1. Rawls the hedgehog, Shklar the fox — Shklar’s inversions; 2. History shapes our conceptual resources — Traditions of commentary — Political praxis over political theoria; 3. Versatile stories, different angles — Jeffersonian education, Jacksonian fairness — Political rights without natural rights?; 4. Tradition as mythology — Heroes with warts; 5. Madison: democracy as political grind — Hamilton: democracy as fact hungry; 6. Jefferson: democracy as self-government — Adams: democracy as dangerously self-destructive — Our two aboriginal forces: hope and evil
1. With John Rawls, Judith Shklar will be recognized as one of the two most important politico-moral philosophers of the last half of the 20th century. [1] In 1971, Rawls published the definitive statement of liberal political philosophy in A Theory of Justice, and it not only revitalized the then widely recognized defunct discipline of political theory, but has defined its problems up to the present. Rawls the hedgehog spent the rest of his career restating, reshaping, and extending that powerful, central vision. Shklar the fox, however, while working in the adjacent department to Rawls at Harvard, left behind a fascinatingly variegated corpus of work behind. The most important to posterity, it seems to me, will be Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Faces of Injustice (1990). The latter inverts the traditional role of the political philosopher, fulfilled most grandly by Rawls, thus opening up a vast new space to be filled by theorists: instead of putting justice at the center of a systematic theory, she puts injustice, and she attempts to show how doing so requires us to reprioritize our conceptual resources.
Even more interesting, perhaps though, is the intellectual context in which Ordinary Vices appears. The traditional mode of political thought that puts justice at the center is also largely a Kantian enterprise (to which Rawls did much to give historical shape to). Rawls’s big enemy in Theory was the then-dominant tradition of politico-moral philosophy, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism and Kantianism had been the two overwhelmingly dominant traditions of thinking for nearly two centuries. No sooner had Rawls’ book appeared, however, then did a revival of Aristotelian-edged virtue ethics appear on the scene, rejecting the seesaw between means-end utility and deontological principle. Virtue ethics has been the most fertile tradition, it seems to me, in pure moral philosophy—but no sooner did it get its spurs, then did Shklar invert its paradigm. Reviving Montaigne’s inversion of Renaissance virtue ethics (which was before Kant and Bentham had blotted out virtue-oriented ethical systems like Shaftesbury and Mandeville [2]), Shklar makes an interesting case for placing vice at the center of one’s philosophy if one is committed to liberal democracy.
2. Central to both Rawls and Shklar’s work was an understanding of the historical line of thinkers that give shape to our conceptual resources. [3] Most of Rawls’ work on history was relegated to his lectures on political and moral philosophy that he gave at Harvard, and that have thankfully been published. Shklar wrote important studies on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu, in addition to a whole series of essays on individual thinkers (most collected in her posthumous Political Thinkers and Political Thought (1998)). And part of Rawls and Shklar’s enduring importance will be because of the students they spread into the world, most of whom take very seriously indeed our intellectual inheritance. [4]
Shklar’s life was cut tragically short, and among the work she left unfinished was a bit of writing on the specifically American political intellectual tradition, which has been published as Redeeming American Political Thought (1998). As Dennis Thompson, one of her former students who writes the forward to the collection, reports, Shklar taught the subject many times, but resisted writing a book on it because, she once said, “the subject is too hard” (vii). Thompson cogently notes the irony of this from someone who’d mastered Hegel (let alone everything else she’d written on). But reading her efforts to wrangle American political theory into an explanatory pattern, one begins to not only understand why she thought so, but believe her. Thompson suggests that “the difficulty lay not in the theorists themselves but in the interpretations that commentators had laid upon them” (vii). However, Shklar was never much of a polemical writer, preferring the mode in which the coherence and power of one’s own vision sustained interest, rather than a self-conscious situating in the current conversational milieu. [5] Lack of polemic characterizes these essays as much as elsewhere, which leads me to think that the difficulty didn’t lie in scraping off (sometimes deeply embedded) traditions of commentary.
Implicit in her approach is an attempt to balance numerous conditions and factors in eliciting American political thought. Above all, it seems that what makes American political thought difficult is that its founders were also the founders of American political practice. And this is significantly different than our European traditions. Whatever the brilliance of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel, they didn’t create a constitution and run for president. The fact that Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton created American political praxis didn’t itself make American political thought unique, and in fact Shklar looked somewhat suspiciously, as Thompson points out, at theses about American exceptionalism. After all, other countries have now tried democracy in various forms and have obviously had their own creators of political praxis that have touched off conversations about its functioning. But the flipside to exceptionalism is parochialism, and that has been an accusation about American political theory and Shklar does find it annoying. (See the beginning of “The American Idea of Aristocracy.”) Between exceptionalism and parochialism are the complex relationships Shklar tried to chart between an abstract, theoretical conversation and the historical practices it was intimately bound up with. It was this binding that seemed much more in force than in Europe. Implicit, I think, in Shklar’s book is a thesis about American political thought being itself implicitly an assertion of pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic priority of theoria to praxis.
3. One of the unique features of the book is that it tells what is essentially the same story over and over, from different angles. For some this might be annoying, and if she’d gotten the chance to get this work to press, I’m certain Shklar would’ve eliminated the repetition. But angular overlap, done right, is a strength of the essay as a genre. In fact, it seems a stylistic parallel to James’s pragmatist idea, in “What Pragmatism Means,” that thoughts are instruments and beliefs habits. And the trick about instruments and habits is that you apply them over and over in new, technically unique situations. That’s how you know it is a good instrument or habit—for if it broke down, you’d get a new instrument or habit. Likewise for developmental stories—the more versatile the story, the better equipped it is to explain phenomena, the more likely it is that that story touches on something real and operative.
Shklar’s story moves through three basic stages: the Revolutionary Era that establishes the basic pattern of American political thought; the second generation of antebellum Jacksonian democrats that heroically failed to face the moral problem of slavery; and the post-war rise of the social sciences. The focus of most of the essays is on the first two stages, and hardly move out of the 19th century. The book is split into two, with the first on individual (or grouped) thinkers (like “Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science” or “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson”) and the second on specific topics (like “The Boundaries of Democracy” or “Democratic Customs”). The first section is more polished and overlaps less than the second because most of the second half of the book is the unpublished material. However, the second half contextualizes the first—it’s the larger story that the individual thinkers move in. For example, “An Education for America” begins, “Do we really know what sort of schooling is most likely to make students into good citizens? ... How does American democracy educate its citizens or help them to educate themselves?” (65) It wasn’t until the second section that I understood how the chapter was implicitly answering a Jeffersonian question that Shklar felt attuned to. For “Jefferson promoted a plan for what he called a ‘natural aristocracy’ through a system of education,” effectively “replacing politics with education” (“The American Idea of Aristocracy,” 150). The Jacksonians, despite using “aristocrat” as a term of political damnation, carried the mantle of Jefferson, because for them “education was looked at entirely as an aspect of citizenship” (“Democracy and the Past: Jefferson and His Heirs,” 183). Indeed, it is during the Jacksonian period that the moral point of view of democracy becomes explicit, if looked at and defended differently by our founding traditions of political thought. For when Shklar says in “Democratic Customs” that “voting and education are marks of dignity, not means to other ends,” she’s invoking a very unpragmatic rhetoric, and quite purposefully I take it. She says that for the Jacksonians, “it was ‘special’ privilege and ‘idle’ wealth, not their very existence, that aroused their sense of injustice. It was a struggle for recognition for them, the right to a dignified status as workers and citizens” (193). This polemically moral vision, she says in her presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “Redeeming American Political Theory,” expresses itself as “fairness [being] the very essence of their notion of justice” (99).
“Justice as fairness” is the (very famous) slogan that was the centerpiece of Rawls’s politico-moral philosophy. [6] Its appearance shows how Shklar viewed Rawls’ contribution to the larger frame she generates. But it unfolds legally in American political practice, which she takes to be distinctive. She notes that Tocqueville had already noticed that “all political problems in the United States become legal problems” and says, “since all our rights are inscribed in the Constitution, every citizen can and must claim his or her rights before the judiciary. American political culture is radically legalistic and focused on the courts” (112). If you take a class on human rights, they will find it important to distinguish between natural rights and political rights. Shklar’s point suggests that American political practice makes the notion of “natural rights” moot in working out justice in the American system. This strikes me as another important site for work to be done, for does it mean that we can just do away with the notion of natural human rights? Or does the presumed existence of natural rights motivate the debate about political rights? Can we chuck the metaphysics and just subsist on our “human rights culture,” which Rorty commended, or do we need the rhetoric of “natural” in some more robust form? [7] And is “justice as fairness” an inherently legalistic doctrine, or a moral conception of some kind? Since Rawls tried making a distinction between moral conceptions and the neutrality toward moral conceptions of his theory of justice, the last has seemed a pressing question in trying to understand liberal notions of tolerance. Shklar helps remind us what it means for these ideas to be embodied and acted upon, however we end up botanizing them.
4. Shklar says of John Adams that he sometimes took history to be “a source of mythology” (189). There is something of the mythological, I think, in all forms of tradition—the live workings of the past in the present made self-conscious. The primary reason intellectuals like Shklar dig so deeply into the past is to make us aware of the roots that are providing our nourishment—and so that we can then make an informed decision about whether it is really nutrients we are getting, or rather poison, thus precipitating a self-conscious choice in what traditions we continue to perpetuate.
