1. Spoiler alert! — Sam Rockwell is really quite charming; 2. Freedom vs. control — Freedom of the child vs. freedom of adulthood — Mechanism and humanity; 3. Cultural control — Decency — Puppets in power’s show
1. Moon is not exactly a mystery, so I hesitate to preface by "spoiler alert!" For one would be hard pressed to describe what is meant to be discovered that doesn’t follow easily and conventionally from its defining, generic premises (like the powerful corporation doing whatever it can to reduce overhead and increase profit margins). It is, after all, only 20 minutes into the movie before we hear, albeit scrambledly, GERTY scolded for “los[ing] a harvester and employee,” which only precedes the second Sam showing up by 10 minutes. However, this is precisely what makes it a wonderful movie, for by a kind of philosophical austerity, the movie is able to call for a more subtle appreciation of what are subtle problems. By quite nearly resting its entire overt success on Sam Rockwell’s ability to charm the viewer (a good bet), the film eschews the troublesome pretensions the typically follow from auteurs who think they’re going to break new ground in a well-worn genre and instead encodes slivers of wedges into a few moments that can be opened to great profit.
This is what roughly happens: Sam Bell (played by Rockwell) is the lone human employee on a space station on the moon in charge of harvesting it—it seems the corporation he works for has found a way of turning moonrock into serviceable energy, which has solved a number of energy problems back home. Sam pines to return home, but before he can do so, he crashes his mooncruiser. He wakes up in the sickbay with no memory of what happened, but GERTY—the computer employee with limited robotic abilities—helps him get back on his feet. What with one thing and another, though, Sam finds the crashed cruiser with himself inside. Thus begins a series of discoveries about how the corporation runs its operation—but mainly a series of existential conversations between Sam-1 and Sam-2.
2. In a classic representation of the evils of autocratic power—whether its manifestation in kings, fascists, or CEOs—it is Freedom that opposes Control. “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom,” as Braveheart puts it. Whether in the 1984 version of fear-control or the Brave New World version of pleasure-control, what is seen as being lost is our “negative liberty” to do what we want. [1] “Negative liberty” is Isaiah Berlin’s phrase for the kind of freedom realized when one is not blocked or hindered from doing what one wants. The flipside of negative liberty is positive liberty—the sheer ability to do something one wants. One registers a gain in positive liberty when an institution enables one to do something, while a gain in negative liberty is registered when an institution is hampered from getting in the way of what one wants to do.
When movies focus on negative liberty as the opposite of the evil of Absolute Control, they tend to represent the feature of the heroes that is the Evil Controller’s undoing to be their free will. “You can tell me what to do, but at any time, I can resist you because deep down, I am free.” This then represents the feature of the hero as a kind of unlawfulness, for freedom can only be flexed by breaking the despised rules. Moon can be understood on this model, but I think it treats us to a more subtle understanding of what the problem of corporate control really is. For the beginning of Sam-2’s self-consciousness is his breaking of GERTY’s corporate-dictated stricture against leaving the base (thus precipitating his discovery of Sam-1). However, the reason why Sam-2 breaks the stricture isn’t perfectly assimilable to his being hindered in doing what he wants. It is not as if Sam just wants to go outside—he wants to go outside to do his job. So instead of the hero’s free will being the downfall of the Evil Controller, it is more like a specifically Kantian-Hegelian sense of autonomy that proves the corporation’s downfall. The Kantian-Hegelian sense of autonomy is that one gains freedom by binding oneself to norms, rules, laws. [2] By binding himself to his job, Sam requires the freedom to do his job as is required by the job itself. That this is what’s going on in Sam-2’s rebellion against the stricture is evidenced by his initial reaction to being told he can’t go out to do his job: “I don’t appreciate being treated like a child” (0:24:10ish). Autonomy, on the Kantian-Hegelian model, is the freedom of adulthood, not the freedom of the child, who can play and do as they wish. [3] Autonomy, at its root, is positive liberty gained by taking on responsibilities. Autonomy requires trust, and Sam-2 did not appreciate the sudden distrust in his ability to cope with the problems he was asked to cope with as part of his job.
Seen this way, Kantian-Hegelian autonomy lies at the heart of the difference between mechanism and humanity. What the corporation wishes for is a mechanism that perfectly carries out its desires, but what it has at its disposal is basically a form of sub-contracting—a “job” is created in lieu of the creator’s ability to do a thing him- or herself. However, by subcontracting, one creates a role with responsibilities that must then be given control-free space for the subcontractor to carry them out. Hence, the more an institutional body itemizes the sequence of success in a responsibility, the more automated the role, and hence more mechanical. [4]
3. This is pretty much all basic, Marxist stuff. On the story Foucault tells about bio-power, it is our increasing ability to extend successfully our control into domains we previously did not know how to that gives the specific cast to modern power. [5] Increased technological control has made us able to itemize responsibilities more effectively. And it would be a lie to say that something like this mechanization isn’t at the heart of the Greek dream of reason—what was always wanted was increased control. However, one wouldn’t have guessed from Foucault’s story that we’ve had certain progressive gains at this same time that we’ve made ourselves more dangerous. The Greek dream of control was born of getting killed all the time by nature (which, as it has often been signified, might be just a stand-in for “something we can’t control yet”). The Greeks dreamed of reducing luck’s grasp on our lives. [6] That doesn’t, on the surface, seem like a bad idea. And part of our ability to reduce luck has been in exerting cultural control—getting people to believe in some ideas (e.g., gravity) rather than others (e.g., witches). So was it a good idea for us to believe in witches? If one thinks not and also concedes Foucault’s point that knowledge is power, then one will receive the full brunt of the crowning irony of Moon. Sam-2, responding to GERTY’s casual remark about rebooting himself and the next Sam to replace Sam-2 after he’s gone: “GERTY—we’re not programmed; we’re people” (1:28:35). Unlike almost every other sci-fi movie with the robot/human distinction in play, this line doesn’t go over like a lead balloon exactly because of its philosophical austerity. But what is the difference then? Programming gives us rights, and power is programming—does that invalidate the rights? So what does Foucault tell us about our humanity? Is the question confused, or outmoded?
There might be a sense in which the question is outmoded, so long as what Foucault did for knowledge is assimilated to Darwin—he shows us that we are just one more species doing its best to survive, knowledge being just one more power-grab against that which puts us at risk. [7] But what does Foucault tell us about Sam-2’s remark to GERTY before the final irony? When GERTY tells Sam-2 that for Sam-2 to succeed, he’ll have to reboot himself, Sam-2 says endearingly, “you okay with that?” We might call that decency, or humaneness, but one of the remarkable things about Foucault’s story is how little he regards the efficacy of powers in the classic liberal story of progress. For example: “As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise—and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings—made it more and more difficult to apply the death penalty.” [8] People being decent to each other plays no role in Foucault’s account, and here we get a sense of the disdain he feels toward typical liberal accounts. And indeed, there is something a little too pat about most upbeat stories about the triumph of liberal democracies (at least, maybe 40 years ago, though still for any story you hear outside of a university setting).
What’s missing from this articulation, however, is the cautiousness we found in The Order of Things. [9] Power is not only anonymous, it is also an agent. “How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life to order” (138)? One could substitute GERTY in that sentence and get a similar conundrum to the one GERTY found and Sam-1 and Sam-2 were able to take advantage of. But GERTY, as Sam-2 suggests, is more like a person—an agent, entrusted with powers and responsibilities, that makes decisions about how best to carry out those responsibilities. Is power like that? If, to adapt William James’ famous phrase, the trail of the power serpent is over all, then Power as an agent is as bad as Humanity in all those awful liberal stories of progress, where Providence is seen acting through all kinds of strange puppets. Power, in the sense Foucault seems to deploy it here, is more like the dream of Perfect Mechanical Control that the autocratic villain always wishes for to carry out perfectly its desires. In Foucault’s picture here, we’re just puppets in Power’s show.
But this is a bad historical account unless one is willing to dismiss the reasons why people do the things they do in favor of Hegel-like Hand-of-God treatments of the Real Actors in life’s drama. And all of this just leads us back to the question: what kind of actors are we? Part of the charm of Moon is the simple humanity displayed by the Sams—the little ways in which they behave, none of which have the hyperbolic magnitude needed for a hero, the kind usually hoped for in dystopias. It might be chilling to think that all Sam-2 wants to do is go to Hawaii when he returns to Earth—his lack of rage at the inhumanity with which he has been treated—but such a reduction of scope makes the problem equally manageable for us real, non-hero people. The brief torrent of media chatter we get at the close, most of which articulates outrage at the corporation, emblematizes how not all institutions are facing one way—Power’s way.
Endnotes
[1] I should add that what is at stake in both dystopias is our ability to want to do certain kinds of things, and that what makes Brave New World, in the end, scarier than 1984 is its more plausible account of how to eliminate fully one’s desire for certain kinds of goods (like reading Shakespeare). If the reason 1984 is scary is that it pictures “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” then the horror of Brave New World is its ability to more plausibly actualize the “forever” (specifically by not being a “stamping”).
[2] I’ve learned how to understand Kantian-Hegelian autonomy most from Robert Brandom’s first three chapters of Reason in Philosophy.
[3] The interesting comparison to make in this regard is the veneration of youth in Emerson and American Romanticism generally. This has tended to make Emerson’s legacy on our moral atmosphere a kind of willful self-assertion, something more analogous to “knowing with your gut,” as Stephen Colbert put it in his parody of George W. Bush’s political rhetoric.
[4] This is why Annette Baier takes trust to be the most important virtue in modern liberalism, for trust is the social relation at the forefront of a relationship in which responsibilities and discretionary powers of action are conferred. And as she says, “one thing that can destroy a trust relationship fairly quickly is the combination of a rigoristic unforgiving attitude on the part of the truster and a touchy sensitivity to any criticism on the part of the trusted” (Moral Prejudices 103). Trust requires room for the entrusted to play the role that’s been asked of them. My emphasis here is on the Kantian tradition’s understanding of autonomy, and I take one very interesting line of investigation to be the rapprochement of the Hegelian and the Humean in their respective critical attitudes to the Kantian model of moral philosophy. For Baier conceives of herself as distinctively anti-Kantian, but as I’ve just intimated, there’s a certain space carved out conceptually that a Humean interest in social-psychological atmosphere can fill. I suspect Brandom, who was a colleague of Baier’s for many years at Pittsburgh, will move us some ways to not only a rapprochement of Hegel with Hume, but with Richard Rorty as well in his (long awaited) forthcoming book on Hegel’s Phenomenology, A Spirit of Trust. (The projected final chapter is entitled “From Irony to Trust: Modernity and Beyond.”)
[5] “Bio-power” is currently one of the hottest pieces of jargon on the market, and it does have significant conceptual resonance (bio is Greek for “life”), even if as a concept it just turns into a mush of noise in many of the attempts to handle it and put it to use. Bearing in mind the Baconian notion that knowledge is power, and how fond pragmatists are of that formulation, Foucault’s introduction of the term makes immediate sense: “one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 143). Foucault’s theorization of the complex interactions between knowledge and practice, and how something new happened in the birth of the social sciences in the 19th century, dovetails interestingly with Judith Shklar’s suggestion that the genre of utopia, until the end of the 18th century, was largely an “intellectualist fantasy” that, while sometimes harshly criticizing, in no way reflected any sense that things could be changed. And likewise, “the end of utopian literature did not mark the end of hope; on the contrary, it coincided with the birth of historical optimism” (Political Thought and Political Thinkers 167).
[6] My understanding of the Greeks here is deeply indebted to Martha Nussbaum’s fascinating early book, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy.
[7] “Just one more species doing its best” is the slogan-title of Rorty’s July 25, 1991 London Review of Books essay-review of a handful of books on Dewey.
[8] The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 138
[9] Compare the dismissal of sentiment as having a historical role to: “Can a valid history of science be attempted that would retrace from beginning to end the whole spontaneous movement of an anonymous body of knowledge? Is it legitimate, is it even useful, to replace the traditional ‘X thought that . . .’ by a ‘it was known that . . .’? But this is not exactly what I set out to do. I do not wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes. It is simply that I wonder whether such descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of scientific discourse, whether there do not exist, outside their customary boundaries, systems of regularities that have a decisive role in the history of the sciences” (The Order of Things xiii-xiv). For a brief discussion of the downside of the rhetoric found here, see “Foucault’s Rhetoric and Posthumanism.”
Showing posts with label Baier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baier. Show all posts
Friday, August 16, 2013
Friday, June 28, 2013
Emerson's Development
1. He who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet — The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing — But in the third stage the great question begins to bore you — Searching for the inner dialectic; 2. Philosopher: one whose art of living is bound up with theory — Whicher on Emerson: acquiescence — The Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance; 3. The tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life — How do you reconcile the inner turmoil with the outer production? — Lapsarian accounts: right about biography, wrong about philosophy; 4. The Principle of Mood — Emerson’s dualism between monism/dualism — Assertion is relative to the mood in when we make them; 5. Juxtaposing “The Poet” and “Experience” — Nature loves to hide — Dream delivers us to dream — Romanticism’s promise of power as a dream to be actualized; 6. Whicher and Mumford — Self-preservation and self-transformation — Transformation and resistance, continuity and change
1. Harold Bloom once said that “critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” [1] One of the things Bloom meant about critics is that they are like metaphysicians, philosophers—these are the kinds of chaps who look for the meaning of things, for a reason why X happened and not Y. This is, pushed to the extreme, reduction which leads to monism. The things disappear beneath the meaning you’ve extracted, and do that enough times and you’ll be left with one thing—Meaning/Reason. (This is why logos is the enveloping term in Greek idealism.) [2]
A more practical version of this is the scholar’s dismay at the fox. As Isaiah Berlin reminded us, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” For Berlin, this was a distinction between those with “a single central vision, one system” and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” [3] Scholars like to connect things; they like to explain why X was written. And it is, honestly, much easier if the writer is a hedgehog, because then you can keep drawing connections back to the central thesis that you’ve sussed out on behalf of the writer. This becomes particularly important as a tool of efficiency if the writer in question wrote material over a long period of time—first book or last, juvenilia or marginalia, hey, wouldn’t you know: it says the same thing.
