rorty’s widened understanding), to avoid simply being the repetition of a previous, powerful poet. This, I believe, is the same basic premise of what Eastern traditions call “beginner's mind.”[fn.22] If we are thrown into the world and socialized, then one way to understand the process of individualizing ourselves to break free of the happenstance education we received is to empty ourselves of that which we’ve learned.

If we think of a literal, perspicuous sentence—a sentence that has a “clear meaning”—as having an inferential path from this particular sentence to another (from the first sentence to its meaning, a second sentence), then we can think of poetic metaphor as a moment of dynamic self-creation, a moment in which all of your education fails you and you are allowed/forced to supply something for yourself. For the sentence “love is a battlefield” has no single clear meaning—many paths are available. And even more, “blue is a tree”—what on earth could that mean? The purpose of a mantra in meditation is to help clear your mind, to eliminate it, by saying a phrase over and over until it loses meaning, until what used to be sounds that had meaning become pure sounds, phonemes qua phonemes, not phonemes qua words. And in that moment, when it loses all public meaning, it attains total private meaning for you and you alone, a completely inarticulate meaning lost the moment you turn to articulate it. The practice of attaining inarticulate meanings is thus a purely private exercise—or rather, an exercise of achieving pure privacy. The public benefit of such inarticulate meanings are not the same as those meanings we get from such sentences as “God is Love” or “America is Freedom,” for an inarticulate meaning is nontransferable. Its only public benefit is on the life of the person as a whole. The notion of “inarticulate meaning” is about as close as we are going to get to a meaningful notion of ineffability, which when push comes to shove is the last conceptual bastion of the mystic notion of reality.

Endnotes

[1]E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 70-75—and the whole chapter, “The Blessings of Madness,” generally—is invaluable on the Greeks.

[2]Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series

[3]See "Philosophical Antiauthoritarianism: A Reply to Johnston," particularly para. 6-8. For "Platonic encapsulation," see ZMM, 388. For an early use in an exposition of a couple Rorty essays, where I articulate some qualms I had about Pirsig's position, see "Hediegger, Dewey, Pirsig" (I'm not sure I still have these qualms). See also my "Introduction to Pirsig" for a short exposition of what I take to be his philosophical fundamentals (in terms of theses he holds, at least).

[4]This summary discussion is indebted to Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. In particular, on landscape painting see 88-90 and his discussion of Tench Coxe that builds up to his emblematic discussion of Carlyle’s disgust with mechanism 162-80.

[5]Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183. This famous passage that Rorty popularized as “breaking the crust of convention” occurs at the end of his chapter, “Search for the Great Community,” in describing the place of the artist in the community.

[6]Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 30. See also his Philosophy as a Way of Life, 158. John McDowell translates this as “What they do say is that I’m very odd, and that I make people feel difficulties.” Cornford as: “the ignorant world describes me in other terms as an eccentric person who reduces people to hopeless perplexity.”

[7]Stanley Fish argues in an analogous way about freedom of speech and first amendment law in the eponymous essay in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Part of Fish’s point is that if silence (i.e., the mystic reality for our purposes) is surrounded by intelligibility, then unintelligibility/silence surrounds intelligibility: “Without restriction, without an inbuilt sense of what it would be meaningless to say or wrong to say, there could be no assertion and no reason for asserting it. The exception to unregulated expression is not a negative restriction but a positive hollowing out of value—we are for this, which means we are against that—in relation to which meaningful assertion can then occur. It is in reference to that value—constituted as all values are by an act of exclusion—that some forms of speech will be heard as (quite literally) intolerable” (103-4). Compare this flip-flop perspective on meaning and unintelligibility to my description of Dynamic Quality as a tear in the map and Pirsig’s picture of Dynamic Quality as surrounding the static patterns in his SODV,13.

[8]The first three chapters of Nehamas’s brilliant The Art of Living are about the different kinds of irony at work in the Platonic dialogues, but see especially on this particular kind 52-7.

[9]Nehamas, The Art of Living, 91. When Harold Bloom discusses the aesthetic power of particular characters he describes them in the same kind of way, as remaining hidden from their authors, which like Nehamas is what then makes them appear more real, as living, breathing personalities than other kinds of characters. The common denominator is that the creation cannot be reduced to this or that description, something always escapes, is unclassifiable. The ability to represent the unrepresentable is the ultimate task, on a Bloomian aesthetics, of every artist—once a culture has learned how to encapsulate a figure or a text it becomes a “period piece.” This is why Bloom argues, for example, that Shakespeare is our mind and that he has not found his “reader”: to be the mind is to do the reading, and to “read” in this sense would be to reduce and thus to kill what was living and irreducible.

[10]Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 46

[11]Kermode, 57

[12]Kermode, 54

[13]Kermode, 55

[14]Kermode, 57

[15]I would go further and argue that, for all practical purposes, the notion of continued "pure immediacy" is both a feeling of eternity and "mere successiveness." This is too large a subject to wade into, but see my discussion of Wyndham Lewis in "Lewis and Ulysses" about what I call "fish-blink" time. See too my discussion of Jameson in "Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia" for another metaphorical use of schizophrenia and the linked notions of intelligibility and unintelligibility.

[16]Rorty, “Reply to Jacques Bouveresse” in ed. Brandom, Rorty and His Critics, 149

[17]From the close of Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry.” Rorty does not explicitly refer to Shelley in this regard in CIS, but it was undoubtedly on his mind and became an explicit invocation in his writings at the end of his life.

[18]Rorty, CIS, 28

[19]Rorty, CIS, 16. The allusion to Nietzsche is of course to his famous passage about truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” (Portable Nietzsche, 46).

[20]For the Davidsonian account of metaphor, see CIS 18-9 and the longer defense in “Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor” in ORT.

[21]See his essay “Spiritual Exercises” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, particularly 82. See also the chapter “Philosophy and Philosophical Discourse” in his What Is Ancient Philosophy? If we were to embark on an attempt to distinguish between theoretical exercises and spiritual exercises (such that we take on Nehamas’s note that philosophy is a way of life that includes the having of theoretical theses—see The Art of Living, 1-6), we will want to take note of Hadot’s suggestion that physics, for the Greeks, was a spiritual exercise and not an attempt for greater control (even predictive) over nature. This is one issue that animates Hans Blumenberg’s attempt to demarcate the ancient Greek from the medieval, and thence the modern. See especially his discussion of Epicurus in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 145-79.

[22]See ZMM, 291-3.

Philosophy Books for Literature Students

2010-12-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

It is a familiar fact that the term “literary criticism” has been stretched further and further in the course of our century. It originally meant comparison and evaluation of plays, poems, and novels – with perhaps an occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past criticism (for example, Dryden’s, Shelley’s, Arnold’s, and Eliot’s prose, as well as their verse). Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. …

Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism. But for accidental historical reasons, having to do with the way in which intellectuals got jobs in the universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties, the name has stuck. So instead of changing the term “literary criticism” to something like “culture criticism,” we have instead stretched the word “literature” to cover whatever the literary critics criticize. A literary critic in what T. J. Clarke has called the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of New York in the ’30s and ’40s was expected to have read the The Revolution Betrayed and The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as The Wasteland, Man’s Hope, and An American Tragedy. In the present Orwellian-Bloomian culture she is expected to have read The Gulag Archipelago, Philosophical Investigations, and The Order of Things as well as Lolita and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The word “literature” now covers just about every sort of book which might conceivably have moral relevance – might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important. The application of this term has nothing to do with presence of “literary qualities” in a book. Rather than detecting and expounding such qualities, the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased – or, where necessary, sharpened. (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 81-2)

Whatever the specifics of Rorty’s picture of what a literary critic is today (I say this partly because Rorty was reflecting on this at the end of the ’80s), the historical picture he sketches in the first paragraph is roughly what happened and gets at the consequences we still deal with. Because of further reactions to the “Orwellian-Bloomian culture,” the present state of becoming professionalized in an English department has become even more complicated, as the addition of what we call “New Historicism” and “cultural studies” adds even more kinds of possible books to be familiar with (such as adding “history” to Rorty’s list, which is all I think New Historicism amounts to, their protests to the contrary). This creates a frenetically anxious environment for the would-be practitioner, just coming through the door wanting to learn what’s what. By the mid-’70s, Said was already describing the situation as “less background, less formal training, less prescribed and systematic information, is assumed before one begins to read, write, or work. Thus when one begins to write today one is necessarily more of an autodidact, gathering or making up the knowledge one needs in the course of creating. The influence of the past appears less useful and, as two recent critics, W. J. Bate and Harold Bloom, have argued, more likely to produce anxiety” (Said, Beginnings, 8).

That’s only kind of what Bate and Bloom meant, and perhaps Said’s somewhat sunny slant on being the autodidact is because he was already so well-learned. The past isn’t “more likely to produce anxiety,” it just does—and particularly when you have less background, less training, and no systematically arranged information to peruse. The situation of the young literature student starting out is similar to that of the amateur philosopher—both are autodidacts, with many avenues of thought that could be pursued, which presents both the freedom and the dilemma: I can only go one way at a time, so which shall it be? Given the limits of time and energy, you don’t want to waste your time. But, too, Rorty’s pragmatic sensibility reminds you that at some point, you’re going to want to get a job doing this, which means you’re going to need to fake knowing something. Every tenured professor has a youthful story about a book that everyone else around them seems to have read but that they didn’t learn about until later. The goal of every student looking into the future is to minimize the length of that list of books.

It is in this situation that I make the following short list. The American education system does not prepare a young student very well to pursue philosophy, and it does this by slighting a historical background in the major thinkers. As a matter of cultural conversation, it doesn’t help to know that they were mainly white men who are now dead—if everyone assumes you know something about them, then you’d better know something about them. Who this unidentified “everyone” is, however, has been shrinking, at least in the United States. The fact is that after the ’60s and ’70s, if you were a budding literary critic, it’s quite probable that you read some Continental philosophy, like Derrida or Foucault or Lacan, because that was hot in those days. The trouble for us now is that it isn’t so hot: which means you are much more likely an autodidact trying to pick it up by yourself.

What makes Continental philosophy difficult is that their frame of reference is often either the history of philosophy or really weird descriptions of “common experience” (think: Being and Nothingness or Being and Time). The latter can be very useful in an ad hoc way, but it’s difficult to feel like you’re getting in the middle of a conversation because Continental philosophers often don’t talk to each other, but rather to the major figures of the past. And if you don’t know how to negotiate through those old figures, you can get lost pretty quick. The only way to get through that problem is to learn something about the past. But, as Said pointed out, there are no how-to manuals lying around. And on top of that, the philosophers who speak your language are nattering on to almost exclusively each other about problems only they (so they say) find interesting—this is why no one knows anything about Anglo-American philosophy either.

The list below is to help with getting into the Anglo-American conversation, to find an entry point into their conversation (unless you already understand Derrida, in which case go to Samuel Wheeler’s Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy). There’s no particular reason why one would need to, but the anglophone philosophical conversation does have some distinctive things it does better and there is the added bonus of knowing something no one else knows (distinguishability is a valuable intellectual-market commodity). In addition, if you want to know more about the Big Dead Guys, you can’t read just any English-speaker’s introductory version, because they often won’t tell you anything relevant to the way the Continental philosophers are talking about them. (Exemplary exception: Robert Solomon’s Continental Philosophy Since 1750. And also, though a Frenchman, Vincent Descombes’s Modern French Philosophy is a brilliant discussion of the Continental mid-century ferment.) And that’s just what a growing intellectual needs: coin to make your way between disciplines, not burrowing into one extra discipline that might never come in handy. Said’s literary critic as quasi-autodidact is very much right insofar as the problems that a student will become immersed in and seek to solve might take them in any number of directions, and the trick is to be able to very quickly sink into a pile of research without getting lost and going the wrong direction (the problem of the red herring).

What makes the list below what it is is that 1) each philosopher was important at some point to the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, 2) the books in some way recapitulate facets of those conversations, 3) they are also about much bigger fish than those narrow conversations, 4) they are very well-schooled in the history of philosophy and the books enter into that larger sequence, and 5) they all have an eye towards an even larger intellectual conversation that, for example, includes literature. Because of those 5 things, the list below is designed to not waste a literature student’s time.

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre—One of the most important books of moral philosophy in the last 50 years, this was MacIntyre’s first extended attempt to link together work in epistemology, philosophy of action, and the fate of our moral and political cultures. And while disagreement with some of its central claims is almost necessary for anyone who doesn’t think God is a necessary presupposition, it is a fascinating tour de force that takes you through the Greeks and the Enlightenment on the composition of communities. In order to get past the notion that Lyotardian postmodernism means the death of continuity and the birth of free-wheeling relativism, one needs a working notion of tradition and practices. MacIntyre offers an excellent version here, while at the same time arguing (as Marxists will love) that liberalism is still undermining their composition. One interesting facet of the book is his treatment of Jane Austen as a moral philosopher.

Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor—Taylor’s book might be an even larger story with a similar perspective as MacIntyre’s, though their titles effectively give you each of their focuses. Taylor’s story is especially important given the kind of sophistication literature students are to show in handling a “character” as a locus of selfhood—for if a character has a self, it might be useful to know how our notions of what a self is have evolved (and thus plunk an author in their own historical milieu). This was a major entry into the debates about “modernity” (even if I think that word is overused), just as Taylor’s recent A Secular Age is a major entry into the somehow still-ongoing debates about secularization. Taylor and MacIntyre were two major thinkers identified as “communitarians”—the position you get when you want to throw away the worst of Marx and keep the best of Hegel. Hegel’s “beautiful soul” is (with good reason) hot right now, and that description of the Romantic self perfectly complements Taylor’s story, which engages heavily with literary traditions, particularly poetry.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by Bernard Williams—this book is largely supposed to be about ethics and political philosophy, but it is something like a comprehensive system inasmuch as Williams situates it within a set of relationships with philosophical neighbors like the philosophy of science and of language. The chapters on their interrelations are some of the best of its kind. Williams also has a historical depth of understanding that is nearly matchless, and his unique ability is to distill the past into its heritage for us today without harming it. Transforming the past into a set of problems to be negotiated is an excellent way to make the actual reading of Plato’s Republic or Kant’s Critiques not just a haze of bare understanding of what’s going on.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty—while MacIntyre’s book distills his earlier work on the philosophy of the social sciences and of action and Williams his work on science and language, they don’t go into extraordinary detail on those conversations. Rorty’s book is, by itself, the most comprehensive recapitulation of the minute details of the “core subjects” of the first 100 years of analytic philosophy available (roughly, 1880 to 1980—Frege to Davidson). It is beautifully Hegelian in its ability to tell a progressive story about how one philosophical position was transumed by the next up to this present (late ’70s) moment. Even if disagreeable in its conclusions, its ability to lay bare the reasons for one position against another is the ideal starting point to understanding what philosophers of language and of mind are going on about. It also situates these smaller conversations into a larger story stretching back to the Greeks and makes inroads to connecting the anglophone conversation with the Continental one.

Must We Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell—if it was difficult to choose one book from the array of useful and powerful books from each of the previous authors’ storehouse (it being very difficult not to choose Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), it was particularly difficult to choose which Cavell book to single out. However, given my commitment to the utility of the book to introduce an autodidact into the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, I chose this book on the basis of each essay’s sterling compactness on an array of relevant issues. The Claim of Reason was difficult not to choose, but Cavell’s discussions of Austin, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics and his general performance in the vein of “ordinary language philosophy” (while offering penetrating insight into what the hell that is) are perfect introductions to their subjects and the occasional weirdness of his later work.

Those are my five suggestions, five being a nice round number, though now I will indulge in four more that more or less fail in the “introduction to anglophone conversation” criterion. These are just brilliant.

The Art of Living by Alexander Nehamas—Nehamas is the most eminent philosophical scholar (a philosopher, not a classicist) of Socrates and Plato living today. This book is, actually, an excellent introduction into a host of scholarly problems about reading Plato, with dense endnotes. Its brilliance, however, is in its humane rendering of what the “philosophical life” is, beginning with the impact of Socrates as a figure in the mind of the philosopher. What follows are amazing discussions of silence, discussion, arête, knowledge, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Foucault and, above all, irony. If you work anywhere in the vicinity of the trope of irony, you cannot afford to pass up this book.

The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch—this book is worth getting just for its first essay. Murdoch was a novelist in addition to a philosopher, and she was also a Platonist. Every single person on my list is, in an important (and delimited) sense, an anti-Platonist. So what gives? To my mind, Murdoch offers one of the best, distilled accounts of the problem of the modern notion of the self taken for granted by early liberal theory. In my favorite phrase of hers, it is “a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.” And while Brandom’s Kant, Cavell’s Wittgenstein, and Lear’s Freud should all be friends of ours, Murdoch points out a pressing problem at that stage of the conversation, and in its face presents an excellent discussion of the pressure of context in ethical decision-making. She puts it in Platonic terms of sight, of “contexts of attention,” but its ancestor, I should say, is rather E. M. Forster. For literary critics who want a good illustration of what a “literary point of view” might be as giving a distinct angle on a philosophical topic, there is nothing better than this very short book.

Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar—if much good moral philosophy these days is “virtue-centered” in its approach (in contradistinction to a Kantian-style search for principles), then Shklar offers an extraordinary meditation on its darker flipside (much as she does for liberal discussion of justice in The Faces of Injustice). Shklar moves easily back and forth between contemporary practical problems (international, domestic, personal), theoretical problems, history both social and intellectual, and sources of our moral thinking as diverse Machiavelli, Montaigne, Christianity, James Madison, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Hawthorne.

Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman—if Rorty offers a narrative of what he even puts in scare quotes as the “core subjects” of anglophone philosophy, then Susan Neiman offers a tremendous narrative of the history of modern moral philosophy, which she argues was actually at the core (at least at its early stage in the 18th century). Ranging from close readings of Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Bayle, Voltaire, Freud, and a really interesting one on the Marquis de Sade, Neiman’s story centers on the importance, in particular, of two world-historical events that have shaped in sometimes subtle ways thinking about evil: the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 and the holocaust at Auschwitz. Her understanding of how our thinking about moral responsibility and the sources of evil have changed and might yet still change (with a short, speculative section on September 11) is penetrating and well-worth thinking about.

The Ellisonian Self

2010-08-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ralph Waldo Ellison is a titan. It is difficult to finish Invisible Man and not be impressed by both depth of thought that clearly went into its making and the execution with which that product of thought was born. It is also difficult to not take very seriously indeed the thought that lies behind his many essays and interviews. An extraordinarily considered and rhetorically skilled writer, Ellison should be considered a philosopher by any other name.

As you dig into the tissue of the relationship between the first three major post-Harlem Renaissance writers, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison, it quickly becomes apparent how much Baldwin and Ellison wrote in the wake of Wright's early success in Native Son (Wright did, too), and how important coming to grips with Marxism was for all three. Forcing that confrontation was Wright's gift to Baldwin and Ellison, and there was undoubtedly a dramatic (and dramatized) reaction. While Wright became a very early convert to American Marxism, Baldwin and Ellison saw it as something of a curse on the writer qua writer. The interaction between Native Son and Wright's early programmatic essay, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," Baldwin's essays in Notes of a Native Son (especially "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone"), and Ellison's Invisible Man and his essays "Richard Wright's Blues" and "The World and the Jug" provide enough fuel for reflection on a hundred related topics about literature, literary criticism, philosophy, history and politics.[fn.1]

The below takes on the more strictly philosophical side of Ellison's vision. Ellison was a natural pragmatist in his theoretical orientation: while I'm not sure how well-read Ellison was in the work of professional philosophers, Ellison was a natural amateur philosopher and struggled personally with his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who Cornel West, Harold Bloom, and Richard Poirier have made us realize was the spiritual progenitor of that professional philosophical movement, pragmatism) and enjoyed and used the work of Kenneth Burke (who was also an amateur philosopher, though we do know he read Dewey). Ellison's vision of culture is deep, and includes a vision of the self and its relationship with society (as every Emersonian struggles with). And while I come from Rorty's professional version of what a pragmatist picture of the self should look like, Ellison's picture--which is only too briefly dug into below--provides a fascinating sidelight on essentially the same picture.

References:
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1952, 1980, 1995.

---. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. Preface by Saul Bellow. New York: The Modern Library, 1995, 2003.

Kimberly W. Benston, Ed., Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987.

Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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A repeated figure in the first part of Invisible Man is variations on the phrase “I am who I am.” What is striking about the figure is the static finality of the verb, and it should make us wonder if this figure is Platonic or Nietzschean in its roots. For the Plato of the Republic, people have essences, bronze, silver, or gold in his myth, and justice is done when each is in their rightful place. The Nietzsche of the Gay Science, on the other hand, wanted us to become who we are. More generally, the Platonic tradition uses metaphors of discovery and being and the Nietzschean metaphors of creation and becoming. With the Invisible Man’s statement that the “end is in the beginning” (Invisible Man 6), there would seem to be a statement of inevitability, of inescapable essence. Yet, the notion of a static essence that each of us has inside and must conform to seems antithetical to the spirit of anti-conformity in Ellison’s work. What kind of self is the Ellisonian self?

To figure out what Ellison means, we shouldn’t start at the level of philosophy and build a theory of the self, but rather begin at the ground level of experiencing selves and tailor our theory to fit what we find there. The reason for this comes out of Ellison himself. What we find in Ellison is a broad rejection of isolated, programmatic theory. For instance, in Ellison’s essay “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” we find a constant denunciation of the maneuvers of literary critics who attempt to bind the artist with their formulations (often in the mode of a joke): “Critics would give you the formula that would make the achievement of a major fiction as certain as making a pre-mixed apple pie” (Essays 699). In Invisible Man, this comes out of the Invisible Man’s relationship to the Brotherhood, which is a veiled reference to Marxism. In referring to the Brotherhood’s “ideology” (e.g., Invisible Man 359), Ellison is ironically calling attention to the Marxist pretension to “science.” Marxism explicitly is not an ideology, which is a term Marx put into currency to distinguish all other modes of life. Marxism is rather a science, a theory, a method of uncovering our rationalizations of injustices (ideology) in order to find the essential path to justice and truth. It is this pretension that the Invisible Man will eventually reject.

There is something ambiguous, however, about Ellison’s relationship to Marxism that comes out in this passage from Brother Jack: “Remember too, that theory always comes after practice. Act first, theorize later; that’s also a formula, a devastatingly effective one!” (359) Practice before theory is a formula I would commend to Ellison, the pragmatism common to Ellison and Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.” Ellison’s comment on Marxism would be that, in practice, Marxists don’t put practice ahead of theory, but rather make the evidence fit their theories. This is punched up when the Invisible Man thinks to himself after Jack offers his formula, “He looked at me as though he did not see me…” (359). The metaphor of sight is deployed to register the sense that the Brotherhood’s theories leave out significant portions of reality. “Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn’t see us” (499). What is deficient about the Brotherhood’s interpretation of reality is that they only offer, as Ellison puts it elsewhere, a “statistical interpretation of our lives” (Essays 75): “It was all a swindle, an obscene swindle! They had set themselves up to describe the world. What did they know of us, except that we numbered so many, worked on certain jobs, offered so many votes, and provided so many marchers for some protest parade of theirs?” (Invisible Man 507) The ambiguity in Ellison’s relationship is that though the Invisible Man rebels against the Brotherhood’s classification and organization of reality, he must classify and organize reality somehow. In the moment that the Invisible Man suddenly realizes that he had not been undermining the Brotherhood by working for them, but rather doing exactly what they wanted, he says, “And in defining, in giving organization to the fury, it seemed to spin me around…” (553, emphasis mine). The Invisible Man hasn’t given up classification, but realized a new classification and interpretation of reality. What Ellison rejects is not organization per se, but the idea of a science or theory of organization, the attempt by some to short-circuit the individual’s experience of reality by authoritatively telling them what they are really experiencing (whether they know it or not).

The vision of reality as in need of organization is a typically Kantian one, but in order to avoid epistemological controversies that Ellison pays no heed to, I would call it a rhetorical vision. A rhetorical vision of reality is one that recognizes the constructedness of reality, rooted in the public means of communication. The major problem for rhetoric, however, has been pointed out by Plato in the Gorgias—if rhetoric requires a common vocabulary between speaker and audience, then how is it not just pandering? How does real change occur if public, inferential communication requires a body of common assumptions for understanding? Ellison knows very well the problems of communication, calling the ideal American audience member “the little man behind the stove” (Essays 495), a symbol of the broadly different forms a writer’s readers might take. Ellison says “the novel is rhetorical” (701) and pondered just that question of communicating to a white audience when writing Invisible Man.[fn.2] But if Ellison has to communicate in the terms of a white audience, how can he change them?

This is a difficult practical problem for every writer, and to help to understand Ellison’s solution we might distinguish between two different modes of presentation that Stanley Fish uses: rhetorical and dialectical. A rhetorical presentation is much like Plato would have it: “A presentation is rhetorical if it satisfies the needs of its readers” (Fish 1). However, “this is not to say that in the course of a rhetorical experience one is never told anything unpleasant, but that whatever one is told can be placed and contained within the categories and assumptions of received systems of knowledge” (1). This presents just the problem, for Ellison wishes to overturn the received assumptions about black Americans. To do so, he uses a format for Invisible Man that is dialectical in Fish’s sense, which is “disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by” (1). Fish says of this experience that “it is nothing less than a conversion, not only a changing, but an exchanging of minds” (2).

This is what I think we see in Invisible Man. The novel is a bildungsroman, but the lessons are not didactic, tacking-ons of easily potted moral lessons, but rather shifts in assumptions about the way the world is that the protagonist finds difficult to cohere with the rest of his working body of assumptions. This makes sense of a motif of incomprehensibility that floats along with the Invisible Man. During the battle royal scene, he accidentally grabs onto the leg of a chair: “I feared the rug more than I did the drunk, so I held on, surprising myself for a moment by trying to topple him upon the rug. It was such an enormous idea…” (Invisible Man 28, first and third sets of italics mine). The surprise is the momentary overturning in practice of a conceptual assumption that shapes his reality, one that by itself is too large to work out and fit with the rest of how he thought reality functioned (where you don’t do things like that to whites). When Mr. Norton is passed out in the Golden Day, the Invisible Man thinks to himself that “the very idea that I was responsible for him was too much for me to put into words” (86). In contemplating Clifton’s selling of the dolls, and the possibility that Clifton believed he’d sold out, Ellison writes, “For a moment I weighed the idea, but it was too big for me” (447). In thinking about Rinehart, Ellison writes, “I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities and turned away. It was too vast and confusing to contemplate” (499).