One thing that commends Shklar’s political intellectual mythology over others is that it is a polytheistic pantheon, not a unified whitewashing of differences. One thing our cultured despisers of the American democratic experiment have too easily gotten off on is the exposing of the warts on the Founding Fathers. Politically and culturally motivated historians through the 19th century are indeed guilty of promoting halos in their pictures through overexposure, which tends to also blot out many defining details. Perhaps American political culture was still too overinfluenced by the divine right tradition of aristocracy, which didn’t like its blemishes noticed and punished those who did. (A culture influenced, I suspect, by the Christian traditions of impiety and blasphemy.) But can we not have heroes, then? Do all pictures of heroes suffer from a whitewashing that is, on this account, a necessary byproduct of the hero-making process? Shklar would think this nonsense. If we had a more Greek mode of tracing our traditions, then we needn’t worry about manipulating the past. [8]
Shklar very resourcefully turns Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton into an in-fighting clan of begetters who disseminated active elements in our current political makeup, both good and bad—or rather, ineffectual when pure and by themselves, but generative when together and conflicting. “Redeeming American Political Theory” might have been the prospectus for the book she didn’t have a chance to write, and it is there she pulls together three of these threads, saying Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton founded “three political sciences in America”: “Jefferson’s was speculative and physiological. Madison’s was institutional and historical, and Hamilton’s was empirical and behavioral. None were perfect, all were prophetic” (94).
5. Madison, who Shklar talks the least of in these essays, “devised a profound theory of political rationality.” Madison is probably best known for Federalist #10, which suggests that we shouldn’t fear the ability for change to quickly sweep a democratic system because factionalism will produce a tug-of-war grinding reform to a creeping minimum. As Shklar says, Madison had a “deeply functional view of democracy.” What attracts Shklar, however, is the bit that we rarely notice—how the experience of this political grind will affect the individual political agent. Madison thought that individual agents will “learn to appreciate the necessity of limiting their interests in response to the rights of other. ... The individual political agent learns to adapt and is forced to become more public-spirited as he accepts and follows the procedures that institutions compel him to follow” (96-7).
Hamilton responded to the “radical democratization of political theory” implied by the Revolution by seeing that “how to assess the behavior and attitudes of the anonymous many who compose the electorate was a wholly novel intellectual task.” What Hamilton set in motion was the assessment of the “tortuous and long road from the individual voter to the public policies of the federal government” (4). Hamilton was no particular fan of democracy—he was the Founder, you’ll recall, who wanted to import a king—and didn’t have a very high opinion of the voters, but he understood that “the modern state ... depended on information.” As Shklar says, “constitutional democracy is inherently a fact hungry political system, in which both those who govern and those who are governed yearn for solid information” (98).
6. If Madison’s political sociology of interest groups and Hamilton’s political science of electoral politics seem the most of interest to a tough-minded political science, Shklar’s tender-minded spirit is most interested in the star-crossed friendship between Jefferson and Adams. The speculative element in Jefferson is what makes him the most admired by Shklar of the four. Time and time again Shklar returns to Jefferson’s dream of “replacing politics with education,” an education that would produce what he calls a “natural aristocracy” (150). Preceding the Jacksonian fear of aristocracy was Adams’s belief that any inequality, separating the few from the many, would turn itself into an oppressive regime. Adams was Calvinistic in this way, being deeply pessimistic about the ability of humanity to side with virtue against corruption. Jefferson and Adams pair nicely with the twin founts of American Romanticism: Emerson and Hawthorne. Jefferson is optimistic in the same way that Emerson was that the American citizen was “capable of self-government” (150), i.e. autonomy, self-reliance. But Adams and Hawthorne were too oppressed by history and their own sense of the self-destructive psychology of the individual to share that optimism.
Thompson suggests that if Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson, then her head was with Adams. I can accept this formula, and it captures quite well how we need to balance these two aboriginal forces in the American spirit: hope and evil. If you hope with your head, that’s when you end up with theological nonsense like the eschatological, providential future-perfect “this will happen—everything will end up for the best.” Likewise, no amount of intellectual evidence can tell you when to or not to hope—you either find it in your heart or not. Conversely, if you believe in the ultimate depravity of humankind with your heart, as Calvinism instructs and as Adams’s great-grandson, Henry Adams, seemed to find himself, then hope may prove impossible, turning a healthy skepticism into a paralyzing nihilism. [9] But understanding, in an intellectual way, that evil indefatigably exists in the world is a mode of tempering one’s optimism about outlook, keeping one tethered to the ground. Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson because she believed ultimately in the autonomy that education promised, and that is why Emerson, Hawthorne, and so many other pieces of literature appear in this and other of her books. Shklar did not believe, with Jefferson, that a natural aristocracy would or should arise, but as indicated by the title of “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson,” she took very seriously the idea that the democratic citizen had much to learn from books specifically, and their authors’ intellectual struggle with the experience of democracy.
Endnotes
[1] Important caveat: only partly due to ignorance, that assessment excludes (generally) all Marxist thinkers. This is because in part thinkers working in the Marxist tradition have (largely) excluded themselves from the conversation surrounding what liberal democracies should do, including the philosophical conversations to which Shklar and others were a part of. Anyone who holds that the “system” is irrevocably corrupt or faulty, and that the only thing to do is get a new system (what Bernard Yack calls the “longing for total revolution”), will inevitably fall back on the activity of diagnosis divorced from proposed action—there's nothing left to do, at that point, but endlessly point out how irredeemable everything is going on around you. And since I believe that Marxism in these forms will fade away because of their inutility, that is another reason why I don't feel bad for my relative ignorance or think it will mar my prediction about Rawls and Shklar. Some thinkers, though, like Foucault and Frank Lentricchia, who fall under this category are nevertheless quite useful. Habermas is so concerned with the functioning of liberal democracies that he hardly counts as being in the Marxist tradition. And there is one branch of what could be thought of as post-Marxist thought—in America known as “communitarianism”—that in the main combines with hope for democracy (even if it would quibble with the qualifier “liberal”). Of these, I suspect Michael Walzer, an important interlocutor of Shklar's and long-time editor of the, roughly, communitarian and thus non-Marxist, leftist rag Dissent magazine, will have the most enduring value.
[2] J. B. Schneewind, in The Invention of Autonomy (1998), tells the most complete story I’ve seen of moral philosophy from the end of the Renaissance and Reformation to Kant. His principle beginning point for modern moral philosophy is Montaigne, but on the revival of virtue (which figured so importantly to, for example, Machiavelli) see Ch. 14, on the now-neglected figures of James Harrington and Shaftesbury. (On Harrington’s importance to British and American political thought, see J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975).)
[3] The importance of this feature of their work should be entertained in the context of Anglophone philosophy’s general neglect of history. I would ultimately (and unsurprisingly) blame this on Plato. For some relevant finger-pointing on this score, one might see “What Happened to Political Philosophy?” and maybe also “On Literature’s Accidents.”
[4] It’s possible I’m more partial to Shklar’s students because, unlike the Kantian Rawls, they are more interested in literature and things American. I think the two most notable of Rawls’ students are Christine Korsgaard, who though an unrequited Kantian, has done much to help the general thinking-through of the conceptual requirements of normative autonomy that Kant and Hegel initiated (see, e.g., The Sources of Normativity (1996)), and Susan Neiman, whose Evil in Modern Thought (2002) is an exceptional non-epistemology centered story of modern philosophy and whose Moral Clarity (2008) is an important, nonspecialist book on liberal American moral problems. Foremost among Shklar’s students for me (exempting the unbelievably useful, though not well-enough known, work of the already mentioned Bernard Yack) is George Kateb, whose work on Emerson has been widely recognized by Americanists.
[5] In a number of disciplines, this is beginning to be frowned on as unscholarly, though really it’s a matter of instrumental self-analysis. Richard Rorty described this mode as “strong misreading,” though “misreading” might be misleading in this context. In a precursor piece to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’s more famous use, Rorty describes his theft of Harold Bloom’s term this way: “The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (“Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 151). The key is the reversal of priority of the purposes for which the author wrote for instead the purposes of the reader. The scholar knows a lot about why an author wrote, but the only way to think with a figure from the past is to have purposes of your own. In Rorty’s more careful moments, he distinguishes this as a philosophical mode as opposed to a historical mode. (See his “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” in Truth and Progress.) The trouble with this mode, barring the scholar’s anxiety of it being bullshit, is that anyone can try and be a strong misreader and simply read a text as one wants—there’s just no assurance at an audience who will care for it. So, to compensate for a lack of self-trust (or for the accurate assessment of limitation), a writer might try and engage his compatriots’ views on the subject in the discipline. But such limitation shouldn’t lead us to resent the strength of others. It is, in the end, a gamble, for as Emerson said, “we hope it is more than whim at last” (“Self-Reliance”).
[6] The slogan first appears as the title of the 1958 paper that eventually was transformed into the first chapter of A Theory of Justice. It appears prominently in his major revision of his stance, Political Liberalism (1993), and its the title of the final slim book (2001) that was to serve as both restatement and primer (edited by Erin Kelly, as Rawls fell ill before he could make final revisions and expansions).