Life (sigh) is never like this, though it’s difficult to imagine why we’d want to spend so much of our time as scholars on such imagined repetition. But we do like order—we like it when a writer does things for reasons that form a pattern. We don’t like it when those reasons are boring. Why did John Grisham write The Firm? To make money? Yawn. Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? To fight racism? Okay, that’s more interesting; I can work with that. Why did Heidegger turn away from Being and Time? Because he realized that the goal of metaphysics was to both do it and transcend it and so had to work out a way of realizing both his own ambitions for conceptual mastery and desires for mystical silence? Now we’re talking. We like people like J. M. Coetzee, who described this hoped-for hedgehogginess thus:
When we fail at coming up with a single ambition or vision that a writer adheres to, we like just as much the challenge of showing how a writer unfolds via an inner dialectic. “Ralph was bored so he asked himself a different question” isn’t good enough—doesn’t really seem to merit attention (by itself). But how Richard Rorty’s first famous article, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965), displays the central conceptual move that leads to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and from there to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but equally that that first article is not Rorty’s answer to the mind-body problem, nor is Mirror Rorty’s final answer about philosophy—that is interesting. It takes time to show, and to show it is to shed new and needed light on what Rorty was really doing.
2. This search for an inner dialectic works quite well when approaching the central American Romantics, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. It’s easy to tell a “death of the imagination” narrative with Hawthorne and a “retreat to private expression” narrative with Melville. Emerson’s tale of development was established definitively by Stephen Whicher. Whicher’s Freedom and Fate (1953) is the beginning point for any serious scholarly work on Emerson, [7] and especially any work on Emerson as a philosopher. For Whicher’s book is about Emerson’s “inner life,” and Emerson’s inner life was taken up by the obsession with intellectual problems. Whicher shows how Emerson is a philosopher in Alexander Nehamas’s sense, someone whose art of living is bound up with the propounding of theoretical theses. [8]
Whicher’s central story is one of “acquiescence” (xvi). The general gist goes like this: Emerson’s first stage was the impress of the typical New England heritage of a Calvinistic belief in God’s Providence. However, do to the watering down of “the white-hot core of the original Calvinistic piety” (8) in Unitarianism, Emerson became susceptible to Humean doubt. This doubt laid waste to all the underpinnings of his faith in Providence, without actually touching the faith itself. This meant that natural, rational, and supernatural paths of justification were out for Emerson, but what saved him was the realization that God was within him—Emerson turns the original Protestant Reformation into a full-blown revolution. “The rock on which he thereafter based his life was the knowledge that the soul of man does not merely, as had long been taught, contain a spark or drop or breath of voice of God; it is God” (21).
So the first two stages of Emerson’s development, that take us to the resignation of his post in the Unitarian Church, give us the interaction of two fundamental principles to understand Emerson: 1) his faith in God’s Providence becomes Emerson’s Principle of Compensation which is then supplemented by 2) the God-within which becomes the Principle of Self-Reliance. The story that Whicher tells is that in the third stage the Principle of Self-Reliance expands into a kind of power madness, “that when Emerson found a basis for the assertion of unconditional good, in his discovery of the God within the soul, the law of compensation slipped into a subordinate place in his thoughts” (39). Finding God within gave Emerson the sense that all of our shackles were man-made, and thus paled in comparison to the power we had when we relied instead on God for support. Mad with his belief that he could do anything, Emerson’s Principle of Self-Reliance quite naturally collapses under its own weight, from the unbalanced ratio between claims-of-power and evidence-for-power. The more the world “remained obdurately independent of his will” (60), the more he saw that the Principle of Self-Reliance was clearly not all there was. So in the fifth and final stage, the Principle of Compensation returns in order to circumscribe the power announced by Self-Reliance. And so the promise of freedom Emerson felt with the discovery of the God within is diminished as he acquiesces to the encompassing demands of fate.
3. There is something very powerful and importantly right about Whicher’s narrative. However, there are two interlocked problems that should lead us to dissent from the conclusions Whicher draws about Emerson’s philosophical attitude. The first is the condensation of the proposed shift between all five stages at the very beginning of his career. The evidence Whicher accumulates doesn’t point at a steady development, but that the major movement of acquiescence has already occurred by Essays, First Series (1941). Nature (1836) is, without a doubt, a bewildering text that does not see Emerson at the height of his powers, but everyone affirms that all the action is in his first two books of essays. [9] How can his most powerful moments be an acquiescence?
Given that the evidence of the interplay between the Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance is present at minimum in seed form even at the beginning of his career as writer, it is equally easy to mark not a sharp break but a gradual unfolding of the essential elements of his mature thought. The difference between the two is that what Lawrence Buell calls Whicher’s “tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life” [10] doesn’t do well in suggesting that Emerson has a coherent philosophy. In essence, Whicher explains away incoherence as biographically legible conflict that is, indeed, conceptually bunk. This treatment, of course, is given industrial strength justification by Emerson himself, his most famous line being “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”).
So the second problem that leads from the first is that Whicher’s account doesn’t precisely help us read the final product. The reason is simple: there’s a reason that Emerson’s journals were raided for the final product of his polished essays and that things appeared as they did, and other things (from the journals) disappeared as they did. The question is what those local reasons were, something that would aid our ability to interpret how the essays hang together as they stand. We should not use the journals to explain away the need for us to think hard about what Emerson was meaning to do in the essays. Barbara Packer, in her book which we should see as an extension of Whicher’s account, summarizes the scholarly problem well in relation to Nature: the problem is in “finding a stylistically sensitive way of reconciling a diachronic account of the book’s genesis and growth with a synchronic account of its structure.” [11]
The main thesis I would forward is that Whicher-Packer lapsarian accounts are broadly right about Emerson’s biography, but wrong about his philosophy. I think such biographical sleuthing has been successful in establishing that Emerson’s initial, cosmically high hopes about the power that could be unleashed within each of us were tragically dashed—what I don’t think they’ve done as well in is in suggesting what Emerson did with that tragedy in constructing his philosophy. In particular, formulating the account as lapsarian gives us exactly the wrong handle on the heart of Emerson’s thought. Emerson may have thought in such biblical terms as the Fall of Man, and mythologized the paradox of having infinite power within while continuing to fail without in those terms, but the central strain of Emerson that faces the future breaks radically with these modes of thought, and so to interpret him according to them is to darken precisely what is most enlightening about him on our problems.
4. Whicher’s problem, I think, is that he doesn’t ascribe enough importance to what I shall call Emerson’s Principle of Mood. I think the hidden message of Emerson’s trajectory is not the fundamental importance of the struggle between the optimistic power of Self-Reliance against the pessimistic power of Fate (which has significant prima facie evidence in the trajectory to The Conduct of Life), but the struggle between the promise he felt in Self-Reliance and it’s ephemerality in the face of changing moods. The Principle of Compensation, which is always overinfluenced by Emerson’s faith in Providence (which is quite cheery), gives way to Mood as the most important element waging battle against Emerson’s optimism. It isn’t optimism vs. pessimism, but optimism vs. optimism/pessimism.
The conceptual source of Whicher’s rhetoric of acquiescence is his sense that Emerson is trying, and failing, to find a way to live in the Power of His Soul all the time. I think all of the following summarizing moments go wrong on precisely the point I’m addressing, and they mount in a steady progression (italics are all mine): “Though not quite ready himself to give up to the soul beyond the possibility of a quick self-recovery, the thought then central to his mind was of a new state of life, a state of greatness and freedom beyond anything in human experience, into which, if he could only hit upon the password, he and all men might at any moment enter” (48); “If freedom lay only in the total self-trust of greatness, and if in fact he could be great only in inceptions and not in act, how did his new faith free him?” (70); “Even if we drop the question of action, and seek on ‘Reality,’ the problem still remains, How is such wholeness to be won and kept?” (83-4); “But the radical defect of man, the creator in the finite, is his incapacity to maintain his creative force. ‘The only sin is limitation’—but this is original sin beyond the power of grace” (97); “Man is promised the world—a promise perpetually renewed and never kept” (111). You can tell Whicher’s account begins to lose explanatory power when he perversely construes Emerson’s exuberant redescription of sin as a lapsarian tragedy. He may, biographically, have been looking for a password and totality, but the philosophy we get in its finished form is not like this. Emerson’s tragic optimism lays precisely in his giving up of the desire for completeness—not as a lost hope, but as a dumb hope. (And this, to me, seems perfectly consistent with having to be reminded oneself about how dumb one’s hopes might be.)
I think we can find this sense of duality—between the elated promise of independence and the depressed realization of its fragmented nature—in his published work, from beginning to end. Less than a year after the publication of Nature, Emerson writes in his journal “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” [13] For Emerson, Unity is the essence of God and thus Self-Reliance’s promise of power, and thus duality is a fragmented deflation of that promise. What I think we find in Emerson’s writing is a dualism between monism/dualism—depending on mood, he sees the world through one lens, and then another.
The importance of the circumscription of mood is that it creates a radical positionality to the Emersonian utterance. And this is how we are to understand Emerson’s hobgoblin—for while it makes sense to say that you cannot hold both “there is a god” and “there is no god,” what sense does it make to say that you cannot be both happy and sad? Oh—at the same time, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to say that a person is being incoherent when they wake up in the morning happy and end the evening sad. Emerson’s radical thought is that our assertions about the world are equally relative to the mood we are in when we make them. And this then makes conceptual coherence a more complex affair to adjudicate the importance of. This means that to understand the most important syntactical unit in the Emersonian corpus—the sentence—you have to ascribe a mood, and that way mount a picture of coherence relative to the kinds of moods. The Principle of Mood is essentially the claim that it is rhetoric all the way down, that we are always contextually and rhetorically defined—but more, for it points the way toward a necessary expansion of our conceptual accounts to include the emotions, passions, temperament, attitude. So while the last half the 20th century has pretty much seen the rhetorical stance become common sense for the intellectuals, we still have Emerson sitting beyond.
5. On the surface, the necessity of understanding the text in context seems so obvious in terms of understanding anything as having one particular meaning as opposed to another that to invoke it to justify apparent contradiction looks suspiciously convenient (which is what many of Emerson’s contemporaries thought—Melville, for one). So I’d like to give one example that illustrates how Emerson uses this thought in a constructive mode. Emblematic of this general train of thought is the first two essays of Essays, Series Two: “The Poet” and “Experience.” These two essays cannot be read separately without giving a very misleading picture of Emerson’s vision. “The Poet” gives us a predictably up-beat picture—by this time, even to his contemporaries, Emerson was The Optimist. “The poet is the sayer, the namer … a sovereign, and stands on the centre.” “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” “Poets are thus liberating gods.” But in “Experience,” Emerson uses the death of his son, Waldo, to establish the much darker tone of the piece, offering this disturbing reaction:
6. Since Whicher supplies all the evidence needed to modulate his case, I think it’s easy to see the slant he puts on it as an unfortunate Mumfordism. While above I attempted to show what the conceptual source of the rhetoric of acquiescence was, it’s nearest historical source is Lewis Mumford’s groundbreaking and very influential The Golden Day (1926). With Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, they composed the “Young American” critics, a group of wide-ranging intellectuals and cultural critics whose central philosophical preoccupation in the early 20th century was an attack on John Dewey and pragmatism for, essentially, not being radical enough. After Mumford’s chapter on the central American Romantics (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville), “The Golden Day,” follows his chapter on William Dean Howells, Twain, and William James, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence.”
Rather than confuting Mumford’s particular interpretation of pragmatism, I want to close by offering this more general observation about the conceptual resources of James and Dewey’s pragmatism. What I think Mumford and Whicher misunderstand about Emerson and the pragmatists is the importance of romantic self-transformation. They saw the essentially conservative character of “reality” and instrumentalism, but didn’t see how the Emersonian tradition was attempting to unlock a radically different orientation to a necessary recognition of the crossed axes of self-preservation and self-transformation. When Whicher sees Emerson try to assimilate the world’s resistance to the Poet’s Self-Reliance by his Principle of Compensation, he thinks Emerson has sold the pass to inevitability. In instrumentalism, we see how ends must first be fixed before deciding on what means or instruments one uses to carry out those ends, and thus how it doesn’t provide the opportunity to change those ends. But this understanding of Dewey’s instrumentalism completely ignores what Dewey tried to articulate in his notion of the means-ends continuum—that in the process of formulating a set of means to carry out a defined end we alter our sense of what end is desired, thus setting off a dialectic, as now new means are needed for the new end, the search for which will again alter the end-in-view, requiring new means, ad infinitum. [16] If we think of romanticism as the movement of thought that apotheosizes the transformative character of human power, we will see that while Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatism plays down the importance of romanticism in pragmatism in favor of Emerson and Whicher’s interpretation of Emerson plays down the importance of romanticism in Emerson in favor of pragmatism (unfortunately, on this view), and that what we really need is a view of Emerson and pragmatism that integrates their views of transformation and resistance, continuity and change, future and past into a coherent conceptual account. [17] It isn’t for them that we must do this, for it certainly may well turn out to be the case that we will have to reject some of their particular ways of understanding things—this is for us, for if Rorty is right, then figuring out how to get their conceptual projects to work is a way for us to understand how to get our conceptual projects to work.
Endnotes
[1] Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 78
[2] This is obviously a very particular understanding of what philosophy is, roughly romantic. For example, it’s the picture that is unveiled in my discussion of John Barth—see the third section of "On Literature's Accidents."
[3] From the beginning of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which can be found in Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Proper Study of Mankind.
[4] Quoted in Christopher Tayler’s “Tables and Chairs,” London Review of Books, March 21, 2013.
[5] This was the burden of Robert Brandom’s “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism. Rorty’s response was that Brandom’s paper gave him “a more flattering view of the course of my work than before. Brandom has suggested a coherence between my earlier and my later writings that had not occurred to me. I had not seen that there was a connection between the eliminative materialism I was urging in the 1960s and the private-public distinction I have been urging since Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. My unconscious has been more cunning than I had realized” (“Response to Brandom,” 190n4, in Rorty and His Critics).