The scene in which the Invisible Man is suddenly given new “organization to the fury” begins, “The words struck like bullets fired close range, blasting my satisfaction to the earth” (552). This is emblematic of the experience of conversion that Fish says follows the dialectical presentation. Such radical change in a mental constitution is difficult to comprehend. For example, the lesson that the Invisible Man says that his grandfather never had to learn was that he was human: “Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity—that was left to his ‘free’ offspring” (580). This thought had suddenly come over the Invisible Man in the psychiatric hospital, though it is forgotten: “But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant” (239). The ECT the Invisible Man receives in that chapter is something like a resetting of his personality, an attempt to wipe the slate clean and begin again. But since the process is imperfect, new thoughts fight against old, hence the Invisible Man’s wonderment at meaning. He can’t put the new thought from the new self together with the old thought from the old self, and so lacks a coherent identity.

It is to this purpose in charting dialectical change that I believe enters the role of narrative. The Invisible Man recognizes by the end of the novel that the past is a necessary part of our identity. Whereas Brother Westrum says of Brother Tarp’s leg chain that “things like that don’t do nothin’ but cause confusion,” the objects of the Invisible Man’s past light his way when he falls into the sewer (567-8). The Invisible Man must tell his own story because he has learned that who we are now in the present is partly because of the way we tell the story of our own lives to ourselves.[fn.3] The “end is in the beginning” (6) not because there is an essential telos around which our identity circles, but because the way in which we tell our own story is determined in part by where we are standing when we begin to tell it—in a hole, in the Invisible Man’s case. When he says, “Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are” (577) I take this sense of “where” to be “where in your own story,” which is partly the loss the Invisible Man feels after the ECT. As Ellison says generally, “the novel is obsessed by the relationship between illusion and reality as revealed in duration and process” (Essays 702). Reality is not a static, Platonic notion for Ellison, but is rather generated by the individual’s experience.

Endnotes

[1] "The World and the Jug" was a two-part exchange with the eminent leftist literary critic Irving Howe, whose addition to the conversation between the above texts can be quite profitable. Howe, in "Black Boys and Native Sons" (published in Dissent, Autumn 1963), wrote something like a defense of Wright against his two rebellious younger brothers, Baldwin and Ellison. The frame itself made Ellison a little peevish, and he responded, and then followed a double exchange of Howe's reply and Ellison's further reply. Howe's original essay with two reflections on the incident (one from 1969 and the other from the retrospective vantage point of 1990) can be found in his Selected Writings 1950-1990. Both parts of Ellison's side of the debate became "The World and the Jug." The exchanges between all four of these great men provide a fascinating, agonistic record of internal dialogue between progressive members of the left.

[2] Michel Fabre quotes a letter from Ellison to Kenneth Burke wondering how to write a “Negro character who would incorporate all of the contradictions present in the Negro-white situation in this country and yet be appealing to whites” (“From Native Son to Invisible Man: Some Notes on Ralph Ellison’s Evolution in the 1950s,” in Speaking For You, 213, emphasis mine).

[3] This is a favorite line of mine that I try to reuse as often as possible. It debuted in one of the first original things I wrote for this blog, a weaving of Pirsig, Rorty, and Virginia Woolf, "Phaedrus, the Woolf," and I quickly recycled it in the third part of an extended rethinking of Pirsig's Lila, "Prospectus" (which is the first time I used Fish's distinction to help make this point). My thinking about narrative was deepened after reading MacIntyre's essay, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science" (which I talk about here, and which I incorporate in an entangling of this theme with Fredric Jameson and Sherman Alexie called "Narrative and Making Sense").

Wright and the Figures of Slave Narrative

2010-08-13T08:00:00.001-07:00

From a seminar on the three largest post-Harlem Renaissance figures, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison, this is a fairly pedantic, unexciting piece that just cobbles together some continuities between the slave narrative tradition and the African-American literary tradition that succeeded it. There's no real motivation for it into a thesis, however. The precursor to this, from which I think I borrow a few lines about Douglass, is "Literacy as Symbol and Material Means in Douglass." Like that piece, I was still caught in an overbearing fascination with the orality/literacy thematic, an understanding still largely conditioned at this point by Ong's Orality and Literacy and Havelock's Preface to Plato.

References:
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Eds. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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I propose to trace out the functioning of three different figures inherited by Wright from the tradition of slave narrative, taking as emblematic Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: curiosity, literacy, and leisure. I will in each case briefly discuss how they work in Douglass before showing how Wright continues, extends, or alters each figure in the changed cultural landscape some 100 years after Douglass’ escape, though I shall spend most of my time on literacy.

An important theme struck by both Douglass and Wright is the repression of curiosity. In Douglass, this occurs frequently, usually in relation to literacy. Curiosity leads you out of your current nest of experience and into a new experience, thus leading to learning. Douglass, who didn’t even realize that literacy was a forbidden object (much as Wright had to learn his lessons the hard way), was taught the basics by his mistress, Mrs. Auld, before her husband corrected her: “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. … He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master” (Douglass 31). This is a “new and special revelation” (ibid.) for the young Douglass and it opens up the “pathway from slavery to freedom” (32). Likewise for Wright, in his own first pass at autobiography in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” when he shows curiosity to learn how to grind lenses, Morrie immediately “grew red.” “Whut yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, git smart?” (Wright 228) The notion that blacks might be “uppity” immediately changes the whites’ attitudes to them, as the first hint of it sours situations for both Douglass and Wright repeatedly.

The figure of literacy might be the most important figure in Douglass’ Narrative, functioning as both a symbol for freedom and an actual, material precondition for freedom. Literacy for Douglass is a skill that allows for the free acquisition of knowledge and the ability to negotiate the white man’s world. It is also a precious commodity carefully protected by slave masters, as illustrated before. The pathway of literacy consists in the attainment of “the more valuable bread of knowledge” (Douglass 34), which functions in two ways for Douglass: 1) knowing how to read and write aids materially in his ability to escape from captivity and 2) Douglass learns that slavery is a contingent institution and that one of its main means of enforcement is the stripping of the slave of his humanity.

The first echo we might point to is again in “Ethics.” Wright says, “it was almost impossible to get a book to read. It was assumed that after a Negro had imbibed what scanty schooling the state furnished he had no further need for books” (Wright 235). Wright here, however, doesn’t go into depth about the meaning of literacy, nor play it out much—all we see is that though African-Americans can read, they aren’t allowed access by white-run libraries. We get a much stronger look at how Wright uses the symbol of literacy in Lawd, Today! (his first significant piece of fiction, though only published posthumously). When the protagonist, Jake, goes by the Chicago Library on his way to his friend Bob’s, Jake says to himself, “That’s right. I ain’t never looked around in one of them joints” (69). What is striking is not that he hasn’t been in a library, or thinks there’s a cover charge, but that if he did go into a library, he muses, he could “tell old Bob and Al and Slim all about the big books I seen…” (ibid.). Seen—not read, or even opened.

What’s worse, upon seeing a black boy reading in the library, Jake immediately thinks, right on the heels of his reverie of setting his friends aflame with jealousy at all the books he had seen, that “too much reading’s bad” (ibid.). This is one of a series of stunning reversals of thought that happen within moments of each other, another being the rapid switch in the group’s opinion of the International Negro Uplift Association, from “Yeah, they’s smart” to nine lines later “Aw … They nuts as hell” (109). Jake says of reading that “it was all right to read the newspapers … but reading a lot of books … would drive you crazy.” “It addles your brains, and if you addle your brains you’ll sure have bookworms in the brain” (69). He then recalls, as justification and evidence for his view, that “his poor old grandmother had told him that when he was a child, and he had never forgotten it, and had never had bookworms” (ibid.).

Wright seems to be, at least in part, displaying literacy as a forgotten means of freedom. The psychology of oral vs. literate culture is such that remembered words and phrases, in an oral culture, function as thought-gatekeepers far more than in a literate culture. Words in the mind tumble over each other in sometimes quite odd associations, but the better and easier remembered (like in proverbs, rhymed aphorisms, or bits of wisdom from authoritative sources, like grandmothers), the more likely these bits will be recalled in connection with current experience. For instance, Jake assigns some prestige to books and being in the library, but then Jake sees the black boy, and thinks, “reading’s bad.” Why? Because “his mind went back to his boyhood; he remembered a schoolmate of his who had become queer from trying to memorize the Bible” (ibid.). When Jake saw the boy, he saw his queer schoolmate, and reacted to himself turning queer—his earlier thought (books good, maybe I should go into the library) was derailed by this fragment of memory. And then his mind immediately reinforced this new thought with a further stock association, the wisdom of his grandmother. His brain doesn’t quit, though, and Wright adds a further illustrative crinkle, as Jake then thinks, “But it was all right if you were studying for the pulpit” (ibid.), because God will protect you from going crazy—but then what happened to the kid memorizing the Bible? Jake’s mind has already moved on, however, and such reversals are never brought to account. A mind brought up in a literate culture, however, because of the opportunity to reinforce the ephemeral spoken word with the unchanging written word, has better opportunity to not be led down mental avenues with no hope of returning and asking, “Did anything I just think (say) make sense?” And when you write it down, you can look it over.

There are two other examples with Jake we might recur to for reinforcement. One is the scene in which he reads the newspaper, as he has said is okay to do. The joke of the chapter is that, when Jake reads the newspaper, all he does is read the headline out loud and then run off at the mouth about whatever he thinks about what he thinks the headline means. But there are several telling moments for my purposes. When Jake goes off on FDR and the Democrats, he closes by saying, “I’m going to stick with the Republicans. Old Abe Lincoln is the ship and all else is the sea . . . Now, who said that?” (29) That old chestnut for black electoral politics tells Jake who to vote for, but it is not an actual evaluation of who would be best for him.[fn.1] When Jake attempts to engage with Lil, she says “I wasn’t listening to you reading” (31)—by which she really means, listening to him spout—and Jake replies, “You could learn something if you didn’t keep that empty head of yours stuck into them Gawddamn Unity books all the time” (ibid.). The irony is, of course, that Lil is actually reading, whereas Jake does not (except for advertisements, which he spends much more time reading the entirety of as we see in the following chapter). But what’s more is what Jake says about God: “Gawd’s hooey! It’s a gyp game, that’s all!” It isn’t apparent that Jake is just saying this eristically, but that he truly believes it—at the time, for compare his relative reverence and respect for God in the Library scene discussed above. And finally, there’s the dialectical series between Jake and Lil beginning with his rant about the Communists. Lil counters him on every response, actually challenging him, recurring to the newspaper as a source of her views. Jake, possibly recalling the moment before she interceded having said, “That’s no lie, I was reading it just the other day in the Tribune…” (33), eventually finds himself backed into a corner and says, “Woman, is you a Red?” (ibid.) There are several fascinating points to this exchange: 1) he appears entirely sincere in his thought process and in thinking that Lil must be a Red for challenging him as she does; 2) it isn’t clear at all that Jake is cognizant of having just lost the debate or the jagged shifts in thought; 3) it isn’t clear why he didn’t recur to his response to Einstein, that “these old newspapers sure tries hard to fool folks” (32), when Lil challenged him, and since that is clearly a legitimately open mental avenue for Jake, it just punches up how rough and random any particular turn his mind seems to take.

Possibly the most illustrative example of the oral cast of mind in Jake, and therefore the importance of literacy to the idea of freedom, occurs when Jake is raging about the inspector at work: “You sonofabitch! It ain’t always going to be this way! His mind went abruptly blank. He could not keep on with that thought, because he did not know where that thought led. He did not know of any other way things could be, if not this way. Yet he longed for them not to be this way” (142). Literacy is the key to other worlds, the key to seeing how things might be another way. An imagination that cannot stretch beyond the things told to it by its immediates is an impaired imagination. Reading is what did it for Douglass and for Wright. Reading allows one to escape immediate surroundings and take flight, either to other actual realities (like in nonfiction, history, etc.) or to made-up realities—the effect is the same, as the circle of possibilities expands outwards, thus increasing the flex of mind that allows you to imagine more for yourself.

The last figure of leisure leads directly from here and shows Wright exerting a tremendous alteration over it. For Douglass, leisure time meant time to strategize and to think. The path to freedom lay open, but obscured, and at one point he says, amidst the “perpetual whirl of excitement” of working at the docks in Baltimore, that “I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty” (Douglass 70) The most obvious shift from slave narratives to neo-slave narratives, of course, is that people like Douglass were escaping a fairly literal slavery, while that which holds Wright and his contemporaries is the more intangible cultural slavery left from continued racism. So, in Wright the figure of leisure plays differently. The image of the “lazy” black man is created. But why? Wright tells us—as the group watches some white students get off work, Jakes thinks, “Them white boys always in a hurry to get somewhere. And soon’s they get out of school they’s going to be bigshots. But a nigger just stays a nigger” (117). “Yeah, but ain’t no use of a black man rushing.” “Naw, ‘cause we ain’t going nowhere” (118). Douglass could imagine that slavery could be ended, and that eventually people could co-exist peacefully. Wright, 100 years later, is displaying the crushing, felt defeat at the hands of whites that debilitates the common black imagination and that begins to repeat itself—like Jake’s grandmother telling him that reading is bad.

Endnotes

[1] It was, in fact, Frederick Douglass about the Republican Party. I suspect this was a veiled slap at Douglass by Wright, with regards to the changed landscape of politics and how Douglass stuck by the Republican Party even after its disastrous effort at Reconstruction and subsequent takeover by the rich, of whom Jake says, “them men owns and runs the country!” (29)

One of the Most Important Chapters in the Entire History

2010-08-06T08:00:00.001-07:00

I don't think this piece is as interesting as my first piece on the Don, "The Necessity of Adapting to Changing Circumstances," but it fills in a connection with another preoccupation of mine, Romanticism and the form of life it spawns. I use below a trope I like to use to describe that lebensform: a fish-blink life, the life of someone for whom each moment is their first. "Oh, a rhinestone!" [blink] "Oh, a rhinestone!" [blink] "Oh, a rhinestone!" This is an idea that Wyndham Lewis best explicated in Time and Western Man as what the embodiment would be if someone lived the apotheosis of the immediate found in the English Romantics and theorized by Bergson. I find it quite resonate not only with those who philosophize the Quest for Immediacy, but also the regular kinds of people who extol immediacy and the derived mysticisms from that idea. Combine this with Don Quixote's madness, and you have a thesis project.

References are to:
Samuel Putnam's translation of Don Quixote (1949).
The 1971 translation of Foucault's The Order of Things.
Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin's translation of Jose Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on Quixote (1966).
Anna Bostock's translation of Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel.

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Taking well in hand the notice that use of superlative is rife throughout Don Quixote, I think we should yet take special note of Chapter 6, Part 2: “Of What Took Place Between Don Quixote and His Housekeeper, Which Is One of the Most Important Chapters in the Entire History.” This chapter functions as something like a portal in Part 2, which as Cid Hamete Benengeli, our Moorish author, says doesn’t really get started until Chapter 8 (Cervantes 651). What we get in this chapter are a series of repeated figures in Don Quixote, most of which we are quite familiar with by now, but some of which are brought to the fore in a special way.

The chapter opens with the niece and housekeeper noticing that Don Quixote, still caught by “his ill-errant conception of knighthood” (637), is bent on going out on more, as the housekeeper says, “adventures but which I call misfortunes” (ibid.). These revaluations of situations between Don Quixote’s view and on-lookers are, of course, a constant feature, but these two, in particular, call on Don Quixote to give us his view of knighthood, and thereby adventure. When asked why he can’t just stay at court like other knights, Don Quixote gives us a neat division between courtiers and knights-errant. Whereas courtiers, Don Quixote says, “may travel all over the earth merely by looking at a map,” we knights-errant “take the measure of the entire globe with our feet” (638). Don Quixote locks down the significance by saying, “We know our enemies not from pictures but as they really are” (ibid., italics mine), which is extraordinary given how Don Quixote’s reality—how things really are for him—is taken from books of chivalry.

The truly extraordinary event—and fairly new as far as self-evaluations of his own situation go—occurs when Don Quixote then promptly says that “We pay no attention to the childish rules that are supposed to govern knightly duels…” (ibid.). For one who is as intent on following the law and letter of the order and rules of chivalry, such stark scorn is startling. Even as Don Quixote might easily reply that he’s only ever upheld the rules for knights-errant, which is what he’s talking about in contradistinction to courtiers, the repeated figure is still that of the order of chivalry, which does go wider than just knights-errant (as the commonality between Don Fernando and Don Quixote displays). The nearest predecessor to this newer explication is even more startling: “Who is so ignorant as not to know that knights-errant are beyond all jurisdiction…?” (481), this to the Holy Brotherhood at the Inn in Part I.

I’ll come back to this figure, but for now I’d like to continue with Don Quixote’s discourse. What we get in chapter 6 is a window into Don Quixote’s sense of self, his sense of what chivalry and knight-errantry are all about, as a result of his (vain) attempt to persuade his niece and housekeeper that all is right in the world. We get the color of this window when the niece attempts to rebut Don Quixote with the obvious (to us) retort, “your Grace must remember that all this you are saying about knights-errant is a fable and a lie” (639). To this Don Quixote exclaims that this is a “blasphemy you have uttered” (ibid.), which is a curious, religious turn of phrase. You normally would only blaspheme against God and his sacred vassals, but—as Don Quixote later explains—“chivalry is a religion in itself” (657).

That the niece would “presume to criticize these knightly histories” (639) prompts Don Quixote to give another extraordinary discourse, this time on a distinction between knights within knight-errantry. Letting loose his anger, Don Quixote recurs to the great Amadis: “What would my lord Amadis say if he could hear such a thing?” (639) Hearing himself exclaim in such a manner as to figure Amadis for vengeance causes Don Quixote—within each distinct moment as he ever is—to hasten to add, “To be sure, he would pardon you…. But there are others who might have heard you, and in that case it would not have gone so well with you” (ibid.). This distinction between Amadis and “rascals” gives us a picture of knight-errantry much like the double figure of God—both smiter and forgiver.

I think we should take Don Quixote’s exclamation of Amadis as a surprising moment for Don Quixote himself, for which he then has to patch up and look reasoned with his further discourse on the two kinds of knights-errant. I think the niece hits the nail when, after this discourse, she says, “in a pinch you could get right up in the pulpit or go out and start preaching in the streets” (640, italics mine). The reason I think we should take Don Quixote as somewhat surprised at himself is that I think Lukács is describing Don Quixote when he says, “The complete absence of an inwardly experienced problematic transforms such a soul into pure activity” (Lukács 99, italics mine). Don Quixote has the unshakeable “inner certitude” (ibid.) from the centeredness he takes from his faith in the order of chivalry, and so simply enacts that order on the reality that confronts him. Now, Lukács says that such a soul is “incapable of any contemplation” (ibid.), to which the obvious rejoinder in the case of Don Quixote would be—does he not reason quite often and quite intelligently? He does, but Don Quixote does not think, he holds forth in speeches and lectures, all internal functions becoming immediately externalized. There is never an “inwardly experienced problematic,” for there never really is any problem—on the inside. All of Don Quixote’s problems arise from his externalizations.

All Don Quixote ever experiences are external problems, which we can otherwise call “adventures.” As Lukács says, “the life of a person with such a soul,” as Don Quixote has, “becomes an uninterrupted series of adventures” (ibid.). And as Ortega says, “each adventure is a new birth of the world, a unique process” (Ortega 132). Don Quixote moves through the world like a fish—every time the fish blinks, it confronts a new world in isolation from the old, and so mainly too with every new, demarcated adventure. That is what it is to be a being of pure action—like a fish-blink life, your whole set of habits are brought to bear fresh on each situation devoid of context, once the “adventure” signal is given. An exemplary example of this is Master Pedro’s puppet show. Don Quixote interrupts the show twice to critique the proceedings, clearly not caught up in the action of the show, but still not reflective on what’s happening. Don Quixote is rather commenting on it from his inner source of action: he interrupts the second time to say that the bells are inaccurate, full of inner certitude at the bells being “beyond a doubt a great piece of nonsense” (Cervantes 807). To this Master Pedro retorts, “Don’t be looking for trifles,” and Don Quixote—action met with action, in this case speech with speech—backs down (“You have spoken the truth”), not because he’s reflected on the issue, but like a sword being parried by another, he must accept the parry and move on—just like his own parry of himself when he surprisingly figured Amadis for vengeance. And from this context of being completely not caught up in the action of the puppet show, Don Quixote suddenly and inexplicably is, as Ortega puts it, “snatched up in the illusory vortex” (Ortega 133). Typically, we would think of a show like this as bringing people like Don Quixote under a spell, slowly putting them to sleep, but Don Quixote's reactions in this scene are like being wide awake one moment and sawing logs the next. The only plausible explanation is through the Ortegean sense of adventure—Don Quixote suddenly received the mysterious signal that a new adventure had started (“Upon seeing such a lot of Moors and hearing such a din,” Cervantes 808), one that required its own new problematic (the Moors are attacking!) and solutions (save “so famous a knight and so bold a lover as Don Gaiferos,” ibid.).

These adventures are the externalized manifestation of the hero’s reality principle. The hero seeks adventures to prove this reality principle, which is why, as Ortega adds, Don Quixote’s will is “obsessed with one single goal: adventure” (Ortega 136). The adventure is the externalization of the hero’s will, which is to be oneself, which is to bring us around in a circle, for the hero's self is his reality principle. Ortega says, “this will to be oneself is heroism” (149). This radical involution—adventure is the externalized will of the hero; the hero’s will is to be himself; he is his reality principle; Don Quixote’s reality is knight-errantry which is adventure—is at the heart of such surprisingly forthright statements of honesty as “We pay no attention to the childish rules” (Cervantes 638) and “knights-errant are beyond all jurisdiction” (481). The order of chivalry attains primacy for Don Quixote only because of a previous act of will, as he continually intimates at almost all points—e.g., in chapter 6, “Heaven wills, fate ordains, reason asks, and, above all, my own will desires” (642, italics mine). Ortega says at one point, “Far from the tragic originating in fate, then, it is essential for the hero to want his tragic destiny” (Ortega 154). The ultimate act of expression for a titanic will like Don Quixote’s was to will the restraints of the order of chivalry on himself, which at the same time are the restraints of constant adventure and enactment of one’s will, “beyond all jurisdiction.”

If one asks what the external point of all this willing of oneself and seeking of adventure to prove the reality of one’s will (or rather, the will of one’s reality) is, then it can only be the record of that titanic will—fame and immortality. Though we get more and more reflections on fame and eternal glory as we move through Part II, more and more involved with the books on Don Quixote as they come out (and Chapter 8 provides us with the first good treatment of fame), Chapter 6 does have those subtle inflections of essential thematic that are inherent in the reiterable essence of chivalry that is Don Quixote. After his taxonomy of knights and then knights-errant, Don Quixote gives us a theory of people: those on the upswing, on the downswing, always up, and always down. Of the latter, he says they had “neither a good start nor a subsequent history that was in any way out of the ordinary and who accordingly will have a nameless end…” (Cervantes 640, italics mine). They “increase the number of the living without any other claim to fame, since they have achieved no form of greatness that entitles them to praise” (641, italics mine). Don Quixote sees “greatness,” not as money or land, or honor or virtue, but as deeds that are recorded—becoming a “name.” The former list falls out from the attainment of the latter, as the promise of an island is continually held out to Sancho Panza. And that is Don Quixote’s tragedy. Don Quixote’s tragic fate, which he wills and desires, is to be Don Quixote—his will is to be the titanic will of Don Quixote, that laughable figure of titanic will. Don Quixote’s tragic fate is to be the immortal, literary figure of Don Quixote. Which is Ortega’s point about epic—the titanic will is out of place, and Don Quixote is that exemplification of an out of place will, and as such is both tragic and comic, buffoonish and sad.

Two Uses of “Rational” and What It Means for Literature

2010-07-30T10:00:00.002-07:00

Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 2009
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, 1987
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, 1962, 2008
Richard Rorty:
“Reply to Six Critics,” in Analyse und Kritik, June 1984
“Signposts Along the Way that Reason Went,” in London Review of Books, Feb. 16 1984
PMN: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
CP: Consequences of Pragmatism
CIS: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
TP: Truth and Progress
PCP: Philosophy as Cultural Politics

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Robert Brandom is Rorty’s greatest student, and he has done far more often than any other (Jeffery Stout and Bjorn Ramberg are his only nearest competitors) the thing convinced Rortyans are really concerned about: explicating the consequences of Rorty’s vision of culture and overturning specific pieces of the Rortyan oeuvre of claims to better explicate the core of what that vision really is (a formulation that itself owes to Brandom’s Hegelian vision of the implicit/explicit dialectic). Brandom’s Reason in Philosophy is the most succinct account of a number of those alterations, though they are all left implicit (I imagine to give someone like me something to do). By way of an obscure article of Rorty’s, I want to illustrate one revision of a Rortyan commonplace and work out what those consequences might be for some other pieces of the Rortyan picture.

In “A Reply to Six Critics,” Rorty takes up a defense of PMN against a series of articles written for Analyse und Kritik. In his reply to Jay Rosenberg, Rorty says that Rosenberg is “less willing than I to see philosophy as continuous with avant-garde literature on the one hand and the more controversial portions of scientific and political discourse on the other” (82). This is the early version of his notion of “strong poets,” explicated in Kuhnian fashion as the distinction between normal and abnormal discourse in PMN, but pitched awkwardly for philosophy as the distinction between “systematic” and “edifying.”[fn.1] Opposed to Rorty’s conception of edification, which he poses as pointless “chat,” Rosenberg conceives of the philosopher as advancing “a rational vision, that is, one which has a legitimate claim on our reasoned assent and which can be coherently sustained in the face of rational criticisms” (qtd. 82). As a gloss on Rosenberg’s earlier definition of philosophy as “a distinctive intellectual mission within any reflective culture worthy of the name, a necessary project of synoptic self-understanding and self-appraisal” (qtd. 82), Rorty rightly says that “few people who use speech rather than guns do not advance such a vision” (82-82) and that you’d need to “explicate ‘rational’ so broadly that Baudelaire and Brecht and Hamilton will also be advancing ‘rational visions’” (83).