[7] See “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in TP. Rorty took the term from Eduardo Rabossi. Shklar wrote twice on this issue, in Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (1964) and American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991). One of her students, Rogers M. Smith, wrote a massive book on the latter’s issue of citizenship in Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions on Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). (Given the nature of writing big books, Smith had been already working on the project when Shklar began her set of lectures that became her book, and the two talked over their work often before her death.)
[8] See Rorty’s related use of “polytheism” in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” in PCP.
[9] There is a “book review” of The Education of Henry Adams Shklar wrote in the collection, but it is somewhat out of place with the rest. For Henry Adams, as Thompson says, “nearly defeat[s] her effort to find something of value in every thinker” (xiii). She was not a big fan of his alienation and irony directed toward the democratic experiment.
Showing posts with label Plato. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plato. Show all posts
Friday, July 04, 2014
Friday, August 02, 2013
A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History
1. A history of concept-making practices — Checking the historian’s predicament; 2. Backward-looking history — Forward-looking imagination; 3. Imagination and hypothesis — How do we curb the vision of mechanism?
1. In The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin evinces what Robert Brandom has called “fundamental pragmatism,” “the idea that one should understand knowing that as a kind of knowing how.” [1] For philosophers, this has been a very difficult idea to assimilate ever since Plato distinguished the knowing of philosophers from the doing of artisans, thus making ideas—idea, eidos—unchanging elements to be contemplated, epitomized in Plato’s Realm of the Forms. Fundamental pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic scale of methodology is associated in the analytic tradition with the later Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, now sometimes called social-practice theorists of language, and who would applaud Shapin’s attempt to write “a history of concept-making practices” (4). [2]
One feature of practices is that they do not come into being randomly or without reason—practices are created for something, to do something. Shapin’s book is shaped to show how the efforts of the past were geared into the concerns of their present. [3] This is, itself, a historiographical lesson. History-writing has been the site of extraordinary theoretical pressures in the last 50 years. One effect has been the greater awareness of the dangers of writing Whiggish histories of progress. Such histories require that one posit in the past the seeds of a phenomena one wishes to praise in the present. This gives a lopsided view of how the past is, however, how it was in its wasness, as things unassociated with the contemporary telos you wish to explain the origins of are pushed from view, things that were possibly quite important to the actual historical actors. Such pessimism about stories of progress give way, however, to a more pervasive doubt about one’s ability to even select the phenomena you, the historian, wish to write about without corrupting the data with your contemporary concerns.
Shapin, in effect, shows how to diffuse this worry, what he calls “the historian’s predicament” (10). His explicit answer is a brusque “it is foolish to think there is some method … that can extricate us from this predicament” (10), before talking about such theoretical shibboleths as “respect [for] the vast body of factual knowledge we now have about the past” (10) and “the desire to make endless qualification to any generalization” (11). These are beside the point to the predicament Shapin has scared up, particularly as any revisionist historian—as Shapin, in the end, does aim to be—bloody well better not respect “the vast body of factual knowledge” we have, at least not if they truly want to change what we think that knowledge is. What Shapin runs up against here is what the earlier philosopher of science Norwood Hanson called the “theory-laden” nature of facts. If a historical fact is only constituted as such within some historical story, then “respect for the facts” can’t play a role when the problem is competing stories. [4] The theory-laden nature of facts simply restates the historian’s predicament. Shapin’s implicit answer is that it won’t do us any good to pose our anxiety at the level of epistemology—at the level in which we attempt to understand our concepts of concept-making. And so Shapin’s implicit answer to the worry about contemporary interests running rampant over the selective process used to tell the story is to take seriously the interests of the historical actors themselves. This is the check on the historian—not “the vast body of factual knowledge,” but sensitive treatment of the historical actor as having concerns of their own, of doing things for reasons that might not be our reasons for developing and employing a practice. Shapin’s selection of the “Scientific Revolution,” indeed as it is commonly understood and talked about, is a mark of his own contemporary interests—“how we got from there to here” (7)—but it is his third chapter that checks the encroachment of too much here into there.
2. What is interesting about the story that Shapin tells is how it parallels the lesson I’ve just pulled out of Shapin’s practice as a historian, thus making Shapin’s story an adjunct to a larger story of cultural development. [5] Shapin gestures toward this larger story at the very opening of his third chapter, whose presence is intended to largely account for the book’s “originality.” Shapin says,
The shape of the conceptual story is this: Shapin’s third chapter is the specifically backward-looking moment in his story. It doesn’t matter if we care about theological problems or not—they do, and that’s all that matters for getting the history right. [6] However, Shapin’s juxtaposition of Descartes and Boyle in that chapter gives us a picture of how to be forward-looking. Here is the crucial passage that sharpens the distinction:
What is at work to create this irony is what philosophers like Wittgenstein and Sellars have now told us about how language works. Underlying the empiricist framework is what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given”—that sense-perception gives us a conceptual content that is unaffected by our interpretive apparatus, e.g. words or theories. [8] If we follow Sellars in thinking that this is a philosophical myth, and that our facts are always already theory-laden, then the “evidence of nature” that Boyle and Ray think obvious and unambiguous is a function of loyalty to the past. For if social-practice theorists of language are right, then facts are a function of the language we’ve been taught to state them in and the force of facts is a function of the authoritative hold we still accord them.
3. The convenience of Shapin’s language in the above passage on Descartes is that it bridges the gap between imagination and reason. Still to this day in philosophical stories, the two are opposed. The distance, however, is not as great as we might imagine. The notion of the “hypothetical” has a history, but the short way to my point is to first point out that in Kant’s time, he still referred to the logical connective we call the conditional (the “if, then”) as “hypothetical judgment.” The conceptual shape of what Descartes was suggesting was the fantasy of supposing X to be true, and then working out its consequences (“if X, then Y”) without regard for whether X was actually true. The axe comes down on the distinction between imagination and reason when we note, with Sellars and Brandom, that the conditional is the basic unit of inference, of reasoning. [9]
What Shapin’s story suggests is why Boyle and Ray followed what we might call an “intellectually conservative” strategy toward mechanism. It is not that they cared more for preserving God’s province, though that is a plausible candidate and a viable motive in respecting the authority of past reasoning. [10] I take it that Shapin’s comment on Newton displays it: “it was not philosophical, but its opposite, to ‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses, even and especially mechanical causal hypotheses, when the senses and the intellect could not securely discover them” (157). The enemy here, the foe to be curbed, is the Poet of Book 10 of Plato’s Republic. With the conceptual understanding I’ve unfolded in hand, one sees that neither “the senses” nor “the intellect” securely discover anything by themselves. For so gerrymandered in Shapin’s gloss on Newton, all the senses tell you are what you’ve already been programmed to say in response to perceptual stimuli and all the intellect tells you is what you’ve already been programmed to concede as consequences once you’ve disallowed new possible premises in reasoning—which is what is ruled out by “‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses.”
To put it in an idiom I can only suggest, the conservative intellectual impulse is here created by a fear of romanticism, a kind of generic romanticism we can trace back to the ancient Greeks. To try and pull together some of these threads, we can see Shapin’s stance toward science—as a sociological phenomena, which is an outcome of what I called his fundamental pragmatism—as the outcome of an ongoing search for how to curb the vision of mechanism: not by how they in Chapter Three did it (God knows), but by how he views effective historical explanation. Effective explanation of action requires us to use a concept of purpose, telos. [11] And since the shape of the story of the Scientific Revolution Shapin tells is in broad terms designed to show the unresolved conflict between mechanical explanation and teleological explanation (which takes its final form in the beginning of modern philosophy, Descartes’ dualism between res extensa and res cogitans), there is a larger story to be told about just what we should do with the metaphor of mechanism. This larger story, I can only suggest, is that romanticism takes the place of religion in a conflict with scientific empiricism, and that romanticism’s successor on the plane of philosophy is first pragmatism and then social-practice theories of language. This makes Shapin’s theoretical views about how to write history the heir of Descartes’ rationalism, which is what saved him from the Boyle-Ray empiricist attempt to curb the visionary expanse of a new metaphor. [12]
Endnotes
[1] Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism, 9
[2] Social-practice theories of language also distinguish the kind of Hegelianism pragmatists like Brandom and Richard Rorty are willing to countenance. “Postmodern theory” has made a bad name for itself by promulgating such slogans as “all we have is discourse.” I think it’s important to distinguish what Shapin, Brandom, and Rorty are saying from this. This slogan has led to too many pratfalls by theorists (e.g., deconstructionists who want to say that meaning is impossible) and too many openings for hostile critics (e.g., “There is no thing other than a text? Really?”). The problem with both is poor communication, where whatever good point was meant to be made gets bogged down (e.g., the foolish idea that Derrida was some Berkeleyan idealist).
The good point of the slogan “all we have is discourse” is that meaning only occurs within language, so if you have “thing,” you have a “discourse.” However, people like Shapin, especially, want to go one step further. They want to say that not only are “things” embedded in “discourses,” but “discourses” are embedded in practices. The reason why this is an important move to make, philosophically, is because it closes the loop between you, your community, and the world. Stopping at “discourse” makes one look like an idealist, which makes some people fear we’ve lost the world for the sake of philosophical laziness (for it is hard to make a realist theory of truth-as-correspondence work—i.e., no one’s done it satisfactorily). “Practices” puts us back in touch with the world in a very obvious sense. It also helps move us closer to why material emblems like clocks weird us out when we wonder whether the clock is a symbol for time or is time itself. Like chasing the horizon, such gestalt hiccups merely punch up how entwined meaning is with practice, semantics with pragmatics.