[6] When you look at Hawthorne, you find a writer with a fairly stable vocabulary for tropes, an intense desire to make those tropes about troping, and an abiding concern about his ability to trope—so we can spot a trajectory wherein many of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches thematize the problem of writing within them, to his three vital novels—all in some manner internalizing the problem of writing, whether Hester’s needlework or Holgrave’s daguerreotyping or Coverdale the minor transcendental poet—to the final Marble Faun, all about death, representation, and the death of representation. Tack on Hawthorne’s inability to finish his final projects and you have a pretty good outline for a “death of the imagination” narrative. (If you want a display of what "thematizing the problem of writing" means, you might check out section 2 of "Work and Idleness.") When you look at Melville, you find a writer fascinated by the act of storytelling, but struggling to find his real voice as a writer. All his books through Moby-Dick are first-person narratives, and after encountering Hawthorne’s work and its literary-conceptual gymnastics, Melville writes his Great Book, publishes it, begins writing the next, and as the bad reviews of Moby-Dick come out, we can see him transforming Pierre into something that seems designed to fail (gloriously, for the book is brilliant). And The Confidence-Man—there’s no protagonist, no narrative! (On the surface, only, of course.) After that he gives up prose entirely for poetry, never publishing another story (Billy Budd was unfinished and posthumous) and writing the longest poem in English (barring, I believe, The Faerie Queene), nearly 18,000 lines, and some other short lyrics in the last 30+ years of his life. This story, reading his increasing impenetrability as a form of private expression, is the burden of Edgar Dryden’s Monumental Melville.
[7] Along with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which obviously has a much larger scope. I hope to say something about Matthiessen’s book soon.
[8] See the “Introduction” to Nehamas’s The Art of Living. Nehamas makes a number of other distinctions in approaching theory and philosophy, all of which are pertinent to understanding Emerson. In particular, as Nehamas himself notes, the kind of philosopher his study is in large part about (Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault) are often called “literary” because central to their act of philosophy is the process of self-creation that happens in the written medium. Additionally, Nehamas’s exemplars “do not insist that their life is a model for the world at large. They do not want to be imitated, at least not directly. That is, they believe that those who want to imitate them must develop their own art of living, their own self, perhaps to exhibit it for others but not so that others imitate them directly. Imitation, in this context, is to become someone on one’s own; but the someone one becomes must be different from one’s model” (10). The relationship to the Emerson who said “imitation is suicide” (“The Poet”) and the Thoreau who said “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account” (Walden, Ch. 1) should be obvious. However, Nehamas has never given any attention to the relationship (genealogical or otherwise) between Emerson and Nietzsche, though everyone who works on either is well aware of it. Nehamas’s story in that book is structured by the obsession his three later writers had with Socrates (and, hence, Plato). And given that two major heroes and influences on Emerson were Plato and Montaigne, there might be an interesting story to tell about the refraction of ideas through all these prisms of intellectual power and self-reliance.
[9] Considering Emerson’s Principle of Transition, that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition” (“Self-Reliance”), an argument could be made about the nature of Nature’s power being based on its slippery fluidity. That is, however, not an argument I intend on making, nor will I discuss the Principle of Transition. Nature is great fun, but Emerson’s acme is in the 1840s work.
[10] Buell, Emerson, 98
[11] Emerson’s Fall, 29
[12] The argument I would make about Emerson’s central line of thought—which is clearly well beyond the space afforded here, and beyond my present grasp anyway—is analogous to the arguments Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Yack mount against philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin. The latter two basically formulate narratives in which today’s modern, secular problems are simply the revenging of old, religious problems because our secular terms are simply written over the palimpsest of religion. (This is sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” and Löwith’s Meaning in History is paradigmatic.) By contrast, Blumenberg and Yack in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Longing for Total Revolution, respectively, attempt to show how some secular conceptual mechanics are genuinely new moves that produce new problems with no precursor in the older modes of thought. What I think is important in understanding Emerson are the reasons for his formulation of self-reliance as self-reliance, and not “God-reliance,” in Whicher’s very influential conflation (57). There’s no doubt in my mind that Emerson sincerely believed that God was within, and so that self-reliance was in some way God-reliance, but the conceptual work being done by his formulations of self-reliance were ultimately antithetical to belief in any and every form of God that is not found within—and this means that most forms of religion are behind the Emersonian curve. Furthermore, I think there’s a reason why his synonym for self-reliance in “Self-Reliance” is “self-trust” and not “self-faith” as well.
[13] May 26, 1837
[14] This is from the extraordinary close of Ch. 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” I use it here as a placeholder for a larger discussion about the Melvillean and Emersonian strands of antirepresentationalism that I find pervasive in the central American Romantics. For in “Experience,” Emerson comes as close as he can get to the apocalyptic pessimism Melville displays in his mature work about the very possibility of representation, of there being any point to this pathetic negotiation we call “life.” Emerson articulates it—and somehow swerves back to optimism. I think of Melville and Emerson standing to each other as, in a manner, Derrida stands to Rorty. Rorty recognizes Derrida’s “arguments” as having an affinity to pragmatism’s antirepresentationlism, but equally that that rejection does not a pragmatist make. To make inroads on this angle, one should coordinate “The Whiteness of the Whale” with Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (in his Margins of Philosophy). Compare Ishmael’s rhetorical question, “is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” to Derrida’s thesis: “White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (213).
[15] The Golden Day, 83 of the 1957 Beacon Paperback edition
[16] Brandom has reformulated Dewey’s notion of the means-ends continuum for Rorty’s notion of what Brandom calls the “vocabulary vocabulary”: “Every use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—and transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expression” ("Vocabularies of Pragmatism," Perspectives on Pragmatism, 153). It's worth pointing out that here Brandom is attempting to assimilate some very specialized points in the philosophy of language with Rorty's taking up of the Mill-Berlin tradition of articulating a public/private distinction in order defend liberalism, but that given Emerson's own preoccupation with the distiction society and solitude, there might be some interesting resources in Emerson to think through this angle on pragmatism that Brandom has done so well in bringing to light. For a different application of Brandom's philosophy of language to the public/private distinction, see my "A Spatial Model of Belief Change."
[17] Despite the previous note, Brandom has rejected romanticism as an important genealogical root of pragmatism. See my discussion of this in “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
1. Harold Bloom once said that “critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” [1] One of the things Bloom meant about critics is that they are like metaphysicians, philosophers—these are the kinds of chaps who look for the meaning of things, for a reason why X happened and not Y. This is, pushed to the extreme, reduction which leads to monism. The things disappear beneath the meaning you’ve extracted, and do that enough times and you’ll be left with one thing—Meaning/Reason. (This is why logos is the enveloping term in Greek idealism.) [2]
A more practical version of this is the scholar’s dismay at the fox. As Isaiah Berlin reminded us, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” For Berlin, this was a distinction between those with “a single central vision, one system” and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” [3] Scholars like to connect things; they like to explain why X was written. And it is, honestly, much easier if the writer is a hedgehog, because then you can keep drawing connections back to the central thesis that you’ve sussed out on behalf of the writer. This becomes particularly important as a tool of efficiency if the writer in question wrote material over a long period of time—first book or last, juvenilia or marginalia, hey, wouldn’t you know: it says the same thing.
Life (sigh) is never like this, though it’s difficult to imagine why we’d want to spend so much of our time as scholars on such imagined repetition. But we do like order—we like it when a writer does things for reasons that form a pattern. We don’t like it when those reasons are boring. Why did John Grisham write The Firm? To make money? Yawn. Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? To fight racism? Okay, that’s more interesting; I can work with that. Why did Heidegger turn away from Being and Time? Because he realized that the goal of metaphysics was to both do it and transcend it and so had to work out a way of realizing both his own ambitions for conceptual mastery and desires for mystical silence? Now we’re talking. We like people like J. M. Coetzee, who described this hoped-for hedgehogginess thus:
One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labour away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere. [4](The third stage, of course, is back to Yawnsville, but then I think that might be precisely the point.)
When we fail at coming up with a single ambition or vision that a writer adheres to, we like just as much the challenge of showing how a writer unfolds via an inner dialectic. “Ralph was bored so he asked himself a different question” isn’t good enough—doesn’t really seem to merit attention (by itself). But how Richard Rorty’s first famous article, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965), displays the central conceptual move that leads to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and from there to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but equally that that first article is not Rorty’s answer to the mind-body problem, nor is Mirror Rorty’s final answer about philosophy—that is interesting. It takes time to show, and to show it is to shed new and needed light on what Rorty was really doing.
2. This search for an inner dialectic works quite well when approaching the central American Romantics, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. It’s easy to tell a “death of the imagination” narrative with Hawthorne and a “retreat to private expression” narrative with Melville. Emerson’s tale of development was established definitively by Stephen Whicher. Whicher’s Freedom and Fate (1953) is the beginning point for any serious scholarly work on Emerson, [7] and especially any work on Emerson as a philosopher. For Whicher’s book is about Emerson’s “inner life,” and Emerson’s inner life was taken up by the obsession with intellectual problems. Whicher shows how Emerson is a philosopher in Alexander Nehamas’s sense, someone whose art of living is bound up with the propounding of theoretical theses. [8]
Whicher’s central story is one of “acquiescence” (xvi). The general gist goes like this: Emerson’s first stage was the impress of the typical New England heritage of a Calvinistic belief in God’s Providence. However, do to the watering down of “the white-hot core of the original Calvinistic piety” (8) in Unitarianism, Emerson became susceptible to Humean doubt. This doubt laid waste to all the underpinnings of his faith in Providence, without actually touching the faith itself. This meant that natural, rational, and supernatural paths of justification were out for Emerson, but what saved him was the realization that God was within him—Emerson turns the original Protestant Reformation into a full-blown revolution. “The rock on which he thereafter based his life was the knowledge that the soul of man does not merely, as had long been taught, contain a spark or drop or breath of voice of God; it is God” (21).
So the first two stages of Emerson’s development, that take us to the resignation of his post in the Unitarian Church, give us the interaction of two fundamental principles to understand Emerson: 1) his faith in God’s Providence becomes Emerson’s Principle of Compensation which is then supplemented by 2) the God-within which becomes the Principle of Self-Reliance. The story that Whicher tells is that in the third stage the Principle of Self-Reliance expands into a kind of power madness, “that when Emerson found a basis for the assertion of unconditional good, in his discovery of the God within the soul, the law of compensation slipped into a subordinate place in his thoughts” (39). Finding God within gave Emerson the sense that all of our shackles were man-made, and thus paled in comparison to the power we had when we relied instead on God for support. Mad with his belief that he could do anything, Emerson’s Principle of Self-Reliance quite naturally collapses under its own weight, from the unbalanced ratio between claims-of-power and evidence-for-power. The more the world “remained obdurately independent of his will” (60), the more he saw that the Principle of Self-Reliance was clearly not all there was. So in the fifth and final stage, the Principle of Compensation returns in order to circumscribe the power announced by Self-Reliance. And so the promise of freedom Emerson felt with the discovery of the God within is diminished as he acquiesces to the encompassing demands of fate.
3. There is something very powerful and importantly right about Whicher’s narrative. However, there are two interlocked problems that should lead us to dissent from the conclusions Whicher draws about Emerson’s philosophical attitude. The first is the condensation of the proposed shift between all five stages at the very beginning of his career. The evidence Whicher accumulates doesn’t point at a steady development, but that the major movement of acquiescence has already occurred by Essays, First Series (1941). Nature (1836) is, without a doubt, a bewildering text that does not see Emerson at the height of his powers, but everyone affirms that all the action is in his first two books of essays. [9] How can his most powerful moments be an acquiescence?
Given that the evidence of the interplay between the Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance is present at minimum in seed form even at the beginning of his career as writer, it is equally easy to mark not a sharp break but a gradual unfolding of the essential elements of his mature thought. The difference between the two is that what Lawrence Buell calls Whicher’s “tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life” [10] doesn’t do well in suggesting that Emerson has a coherent philosophy. In essence, Whicher explains away incoherence as biographically legible conflict that is, indeed, conceptually bunk. This treatment, of course, is given industrial strength justification by Emerson himself, his most famous line being “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”).
So the second problem that leads from the first is that Whicher’s account doesn’t precisely help us read the final product. The reason is simple: there’s a reason that Emerson’s journals were raided for the final product of his polished essays and that things appeared as they did, and other things (from the journals) disappeared as they did. The question is what those local reasons were, something that would aid our ability to interpret how the essays hang together as they stand. We should not use the journals to explain away the need for us to think hard about what Emerson was meaning to do in the essays. Barbara Packer, in her book which we should see as an extension of Whicher’s account, summarizes the scholarly problem well in relation to Nature: the problem is in “finding a stylistically sensitive way of reconciling a diachronic account of the book’s genesis and growth with a synchronic account of its structure.” [11]
The main thesis I would forward is that Whicher-Packer lapsarian accounts are broadly right about Emerson’s biography, but wrong about his philosophy. I think such biographical sleuthing has been successful in establishing that Emerson’s initial, cosmically high hopes about the power that could be unleashed within each of us were tragically dashed—what I don’t think they’ve done as well in is in suggesting what Emerson did with that tragedy in constructing his philosophy. In particular, formulating the account as lapsarian gives us exactly the wrong handle on the heart of Emerson’s thought. Emerson may have thought in such biblical terms as the Fall of Man, and mythologized the paradox of having infinite power within while continuing to fail without in those terms, but the central strain of Emerson that faces the future breaks radically with these modes of thought, and so to interpret him according to them is to darken precisely what is most enlightening about him on our problems.
4. Whicher’s problem, I think, is that he doesn’t ascribe enough importance to what I shall call Emerson’s Principle of Mood. I think the hidden message of Emerson’s trajectory is not the fundamental importance of the struggle between the optimistic power of Self-Reliance against the pessimistic power of Fate (which has significant prima facie evidence in the trajectory to The Conduct of Life), but the struggle between the promise he felt in Self-Reliance and it’s ephemerality in the face of changing moods. The Principle of Compensation, which is always overinfluenced by Emerson’s faith in Providence (which is quite cheery), gives way to Mood as the most important element waging battle against Emerson’s optimism. It isn’t optimism vs. pessimism, but optimism vs. optimism/pessimism.
The conceptual source of Whicher’s rhetoric of acquiescence is his sense that Emerson is trying, and failing, to find a way to live in the Power of His Soul all the time. I think all of the following summarizing moments go wrong on precisely the point I’m addressing, and they mount in a steady progression (italics are all mine): “Though not quite ready himself to give up to the soul beyond the possibility of a quick self-recovery, the thought then central to his mind was of a new state of life, a state of greatness and freedom beyond anything in human experience, into which, if he could only hit upon the password, he and all men might at any moment enter” (48); “If freedom lay only in the total self-trust of greatness, and if in fact he could be great only in inceptions and not in act, how did his new faith free him?” (70); “Even if we drop the question of action, and seek on ‘Reality,’ the problem still remains, How is such wholeness to be won and kept?” (83-4); “But the radical defect of man, the creator in the finite, is his incapacity to maintain his creative force. ‘The only sin is limitation’—but this is original sin beyond the power of grace” (97); “Man is promised the world—a promise perpetually renewed and never kept” (111). You can tell Whicher’s account begins to lose explanatory power when he perversely construes Emerson’s exuberant redescription of sin as a lapsarian tragedy. He may, biographically, have been looking for a password and totality, but the philosophy we get in its finished form is not like this. Emerson’s tragic optimism lays precisely in his giving up of the desire for completeness—not as a lost hope, but as a dumb hope. (And this, to me, seems perfectly consistent with having to be reminded oneself about how dumb one’s hopes might be.)