The sense of “rational” that Rorty is forced to fall back on to capture Rosenberg’s sense of the philosopher’s mission—which it turns out is ubiquitous across reflective culture—is as “coherent”: you are rational if you are coherent. For Davidsonian reasons, all people are rational most of the time.[fn.2] Brandom agrees that people don’t walk around in radical incoherence (which would the Cartesian ploy of convincing us that we might be), but he thinks Rosenberg has a point about “a legitimate claim on our reasoned assent and which can be coherently sustained in the face of rational criticisms.” There is something different about what Baudelaire does and Rawls does. Rorty’s concern was metaphilosophical—his point is that “rational criticism” occurs in “normal discourse,” which is to say that a vocabulary/vision has already been chosen as the frame of reference in which arguments can be exchanged. Rorty, and Brandom would agree, is punching up the fact that “synoptic self-understandings” that allow “self-appraisal” aren’t the natural purview of philosophers, but are 1) the implicit background of anyone who’s using a language (Wittgenstein’s point about lebensform) and 2) can be offered by just about anyone using whatever methods and modes they have available.

Most philosophers of language accept (1) these days, but it is (2), and Rorty’s apotheosis of Romanticism (and “literary” writers generally), that still sends chills down the philosopher’s spine. It is here that Brandom wishes to step in. The chill is generated by Rorty’s infamous (and disingenuous) abdication of argumentation (cf. CIS 8-9). This has seemed to most to be a rejection of rationality.[fn.3] Rorty’s right that there is a commonality between Baudelaire, Derrida, Rawls and Sellars at the level of generating a “synoptic self-understanding,” but there are also obvious differences. Or rather, we’ve always thought that the differences were obvious, but now Rorty’s challenging most of the senses in which we’ve tried to explicate them. Rorty usually just falls back on generic differences, but Brandom wishes to help us better understand just what choosing one genre over another does and does not imply.

Brandom’s first step would be to distinguish the Davidsonian sense of “rational” Rorty recurred to above from the sense of “rational” as subject to “rational criticism” that Rosenberg wished to bring into view. He does so by calling the former the “constitutive sense” and the latter the “evaluative sense.” To say that we are rational in the evaluative sense is just to say that we subject our beliefs and choices to the kind of scrutiny that produces reasons (i.e., justification) for believing or choosing X or Y. The insight that Brandom claims Kant first brought out, and Sellars best explicated the consequences of, is that the “evaluative or comparative normative dimension of rationality rests on a conceptually prior constitutive one” (Brandom 2). The pragmatist impetus for critique of the positivist philosophical program since its inception has been against its atomism (the attempt to pair off word-world relations in isolation from linguistic communities) of which Davidson’s holism (the triangulation of world-person-community relations) is the best instance of counterattack.[fn.4] Brandom claims that this holism was, in fact, first Kant’s idea, best captured by Sellars’ slogan of “the game of giving and asking for reasons.” Philosophical atomism is marked by the idea that we use reason to find the correct beliefs to have, the correct word-to-world relations, but this produces a sense of “being rational” beholden to the “having of correct beliefs.” Philosophical holism reverses the way the water flows: one has to be first rational before one can begin the search for correct beliefs—you have to first commit to the game before actually playing the game. (Atomism is what largely produced the notion of an Enlightenment ideology, or the notion that “secular humanism” is a religion, best captured by Gadamer’s pithy slogan about the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice.” What the Enlightenment was struggling towards was a holistic understanding of reason.)

The relationship between the constitutive sense of rational (which captures Davidsonian holism) and the evaluative sense of rational (which captures the enduring spirit of Socrates that we should have reasons for believing) is that while you cannot be more or less rational in the constitutive sense—once you start speaking a language and having beliefs, you are automatically rational in the requisite sense—you can be more or less rational in the evaluative sense because to be rational in the constitutive sense is to be in the game of giving and asking for reasons, though you can abdicate that responsibility occasionally. “Rational beings [in the constitutive sense] are ones that ought to have reasons for what they do” (Brandom 3). To be constitutively rational is to place yourself under the moral obligation of having reasons. To be evaluatively rational is to agree to offer some.

So—are there reasons why we might want to abdicate that responsibility? Of course, like in writing fiction. One way of understanding the writing of fiction is as a series of “as if” inflections of language. While assertoric prose asks us to evaluate the truth of its individual assertions, non-assertoric prose (which we might just call “poetry”) asks us to “pretend as if” what was being written was true. We might say, somewhat misleadingly, that assertoric prose can be evaluated atomistically, while non-assertoric, as-if prose can only be evaluated holistically. What this catches is the sense in which, for assertions to be evaluated, a background must be taken for granted. For typical assertions, the background is generally well known. It is the atypical ones that catch the atomist off guard, and which seem more like literature, which generates, seemingly ex nihilo, its own background in which individual sentences are to be understood (modern science fiction and fantasy being the obvious cases).

What Rosenberg wants to capture is the difference between the philosopher’s putting forward of a sentence as a candidate for belief in the real world and the poet’s putting forward of a sentence, which seems to skirt in special ways such candidacy. “Special” is the key here, for Rorty does want to claim that poets like Blake were intending to affect real-world belief just as much as people like Newton (which is one reason why Rorty lumped both in his special sense of “poet”). But it doesn’t seem exactly apropos to subject The Book of Thiel to “rational criticism,” while it might to the Principia. This is the point at which philosophers like Habermas, wanting to acknowledge the power Rorty slots under the heading of “metaphor,” distinguish between the “world-disclosing” function of language and the “problem-solving” function. This distinction exactly parallels Rorty’s PMNian abnormal/normal discourse distinction. And when Habermas criticizes Derrida for being blind to the fact that “everyday communicative practice makes learning processes possible … in relation to which the world-disclosive force of interpreting language has in turn to prove its worth” (Habermas 205), Rorty responds that, on his reading, Derrida “knows perfectly well that there are communicative practices to which argumentation by reference to standard rules is essential, and that these are indispensable for public purposes” (TP 313).

What Derrida thinks is difficult to tell, but Rorty’s right that there’s nothing essential to Derrida’s performance that requires him to see non-play (“problem-solving”) as parasitic on play (“world-disclosive”). And though Rorty discussed for years the parasitic qualities of irony—that kind of playful language-use exemplified best by the Romantic poets—when the frame of reference is problem-solving/world-disclosure, it becomes difficult for Rorty to explicate his defense of Derrida while maintaining with Shelley that poets are the legislators of the world (using a Davidsonian understanding of metaphor).[fn.5] For Rorty does want to make the strong poet the essential character in the drama of civilization, forcing the problem-solvers and tinkerers and hammer-outers of new vocabularies to secondary, parasitic status.[fn.6] Brandom, decidedly, does not:

…it has seemed perverse to some post-Enlightenment thinkers in any way to privilege the rational, cognitive dimension of language use. But if the tradition I have been sketching is right [the one that responds to the empiricism of Locke through Kant’s fires to its denouement in “Sellars’s rationalist critique of empiricism”], the capacity to use concepts in all the other ways explored and exploited by the artists and writers whose imaginative enterprises have rightly been admired by romantic opponents of logocentrism is parasitic on the prosaic inferential practices in virtue of which we are entitled to see concepts in play in the first place. The game of giving and asking for reasons is not just one game among others one can play with language. It is the game in virtue of the playing of which what one has qualifies as language (or thought) at all. (Brandom 119-20)

You can just about hear the echoing, “I’m looking at you, Dick,” at the conclusion of that passage.[fn.7]

Rorty wants to apotheosize the poet, and Brandom the philosopher. I find it difficult to decide the answer to that cultural-political question, as Rorty would have wanted it put. However, one thing is clear: Rorty would have agreed with Brandom about the centrality of inference to language, against which divergent uses gain their reflected glory, but the consequences of this thought remained hidden from Rorty because of the terms often used to press it upon him. In the case of Habermas, “problem-solving” doesn’t quite nab the centrality of inference, but rhetorically opposes itself quite nicely in parity with “world-disclosure.” Sometimes we’re solving problems, sometimes we’re disclosing worlds, and sometimes we’re just making stupid puns or spouting gibberish. While Rorty can easily admit that “there are communicative practices” for which reason-giving “is essential” (TP 313), Brandom wants to say that the practice of reason-giving is the essential communicative practice, upon which all other linguistic practices are then parasitic.

I haven’t argued for Brandom’s conclusion, but I am persuaded by it, though it doesn’t tell us which cultural figure to apotheosize. All it tells us is that “rational criticism,” the game of giving and asking for reasons, is the paradigm of linguistic use. So what does that mean for literature? Recurring to Rorty’s discussion of Rosenberg, we might say that while Rorty is right that both Baudelaire and Rawls offer rational visions in the sense of coherent visions, Rosenberg would be right if he said that, while true, Baudelaire himself is not offering reasons to defend against rational criticisms. Rorty will want to agree, but his constant point since the 80s has been that non-reason-giving genres of writing have been just as instrumental—if not more so—as prosaic, assertoric, typically problem-solving genres in cultural evolution.

This verges into the debate still fluctuating in the academy about the role of sentiment in moral progress, and the role of sentimentalism in literary history. Put simply, tear-jerking has seemed like cheating for one side of the debate, who emphasize—like Brandom—the importance of reason-giving in having a healthy secularist culture.[fn.8] I don’t think Rorty ever wanted to deny that emphasis. The issue that Brandom helps make clearer, I think, is how the mechanics of sentiment, or metaphors, work in their impact on our reason-giving practices. The tools were always in place for Rorty: Davidson’s distinction between causes and reasons. The world—or a metaphor or (awkwardly put) a sentiment—can cause us to believe X or Y, but our sudden believing-X does not yet have reasons until it is put into a network of inferential relations. The origins of a belief must be held separate from the justification of a belief (though given a set of practices—such as the practice of first-person observational reporting—referring to the origins of your belief may qualify as an acceptable reason). So little Eva’s death might cause us to believe that slavery is wrong, but our tears are not themselves a (sufficient) reason (it’s doubtful we’d want to admit a practice in which any cause of tears is uniformly extirpated from our culture). And so too does saying, “I’m an abolitionist because I cried when I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” seem a little silly, and distinctly not a good reason. It might be the correct explanation of the origins of your belief, but it does not seem a good justification for continuing to hold that belief.

What Brandom helps us to see, with his inferential vocabulary of commitments/entitlements, is the mechanics of inference.[fn.9] And what this can then help us to see is that while non-assertoric, as-if prose must be treated holistically because of its as-if quality, reasons can be generated from it by a holistic translation into assertoric prose: literary criticism. Great novelists and artists do offer coherent visions—which the right critical reading would capture—but those visions themselves aren’t advanced as assertoric, and so cannot be rational in the evaluative sense, though we might later discuss them as if they were. The “as if” works both ways. And in both cases a holistic evaluation is required to pull out bit-sized atoms of reasoning (for either evaluations of the as-if text or premises in our own reasoning about the non-as-if world). It might occur to you that my definition of poetry as a kind of “pretend as if this is true” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for poems like Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” or most poems for that matter. “Among twenty snowy mountains,/The only moving thing/Was the eye of the blackbird.” In what sense are we to treat that as true? Asking what sense is exactly the right question, for asking what makes sense of the poem—the beginning of the act of interpretation—will cause you to produce sentences that, if true, will make sense of the poem’s strangeness (and thus the act of haggling over interpretations is the act of calling out your opponent’s sense-generating sentences as not true).[fn.10]

I’d like to close by going back to Rosenberg’s characterization of Rorty’s “edifying conversation” as “mere chat.” His point was that the kind of chatting Rorty wanted to apotheosize doesn’t have a point, which can be contrasted with the kind that does (which we can call “inquiry”). Rorty’s point about metaphilosophical conversation about which vocabularies we should use for particular inquiries was badly put in CIS as abdicating arguments. What Rorty wanted philosophers to better see is a point Heidegger made in Being and Time about “idle talk.” Heidegger said that idle chatter communicates “by following the route of gossiping and passing the word along. What is said-in-the-talk as such, spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so” (Heidegger 212). Rorty wants to say that such talk is not so idle as it appears, but that it is something like “things are so because one says so.” This is the kind of boot-strapping of a new vocabulary that is really a matter of just getting the hang of it. What Rorty wanted was to help breed a more self-conscious space between “idle chatter” and “pointed inquiry.” There are no neutral criteria for deciding what kind of vocabulary one should conduct an inquiry in, but this shouldn’t blind us to the fact that we do need to make reasoned choices. Rorty’s misleading rhetoric that led philosophers to think he was promoting an irrational vision should not blind us to how far his sound point—that there are no knock-down arguments for one vocabulary over another in the high metaphilosophical terrain—does in fact reach. There is only pragmatic cost-benefit analysis for one vocabulary over another, and Rorty wanted to breed higher levels of explicit reflection on why a philosopher thought it was important to do something.

Endnotes

[1] The “Reply” is the beginning of the long sequence of apologies Rorty left littered over his corpus: on 84, Rorty apologies for the whole raft of distinctions in Part III of PMN that reviewers kept conflating together: hermeneutics/epistemology, abnormal/normal, edifying/systematic, Continental/analytic. See, too, Rorty’s amusing apology to the Peirce Society for calling himself a pragmatist (in “Comments on Sleeper and Edel,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Winter 1985). Technically the first retraction Rorty had occasion to make, I believe, is in the introduction to CP (xlvn25), but abdication of a philosophical position (in this case, Peirce’s angle on truth) is a little different than Rorty’s rhetorical apologetics.

[2] This is a highly specialized point to explicate, one which I cannot myself adequately defend (not being a professional philosopher), but it involves the confluence of Davidson’s principle of charity—which establishes the conclusion that belief (qua belief) is by its nature veridical (which is to say, as Davidson puts the point less technically, “most of our beliefs are true”)—and the pragmatist point that justification is our only route to truth (which means that most of our beliefs can be given a rational qua coherent accounting). Davidson’s principle is based, roughly, on the considerations of successful communication: because we successfully communicate with each other, what must be true to account for this fact? What must be true is what two speakers of different languages must do to establish successful communication—assume, charitably, that the other person lives in, largely, the same world as you and that which both of you largely successfully navigate. What is initially (from the Cartesian point of view) a shot-in-the-dark assumption to get language-learning off the ground can then be cashed in as correct when you—as we then say—successfully learn the language.

[3] The queer feeling Rorty gave to the analytic community was first amped up, after PMN, in his presidential address to the Eastern Division of the APA, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” (in CP). See, too, Rorty’s review of the English release of Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy in the London Review of Books: “If you want to know what the common sense of the bookish will be like fifty years from now, read the philosophers currently being attacked as ‘irrationalist.’ Then discount the constructive part of what they are saying. Concentrate on the negative things, the criticisms they make of the tradition. That dismissal of the common sense of the past will be the enduring achievement of the long-dead ‘irrationalist’” (“Signposts” 5).

[4] For a pithy rundown on the route from atomism to holism with reference to the issue of those who use the experience-idiom instantiated by Kant and those who use the language-idiom instantiated by Frege (i.e., the still on-going debate about the “linguistic turn”), see my “Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn.” Brandom’s route through is to make explicit the underlying thought of Kant’s that Frege made more explicit in the language-idiom. You can do this by reading Kant’s “concepts” as “words,” and reinterpreting Kant’s way of putting them together with experience—e.g., his slogan “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75)—by reading the integration of “intuitions” (i.e. experience) by “concepts,” not as a cookie-cutter placed upon formless dough (in Putnam’s excellent image), but as the integration of intuitions into a network of inferential relationships. This is the transformation of a cause for belief (e.g., bumping into a rock) into a reason for belief (“Why do you look like you are in pain?” “Because I bumped into a rock.”). The dialogic explication of the transformation of the first parenthetical to the second is quite intentional. For a good, pithy summary of Brandom’s that can be put to immediate work on this issue, see Brandom 167-70. The crown of his rundown is that those who wish to blur the difference between, as Brandom puts it, sentience (beings with sensuous experience, for whom it makes plausible sense to ask “what it is like to be” them) and sapience (language-using humans) must eventually blur the difference between parrots and thermometers, and even between them and rocks—anything that responds to their environment, thus leading to panpsychism (which Nagel, who best conceptualized the qualia-defending retort of “what it is like to be X,” quite consistently entertains in Mortal Questions). Brandom’s claim about the difference between sentience and sapience, while acknowledging all this about differential response to one’s environment, can then be put like this:

The parrot [squawking “Red!” when it sees a patch of red], the photocell [registering the relative volume of noise in a room], and the chunk of iron [responding to the wet outdoors by rusting] can serve as instruments for the detection of red things or wet things, because they respond differentially to them. But those responses are not claims that things are red or wet, precisely because they do not understand those responses as having that meaning or content. By contrast, when you respond to red things or wet things by saying, “That’s red” or “That’s wet,” you do understand what you are saying, you do grasp the content, and you are applying the concepts red and wet. What is the difference that makes a difference here? What practical know-how have you got that the parrot, the photocell, and the chunk of iron do not? I think the answer is that you, but not they, can use your response as the premise in inferences. For you, and not for them, your response is situated in a network of connections to other sentences, connections that underwrite inferential moves to it and from it. … The responsive, merely classificatory, non-inferential ability to respond differentially to red and wet things is at most a necessary condition of exercising that understanding, not a sufficient one. (170)

[5] Rorty’s first discussions of parasitism were about the form of transcendental arguments, notably in “Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments” (in Nous Fall 1971) and “Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” (in Transcendental Arguments and Science, eds. Peter Bieri et al, 1979). I haven’t given a lot of thought yet as to whether there is a connection between the transcendental argument’s parasitism—which is common to Davidson’s argument about the scheme/content dichotomy and Brandom’s argument about the centrality of inference to language—and irony’s parasitism, or any other “poetic” uses of language. Given my topic, one particularly interesting earlier approach towards the power of irony, and its parasitic quality, is in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” It’s tough to say how much Rorty would apologize for its ironic conclusion: “For the ironist poet owes far more to Parmenides and the tradition of Western metaphysics than does the scientist. The scientific culture could survive a loss of faith in this tradition, but the literary culture might not” (CP 137).

[6] A good, late-stage articulation of this point can be found in “Pragmatism and Romanticism” (in PCP).

[7] Terminologically, Brandom sets out to differentiate himself from Rorty by resurrecting the appellation of “rationalism” for his philosophical program (which is decidedly a philosophical system), which in Tales of the Mighty Dead he traces from Leibniz and Spinoza to Frege and Sellars, and saying recently that “pragmatism is not a romanticism” (“The Pragmatist Enlightenment,” from Brandom’s website, which is full of interesting stuff, but specifically this page).

[8] The literary battle, which takes up lines on the moral one, can usefully be seen to begin with Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (which argues, roughly, that books like Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin turns us into a bunch of pussies) and the return fire of Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs. The virtue of these two books is that they combine a number of different issues into a coherent vision and argument, though in the end we should disentangle those issues and answer them somewhat separately (for example, Tompkins usefully highlights an underlying modernist aesthetic in Douglas’s canon of good texts, but she leaves it entangled with the issue of the political applicability of the texts).

[9] For a brief account of its basics, see the first part of "A Spatial Model of Belief Change."

[10] I mention “Thirteen Blackbirds,” not just because it is a sweet, aggravating poem, but because my poetry professor had us perform an interesting experiment on it that illustrates what I’m calling the general performance of interpretation. The poem contains 13 small, separated stanzas, all with the word “blackbird” in them (I won’t even be so presumptuous as to begin the act of interpretation by saying they are all “about” blackbirds). The experiment was to treat each stanza as a separate poem and each poem as a response to an implicit question. The trick was then to make explicit the question that makes sense of the poem-answer. So, for the quoted stanza, my question was “If one could discern the horizon, what would stand still?” Naturally, still quite opaque. My favorite two were stanzas 3 and 8:

III.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

Can we have theory without praxis in this day?

VIII.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

You can’t stop thinking about Lenore, either, can’t you?

Dreams, Narrative Structure, and Epistemological Authority in Wieland

2010-07-23T08:00:00.001-07:00

This was a final for a seminar in sentimentalism and sensationalism in antebellum American literature, dressed up as a conference paper (we faked one at the end of the course, a great idea and experience for getting the swing of professional practices). What was interesting about the course was that it tried to find parity between a number of axes of discourse and debate: popular vs. high-brow (e.g., is Uncle Tom's Cabin a great piece of writing?), historical (what's going on in America?), theoretical (how does our understanding, then or now, of morals and/or emotions tie into the texts?), political (does Lippard's Quaker City say anything about his surroundings, and how should we care?).

My attraction to Charles Brockden Brown, known as America's first professional novelist, was because of the way his Wieland seemed to register on two valences I'm interested in: philosophical and political. In particular, we might shake out two different epistemological projects begun in the 17th century (and for which we identify as the beginning of "modern philosophy"): personal-epistemology and state-epistemology. Descartes is the paradigmatic father of the former, and Hobbes of the latter. What I have in mind is the well-known idea that Descartes was after certainty in our reasoning: how do we authorize the premises of our reasoning? By taking this to be radically unclear, he hoped to find a foundation to begin building from: the birth of modern foundationalism. My smallish claim is that Hobbes' project is the exact parallel of Descartes': the quest for legitimation of a government in the face of radical doubt about any such legitimacy. My sense is that the connections between these two different projects has largely been unexplored in the philosophical literature (though a good place to start is Toulmin's Cosmopolis).

What I found in Brown's Wieland was the embodiment of the kind of explicit philosophical work I think needs to be done on the connection between how an individual's practical reasoning interacts with the body politic. I was so excited that my first attempts (an initial presentation, an initial abstract, and my first draft) came out as gobbily-gook. I had the good fortune of having a professor who was experienced in putting together philosophy and literature, and who have me great advice for how to shape something presentable. What is below simply approaches the issues I've outlined as the interaction between personal-epistemology and state-epistemology (and what I really want is the historical reconstruction of the common underlying motive that produced two disparate strains of philosophical inquiry that rarely coincide: for some fanciful reflection that begins with the Greeks, see "What Happened to Political Philosophy?"). In particular, the notion of the dream as a metaphor for radical non-constraint can be developed much, much further, and I really did very little to truly capitalize on this potentially rich thought, and it might be a very fruitful historical project in tracing how the dream-metaphor has functioned in intellectual history (I suspect it has played similar roles as that of madness, and seeing both histories together would be interesting).

Since nobody's read Wieland, and I'd at least like to make the issues I try and explore accessible, I'll begin with Tompkins' pithy summary of the plot, which she claims (rightly) is central to understanding the meaning of the novel (not in the obvious way). The fact of the matter is, the plot is simple and bizarre, which makes it inaccessible to a modern reader wondering how on earth somebody could go from a coolly rational person to massacring their whole family because an unknown voice told him it was God, and what God wants, God gets, and God wants'em all to die. Bizarre, frustrating, and hilarious at times, though I'm not sure Brown meant it to be, it also--if read right--provides insight into the process of slipping down slopes that happen because of bad, previous assumptions about what's going on. And for this insight, it isn't the content of the plot that must be emphasized, but the form of the narrative. At any rate, here's Tompkins:

This is what happens in Wieland.

Four young adults--Theodore and Clara Wieland, and Catherine and Henry Pleyel--are leading the most rational and harmonious existence imaginable on a country estate on the banks of the Schuylkill River. One night, after the arrival in their midst of a mysterious person named Francis Carwin, one of them hears a strange voice and after that, it is no exaggeration to say, things go rapidly downhill. Theodore Wieland, who heard the voice, becomes introspective and morbid. Clara begins to hear voices too--men in her bedroom closet threatening to rape and kill her, other men warning her to keep off her own cottage grounds. Pleyel overhears someone say that his fiancee in Germany is dead (she is alive), and later he hears someone say that Clara, whom he loves, has betrayed him with another man (she has not). The climax comes when Wieland is visited by an apparition (he thinks it is God) commanding him, as proof of religious devotion, to kill his wife--which he does--and then demanding that he kill his children--which he also does (he has four of them). Upon learning of this, Clara falls desperately ill, but recovers in time for Wieland to break out of jail in order to kill her, too. She is saved, however, by the interposition of Carwin, whose confession that he is a ventriloquist causes Wieland to doubt whether it was indeed God's voice that commanded him to murder his family. He kills himself. Clara's house burns down. Somehow, the misunderstanding between her and Pleyel is cleared up and they go off to Europe. End of story.

This summary of Wieland's main narrative exaggerates its craziness only slightly. (40)

I might also add that the argument below embodies an increasing reliance on a critical vocabulary that emphasizes the role of inference: my increasing appreciation of Robert Brandom's pragmatism is evident in my construction of how epistemological authority works. And if I'm right about Brown, then Brown knew as well as Kant (if perhaps not as explicitly, which is Brandom's fascinating new interpretation of Kant in Reason in Philosophy) that the content of thoughts depend on their inferential connections to each other (which is my slide between "descriptions" and "deductions" below).

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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The dominant interpretation of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland since the mid-80s has been as political allegory.[fn.1] Lifting off from Brown’s ironic invocation of the Platonic analogy of scale between city and soul, of making “the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of a nation” (Brown 34),[fn.2] and grounding the allegory’s presence in facts like Brown’s membership to the largely Federalist-leaning Friendly Club and that Brown sent a copy of Wieland to Thomas Jefferson upon its completion,[fn.3] this interpretation seeks to explain the presence of the many kinds of uncertainty in the text as emblems for the dissolution of traditional kinds of authority in a pure democracy. Federalists like Adams and Hamilton thought that a strong central authority was needed to lead and control the passions of the populace, whereas Republicans like Madison and Jefferson were quite sure that a strong central authority was the key impediment to freedom that the recent Revolution had been designed to overcome. And while in political terms this was a debate about how strong the national government should be, the Federalists and Republicans also saw it as a struggle over truth: Republicans believed that truth would come out in the free proliferation of opinions and Federalists thought that was just a screen to believe whatever you wanted.[fn.4] Wieland, on this interpretation, intersects this debate by showing three generations of Wielands progress away from aristocratic, traditional boundaries into a free, idyllic conversational paradise, which suddenly implodes with the introduction of an eloquent outside element that does not have their best interests at heart.[fn.5] Without any central authority to reign in speculation on the mysteries of the voices, Carwin stands as an emblem of the problem of rhetoric in a free-for-all of competing opinions and Wieland as an emblem of the problem of the authority of God in a secular, pure democracy.