[3] Shapin says that “if there is any originality” in his book it “flows from its basic organization” (12).
[4] I take it that Shapin himself isn’t nearly this naïve, and this theoretical lacuna is a result of his writing a book suitable for non-professionals.
[5] Though, admittedly, size is relative to perspective.
[6] I use the literary present tense, “they do,” partly because I think it is helpful to think of the “other in the past” as a conversation partner, much like we do a contemporaneous other we wish to talk to and understand, such as an Australian aborigine, French political operative, or Arizona Diamondbacks fan. I suspect that this has been common sense for historians for some time.
[7] It might suffice for this old doxographical chestnut to point out that the Three Great Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, are all from the British Isles and that the Three Great Rationalists are Descartes (French), Spinoza (Dutch), and Leibniz (German).
[8] Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given is from his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” which one can find in his collection Science, Perception, and Reality or as a standalone book from Harvard UP with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Brandom.
[9] Technically the conditional is the basic unit of self-conscious reasoning, but that is part of a much different story.
[10] I think this is true in Descartes’ case—I take it that, even from just the evidence Shapin displays, that Descartes was a true believer and wanting to display loyalty to God as much as Boyle. However, in terms of possible motivations, concern about one’s relationship to established Church practices and patterns of thought is certainly a distinct possibility in a way that, for example, it wasn’t in Athens in the first century or most intellectual centers in the United States in this century.
[11] For an articulation of the difference between action and behavior in the context of a discussion of what intentionality is, see Section 4 of “Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization.”
[12] This larger story isn’t as kooky as it seems when it’s just kind of thrown out there. It is roughly coordinate with the kind of story M. H. Abrams tells about romanticism in Natural Supernaturalism, Leo Marx tells about American romanticism in The Machine in the Garden, Rorty tells about pragmatism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and Brandom tells about social-practice theories of language in Tales of the Mighty Dead and Reason in Philosophy. The interesting conclusion of Brandom is that some of the roots of the pragmatist philosophy that Rorty espoused went back to not only Kant, but Leibniz and Spinoza. For a discussion of Brandom's reinsertion of rationalism into pragmatism and his relationship to romanticism, see “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
1. In The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin evinces what Robert Brandom has called “fundamental pragmatism,” “the idea that one should understand knowing that as a kind of knowing how.” [1] For philosophers, this has been a very difficult idea to assimilate ever since Plato distinguished the knowing of philosophers from the doing of artisans, thus making ideas—idea, eidos—unchanging elements to be contemplated, epitomized in Plato’s Realm of the Forms. Fundamental pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic scale of methodology is associated in the analytic tradition with the later Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, now sometimes called social-practice theorists of language, and who would applaud Shapin’s attempt to write “a history of concept-making practices” (4). [2]
One feature of practices is that they do not come into being randomly or without reason—practices are created for something, to do something. Shapin’s book is shaped to show how the efforts of the past were geared into the concerns of their present. [3] This is, itself, a historiographical lesson. History-writing has been the site of extraordinary theoretical pressures in the last 50 years. One effect has been the greater awareness of the dangers of writing Whiggish histories of progress. Such histories require that one posit in the past the seeds of a phenomena one wishes to praise in the present. This gives a lopsided view of how the past is, however, how it was in its wasness, as things unassociated with the contemporary telos you wish to explain the origins of are pushed from view, things that were possibly quite important to the actual historical actors. Such pessimism about stories of progress give way, however, to a more pervasive doubt about one’s ability to even select the phenomena you, the historian, wish to write about without corrupting the data with your contemporary concerns.
Shapin, in effect, shows how to diffuse this worry, what he calls “the historian’s predicament” (10). His explicit answer is a brusque “it is foolish to think there is some method … that can extricate us from this predicament” (10), before talking about such theoretical shibboleths as “respect [for] the vast body of factual knowledge we now have about the past” (10) and “the desire to make endless qualification to any generalization” (11). These are beside the point to the predicament Shapin has scared up, particularly as any revisionist historian—as Shapin, in the end, does aim to be—bloody well better not respect “the vast body of factual knowledge” we have, at least not if they truly want to change what we think that knowledge is. What Shapin runs up against here is what the earlier philosopher of science Norwood Hanson called the “theory-laden” nature of facts. If a historical fact is only constituted as such within some historical story, then “respect for the facts” can’t play a role when the problem is competing stories. [4] The theory-laden nature of facts simply restates the historian’s predicament. Shapin’s implicit answer is that it won’t do us any good to pose our anxiety at the level of epistemology—at the level in which we attempt to understand our concepts of concept-making. And so Shapin’s implicit answer to the worry about contemporary interests running rampant over the selective process used to tell the story is to take seriously the interests of the historical actors themselves. This is the check on the historian—not “the vast body of factual knowledge,” but sensitive treatment of the historical actor as having concerns of their own, of doing things for reasons that might not be our reasons for developing and employing a practice. Shapin’s selection of the “Scientific Revolution,” indeed as it is commonly understood and talked about, is a mark of his own contemporary interests—“how we got from there to here” (7)—but it is his third chapter that checks the encroachment of too much here into there.
2. What is interesting about the story that Shapin tells is how it parallels the lesson I’ve just pulled out of Shapin’s practice as a historian, thus making Shapin’s story an adjunct to a larger story of cultural development. [5] Shapin gestures toward this larger story at the very opening of his third chapter, whose presence is intended to largely account for the book’s “originality.” Shapin says,
Seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers attempted to discipline, if not in all cases to eliminate, teleological accounts of the natural world. Yet as ordinary actors they accepted the propriety of a teleological framework for interpreting human cultural action, and with some exceptions so do modern historians and social scientists: the very identity of human action—as action rather than behavior—embodies some notion of its point, purpose, or intention. (119)The unspoken implication of this passage, which is simply a segue into Shapin’s check against his selection process, is that what he’s selected is somehow antithetical to contemporary wisdom about the selection process. I believe there is no contradiction here, not even for one who thinks that the mechanistic model of nature has been and still is a boon to scientific study, but it does invite the telling of another story.
The shape of the conceptual story is this: Shapin’s third chapter is the specifically backward-looking moment in his story. It doesn’t matter if we care about theological problems or not—they do, and that’s all that matters for getting the history right. [6] However, Shapin’s juxtaposition of Descartes and Boyle in that chapter gives us a picture of how to be forward-looking. Here is the crucial passage that sharpens the distinction:
On the one hand, Descartes proceeded by imagining a hypothetical natural world that God might have created, a world wholly amenable to mechanical explanation: this was the world the natural philosopher was to explain. On the other hand, such writers as Robert Boyle and John Ray were concerned to trace the evidence of God’s purpose and design in the world he did create. That is why they were comfortable with the philosophical propriety of giving explanations in terms of purpose when, as they reckoned, the evidence of nature unambiguously supported such conclusions. (156)Shapin’s account of Descartes here displays, whether Descartes intended to or not, how to be a visionary, looking forward to a time not fully comprehended: “by imagining a hypothetical natural world.” The irony of this situation is that the English are known for being philosophical empiricists as opposed to those on the Continent being rationalists in this time period, [7] and it is empiricism that is so often thought synonymous with science and scientific method. However, in this juxtaposition we see Descartes the visionary pursuing the outer limits of this new metaphor’s effects on human understanding, whereas it is the English who stop at the limits of common sense, which is whatever is denoted as “obvious” or “unambiguous.”
What is at work to create this irony is what philosophers like Wittgenstein and Sellars have now told us about how language works. Underlying the empiricist framework is what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given”—that sense-perception gives us a conceptual content that is unaffected by our interpretive apparatus, e.g. words or theories. [8] If we follow Sellars in thinking that this is a philosophical myth, and that our facts are always already theory-laden, then the “evidence of nature” that Boyle and Ray think obvious and unambiguous is a function of loyalty to the past. For if social-practice theorists of language are right, then facts are a function of the language we’ve been taught to state them in and the force of facts is a function of the authoritative hold we still accord them.
3. The convenience of Shapin’s language in the above passage on Descartes is that it bridges the gap between imagination and reason. Still to this day in philosophical stories, the two are opposed. The distance, however, is not as great as we might imagine. The notion of the “hypothetical” has a history, but the short way to my point is to first point out that in Kant’s time, he still referred to the logical connective we call the conditional (the “if, then”) as “hypothetical judgment.” The conceptual shape of what Descartes was suggesting was the fantasy of supposing X to be true, and then working out its consequences (“if X, then Y”) without regard for whether X was actually true. The axe comes down on the distinction between imagination and reason when we note, with Sellars and Brandom, that the conditional is the basic unit of inference, of reasoning. [9]
What Shapin’s story suggests is why Boyle and Ray followed what we might call an “intellectually conservative” strategy toward mechanism. It is not that they cared more for preserving God’s province, though that is a plausible candidate and a viable motive in respecting the authority of past reasoning. [10] I take it that Shapin’s comment on Newton displays it: “it was not philosophical, but its opposite, to ‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses, even and especially mechanical causal hypotheses, when the senses and the intellect could not securely discover them” (157). The enemy here, the foe to be curbed, is the Poet of Book 10 of Plato’s Republic. With the conceptual understanding I’ve unfolded in hand, one sees that neither “the senses” nor “the intellect” securely discover anything by themselves. For so gerrymandered in Shapin’s gloss on Newton, all the senses tell you are what you’ve already been programmed to say in response to perceptual stimuli and all the intellect tells you is what you’ve already been programmed to concede as consequences once you’ve disallowed new possible premises in reasoning—which is what is ruled out by “‘feign’ (or imaginatively concoct) hypotheses.”