I think we can find this sense of duality—between the elated promise of independence and the depressed realization of its fragmented nature—in his published work, from beginning to end. Less than a year after the publication of Nature, Emerson writes in his journal “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” [13] For Emerson, Unity is the essence of God and thus Self-Reliance’s promise of power, and thus duality is a fragmented deflation of that promise. What I think we find in Emerson’s writing is a dualism between monism/dualism—depending on mood, he sees the world through one lens, and then another.
The importance of the circumscription of mood is that it creates a radical positionality to the Emersonian utterance. And this is how we are to understand Emerson’s hobgoblin—for while it makes sense to say that you cannot hold both “there is a god” and “there is no god,” what sense does it make to say that you cannot be both happy and sad? Oh—at the same time, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to say that a person is being incoherent when they wake up in the morning happy and end the evening sad. Emerson’s radical thought is that our assertions about the world are equally relative to the mood we are in when we make them. And this then makes conceptual coherence a more complex affair to adjudicate the importance of. This means that to understand the most important syntactical unit in the Emersonian corpus—the sentence—you have to ascribe a mood, and that way mount a picture of coherence relative to the kinds of moods. The Principle of Mood is essentially the claim that it is rhetoric all the way down, that we are always contextually and rhetorically defined—but more, for it points the way toward a necessary expansion of our conceptual accounts to include the emotions, passions, temperament, attitude. So while the last half the 20th century has pretty much seen the rhetorical stance become common sense for the intellectuals, we still have Emerson sitting beyond.
5. On the surface, the necessity of understanding the text in context seems so obvious in terms of understanding anything as having one particular meaning as opposed to another that to invoke it to justify apparent contradiction looks suspiciously convenient (which is what many of Emerson’s contemporaries thought—Melville, for one). So I’d like to give one example that illustrates how Emerson uses this thought in a constructive mode. Emblematic of this general train of thought is the first two essays of Essays, Series Two: “The Poet” and “Experience.” These two essays cannot be read separately without giving a very misleading picture of Emerson’s vision. “The Poet” gives us a predictably up-beat picture—by this time, even to his contemporaries, Emerson was The Optimist. “The poet is the sayer, the namer … a sovereign, and stands on the centre.” “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” “Poets are thus liberating gods.” But in “Experience,” Emerson uses the death of his son, Waldo, to establish the much darker tone of the piece, offering this disturbing reaction:
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.I don’t intend to here attempt to read this passage, which continues to shock our sensibilities. (I should add that Emerson’s grief in his journal is overwhelming—if there is anything in his published work that needs to be understood according to the Principle of Mood, it is this passage.) For now I simply offer the above two cross selections to establish the tenor of the essays as a whole. What I want to instead compare are two examples of a more specific procedure that Emerson uses to great effect in these two essays. Compare these two passages, and ask yourself—which essay does it come from?
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.If you guessed I would be tricky and put the second essay first and the first second, you’d be right. The mood of the two passages are so starkly opposed—the first depressing while the second, though speaking of the sad nature of the poet to be useless in society, makes it sound great. What I want to punch up are the two lines that express the same conceptual thought but in two precisely different attitudes, like an apple being looked at from two different directions. “Nature does not like to be observed” and “Thou shalt lie close hid with nature.” This is an allusion to an aphorism of Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide.” In the darker essay of “Experience,” Nature’s tendency to hide from us is really our fault, the “most unhandsome part of our condition.” But from a different direction, the poet is who transcends this condition (and thus liberating gods for it) though at the expense of being lost to social intercourse. (“To be great is to be misunderstood,” as Emerson says in “Self-Reliance.”) One more:
For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love.
That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.Again, the moods are so clearly juxtaposed. The poet, drunk on his power to say, would sell off everything else—which is precisely the dark fringe to this dream, the nightmare hanging off in the wings: What if it is all an illusion? If it’s an illusion, then getting drunk on it seems to just double down on a shitty hand. Emerson’s early life took Humean skepticism very seriously, and these two passages perfectly illustrate Emerson’s constructive use of that early encounter. Emerson conceptualizes romanticism’s promise of power as a dream, which is both its best and worst feature. Progress is contingent on our ability to actualize the dream in the world, but what then is the world but an endless succession of particular people’s dreams? This is how you make the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume practical again. (Something, I should add, Hume I think already began to do if Annette Baier’s reading of him is right in A Progress of Sentiments.) For the output of this line is not paralysis, as a practically lived Cartesian skepticism would be—if you are self-conscious enough about mood circumscribing speech acts, as I think Emerson is, then the mood in which you become depressed about mood circumscribing speech acts and how it just shows it all to be a sham, an illusion, “so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within” [14]—then you’ll also recognize that sometimes you aren’t in that mood. And this suggests to me that the point of this juxtaposition of moods on the metaphor of dreams is that what we must really beware is not the act of saying tout court, but the drunkenness of dogmatism—self-reliant saying can forget its fallibility in its moment of power, of changing the shape of the world by changing what it is possible for us to dream of.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem.
6. Since Whicher supplies all the evidence needed to modulate his case, I think it’s easy to see the slant he puts on it as an unfortunate Mumfordism. While above I attempted to show what the conceptual source of the rhetoric of acquiescence was, it’s nearest historical source is Lewis Mumford’s groundbreaking and very influential The Golden Day (1926). With Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, they composed the “Young American” critics, a group of wide-ranging intellectuals and cultural critics whose central philosophical preoccupation in the early 20th century was an attack on John Dewey and pragmatism for, essentially, not being radical enough. After Mumford’s chapter on the central American Romantics (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville), “The Golden Day,” follows his chapter on William Dean Howells, Twain, and William James, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence.”
What is valid in idealism is the belief in this process of re-molding, re-forming, re-creating, and so humanizing the rough chaos of existence. That belief had vanished: it no longer seemed a genuine possibility. … It was an act of grand acquiescence. Transcendentalism, as Emerson caustically said, had resulted in a headache; but the pragmatism that followed it was a paralysis. This generation had lost the power of choice; it bowed to the inevitable; it swam with the tide; and it went as far as the tide would carry it. [15]I don’t wish to whitewash Mumford’s complex relationship to James, Dewey, and pragmatism, but his view of it was perhaps a little overinfluenced by Santayana’s criticism of Emerson through James as “the genteel tradition.” For it’s not hard to see how Emerson himself led to the situation—the divine providence that became Emerson’s Principle of Compensation later became what Emerson called “fate.”
Rather than confuting Mumford’s particular interpretation of pragmatism, I want to close by offering this more general observation about the conceptual resources of James and Dewey’s pragmatism. What I think Mumford and Whicher misunderstand about Emerson and the pragmatists is the importance of romantic self-transformation. They saw the essentially conservative character of “reality” and instrumentalism, but didn’t see how the Emersonian tradition was attempting to unlock a radically different orientation to a necessary recognition of the crossed axes of self-preservation and self-transformation. When Whicher sees Emerson try to assimilate the world’s resistance to the Poet’s Self-Reliance by his Principle of Compensation, he thinks Emerson has sold the pass to inevitability. In instrumentalism, we see how ends must first be fixed before deciding on what means or instruments one uses to carry out those ends, and thus how it doesn’t provide the opportunity to change those ends. But this understanding of Dewey’s instrumentalism completely ignores what Dewey tried to articulate in his notion of the means-ends continuum—that in the process of formulating a set of means to carry out a defined end we alter our sense of what end is desired, thus setting off a dialectic, as now new means are needed for the new end, the search for which will again alter the end-in-view, requiring new means, ad infinitum. [16] If we think of romanticism as the movement of thought that apotheosizes the transformative character of human power, we will see that while Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatism plays down the importance of romanticism in pragmatism in favor of Emerson and Whicher’s interpretation of Emerson plays down the importance of romanticism in Emerson in favor of pragmatism (unfortunately, on this view), and that what we really need is a view of Emerson and pragmatism that integrates their views of transformation and resistance, continuity and change, future and past into a coherent conceptual account. [17] It isn’t for them that we must do this, for it certainly may well turn out to be the case that we will have to reject some of their particular ways of understanding things—this is for us, for if Rorty is right, then figuring out how to get their conceptual projects to work is a way for us to understand how to get our conceptual projects to work.
Endnotes
[1] Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 78
[2] This is obviously a very particular understanding of what philosophy is, roughly romantic. For example, it’s the picture that is unveiled in my discussion of John Barth—see the third section of "On Literature's Accidents."
[3] From the beginning of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which can be found in Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Proper Study of Mankind.
[4] Quoted in Christopher Tayler’s “Tables and Chairs,” London Review of Books, March 21, 2013.
[5] This was the burden of Robert Brandom’s “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism. Rorty’s response was that Brandom’s paper gave him “a more flattering view of the course of my work than before. Brandom has suggested a coherence between my earlier and my later writings that had not occurred to me. I had not seen that there was a connection between the eliminative materialism I was urging in the 1960s and the private-public distinction I have been urging since Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. My unconscious has been more cunning than I had realized” (“Response to Brandom,” 190n4, in Rorty and His Critics).
[6] When you look at Hawthorne, you find a writer with a fairly stable vocabulary for tropes, an intense desire to make those tropes about troping, and an abiding concern about his ability to trope—so we can spot a trajectory wherein many of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches thematize the problem of writing within them, to his three vital novels—all in some manner internalizing the problem of writing, whether Hester’s needlework or Holgrave’s daguerreotyping or Coverdale the minor transcendental poet—to the final Marble Faun, all about death, representation, and the death of representation. Tack on Hawthorne’s inability to finish his final projects and you have a pretty good outline for a “death of the imagination” narrative. (If you want a display of what "thematizing the problem of writing" means, you might check out section 2 of "Work and Idleness.") When you look at Melville, you find a writer fascinated by the act of storytelling, but struggling to find his real voice as a writer. All his books through Moby-Dick are first-person narratives, and after encountering Hawthorne’s work and its literary-conceptual gymnastics, Melville writes his Great Book, publishes it, begins writing the next, and as the bad reviews of Moby-Dick come out, we can see him transforming Pierre into something that seems designed to fail (gloriously, for the book is brilliant). And The Confidence-Man—there’s no protagonist, no narrative! (On the surface, only, of course.) After that he gives up prose entirely for poetry, never publishing another story (Billy Budd was unfinished and posthumous) and writing the longest poem in English (barring, I believe, The Faerie Queene), nearly 18,000 lines, and some other short lyrics in the last 30+ years of his life. This story, reading his increasing impenetrability as a form of private expression, is the burden of Edgar Dryden’s Monumental Melville.
[7] Along with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which obviously has a much larger scope. I hope to say something about Matthiessen’s book soon.
[8] See the “Introduction” to Nehamas’s The Art of Living. Nehamas makes a number of other distinctions in approaching theory and philosophy, all of which are pertinent to understanding Emerson. In particular, as Nehamas himself notes, the kind of philosopher his study is in large part about (Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault) are often called “literary” because central to their act of philosophy is the process of self-creation that happens in the written medium. Additionally, Nehamas’s exemplars “do not insist that their life is a model for the world at large. They do not want to be imitated, at least not directly. That is, they believe that those who want to imitate them must develop their own art of living, their own self, perhaps to exhibit it for others but not so that others imitate them directly. Imitation, in this context, is to become someone on one’s own; but the someone one becomes must be different from one’s model” (10). The relationship to the Emerson who said “imitation is suicide” (“The Poet”) and the Thoreau who said “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account” (Walden, Ch. 1) should be obvious. However, Nehamas has never given any attention to the relationship (genealogical or otherwise) between Emerson and Nietzsche, though everyone who works on either is well aware of it. Nehamas’s story in that book is structured by the obsession his three later writers had with Socrates (and, hence, Plato). And given that two major heroes and influences on Emerson were Plato and Montaigne, there might be an interesting story to tell about the refraction of ideas through all these prisms of intellectual power and self-reliance.
[9] Considering Emerson’s Principle of Transition, that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition” (“Self-Reliance”), an argument could be made about the nature of Nature’s power being based on its slippery fluidity. That is, however, not an argument I intend on making, nor will I discuss the Principle of Transition. Nature is great fun, but Emerson’s acme is in the 1840s work.
[10] Buell, Emerson, 98
[11] Emerson’s Fall, 29
[12] The argument I would make about Emerson’s central line of thought—which is clearly well beyond the space afforded here, and beyond my present grasp anyway—is analogous to the arguments Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Yack mount against philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin. The latter two basically formulate narratives in which today’s modern, secular problems are simply the revenging of old, religious problems because our secular terms are simply written over the palimpsest of religion. (This is sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” and Löwith’s Meaning in History is paradigmatic.) By contrast, Blumenberg and Yack in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Longing for Total Revolution, respectively, attempt to show how some secular conceptual mechanics are genuinely new moves that produce new problems with no precursor in the older modes of thought. What I think is important in understanding Emerson are the reasons for his formulation of self-reliance as self-reliance, and not “God-reliance,” in Whicher’s very influential conflation (57). There’s no doubt in my mind that Emerson sincerely believed that God was within, and so that self-reliance was in some way God-reliance, but the conceptual work being done by his formulations of self-reliance were ultimately antithetical to belief in any and every form of God that is not found within—and this means that most forms of religion are behind the Emersonian curve. Furthermore, I think there’s a reason why his synonym for self-reliance in “Self-Reliance” is “self-trust” and not “self-faith” as well.
[13] May 26, 1837
[14] This is from the extraordinary close of Ch. 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” I use it here as a placeholder for a larger discussion about the Melvillean and Emersonian strands of antirepresentationalism that I find pervasive in the central American Romantics. For in “Experience,” Emerson comes as close as he can get to the apocalyptic pessimism Melville displays in his mature work about the very possibility of representation, of there being any point to this pathetic negotiation we call “life.” Emerson articulates it—and somehow swerves back to optimism. I think of Melville and Emerson standing to each other as, in a manner, Derrida stands to Rorty. Rorty recognizes Derrida’s “arguments” as having an affinity to pragmatism’s antirepresentationlism, but equally that that rejection does not a pragmatist make. To make inroads on this angle, one should coordinate “The Whiteness of the Whale” with Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (in his Margins of Philosophy). Compare Ishmael’s rhetorical question, “is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” to Derrida’s thesis: “White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (213).