I think all of this is right, but the emphasis on the narrative content of Wieland—the story, the plot—tends to de-emphasize the text’s radical penetration into the uncertainty about authority produced by pure democracy. We should understand ventriloquism as a metaphor for secularization,[fn.6] which means not just the difficulties of taking God as an authority in a democracy, but the problem of the general human condition under the auspices of the nebulous authority-structures of democracy. Not just those who claim God as an authority are affected by democracy, but all claims in general are subjected to the uncertainty of decision resulting from democracy’s cherishing of unconstrained conversation. Thus Brown’s allegory ultimately grounds itself in the very real practical situation of making decisions in a democracy. To show this, I will first focus on the narrative structure of Wieland (as opposed to content) in order to suggest that Brown’s choice of how to tell the story of the Wieland family was not haphazard but central to his point. And secondly, I will focus on the metaphor of the dream as a fiction of radical non-constraint to show how deep Brown’s epistemological nightmare goes.

Brown chose the epistolary form as the vehicle for his narrative, and by making the story of Wieland unfold from Clara’s retrospective pen, Brown is able to place us inside of an active mind still entangled in past events. However, Clara not only provides us with her retrospective feelings about the events (as in the beginning of Chapter 6 when Clara struggles for a page gathering “strength enough to proceed” (56), before ushering Carwin onto stage), but Brown also has Clara narrate in the past tense her then understanding and movements of mind at the time of the occurrences. This intimate view of Clara’s mind, where we are allowed into her most private of thoughts and struggles like the close friend we, as reader, have the pretence of being, allows Brown to emphasize the importance of description to the unfolding of events. Clara’s past-tense narration gives us a special view of a person’s mind as they experience an event, but her present-tense narration of the past as she now sees it gives us a view of how descriptions of events evolve, an “if I had only known then…” quality. The important point here is that descriptions change. And while this may seem a platitude, Brown wants to emphasize to us how Clara’s actions at the time rested on her description, her understanding, of the events at the time and how the knowledge of potential change in description creates the precarious feeling of basing actions on mutable reasons. For the reason why you do something is based in part on your understanding, your description, of what the event you're responding to is.

To concretize what I’m suggesting about Brown’s motives for choosing the epistolary form, let me quote a passage (just after Clara has heard the first whisper in her closet):

The maid was my only companion, and she could not reach my chamber without previously passing through the opposite chamber, and the middle passage, of which, however, the doors were usually unfastened. If she had occasioned this noise, she would have answered my repeated calls. No other conclusion, therefore, was left me, but that I had mistaken the sounds, and that my imagination had transformed some casual noise into the voice of a human creature. Satisfied with this solution, I was preparing to relinquish my listening attitude, when my ear was again saluted with a new and yet louder whispering. It appeared, as before, to issue from lips that touched my pillow. A second effort of attention, however, clearly shewed me, that the sounds issued from within the closet, the door of which was not more than eight inches from my pillow. (65)

The narrative grammar of typical passages in the novel is such that events are not shown, but tightly bound to Clara’s acts of showing. Clara does not just tell us what happened, but argues for her description, littering the narration with “hences,” “therefores,” “persuasions,” and “conjectures.” This gives us the odd spectacle of not just a fallible narrator, but an argumentative narrator, and the reader is made to actively question the description of events by the narrator’s own active interrogation. As thinly veiled as Brown’s use of the epistolary form is—which unlike William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy or Samuel Richardson’s Pamela carries none of the accoutrements of a letter, like salutations, dates, places of origin, or names of correspondents—it does allow Brown the pretence of a reading audience, of somebody specifically being communicated to within the frame of the story. This gives Clara motivation within the frame of the story to argue for what she describes. What is heightened by Clara’s argumentativeness is cognizance of the chains of inference that lead us to conclude that a scene should be described as such and such, an event being this and not that.

The narrative action in Wieland, I’d like to suggest, is on the model of a practical syllogism. Syllogisms are short, inferential proofs of two premises and a conclusion, and for my purposes the length of Clara’s mental machinations matter less than three propositional forms typical of a syllogism: descriptions of a scene (“the maid … could not reach my chamber without previously passing through the opposite chamber”), conditional statements to set inferences in motion (“if she had occasioned this noise, [then] she would have answered my repeated calls”), and conclusions resulting in action-outputs (“No other conclusion, therefore, was left me, but that I had mistaken the sounds…. Satisfied with this solution, I was preparing to relinquish my listening attitude”). At one point in the novel, Clara says: “The will is the tool of the understanding, which must fashion its conclusions on the notices of sense. If the senses be depraved, it is impossible to calculate the evils that may flow from the consequent deductions of the understanding” (39). This is Brown’s epistemological situation in a nutshell. The understanding receives sensory inputs and must fashion them into descriptions, “deductions” as Clara puts it, before it is able to tell the will what action-outputs it should perform.

This situation, however, is not simply a private one—it is affected greatly by public discussion. The ongoing public discussion of the voices between the Wieland family, with Carwin being added to the discussion in Chapter 8, mirrors the ongoing discussion of public policy carried out by the Democratic Clubs that came into existence at the close of the 18th century. Defending their right to exist, the Democratic Clubs articulated the idea of a “public sphere” where the citizen, because not at the direct helm of the ship of state as in ancient Athenian democracy, could remain constantly involved in public affairs. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 passed by the Federalists—the same year Wieland came out and Brown’s club, the Friendly Club, dissolved—attempted to suppress this newly created sphere, but Republicans Madison and Jefferson came to the sphere’s aid by repudiating, in historian Eric Foner’s words, “the common law tradition that the national government enjoyed the power to punish ‘seditious’ speech.”[fn.7] In Wieland, Brown is articulating first-hand anxiety over the form of social life that comes about in repudiating traditional sanctions on conversation. To Jefferson’s Miltonic echo of “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it,”[fn.8] Hamilton would reply skeptically that “Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.”[fn.9]

The Wieland family is a double for both the Friendly Club and our national culture. The horror of what happens to the Wielands depends on both the care-free attitude of the Wieland family’s discussions and consequential decision-making. The Wieland family’s attitude to life, where most outside events like war or Louisa’s story contribute “in some sort to our happiness, by agitating our minds with curiosity” (29), and providing “a copious theme of speculation” (33), mirror the Democratic Clubs’ discussions insofar as they are carefree because they lack power—the Clubs are precisely not at the helm and so not responsible for actually making any decisions. However, due to the nature of democracy, public discussion is consequential, which is why the Federalists feared the Democratic Clubs’ very existence.[fn.10] Likewise, the Wieland family does make consequential decisions, like the debate between Pleyel and Wieland about whether to go to Europe. It is the insertion of meaningful consequence into unconstrained conversation that turns the secret knowledge of God’s will into a potential slaughterhouse just waiting to happen. Without any outside authority to restrain Wieland, he’s at liberty to pursue the consequences of his belief. The slim figure that connects the double role of the Wieland family, as both idyll of unconstrained conversation and the potential horror of pure democracy, is that of the reasoning-not-reasonable individual—Clara: the embodiment of a person grown into a culture of unconstrained conversation, unused to the authority of anything but her own senses, and without recourse when those senses fail her, and who, as narrator, is constantly emphasizing this point to the reader in her narrative grammar.[fn.11]

The figure of the dream serves to deepen the problem contained in the authority of the senses. At the beginning of Chapter 7, Clara tells us of a dream she had, in which she sees her brother:

As I carelessly pursued my walk, I thought I saw my brother, standing at some distance before me, beckoning and calling me to make haste. He stood on the opposite edge of the gulph. I mended my pace, and one step more would have plunged me into this abyss, had not some one from behind caught suddenly my arm, and exclaimed, in a voice of eagerness and terror, “Hold! hold!” (71-2)

Clara says that “images so terrific and forcible disabled me, for a time, from distinguishing between sleep and wakefulness, and withheld from me the knowledge of my actual condition” (72), and until Carwin finally corrects her, she believes that the voice was internal to her dream. When Clara hears the words “Hold! hold!” again later, she recognizes them as from her dream and says, “There are means by which we are able to distinguish a substance from a shadow, a reality from the phantom of a dream” (99). Yet, this belief that she indeed possesses these means are what lead her to believe that she heard a supernatural agent come to her protection in telling her to “hold.” In practical terms, we believe that we have these means available (for example, Clara says after Pleyel first confronts her about imputed improprieties with Carwin, “I moved that I might banish the doubt that I was awake” 119), but these means are predicated on a fairly stable reliance on our senses, which is exactly the problem throughout the novel. Brown’s reference to “reality” and “dream” heightens the problems of the Wieland family to an almost Cartesian level given the actual problems they encounter in taking the authority of the senses.

What is interesting about the interaction between the dream and the voices is how, once one has softened the distinction between dream and reality, more and more of what was previously a dream becomes interactive with reality. Upon hearing the dream-voice again, Clara immediately takes stock of the items in her dream, saying her brother, seized arm, and the voice “were surely imaginary”—“yet the words and the voice were the same” (99). As soon as this move has been made, picking away at her certainty about what is on which side of the line between dream and reality, she begins contemplating this “monstrous conception” of her brother from the dream. And though she promptly dispels this “strange and terrible chimera,” she also immediately follows that with “yet it would not be suddenly dismissed” (99). Just as the Federalists feared, in historian Gordon S. Wood’s phrase, the “democratization of truth” that Republicans cherished because there would be no agreed upon method for determining who was right and who was wrong—just a war of opinions, all against all—so does the lack of method in distinguishing dream from reality exemplify this fear, and land Clara in a slippery slope of allowing into her practical syllogisms all kinds of riff-raff. For example: that she has an invisible guardian. Even before Carwin has solidified this belief in Clara, by pretty much out and out stating that she has an invisible guardian, the way was paved in Clara’s own mind by just contemplating the voice and then the dream. She says, “My belief that my monitor [i.e. the mysterious voice telling Clara to hold] was posted near, was strong, and instantly converted these appearances [i.e. shadows in the room and curtains swaying in the breeze] to tokens of his presence, and yet I could discern nothing” (98). As Carwin says in his confession to Clara: “I had filled your mind with faith in shadows and confidence in dreams” (241).

The way the dream is able to seep into Clara’s waking life, the way ambiguity over what parts were dream and which not, serves to make the dream a figure for the Friendly Club, for the dream of democratic society. For Clara’s “fancy” (71) is given control and free reign over Clara in her dream, unconstrained allowance to do what it pleases. The ability of the fancy to do as it pleases in a dream mirrors Federalist fears over the Democratic Clubs. What they feared was that the Democratic Clubs were bypassing politicians in power and making direct appeals to the people, bypassing the traditional currents of power. The Democratic Clubs, in effect, were able to think what they pleased and then set these ideas loose on the American public. This breakdown between a populace that can think whatever it wants because it has no power and a power-controlling inner circle is the parallel breakdown of the distinction between dreams and reality. As the breakdown begins when the “Hold! hold!” moves from dream to reality and Clara’s “horrific conception” of her brother then begins affecting her life, her “reason” flees her. She says her “actions were dictated by phrenzy” and “surely I was bereft of understanding” (101). As the boundary between dream and reality breaks down, Clara turns into the passion-fueled mob Hamilton and the Federalists feared.

In an early essay, “Walstein’s School of History,” Brown comes down on the side of narrative as a better instrument of moral education over “abstract systems and intellectual reasonings,”[fn.12] and this, I think, because narratives are able to embody intellectual reasoning, show its processes and inner workings. In Wieland, the display of the process of reasoning becomes, not just a better didactic tool, but central to his purpose. By showing Clara’s sometimes fantastic movements of mind, Brown is able to show what one person’s mental state is when bereft of traditional authority-structures. When Carwin says that he had filled Clara’s mind “with faith in shadows and confidence in dreams,” I think this is a nod not only to the dream-voice turn invisible guardian, but the dream of democratic society that Republicans were trying to promulgate. Repubican-leaning deists—like fallen Calvinist preacher turned deist orator Elihu Palmer—would speak of the coming “new religion” which taught of the “perfectibility of man” and would usher in the “universal reign of reason, peace, and justice.”[fn.13] We can see Pleyel, “champion of intellectual liberty” (28), especially, in this description, but the Wieland family generally. The nightmare scenario of the plot of Wieland is intended to dissolve an easy faith in this dream. While on the one hand, Brown’s metaphor of ventriloquism strikes at the heart of those who speak in the name of God—placing him in camp with Republican deists—on the other, Brown, in part through the form of the narrative, through Clara’s constant mental deliberations, is able to push this metaphor so that it cuts into any private store of knowledge.[fn.14] Private deliberation becomes an echo-chamber where the slightest push in the wrong direction can send you tumbling down a chain of bad inferences.

Bibliography

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. Ed. Jay Fliegelman. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Fischer, David Hackett. Liberty and Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Waterman, Bryan. Republic of Intellect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 1993.

Endnotes

[1]I take the two major documents of this shift to be Jane Tompkins’ chapter on Wieland in her Sensational Designs and Jay Fliegelman’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Wieland. Tompkins refers to Fliegelman’s earlier interpretation of Wieland in his Prodigals and Pilgrims, published in 1982, as having independently developed an “almost identical” (Tompkins 208n4) approach to her own, and so I read Tompkins’ book as having tipped the scales in favor of political allegory, prompting Penguin to ask Fliegelman to introduce their edition. Bryan Waterman’s book on the Friendly Club, Republic of Intellect, offers a significant revision of this political interpretation.

[2]The allusion is ironic because Pleyel offers the formula in order to say that it “was absurd” (Brown 34).

[3]Tompkins’ attempt to shift interpretation of Wieland begins with this “single fact” (Tompkins 43).

[4]David Hackett Fischer’s “visual history,” Liberty and Freedom, contains a good example of this sentiment, showing a print drawing from 1793 entitled “A Peep Into the AntiFederal Club,” with part of the club’s creed on the wall of the drawing being “liberty is the power of doing anything we like” (Fischer 204).

[5]Tompkins emphasizes the function of the first two Wielands on 56-7.

[6]Jay Fliegelman says this in his introduction to Wieland (Brown xxxix).

[7]Foner 43

[8]Quoted in Wood 363.

[9]Quoted in May 254.

[10]May 254

[11]Wood describes the general milieu of the “democratization of truth”: “Most ordinary people were no longer willing to defer to the knowledge and judgments of those who had once been their superiors. Perhaps plain people did not have the college education, the extensive travel, or the intellectual power of their aristocratic neighbors, but, their spokesmen said, they had eyes and ears, and they knew what was true for them better than some ‘commanding genius’ or ‘learned sage’ did” (362).

[12]Quoted in Tompkins 46.

[13]May 231-2

[14]Waterman, 50-91, expands on the perceived difficulties of knowledge-production entertained in the conflict between Federalists and Republicans, particularly in relationship to Illuminati conspiracy theories, saying that the conflicts between Federalists and Republicans on the one hand and deists and religionists on the other “reveal late-Enlightenment crises of epistemology and public intellectual authority as they raised questions about who had avenues to knowledge adequate to warrant the public’s trust” (53).

Morton and Metaphysics

2010-07-16T08:00:00.003-07:00

Timothy Morton's recent book, Ecology without Nature, is an interesting, provocative meditation on the notion of nature in writing--and since all "notions" are conceptual, articulated things, nature, when when we talk about it, is always, in an attenuated sense, "in writing." Morton's book is broken into three massive chapters. The first is required reading for anybody working with nature-writing: Pirsig, Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, whoever. The most important portion is a very astute itemizing of rhetorical techniques, what he calls an "ambient poetics," and what they are usually doing for these kinds of writers. Morton calls nature-writing "ecomimesis," which from its Greek roots would mean "imitation of the home." Just playing around with his terminology can yield interesting insights, even if you for the most part ignore everything else.

Which is what I would like to do to large swaths of his book. A lot of it, so it seems to me, is mired in fancy Derridean clothing that, while not tanking his unique perspective (as it totally would of a lesser critic), is quickly becoming out-dated. What I wrote below tries to bring out what that is.

Even as that is so, the second chapter is an attempt to link Romantic poetry, the Romantic ethos, the consumerist ethos, economics and our ethical thinking about nature. And while certain aspects are still too marxist for me to take seriously (which is to say, once you shuck the marxist vocabulary that requires a platonic method to constitute, the sentence loses its polemical point and so any utility at all), Morton has written previously on a much larger scale about only that subject, and some of the things briefly stated in this book are interesting and plausible. I can't wait for the day that our cultural-studies thinking forgets about marxism so that it can really spread its wings. The third chapter is a looser cavalcade of speculative, philosophical thinking about how we might "represent" (the modern translation of mimesis) nature. There are some interesting bits, to be sure, but reading Stanley Cavell (like this chapter from In Quest of the Ordinary) is probably a more productive use of time.

References are to:
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2007

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Near the center of his book, Morton makes this statement about the center of his book: “Ambience is really an externalized form of the beautiful soul. Without doubt, the discovery of the beautiful soul as the form of ecological consumerism is the most important concept in this book” (121). The difficult equivocation tucked into this statement is between “ambience as the rhetoric of talking about ‘the outside’” and “ambience as an historical construction.” Much of Chapter 1, which is given over to the discussion of ecomimesis and the poetics of ambience, reads like a manual for how to achieve the effect of there being an environment in one’s writing. However, granting that “strong ecomimesis” is “distinct and modern” (32, 33), Morton still spends most of the book talking about just how inescapable this rhetoric is while at the same time speaking of it as historically arising out of particular circumstances. But if the beautiful soul is a peculiar moment in the unfolding of the Western Geist, as Hegel thought and Morton following a Marxist brand thinks, it is unclear how ambience in general could be the externalized form of this particular historical construct, though it is clear how that being the case could make the beautiful soul look nearly inescapable.

One of the virtues of Morton’s book is his elaboration of a poetics of ambience, of the rhetoric of inside/outside. Its main vice is its assumption of the inescapability of metaphysics. Take Morton’s elaboration of the Derridean notion of the “re-mark,” which he takes to be the fundamental mark of ambience. He says, “there is nothing underneath the wave/particle distinction. The same is true of the re-mark. Either the inside/outside distinction is constituted, or not” (50). The analogy is perfect for his purposes, but on elaborating this point again at the close of the chapter, Morton immediately follows with “Not that the distinction is real; it is entirely spurious” (78). What could this mean? For a distinction to be an illusion, there would have to be a reality to the situation that you could then elaborate, but Morton expressly says that there is “nothing underneath” the distinction.

This curious equivocation is repeated in a similar way in Chapter 2, which is a recrossing of Marx back with Hegel to read the phenomenon of Romanticism. Morton suggests that Hegel's notion of the beautiful soul is an amping up of a picture of the mind that Morton calls “the ideology of consumer capitalism”—“the mind is like a supermarket and … our consciousness floats, with free choice, among various ideas that can be selected at will, like so many different bottles of shampoo or magazines” (126). This is an excellent description, as is his articulation of the beautiful soul as, in summary, one who values “transformative experiences” qua transformative experiences (111), whose “purpose is to have no purpose” (112) because the point is not what you are transformed into (the eschewal of content), but the transformation itself (the form). And though elitist Baudelaire-types (Romantic poets, bohemians, hipsters, etc.) realize self-consciously this lebensform, every mindless repetition of “supermarket consumption” reinforces the self-conscious form’s possibility of flowering by emphasizing how every act of “free choice” of this or that bottle of shampoo is but an abstract emblem for one thing: Free Choice. This drains the content leaving only the form (that which lies behind, e.g., the post-9/11 idea that if you don’t buy stuff at the mall, the terrorists will win).

So far a good bit of cultural criticism. However, “ideology” as a term can only receive its utility from a contrast with something else, if not Marxian “science,” then at the very least some other ideological form (taking “ideology” in a very neutral, descriptive sense). So on the one hand we have the ideology of consumer capitalism’s picture of the mind as an empty consciousness floating around making “free choices”—but what is the alternative? Morton nowhere comes close to suggesting that he wishes to revamp a Marxist-like notion of “science” or any other kind of epistemological method with which to pierce behind the veil of appearances to reality, yet he says—in a constant motif of avoiding anything smacking of the “new and improved”—“these ‘new and improved’ versions of identity never entirely get rid of the paradoxes of the idea of self from which they deviate” (176). Morton doesn’t think we can have a new picture of the self: “We cannot come up with a ‘new and improved’ version of identity that will do without the paradoxes and aporias associated with it” (182). And yet it is not at all clear why not. One could grab Iris Murdoch at random from a bag full of anti-Kantians (Richard Rorty, Annette Baier, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre) and it would be easy to show that not only does Murdoch identify the trouble with what we might call modernity its picture of an empty self (blaming it largely, though perhaps in the long-run unfairly, on Wittgenstein), but that she feels quite content in elaborating a picture of a non-empty self. What is unclear is not only how her picture of the substantial self catches itself up in Cartesian paradoxes and aporias, but more especially how it wouldn’t only improve Morton’s picture of an ecology without nature.[fn.1]

To help substantiate this, I would point to Morton’s approving mention of the “Western Apache’s use of narrative in the naming of places,” where “there is no difference between a place and the socially reproving and improving stories that the Apache associate with it, and thus, there is no nature” (180). Compare this to Rorty’s extrapolation of Daniel Dennett’s picture of the self as a “center of narrative gravity” to the general picture of any object as a center of “descriptive gravity.”[fn.2] In Rorty’s picture of the self, and indeed anything we differentiate as an object (which means putting into the foreground with a background), language is indelibly wrapped up into it. This has caught Rorty a lot of flack in the anglophone philosophical world, but it chimes perfectly with Morton’s appreciation of Derrida’s comments on narcissism, which are echoed when he says, “One cannot help anthropomorphism” (180).[fn.3] Indeed, Morton goes quite far in laying the groundwork for a rapprochement with American pragmatism when, following Marx’s pragmatism (encapsulated best in the “Theses on Feuerbach”), he says, “In order to be sitting by a fire, you have to satisfy certain needs” (181). This in one fell, odd semantical swoop captures the pragmatist point that differentiations come attached to purposes—it wouldn’t be this or that “place” if it weren’t satisfying certain needs, for which the distinction between an object in the foreground against a background is but the tool.

It is at this point that Morton would start making contortions. For one, he says that the possibility of the expansion of sympathy from the human to the nonhuman implied by Derrida’s work on forgiveness seems to imply “that we should treat animals and plants as ends in themselves and not as means. But the paradox is that maintaining this view denatures nature” (180) What isn’t clear is why this is bad—we are replacing one conception of nature for another, are we not? Morton’s Derridean enjoyment of paradox gets in the way of his point. After making the pragmatist point about tools and purposes I elicited earlier, he says “the debate about environment and world—between humans who are able to contemplate their needs aesthetically (with distance), and animals who make do with whatever is around them—is thus a red herring” (181). Morton, who is referring to John McDowell’s book Mind and World, is absolutely right, though I think his point is obscured by his transformation of McDowell. Morton is referring to a section in McDowell’s book where he is intent on elaborating a distinction between “mere sentience” and “second nature,” which humans have. Here’s the key line: “When we acquire conceptual powers, our lives come to embrace not just coping with problems and exploiting opportunities, constituted as such by immediate biological imperatives, but exercising spontaneity, deciding what to think and do” (McDowell 115) The key disagreement between McDowell and Rorty is McDowell’s reinvention of Kant’s notion of spontaneity as different in kind from “coping.” For pragmatists, the purpose behind the deployment of differentiations is coping. McDowell wants a radical difference between what animals do and what humans do. What’s unclear in Morton’s appreciation of the problem is what he could mean by calling this question “profound”: “are animals capable of aesthetic contemplation?” (Morton 181) For McDowell and Rorty, the difference is language and so, in Rorty’s rejection of the distinction between environment and world as a red herring, he would say the question is as profound as the task of figuring out whether the animal is linguistic.[fn.4] So what could it mean to reject the distinction as a red herring and still find the question compelling and profound?

A capsule summary of the background to Morton’s book would be that it assumes that Derrida was correct when he elaborated the notion that philosophy is rhetorical yet rejects rhetoric and that philosophy is inescapable. Morton’s book has the vices of its virtues in this approach—he precisely avoids all those questions in which the Derrida-like unavoidability of paradox might become suspect. This isn’t exactly a criticism, for it would be like criticizing the creator of a new paradigm for spending too much time constructing it—at a certain point you want to stop abusing the blueprints and see what goes up. The oddity of Morton’s experiment, naturally, is in turning deconstruction into a basis for construction, but this simply embodies the paradoxes Morton continually finds rooted and unavoidable at the bottom of every deconstructive investigation. It is this issue of “unavoidable paradox” that should provide a moment of true curiosity for the deconstructive deep-sea diver—for how is the baptism of a paradox into metaphysical unavoidability any different from a Cartesian Archimedean point?[fn.5] Morton teases out paradoxes in the rhetoric of ecology and, rather than getting rid of them, makes them the basis of his constructive project, the way the world is that we must deal with. But how does this not turn deconstruction into a Cartesian method of piercing behind the veil of appearances to reality and not turn Derrida into a foundationalist? The problem is neither paradigm-deconstruction nor paradigm-construction, but rather—as in all major, interesting philosophical difference—picking the wrong assumptions to hold with conviction (in the Greek: dogma) and build off of. This doesn’t “demolish” Morton’s project, of course, which is the true virtue of his book. For as much as his rhetoric against much thinking revolves around the threat that they are seeking the “new and improved” and he is radically not (somehow), it hardly clouds the interesting ideas that pop out.

Endnotes

[1]Murdoch elaborates this view in “The Idea of Perfection” in her The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 2001) (which can also be found in the very representative collection of her essays, Existentialists and Mystics). She says this picture, which she finds behind the behaviorist, existentialist, and utilitarian, is a “happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud” (9). Her view of the self is based on emphasizing “contexts of attention” to the process of choice, and of dissolving the notion of a “will” that undergirds Kantian moral philosophy, treating so-called “decisions” as more like “compulsions.” In her attack on the will, she mirrors Williams in his book Shame and Necessity and MacIntyre’s notion of “emotivism” in After Virtue.