To put it in an idiom I can only suggest, the conservative intellectual impulse is here created by a fear of romanticism, a kind of generic romanticism we can trace back to the ancient Greeks. To try and pull together some of these threads, we can see Shapin’s stance toward science—as a sociological phenomena, which is an outcome of what I called his fundamental pragmatism—as the outcome of an ongoing search for how to curb the vision of mechanism: not by how they in Chapter Three did it (God knows), but by how he views effective historical explanation. Effective explanation of action requires us to use a concept of purpose, telos. [11] And since the shape of the story of the Scientific Revolution Shapin tells is in broad terms designed to show the unresolved conflict between mechanical explanation and teleological explanation (which takes its final form in the beginning of modern philosophy, Descartes’ dualism between res extensa and res cogitans), there is a larger story to be told about just what we should do with the metaphor of mechanism. This larger story, I can only suggest, is that romanticism takes the place of religion in a conflict with scientific empiricism, and that romanticism’s successor on the plane of philosophy is first pragmatism and then social-practice theories of language. This makes Shapin’s theoretical views about how to write history the heir of Descartes’ rationalism, which is what saved him from the Boyle-Ray empiricist attempt to curb the visionary expanse of a new metaphor. [12]
Endnotes
[1] Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism, 9
[2] Social-practice theories of language also distinguish the kind of Hegelianism pragmatists like Brandom and Richard Rorty are willing to countenance. “Postmodern theory” has made a bad name for itself by promulgating such slogans as “all we have is discourse.” I think it’s important to distinguish what Shapin, Brandom, and Rorty are saying from this. This slogan has led to too many pratfalls by theorists (e.g., deconstructionists who want to say that meaning is impossible) and too many openings for hostile critics (e.g., “There is no thing other than a text? Really?”). The problem with both is poor communication, where whatever good point was meant to be made gets bogged down (e.g., the foolish idea that Derrida was some Berkeleyan idealist).
The good point of the slogan “all we have is discourse” is that meaning only occurs within language, so if you have “thing,” you have a “discourse.” However, people like Shapin, especially, want to go one step further. They want to say that not only are “things” embedded in “discourses,” but “discourses” are embedded in practices. The reason why this is an important move to make, philosophically, is because it closes the loop between you, your community, and the world. Stopping at “discourse” makes one look like an idealist, which makes some people fear we’ve lost the world for the sake of philosophical laziness (for it is hard to make a realist theory of truth-as-correspondence work—i.e., no one’s done it satisfactorily). “Practices” puts us back in touch with the world in a very obvious sense. It also helps move us closer to why material emblems like clocks weird us out when we wonder whether the clock is a symbol for time or is time itself. Like chasing the horizon, such gestalt hiccups merely punch up how entwined meaning is with practice, semantics with pragmatics.
[3] Shapin says that “if there is any originality” in his book it “flows from its basic organization” (12).
[4] I take it that Shapin himself isn’t nearly this naïve, and this theoretical lacuna is a result of his writing a book suitable for non-professionals.
[5] Though, admittedly, size is relative to perspective.
[6] I use the literary present tense, “they do,” partly because I think it is helpful to think of the “other in the past” as a conversation partner, much like we do a contemporaneous other we wish to talk to and understand, such as an Australian aborigine, French political operative, or Arizona Diamondbacks fan. I suspect that this has been common sense for historians for some time.
[7] It might suffice for this old doxographical chestnut to point out that the Three Great Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, are all from the British Isles and that the Three Great Rationalists are Descartes (French), Spinoza (Dutch), and Leibniz (German).
[8] Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given is from his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” which one can find in his collection Science, Perception, and Reality or as a standalone book from Harvard UP with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Brandom.
[9] Technically the conditional is the basic unit of self-conscious reasoning, but that is part of a much different story.
[10] I think this is true in Descartes’ case—I take it that, even from just the evidence Shapin displays, that Descartes was a true believer and wanting to display loyalty to God as much as Boyle. However, in terms of possible motivations, concern about one’s relationship to established Church practices and patterns of thought is certainly a distinct possibility in a way that, for example, it wasn’t in Athens in the first century or most intellectual centers in the United States in this century.
[11] For an articulation of the difference between action and behavior in the context of a discussion of what intentionality is, see Section 4 of “Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization.”
[12] This larger story isn’t as kooky as it seems when it’s just kind of thrown out there. It is roughly coordinate with the kind of story M. H. Abrams tells about romanticism in Natural Supernaturalism, Leo Marx tells about American romanticism in The Machine in the Garden, Rorty tells about pragmatism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and Brandom tells about social-practice theories of language in Tales of the Mighty Dead and Reason in Philosophy. The interesting conclusion of Brandom is that some of the roots of the pragmatist philosophy that Rorty espoused went back to not only Kant, but Leibniz and Spinoza. For a discussion of Brandom's reinsertion of rationalism into pragmatism and his relationship to romanticism, see “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
Friday, July 19, 2013
Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization
1. Belatedism — Reductionism — Ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction; 2. General problem of antiessentialism — From ethics to epistemology and ontology — Living in the flux — Essences as stabilities — Making distinctions; 3. Taking humans for granted — Taking humanism for granted — Special problem of demarcation — How to make a human less special; 4. Bennett on actants and assemblage — Giving out intentionality — Doing an action, causing an effect; 5. What intentions are for — Global problem of anthropomorphism — Properties vs. attributions; 6. Instrumentals rationality — Tools of our tools — Ancient science as spiritual exercise — Knowledge as depersonalization — Theoretical practices
1. “Posthumanism,” in the last 20 years, has become the latest popular entry into our post-’60s craze for being after something, usually some “ism.” Also in the last 20 years, nearly all promulgations of isms come attached with increasingly anxious qualifiers about the promulgator not wanting to reduce the perceived proponents of the ism to his or her formulation, or not wanting to suggest the essence of what the ism is. [1] I find such hand-waving pointless—partly because I take any good reader or listener to have the good sense to feel free to disagree at any point without the author’s encouragement—but this anxiety plays a special role in my topic because of the way reductionism and essentialism have been tied by theorists into a story about the degradation and oppression of humanity—and, of course, now more than just humanity.
In what follows, I’d like to perform two services: 1) I hope to clarify three problems that any posthumanist theorist will encounter in articulating their view: the general problem of antiessentialism, the special problem of demarcation, and the global problem anthropomorphism. What all three of these problems revolve around is the practical aspect of living the theories we propound. Since many posthumanist perspectives articulate themselves in terms that are inherently paradoxical, I hope by clarifying these three problems to point in the direction of a nonparadoxical mode of articulating the central motive of posthumanism—ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction. 2) I will re-tell a familiar story of the last 300 years as a means of bring into focus the problem of our practices as the primary object of our ethical inquiries. Posthumanism is nothing if not ethically motivated, so when posthumanist theory finds itself moving away from ethics to epistemology or ontology, it behooves us to reexamine our priorities and their interrelationships. The basic problem central to the “scientific revolution” of the European 17th century—which typically stands in as the moment the dam broke, flooding our landscape with instrumental rationality—is the assertion of purely egocentric interests. Working through this conceptual and historical exercise, seeing posthumanism’s broader concern with purely human interests, will put us in a position of seeing a larger project of thinking through ethical authority in a world structured only by material, as opposed to supernatural, agencies.
2. If the central motive of posthumanism is to cease treating “human” as a term of ethical distinction, then one of its central moves has been to cease treating “human” as a term of distinction at all. This shifts the central theoretical terrain from ethics to epistemology and ontology, from how we treat X to how we know what X is. The primary theoretical current that this move draws power from is the antiessentialism common to Heidegger, Sartre, the American pragmatists, and the Continental poststructuralists. We might embody it in Sartre’s slogan that “existence precedes essence.” [2] By overturning the ultimately Platonic relationship that envisions the flux of lived appearances as conceptually beholden to an order of stable essences, antiessentialism emits a panrelationalism—things are not what they are in themselves, but only as they relate to other things. [3] This dissolves any particular thing into a web of relations, and can ultimately cause a fear for stability—how does the antiessentialistic reversal not just flip us into a nasty flux of relations with no footholds for understanding? I think it is fairly clear that no person actually lives their life as if there were no foothold for understanding, as if they did live a flux like a tempest (as opposed to a flux like an oscillating fan). Sartre’s word for this was “metastable.” [4]
If this seems to dissolve the problem surrounding antiessentialism, why am I calling this a general problem for posthumanism? The reason is that though practically we have no problem living in the flux, our theoretical descriptions still tend to contort themselves when describing this practical situation. At root, I think, is the suspicion that existence only precedes essence, that essentialism will always reconstitute itself in the process of understanding. This comes out as a sense that definition, i.e. giving conceptual shape to any particular X, is essentializing. (Need I add “is essentially” or “by definition” to complete the contortion?) This suspicion can largely be traced to origins in poststructuralism, and is best embodied by Gayatri Spivak’s resignation about the state of affairs we must find ourselves in that demands her notion of “strategic essentialism.” [5] Because of the history of oppression through conceptual means that an entire host of cultural critics in the last century have been busily excavating, what was once Plato’s fear for stability has turned into a fear of stability—that any stable entity is covering over the oppression required to achieve that stability. If at one very real extreme is the actual use of linguistic categories to justify the continued oppression of cultural groups and persons, then at the other extreme is the absurdity of thinking that my body’s stable existence at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates is papering over my body’s right to exist at every over set of coordinates. There are stabilities, and then there are stabilities. What we need—but what theorists like Spivak are conceptually unable to provide resources for—is the ability to distinguish between the range of stabilities on that ethical scale. So the general problem of antiessentialism is: how do you de-privilege one distinction without harming your ability to make any distinctions? The way to do this, I think, is to replace Sartre’s existentialist formula with a pragmatist formula like, “practice precedes theory.” This turns all theoretical conundrums back to their origins in practice. This makes one’s fear of stability negotiable by turning the suspicion of a particular stability back to the practice being enabled by it—still suspicious given any kind of oppression, but hardly suspicious at all given a body’s continued existence at a set of spatiotemporal coordinates qua continued existence (though the why for, e.g., the prisoner’s continued existence in the jail cell might be up for grabs).