[15] The Golden Day, 83 of the 1957 Beacon Paperback edition
[16] Brandom has reformulated Dewey’s notion of the means-ends continuum for Rorty’s notion of what Brandom calls the “vocabulary vocabulary”: “Every use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—and transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expression” ("Vocabularies of Pragmatism," Perspectives on Pragmatism, 153). It's worth pointing out that here Brandom is attempting to assimilate some very specialized points in the philosophy of language with Rorty's taking up of the Mill-Berlin tradition of articulating a public/private distinction in order defend liberalism, but that given Emerson's own preoccupation with the distiction society and solitude, there might be some interesting resources in Emerson to think through this angle on pragmatism that Brandom has done so well in bringing to light. For a different application of Brandom's philosophy of language to the public/private distinction, see my "A Spatial Model of Belief Change."
[17] Despite the previous note, Brandom has rejected romanticism as an important genealogical root of pragmatism. See my discussion of this in “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
Saturday, May 10, 2008
What Happened to Political Philosophy?
*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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If you ask a 22-year-old philosophy major for a Great Philosophers shortlist, one that extends until, say, 1950, it would probably go something like this: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre. In fact, it would probably even go in that particular order. However, if you ask for a shortlist of the great political philosophers, that list would likely go something like this: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx. Significantly shorter, yes, but why so little overlap? One might think specialization, and certainly when Plato and Aristotle were at it, everything was more or less "love of wisdom." But if you ask for a list of the great metaphysicians, or epistemologists, you get pretty much the exact same list as the Greats list (though a savvy student will hesitate with metaphysician, and in some cases epistemologist, for everybody after Hegel). And what's with no names from the early part of the 20th century?
What happened to political philosophy?
When students take Philosophy 101, they are typically still taught that there are three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Some students (usually the ones already earmarked for phil-majorhood) will recognize the first two, but almost no one will have ever heard of the third. The professor, of course, will be quick to break down the etymological roots of all three, particularly the last: the study of "value". They will then explain that this branch breaks into the more well-known ethics and aesthetics. Occasionally that will be it--on with the show. Many times, though, the professor will also expand on the many sub-branches that have been created over time to help future majors swim later: philosophy of mind, of language, of science, of art (which has largely replaced "aesthetics"), moral philosophy (mainly the new moniker for philosophical study of "ethics"), political philosophy.
In 101 courses, however, political philosophy is usually overlooked, and sometimes even moral philosophy. Most of the focus remains on metaphysics and epistemology. The reasons for this are, naturally, many and complex, but some general considerations arise to answer some of the anomalies I pointed out earlier.
The most important reason is Kant. Kant institutionalized (for reasons having to do with his genius, but also because of the birth of modern universities and the professionalization--the professorialization--of philosophy) the historical line of personages that we now recite as the Great Ones by, during the creation of transcendental philosophy, splitting the difference between--what he named as--the traditions of Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). In fact, the very notion of "metaphysics" and "epistemology" as subjects, as different branches of philosophy, didn't really cohere until after Kant. ("Metaphysics," of course, is the name Aristotle's redactor gave to the first collection of writings after the previous collection, the Physics. Epistemology, I believe, wasn't coined until the 19th-century, in German as erkenntnistheorie.) Since Descartes began his philosophy by doubting everything he knew, and Kant then stepped back and wondered how we know anything at all, epistemology has seemed to be the most pressing item on the list, even right before the part where we divvy out the existence of things--how else, after all, would we know?
Epistemology becoming the king of the discipline, however, doesn't explain why the series of great political philosophers differs so much from the other series. It explains why the Great Metaphysicians series looks exactly like the Great Philosophers one, but not why Machiavelli didn't have a theory of knowledge, nor Descartes a theory of the state.
I think the explanation has to run through Plato's distaste for the affairs of humanity. "But Plato wrote the first comprehensive political theory?" It is true, Plato is usually the first stop for political philosophy, but you have to dig into what he was saying--Plato wanted to banish politics. Political, and moral, philosophy were supposed to be those branches where we deal with the Problems of Men, but ever since Plato wiped his brush of Philosophy over the canvas of humanity's interests, banishing Poetry, Politics, and Rhetoric, philosophers who have turned their attention to the temporal have all struggled with the tension between the subject matter's obvious humanness and their desire to rise above it. Plato created the desire to float into the heavens precisely because he wanted to push aside the things that otherwise seem the most distinctively human. Do animals have politics? Do they capture each other's passions with moving oratory? No, but they do all have a mode of being in the world. Our mode would seem to be like Aristotle said, animals with politics, but Plato put his stamp on humanity by suggesting that we were most human, not by doing all these human-y things, but when we rise above, that we were most human when we were rubbing elbows with eternity. Plato did it by creating a new activity that would be definitive of humanity, call it philosophy, theory or contemplation, that would allow us to show off our celestial side.
The impact was that Hobbes and Machiavelli seem to philosophers to be cynics, reveling in the baseness of humanity. To those still marked strongly by Plato, moral--and particularly political--philosophy needed to be devoid of the crass things we do on a regular basis, ego struggles, white lies, above all sex: these things had no place in a proper understanding of ethical behavior. This led to the abortive position of emotivism, and it led to subdisciplines--really, redefinitions of the discipline--like "moral theory" and "metaethics." All of these maneuvers were designed to get the human out of morality. But how the hell do you do that in politics?
Platonism never could figure out what to do with politics because it just seemed so coarse, after all, naturally and essentially having to do with other people. So philosophers have increasingly isolated themselves over 2500 years from the affairs of people. At least in regards to what they do professionally, politics was something they looked oddly at because it was the realm of human action, whereas their domain seems directly opposed to it, the realm of contemplation. They keep trying to affect human action, how we act in the world, but the further we get from Plato, the worse their specifically philosophical attempts seem. The dynamic of Platonism was such that it created a rift between the actual and the ideal, encapsulated in More's re-Platonizing of political philosophy, Utopia. More wanted to affect action, his book was a political tract that was to have real political effect, but Plato's stamp shows it's true colors in how we think of More's coined word today: utopic thinking is something that's out of touch with reality.[fn.1] Think of that old, post-60s Cold War chestnut: "Sure, communism works in theory, but...."
The struggle between Plato and the Sophists was the struggle between sophia and techne. "Loving wisdom" was something that Plato introduced, and it was not what other's had in mind. Pierre Hadot gives us a good reconstruction of what Plato did to wisdom in his What is Ancient Philosophy?. Early philosophers had no notion of philosophia, but they did think of wisdom as a kind of know-how, which is still the most commonly used notion of the word in common sense. Techne we can translate as "skill," and we can see how 5th-century intellectuals before Socrates might have thought sophia and techne very similar notions, wisdom being a generalized know-how and various skills being particular kinds of know-how. The epitaph of Thrasymachus, Plato's punching bag at the beginning of the Republic, read: "My career is sophia," which, in the Sophists adoring naïveté, they thought they could teach. Socrates' strategy and goal was to show that they were full of it by asking them what, exactly, they were teaching. The particular bit they were teaching was arete.
The word has gone through a number of stages of translation, which itself gives us a potted history of philosophy's struggle between theory and practice, contemplation and action. The oldest English translations we were living with at the beginning of the 20th century was arete as "virtue." The trouble with virtue is that it is something we tend to itemize into various virtues, like the virtue of compassion or temperance. So arete seemed to equivocate between various things we could teach, and teach better by knowing what it, in its various particular guises, was (thus lending credence to Plato's turn to the heavens) and a more hard to define general thing, as in, "That person has virtue." They have virtue? What, exactly, do you mean?
What, indeed, and it becomes worse, and Socrates' rancor over the Sophists even more understandable, when we move to arete as "excellence," a translation that started to become popular around the middle of the century. "That person has excellence" doesn't even make much sense in English, but it is closer to what the Greeks meant. How on earth do you teach excellence, in general? The difficulty seems to be that it is only by being more specific to an activity can you describe how one is excellent in it. I think the way we boggle at the question of teaching arete so defined is the degree to which we take Socrates as making an advance in our moral knowledge--he was right to call the Sophists out on teaching arete, for what the hell does it mean to do that generally?
Alexander Nehamas has proposed going even further, and suggests translating arete as "success." Now, on the one hand, this makes sense of the Sophists in a way that "excellence" does not. The Sophists were interested in the affairs of humanity and in Greece, at that time, the only way to make it as a citizen of a city-state, particularly in Athens, was by being able to perform orally in front of an audience. Athens in the 5th century became the seat of the birth of both modern democracy and a modern judiciary. Every citizen was their own politician and their own lawyer, every citizen expected to be able to argue and defend their own viewpoint in politics and their own case in law. Nowadays we bemoan the rise of professional politics as a weakening of the idea of democracy, with its sense of everyone having their own voice. We have a (largely correct) sense that having professional politicians makes it easier for citizens to become uninformed, when the only way for a true democracy to work, as the American Founding Fathers foresaw, is to have an informed electorate. And yet, there is a strong analogy between politics and law, reflected in the view of them the Athenians took--every citizen their own law-maker and -interpreter--and in the history of those activities since: no one bats an eye at the professionalization of law. How can any person be expected to argue the ins and outs of their case when there is such a massive amount to know about law, being the particular kind of thing it is?
The Sophists were performing a much needed service for the Athenians by teaching them how to be successful in their duties as a citizen of Athens. People don't just naturally know to argue and present the best case. You have to learn how to do that, and that's what the Sophists were doing: teaching the Athenian's success in the domains of politics and law. But because of the nature of concepts and language, these ideas were not the evolved notions we have, but still being tried out. The Sophists said they were teaching "success," but--and this is on the other hand--Socrates perceived rightly a problem with teaching a general skill called "virtue" or "excellence" or "success." Like Socrates, we wonder what it could possibly mean to teach "success" generally, an even worse proposition than "excellence."
Plato rectified the matter by giving a particular spin to sophia that distinguished it from techne. Plato took over from Socrates the idea that "wisdom" was actually an an ineffable object. Socrates, noting the absurdity of trying to teach a general techne called arete, called attention to it by asking the teachers what exactly it was they were teaching--give me a definition. Socrates would then dialectically beat the crap out of every definition given, and declare at the end that, if you can't give it a defensible definition, then you must not know what you are doing. QED. Plato thought this brilliant, which it was, a terrific strategy on Socrates' part to make fun of the Sophists. But Plato thought it was more than a terrific way to show up the Sophists, a way of punching up the difficulty in teaching something general, like "success." Plato thought that Socrates was showing us what true wisdom was, which in Socrates' analysis always ended up a blank--no definition ever survives. True wisdom was acknowledging the fact that we were fallen beings (hence Socratic superiority in knowing that you don't know) and turning it into the essence of an activity definitive of humanity.
That was the trap Socrates set for Plato, and that Plato, for lack of knowing how to resolve it, repeated in his writings, indelibly marking the tradition--philosophers must teach something because we are fallen beings who have to act in the world, but the sad truth of it is, we can never have what we most want. Socrates placed wisdom beyond the bounds of reason by showing that if we could not define the essence of an object, we could not teach it. But we've had to go on teaching it anyways. The ultimate parody of the struggle between the Sophists and Platonists, between not knowing what to teach and teaching something, comes to us in the form of an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch. The younger brother asks his older, successful brother for advice for an upcoming interview, whether he has a secret weapon. The older, wiser brother makes him promise not to tell anybody and, noting that it is kind of a long-term strategy, asks him how much time he has. The younger brother says he has only a week, and the older brother says that it still might work. His secret wisdom, the secret to all of his success, the strategy he has employed? "Every time a penny passes through your hands, stick it up your ass. And then spend it." The younger brother first thinks he's joking, and then recoils at the thought that this is what his brother does, this is his secret:
"Thanks Nick, yeah. I thought you were really going to help me. How is sticking pennies up my ass going to help me?"
"You don't just stick them up your ass, you spend them. I told you, it's a long-term strategy. I've been doing this for 11 years now, and every day for the last 11 years, I've stuck $30 in pennies up my ass. I use them for everything, cab rides, movie theaters, groceries."
"What does that accomplish?"
"Will you listen? That's a lot of ass-pennies I've got out there, my friend. And here's where the magic comes in: when I meet someone who intimidates me, who puts me on edge, a real 'hard ass,' I just think to myself, 'they've probably handled one of my ass-pennies.' In fact, they probably got one in their pocket right then. That just seems to sort of give me the upper-hand. I mean, hey, I haven't touched anything that's been in their ass."
And that is what has happened to political philosophy. Plato made wisdom ineffable, which means the secret of life could be, according to the philosophers, sticking pennies in your ass. Nothing is closer to the heart of the human experiment than our negotiations with each other over how we are to function together--but is that the essence of humanity? "Go ahead, defend that thesis. I will destroy it," says the ghost of Socrates. Plato thought the wisdom of Socrates was the idea of an ineffable object of supremacy that was pure and holy and so extraordinarily not human, totally free of humanity's taint. What we should come to acknowledge as the wisdom of Socrates, however, is not the inhumannes of abstraction, but the total inanity of looking for abstract essences that somehow control particular, specific human activities. No general definition of arete is going to tell us how to teach it as a general techne. Though the Sophists thought of themselves as teaching a general skill called "success," careers spent in service to wisdom, what they were actually doing was something more specific, teaching Athenians how to survive in the Greek city-state environment.
Philosophy has been trying to work out the relationship between our self-understanding of what we are doing and what we are actually doing ever since Plato. One direction has been to play out the consequences of Plato's self-understanding of what philosophy was, and since it was directed towards an ineffable object, the effect was to remove philosophy further and further away from anything applicable to the affairs of humanity. Once you could connect it to what we do, a Platonist would come along and go, "Oh, well, that must not be what we should be talking about then," because the very fact that it was useful for humanity showed that it was not what Plato was talking about. The other direction was in the direction of the Sophists, the actual activity of philosophizing, which is a practical activity of teaching people how to think. We know, now, that that is what the Sophists were actually doing (and Socrates doing better) because we know with much better clarity and understanding that thinking is a social activity, even when done alone. The activity of reflection is only possible by the internalizing of a voice different from our own in our mind. We think by making explicit in our minds some thesis which we would otherwise bring out, make into action, but instead of actualizing it, we try and defeat it, play out the consequences of the idea in our head, look for alternatives--all things that involve pretending to be someone or something else with a different viewpoint.
