1. Belatedism — Reductionism — Ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction; 2. General problem of antiessentialism — From ethics to epistemology and ontology — Living in the flux — Essences as stabilities — Making distinctions; 3. Taking humans for granted — Taking humanism for granted — Special problem of demarcation — How to make a human less special; 4. Bennett on actants and assemblage — Giving out intentionality — Doing an action, causing an effect; 5. What intentions are for — Global problem of anthropomorphism — Properties vs. attributions; 6. Instrumentals rationality — Tools of our tools — Ancient science as spiritual exercise — Knowledge as depersonalization — Theoretical practices
1. “Posthumanism,” in the last 20 years, has become the latest popular entry into our post-’60s craze for being after something, usually some “ism.” Also in the last 20 years, nearly all promulgations of isms come attached with increasingly anxious qualifiers about the promulgator not wanting to reduce the perceived proponents of the ism to his or her formulation, or not wanting to suggest the essence of what the ism is. [1] I find such hand-waving pointless—partly because I take any good reader or listener to have the good sense to feel free to disagree at any point without the author’s encouragement—but this anxiety plays a special role in my topic because of the way reductionism and essentialism have been tied by theorists into a story about the degradation and oppression of humanity—and, of course, now more than just humanity.
In what follows, I’d like to perform two services: 1) I hope to clarify three problems that any posthumanist theorist will encounter in articulating their view: the general problem of antiessentialism, the special problem of demarcation, and the global problem anthropomorphism. What all three of these problems revolve around is the practical aspect of living the theories we propound. Since many posthumanist perspectives articulate themselves in terms that are inherently paradoxical, I hope by clarifying these three problems to point in the direction of a nonparadoxical mode of articulating the central motive of posthumanism—ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction. 2) I will re-tell a familiar story of the last 300 years as a means of bring into focus the problem of our practices as the primary object of our ethical inquiries. Posthumanism is nothing if not ethically motivated, so when posthumanist theory finds itself moving away from ethics to epistemology or ontology, it behooves us to reexamine our priorities and their interrelationships. The basic problem central to the “scientific revolution” of the European 17th century—which typically stands in as the moment the dam broke, flooding our landscape with instrumental rationality—is the assertion of purely egocentric interests. Working through this conceptual and historical exercise, seeing posthumanism’s broader concern with purely human interests, will put us in a position of seeing a larger project of thinking through ethical authority in a world structured only by material, as opposed to supernatural, agencies.
2. If the central motive of posthumanism is to cease treating “human” as a term of ethical distinction, then one of its central moves has been to cease treating “human” as a term of distinction at all. This shifts the central theoretical terrain from ethics to epistemology and ontology, from how we treat X to how we know what X is. The primary theoretical current that this move draws power from is the antiessentialism common to Heidegger, Sartre, the American pragmatists, and the Continental poststructuralists. We might embody it in Sartre’s slogan that “existence precedes essence.” [2] By overturning the ultimately Platonic relationship that envisions the flux of lived appearances as conceptually beholden to an order of stable essences, antiessentialism emits a panrelationalism—things are not what they are in themselves, but only as they relate to other things. [3] This dissolves any particular thing into a web of relations, and can ultimately cause a fear for stability—how does the antiessentialistic reversal not just flip us into a nasty flux of relations with no footholds for understanding? I think it is fairly clear that no person actually lives their life as if there were no foothold for understanding, as if they did live a flux like a tempest (as opposed to a flux like an oscillating fan). Sartre’s word for this was “metastable.” [4]
If this seems to dissolve the problem surrounding antiessentialism, why am I calling this a general problem for posthumanism? The reason is that though practically we have no problem living in the flux, our theoretical descriptions still tend to contort themselves when describing this practical situation. At root, I think, is the suspicion that existence only precedes essence, that essentialism will always reconstitute itself in the process of understanding. This comes out as a sense that definition, i.e. giving conceptual shape to any particular X, is essentializing. (Need I add “is essentially” or “by definition” to complete the contortion?) This suspicion can largely be traced to origins in poststructuralism, and is best embodied by Gayatri Spivak’s resignation about the state of affairs we must find ourselves in that demands her notion of “strategic essentialism.” [5] Because of the history of oppression through conceptual means that an entire host of cultural critics in the last century have been busily excavating, what was once Plato’s fear for stability has turned into a fear of stability—that any stable entity is covering over the oppression required to achieve that stability. If at one very real extreme is the actual use of linguistic categories to justify the continued oppression of cultural groups and persons, then at the other extreme is the absurdity of thinking that my body’s stable existence at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates is papering over my body’s right to exist at every over set of coordinates. There are stabilities, and then there are stabilities. What we need—but what theorists like Spivak are conceptually unable to provide resources for—is the ability to distinguish between the range of stabilities on that ethical scale. So the general problem of antiessentialism is: how do you de-privilege one distinction without harming your ability to make any distinctions? The way to do this, I think, is to replace Sartre’s existentialist formula with a pragmatist formula like, “practice precedes theory.” This turns all theoretical conundrums back to their origins in practice. This makes one’s fear of stability negotiable by turning the suspicion of a particular stability back to the practice being enabled by it—still suspicious given any kind of oppression, but hardly suspicious at all given a body’s continued existence at a set of spatiotemporal coordinates qua continued existence (though the why for, e.g., the prisoner’s continued existence in the jail cell might be up for grabs).