3. I suspect, as I somewhat suggested before, that theorists have no problem resolving these theoretical problems of definition and essence in practice as persons or citizens (rather than as theorists). But working through the general problem of de-privileging can give us a handle on a second, special problem that emits from the first: how do we demarcate humans from other things? The problem of antiessentialism and the fear of stability are marks of a desire to not privilege anything—but now how do we tell the difference between us and other animals? The amused self-consciousness that accompanies most articles about posthumanism is, I think, not nearly nervous enough about this as a problem. Most theorists of the posthuman seem to take it for granted that we can just tell the difference, but what their work needs to do is provide some handle for how to tell the difference between a human res and a nonhuman res so as to keep the critical edge of their polemic while not resting on either an unarticulated practical grasp or a paradoxical run around wherein we find, ultimately, that we have to ask some portentous “question of the human” every time we want to articulate the difference between a human and a beaver. The former is antithetical to the project of theorizing and the latter I suspect has become popular because 1) people like imitating Derrida, but more importantly 2) they are beholden to the fear of stability that produces the problem of antiessentialism.
Posthumanists do much better when they state their opposition as “humanism,” or “liberal humanism,” or “liberal subjectivity.” What they want to pick out and contest are particular ways in which the human subject is picked out of a crowd. As my use of “res” indicates, we are going to be led back to Descartes—since he distinguished between res cogitans and res extensa, “the mind” has too often been used as the repository for our dreams of difference. But as Rorty retails in his opening chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, there are as many ways to pick out what demarcates the mind—and thus the human—as there are fingers on your hands. [6] The typical approach of posthumanism has been to select one of these marks and reappropriate it for res extensa, thus making the human a little less special. So the special problem of demarcation (which is really just a species of the more general problem of antiessentialism) is: how do you make the human less special while retaining the conceptual ability to tell a human from a nonhuman? Darwin’s naturalism made it possible for Nietzsche to think of us as a diseased animal precisely because of our desire to be special, [7] but the flipside of Nietzsche’s cynicism is John Dewey’s suggestion that Darwin made it possible for us to really get to the bottom of our human cultural practices: “the influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition….” Dewey saw Darwin as making possible antiessentialism, as overturning “the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final” and finally alleviating our desire to “lay hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency.” [8]
4. In order to see better how the blurring motions of antiessentialisms can make it hard to see what makes humans, if not special, at least their own peculiar selves above and beyond physiology, we might turn to Jane Bennett’s recent book, Vibrant Matter (2010). Bennett wouldn’t call herself a posthumanist, but her book works in the same vein, and its utility lies in how thoroughly Bennett wishes to rethink our ontological assumptions—Bennett pushes to the limit certain strategies commonly used by posthumanist theorists, in particular an effort to rethink ontology with ethical implications. Bennett’s ontology centers on the attempt to reinscribe “things” with a “power” she says they’ve been denied by Kantian accounts of agency, thus giving “the force of things its due.” [9] She does so by using Latour’s notion of “actants” as a way of inscribing intentionality in the nonhuman-thing so as to gain a better picture of the “human-nonhuman assemblage” (her term taken from Deleuze and Guattari). [10]
What this power amounts to, however, doesn’t seem much more than being an active force in the material world. Bennett feels this as a point of resistance that deserves the edge of her polemic because of the old notion of the “passivity of matter.” [11] But what extra power is gained by intentionality, alongside causal power, is unclear—and nobody has denied the material world’s causal ability to blot us from existence. Bennett says that “the question is whether other forces in the world approximate some of the characteristics of intentional or purposive behavior on the part of humans” (29), but this makes the mistake of thinking we know what intentionality is. By assuming she already has a conceptual grasp of intentionality, Bennett is able to show how other things have it, too. But this doesn’t seem very hard. Giving out intentionality is easy—just do it, and you’ve done it. Thinking the rock intended to fall to the floor is enough for the rock to have intentionally fallen to the floor. Who, after all, is going to contradict you (except for theorists not assuming we already know what intentionality is)?
Intentionality is simply things behaving as if other things are behaving intentionally. [12] The problem is that the rock behaves the same way whether we attribute intentionality to it or not—or whether the rock attributes intentionality to us or not. So the only question is whether it is useful to attribute intentions to any particular X. To answer this question about a rock falling, we might compare it to a hand going up in a classroom. If the person whose hand goes up gets “called on,” it is because of a practice the caller-on (and all those who expected the person to get called on) is embedded in. If the person was “lifting their hand” rather than “raising their hand,” we can say that the person “unintentionally raised their hand”—we need this locution to distinguish between doing an action (intentionally lifting a hand to get called on) and causing an effect (lifting a hand and unintentionally getting called on). The movements are the same, but only when embedded in a practice can the movement have a certain effect. So, returning to the rock, what is the added bonus of saying the falling rock intentionally crushed my foot if the effect is the same whether I ascribe an intention to the rock or not?
5. The moral of this story is that one reason we attribute intentions is because by making actors aware of the effects of their actions, we can get the actor to not perform the effect-causing action. This, at least, is not the case with the rock, though it might be with the person who dropped it on my foot. It is clear that Bennett wishes her new ontology to have an effect on our moral discourse. She gives a series of imperatives toward the end of her book that punches up this problem of intentionality: “Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate” (116). But what could it mean to engage civilly with rocks? Do rocks respond differently if you are rude to them? While behaving more strategically and subtly with rocks might make sense, civility would seem to only be in play if you could change the rock’s behavior by doing so. But what the analogy is for politely dropping a rock and it not crushing my foot because I treated the rock civilly rather than rudely isn’t clear.
This brings us to the final, global problem of anthropomorphism. Bennett sees clearly that she must face the problem of whether she’s anthropomorphizing non-anthropo-stuff by, for example, attributing intentions to stuff we might normally withhold it from. The global problem of anthropomorphism is: how do you use categories of understanding that are not human categories? Bennett sees that what she calls her “vital materialism” seems to “entail a performative contradiction”: “‘Is it not, after all, a self-conscious, language-wielding human who is articulating this philosophy of vibrant matter?’ It is not so easy to resist, deflect, or redirect this criticism” (120). However, there would only seem to be a performative contradiction if you haven’t been able to provide an account for what separates humans from nonhumans. More particularly, it is by treating intentionality as a property instead of an attribution that heaves Bennett’s project into paradox when she admits she has no separate method for ascertaining the properties of rocks except for the regular human one’s we’ve always employed.
6. Bennett’s confrontation with anthropomorphism, like Spivak’s confrontation with essentialism, emits a general helplessness—for, almost all admit, we can only use human categories. But why should we feel helpless? The reason I think we find ourselves to be helpless or stuck in the position of humanity, rather than, say, thankful or unashamed, is because of the way scientific innovation, technological development, economic consumption, and liberal democracy have all dovetailed into a story about instrumental rationality. This is the story, familiar to us from Germany—be it the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, et al or Heidegger—that the history of the West is the history of Reason increasing our ability to control stuff, including ourselves. In its initial form, the concern seemed to be primarily with us, with succumbing to a “blindly pragmatized thought [that] loses its transcending quality.” [13] Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern was that, not only was our thought simply a means to carry out preexisting and unreflectively held ends, but that the end or purpose of thought had simply become the increased efficiency of means. Unreflectively held purposes dovetails with Heidegger’s discussion of the rhetoric of mathematics and method that took over the natural sciences in the 17th century and was encroaching on the social sciences at the end of the 19th. [14] But what’s worse is that, in Thoreau’s phrase, “men have become the tools of their tools.” [15] The central idea is that we are caught up in the practices we’ve created and have become beholden to them, and that these practices are working out a destructive teleology. And since the increasing obviousness of the consequences of global industrialization, this sensed destruction has become both to ourselves and nonhuman nature. As should be clear, this is a pessimistic narrative that implies that we no longer have the hope of changing (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Heidegger’s conclusion) or that we no longer have the desire to (Thoreau’s fear).