The Greeks were trying to teach us how to think, and though Plato totally misconstrued the activity, we can still see the virtue in philosophy. Political philosophy is that amorphous activity that bounces back and forth between political realities, details, behavior, laws and ideal fulminations of how things might be, should be. Political philosophy has historically been neglected in the canons of disciplines because it is the true king discipline--not philosophy as Kant thought, not science as Comte thought, not religion, not psychology, not linguistics, not history, not any of these. Political philosophy is the great discipline because all other disciplines, all other activities find their place within it. It is the conjunction of the two sides of our humanity, action and contemplation. It is a thing that is almost impossible to foresee how it is to be done well. Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Albert Hirschman, Albert Hofstadter, Thom Hartmann, Paul Krugman, Foucault, Rorty, Pirsig, Harold Bloom, Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Michael Oakeshott, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, Jonathon Lear, Randy Rhodes, Aaron Sorkin, Upton Sinclair, Milan Kundera, Cindy Sheehan, Judith Shklar, Randolph Bourne, Alexis de Toqueville, Jefferson, Dewey, Markos, Stanley Fish, Dan Savage, Elaine Scarry, John Hollander, Walter Ong, Walter Kaufmann, Michael Walzer, Habermas, Adorno, Gadamer, Louis Menand, Clifford Geertz, Ruth Benedict, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Annette Baier--they have all written things that can aid a political philosopher. Some self-consciously do political philosophy, some politics, some subjects related to politics, or philosophy, but a few in a connection that is probably opaque until I relate how I've, at least, found wisdom on their pages relatable to something called "political philosophy."
What do they all have in common? Nothing. Doing good political philosophy is impossible to define in a way that will predict where you can find wisdom. And that's generalizable to life. And because utterly unpredictable, professionals at it are partly historians and commentators on a diffuse array of writers, thinkers, singers, painters, speakers, as many activities as you can list--the political philosopher creates a canon of wisdom-creators and because it will partly be so idiosyncratic because of its diffuseness (we all find wisdom in different places), it is hard to see that profession as massively important. Which is just as well, because the fact that political philosophy is what it is also makes all of us political philosophers in the required sense, and the notion of specialists in political philosophy either stupid (because Platonic) or just meaning, "Well-read in other wisdom-seekers."
What happened to political philosophy? It has been going through the growing pains one could safely predict of anything that evolves, but in it's peculiar case, it has been the reflection of Humanity's Evolutionary Story as it, in effect, wishes to relate its past, present and future all at once. The mark of Platonism, carried out, makes philosophers understand whatever it is they teach to be effectively like ass-pennies--look, wisdom is ineffable, so as far as anyone can know, sticking these pennies in your ass is going to make you successful and better at life. And yet, philosophers and intellectuals are successful at making humanity better. What 2500 years has taught us is that the self-understanding of what philosophy is that Plato gave us might be the problem.
Endnotes
[1]POSTSCRIPT, JULY 2010: I have since learned that this sentence is wrong about More. I don't know about "re-Platonizing" (I think I just want to distinguish Machiavelli from More, but I don't know enough about the history of predecessors or successors), but Judith Shklar argues that More was Platonic in just the way I was suggesting he wasn't: More had no intent to be politically efficacious. Her two essays on the idea of utopias in Political Thought and Political Thinkers are invaluable to any kind of thinking about this. Shklar further argues that things began to change for political philosophy, beginning to shuck it's Platonic heritage, with what she calls the "birth of historical optimism," which was a combination of the increased exploits of technology--leading to greater material wealth--and the rise of a middle-class that began challenging aristocratic control of power (loosely defined as whatever is at the top of any hierarchy, be it a single king or a host of nobility), and these led to a greater appreciation of history (culminating in Hegel). The interplay between increased theoretical grasp (science) leading to increased causal control (technology) leading to increased material production (industrial) leading to increased wealth (economics) leading to increased power (politics) leading to a different increase of theoretical grasp (i.e., "hey, I think we can change things"), which leads to democracy, is a full story we are getting better and better at telling, but I haven't read anybody that puts it all together in a pithy way.
----------
If you ask a 22-year-old philosophy major for a Great Philosophers shortlist, one that extends until, say, 1950, it would probably go something like this: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre. In fact, it would probably even go in that particular order. However, if you ask for a shortlist of the great political philosophers, that list would likely go something like this: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx. Significantly shorter, yes, but why so little overlap? One might think specialization, and certainly when Plato and Aristotle were at it, everything was more or less "love of wisdom." But if you ask for a list of the great metaphysicians, or epistemologists, you get pretty much the exact same list as the Greats list (though a savvy student will hesitate with metaphysician, and in some cases epistemologist, for everybody after Hegel). And what's with no names from the early part of the 20th century?
What happened to political philosophy?
When students take Philosophy 101, they are typically still taught that there are three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Some students (usually the ones already earmarked for phil-majorhood) will recognize the first two, but almost no one will have ever heard of the third. The professor, of course, will be quick to break down the etymological roots of all three, particularly the last: the study of "value". They will then explain that this branch breaks into the more well-known ethics and aesthetics. Occasionally that will be it--on with the show. Many times, though, the professor will also expand on the many sub-branches that have been created over time to help future majors swim later: philosophy of mind, of language, of science, of art (which has largely replaced "aesthetics"), moral philosophy (mainly the new moniker for philosophical study of "ethics"), political philosophy.
In 101 courses, however, political philosophy is usually overlooked, and sometimes even moral philosophy. Most of the focus remains on metaphysics and epistemology. The reasons for this are, naturally, many and complex, but some general considerations arise to answer some of the anomalies I pointed out earlier.
The most important reason is Kant. Kant institutionalized (for reasons having to do with his genius, but also because of the birth of modern universities and the professionalization--the professorialization--of philosophy) the historical line of personages that we now recite as the Great Ones by, during the creation of transcendental philosophy, splitting the difference between--what he named as--the traditions of Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). In fact, the very notion of "metaphysics" and "epistemology" as subjects, as different branches of philosophy, didn't really cohere until after Kant. ("Metaphysics," of course, is the name Aristotle's redactor gave to the first collection of writings after the previous collection, the Physics. Epistemology, I believe, wasn't coined until the 19th-century, in German as erkenntnistheorie.) Since Descartes began his philosophy by doubting everything he knew, and Kant then stepped back and wondered how we know anything at all, epistemology has seemed to be the most pressing item on the list, even right before the part where we divvy out the existence of things--how else, after all, would we know?
Epistemology becoming the king of the discipline, however, doesn't explain why the series of great political philosophers differs so much from the other series. It explains why the Great Metaphysicians series looks exactly like the Great Philosophers one, but not why Machiavelli didn't have a theory of knowledge, nor Descartes a theory of the state.
I think the explanation has to run through Plato's distaste for the affairs of humanity. "But Plato wrote the first comprehensive political theory?" It is true, Plato is usually the first stop for political philosophy, but you have to dig into what he was saying--Plato wanted to banish politics. Political, and moral, philosophy were supposed to be those branches where we deal with the Problems of Men, but ever since Plato wiped his brush of Philosophy over the canvas of humanity's interests, banishing Poetry, Politics, and Rhetoric, philosophers who have turned their attention to the temporal have all struggled with the tension between the subject matter's obvious humanness and their desire to rise above it. Plato created the desire to float into the heavens precisely because he wanted to push aside the things that otherwise seem the most distinctively human. Do animals have politics? Do they capture each other's passions with moving oratory? No, but they do all have a mode of being in the world. Our mode would seem to be like Aristotle said, animals with politics, but Plato put his stamp on humanity by suggesting that we were most human, not by doing all these human-y things, but when we rise above, that we were most human when we were rubbing elbows with eternity. Plato did it by creating a new activity that would be definitive of humanity, call it philosophy, theory or contemplation, that would allow us to show off our celestial side.
The impact was that Hobbes and Machiavelli seem to philosophers to be cynics, reveling in the baseness of humanity. To those still marked strongly by Plato, moral--and particularly political--philosophy needed to be devoid of the crass things we do on a regular basis, ego struggles, white lies, above all sex: these things had no place in a proper understanding of ethical behavior. This led to the abortive position of emotivism, and it led to subdisciplines--really, redefinitions of the discipline--like "moral theory" and "metaethics." All of these maneuvers were designed to get the human out of morality. But how the hell do you do that in politics?
Platonism never could figure out what to do with politics because it just seemed so coarse, after all, naturally and essentially having to do with other people. So philosophers have increasingly isolated themselves over 2500 years from the affairs of people. At least in regards to what they do professionally, politics was something they looked oddly at because it was the realm of human action, whereas their domain seems directly opposed to it, the realm of contemplation. They keep trying to affect human action, how we act in the world, but the further we get from Plato, the worse their specifically philosophical attempts seem. The dynamic of Platonism was such that it created a rift between the actual and the ideal, encapsulated in More's re-Platonizing of political philosophy, Utopia. More wanted to affect action, his book was a political tract that was to have real political effect, but Plato's stamp shows it's true colors in how we think of More's coined word today: utopic thinking is something that's out of touch with reality.[fn.1] Think of that old, post-60s Cold War chestnut: "Sure, communism works in theory, but...."
The struggle between Plato and the Sophists was the struggle between sophia and techne. "Loving wisdom" was something that Plato introduced, and it was not what other's had in mind. Pierre Hadot gives us a good reconstruction of what Plato did to wisdom in his What is Ancient Philosophy?. Early philosophers had no notion of philosophia, but they did think of wisdom as a kind of know-how, which is still the most commonly used notion of the word in common sense. Techne we can translate as "skill," and we can see how 5th-century intellectuals before Socrates might have thought sophia and techne very similar notions, wisdom being a generalized know-how and various skills being particular kinds of know-how. The epitaph of Thrasymachus, Plato's punching bag at the beginning of the Republic, read: "My career is sophia," which, in the Sophists adoring naïveté, they thought they could teach. Socrates' strategy and goal was to show that they were full of it by asking them what, exactly, they were teaching. The particular bit they were teaching was arete.
The word has gone through a number of stages of translation, which itself gives us a potted history of philosophy's struggle between theory and practice, contemplation and action. The oldest English translations we were living with at the beginning of the 20th century was arete as "virtue." The trouble with virtue is that it is something we tend to itemize into various virtues, like the virtue of compassion or temperance. So arete seemed to equivocate between various things we could teach, and teach better by knowing what it, in its various particular guises, was (thus lending credence to Plato's turn to the heavens) and a more hard to define general thing, as in, "That person has virtue." They have virtue? What, exactly, do you mean?
What, indeed, and it becomes worse, and Socrates' rancor over the Sophists even more understandable, when we move to arete as "excellence," a translation that started to become popular around the middle of the century. "That person has excellence" doesn't even make much sense in English, but it is closer to what the Greeks meant. How on earth do you teach excellence, in general? The difficulty seems to be that it is only by being more specific to an activity can you describe how one is excellent in it. I think the way we boggle at the question of teaching arete so defined is the degree to which we take Socrates as making an advance in our moral knowledge--he was right to call the Sophists out on teaching arete, for what the hell does it mean to do that generally?
Alexander Nehamas has proposed going even further, and suggests translating arete as "success." Now, on the one hand, this makes sense of the Sophists in a way that "excellence" does not. The Sophists were interested in the affairs of humanity and in Greece, at that time, the only way to make it as a citizen of a city-state, particularly in Athens, was by being able to perform orally in front of an audience. Athens in the 5th century became the seat of the birth of both modern democracy and a modern judiciary. Every citizen was their own politician and their own lawyer, every citizen expected to be able to argue and defend their own viewpoint in politics and their own case in law. Nowadays we bemoan the rise of professional politics as a weakening of the idea of democracy, with its sense of everyone having their own voice. We have a (largely correct) sense that having professional politicians makes it easier for citizens to become uninformed, when the only way for a true democracy to work, as the American Founding Fathers foresaw, is to have an informed electorate. And yet, there is a strong analogy between politics and law, reflected in the view of them the Athenians took--every citizen their own law-maker and -interpreter--and in the history of those activities since: no one bats an eye at the professionalization of law. How can any person be expected to argue the ins and outs of their case when there is such a massive amount to know about law, being the particular kind of thing it is?
The Sophists were performing a much needed service for the Athenians by teaching them how to be successful in their duties as a citizen of Athens. People don't just naturally know to argue and present the best case. You have to learn how to do that, and that's what the Sophists were doing: teaching the Athenian's success in the domains of politics and law. But because of the nature of concepts and language, these ideas were not the evolved notions we have, but still being tried out. The Sophists said they were teaching "success," but--and this is on the other hand--Socrates perceived rightly a problem with teaching a general skill called "virtue" or "excellence" or "success." Like Socrates, we wonder what it could possibly mean to teach "success" generally, an even worse proposition than "excellence."
Plato rectified the matter by giving a particular spin to sophia that distinguished it from techne. Plato took over from Socrates the idea that "wisdom" was actually an an ineffable object. Socrates, noting the absurdity of trying to teach a general techne called arete, called attention to it by asking the teachers what exactly it was they were teaching--give me a definition. Socrates would then dialectically beat the crap out of every definition given, and declare at the end that, if you can't give it a defensible definition, then you must not know what you are doing. QED. Plato thought this brilliant, which it was, a terrific strategy on Socrates' part to make fun of the Sophists. But Plato thought it was more than a terrific way to show up the Sophists, a way of punching up the difficulty in teaching something general, like "success." Plato thought that Socrates was showing us what true wisdom was, which in Socrates' analysis always ended up a blank--no definition ever survives. True wisdom was acknowledging the fact that we were fallen beings (hence Socratic superiority in knowing that you don't know) and turning it into the essence of an activity definitive of humanity.
That was the trap Socrates set for Plato, and that Plato, for lack of knowing how to resolve it, repeated in his writings, indelibly marking the tradition--philosophers must teach something because we are fallen beings who have to act in the world, but the sad truth of it is, we can never have what we most want. Socrates placed wisdom beyond the bounds of reason by showing that if we could not define the essence of an object, we could not teach it. But we've had to go on teaching it anyways. The ultimate parody of the struggle between the Sophists and Platonists, between not knowing what to teach and teaching something, comes to us in the form of an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch. The younger brother asks his older, successful brother for advice for an upcoming interview, whether he has a secret weapon. The older, wiser brother makes him promise not to tell anybody and, noting that it is kind of a long-term strategy, asks him how much time he has. The younger brother says he has only a week, and the older brother says that it still might work. His secret wisdom, the secret to all of his success, the strategy he has employed? "Every time a penny passes through your hands, stick it up your ass. And then spend it." The younger brother first thinks he's joking, and then recoils at the thought that this is what his brother does, this is his secret:
"Thanks Nick, yeah. I thought you were really going to help me. How is sticking pennies up my ass going to help me?"