[2]This is in his essay “Daniel Dennett on Intrinsicality,” particularly 105-110, of his Truth and Progress (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[3]For further remarks along this line on anthropomorphism with respect to animals (particularly my reference to Snell), see "The Representation of Animals."

[4]Rorty's most illustrious student, and McDowell's long-time colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, Robert Brandom, has also reconstituted Kant's shadow in the face of Rorty's long-standing battle with it (since "The World Well Lost"). While McDowell tries to breathe life into Kant's notion of "spontaneity" (which Rorty comments on in a 1998 article in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), Brandom breathes fascinating life into Kant's notion of the "unity of apperception" (in the first chapter of his 2009 Reason in Philosophy). The difference between McDowell and Brandom, and why Rorty would have endorsed Brandom's version of Kant, is that McDowell tries to make an ontological distinction between "mere sentience" and the "second nature" of language. Brandom, on the other hand, takes Rorty's Davidsonian point and works further from there to show just what the addition of language does entail to our difference from animals, for the move from sentience to sapience. This point is most stunningly worked out in the last chapter of that book, "How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science," where Brandom reverses Rorty's long (long) standing notion that philosophy does not make progress by showing (and convincing even me) that philosophy, indeed, does show results that other disciplines might want to bone up on.

[5]For a little more on metaphysical baptism, see closing two paragraphs of "Dynamic Quality as Pre-Intellectual Experience."

Stuart Hall, Codes, and Theory

2010-07-09T08:00:00.003-07:00

This was a presentation whose goal was to explicate two articles by Stuart Hall, "Encoding, Decoding" and "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies." It's a useful exercise for students, to help leverage oneself into another's theoretical perspective, but I also took the time to press some of my own positions on Hall's theory of coding. Hall's notions--or rather, perhaps, his metaphor--became extremely popular in the just budding field known to English Departments as "cultural studies." Hall was at the forefront of what came to be known as the Birmingham School, the place where English Marxist critics fled to do what they wanted to do, and one lasting field they helped pioneer was the study of popular culture. (The balance between the two poles of literature and popular culture might best be exemplified by Raymond Williams on one side and Dick Hebdige on the other.) One finds the metaphor of coding, for example, in Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: a Marxist, but only oddly a member of cultural studies (mainly because, hinted at in the last section, most of whom identify as doing cultural studies don't want to say they are working in a discipline, and Jameson still held that Marxism--through its teleological philosophy of history--can still provide a ground for such work).

The article below functions as a primer on dislocating oneself from pre-Quinean philosophy of language. While anglophone philosophers of language largely don't work with Saussure, anglophone English professors largely don't work with Quine. Since whatever background I might be granted is in the anglophone tradition, I bridged the gap by being abstract, but the points Hall scores against the "defunct model," as I call it, are basically the one's post-positivists want to score. Where we go from there is the $64 question not everyone agrees about, and where my line of critical pressure comes from. But the basics about encoding and decoding is the same kind of thing Donald Davidson, for example, would want to say (with his account of triangulation).

You'll also notice a Marxist vocabulary blithely used (ideology, substructure): not my favorite choice, but Marxism underscores almost all the lasting critical trends that have made it to the new millennium. While deconstruction has thankfully petered out, New Historicism, Cultural Studies, and Post-Colonialism are still chugging along. But I cannot emphasize baldly enough: I hate the Marxist vocabulary. I think it just obscures everything important in a cloud of self-righteousness. So, while for some righteousness seems a necessary condition of their writing (like Jameson), for others the cloud lingers and annoys (like Hall, who seems otherwise quite sensible). Call it a bias, but I can't see that anything is gained by talking about "ideology" or "substructure" once everyone's turned in their "I have a science/method to distinguish illusion/ideology from reality/substructure!" cards (which even Jameson admits to not having).

All references are to The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd Ed., edited by Simon During.

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What’s Meaning?

How is meaning generated? In an old version, “meaning” was seen as a little bundle put together by a speaker/writer and sent out into the world to be caught by a hearer/reader—meaning as a kind of paper airplane, or better—bullet. On this model, a reader shotguns sentences into her mind and understanding is a matter of getting each of these bullets right.

Hall sums up this defunct model in “Encoding, Decoding” as the “sender/message/receiver” (478) circuit. The biggest trouble is how thin the notion of each segment in the circuit is—how does the sender construct the message and what, exactly, does the receiver do with it? In an attempt to do justice to both ideology and substructure, Hall constructs a model of meaning generation and dissemination that attempts to capture, in an isolated yet flexible fashion, the various pieces of life that go into the creation of a bit of meaning.

Encoding

Every piece of communication—from a whisper over wine to Tom Brokaw’s bramble-mouth—has both a means and an end. For means, in the case of broadcast news, we can list cameras, computers, cell phones, satellites, green screens—all of these serve particular kinds of purposes in generating particular kinds of meaning (simply recall the “how cool are we” gesticulations of news outlets during the 2008 election with their holograms and mega-maps). In the case of writing, paper, pens, computers and other devices all contribute to the kind of meaning able to be produced (consider the case of Blake’s engraved poetry). Even—and this is key—in the case of one-on-one verbal communication we must—in order to remain coherent materialists—count utterances as material means. Think of the different kinds of meaning produced by the words “I love you” when said by a classmate versus Johnny Depp over wine. Not simply the producer is at issue here, but too, think if Depp had yelled it or, with all the charismatic power of years playing celluloid (now digital) heart-throbs coming to his aid, whispered it in your ear. When Hall says, “the organization and combination of practices with media apparatuses” (478), I think we must think long and wide. Every computer chip, every light bulb lighting Brokaw’s face, every acting lesson Depp took to get on 21 Jump Street—these all combine to transform senders into the particular kind of sender they are. The “means of production” in Hall’s vision of Marxism is considerably widened: “knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, historically defined technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience and so on…” (479).

Having the means doesn’t produce meaning—you must have a message to impart. Thus enters the notion of having an end-in-view—the combination of the means with an end produces the encoded sign-vehicle (478). In the case of news, “reporting events” might be a typical end-in-view. What Hall highlights is how an actual event we see happening before our very eyes is not what is on the news. What he terms the “‘raw’ historical event” is what we otherwise call “life.” When we attempt to communicate about life—that is when the process of encoding begins, when the means of communicative production transform the raw material of life into a transportable object. Hall’s paradox becomes much more apparent when we replace “life” for “event” in his formulation: “[life] must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative [life]” (478). In terms of TV, “events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of television discourse” (478). When an event goes behind a camera, we put make-up on it, we light it, we shoot it at its most favorable angles. And even if we don’t, this too can become part of encoded meaning. Mockumentaries have raised our awareness of the earmarks of reality, the syle of the real. The rise of the jittery-camera (stemming from, perhaps, Saving Private Ryan's colossal success) as a technique has lent the constructed authenticity of “reality”—somehow we perceive (if not think) that Jason Bourne is deserving of more pathos because we can hardly see him behind Paul Greengrass’ interminable camera-shaking.

Decoding

Our notion of “meaning” is not complete, however—now that we have an encoded message, we must have a receiver to decode it, untie its message, generate the meaning latent within it. This is where things get tricky for Hall:

Once [encoding is] accomplished, the discourse must then be translated – transformed, again – into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. If no ‘meaning’ is taken, there can be no ‘consumption’. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. (478)

Hall suggests that the benefit of this approach is the isolation of encoding from decoding, but his description seems to go a bit beyond his cause. Hall seems to suggest that, e.g., if I do not buy Bud Light after seeing a commercial, the meaning-loop has not been closed. If we expand the notion of “social practices” to a very wide parameter, where even an occurent thought—something that just flashes across the mind's eye—counts as a member of a social practice (for Wittgensteinian reasons)—and I think this is the right approach for the lasting value of Hall’s model—then everything counts as a proper effect, up to and including the noise we attribute to foreign languages, for if we’ve previously formulated the assumption that there is an intentionally aimed message careening at us, then even the shrug of nonunderstanding is meaning enough. What meaning? “No meaning,” which is an articulable enough reaction and effect of a communicative event—“Did you see that advertisement for Bud?” “Yeah.” “What did you think of it?” “Nothing.”

I’m pulling a little hard on Hall’s notion, but I hope there’s a payoff. For there is certainly an obvious enough sense to what Hall’s suggesting if we limit ourselves to the example of advertisements and the perspective of advertisement executives. For the encoder, no meaning has been exchanged and the circuit remains unclosed if there is no apparent reaction, like buying beer or laughing at Super Bowl frogs and Clydesdales. It is helpful in this regard to recall William James’s old pragmatic question, “what’s the difference that makes a difference?” If the receiver remains, more or less, unaffected by the message, then should we say the receiver has even decoded it? Not a lot seems to hinge on saying yes or no, since either way the receiver is unaffected.

The trouble that I think begins here, however, is the lack of perspective. There are hardly any people populating Hall’s analysis. When I talked about ends-in-view, this was part pedagogical and part cover-up. What the ends of messaging are dissolved into, in Hall’s analysis, are roughly “hegemonic powers.” To get ahead of Hall, at the close he says, “Majority audiences probably understand quite adequately what has been dominantly defined and professionally signified. The dominant definitions, however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent definitions of situations and events which are ‘in dominance’ (global)” (486). It seems difficult to understand precisely what is said in that second sentence, what extra meaning has been generated to deepen our understanding of Hall’s vocabulary, when it appears tautological. What I think has dropped out and been replaced by an awkwardly rendered, anonymous power is the message-creator, and specifically the ends, or purposes, of the creation of messages. What we get instead is “dominance which is hegemonic because it’s dominant”—a kind of “dominance is as dominance does” answer to the ends of dominance. The end of power might be power, but power itself is always a steady state—it is a person’s share in power that fluctuates (perhaps even in Foucault's analysis).

How Not to Talk About Language

Saussure was wrong—language is not arbitrary, it has no rules, it is not based on conventions. Hard words, and difficult to defend, but evolution is important here: social practices are evolving bodies in reality. Part of the strike against scientific Marxism is the recuperation of the “superstructure,” or "ideology," the flake at the top of reality that Marx didn't seem to take seriously, but later Marxists like Gramsci do. Hall is sympathetic to this. However, if we see the beginnings of (oral) communication as a matter of collating noises to reactions, such that regularity of response to sounds becomes the beginning of a “language,” then the stability and utility of language only exists insofar as regularity is reproduced, sound and expected reaction. This stability is only as arbitrary as our thumbs—it is only from a cosmic, external view of language and species that we should be able to call the use of the word “cow” or thumbs arbitrary. And like thumbs, there are things language can and cannot do, but neither have rules—Wittgenstein’s metaphor of language-games was misleading just insofar as it cast the spectare of mechanical input-output productions. There are no “rules,” only effective and ineffective communication strategies—just as Hall says about the closing of the meaning-loop being the effect in social practices.

Hall seems importantly right to remark that “there is no degree zero in language” (481). In understanding, I take it, there is no point at which language drops out and reality stands apart naked. All signs are “culture-specific” and those that appear “natural” simply display the “depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use” (481). There are two different notions here that make up the appearance of naturalness: depth and near-universality. We should distinguish between the two to capture the difference between a code’s wide dissemination and how deeply it is ingrained. The zero-degreeness of language and the trappings of naturalness is what stand in tension with Hall’s Sausurrean suggestion that “cow” is arbitrary and built out of convention whereas the pictogram of a cow is not. If we are to take seriously both the slogan that there is “no degree zero in language” and that all events—life—become transfigured in the process of encoding/decoding, including pictograms and TV, then we ultimately have to reject the nature/convention distinction. It is only by standing on the outside of Creation that we can attain the external view necessary to suppose arbitrariness. And this effect of standing outside of Creation isn’t, in fact, difficult to achieve once one follows Wittgenstein’s suggestion that a language composes a lebensform (lifeform) and then get’s dropped into a foreign-language speaking village—every sound will be noise, and the noises seemingly arbitrarily emitted. Why one noise as opposed to another? Why make that noise when you see a cow? To learn a language, however, you have to at once drop the notion that the noises are arbitrarily emitted and suppose that there is a pattern of regularity and stability, the learning of which constitutes the learning of a language. The noise the French make, “vache,” instead of “cow,” only seems arbitrary when you either don’t know the language at all or isolate it from the herd of other noises and compare them by themselves: “Why ‘vache’ instead of ‘cow’? How arbitrary!” Or the person who arbitrarily throws foreign words into conversation: “Why did you say lebensform instead of lifeform? How arbitrary!” Except that, just like what goes behind a camera, these can be earmarks for specific kinds of codes, e.g. a comedic display of erudition or a random display of arbitrariness.

Denotation and Connotation

Following fashions in linguistics, Hall defines “denotation” as “literal meaning” and “connotation” as “associative meanings” (482). Hall’s beef with the linguistic theorists is that they often mistakenly take denotation to be a transcript of reality, whereas connotation is all those extraneous and idiosyncratic associations we make between, e.g., vache and marbles—completely arbitrary to everybody but the person for whom it makes perfect sense. What Hall would rather like to do is take the denotative/connotative distinction as a rule of thumb to be deployed at instances of communication to separate out these two distinct parts. For example, the existence of sarcasm makes “Oh, you look great in those jeans” an entirely different denotation than if sans sarcasm. Denotations and connotations more fluidly interact with the action of communication.

There is a small cadre of problems hidden in Hall’s not-so-different use of the literal/associative distinction (some to do with metaphor, others to do with meanings-as-bundles), but the most interesting for a grasp of Hall’s style is that the use of “literal” allows Hall to eliminate reference to people communicating. If you don’t understand what somebody’s denoting, you ask them, “What did you mean?” and the first answer they decide to choose among a possible bevy of things they were signifying we can call the literal, denoted meaning, with all the others the frosting that makes language a beautiful, associative cake. This dissolves the faceless “literal,” which retains the notion of small, essential monads of meaning attached to small swatches of phrases, into “desired encoding”—what did the sender want the receiver to receive.

This muddies the water, however, for Hall suggests that it “is at the connotative level of the sign that situational ideologies alter and transform signification” (482). Recurring to a different distinction, the up-shot of Hall’s rendering is that the overt message is what is said on the surface while ideology is a covert encoding intended to slip past our decoding censors. “Desired encoding,” on the other hand, obliterates the difference between overt and covert since both are likely desired by self-conscious television news producers.

On the other hand, something terribly difficult happens when Hall continues his faceless analysis by talking about the decoding of denotative and connotative meanings. Things appear fine when he talks about the “‘work’ required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a decoding” (484), for we can get the swing of how many techniques are used by people to disseminate a message and its decoder ring, positive reinforcement being the most general category to name it with (give a cookie to the person who cheers back “Bourgeois ideology!”). But something goes awry when we get to Hall’s three decoder positions—are these positions self-conscious or unconscious? Are they just analytically descriptive? How does an analyst know whether the dominant-hegemonic position is being taken if everyone, including the analyst, has to engage in the act of decoding, which produces the position of “am I getting this wrong?” This is where it is helpful to have a concept of agency lying around. Hall can’t ask anyone because his apparatus is built of faceless literal meanings and dominant codes. A lot of useful analysis can be done by Hall’s model, but it runs into a hole when moving to individuals decoding messages. Take Hall’s “simplest example of a negotiated code,” which is one that is a “mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements”: “At the level of the ‘national interest’ economic debate the decoder may adopt the hegemonic definition, agreeing that ‘we must all pay ourselves less in order to combat inflation’. This, however, may have little or no relation to his or her willingness to go on strike for better pay and conditions…” (486). Surely Hall’s worker is not self-consciously “adopting” the hegemonic option? Yet, would it not be terribly easier when talking about decoding to talk about the individual’s relationship to the codes in play? That, on the one hand, the worker feels a simple patriotism and responds to calls for duty, but on the other needs more money? The notion of “adoption” sneaks agency into Hall’s fairly unpeopled vocabulary because he needs it to describe people, but it reflects the same kind of arbitrainess nonsense we need to extirpate from the level of philosophy of language (what they call "decisionism" in moral philosophy). Choices and readings and decodings aren’t made arbitrarily, and some of the work involved in just this activity is elided by his vocabulary.

What Is Theory For?

The epithet I was reaching for at the close of the last section was “overtheorized.” This is a danger Hall takes up in his retrospective gloss on the growth of cultural studies in “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” At least at two points, Hall stops to remark that he hopes nobody’s reading him as anti-theoretical (39, 41). Nothing could have been farther from my mind, but it strikes up the utility of theory in general. Why should Hall be so self-conscious? Because theory is well-known for being over-jargonized? Well, what is theory if not a specific jargon one wields to approach a problem?

The trouble is that theory still plays two games—one amongst themselves and one with the problems. Over-jargonizing is a sign that theorists have been playing with themselves for too long. So Hall wants to suggest that they get their semiotics dirty (35). However, he also doesn’t want to slight theory. One exemplary metaphor he uses is “theoretical work as interruption” (39). Theory interrupts what you are otherwise doing, like working with people with AIDS. It allows you to create a space with which to wonder about the work you are doing, because in the midst of it you must remain in the midst of it to do it well. This space allows us to become self-conscious about the tools we employ while doing our work, and for cultural studies that means the way we represent, signify, and symbolize. For example, we no longer have autistic children because work done in identity-formation suggests that treating certain kinds of illnesses and whatnot as attributes rather than baggage creates a stymied identity that limits a person’s ability to grow—so we now have children with autism. Representational shifts like this are easily lampooned, but it is difficult to see why such representational experimentation is any different than the R&D we do in technological industry—if there’s a problem, you try and fix it. Some people do it badly, but still, how is that any different than Toyota?

The Representation of Animals

2010-07-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

Talk of "the Other" was popular for a long time in Continental philosophy. Perhaps it still is. To tell you the truth, it bores the hell out of me. People who still think capitalizing the "O" is going to shock people into realizing something are perhaps misjudging how much ground they've gained in the last 50 years, and forgotten that it was a rhetorical tactic, not an ontology. (Well, in fairness, much of the mischief was because many did originally think it was an ontology.) This will likely be the only time I talk about animals in a philosophical way, since I tend to think that all the hard work to be done is in talking about factory farms, which means for the most part giving up trying to penetrate the silent face of animals to hear their call. I register in some fashion the fact that all philosophical reflection deals on some level with two prior distinctions in order to get off the ground--humanity's distinction from Nature, and humanity's distinction from Animals. But I don't think this fact gets us terribly far by itself, though a lot of ground has been gained in better ways of treating both ideas.

Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan: Press), 1995
Garrard - Ecocriticism, (New York: Routledge), 2004
Midgley 1 - Animals and Why They Matter, (Athens: University of Georgia: Press), 1984
Midgley 2 - Beast and Man, Rev. Ed., (New York: Routledge), 2002
Perkins - Romanticism and Animal Rights, (New York: Cambridge University: Press), 2003
Snell - The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, (New York: Dover),: 1953, 1982
Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe,: (New York: Macmillan Company), 1953
A version of Robert Burns's "To a Mouse."
A version of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition."

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Apparently reporting on a break in recent scholarship, Greg Garrard says that there is a “split between philosophical consideration of animal rights and cultural analysis of the representation of animals” (Garrard 136). Whether this is accurate or not, I should argue that it is odd, since how we represent animals leads directly into how we philosophically consider them, for you can’t consider them without first conceptualizing them in some manner. Garrard briefly takes up this line of thought in talking of Mary Midgley, but the power of this point in tackling not only the particular issue of animals, but also the wider issue of “nature” is obscured. I will argue that Midgley’s pragmatic sensibleness opens up a vista with which to explore representations of animals as reflections on humanity that histrionic talk of the radical otherness of nature and animals obliterates—which, then, ironically destroys the only hope of these silent beings. To illustrate the profitability of this vista, I will consider Robert Burns and Anna Barbauld’s different representations of mice in their two short poems.

Midgley’s appreciation of anthropomorphism, which Garrard briefly considers (137-8), basically consists in the note that language—and hence all verbs, nouns, and particularly descriptive adjectives—is in some sense a projection of our own humanity. When facing down the threat of Cartesian solipsism produced by the sundering of Mind from Nature (in Descartes’ res cogitans and res extensa), we face what Midgley calls the “unrealistic sceptical isolation of human life from every possible context” (Midgley 1 128). It is because of this previous Cartesian platitude that anthropomorphism—when taken as an ecocritical concept—becomes distended. Defenders of nature and animals, wishing to do right by those they defend, wish to render the “authentic” animal, the lion qua lion. But registering the previous note that language is a set of human categories, the idea of anthropomorphism can generate the sheer impossibility of conceptualizing animals entirely, suggesting that “God – and indeed all non-human life – must be so unlike us that none of it can be understood from a human standpoint at all” (128). This is what Wittgenstein meant when, pointing at this Cartesian picture holding us captive, he said, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (Wittgenstein 223). The idea that we could understand the lion qua lion is a mirage created by our previous posited isolation from him, and this mirage—appearing the oasis from humanity’s tainted touch—is what renders the lion qua human categories reprehensible.

This Cartesian isolation is what produces the tangled web of Horkheimer and Adorno’s and Heidegger’s pessimism about the human situation. The haunting inevitability of “blindly pragmatized thought” [fn.1] lurks behind Heidegger’s obscure attempts to clear away and rehabilitate what he calls, in contradistinction to scientific thought, “Thought.” But Heidegger’s late-stage obscurity about what exactly he means by “Thought,” or “the Thinker” or “Poet,” just highlights the on-going struggle with the Cartesian problematic. Even Midgley falls for it, albeit briefly: “There is nothing unusual about confusing a symbol with the thing symbolized, about projecting a fantasy. … Mixing up a symbol with an attribution is, in fact, normal. Among human beings, it is often best checked by the victim, the walking symbol himself, who can say, ‘Hey, look—I am not that, but me’” (Midgley 2 33) Asking “the victim” is the Heideggerian point about the redescription of essence (res) as a “gathering,” which leads to Heideggerian authenticity (every “thing” has its own authentic collection of attributes) and the switch to aural metaphors (if only we could hear them). But this distinction between projected attributes and essential attributes can’t be maintained for the same reason that the Galilean metaphor of Science reading the Book of Nature cannot be maintained—only humans have and use language, and Heidegger’s reversal (“language speaks man”) simply obscures the silence Baudrillard says haunts us about animals. Even here, however, Baudrillard’s sense that Reason, and hence experimentation, is simply out for the “admission of the principle of objectivity” (129) muddles just what else we are supposed to do. Baudrillard says, “What is essential is that nothing escape the empire of meaning, the sharing of meaning. Certainly, behind all that, nothing speaks to us, neither the mad, nor the dead, nor children, nor savages, and fundamentally we know nothing of them, but what is essential is that Reason save face, and that everything escape silence” (137). Baudrillard is attempting to cast Reason as a bad guy for putting words in unspeaking mouths, but it is unclear what speaking is once you get “behind” the “empire of meaning”—behind meaning is noise, and even those who speak for themselves take part in that empire, which means animals do not present humans with a peculiar problem, so much as the constant threat of the breakdown in communication always does.

The representation of animals has to remain a pragmatic event of trial-and-error, for there is no “essence” to anything that we do not put there. This antiessentialism comes out of a consideration of how language works in the Cartesian problematic because the only way to beat Cartesian solipsism is by attribution, by the extension of what you are aware of (as a self-aware res cogitans) to everything else by analogy. The cessation of doubt, rather than through the theoretical scaffolding Descartes hoped to erect from undoubted doubting, to God, to everything else, is rather a practical affair of testing extensions and seeing what works. When we come to the particular kinds of attributions humanity has made to animals, they are varied, but one pernicious one Midgley analyzes is the “Beast Within” (Midgley 2 35). Midgley suggests that this image was created to “solve the problem of evil” (39). Whereas in the Iliad, the formula for explaining misfortune seems to be “if you cannot blame the enemy, blame the gods” (41), the slow slide in belief in Gods' efficacious externality (including their internalization as thumos—will, drive, spirit) produced the need for a new scapegoat. And so we get Plato’s Simile of the Charioteer, with the partitioning of the soul into a good horse and a bad horse, and as Midgley says, “the feelings named in this connection are shame, ambition, the sense of honor, never, for instance, pity or affection, where the body might be held to make good suggestions to the soul. Plato’s map excludes such a possibility” (42).

This is the shift we see taking place in the Romantic era. The rise of the function of Imagination in the role of the mind’s relationship to reality is concurrently the rise of sympathy’s fortunes in the realm of morality, which we can see in Edmund Burke’s account of the mind’s faculties in the Philosophical Enquiry and most especially in the Scottish Enlighenment’s redistribution of the mind’s powers for morals, e.g., in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The dynamic begun by Homeric and Platonic similes is still best given by Bruno Snell in his still classic, if a bit battered, The Discovery of the Mind: “it is not quite correct to say that the rock is viewed anthropomorphically, unless we add that our understanding of the rock is anthropomorphic for the same reason that we are able to look at ourselves petromorphically…. In other words, and this is all-important in any explanation of the simile, man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself" (201, italics mine).

In Burns’s and Barbauld’s poems about the mouse, this analogical attitude is on full display, though in different ways. What is interesting in this juxtaposition is that, as Perkins notes, Barbauld’s “mouse speaker is an intellectual” (Perkins 9), whereas Burns’s ploughman is “more personal, impulsive, and emotional” (10). This juxtaposition registers the fact that the ploughman, on the one hand, as a human is the intended audience for the sympathetic plea. So the reader, as a fellow human, identifies with the ploughman, who makes the plea because he shows imaginative sensitivity to the plight of the mouse (e.g., lines 19-24, when the “Nest” of the title is analogized to “Thy wee-bit housie”). On the other hand, the first move of imagination is already made in Barbauld’s poem when she makes the speaker’s voice the mouse’s. Instead of having to make the superior position (the ploughman) receptive to the work of sympathy, Barbauld’s taken the locus of weakness as the poem’s voice, and the mouse—following out Burke’s insight about size—makes itself quite a naturally sympathetic voice. To counter an over-balancing, in which the mouse becomes pathetic and therefore threatens to become an object of contempt, Barbauld rather makes the mouse a site of intellectual power. And in the course of the plea, Barbauld’s mouse argues for sympathy—unable to display the sympathetic ear (as with the ploughman), the mouse reasons that the “well taught philosophic mind” “feels for all that lives” (line 25, 28). The important move in Barbauld’s poem is “men, like mice” (line 46)—the center of gravity of the simile is the mouse. The conceit of the poem is the projection of the highest virtues of humanity (vaunted Reason and Philosophy) to mice, which are only then glancingly reflected back to humanity.