3. I suspect, as I somewhat suggested before, that theorists have no problem resolving these theoretical problems of definition and essence in practice as persons or citizens (rather than as theorists). But working through the general problem of de-privileging can give us a handle on a second, special problem that emits from the first: how do we demarcate humans from other things? The problem of antiessentialism and the fear of stability are marks of a desire to not privilege anything—but now how do we tell the difference between us and other animals? The amused self-consciousness that accompanies most articles about posthumanism is, I think, not nearly nervous enough about this as a problem. Most theorists of the posthuman seem to take it for granted that we can just tell the difference, but what their work needs to do is provide some handle for how to tell the difference between a human res and a nonhuman res so as to keep the critical edge of their polemic while not resting on either an unarticulated practical grasp or a paradoxical run around wherein we find, ultimately, that we have to ask some portentous “question of the human” every time we want to articulate the difference between a human and a beaver. The former is antithetical to the project of theorizing and the latter I suspect has become popular because 1) people like imitating Derrida, but more importantly 2) they are beholden to the fear of stability that produces the problem of antiessentialism.
Posthumanists do much better when they state their opposition as “humanism,” or “liberal humanism,” or “liberal subjectivity.” What they want to pick out and contest are particular ways in which the human subject is picked out of a crowd. As my use of “res” indicates, we are going to be led back to Descartes—since he distinguished between res cogitans and res extensa, “the mind” has too often been used as the repository for our dreams of difference. But as Rorty retails in his opening chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, there are as many ways to pick out what demarcates the mind—and thus the human—as there are fingers on your hands. [6] The typical approach of posthumanism has been to select one of these marks and reappropriate it for res extensa, thus making the human a little less special. So the special problem of demarcation (which is really just a species of the more general problem of antiessentialism) is: how do you make the human less special while retaining the conceptual ability to tell a human from a nonhuman? Darwin’s naturalism made it possible for Nietzsche to think of us as a diseased animal precisely because of our desire to be special, [7] but the flipside of Nietzsche’s cynicism is John Dewey’s suggestion that Darwin made it possible for us to really get to the bottom of our human cultural practices: “the influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition….” Dewey saw Darwin as making possible antiessentialism, as overturning “the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final” and finally alleviating our desire to “lay hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency.” [8]
4. In order to see better how the blurring motions of antiessentialisms can make it hard to see what makes humans, if not special, at least their own peculiar selves above and beyond physiology, we might turn to Jane Bennett’s recent book, Vibrant Matter (2010). Bennett wouldn’t call herself a posthumanist, but her book works in the same vein, and its utility lies in how thoroughly Bennett wishes to rethink our ontological assumptions—Bennett pushes to the limit certain strategies commonly used by posthumanist theorists, in particular an effort to rethink ontology with ethical implications. Bennett’s ontology centers on the attempt to reinscribe “things” with a “power” she says they’ve been denied by Kantian accounts of agency, thus giving “the force of things its due.” [9] She does so by using Latour’s notion of “actants” as a way of inscribing intentionality in the nonhuman-thing so as to gain a better picture of the “human-nonhuman assemblage” (her term taken from Deleuze and Guattari). [10]
What this power amounts to, however, doesn’t seem much more than being an active force in the material world. Bennett feels this as a point of resistance that deserves the edge of her polemic because of the old notion of the “passivity of matter.” [11] But what extra power is gained by intentionality, alongside causal power, is unclear—and nobody has denied the material world’s causal ability to blot us from existence. Bennett says that “the question is whether other forces in the world approximate some of the characteristics of intentional or purposive behavior on the part of humans” (29), but this makes the mistake of thinking we know what intentionality is. By assuming she already has a conceptual grasp of intentionality, Bennett is able to show how other things have it, too. But this doesn’t seem very hard. Giving out intentionality is easy—just do it, and you’ve done it. Thinking the rock intended to fall to the floor is enough for the rock to have intentionally fallen to the floor. Who, after all, is going to contradict you (except for theorists not assuming we already know what intentionality is)?