"You don't just stick them up your ass, you spend them. I told you, it's a long-term strategy. I've been doing this for 11 years now, and every day for the last 11 years, I've stuck $30 in pennies up my ass. I use them for everything, cab rides, movie theaters, groceries."
"What does that accomplish?"
"Will you listen? That's a lot of ass-pennies I've got out there, my friend. And here's where the magic comes in: when I meet someone who intimidates me, who puts me on edge, a real 'hard ass,' I just think to myself, 'they've probably handled one of my ass-pennies.' In fact, they probably got one in their pocket right then. That just seems to sort of give me the upper-hand. I mean, hey, I haven't touched anything that's been in their ass."
And that is what has happened to political philosophy. Plato made wisdom ineffable, which means the secret of life could be, according to the philosophers, sticking pennies in your ass. Nothing is closer to the heart of the human experiment than our negotiations with each other over how we are to function together--but is that the essence of humanity? "Go ahead, defend that thesis. I will destroy it," says the ghost of Socrates. Plato thought the wisdom of Socrates was the idea of an ineffable object of supremacy that was pure and holy and so extraordinarily not human, totally free of humanity's taint. What we should come to acknowledge as the wisdom of Socrates, however, is not the inhumannes of abstraction, but the total inanity of looking for abstract essences that somehow control particular, specific human activities. No general definition of arete is going to tell us how to teach it as a general techne. Though the Sophists thought of themselves as teaching a general skill called "success," careers spent in service to wisdom, what they were actually doing was something more specific, teaching Athenians how to survive in the Greek city-state environment.
Philosophy has been trying to work out the relationship between our self-understanding of what we are doing and what we are actually doing ever since Plato. One direction has been to play out the consequences of Plato's self-understanding of what philosophy was, and since it was directed towards an ineffable object, the effect was to remove philosophy further and further away from anything applicable to the affairs of humanity. Once you could connect it to what we do, a Platonist would come along and go, "Oh, well, that must not be what we should be talking about then," because the very fact that it was useful for humanity showed that it was not what Plato was talking about. The other direction was in the direction of the Sophists, the actual activity of philosophizing, which is a practical activity of teaching people how to think. We know, now, that that is what the Sophists were actually doing (and Socrates doing better) because we know with much better clarity and understanding that thinking is a social activity, even when done alone. The activity of reflection is only possible by the internalizing of a voice different from our own in our mind. We think by making explicit in our minds some thesis which we would otherwise bring out, make into action, but instead of actualizing it, we try and defeat it, play out the consequences of the idea in our head, look for alternatives--all things that involve pretending to be someone or something else with a different viewpoint.
The Greeks were trying to teach us how to think, and though Plato totally misconstrued the activity, we can still see the virtue in philosophy. Political philosophy is that amorphous activity that bounces back and forth between political realities, details, behavior, laws and ideal fulminations of how things might be, should be. Political philosophy has historically been neglected in the canons of disciplines because it is the true king discipline--not philosophy as Kant thought, not science as Comte thought, not religion, not psychology, not linguistics, not history, not any of these. Political philosophy is the great discipline because all other disciplines, all other activities find their place within it. It is the conjunction of the two sides of our humanity, action and contemplation. It is a thing that is almost impossible to foresee how it is to be done well. Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Albert Hirschman, Albert Hofstadter, Thom Hartmann, Paul Krugman, Foucault, Rorty, Pirsig, Harold Bloom, Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Michael Oakeshott, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, Jonathon Lear, Randy Rhodes, Aaron Sorkin, Upton Sinclair, Milan Kundera, Cindy Sheehan, Judith Shklar, Randolph Bourne, Alexis de Toqueville, Jefferson, Dewey, Markos, Stanley Fish, Dan Savage, Elaine Scarry, John Hollander, Walter Ong, Walter Kaufmann, Michael Walzer, Habermas, Adorno, Gadamer, Louis Menand, Clifford Geertz, Ruth Benedict, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Annette Baier--they have all written things that can aid a political philosopher. Some self-consciously do political philosophy, some politics, some subjects related to politics, or philosophy, but a few in a connection that is probably opaque until I relate how I've, at least, found wisdom on their pages relatable to something called "political philosophy."
What do they all have in common? Nothing. Doing good political philosophy is impossible to define in a way that will predict where you can find wisdom. And that's generalizable to life. And because utterly unpredictable, professionals at it are partly historians and commentators on a diffuse array of writers, thinkers, singers, painters, speakers, as many activities as you can list--the political philosopher creates a canon of wisdom-creators and because it will partly be so idiosyncratic because of its diffuseness (we all find wisdom in different places), it is hard to see that profession as massively important. Which is just as well, because the fact that political philosophy is what it is also makes all of us political philosophers in the required sense, and the notion of specialists in political philosophy either stupid (because Platonic) or just meaning, "Well-read in other wisdom-seekers."
What happened to political philosophy? It has been going through the growing pains one could safely predict of anything that evolves, but in it's peculiar case, it has been the reflection of Humanity's Evolutionary Story as it, in effect, wishes to relate its past, present and future all at once. The mark of Platonism, carried out, makes philosophers understand whatever it is they teach to be effectively like ass-pennies--look, wisdom is ineffable, so as far as anyone can know, sticking these pennies in your ass is going to make you successful and better at life. And yet, philosophers and intellectuals are successful at making humanity better. What 2500 years has taught us is that the self-understanding of what philosophy is that Plato gave us might be the problem.
Endnotes
[1]POSTSCRIPT, JULY 2010: I have since learned that this sentence is wrong about More. I don't know about "re-Platonizing" (I think I just want to distinguish Machiavelli from More, but I don't know enough about the history of predecessors or successors), but Judith Shklar argues that More was Platonic in just the way I was suggesting he wasn't: More had no intent to be politically efficacious. Her two essays on the idea of utopias in Political Thought and Political Thinkers are invaluable to any kind of thinking about this. Shklar further argues that things began to change for political philosophy, beginning to shuck it's Platonic heritage, with what she calls the "birth of historical optimism," which was a combination of the increased exploits of technology--leading to greater material wealth--and the rise of a middle-class that began challenging aristocratic control of power (loosely defined as whatever is at the top of any hierarchy, be it a single king or a host of nobility), and these led to a greater appreciation of history (culminating in Hegel). The interplay between increased theoretical grasp (science) leading to increased causal control (technology) leading to increased material production (industrial) leading to increased wealth (economics) leading to increased power (politics) leading to a different increase of theoretical grasp (i.e., "hey, I think we can change things"), which leads to democracy, is a full story we are getting better and better at telling, but I haven't read anybody that puts it all together in a pithy way.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
The Diversity of Goods
Charles Taylor is one of those philosophers (like so many) that I've learned about through Rorty and have their books on my shelves (which I've been talking about a lot lately, all those unread books, staring me down). Taylor and MacIntyre are both philosophers who have been called "communitarians" as part of the revolt against liberalism. Many others have been called communitarians, too, and part of why I think this particular battle line, communitarians v. liberals, bad and outdated is because most of the communitarians look like good liberals to me.
What intrigues me about Taylor is that, like Bernard Williams, he appears to advocate the ripping down of Kantian moral philosophy, but he also still advocates a hard distinction between the natural sciences and humanities. I've commented before in relation to Williams that I find this quite striking, particularly with the thoroughness in Taylor and Williams' narratives of moral philosophy (I'm thinking of, for instance, Sources of the Self and Shame and Neccessity). I still don't know what to make of it, but lately I've been setting aside such issues to emphasize the positive.
Taylor's "The Diversity of Goods" (found in the Anti-Theory book I've been reading) is a general attack on monolithic moral theories, specifically utilitarianism, and what Annette Baier called "normative moral theories". Taylor opens by saying that utilitarianism had a lot going for it, “its seeming compatibility with scientific thought; its this-worldly humanist focus, its concern with suffering. But one of the powerful background factors behind much of this appeal was epistemological.” (223) This attack on modern, Cartesian epistemology is what I take to be in common to Rorty, MacIntyre, Taylor, and Baier. Taylor suggests that utilitarianism caught on because of the craze to make everything “scientific,” that with it we “could abandon all the metaphysical or theological factors—commands of God, natural rights, virtues—which made ethical questions scientifically undecidable. Bluntly, we could calculate.”
There is another contemporary variant of moral philosophy distorted by modern epistemology, and these are the kinds of neo-Kantian formalisms that we get with Hare and Donagan. What both utilitarianism and formalism offer is “the hope of deciding ethical questions without having to determine which of a number of rival languages of moral virtue and vice, of the admirable and the contemptible, of unconditional versus conditional obligation, are valid.” (224) What Taylor suggests is that both of these options flow directly out of a substantive moral insight, “one of the most fundamental insights of modern civilization, the universal attribution of moral personality: in fundamental ethical matters, everyone ought to count, and all ought to count in the same way.” (224-5)
Taylor points out that this insight is historically parochial, that the Greeks for one did not share it. What modern moral philosophies have done is to take this moral insight and enshrine it as a principle to which everything else in the realm of morality must follow. However, Taylor says, “they look like formal principles only because they are so foundational to the moral thinking of our civilization.” (226) But as insights, rather than first, axiomatic principles, we find that these insights are “in need of justification like the others. This points us to one of the motives for construing them as formal principles. For those who despair of reason as the arbiter of moral disputes (and the epistemological tradition has tended to induce this despair in many), making the fundamental insights into a formal principle has seemed a way of avoiding a moral scepticism which was both implausible and distasteful.”
The reason the Cartesian epistemological tradition has come to cause this despair is because it modeled itself on the successes of the fledgling natural sciences. Because “reason” during this time period became so associated with science, and moral and political conflict seemed so interminable in comparison with the rapid beating back of nature, post-Cartesians thought that the only thing that could save morality from being completely irrational was making it quantifiably empirical or axiomatically formal. The successes of Galilean science were so rapid that they essentially made reasoning look simple. And anything that was hard must not be using reason. This seems patently silly, but one can see the line of reasoning that brings us there. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to make life easier? So utilitarians and formalists suggest their ethical theories as providing firmer foundations, as making life easier.
Taylor says that “these claims to firmer foundation are illusory. What is really going on is that some forms of ethical reasoning are being privileged over others because in our civilization they come less into dispute or look easier to defend. This has all the rationality of the drunk in the well-known story … who was looking for his latch key late one night under a street lamp. A passerby, trying to be helpful, asked him where he had dropped it. ‘Over there,’ answered the drunk, pointing to a dark corner. ‘Then why are you looking for it here?’ ‘Because there’s so much more light here,’ replied the drunk.” (234)
Taylor argues that “the price of this formalism, as also of the utilitarian reduction” has been the creation of “the unity of the moral”: “one of the big illusions which grows from either of these reductions is the belief that there is a single consistent domain of the ‘moral’, that there is one set of considerations, or mode of calculation, which determines what we ought ‘morally’ to do.” (226) Taylor suggests, instead, that the “boundaries of the moral are an open question” and that he would argue “that the universal attribution of moral personality is valid, and lays obligations on us that we cannot ignore; but that there are also other moral ideals and goals—e.g., of less than universal solidarity, or of personal excellence—that cannot be easily coordinated with universalism, and can even enter into conflict with it. To decide a priori what the bounds of the moral are is just to obfuscate the question whether and to what degree this is so, and to make it incapable of being coherently stated.” (226-7)
Taylor says that we need a notion of “qualitative contrast” to embrace the plurality of purposes and goals of ethical thinking. The notion of qualitative contrast “is the sense that one way of acting or living is higher than others, or in other cases that a certain way of living is debased.” (229) He suggests that treating them monolithically as all pointing towards the attainment of some common good distorts these individual values. “Integrity, charity, liberation, and the like stand out as worth of pursuit in a special way, incommensurable with other goals we might have, such as the pursuit of wealth, or comfort, or the approval of those who surround us. Indeed, for those who hold to such views of the good, we ought to be ready to sacrifice some of these lesser goods for the higher.” (230)
Not only that, but recognizing the distinctions between these goods “is an essential condition of his realizing the good concerned.” We wouldn’t often apply the virtue of charity to a person’s actions if they themselves didn’t recognize the high value of acting charitably. Taylor says that “motivation enters into the definition of the higher activity or way of being in all these cases.”
Another part of these virtues is that they are obligatory in some sense. Wealth may be a goal for some people, but we don’t usually look down on those who don’t have that goal. “By contrast, it is in the nature of what I have called a higher goal that it is one we should have. Those who lack them are not just free of some additional instrumental obligations that weigh with the rest of us; they are open to censure.” (231)
Not all qualitative contrasts are in the moral realm. Taylor points out the aesthetic domain and the judgments we make there. It is here that Taylor lays out most plainly the fuzzy nature of the moral realm. Taylor suggests at several points that perhaps one term, “moral”, may not suffice for all of our language, for our ways of condemnation and appraisal. We can make ad hoc distinctions, but they all remain fuzzy. Most of Taylor’s paper consists in attacking the pretensions and illusions engendered by epistemological distorsions (including a very good one about another motivation for formalism and reductionism: naturalism), but it paves the way in suggestive ways for the greater appreciation for “qualitative contrasts”.
*All citations for Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, ed. Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson.
What intrigues me about Taylor is that, like Bernard Williams, he appears to advocate the ripping down of Kantian moral philosophy, but he also still advocates a hard distinction between the natural sciences and humanities. I've commented before in relation to Williams that I find this quite striking, particularly with the thoroughness in Taylor and Williams' narratives of moral philosophy (I'm thinking of, for instance, Sources of the Self and Shame and Neccessity). I still don't know what to make of it, but lately I've been setting aside such issues to emphasize the positive.