Endnotes

[1] I talk a little about Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in "Blake and the Dialectic of Englightenment," though not nearly extensively enough. Their pessimism is succinctly treated in Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 56-7. Bernard Yack diagnoses the underlying problem of both Horkheimer and Adorno and Heidegger as a totalizing concept of modernity in his The Fetishism of Modernities, Ch. 5. Yack's impressive little book presses home the thought on contemporary theory he excavated in The Longing for Total Revolution: that the troubling theoretical problems of both post-Marxist forms of thought (Frankfurt School critical theory to Birmingham School cultural studies) and post-Nietzschean forms (from Heidegger and Sartre to Foucault and Derrida) are one and the same--a totalizing concept of Society requiring a Herculean concept of autonomy.

Pirsig's Quest for Certainty

2010-06-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

This was initially written from a prompt by Leela, who asked in a discussion at the MD, after suggesting that the quest for metaphysical certainty drove Pirsig to insanity, whether Pirsig achieved a comfortable equilibrium.

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From what little appearances we know of Robert Pirsig's life since the time of ZMM, he's been able to control the demons that left him in the corner of a Chicago apartment with cigarettes burning into his knuckles. I think the most important thing to understand about Pirsig's philosophy is the personal nature Pirsig most of the time perceives to be at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. This is the point at which we might bring up the James picture of a hallway with different doors, or an art gallery with a myriad of paintings. This, of course, makes Pirsig sound like he only half-meant the Metaphysics of Quality. Emphasizing the fact that Pirsig thought philosophy was like playing chess, rather than having a perfect set of chess moves, suggests to some Pirsigians that the system Pirsig created is trying to be ignored. The question is: how do we balance Chapter 26 of Lila, the philosophology chapter wherein Pirsig tells us how to read philosophy, with Chapter 12, the levels chapter wherein Pirsig solves a few philosophical problems with his Metaphysics of Quality?

Pirsig attempted to develop a new metaphysics not just for himself, but for others, too--everybody gets that. The Metaphysics of Quality wasn't just for Pirsig. However, the way to balance the self-other equation might be like this: the Metaphysics of Quality is Pirsig's, but the insights of the Metaphysics of Quality are for everyone.

The "comfortable resolution" of a quest can only be decided by the life lived, because that's ultimately where philosophy dumps out. I think one of the greatest passages Pirsig wrote is the gumption chapter in ZMM. In that chapter, Pirsig brought together philosophical abstraction with practical living--he showed us how he thinks his explorations of the "high country of the mind" dump out into the valleys of life. What he shows is how a mind can get trapped in certain thought-loops, like the monkey and the rice. That's what happened to Phaedrus. That's the problem with the Quest for Certainty, as Dewey named it. What Pirsig picked up are techniques for quelling the inferential machine known as the mind--that's what the art of meditation specifically helps with. Pirsig perceived (rightly I think) the modern mind as quickly skipping down a road that will eventually prove to be self-destructive to both individual and society. So Pirsig wanted to expand a different set of roads, to show how we don't need to run into dilemmas like "where is the value, in the subject or object?"

But there are many ways of avoiding certain bad trains of thought--Pirsig's one occasional fault is that he sometimes creates the appearance of yelling out alone at night. But there are a lot of intellectuals who perceive similar evils and propose useful techniques and roads of travel. The one major problem caused by Pirsig's occasional flirtation with superlative uniqueness, which we could forgive in a friend, is that it leads to inflexibility of thought in fellow-travelers. It leads people to perceive themselves as not fellow-travelers, but rather disciples. It leads to the thought that edifices of thought generated by thinkers must be either rejected or accepted wholecloth, and that disagreement with the master is a rejection of everything holy.

Pirsig became comfortable with his quest for certainty because he eventually learned how to tone down the personal ramifications for failure. I think he learned that it isn't a Quest for Certainty that the philosophical tradition is in search of an answer to, but rather a personal quest for the kinds of everyday certainties that we act out of. Phaedrus' quest in ZMM may have begun as Plato's, but Pirsig's quest in writing it down was the quest to resolve doubts about the everyday certainties that are leading to bad things. Phaedrus began with Doubt about the possibility of Certainty, but Pirsig finished with specific doubts about particular certainties. Pirsig eventually became comfortable with the line of thought he'd written down, and the kinds of life-instincts it had given him.

That others may not be comfortable with his resolution only matters insofar as what is being pointed to are limitations in the tools and insights he afforded. Philosophy is autobiographical--we are commending things we've found useful. What philosophy is not is a search for an Answer to an antecedantly posed Question, like from Reality, or some other entity that's big and powerful enough to be able to pose a question antecedantly to spatialtemporal people. Only with the latter understanding of philosophy does it make sense to "reject the MoQ," or any system. Only if one assumes that there are universally perspicuous questions that every philosophy or person must have an answer to would one think that the MoQ's success rests on its ability to please everyone. Only if one thinks there's a big universal Quest humanity is on, rather than a lot of little quests individual people are on, will one take seriously the rhetoric of "demonstration" and "proving."

Philosophy is autobiography for Pirsig, and it is best served by taking it seriously, but not too seriously.

Order in Stevens

2010-06-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Poets who are better philosophers than philosophers are my favorite poets. It's a sad state of affairs, but everything I read gets fit into the stories of intellectual power that are constantly playing in my head. One of the curious effects of reading Bloom and Rorty, however, is that the aesthetic and the cognitive tend to dovetail, and so fitting everyone from Plato to Blake to Heidegger to Charles Brockden Brown into a sweeping story of how the West was won, or rather became itself (two ways of saying the same thing after Emerson), is a perfectly acceptable practice, if not any easier to do.

I probably like Stevens more than any other poet of the last 100 years because it always seems like he's wrestling with Plato. At least, that's all my ear picks up. That's pretty much the sum of the reading below, the final paper in a "Close Reading" seminar. There's not a lot to it, just a gerrymandered reading of three poems of Stevens I happen to like, barring "Of Mere Being," my favorite, because I'd already written on it.

You can find the three poems online here:
Anecdote of the Jar
The Idea of Order at Key West
The Poems of Our Climate (scroll down)

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To motivate my close reading, I’d like to remark at the outset that Stevens seems obsessed with the poet’s capacity to create order with words. Every poem, by being a poem, would seem to create its own implicit order, but what this means for order to be created by words is a theme Stevens often takes up in the poem. In Anecdote of the Jar, the problematic is set in the ambiguity that ensues as the jar attempts to order the landscape. In The Idea of Order at Key West, the poet’s relationship to her power in ordering is focused and takes on a sad, lonely tinge. Finally, The Poems of Our Climate takes the other side of the relationship, and shows a perfect order to not even be desirable.

The landscape of Anecdote is dominated by a hill, a jar, the wilderness, and—in a more subtle way—the “I.” The spare set-up of the anecdote begins: “I placed a jar in Tennessee,/And round it was, upon a hill.” (1-2) The “I” almost appears to look out onto the poem, never really moving from its position before placing the jar and disappearing. Like the singer’s voice in Idea of Order, the placing of the jar has a similar power of causation. The “I” creates a proxy in the “jar,” transferring its power as a finger pushes over the first domino. The effect of the jar being placed on the hill is felt immediately: “It made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill.” (3-4) Specificity is drawn out in “a hill” and again in “that hill,” a repetition of the anecdotal thematic. The truly curious thing about that jar on that hill, of course, is that it made the wilderness surround the hill.

The difficulty in the jar’s relationship to the hill appears more boldly when we add the next two lines: “The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild.” (5-6) This is the moment of ordering, but the ambiguities implied are twofold: 1) the verbs of “surround” and “rose” are ambiguous between a literal movement on the part of the wilderness, as if the jar caused the wilderness to march up to the hill, and a change in perspective caused by the jar being placed in the landscape, the juxtaposition of the newly placed jar making the wilderness appear differently than it did before. And 2) “slovenly” and “sprawled” give a very untidy appearance to the wilderness, but the effect of the jar on the wilderness is to make it “no longer wild.” To remove the “wild” from “wilderness” would be to disembowel, one would think, its very essence. Yet the “making” began in line 3, when it was first introduced as “slovenly” (let alone as “wilderness”), and even if we imagine its slovenly appearance to be in the midst of a makeover, the second action taken by it (“rising”) is accompanied by its sprawling and its no longer being wild. These two ambiguities create a sense of failed change, failed ordering. The actions of surrounding and rising are the appearance of action, simply a created effect—the jar suddenly appears on the hill and so the wilderness appears to surround and rise up to it. The wilderness is announced as no longer wild, yet it still sprawls. Just as the jar is taking “dominion everywhere” (9), the wilderness appears like a child who was ordered by its mother to clean up, but does so in name only.

The ambiguity of order is continued between lines 7 and 8: “The jar was round upon the ground/And tall and of a port in air.” Line 7 has a kind of ordering with the internal rhyming of “round” and “ground,” but the squatness of “round” when it is on the ground is juxtaposed in line 8 with its tallness when it is in the air. Further, the jar’s two different appearances are not vigorously separated by a “but,” but rather softly distinguished by the “and.” And whereas on the ground the jar is squat, in the air it has a certain “port,” or carriage. This shift in outward appearance, or carriage, is matched by a shift in diction, “port” being an archaic usage, age carrying with it a raised dignity. The movement we should notice is that while on the one hand, as the jar goes into the air, the diction rises and the jar appears more regal, on the other hand, all of the jar’s power occurs in its movement towards the ground. Just as the powers of order occur low to the ground, so does Stevens lower the poetic diction in shifting from the traditional “ode” (like to, say, a Grecian urn) to the “anecdote” (five appearing in Harmonium). Whereas the ode now gives the semblance of being over-composed, “anecdote” is from the Greek for “things unpublished.” If the ode gives us the sense of an embarrassedly raised diction, something too well-ordered, then Stevens’ anecdote gives us its proper opposite. In Anecdote of the Jar, we are treated to a jar that orders, but within the loose assemblage of the “anecdote.” In a similar way, Stevens achieves this contrast of dictions in the title of The Idea of Order at Key West. On the one hand there is “the idea of order,” with its high, Platonic-like diction, and on the other there is “Key West,” an American resort town.

The powers of ordering in Anecdote are transferred from the jar to the “she”-singer of Idea of Order:

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard. (8-14)

We were introduced to the sea as a “body wholly body” (3) that makes “mimic motion” (4). Lines 8-14 further differentiate the sea from the singer’s song. As we are introduced to the song, like in Anecdote, the verse itself takes on “melodic” attributes to mimic the order being created. The above is in blank verse, in perfect pentameter with near perfect iambs. Most of the poem is in something near blank verse, with a random dispersion of 10 to 12 syllable lines, and indeed takes on the form of something like a Homeric hymn, with its long stanzas of description, and particularly with the split five feet between lines 33 and 34 (“Of sky and sea./It was her voice that made”). Somehow the single rhyming sound at the end of lines 10, 11, 12, and 14 don’t seem overbearing or repetitive, possibly upset by “word by word,” with the first “word” sonically disturbing the perfect rhyme and so setting up the next between 11 and 12. Further melodic ordering includes the mirroring of “grinding water” and “gasping wind” and the beautiful closing internal rhyme before the final “heard” in line 14.

The singer is a poet. “For she was the maker of the song she sang.” (15) Homeric poets were rhapsodes, and their poetry was actually sung, thus beginning poetry’s long romance with metaphors of song. “Poet” comes from the Greek poiētēs, which meant “maker.” But there seems to be a tension in “The maker’s rage to order words of the sea” (53). “Making” seems to imply an act of creation, whereas “ordering” seems to imply an arrangement of things already there. The poem seems to be granting that creatio ex nihilo is an impossibility, but goes further still in honing a tension between the singer’s attempt to create something new as opposed to simply arranging things that were already there. Most of the poem spends its time consolidating the singer’s power in contradistinction to the sea. The simply stated “The song and water were not medleyed sound” (9) creates the impression that the “fluttering” (3) of the sea’s “empty sleeves” (4) are a mere epiphenomena to the song, yet the “It may be that in all her phrases stirred/The grinding water and the gasping wind” (12-13) compromises this sense. Even as lines 8-14 begin the consolidation of the singer’s power, the lines seem sad. This sadness begins to set in with “yet its mimic motion/Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry” (4-5). In the odd epanorthosis which corrects the sea crying to simply causing a cry, it is difficult to tell which is the more disturbing, though in the end the correction merely appears as a repetition for emphasis as “we understood” (6) the cry to be “of the veritable ocean.” (7) After the singer begins her ordering of lines 8-14, the tone of melancholy reaches its denouement for the sea when we find that the “tragic-gestured sea/Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.” (16-17)

I sense a transference beginning, however, when the next line begins “Whose spirit is this? we said” (18). The audience, of which our hidden narrator is but one (never fully making an appearance until he begins talking to Ramon Fernandez), makes a distinction between the “spirit” and something else. At first we might simply take it to be the sea, that “body wholly body” (3). But as the auditor continues to listen, the answer seems to change. Lines 21 to 28 contain a long conditional that begins “If it was only the dark voice of the sea” (21) and finally ends “it would have been … sound alone” (25, 28). The sea is “sound alone”—no spirit. But then: “But it was more than that,/More even than her voice, and ours, among/The meaningless plunging of water and the wind” (28-30). This is an effusive “more,” more than sound alone, more than the singer’s voice, more than the audience’s voice (the implication that the audience makes sounds similar to the singer’s). Yet this effusive “more” seems to obscure the spirit-body distinction that we would’ve identified with the song-sea distinction. It is this same effusive “more” that is cut off by the split pentameter of lines 33 and 34. Almost asking to begin again, 34 restores the singer’s voice to power: “It was her voice that made/The sky acutest at its vanishing.” (34-35) But as the singer accumulates more and more power (“when she sang, the sea,/Whatever self it had, became the self/That was her song,” 38-40) she becomes more solitary: “Then we,/as we beheld her striding there alone,/Knew that there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.” (40-43) This near solipsistic moment achieves the singer’s own melancholic denouement. We find that the sad cry of the sea is a mirror for the sad, solitary cry of the singer, obscured before, but now mimicked by the parity between her measuring of the sky’s “solitude” in line 36 and striding “alone” by the sea in line 41.

The narrative of Idea of Order is the auditor’s coming to terms with the song and the sea, between ordering and making. On the one hand, the “words of the sea” simply do what the singer tells them to do, the more power taken, the more alone she is. On the other hand, the audience espies a spirit behind both the sea and her voice, something more. As a mere ordering (as in lines 8-14) turns into a stronger making, the singer becomes solipsistic—and yet even then, something escapes. This something “more” arises again in The Poems of Our Climate. We are presented with “Clear water in a brilliant bowl,/Pink and white carnations.” (1-2) The syntax in which the carnations are pictured in the bowl gives a kind of simple, lyric quality to the lines. And yet:

Pink and white carnations—one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there. (6-10)

The “brilliant bowl” of “clear water” achieve some of the jar’s causal power as the day seems to be simplified by the bowl itself. Compare the bowl’s “complete simplicity” (11), how it is “low and round” (9), with the jar being “round upon the ground” (Anecdote, 7) and “gray and bare” (10).

Certainly with the jar one would want more, and as the jar neuters the wilderness, so does the bowl strip down the surrounding world:

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white snowy scents. (Poems, 11-17)

The “complete simplicity” of the bowl is opposed to complexity, to the “evilly compounded, vital I,” yet as light and airy as the “newly-fallen snow” appears in the first stanza, the bowl itself seems the sinister element, the pink and white carnations a mere façade. The “evilly” in the second stanza seems imposed by the order of the bowl, not fitting with the I’s vitality. In fact, I take the “vital I” to be the same “I” that places the jar on the hill, the only real, unambiguous action in that poem. In Poems, the sense is that as nice as the carnations and clear water seem, there is something missing that one wants, and the “vital I” seems the key.

The “more” seems even more incessant than in Idea of Order, and whereas the “more” of Idea of Order was of something more that escaped the sea and the voice, the “more” of Poems turns into a desire to escape:

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. (18-24)

The ambiguity of order in Anecdote, where it isn’t clear if the jar succeeds in neutering the still sprawling, un-wild wilderness, compares well with the ambiguity of both success of an ordering-turn-making (with the spirit still escaping) and our desire for the resultant solipsism in Idea of Order. The latter’s “blessed rage for order” (Idea of Order, 52) should be compared to the juxtaposing of delight and bitterness and paradise and imperfection in Poems. Indeed, the “however clear” (25) that the sea was in Idea of Order finds its way into “clear water” of the bowl. And while our imperfection is “hot” (Poems, 23), the bowl is “Cold, a cold porcelain” (9). The tensions in Anecdote and Idea of Order become explicitly manifest in Poems, becoming the exact source of not only our sadness, as in Idea of Order, but also our happiness.

Stevens’ sense of order is an imperfect arranging. In Anecdote, the order that appears only does so by its contradistinction to the wilderness which surrounds it, that even as it takes “dominion everywhere,” the wilderness is only ambiguously tamed. In Idea of Order, the singer’s “rage to order words of the sea” masters the mimicking sea, but the spirit still escapes. In Poems, order takes its appearance as an unsatisfactory, “complete simplicity.” In each poem, something escapes the order, and Stevens seems to be suggesting that we should delight in this imperfection of our imposed order. The jar’s perfect ambiguity is expanded into the singer’s solipsistic rage and focused in the bowl as our imperfect paradise.

Cavell and Romanticism

2010-06-11T08:00:00.002-07:00

Stanley Cavell is a unique figure in philosophy and literary criticism, not quite having a home in either but tending to demand attention nonetheless. I'm not sure how Cavell's fortunes are faring in Philosophy Departments, though I suspect he'll go the way of Santayana, but if you're working the streets of Romanticism these days, particularly Emerson or Thoreau, Cavell shows up on the litcrit radar. As well he should, for despite Rorty's strictures against taking philosophical skepticism seriously, if one were to, Cavell is one of the few to show how. The route through is to deflate its philosophical character, which following Rorty we should say is its "Philosophical" character. And by returning to what Cavell calls "the Ordinary," we can better see what live issues there are surrounding the hubbub Descartes created (or Pyrrho for that matter), though perhaps not why we should call it "the Ordinary" and make such a big deal "O" of it. On the other hand, the way I read Cavell is as I read Rorty's talk about metaphors as the engine of cultural change, which is an important point to make.

I stumbled into philosophy by accident, a random obsession with Pirsig which, stumbling into a book at a bookstore one fateful Christmas-break day, blossomed eventually into a random obsession with Rorty. There are perhaps two philosophers with which I wonder what I would think should I have become obsessed with their writing rather than Rorty's, two writers who hold a candle in my imagination. But I doubt Bernard Williams would have captivated by attention in just the same way. Cavell would have.

References are to Cavell's In Quest of the Ordinary.

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One of the unique things about Cavell is the payment one receives by close reading him. I take the following passage, describing his relationship with Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, to encapsulate Cavell’s understanding of the Romantic project:

But I had never been able to stay with it for longer than a chapter, and maybe half of the next, before closing the book with fear and frustration—both at the hopelessness in its ambitions for reconstituting the history of thought, by means, for example, of its elated obscurities as it translates Schelling on the task of something called uniting subject and object; and at its oscillation of astounding intelligence and generosity together with its dull and withholding treatment of Wordsworth’s sense in claiming for poetry the language of the rustic and the low. (Cavell 41)

If we aren’t careful, I think it might be easy to read the “hopelessness” as driving his fear (ambitions too tall) and the “oscillation” as driving his frustration (“why can’t Coleridge give Wordsworth a break?”). I think, however, that Cavell feels both fear and frustration at both the “hopelessness” and “oscillation.” Romanticism has lofty goals and ambitions and this loft produces “elated obscurities.” The trouble, and where the conflict and oscillation comes, is that the overall ambition of Romanticism, as Cavell understands it, is the reconstitution of what he otherwise calls “the Ordinary.”

To restate Cavell’s thought: philosophy began as a flight from the everyday, and began building its floating thought-castles to replace, in some fashion, the bleakness of the ground it wished to flee. The Romantic perceives this flight as misguided and wishes to replace, in some fashion, Philosophy. However, doing so means fighting them on their own ground, which is to say, in the air. And there is a sense, no less, that the impetus to philosophy—skepticism at pieces of the everyday—wasn’t wrong, and should be reconstituted in the replacement Romanticism. This resketching of Cavell, I think, catches his point about “romanticism,” with its lowercase “r,” being not just an historical entity, but a current of thought that runs everclear. But while this is the case—which makes lowercase philosophy a deathless force—the historical entities known as Romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc.) and Philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Schelling, etc.) must still be contested on their own terms. The question of what the “terms” are is, again no less, what is in part at issue and causing of the loft of ambition needed to engage.

Cavell is frustrated at having not just to contend with these obscurities, but produce them himself in trying to reconstitute the history of thought. This frustration then also fuels his fear that these ambitions might be too great, that the philosophical acts required might be all for naught. Is there something special in this for romanticism, though? Why would this frustration and fear loop not just be the regular fears and frustrations of the ambitious? Why is Cavell, as I think he is, especially confronted with this double problem by Coleridge’s text? So far I’ve been concentrating most on the hopelessness-of-ambition part of Cavell’s two-part fear and frustration. In glossing the “history of thought” bit, I’ve attempted to hint at how the hopelessness of philosophical ambition (and the attendant annoyingness of philosophic diction) is entwined with Cavell’s problem with Coleridge’s oscillation. Attending to what Cavell confronts in Coleridge’s confrontation with Wordsworth, I think, will give us the problem that is specific to romanticism.

Cavell’s frustration with Coleridge’s “elated obscurities” is counterpointed by his frustration with Coleridge’s attitude towards Wordsworth’s “claiming for poetry the language of the rustic and the low.” The fact that poetry should have to lay claim to “the low” articulates poetry’s natural, tall position in the equation. The oscillation that Cavell feels is between Coleridge “getting” Wordsworth and then not, between “praising his power and promise” and then “cursing him” for “failing his power and breaking his promise” (41). “Getting the hang” of Wordsworth, I think, is an appropriate idiom to import, and Cavell’s word is “generosity”—Coleridge gives something to Wordsworth when he understands him properly, the sense in which he claims the low for poetry. Cavell unpacks this oscillation as Coleridge’s projection of “the achievements back into promises” (41). That is the key, hiding as it is in Wordsworth’s use of what Coleridge said to him in the 1815 supplementary essay to the Lyrical Ballads: the great poet creates “the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” What Coleridge acts out unconsciously in his critical glance at Wordsworth and what Cavell senses in the promise and problem of romanticism is that the poetic, visionary, prophetic achievement opens the view in which the achievement can be seen at all, but it is always a partial failure for it cannot itself step through the opening. The achievement creates the terms by which it should be judged, and predictably enough the letter is found wanting by an evolved and retrospectively glancing spirit—an ungrateful spirit created by the letter. In other words, the oscillation is a necessary trait of romanticism, for the more Coleridge gives to Wordsworth’s achievement, the more he changes into his vision, and the more he sees is wanting because of the more he sees.

To help better understand this swing from praising the vista to damning the groundbreaking limitations, we might add Cavell’s brilliant summary of his The Claim of Reason: the “mark of the natural in natural language is its capacity to repudiate itself, to find arbitrary, or merely conventional, the lines laid down for its words by our agreement in criteria, our attunement with one another…” (48). If we go the other way at this suggestion, it brings to light philosophy’s relationship with poetry—the “artificial” in language is that which is stipulated, that which by definition does not need agreement for it asks for none, that which asks for no generosity. The process of agreeing to stipulations is the passing of poetry into “natural language”—the “getting the hang” of an idiom. A vision opens a future in which its taste can be enjoyed, but it only becomes the present as people generously pass through the opening. This is the hidden flipside to the Fall story that “seems a romantic’s birthright”—poetry passing into theology, in Blake’s terms, is the fate of any vision to be enjoyed, and yet its enjoyment is its fall from grace, from pure poetry into something understandable, agreed upon, attuned to. By claiming the language of the low for poetry, Wordsworth was internalizing the dialectic of life and death lived by the poet’s metaphors.

Of Mere Being

2010-06-04T08:00:00.001-07:00

I am not a great reader of poetry, and really not a reader at all, but I've begun to find poets and poems that I can read, by which I mean I find nourishment, if not articulated understanding.

I can't tell whether it is just an effect of having read so much of Harold Bloom, but I find that my tastes are identical to his. At least, the early Bloom. I haven't found my way in Shakespeare or Homer yet, but the early Bloom was preoccupied with Romanticism and its offspring, and I hazard that the three poets who loomed largest were Blake, Emerson, and Wallace Stevens. And those are the three who've found me most. As Bloom aged, and he endeavored to take more and more history in his grasp, the only one of the three to continue on at the forefront of his writing was Emerson (probably an effect of wanting to become an American Sage) and in contrast to the others' fall was the J-writer, Homer, Milton and Shakespeare's rise. But that's merely an effect of perspective: if you asked him even now who he loves most, rather than who was most powerful over a 3,000 year span, I think he would say Stevens and Hart Crane.

I took a "Close Reading" seminar a little time ago, and after taking a class on English Romanticism, I'm finding the little readings I wrote for those classes beginning to make a useful collage. The pattern was, no doubt, predetermined by my preoccupations, which are in some ways taken from my heroes, like Rorty and Bloom, but their preoccupations come from the source material I now look at, so it isn't surprising I see and write about their themes in relation to it. And perhaps these might find useful exposition under my jagged saw, if only to send one to the nearest surgeon's knife.

Of Mere Being can be found here (corrected copy with "decor" and not "distance").

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A lone palm frond rises up before us and it is difficult to tell where it came from. Such is the effect of the Godlike, yet human, stance taken in the poem—there’s hardly a “tone,” if tone be something emotional, at all. This dry, surveying of an interior space, of course, is the proper affect of an explorer, reporting to his fellows his discoveries. The Explorer stands inside of us, our minds, and is telling Us his findings—what makes us happy or unhappy. But since the Explorer is also us, there is a certain self-addressed quality—the introspective sojourner, telling us and himself about what he found inside of himself, which is also inside of us.