Intentionality is simply things behaving as if other things are behaving intentionally. [12] The problem is that the rock behaves the same way whether we attribute intentionality to it or not—or whether the rock attributes intentionality to us or not. So the only question is whether it is useful to attribute intentions to any particular X. To answer this question about a rock falling, we might compare it to a hand going up in a classroom. If the person whose hand goes up gets “called on,” it is because of a practice the caller-on (and all those who expected the person to get called on) is embedded in. If the person was “lifting their hand” rather than “raising their hand,” we can say that the person “unintentionally raised their hand”—we need this locution to distinguish between doing an action (intentionally lifting a hand to get called on) and causing an effect (lifting a hand and unintentionally getting called on). The movements are the same, but only when embedded in a practice can the movement have a certain effect. So, returning to the rock, what is the added bonus of saying the falling rock intentionally crushed my foot if the effect is the same whether I ascribe an intention to the rock or not?
5. The moral of this story is that one reason we attribute intentions is because by making actors aware of the effects of their actions, we can get the actor to not perform the effect-causing action. This, at least, is not the case with the rock, though it might be with the person who dropped it on my foot. It is clear that Bennett wishes her new ontology to have an effect on our moral discourse. She gives a series of imperatives toward the end of her book that punches up this problem of intentionality: “Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate” (116). But what could it mean to engage civilly with rocks? Do rocks respond differently if you are rude to them? While behaving more strategically and subtly with rocks might make sense, civility would seem to only be in play if you could change the rock’s behavior by doing so. But what the analogy is for politely dropping a rock and it not crushing my foot because I treated the rock civilly rather than rudely isn’t clear.
This brings us to the final, global problem of anthropomorphism. Bennett sees clearly that she must face the problem of whether she’s anthropomorphizing non-anthropo-stuff by, for example, attributing intentions to stuff we might normally withhold it from. The global problem of anthropomorphism is: how do you use categories of understanding that are not human categories? Bennett sees that what she calls her “vital materialism” seems to “entail a performative contradiction”: “‘Is it not, after all, a self-conscious, language-wielding human who is articulating this philosophy of vibrant matter?’ It is not so easy to resist, deflect, or redirect this criticism” (120). However, there would only seem to be a performative contradiction if you haven’t been able to provide an account for what separates humans from nonhumans. More particularly, it is by treating intentionality as a property instead of an attribution that heaves Bennett’s project into paradox when she admits she has no separate method for ascertaining the properties of rocks except for the regular human one’s we’ve always employed.
6. Bennett’s confrontation with anthropomorphism, like Spivak’s confrontation with essentialism, emits a general helplessness—for, almost all admit, we can only use human categories. But why should we feel helpless? The reason I think we find ourselves to be helpless or stuck in the position of humanity, rather than, say, thankful or unashamed, is because of the way scientific innovation, technological development, economic consumption, and liberal democracy have all dovetailed into a story about instrumental rationality. This is the story, familiar to us from Germany—be it the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, et al or Heidegger—that the history of the West is the history of Reason increasing our ability to control stuff, including ourselves. In its initial form, the concern seemed to be primarily with us, with succumbing to a “blindly pragmatized thought [that] loses its transcending quality.” [13] Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern was that, not only was our thought simply a means to carry out preexisting and unreflectively held ends, but that the end or purpose of thought had simply become the increased efficiency of means. Unreflectively held purposes dovetails with Heidegger’s discussion of the rhetoric of mathematics and method that took over the natural sciences in the 17th century and was encroaching on the social sciences at the end of the 19th. [14] But what’s worse is that, in Thoreau’s phrase, “men have become the tools of their tools.” [15] The central idea is that we are caught up in the practices we’ve created and have become beholden to them, and that these practices are working out a destructive teleology. And since the increasing obviousness of the consequences of global industrialization, this sensed destruction has become both to ourselves and nonhuman nature. As should be clear, this is a pessimistic narrative that implies that we no longer have the hope of changing (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Heidegger’s conclusion) or that we no longer have the desire to (Thoreau’s fear).