Taylor's "The Diversity of Goods" (found in the Anti-Theory book I've been reading) is a general attack on monolithic moral theories, specifically utilitarianism, and what Annette Baier called "normative moral theories". Taylor opens by saying that utilitarianism had a lot going for it, “its seeming compatibility with scientific thought; its this-worldly humanist focus, its concern with suffering. But one of the powerful background factors behind much of this appeal was epistemological.” (223) This attack on modern, Cartesian epistemology is what I take to be in common to Rorty, MacIntyre, Taylor, and Baier. Taylor suggests that utilitarianism caught on because of the craze to make everything “scientific,” that with it we “could abandon all the metaphysical or theological factors—commands of God, natural rights, virtues—which made ethical questions scientifically undecidable. Bluntly, we could calculate.”
There is another contemporary variant of moral philosophy distorted by modern epistemology, and these are the kinds of neo-Kantian formalisms that we get with Hare and Donagan. What both utilitarianism and formalism offer is “the hope of deciding ethical questions without having to determine which of a number of rival languages of moral virtue and vice, of the admirable and the contemptible, of unconditional versus conditional obligation, are valid.” (224) What Taylor suggests is that both of these options flow directly out of a substantive moral insight, “one of the most fundamental insights of modern civilization, the universal attribution of moral personality: in fundamental ethical matters, everyone ought to count, and all ought to count in the same way.” (224-5)
Taylor points out that this insight is historically parochial, that the Greeks for one did not share it. What modern moral philosophies have done is to take this moral insight and enshrine it as a principle to which everything else in the realm of morality must follow. However, Taylor says, “they look like formal principles only because they are so foundational to the moral thinking of our civilization.” (226) But as insights, rather than first, axiomatic principles, we find that these insights are “in need of justification like the others. This points us to one of the motives for construing them as formal principles. For those who despair of reason as the arbiter of moral disputes (and the epistemological tradition has tended to induce this despair in many), making the fundamental insights into a formal principle has seemed a way of avoiding a moral scepticism which was both implausible and distasteful.”
The reason the Cartesian epistemological tradition has come to cause this despair is because it modeled itself on the successes of the fledgling natural sciences. Because “reason” during this time period became so associated with science, and moral and political conflict seemed so interminable in comparison with the rapid beating back of nature, post-Cartesians thought that the only thing that could save morality from being completely irrational was making it quantifiably empirical or axiomatically formal. The successes of Galilean science were so rapid that they essentially made reasoning look simple. And anything that was hard must not be using reason. This seems patently silly, but one can see the line of reasoning that brings us there. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to make life easier? So utilitarians and formalists suggest their ethical theories as providing firmer foundations, as making life easier.
Taylor says that “these claims to firmer foundation are illusory. What is really going on is that some forms of ethical reasoning are being privileged over others because in our civilization they come less into dispute or look easier to defend. This has all the rationality of the drunk in the well-known story … who was looking for his latch key late one night under a street lamp. A passerby, trying to be helpful, asked him where he had dropped it. ‘Over there,’ answered the drunk, pointing to a dark corner. ‘Then why are you looking for it here?’ ‘Because there’s so much more light here,’ replied the drunk.” (234)
Taylor argues that “the price of this formalism, as also of the utilitarian reduction” has been the creation of “the unity of the moral”: “one of the big illusions which grows from either of these reductions is the belief that there is a single consistent domain of the ‘moral’, that there is one set of considerations, or mode of calculation, which determines what we ought ‘morally’ to do.” (226) Taylor suggests, instead, that the “boundaries of the moral are an open question” and that he would argue “that the universal attribution of moral personality is valid, and lays obligations on us that we cannot ignore; but that there are also other moral ideals and goals—e.g., of less than universal solidarity, or of personal excellence—that cannot be easily coordinated with universalism, and can even enter into conflict with it. To decide a priori what the bounds of the moral are is just to obfuscate the question whether and to what degree this is so, and to make it incapable of being coherently stated.” (226-7)
Taylor says that we need a notion of “qualitative contrast” to embrace the plurality of purposes and goals of ethical thinking. The notion of qualitative contrast “is the sense that one way of acting or living is higher than others, or in other cases that a certain way of living is debased.” (229) He suggests that treating them monolithically as all pointing towards the attainment of some common good distorts these individual values. “Integrity, charity, liberation, and the like stand out as worth of pursuit in a special way, incommensurable with other goals we might have, such as the pursuit of wealth, or comfort, or the approval of those who surround us. Indeed, for those who hold to such views of the good, we ought to be ready to sacrifice some of these lesser goods for the higher.” (230)
Not only that, but recognizing the distinctions between these goods “is an essential condition of his realizing the good concerned.” We wouldn’t often apply the virtue of charity to a person’s actions if they themselves didn’t recognize the high value of acting charitably. Taylor says that “motivation enters into the definition of the higher activity or way of being in all these cases.”
Another part of these virtues is that they are obligatory in some sense. Wealth may be a goal for some people, but we don’t usually look down on those who don’t have that goal. “By contrast, it is in the nature of what I have called a higher goal that it is one we should have. Those who lack them are not just free of some additional instrumental obligations that weigh with the rest of us; they are open to censure.” (231)
Not all qualitative contrasts are in the moral realm. Taylor points out the aesthetic domain and the judgments we make there. It is here that Taylor lays out most plainly the fuzzy nature of the moral realm. Taylor suggests at several points that perhaps one term, “moral”, may not suffice for all of our language, for our ways of condemnation and appraisal. We can make ad hoc distinctions, but they all remain fuzzy. Most of Taylor’s paper consists in attacking the pretensions and illusions engendered by epistemological distorsions (including a very good one about another motivation for formalism and reductionism: naturalism), but it paves the way in suggestive ways for the greater appreciation for “qualitative contrasts”.
*All citations for Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, ed. Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Doing Without Moral Theory?
Annette Baier is a very interesting moral philosopher who I find quite cogent on a number of issues. Not only is she an anti-Kantian like my favorite philosophers, but she also engages extensively with the history of philosophy. I find that so many of the philosophers who I connect with (which does not include agreeing with) engage the history of philosophy to mine it for wisdom, rather than just spinning off a few theses or positions with attendant arguments. I'm thinking of Rorty, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stephen Toulmin, Jeffrey Stout, Susan Neiman, Robert Solomon. The list goes on. And some of them take up a particular philosopher as standard bearer. In Baier's case, she's devoted a lifetime of study to Hume and holds Hume up as the example of what moral philosophy should look like. (She's also a feminist philosopher, and makes the case in several places that Hume is the "woman's philosopher".)
One of the basic positions that I've occupied through Rorty and Pirsig and others is anti-theoretical, that reality and truth and good and the like are not something to which you can really have a theory about. Opposed to theory, I've been talking about this nebulous thing called "wisdom" accrued from practice. When it comes to moral philosophy, Baier talks about just this sort of thing in her assessment of contemporary moral philosophy, "Doing Without Moral Theory?"
Baier begins by noting that Aristotle and Hume, unlike contemporary moral philosophers beginning with Bentham and Mill, presumed a moral consensus on their actual moral judgments. Nowadays, philosophers presume the absence of consensus. Baier doesn't concern herself here with why this exactly occured, but simply that moral and cultural pluralism is now taken for granted. Baier says that "what is striking about this shift from presumption of moral consensus to presumption of its absence is that the philosophers at the beginning of the transition saw themselves as working for some disputed moral cause, saw themselves as members of the nonagreeing community of moral judges, while more recent moral theorists mostly see themselves as above the moral fray, outside the everyday disputes about what is to be tolerated." (30) Mill, in addition to being a moral philosopher, was a moral reformer, but Baier suggests that there are "very few contemporary Anglo-American moral theorists to whom one would naturally apply the term 'moral reformer.'" Baier looks at the theorists around her and sees them in the "intellectual construction business--one attempts to outbid one's competitor constructors in erecting a theory that rationalizes the moral opinion of some group," but in the limiting case of some constructions "the group is oneself."
Baier wants to suggest that "there is no room for moral theory as something which is more philosophical and less committed than moral deliberation, and which is not simply an account of our customs and styles of justification, criticism, protest, revolt, conversion, and resolution" and the consequence is that "any moral philosophy which is not such descriptive anthropology will tend to merge with moral action." (33) Baier's suggestion is that moral philosophers need to get their hands dirty. They need to live life. If we are to be moral reformers like Mill, guides to moral action and not just sketching out the possibility of moral action (as neutral theorists sometimes describe themselves), we need to have knowledge about many different kinds of moral action. Her example for a secular moral philosophy is Hume. Hume's moral philosophy involved psychological and political and economic theories, but no normative theory. Hume's general practice was to go out and test his theories and go back and refine them. During his life, Hume had been a business man, a secretary to a general, a diplomat, a historian, he knew a little law. He was well acquainted with many different aspects of life. On Hume's account, moral philosophy attempts to provide a "mental geography", maps that can be tested and made better. Hume "directs the philosopher to learn from the nonphilosophers before presuming to advise them." (39) Hume is, in a way, directing moral philosophers to be a bit like dilettantes.
Baier notes at the end that much moral advice would seem to be just as easily given by nonphilosophers as professionals, which is something Rorty notes also (in "Philosophy in American Today" in CP). But that still doesn't leave the moral philosopher with nothing to do. They can at least be very well read, traversing a wide array of literature, looking for wisdom. Baier's article does much towards disabusing us of the notion of Kantian normative theory. Baier thinks that a Humean moral philosophy "would merge with other disciplines, and with the reflections of common life, and such a merger might help us to escape from that arrogance of solitary intellect which has condemned much moral theory to sustained self-delusions concerning its subject matter, its methods, and its authority." (46)
I should note that the last fourth of Baier's essay traverses another, though related, topic, of the way in which moral philosophy teachers compose themselves, and so also the very idea of professional moral philosophers, and philosophers in general. This is very interesting and acute, but a lesson for another time.
*Annette Baier's "Doing Without Moral Theory?" can be found in her Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (London: Methuen, 1985) and (where I have it and all pagination is coordinated to) in Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Convervatism ed. Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson (Albany: SUNY, 1989).
One of the basic positions that I've occupied through Rorty and Pirsig and others is anti-theoretical, that reality and truth and good and the like are not something to which you can really have a theory about. Opposed to theory, I've been talking about this nebulous thing called "wisdom" accrued from practice. When it comes to moral philosophy, Baier talks about just this sort of thing in her assessment of contemporary moral philosophy, "Doing Without Moral Theory?"
Baier begins by noting that Aristotle and Hume, unlike contemporary moral philosophers beginning with Bentham and Mill, presumed a moral consensus on their actual moral judgments. Nowadays, philosophers presume the absence of consensus. Baier doesn't concern herself here with why this exactly occured, but simply that moral and cultural pluralism is now taken for granted. Baier says that "what is striking about this shift from presumption of moral consensus to presumption of its absence is that the philosophers at the beginning of the transition saw themselves as working for some disputed moral cause, saw themselves as members of the nonagreeing community of moral judges, while more recent moral theorists mostly see themselves as above the moral fray, outside the everyday disputes about what is to be tolerated." (30) Mill, in addition to being a moral philosopher, was a moral reformer, but Baier suggests that there are "very few contemporary Anglo-American moral theorists to whom one would naturally apply the term 'moral reformer.'" Baier looks at the theorists around her and sees them in the "intellectual construction business--one attempts to outbid one's competitor constructors in erecting a theory that rationalizes the moral opinion of some group," but in the limiting case of some constructions "the group is oneself."
This, I suggest, makes moral philosophy into either ideology or into play-ideology. Like most of us, I welcome good ideology for a cause I espouse--I admire J. S. Mill for his cultural crusades and for his effort to use intellectual instruments along with any others he could get. What I am less happy with is professional play-ideology, and with unacknowledged ideology, ideology parading as detachment.This play-ideology and unacknowledged ideology is what we get with what Baier calls "normative ethical theory": "a system of moral principles in which the less general are derived from the more general." (33) This is the kind we get with R. M. Hare, Alan Donagan, Alan Gewirth, John Rawls--morally neutral edifices rationally deducted from our common reason, and therefore should be held by all reasonable people (though, it should be noted, that Rawls looks less and less normative in his later writings after A Theory of Justice). Baier notes that neither Aristotle nor Hume had normative theories--this was something that we get after Kant. The main practical trouble with normative theories (there are many theoretical ones) is why do we need them? Baier acknowledges that we need theories as accounts of what's going on in the world, scientific theories, psychological theories, political theories, economic theories, etc. "But do we need normative theories, theories to tell us what to do, in addition to theories that present to us the world in which we are to try to do it?" (34)
Baier wants to suggest that "there is no room for moral theory as something which is more philosophical and less committed than moral deliberation, and which is not simply an account of our customs and styles of justification, criticism, protest, revolt, conversion, and resolution" and the consequence is that "any moral philosophy which is not such descriptive anthropology will tend to merge with moral action." (33) Baier's suggestion is that moral philosophers need to get their hands dirty. They need to live life. If we are to be moral reformers like Mill, guides to moral action and not just sketching out the possibility of moral action (as neutral theorists sometimes describe themselves), we need to have knowledge about many different kinds of moral action. Her example for a secular moral philosophy is Hume. Hume's moral philosophy involved psychological and political and economic theories, but no normative theory. Hume's general practice was to go out and test his theories and go back and refine them. During his life, Hume had been a business man, a secretary to a general, a diplomat, a historian, he knew a little law. He was well acquainted with many different aspects of life. On Hume's account, moral philosophy attempts to provide a "mental geography", maps that can be tested and made better. Hume "directs the philosopher to learn from the nonphilosophers before presuming to advise them." (39) Hume is, in a way, directing moral philosophers to be a bit like dilettantes.
Baier notes at the end that much moral advice would seem to be just as easily given by nonphilosophers as professionals, which is something Rorty notes also (in "Philosophy in American Today" in CP). But that still doesn't leave the moral philosopher with nothing to do. They can at least be very well read, traversing a wide array of literature, looking for wisdom. Baier's article does much towards disabusing us of the notion of Kantian normative theory. Baier thinks that a Humean moral philosophy "would merge with other disciplines, and with the reflections of common life, and such a merger might help us to escape from that arrogance of solitary intellect which has condemned much moral theory to sustained self-delusions concerning its subject matter, its methods, and its authority." (46)
I should note that the last fourth of Baier's essay traverses another, though related, topic, of the way in which moral philosophy teachers compose themselves, and so also the very idea of professional moral philosophers, and philosophers in general. This is very interesting and acute, but a lesson for another time.
*Annette Baier's "Doing Without Moral Theory?" can be found in her Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (London: Methuen, 1985) and (where I have it and all pagination is coordinated to) in Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Convervatism ed. Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson (Albany: SUNY, 1989).
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