The figure repeated by this Cartesian Explorer, which seems to undergird his very existence as an Explorer, is the spatial metaphor for the mind—if the mind weren’t a space, it would be difficult to presume that we need an Explorer, “out” “un-covering” facts about the way things “are” (before they were covered). The tropes of factual existence and space are so tightly bound together, it is difficult to tell which one came first, or how to unbind them. The affect of a tonal blandness, what we call “matter-of-fact,” is a further trope difficult to untangle—even knowing they are all tropes, and so created, we can’t seem to get away from the “fact” that when you want to “emote” the way things “are,” you do it “matter-of-factly,” as if the way things are had a special sound or tone. And then, of course, you huddle your difficulties together in scare quotes to pretend like you don’t really mean those words, without realizing that “really meaning” anything would seem to itself imply the thing you’re scared of.

Our Explorer, however, is unafraid, and calmly pushes, like furniture out of the way, “Beyond the last thought” (2) to “The palm at the end of the mind,” (1) which “rises/in the bronze decor” (2-3). Such a silly image, our mind as a bronzed room in which the Explorer has discovered a palm frond rising out of at its edge—near the window, perhaps, just past the chaise-thought—is the oddity we began with: how matter-of-factly presented! Yet on we go, to find “A gold-feathered bird” (4) presented to us, which “Sings in the palm” (5). At this point, the Explorer begins withholding from us: the song is “without human meaning,/Without human feeling, a foreign song.” The sense of “without” as being a “withheld” is given by the sense in which the Explorer, having discovered this bird that sings, is telling us that its song is without meaning or feeling. And yet, the bird is within all of us, so the description is an assertion about the song's unavailability, despite what we may think should we care to explore the bronze room ourselves. And further, that the song is “foreign,” and not unintelligible though pretty noise, suggests that our Explorer, or someone, can understand the song—its translation is being withheld from us, either willfully or do to sheer inability on our part. And given the godlike, surveying powers of the Cartesian Explorer, it is difficult not to feel a little of both.

The Explorer now mounts an argument: “You know then that it is not the reason/That makes us happy or unhappy./The bird sings. Its feathers shine” (7-9). Like a scientist building a case for his theory, “You know” stands in for “given the evidence I just gave you.” The Explorer has discovered something, and given this, we know something else. But given our tilting apprehensions at information being withheld, the argument plays a little forced. The Explorer, seeing his hand bent a little too far forward, rushes the staccato evidential claims, “The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” The Explorer emotes a little uncertainty thereby, given his own listening to the song he’s singing.

The report of the last stanza gives the feeling of ebbing away. I think this should suggest to us that the tone of matter-of-factness becomes the trope I called it earlier. The juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact tone with the silly image heightens until it shakes the Explorer’s own faith in it. There is a shift in tone between the third and fourth stanzas, from dry arguing and listing of data to increasingly lyrical and “poetic” descriptions. We first get the palm frond again, but then we get an entirely new sentence which gives us a slow breeze blowing through the verse, an environmental quality to the mind that was missing in the staid, dry tone used earlier. And while it is a “wind,” and not specifically a breeze, there is a feeling that by the last line, it would have been a “willowy wafting breeze,” as the Explorer lets loose a pure, poetic outburst, with a sudden alliterative nightmare of complications to metaphors (the gold feathers are now “fire-fangled”; what is “fire-fangled”?; they dangle down despite the wind; why dangle?). This complete about-face in tone and style, his entire rhetorical edifice, suggests that the Explorer is spiraling away from himself, giving to himself not only hints of uncertainty in the third stanza with the rushed argument, but a full crisis of being.

I do not think the last line means anything—I think it is as close to an unintelligible outburst as Yeats’ “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” The Explorer mirrors his last line—which is still yet an image within the mind, within the compass of his exploration—on the boundary, “the end,” “the edge” of intelligibility created by the bird’s own “foreign song,” in order to create the effect of our minds actually reaching that edge, which is at the same time to pull down the curtain hiding the tropeness of discovery and the mind as an interior space. The Explorer begins as an Explorer, but ends as a Poet, giving the impression that if we could just disentangle this last “foreign” phrase, “fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” we might know what the song means. But what we know, in line seven, is that “it”—the song—“is not the reason/That makes us happy or unhappy.” It’s the feathers—the poetic act of near-unintelligibility, gently nudging the edges of our mind back.

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Postscript

I took the easy way out with the last line. Most litcrits these days seem to be quite enamored with this uncertainty, Keats’ negative capability, with the fact that the oddity of the metaphor, the distinct unclarity of the trope, should not be something washed away, and if you did, you might be thereby effacing the trope.

Well, with the last line—knowing well in advance that everything can be made into a trope and that this wasn’t the first time (we always want to be a poem’s first time, don’t we?)—the sheer unintelligibility of “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down” became, for me, the trope. Instead of seeing the line, and going, “Damn—now what the hell does that mean!?,” I said, quite matter-of-factly, “The last line of the poem does not mean anything.”

Which of course, like the depth of surfaces, is just to say that the last line does mean something—specifically, nothing. The question of course is, “how do you know it means nothing?” And hence the several hundred words before, all about a “matter of fact” tone, held throughout the poem of “discovery” of the boundaries of meaning in the “inner space” of the mind. Once one realizes that the mind-as-a-space is a trope, that produces an “Explorer” in the first place, this allows you to “discover” that the far-reaches of the mind is the far-end of trope. The Explorer turns into a Poet at the end because he realizes that the edge of intelligibility teaches the tropeness of tone and rhetoric, and so drops the tone of the Explorer, picks up that of the Poet and lets loose with a piece of nonsense. The last line is the written version of the “foreign song” we were told doesn’t have any meaning—now we see it doesn’t have any meaning.

Which is all quite a pat argument, and somehow makes the poem less fun—except the last line, which always remains fun, for it means nothing. Until I say it specifically means nothing, thus enclosing it with a certain meaning: nothing. Then I read it again and go, “yeah, but what the hell does that mean?” And I have to remind myself, “nothing. It means nothing.” And so it ebbs away in my mind, having wrangled its meaning, the metaphor dying andthenIreaditagain “fire-fangled feathers dangle down” and go, “How could anybody attach any meaning to thatohyeah: it means nothing....But—no, nothing, right....right?yes, nothing....bu—okay: YOU HAVE TO STOP READING THE POEM.”

Rhetorical Universalism

2010-05-28T08:00:00.004-07:00

I shall define universalism as the philosophical position taken by any range of claims of which it is said that a claim might be true whether someone believes it or not. For a universalistic claim, truth swings free of belief.

To weigh the universalist claim, I would distinguish two questions: 1) Is it true? and 2) Is it effective?

On its face, to distinguish these two questions seems to concede the issue to the universalist—the effectiveness of a claim is its ability to claim belief. So to distinguish between effectiveness and truth as two different questions is to already claim that truth swings free from belief.

To justify this distinction, I would suggest that attempts to move around the distinction fall into two camps, two different reductionisms: Platonists and Sophists. The battle between Platonists and Sophists is the battle between Platonists who think that the second question collapses into the first (truth produces effectiveness) and Sophists who think that the first question collapses into the second (effectiveness produces truth). Each camp, however, needs to explain their own set of anomalous occurrences. The Platonist needs to explain why the truth isn’t always effective—why isn’t hearing a true statement always convincing? Why does it sometimes fall on “deaf ears”? The Sophist, on the other hand, needs to explain the smell of sulfur—why is her claim not just an excuse to tell lies, since we all know lies can be as effective as truths?

The way I’ve described both anomalies cues both camps to their own pernicious, and unsatisfactory, responses. The Platonist can claim that it is just deafness on the part of some, which at its extremes is a kind of willful plugging of the ears. The Sophist can claim that that’s all truths are—just lies we all believe, and the name of the game is getting people to buy what your selling, however you do it. Both of these responses are unsatisfactory for the same reason—they are too easy, both ending discussion with a dogmatic assertion of how things are. And if the retort from either is, “ah, but that doesn’t mean what I’m saying isn’t true,” then we’ve already moved further into the game I’m suggesting—that truth and effectiveness are distinct.

To defend their reductionisms without contradiction, without reducing and distinguishing in two separate, analogous breaths, both the Platonist and the Sophist need to suggest a mechanism by which we can tell when one side has been reduced to the other. This mechanism would then be able to suggest to us what cases of pernicious static do in fact look like. For example, for the Platonist to not look like a jerk who cries “you are deaf to the truth!!!” every time someone disagrees with him, the Platonist needs a method that’s publicly available to all that will tell us when a person really is just willfully plugging their ears or spitefully blinding themselves in order to hold on to some cherished, though now falsified, belief. Likewise, for the Sophist to not look like a devilish, insincere fraud who will say anything to get her way, the Sophist needs a method that’s publicly available to all that will tell us when a particular line of reasoning or justification that up-holds some particular belief is, in fact, true and not simply convenient. In other words, the Platonist and the Sophist are looking for the same thing.

Since a search for a theoretical method or theorem that will ascertain truth is a typical trope for what we think of as Platonism, but not the Sophist, I will say a little bit more about the Sophist. For, have not philosophers occasionally argued that we do not need truth, that all we need is justification? Justification, when properly distinguished from truth, is relative to an audience in a way that truth is not. Your ability to justify yourself in front of an audience is relative to your ability to communicate with them, which means sharing a language, relevant concerns, and a sense of what counts as evidence and good and bad reasons. This means that you could find yourself in front of an audience that counts as a good reason a belief (e.g., in God) that you yourself do not hold. So what is stopping you from grasping at the disbelieved straw if it gets your audience to do what you want?

One might say the virtue of sincerity, but Platonists don’t think this option is available to the Sophist. They don’t understand why, if one really thought that all you needed was effectiveness, one wouldn’t grasp at whatever means were available at any moment to attain one’s ends. I don’t have an answer to this because I honestly don’t see the difficulty—it is unclear what the relationship is, to use Bernard Williams’s distinction, between truth and truthfulness. It is that relationship that further needs a theoretical adumbration, a mechanism.

In my first formulation of Platonism and Sophism, I claimed they were reductionisms and that this reduction requires a mechanism. In this sense, they both deny the distinction between truth and justification. On this formulation, however, it makes as much sense to say that Platonists can use whatever justification they want, just so long as they know the true truth in their hearts. For if you know the truth, but have no mechanism available to convince other people, what aside from sincerity keeps you from grasping whatever means you can? But this lack of mechanism includes the link between truth and sincerity, so if it is denied the Sophist, so too for the Platonist. And the fact of the matter is that I think there is historical precedence for both phenomenons—for pernicious liars who are pathologically only out for themselves (e.g., the Hitler administration) and for pernicious Holders of Truth who will do what they need to do because they know it’s true in their gut (e.g., the Bush administration).

I’d like to note that I modulated earlier from “truth reduces to justification” to “all you need is justification.” The “all you need” formulation is a modulation from the reduction-formulations to try and capture a wilier version of this problem, to try to avoid stawmen as much as possible. But look what happens when we apply both versions to Platonism and Sophism. The picture of the Platonist looks normal when wearing the notion of a mechanism, but the Sophist does not. So to help the picture of the Sophist I modulated from reduce-as-mechanism to reduce-as-“all you need.” But “all you need” is not a reduction in the strictest sense because what it requires is a firm distinction between two things (only one of which you need). The picture of the Sophist looks normal when wearing the notion of reduction, but the Platonist looks a little odd because we are used to associating the Platonist with Up-Holders of Truth. As I’ve suggested, though, without the “Up” of mechanism, the Holders of Truth produce just as much nasty material as liars.

So what is going on? James, Dewey, and Foucault all seemed to toy with the Sophist reduction. Foucault’s channeling of Thrasymachus in the formula “knowledge is power” is just the darker-seeming flipside of James’ more optimistic-seeming “the true is the good in the way of belief.” The more neutral formula of what both come to is Dewey’s “truth is warranted assertibility.” But what does this reduction amount to without the mechanism? So-called “postmodern” reductions of truth to illusions, of which Foucault’s is one of the more sensible (once you understand what Foucault means by “discipline”), themselves founder for the same reason the appearance/reality distinction does—if you aren’t going to offer a method for discerning truth from illusion, using the rhetoric of illusion for anything is theoretically self-contradictory.

I would like to say that the dialectic between Platonist and Sophist I’ve brought us through helps us better appreciate the situation we face when considering the universalist claim. The idea that truth swings free from belief is often associated with the Platonist side of the dialectic, but notice that if we don’t get a mechanism—which is what drove the seesaw—it is unclear what the universalist claim gets us: the Platonist wanted more truth, but without the mechanism, what more does the universalist claim give?

Rorty’s strategy for dealing with the situation was to claim that truth and justification are distinct, but that justification is the only route we have to making a claim of truth. I want to call this rhetorical universalism. By the time the Sophist side of the dialectic with Platonists reaches Dewey, it has become clear that Dewey would need a mechanism as much as the Platonist. This realization causes us to notice the similarities. Against reducing truth to justification that has been a typical strategy of pragmatists, Rorty sides with Donald Davidson’s claim that truth is a semantic and radically non-epistemic notion. Truth swings free of belief, but that tells us nothing about what to believe.

If we call the universalist claim—a claim might be true whether someone believes it or not—the realist intuition, we can see the impetus behind philosophical realisms and Platonisms and the force of Davidson’s theory as a way of paying homage to that intuition. The realist and Platonist want to emphasize that what we happen to believe now might not be the truth. Davidson is saying that it is the case that truth swings free of belief, but that there is no way to motivate this in a way that tells us which particular beliefs are false (aside from the universalist claim itself). The key is motivating truths—how do you motivate the realist intuition that is, e.g., housed in the disquotational theory of truth: “snow is white” is true iff snow is white. Davidson claims that the disquotational theory of truth is all the theory we are going to get. All it tells us is how the word “true” works: a sentence is “true” if what the sentence says is the case. What it doesn’t give us is a mechanism for ascertaining the truth of the sentence. What Davidson is saying is that the realist intuition is true, but that’s as far as it goes.

But say we accept all this—is there not still something left to account for in coming to terms with the realist intuition? For, where did the realist intuition come from? Even if we don’t believe in various supernaturalisms, positing various kinds of “intuitive” faculties; even if we are naturalist through and through, that still means the realist intuition came from somewhere.

In fact, intuitive faculty explanations turn out to be the easy way out. To say that an intuition of some kind, some belief you have about this or that which you have no easy explanation to offer about its source, to say that it came from a “direct” relation to reality is to basically halt the explanatory sequence at that the claim of directness. Doing this changes the subject of explanation from “where did this particular belief come from?” to “what is this ‘direct relation’ exactly?” The former question is a perfectly understandable, naturalistic historical-rhetorical question. The latter question is a perfectly suitable, specifically epistemological question. If your interests are to move from questions anybody can answer to a disciplinary question only specialists can answer, then this performs the delimiting magic required. However, to delimit the field of inquiry in this manner—to construct “epistemology” as a subject that asks questions which are not historical-rhetorical—is to revert to a Cartesian-Kantian understanding of epistemology. Specifically, I am suggesting that direct-relations claims will at some point need to fall back on a faculty psychology, one that is anti-naturalistic.

So to return to the difficult historical-rhetorical question (rather than posing a different, non-natural question)—where does the realist intuition come from? What is it about the world that produces the sense that some things are true whether or not you believe them (like snow being white)? The answer that I think Davidson would suggest is that to say “the world” in stating the question has been what has misled us into creating philosophical realisms all these many years. There is a hidden, pernicious distinction in the question between “the world” and “us,” how “the world” is that produces something “in us.” For Davidson, the fact of successful communication presupposes triangulation, an inseparable triad of person-community-world. So the best answer about where the realist intuition comes from may be “it comes from the fact that a single person is typically successful in her communicative negotiations with other people and the world at large, and that the idea of ‘success’ presupposes an occasional unsuccess, which produces in the single person a sense that she might be, on occasion, corrected in her attempts at communication.” Or to put it more simply: “I feel like I’m right, but I have to allow for the fact that I might be wrong.” The realist intuition is just fallibilism. Philosophical realisms have been trying to convert our occasional wrongness about the world into a theory. When the topic has been truth, it has taken the guise of a certifying theorem that will convert historical-rhetorical justifications into irrefutable, infallible true statements that are impervious to further inquiry. But we have found out—so goes the Rortyan story about the march of 2500+ years of philosophical dialogue—that there is no theorem that will relate justification and truth in this way. There is no route from fallibility to infallibility.

What I’m calling rhetorical universalism is the claim that we are always and everywhere situated in a rhetorical web, and that this is true whether or not you believe it. Davidson’s arguments about triangulation, the disquotational theory of truth, the principle of charity, the rejection of the scheme/content distinction—all of these dovetail into a description of how communication must work. And since we agree that we do most of the time successfully communicate, it follows from this very simple fact that we are always situated in a historical-rhetorical community—that “rhetoric goes all the way down.” This truth has not always been recognized, would not have always been justified, would not have always been rhetorically effective. But there is nothing contradictory between holding these two things, just so long as you distinguish between two questions: Is it true? and Is it effective?

Are There Bad Questions?

2010-05-21T08:00:00.002-07:00

Richard Rorty spent the last ten years of his life redacting some of his more controversial rhetorical strategies, which included endlessly apologizing for hyperbole. One of his favorite strategies was to say that there were bad questions: to pursue a certain line of thought was to put yourself on the path to a conversational cul-de-sac, ending in aporia, a seeming inability to get anybody to agree to an answer. This inability to find criteria that you could get people to agree on to explain what a good answer would look like was the tell-tale sign of a bad question. The “bad question” approach to philosophical disagreement is hiding in his earliest writing, but began to truly flower when Rorty first formulated the groundplan for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1970 with “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” became solidified in that book, and most famously codified in the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism. In that intro, the bad-question approach becomes entwined with another strategy Rorty came to embrace: the I-don’t-have-a-theory approach. “[The pragmatist theory of truth] says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about” (CP xiii).

The ironic self-contradiction has always been plain to people, though most who have taken to pointing it out leave out the irony and what it means: the pragmatist theory of truth is one about why we won’t have an interesting theory about truth. That’s important, though I’m not sure Rorty always understood quite how important. For a page later he says, famously:

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the Truth or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions anymore. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. (CP xiv)

This “I have no theory” approach gets broadened into “and neither arguments nor theses,” as when he said in the late-70s, “Non-Kantian philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, they do not have arguments or theses” (CP 93). This eventually turns into his claim that Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity contains no arguments (evidence to the contrary). The interrelationship between what Rorty means by “theory,” “argument,” and “thesis” at any given moment can be parsed, and I think it would show that it depends on which direction he’s facing—whether towards Platonists, who think we must have a theory, or towards pragmatists, who think they are optional. This can be a complicated needle to thread (principally because it involves the fact that people have, e.g., selves though having a theory or thesis about that fact is optional), but to make the first pass in knitting the row, I would point out that Rorty doesn’t mention who finds the essence of Force or definition of “number” interesting. Because I certainly don’t. There are two different audiences for “number” and then “truth.” In the former case, the audience is likely mathematicians. In the latter case, Rorty’s audience is professional philosophers. And it is those who disagree with how interesting results about truth have been. So what does Rorty mean be “interesting”?

Rorty usually means by “interesting” in these contexts “discernable effect on people’s lives.” In the case of numbers, though non-mathematicians could care less, the fact that mathematics professors do and keep producing results that pan out into the warp of society means that the woof of what they do has interest. This is not the case with “truth” and “good” as of yet, for Rorty’s claim is that inquiry into Truth has not helped people produce more true statements. And by and large (emphasis on the “large”) this is true. The trouble is that Rorty has to admit that for philosophers, inquiry into Truth has helped them produce more true statements—for example, Davidson’s claim that “most of our beliefs are true.” This, as Rorty admits, is interesting and could not have been done without the context of logical positivism and their unacknowledged Platonic goals.

Being forced to face this equivocation in his rhetorical stances, Rorty began to finally admit that he does have theses, or theories, or pictures, of this or that philosophical-looking kind of object (“the self” or “reality” or “experience” or “language”). This means a disentangling of the bad-question approach and no-theory approach. “I have no theory” is really code for “you are going to be really disappointed when I tell you what it is…,” and this because of the Platonic expectations typically carried by people asking for one. But this means that “bad question” isn’t inherent, but rather a conversational stability produced by the instability of criteria for what counts as a good answer. Rorty can answer the question of what truth is, but because of the wildly ranging differences of opinion over what it is good for, it will seem a bad answer to somebody. The light in which Rorty’s answer, or anybody’s, can appear good is a stipulative light—“if for the moment we agree on X, Y, and Z, then this theory will satisfy it.” Rorty’s stipulation on truth has been the stipulation that truth, properly speaking (which is to say “for the occasion of my theory”), is a semantic and radically non-epistemic concept. That is not the only way we use the word “true,” but when push comes to shove, we should stop trying to incorporate those uses, e.g. the endorsing use, into our theory of truth because doing so is what leads to bad questions that we can’t seem to answer, or would have any practical consequences even if we could (like how we know when “snow is white” corresponds to the fact that snow is white). When Rorty would say, “That’s a bad question we shouldn’t ask,” he was suggesting there might be other, more profitable questions to discuss. And when Rorty gave an answer to the bad question, e.g. a disquotational theory of truth, it was intended shut down avenues of thought that have proven interminable cul-de-sacs (hence the epithet for disquotationalists of “deflationists” and, more generally on Platonic questions, “quietists”).

Rorty had begun sorting out these equivocations and changes in stances in his last ten years, but in Rorty’s reply to Jaroslav Peregrin in his installment to the Living Library of Philosophers, Rorty says most clearly what I’ve articulated above (and what produced the impetus to further articulate this point on the scope of his writing):

I should also have been careful not to invoke Wittgenstein’s contrast between “advancing theses” and “practicing therapy.” Doing the former now seems to me a perfectly legitimate, and often useful, therapeutic technique. Peregrin cites Wittgenstein’s claim that he was “in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another.” He says that this would be a good description of my preferred mode of philosophical activity. I am happy to accept the suggestion, but less happy about this suggestion that “neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty thinks that it is possible to give a theory answering ‘philosophical questions’.”

Consider Davidson’s thesis that most of our beliefs must be true, or Brandom’s inferentialist theory about the origin of singular terms. Such theses and theories provide answers to questions like, “Well, what will we say about the relation between language and nonlanguage, once we abandon the familiar ‘realist’ account?” By providing the pragmatist with such answers, they facilitate his propagandizing efforts. Not everybody feels it necessary to pose such questions seriously, but when somebody does it is nice to be able to gratify her. Though sometimes it works best to say, “that’s a bad question, one that we pragmatists don’t ask,” with some interlocutors it is more effective to reply, “here’s an answer to that question, since you insist on asking it.” (The Philosophy of Richard Rorty 247-8)

If I had to speculate on what most produced this change in Rorty, I would have to say it was the work of his student, Robert Brandom. Rorty grew up, philosophically speaking, on Davidson, who was at Princeton for a time in the late 60s. Rorty spent much of the 60s retooling as an analytic philosopher, which meant falling in love with Sellars and becoming acquainted with Davidson’s cast of mind. Rorty was left to his own devices after Davidson left, and the formative 70s—when Rorty was drawing out the consequences of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson—were also the years Brandom was at Princeton, ’72-’77.

Rorty’s fall from analytic-grace was initially a souring with “system,” with the hopes of pay-off attending all the work that must be done to create a system. Rorty was first and foremost a voracious reader, and he loved reading systems in the hopes there has a hidden source of power in them (he wrote his master’s thesis and dissertation on Whitehead). In the end, I think Rorty liked reading too much—sitting at a desk, pouring energy into getting the system just right, didn’t seem appealing because it took him out of the library stacks too long (or away from the forests where he loved bird-watching). And combine this with his reading of so many systems, whether Kant’s or Hegel’s or Carnap’s or Whitehead’s (or Dewey’s, for that matter), all claiming to have the hiddern power, and all of them contradicting each other, and you have a recipe for someone with a pretty good self-justification for not writing a system himself. Rorty’s disagreement with Davidson throughout his career pretty much amounts to the fact that Davidson always wanted to write a system, but never got around to it—so Rorty would always wonder about the aspiration, since the work he was doing in essays was so good itself. Brandom, however, is a brilliant systematizer, and has done in Making It Explicit what Davidson was never able to do and Rorty never thought worth doing. From the time of that book's publication in 1994, you can see a slow slide in Rorty’s responses to Brandom, beginning with a queasy reaction to his rehabilitiation of “representation” to a final “I still don’t think regular people need a system, but if you want one, get a load of this…totally worth it.”

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Addendum on Pirsig

What does Pirsig think about bad questions and systems?

I think it’s important to notice the course of events and presentation. In ZMM, Pirsig describes the S/O Dilemma as an aporia created by a previous agreement on the terms of debate. Pirsig later describes “truth traps,” on the analogy of the “old South Indian Monkey Trap”—which is similar to Chinese finger-cuffs—and interprets the Japenese word “mu” as “unask the question.”

And then ZMM ends (there’s a chance I might be forgetting something). The trick is that Pirsig offers a few half-hearted stabs at sysematizing his thoughts about Quality (don’t forget the diagram in Ch. 20), but the point of the story doesn’t appear to be a replacement system, but rather the resurrection of Phaedrus after chasing down the ghost of reason to Plato. When we move to Lila, I think we should pay close attention to how the Metaphysics of Quality is introduced. Pirsig quickly presents us with the quandry of SOM, a sort of recapitulation of the point of ZMM, and begins to describe his metaphysical answers. What happens then is that Rigel intercedes and objects (Ch. 6). Pirsig then bemoans his answers given, and the problem turns out to be a pernicious understanding of virtue—Pirsig let Rigel and the Victorians decide the terms of debate (the definition of the terms) and so lost before the fight even began.

The Metaphysics of Quality takes flight after a conversational difficulty. Pirsig writes that Phaedrus “realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change” (Lila 123, Ch. 9). Why? Because “he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality” (124), he’d already said something positive rather than sticking to the via negativa that mystics, particularly in the West, typically force themselves to stick to, a route that after Hegel (and particularly Adorno) became more and more prominent in non-theological metaphysics, too. Pirsig realizes that he has to say something, even that saying things are good. And this is where the presentation is interesting. The two paragraphs run like this:

By even using the term “Quality” he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term “Quality” set up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unaswered. Even the name, “Quality,” was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were “Quality” meants weren’t they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phaedrus had no answers.