I think it is something like this story that stands behind most posthumanisms. [16] Without it, it's hard to make sense of why we should go in for all the arid metaphysical talk. And while I think there is sufficient plausibility for Thoreau’s fear, I want to quickly sketch an alternative narrative about our theoretical practices that takes the edge off the conclusion that we are now hopeless. This story is drawn from Hans Blumenberg’s account of the transition from ancient and medieval cosmology to modern. Central to this account is the notion that for the ancients, theoretical descriptions of the nonhuman were spiritual exercises meant to relieve the pressures of theory itself. [17] For example, as Blumenburg writes, Epicurus’s “atomistic physics was not meant to satisfy a theoretical interest in reality but rather to argue for the irrelevance of the physical answers to the shaping of life in the world.” [18] “Only insofar as physics could be thought of as producing real human power over nature could natural science potentially serve as the instrument by which to overcome the new radical insecurity of man’s relation to reality” (155). Only when science could demonstrate its practical mastery over life, its “real human power,” could science serve as a mode of overcoming. But overcome what turns out to be the real question. It behooves us to make a distinction between our increased mastery over nonhuman forces indiscriminately killing us off and other forms of overcoming—overcoming our parents, parts of ourselves we dislike, our political enemies, precursor poets, etc.
The upshot of Blumenberg’s story is that we should make finer distinctions among the different projects and practices we’ve put into play over the course of cultural history in order to better grasp why we originally created them so as to better understand why we might continue them. One of the central distinctions Blumenberg makes about the outcome of the 17th century scientific revolution is that philosophers took two divergent paths, that of Cartesian “self-foundation” and Baconian “self-assertion” (see 181-203). [19] As Blumenberg understands it, the mode of self-assertion preceded self-foundation because the central cultural concern they both had eschew was the authority of the ancients (as read by the Scholastics). Thus we find Bacon bashing idols and Descartes retreating to his fireplace. However, as Steven Shapin notes, there was an intense suspicion that accompanied this “intellectual individualism and the rejection of trust and authority.” [20] At this point, it is helpful to make a distinction between the personal and the individual. The individualism common to Bacon and Descartes states that knowledge begins with an individual’s personal experience. The concern, then, is how to make this knowledge portable, intersubjective. This produces different practices intended to depersonalize the knowledge gained firsthand. As Shapin suggests, this amounts to the elaboration of different “practical procedures” (93) such as Boyle’s recommendation “that experimental reports be written in a way that allowed distant readers—not present as firsthand witnesses—to replicate the relevant effects” (107). But another method of depersonalization lies in Descartes’s search for a foundation to knowledge in indubitable certainty. If one could once establish the foundation upon which all knowledge must repose, then one can gain the assent of all inferences from it as common to all because of the necessity created by the demonstration.
It is now generally agreed that Descartes’s foundationalism is an off-shoot of Platonic essentialism, what Dewey called “the quest for certainty” grounded in a “search for the immutable.” [21] What I articulated as the problem of antiessentialism is the problem of searching for replacement practices for the specific theoretical practice of hunting down immutability. Thus this problem becomes paradoxical only if one thinks that a certain set of theoretical practices inevitably ties us into a certain set of self-descriptions and problems—e.g., thinking linguistic practices are necessarily essentializing or thinking intentionality necessary for ethical consideration. Seeing these practices in the light of history, however, can give us a sense of their continuity with other practices motivated for similar purposes and their contingency as practices that can be altered given new situations that require new purposes.
Endnotes
[1] Two examples—N. Katherine Hayles, a major figure (displaying only slight anxiety): “What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety of sites. It is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive)” (How We Became Posthuman (1999), 2); Neil Badmington, writing an introduction (displaying acute anxiety): “What would it mean to view this as an example of posthumanism? The use of such a term is, of course, far from straightforward. Writing in 1947, Martin Heidegger drew attention to the paradoxical status of an ‘-ism,’ observing that…[etc., etc.]. Was I in danger of giving currency to yet another ‘-ism’ devoid of clarity, coherence and credibility” (Posthumanism (2000), ed. Badmington, 1)?
[2] “L’existence précède l’essence” is from Sartre’s essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (translated in Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre—see 348). I pass over the irony of using this essay in this context, though the kernel of my reply is embodied in my discussion of anthropomorphism below.
[3] This is the lesson Richard Rorty draws from “philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michel Foucault” (“A World without Substances or Essences,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 47). Rorty immediately goes on to say that being an “antidualist,” which is how they articulated their antiessentialism, does not mean “that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions. It means rather that they are trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality.”
[4] Being and Nothingness, 90. In the context of Sartre’s discussion, metastable seems to connote something closer to instability. But see Rorty’s use of Sartre in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: “Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort ‘ironists’ because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called ‘meta-stable’: never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change…” (73-74). Something being subject to change is much different than something ceaselessly changing. I think the lesson is that Sartre’s term is a good description of the terrain of antiessentialism, though it originally had to be deployed with more of the polemical edge of flux.
[5] Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a virtuoso performance showing how ethical and epistemological issues are bound together. Spivak’s term, however, comes from the fact that she does not believe there is any alternative to essentialism, or rather that language is in its nature essentializing. For philosophers like Rorty, as I articulated in note 3, this would be like saying that Platonic dualisms were at the heart of language and unavoidable.
[6] See PMN 32-37. Rorty distinguishes nine different marks of the mental and groups them into three different problem-piles: the problem of consciousness, the problem of reason, and the problem of personhood. I take such refinement of distinction to be the first step toward wisdom in this area.
[7] See On the Genealogy of Morality, 3.28: “If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, has until now had no meaning. This existence on earth contained no goal…. Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a diseased animal…” (117).
[8] From "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy" (1909).
[9] VM, 29
[10] See ibid., 9 for Bennett’s introduction of Latour’s “actant”; her second chapter discusses the “assemblage.”
[11] See ibid., vii.
[12] I am blithely taking on board Daniel Dennett’s mode of discussing intentionality, principally from The Intentional Stance, as if it is obvious, but clearly this is contentious for philosophers of mind. The general idea is that intentionality is a holistic game that a community weasels its way into by members attributing intentionality to each other. This is how functionalists avoid the Cartesian problem of Other Minds—intentional minds are created when all the members attribute them to each other, and there is no deeper problem than that. What is interesting is that, on Dennett and Rorty’s understanding, Dennett is the heir of Darwin and it is only theorists who wish to retain the mind as a mark of humanity’s specialness that resist Dennett’s functionalism.
[13] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), xiii. I’m quoting from the John Cummings translation, though Edmund Jephcott’s recent translation is likely to become canonical. This line in particular just rings better in Cummings’ translation, though I have no other reason for choosing it.
[14] See Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays) especially of the notion of a “procedure” being a “fixed ground plan” (118). This kind of rhetoric about math and method is charted succinctly by Steven Shapin in The Scientific Revolution—see especially 57-64 on the problematic notion of the “mathematization of the universe” (63) and 89-96 on the notion that “method was meant to be all” (90). Shapin’s comment that “there is much to commend a revisionist view that formal methodology is to be understood as a set of rhetorical tools for positioning practices in the culture” (95) might be expanded to include the use of mathematics. See also the opening section of Rorty’s “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in Consequences of Pragmatism) for a pithy polemic about what the philosophical upshot of the scientific revolution should have been.
[15] Walden, Ch. 1
[16] My use of Thoreau is partly intended to lend plausibility to this narrative standing behind Bennett. Bennett has a previous book on Thoreau as a political philosopher.
[17] “Spiritual exercises” is a term taken from Pierre Hadot. See, for example, his Philosophy as a Way of Life.
[18] Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 181
[19] My understanding of self-assertion owes much to Rorty’s use of Blumenberg. See, e.g., his “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others), especially where he calls Bacon “the prophet of self-assertion as opposed to self-grounding” (172).
[20] The Scientific Revolution, 72
[21] “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable” is the second chapter in Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty, which attempts to locate a tradition of philosophical inquiry—specifically metaphysical and epistemological—in our historical and existential condition as beings in the world.
1. “Posthumanism,” in the last 20 years, has become the latest popular entry into our post-’60s craze for being after something, usually some “ism.” Also in the last 20 years, nearly all promulgations of isms come attached with increasingly anxious qualifiers about the promulgator not wanting to reduce the perceived proponents of the ism to his or her formulation, or not wanting to suggest the essence of what the ism is. [1] I find such hand-waving pointless—partly because I take any good reader or listener to have the good sense to feel free to disagree at any point without the author’s encouragement—but this anxiety plays a special role in my topic because of the way reductionism and essentialism have been tied by theorists into a story about the degradation and oppression of humanity—and, of course, now more than just humanity.
In what follows, I’d like to perform two services: 1) I hope to clarify three problems that any posthumanist theorist will encounter in articulating their view: the general problem of antiessentialism, the special problem of demarcation, and the global problem anthropomorphism. What all three of these problems revolve around is the practical aspect of living the theories we propound. Since many posthumanist perspectives articulate themselves in terms that are inherently paradoxical, I hope by clarifying these three problems to point in the direction of a nonparadoxical mode of articulating the central motive of posthumanism—ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction. 2) I will re-tell a familiar story of the last 300 years as a means of bring into focus the problem of our practices as the primary object of our ethical inquiries. Posthumanism is nothing if not ethically motivated, so when posthumanist theory finds itself moving away from ethics to epistemology or ontology, it behooves us to reexamine our priorities and their interrelationships. The basic problem central to the “scientific revolution” of the European 17th century—which typically stands in as the moment the dam broke, flooding our landscape with instrumental rationality—is the assertion of purely egocentric interests. Working through this conceptual and historical exercise, seeing posthumanism’s broader concern with purely human interests, will put us in a position of seeing a larger project of thinking through ethical authority in a world structured only by material, as opposed to supernatural, agencies.