I think it is something like this story that stands behind most posthumanisms. [16] Without it, it's hard to make sense of why we should go in for all the arid metaphysical talk. And while I think there is sufficient plausibility for Thoreau’s fear, I want to quickly sketch an alternative narrative about our theoretical practices that takes the edge off the conclusion that we are now hopeless. This story is drawn from Hans Blumenberg’s account of the transition from ancient and medieval cosmology to modern. Central to this account is the notion that for the ancients, theoretical descriptions of the nonhuman were spiritual exercises meant to relieve the pressures of theory itself. [17] For example, as Blumenburg writes, Epicurus’s “atomistic physics was not meant to satisfy a theoretical interest in reality but rather to argue for the irrelevance of the physical answers to the shaping of life in the world.” [18] “Only insofar as physics could be thought of as producing real human power over nature could natural science potentially serve as the instrument by which to overcome the new radical insecurity of man’s relation to reality” (155). Only when science could demonstrate its practical mastery over life, its “real human power,” could science serve as a mode of overcoming. But overcome what turns out to be the real question. It behooves us to make a distinction between our increased mastery over nonhuman forces indiscriminately killing us off and other forms of overcoming—overcoming our parents, parts of ourselves we dislike, our political enemies, precursor poets, etc.
The upshot of Blumenberg’s story is that we should make finer distinctions among the different projects and practices we’ve put into play over the course of cultural history in order to better grasp why we originally created them so as to better understand why we might continue them. One of the central distinctions Blumenberg makes about the outcome of the 17th century scientific revolution is that philosophers took two divergent paths, that of Cartesian “self-foundation” and Baconian “self-assertion” (see 181-203). [19] As Blumenberg understands it, the mode of self-assertion preceded self-foundation because the central cultural concern they both had eschew was the authority of the ancients (as read by the Scholastics). Thus we find Bacon bashing idols and Descartes retreating to his fireplace. However, as Steven Shapin notes, there was an intense suspicion that accompanied this “intellectual individualism and the rejection of trust and authority.” [20] At this point, it is helpful to make a distinction between the personal and the individual. The individualism common to Bacon and Descartes states that knowledge begins with an individual’s personal experience. The concern, then, is how to make this knowledge portable, intersubjective. This produces different practices intended to depersonalize the knowledge gained firsthand. As Shapin suggests, this amounts to the elaboration of different “practical procedures” (93) such as Boyle’s recommendation “that experimental reports be written in a way that allowed distant readers—not present as firsthand witnesses—to replicate the relevant effects” (107). But another method of depersonalization lies in Descartes’s search for a foundation to knowledge in indubitable certainty. If one could once establish the foundation upon which all knowledge must repose, then one can gain the assent of all inferences from it as common to all because of the necessity created by the demonstration.
It is now generally agreed that Descartes’s foundationalism is an off-shoot of Platonic essentialism, what Dewey called “the quest for certainty” grounded in a “search for the immutable.” [21] What I articulated as the problem of antiessentialism is the problem of searching for replacement practices for the specific theoretical practice of hunting down immutability. Thus this problem becomes paradoxical only if one thinks that a certain set of theoretical practices inevitably ties us into a certain set of self-descriptions and problems—e.g., thinking linguistic practices are necessarily essentializing or thinking intentionality necessary for ethical consideration. Seeing these practices in the light of history, however, can give us a sense of their continuity with other practices motivated for similar purposes and their contingency as practices that can be altered given new situations that require new purposes.
Endnotes
[1] Two examples—N. Katherine Hayles, a major figure (displaying only slight anxiety): “What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety of sites. It is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive)” (How We Became Posthuman (1999), 2); Neil Badmington, writing an introduction (displaying acute anxiety): “What would it mean to view this as an example of posthumanism? The use of such a term is, of course, far from straightforward. Writing in 1947, Martin Heidegger drew attention to the paradoxical status of an ‘-ism,’ observing that…[etc., etc.]. Was I in danger of giving currency to yet another ‘-ism’ devoid of clarity, coherence and credibility” (Posthumanism (2000), ed. Badmington, 1)?
[2] “L’existence précède l’essence” is from Sartre’s essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (translated in Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre—see 348). I pass over the irony of using this essay in this context, though the kernel of my reply is embodied in my discussion of anthropomorphism below.