. . . [ellipsis Pirsig’s] That was the problem this morning too, with Rigel. Phaedrus had no answers. If you’re going to talk about Quality at all you have to be ready to answer someone like Rigel. You have to have a ready-made Metaphysics of Quality that you can snap at him like some catechism. Phaedrus didn’t have a Catechism of Quality and that’s why he got hit. (124)

Pirsig considers metaphysics to be a good thing to do because it gives you an answer to people like Rigel, people who insist on certain questions. The analogy with Catholic practices in particular highlights what Pirsig has in mind. “Catechism” is from Greek roots that mean an “indoctrination.” This has bad connotations to our ears now, as does the other name Catholics have for it: dogma. But all Pirsig is highlighting is how what he is lacking is a systematic way to keep things straight in his line of thought, and how to answer people who press him.

Pirsig immediately goes on to analogize metaphysics with chess, and writes this:

Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can’t do it. It’s out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start asking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon. (125)

I’m not sure Pirsig ever comments further on the purpose of this paragraph. But we might notice that Pirsig’s subsumption of “reasonable” to “good” from ZMM should still be in effect, which may explain why “illogic” does not always hold sway. And further, we might imagine that Pirsig did have his Catechism of Quality at the ready when Rigel comes calling—would Rigel have been blown away? Should he have? There is no indication in these early pages, and particularly with the above paragraph, that Pirsig believes that had Phaedrus the MoQ ready to snap, it would have changed Rigel’s mind. It would have, rather, continued the conversation (until, perhaps, Rigel tired out first). Consider, too, the fact that when Rigel returns at the close, there’s no indication that any of Phaedrus’ “answers” are what lead Rigel to come back (for more on this curious aspect see my “Prospectus”).

What sometimes gets lost in metaphysical system-building is the person doing the building, and what the building is for. For Pirsig, there is a strong indication that metaphysics is for keeping yourself straight in conversation—consider Pirsig’s introduction to Lila’s Child where he picks up the chess metaphor again and says that “real chess is the game you play with your neighors. Real chess is ‘muddling through.’ Real chess is the triumph of mental organization over complex experience. And so is real philosophy” (viii). “Muddling through” is one of Dewey’s favorite images, one that Rorty loved to promote. Between Pirsig’s lament about getting broad-sided by Rigel and the Catechism of Quality, there’s Pirsig’s chapter on metaphysical platypi—the outcome of previously made cuts in the metaphysical firmament, previously made choices about which questions deserve answers. Pirsig says early in that chapter that “saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false” (Lila 115, Ch. 8). Both are used, are determined better or worse, relative to the purpose with which you are using them. The figure standing there weighing the options between the two alternatives is the philosopher, who sometimes goes missing in the attempt to limn the structure of reality.

And if someone insists on asking whether Quality is in the subject or object? Just say, “both—the object’s made out of inorganic, and maybe biological static patterns of Quality, and for the subject just tack on some intellectual and/or social static patterns of Quality.” And then you have your answer to a bad question. The questions won’t stop, but do they ever?

Blake and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

2010-05-16T14:00:00.003-07:00

This is a fairly uninteresting piece, gerrymandered together out of reading Blake, Horkheimer and Adorno (H/A), and a Romanticist named Mark Lussier (for a class reflection in ecocriticism). In my understanding, H/A formulated one of the most thorough articulations of the post-Rousseauian longing for total revolution, a phrase borrowed from Bernard Yack. I think this longing is one of the most important conceptual pieces to understanding much about modern thought. Once one identifies society as the problem and pervasive, you begin to wish it would all go away--somehow. English Romanticism contains this longing, but like Rorty, I see something else going on, too. I think American Romanticism--Emerson--does much to overcome the problem of this longing, and I take it to be the tension between what Emerson termed "solitude and society" and the identification of that tension as power.

There isn't any of that here, but what Harold Bloom calls Emerson's "dialectics of power" has echoes in this discussion of people "across the pond" (as we stuffy litcrits apparently like to say), and what I identify below as Blake's sly humbling through metonymy is Emerson's mode in Nature. So while below I suggest that Blake's Platonism can't break through H/A's formulation of the dialectic, the real problem isn't Blake's Platonism (which I take to be ironic like Emerson's), but the formulation--the longing--itself. In Blake, the dialectics of power that shirks this longing shows up as the dialectic between Poets and Priests found in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, also not discussed here. To understand this dialectic, between self-alone and self-among-others, it helps to translate Blake's categories into Bloom's: poetry and belief. Santayana helps beautifully with this, too: "Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry" (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion v). Working out the involution of that sentence will move one far towards understanding what Rorty means by metaphors as the catalyst of cultural change and his public/private distinction.

What I have left to work out in these stories is the relationship between mathematics (an enemy common to H/A in the Dialectic of Englightenment and Heidegger in, e.g., "The Age of the World Picture") and the ironic Platonism I find in Romantics from Blake and Emerson to Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. I suspect that I find their Platonism ironic precisely because Platonism took the path of method identified with mathematics, and that this path ironically transformed into materialism in the New Science (an irony charted by Blumenberg)--hence, the needed irony of a return to Plato and Greek idealism.

References are to an article by Lussier, "Blake's Deep Ecology," in Studies in Romanticism Fall 1996 (my pagination is not coordinate to the hardcopy). The H/A translation of the Dialectic of Englightenment used throughout, except one place noted, is to the new Jephcott translation.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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The story Horkheimer and Adorno tell about the history of thought is compressed and dense, but one of its central components is that “in thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered” (Horkheimer and Adorno 31). What Horkheimer and Adorno fear is the instrumentalization of thought, the turning of thought into merely a tool: “blindly pragmatized thought loses its transcending quality and, its relation to truth.”[fn.1] The disturbing thing in Horkheimer and Adorno’s picture is that once the dialectical path is stepped upon, there is no getting off until the bottom. Like Marx’s sense that once the division of labor is made, the rest of history is but an extension of that first moment, it is difficult to find in Horkheimer and Adorno where the wrong but civilization-creating turn was. What they term “enlightenment” is out to destory myth, but it is a hopeless battle: “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology” (8). So the question is: can we turn back the clock? Can we break the dialectic of enlightenment?

Mark S. Lussier has suggested that Blake has, indeed, formulated a way through. By driving straight at Blake’s dualism between humanity and nature, and suggesting that they are deeply symbiotic, Lussier hopes to capitalize on Blake’s formulation of the fall from innocence that marks the birth of modernity Blake stands astride. And much like Horkheimer and Adorno, Lussier highlights Blake’s fingering of Bacon for complicity in the act. Horkheimer and Adorno say that “Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically…” (18). Mathematics bring the “self-satisfaction of knowing in advance” (18) which is ironically coupled with the “apotheosis of advancing thought” (18). Galileo is associated with the former and is the treatment of “nature as self-repetition” (12). But in its repetitious nature, there is the endless scribbling to reinstate math’s preplanned plan—experimentation, of which Bacon is the father. Scientific thought advances in empirical experimentation, just as math makes the experiments less and less interesting.

Lussier references one of Blake’s handy lists of mathematizing, empirical culprits, “Bacon, Locke & Newton” in Milton, but I’d like to refocus on that same list in Jerusalem: “I am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!” (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, v. 16-17) This line tells us something important about the spirit of Bacon and enlightenment—they teach humility before nature. Rather than treating nature as a god to be fought with, as the myths show us, we must acknowledge nature’s power. We must bow respectfully before it and simply trace its contours. But through humility, we gain power. Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Odysseus help unlock this process: “The formula for Odysseus’s cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her” (Horkheimer and Adorno 45). By reducing ourselves, we reduce nature—much along the lines of Lussier’s reversal of Blake’s formula: “just as ‘nature is barren’ in the absence of man, so too, by necessity of the proverb’s own symmetries, man is barren in the absence of nature” (Lussier 5). This reduction of nature’s power by draining ourselves of our own functions along the lines of Harold Bloom’s figure of kenosis, and Bloom assigns the trope of metonymy to this poetic maneuver—the trope Blake is constantly using, as in his use of “Bacon.” By this logic, the enlightenment stands humbled before nature, promising to experiment and test nature slowly, in order to circumscribe nature with mathematics. And Blake humbles himself before “Bacon & Newton & Locke” in order to circumscribe them with his poetry.

The difficulty in breaking the dialectic Horkheimer and Adorno map out still lies before us, though: “Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion” (Horkheimer and Adorno 9). Even a humbling is a succumbing to the dialectic. It isn’t clear how Blake’s Platonism can save him, for it still posits a dichotomy between humanity and nature, and even if they are symbiotic, the trouble is that humanity would rather debase themselves by instrumentalizing their thought than suffer nature’s tyranny. “Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature or its subjugation to the self” (25). In such a dark formulation of the problem of enlightenment, it’s difficult to see how a regression to Platonism, the earlier metaphysics which was the first step past myths (which inexorably produced it), is the way through. And as Lussier, quoting a deep ecology mission statement, agrees, “nothing short of a total revolution in consciousness will be of lasting use” (Lussier 5). The trouble that even stunted Horkheimer and Adorno was in how to conceive of it.

To ferret out this problem in Blake’s Platonism, I would reread a selection of the Book of Thel that Lussier glosses:

Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud.
Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water.
Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face.
Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the air; (I, v. 8-11)

Lussier says that, “in an interesting reversal,” “it is consciousness, and not nature, that ‘mirrors’” (4). This strikes me as just wrong, and it signficantly elides the dialectical danger of Platonic dualism. Lussier wants the reversal so he can say, “See—nature and man need each other so that neither is barren.” But the reversal is not strongly tuned in Lussier’s direction. Noting Bloom’s comment that “Thel” is Greek for “will,” Lussier, I think correctly, identifies Thel with consciousness. But whereas Lussier is focused on Thel’s transformations through the repeated and varied simile, I think one needs to slow down and look at what exactly Thel is like, particularly “a reflection in a glass” and “shadows in the water.” Thel, consciousness, is “like a reflection in a glass”—consciousness is paired with “reflection,” which means nature, as earlier in the Vision of the Last Judgment, is the mirroring glass. “Shadows in the water” is even more Platonically disturbing for consciousness—the water, nature, again reflects back consciousness, and what it reflects are transitory shadows, like those in the Plato’s Cave.

It isn’t clear to me that Blake proposes a total revolution, nor is it clear that he even wants to escape Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he says “Without Contraries is no progression.” (Plate 3) An other-worldly, Platonic-like answer would be to shunt progression, then, to avoid the dialectical devolution portrayed by Horkheimer and Adorno entirely. But Blake says these contraries are “necessary to Human existence.” (Plate 3) The escape of an Edenic Heaven is always paired with the energy and vitality of Hell and Milton’s Satan. For Blake says, “this history has been adopted by both parties” (Plate 5).

Endnotes

[1]This is the old translation by John Cumming, which I greatly prefer to Edmund Jephcott’s translation: “thought in its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and therefore its relation to truth” (xvi).

The Necessity of Adapting to Present Circumstances

2010-01-14T08:00:00.004-07:00

This was a short paper for a class on, roughly, the origins of the novel. The idea was that we'd write a "close reading" of some exemplary passages from each of the books we read for the class--an excellent exercise, though draining on the brain.

It didn't go so well with Don Quixote, though I partly blame Don Quixote. I got two passes at him (it's a huge book, if you haven't seen it), and each time I got too caught up in the philosophical implications of reading him alongside Foucault, Ortega, and Lukacs (the last paragraph here, in particular, becomes incomprehensible in reaching for the big picture, so much so that I cannot even make a second pass at making better sense of it without enlarging the scope and spending more time than I have--it remains an extended figure pointing, though I won't tell you which finger). Don Quixote truly is a fascinating and hilarious read, and certainly stands as the "birth of the novel" for good reason (with all apologies to Rabelais).

I've also included a Postscript on Literary Madness, which sums up the main philosophical moral in the paper and makes some other general reflections of madness.

References are to:
Samuel Putnam's translation of Don Quixote (1949).
The 1971 translation of Foucault's The Order of Things.
Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin's translation of Jose Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on Quixote (1966).

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Almost half way through Part I of Don Quixote, the titular character mounts a brilliant defense of his impending (faked) madness. After explaining to Sancho Panza that he shall go out of his head “without any occasion” (Cervantes 232) for his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, Sancho just about loses it: “Listening to you, I come to think that all you have told me about deeds of chivalry and winning kingdoms and empires and bestowing islands and other favors and dignities is but wind and lies…” (233). Don Quixote retorts: “How is it possible for you to have accompanied me all this time without coming to perceive that all the things that have to do with knights-errant appear to be mad, foolish, and chimerical, everything being done by contraries? Not that they are so in reality…” (233). This extraordinary moment in the narrative, oddly no more nor less extraordinary than the last or the next, is paradigmatic in that it contains, like every other moment in the narrative, the essence of Don Quixote, though perhaps more flamboyantly present at this particular moment.

The peculiar madness that took Don Quixote at the beginning of the tale is well-described by Foucault: “Don Quixote reads the world in order to prove his books. And the only proofs he gives himself are the glittering reflections of resemblances” (Foucault 47). Don Quixote perceives the world through the eyes of his books of chivalry, which is to say that the world he moves through is that reality, “every moment his imagination was filled with battles, enchantments, nonsensical adventures,” “every act he performed, had to do with such things as these” (Cervantes 152). Because every moment and every act Don Quixote performs are through his madness, there is a certain reiterability of every moment of the tale—as every moment for Don Quixote must resemble the books of chivalry, or not been seen at all, every moment and act are similar in just the same way to each other. This reiterability of the essence of chivalry is encapsulated by a repeated figure in the text—after Don Quixote finishes chiding Sancho for not seeing that all knights appear mad (though in reality are not), the narrator cuts Don Quixote off and begins a new paragraph, “Conversing in this manner, they reached the foot…” (234, italics mine), as if what Don Quixote was actually saying didn’t matter, for the form of it, the basic essence of what he would say, we already should know (just as Sancho should).

The basic strategy that Don Quixote’s madness implements over and over to secure its hold occurs after his first encounter with others during his first sally. After revealing his identity through verse to the wenches (or, as Don Quixote perceives them, "ladies"), he concedes he had no intention of doing so, but “the necessity of adapting to present circumstances that old ballad of Lancelot” (36) led him to do so. This is another repeated theme, of adapting to the circumstances around him, and what Don Quixote is adapting is the form of his books to the content of reality. Or perhaps, it is rather the other way around, as Don Quixote says once, “in knighthood there are ways of adjusting everything” (161), notably phrased as not adjusting himself to everything, but adjusting everything to himself. At one point, Sancho gives a fine speech about a rash oath Don Quixote has adapted from that “old madman of a Marquis of Mantua,” saying, “supposing that for many days to come we meet no man wearing a helmet, then what are we to do?” (89) But Sancho, who even perceives Don Quixote’s model as mad, has not yet learned that this is like asking whether Don Quixote will be able to fit another story to “present circumstances.” And though memory sweeps away the oath for about 70 pages (which Sancho gets blamed for), when he is reminded of it, it takes just about 20 for a man with a basin on his head to appear, which Don Quixote sees as “a helmet of gold, for he readily fitted all the things that he saw to his own mad, ill-errant thoughts of chivalry” (185).

Ortega helps us understand both Don Quixote’s madness and the oft-made claim that Don Quixote marked the beginning of the novel (and/or the Modern) when he says that, for the Greeks, “the real is the essential” (Ortega 124). Before Descartes was able to place the whole of reality within his res cogitans (a movement completed by Kant’s transcendental ego), and thus making perception of the appearances our only reality, there was the spectacle of Greek idealism, found in Plato’s elevation of Idea and Eidos to the level of the really real, leaving the appearances of our perceptions mere shadows of their essence, the Forms. So as noted earlier, Don Quixote adjusts everything else to himself because the essence of chivalry is the center of gravity, is his reality, not the shifting appearances of various circumstances. What we might call Don Quixote’s Epitome Speech (Cervantes 189-91) tells us best this essence—for three pages, Don Quixote goes into great detail the general form of every knight’s tale, in future perfect tense, even tossing in an occasional “king or prince or whoever” to show that the story is not set in stone (about 8 or 9 of them in three pages). Cervantes is so good at writing this speech that Putnam pilfers a note from an earlier translator, John Ormsby, saying, “Cervantes gives here an admirable epitome, and without any extravagant caricature, of a typical romance of chivalry” (560n.9). The extraordinary detail, of course, is satirical, but on the other hand, as Ormsby says, it is accurate to the real books of chivalry. Don Quixote takes this general form to be his reality and Don Quixote’s ability to adapt his present circumstances to this form is exhibited by his brief struggle with the fact that he’s not of royal lineage, as all great knights are in the tales, followed by his neat solution (which notably has to do with books): “it may further be that the learned scribe who writes my history will so clear up my relationships and ancestry” (192).

This helps us unlock Don Quixote’s essence by noting with Ortega that Don Quixote’s madness is a satirical instantiation of the Greek mode of reality-as-essence. It is in fact satirical by virtue of it being out-moded. As Ortega points out, we have to read Don Quixote in the light of it being “a polemic against books of chivalry” (Ortega 135), and what it is is a parody of a reality now past, or rather, in a different way, a reality that never existed. The books of chivalry certainly existed, but following Ortega, we should read the chivalric books as in the epic tradition, such that “the epic past is not our past. Our past is thinkable as having been the present once, but the epic past eludes identification with any possible present” (118). This explains why Don Quixote keeps calling his books of chivalry “annals” and “histories,” for instance, “of England that treat of the famous exploits of King Arthur” (Cervantes 106), because Cervantes is parodying these so-called treatments of the past by having Don Quixote believe they are the actual past. And when someone, like the traveler in Chapter 13, pressures Don Quixote about the reality of his reality, the oft-repeated figure of retort is denial (“That…is impossible,” 109) and then recurrence to the books: “I am quite sure that no one ever read a story [that contradicts my reality]…” (109).

Don Quixote’s repeated recurrence to the books of chivalry also helps us unlock how his madness functions, how (our normal) reality is replaced with the books of chivalry (his reality). Take this passage from Don Quixote’s first night with Sancho, which helps establish the pattern of his madness: “He did not sleep all night long for thinking of his lady Dulcinea; for this was in accordance with what he had read in his books, of men of arms in the forest or desert places who kept a wakeful vigil, sustained by the memory of their ladies fair” (74, emphasis mine). The memory Don Quixote is sustained by is not the memory of Dulcinea, for there is no Dulcinea, only an Aldonza Lorenzo that Don Quixote's madness alters to become Dulcinea del Toboso. The memory that sustains Don Quixote is the memory of the books, his memory of the chivalric order, itself a double figure for the order of knights he belongs to and the order he shapes his reality with. Don Quixote’s madness works as a metonymic device, whereby the appearances of our world (Aldonza) are altered (to Dulcinea) so that they resemble, following Foucault, the essence of chivalry, which is Don Quixote’s reality. His entire reality is a series of figures for the hidden (from the person who hasn’t read the books—like Sancho) books of chivalry, or really, his memories of the books of chivalry (punched up nicely by Chapter 4, when the books are burned).

When we return to Chapter 25, where Don Quixote decides to play “the part of a desperate and raving madman” (232), we find all of these themes and figures. To close the events of the previous chapter, Sancho asks Don Quixote why he got so offended when Cardenio disparaged a chivalric queen’s honor—he does so because they are his reality, and so he knows Queen Magimasa better than his own mother (229). When Don Quixote lists off those he will imitate for his bout of faked madness, they are epic personages, Ulysses, Aeneas, Amadis—the latter invoked as “the sole and only one, the very first” (231), which reflects Ortega’s theory of the epic in that the essence (here Amadis) stands outside of history, and is “itself the origin and the norm, the cause and the model of phenomena” (Ortega 121). Don Quixote even realizes this Ortegan wisdom—“And these personages, be it noted, are not depicted or revealed to us as they were but as they ought to have been, that they remain as an example of those qualities for future generations” (Cervantes 231, emphasis mine). Don Quixote decides to imitate Amadis’ madness because it is “easier for me to imitate him in this than by cleaving giants, [etc., etc.,]…” and because “this place where we are is better adapted to such a purpose as the one I have in mind, I feel that I should not let slip the opportunity that now so conveniently offers me its forelock” (231-2, emphasis mine). Don Quixote’s imitation, mind you, will not be “point for point,” but “what I shall give, rather, is a rough sketch, containing what appear to me to be the essentials” (232, emphasis mine).

The series of chapters in the Sierra Morena, in fact, fit in nicely with Ortega’s theory of the epic, tragedy, and comedy. There is a constant flip-flop in Don Quixote as we move from concern for the tragic personages of Don Quixote and (especially) Sancho getting the tar beat out of them to laughing at them, too. These moments of tragedy are also precisely the moments of comedy because these are the moments in which Don Quixote receives his comeuppance for his pretension at being heroic and bossing people around. As Ortega says, “reality” in the novel is a “generic function,” which I take to mean that whatever it is we conceive of as reality functions as the skewer that punctures “man’s pretension to the ideal” (Ortega 144). This flip-flop occurs in two ways: 1) between realism creating comedy and the pretension then producing tragic results (as all epics do) and 2) realistic poetry can only occur with an epic foil—realism can only occur when it has an ideal to skewer. If something realistic loses its foil, the epic myth, it doesn’t lose its –istic and become real, but rather becomes an epic myth itself—an endlessly reiterable essence. Just so with Cardenio’s tragic story—Cardenio has none of Don Quixote’s pretentiousness at heroism, and bereft of that, his story becomes a tragic myth, despite the fact that within Don Quixote Cardenio is real (unlike Don Quixote, who is really Quejana) and whose story has markings of the real (like the fact that as we read it, the unknown detail of what Luscinda’s bodice note said escapes us, like many of reality’s details). For all of that, Cardenio is still not real in the requisite sense of existing outside of the parameters of Cervantes’ novel. Like an epic tragedy, we know the end before we hear it (mad Cardenio in tattered clothes is proof enough). Without Don Quixote’s epic pretentiousness, the foil that creates the comedy, the fictionally bounded character of Cardenio gives us a real tragedy of epic proportions—which can simply become grist for Don Quixote’s mill, as happened earlier to the story of Grisόstomo, echoed by Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena as the “occasion” for his madness (which has the double figure now of both being his excuse for his fake madness and the epic, i.e. chivalric romances, being the cause of his actual madness): “for you have heard that shepherd Ambrosio saying, ‘He who is absent, suffers and fears all evils’” (Cervantes 232). This alluding to: “for whom jealous imaginings, fears, and suspicions became a seeming reality” (119, emphasis mine).

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Postscript on Literary Madness

Our understanding of our world and reality, so we say after the post-structuralists and post-positivists have finished their work, is--at least in large part--linguistic. If this is the case, our linguistic representations of reality, by which I mean our descriptions of what's going on around us, are in large part responsible for how we conceive of reality. That being the case, the way we put things in words creates to a certain extent the way we perceive things. And this is just a distended route to throwing out the old slogan, "it's rhetoric all the way down."

At least since Foucault's Madness and Civilization (which in the French is a much larger book) intellectuals have become much more aware of how, in particular, the ideas of insanity and madness, or any category of "mental aberration," are rooted in social constructions, which are partly linguistic. What literature, in general, gives us are differing models of reality-construction--the author orders the reality of his characters by means that the reader perceives implicitly and the critic disentangles explicitly. Seeing literature as such, and seeing reality in general as linguistically conceived, allows us to see the models delivered by literature on a theoretical par with the models delivered by the various sciences and other social institutions. Freud gives us one model of how to conceive of madness; the law gives us another; and Cervantes another. To put it together with my earlier slogan, perception of madness is greatly enhanced by the enlargement of our repertoire of models of mental aberration and, in particular, the critical understanding of how the models work.

In the above, I suggested an understanding of how Cervantes creates his model:

The memory Don Quixote is sustained by is not the memory of Dulcinea, for there is no Dulcinea, only an Aldonza Lorenzo that Don Quixote's madness alters to become Dulcinea del Toboso. The memory that sustains Don Quixote is the memory of the books, his memory of the chivalric order, itself a double figure for the order of knights he belongs to and the order he shapes his reality with. Don Quixote’s madness works as a metonymic device, whereby the appearances of our world (Aldonza) are altered (to Dulcinea) so that they resemble, following Foucault, the essence of chivalry, which is Don Quixote’s reality. His entire reality is a series of figures for the hidden (from the person who hasn’t read the books—like Sancho) books of chivalry, or really, his memories of the books of chivalry (punched up nicely by Chapter 4, when the books are burned).

What I mean by "metonymic device" is that there are two worlds, one the "real world" (what I called "(our normal) reality") and the other the world of chivalry, and that Don Quixote's reality is created by his (largely unconscious) putting up of the chivalric world next to (the metonymy) the normal world and then altering the normal world to resemble the chivalric one.

We might call this one version of a rhetoric of madness. Every conception of madness will have certain methods of creating this effect, in creating the category. I imagine this metonymic device might underlie many other versions (for instance, my treatment of Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven at the end of "Narrative and Making Sense"). Some others include the Lacanian breakdown of a signification chain (which I briefly describe in "Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia," which also makes up part of the first half of "Narrative and Making Sense") and Robert Pirsig's spatialized model of madness as "being outside the mythos."

Defining a rhetoric of madness, and the kinds of conceptual moves it makes, should have a special place in philosophical discussion about the "nature of reality" because the nature of this category--call it "madness," "insanity," "mental abnormality"--is designed specifically for those who diverge from what everyone else calls "reality." Rather than using "Nothingness" or "Infinity" as our rhetorical opposites for philosophical reflection about the world in which we finite somethings move, more energy should be concentrated on the way we conceive of those who in practice behave as if they are living in a different world. Foucault made a brilliant beginning on this kind of reflection, and Ian Hacking has followed well, but Pirsig isn't far off when he says that his philosophy opens up a whole new area of discourse, a philosophy of insanity, because philosophers are still too concerned with philosophical puzzles like the relationship between the universal and particular or the contingent and necessary. These puzzles focus attention on Humanity's Opposite as Kant's "starry heavens above," which loses focus on humanity entirely. The puzzles we should concentrate on more are those we have between each other.