[3] This is the lesson Richard Rorty draws from “philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michel Foucault” (“A World without Substances or Essences,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 47). Rorty immediately goes on to say that being an “antidualist,” which is how they articulated their antiessentialism, does not mean “that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions. It means rather that they are trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality.”
[4] Being and Nothingness, 90. In the context of Sartre’s discussion, metastable seems to connote something closer to instability. But see Rorty’s use of Sartre in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: “Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort ‘ironists’ because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called ‘meta-stable’: never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change…” (73-74). Something being subject to change is much different than something ceaselessly changing. I think the lesson is that Sartre’s term is a good description of the terrain of antiessentialism, though it originally had to be deployed with more of the polemical edge of flux.
[5] Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a virtuoso performance showing how ethical and epistemological issues are bound together. Spivak’s term, however, comes from the fact that she does not believe there is any alternative to essentialism, or rather that language is in its nature essentializing. For philosophers like Rorty, as I articulated in note 3, this would be like saying that Platonic dualisms were at the heart of language and unavoidable.
[6] See PMN 32-37. Rorty distinguishes nine different marks of the mental and groups them into three different problem-piles: the problem of consciousness, the problem of reason, and the problem of personhood. I take such refinement of distinction to be the first step toward wisdom in this area.
[7] See On the Genealogy of Morality, 3.28: “If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, has until now had no meaning. This existence on earth contained no goal…. Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a diseased animal…” (117).
[8] From "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy" (1909).
[9] VM, 29
[10] See ibid., 9 for Bennett’s introduction of Latour’s “actant”; her second chapter discusses the “assemblage.”
[11] See ibid., vii.
[12] I am blithely taking on board Daniel Dennett’s mode of discussing intentionality, principally from The Intentional Stance, as if it is obvious, but clearly this is contentious for philosophers of mind. The general idea is that intentionality is a holistic game that a community weasels its way into by members attributing intentionality to each other. This is how functionalists avoid the Cartesian problem of Other Minds—intentional minds are created when all the members attribute them to each other, and there is no deeper problem than that. What is interesting is that, on Dennett and Rorty’s understanding, Dennett is the heir of Darwin and it is only theorists who wish to retain the mind as a mark of humanity’s specialness that resist Dennett’s functionalism.
[13] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), xiii. I’m quoting from the John Cummings translation, though Edmund Jephcott’s recent translation is likely to become canonical. This line in particular just rings better in Cummings’ translation, though I have no other reason for choosing it.
[14] See Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays) especially of the notion of a “procedure” being a “fixed ground plan” (118). This kind of rhetoric about math and method is charted succinctly by Steven Shapin in The Scientific Revolution—see especially 57-64 on the problematic notion of the “mathematization of the universe” (63) and 89-96 on the notion that “method was meant to be all” (90). Shapin’s comment that “there is much to commend a revisionist view that formal methodology is to be understood as a set of rhetorical tools for positioning practices in the culture” (95) might be expanded to include the use of mathematics. See also the opening section of Rorty’s “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in Consequences of Pragmatism) for a pithy polemic about what the philosophical upshot of the scientific revolution should have been.
[15] Walden, Ch. 1
[16] My use of Thoreau is partly intended to lend plausibility to this narrative standing behind Bennett. Bennett has a previous book on Thoreau as a political philosopher.
[17] “Spiritual exercises” is a term taken from Pierre Hadot. See, for example, his Philosophy as a Way of Life.
[18] Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 181
[19] My understanding of self-assertion owes much to Rorty’s use of Blumenberg. See, e.g., his “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others), especially where he calls Bacon “the prophet of self-assertion as opposed to self-grounding” (172).
[20] The Scientific Revolution, 72
[21] “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable” is the second chapter in Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty, which attempts to locate a tradition of philosophical inquiry—specifically metaphysical and epistemological—in our historical and existential condition as beings in the world.
Showing posts with label Adorno. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adorno. Show all posts
Friday, July 19, 2013
Friday, July 02, 2010
The Representation of Animals
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.
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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.
- 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."
References:
----------
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.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Are There Bad Questions?
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:
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):
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:
Pirsig immediately goes on to analogize metaphysics with chess, and writes this:
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?
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’.”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.
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)
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.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.
. . . [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 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?
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Blake and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
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:
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).
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.
----------
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.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.
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)
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).
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