2. If the central motive of posthumanism is to cease treating “human” as a term of ethical distinction, then one of its central moves has been to cease treating “human” as a term of distinction at all. This shifts the central theoretical terrain from ethics to epistemology and ontology, from how we treat X to how we know what X is. The primary theoretical current that this move draws power from is the antiessentialism common to Heidegger, Sartre, the American pragmatists, and the Continental poststructuralists. We might embody it in Sartre’s slogan that “existence precedes essence.” [2] By overturning the ultimately Platonic relationship that envisions the flux of lived appearances as conceptually beholden to an order of stable essences, antiessentialism emits a panrelationalism—things are not what they are in themselves, but only as they relate to other things. [3] This dissolves any particular thing into a web of relations, and can ultimately cause a fear for stability—how does the antiessentialistic reversal not just flip us into a nasty flux of relations with no footholds for understanding? I think it is fairly clear that no person actually lives their life as if there were no foothold for understanding, as if they did live a flux like a tempest (as opposed to a flux like an oscillating fan). Sartre’s word for this was “metastable.” [4]
If this seems to dissolve the problem surrounding antiessentialism, why am I calling this a general problem for posthumanism? The reason is that though practically we have no problem living in the flux, our theoretical descriptions still tend to contort themselves when describing this practical situation. At root, I think, is the suspicion that existence only precedes essence, that essentialism will always reconstitute itself in the process of understanding. This comes out as a sense that definition, i.e. giving conceptual shape to any particular X, is essentializing. (Need I add “is essentially” or “by definition” to complete the contortion?) This suspicion can largely be traced to origins in poststructuralism, and is best embodied by Gayatri Spivak’s resignation about the state of affairs we must find ourselves in that demands her notion of “strategic essentialism.” [5] Because of the history of oppression through conceptual means that an entire host of cultural critics in the last century have been busily excavating, what was once Plato’s fear for stability has turned into a fear of stability—that any stable entity is covering over the oppression required to achieve that stability. If at one very real extreme is the actual use of linguistic categories to justify the continued oppression of cultural groups and persons, then at the other extreme is the absurdity of thinking that my body’s stable existence at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates is papering over my body’s right to exist at every over set of coordinates. There are stabilities, and then there are stabilities. What we need—but what theorists like Spivak are conceptually unable to provide resources for—is the ability to distinguish between the range of stabilities on that ethical scale. So the general problem of antiessentialism is: how do you de-privilege one distinction without harming your ability to make any distinctions? The way to do this, I think, is to replace Sartre’s existentialist formula with a pragmatist formula like, “practice precedes theory.” This turns all theoretical conundrums back to their origins in practice. This makes one’s fear of stability negotiable by turning the suspicion of a particular stability back to the practice being enabled by it—still suspicious given any kind of oppression, but hardly suspicious at all given a body’s continued existence at a set of spatiotemporal coordinates qua continued existence (though the why for, e.g., the prisoner’s continued existence in the jail cell might be up for grabs).
3. I suspect, as I somewhat suggested before, that theorists have no problem resolving these theoretical problems of definition and essence in practice as persons or citizens (rather than as theorists). But working through the general problem of de-privileging can give us a handle on a second, special problem that emits from the first: how do we demarcate humans from other things? The problem of antiessentialism and the fear of stability are marks of a desire to not privilege anything—but now how do we tell the difference between us and other animals? The amused self-consciousness that accompanies most articles about posthumanism is, I think, not nearly nervous enough about this as a problem. Most theorists of the posthuman seem to take it for granted that we can just tell the difference, but what their work needs to do is provide some handle for how to tell the difference between a human res and a nonhuman res so as to keep the critical edge of their polemic while not resting on either an unarticulated practical grasp or a paradoxical run around wherein we find, ultimately, that we have to ask some portentous “question of the human” every time we want to articulate the difference between a human and a beaver. The former is antithetical to the project of theorizing and the latter I suspect has become popular because 1) people like imitating Derrida, but more importantly 2) they are beholden to the fear of stability that produces the problem of antiessentialism.
Posthumanists do much better when they state their opposition as “humanism,” or “liberal humanism,” or “liberal subjectivity.” What they want to pick out and contest are particular ways in which the human subject is picked out of a crowd. As my use of “res” indicates, we are going to be led back to Descartes—since he distinguished between res cogitans and res extensa, “the mind” has too often been used as the repository for our dreams of difference. But as Rorty retails in his opening chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, there are as many ways to pick out what demarcates the mind—and thus the human—as there are fingers on your hands. [6] The typical approach of posthumanism has been to select one of these marks and reappropriate it for res extensa, thus making the human a little less special. So the special problem of demarcation (which is really just a species of the more general problem of antiessentialism) is: how do you make the human less special while retaining the conceptual ability to tell a human from a nonhuman? Darwin’s naturalism made it possible for Nietzsche to think of us as a diseased animal precisely because of our desire to be special, [7] but the flipside of Nietzsche’s cynicism is John Dewey’s suggestion that Darwin made it possible for us to really get to the bottom of our human cultural practices: “the influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition….” Dewey saw Darwin as making possible antiessentialism, as overturning “the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final” and finally alleviating our desire to “lay hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency.” [8]
4. In order to see better how the blurring motions of antiessentialisms can make it hard to see what makes humans, if not special, at least their own peculiar selves above and beyond physiology, we might turn to Jane Bennett’s recent book, Vibrant Matter (2010). Bennett wouldn’t call herself a posthumanist, but her book works in the same vein, and its utility lies in how thoroughly Bennett wishes to rethink our ontological assumptions—Bennett pushes to the limit certain strategies commonly used by posthumanist theorists, in particular an effort to rethink ontology with ethical implications. Bennett’s ontology centers on the attempt to reinscribe “things” with a “power” she says they’ve been denied by Kantian accounts of agency, thus giving “the force of things its due.” [9] She does so by using Latour’s notion of “actants” as a way of inscribing intentionality in the nonhuman-thing so as to gain a better picture of the “human-nonhuman assemblage” (her term taken from Deleuze and Guattari). [10]
What this power amounts to, however, doesn’t seem much more than being an active force in the material world. Bennett feels this as a point of resistance that deserves the edge of her polemic because of the old notion of the “passivity of matter.” [11] But what extra power is gained by intentionality, alongside causal power, is unclear—and nobody has denied the material world’s causal ability to blot us from existence. Bennett says that “the question is whether other forces in the world approximate some of the characteristics of intentional or purposive behavior on the part of humans” (29), but this makes the mistake of thinking we know what intentionality is. By assuming she already has a conceptual grasp of intentionality, Bennett is able to show how other things have it, too. But this doesn’t seem very hard. Giving out intentionality is easy—just do it, and you’ve done it. Thinking the rock intended to fall to the floor is enough for the rock to have intentionally fallen to the floor. Who, after all, is going to contradict you (except for theorists not assuming we already know what intentionality is)?
Intentionality is simply things behaving as if other things are behaving intentionally. [12] The problem is that the rock behaves the same way whether we attribute intentionality to it or not—or whether the rock attributes intentionality to us or not. So the only question is whether it is useful to attribute intentions to any particular X. To answer this question about a rock falling, we might compare it to a hand going up in a classroom. If the person whose hand goes up gets “called on,” it is because of a practice the caller-on (and all those who expected the person to get called on) is embedded in. If the person was “lifting their hand” rather than “raising their hand,” we can say that the person “unintentionally raised their hand”—we need this locution to distinguish between doing an action (intentionally lifting a hand to get called on) and causing an effect (lifting a hand and unintentionally getting called on). The movements are the same, but only when embedded in a practice can the movement have a certain effect. So, returning to the rock, what is the added bonus of saying the falling rock intentionally crushed my foot if the effect is the same whether I ascribe an intention to the rock or not?
5. The moral of this story is that one reason we attribute intentions is because by making actors aware of the effects of their actions, we can get the actor to not perform the effect-causing action. This, at least, is not the case with the rock, though it might be with the person who dropped it on my foot. It is clear that Bennett wishes her new ontology to have an effect on our moral discourse. She gives a series of imperatives toward the end of her book that punches up this problem of intentionality: “Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate” (116). But what could it mean to engage civilly with rocks? Do rocks respond differently if you are rude to them? While behaving more strategically and subtly with rocks might make sense, civility would seem to only be in play if you could change the rock’s behavior by doing so. But what the analogy is for politely dropping a rock and it not crushing my foot because I treated the rock civilly rather than rudely isn’t clear.
This brings us to the final, global problem of anthropomorphism. Bennett sees clearly that she must face the problem of whether she’s anthropomorphizing non-anthropo-stuff by, for example, attributing intentions to stuff we might normally withhold it from. The global problem of anthropomorphism is: how do you use categories of understanding that are not human categories? Bennett sees that what she calls her “vital materialism” seems to “entail a performative contradiction”: “‘Is it not, after all, a self-conscious, language-wielding human who is articulating this philosophy of vibrant matter?’ It is not so easy to resist, deflect, or redirect this criticism” (120). However, there would only seem to be a performative contradiction if you haven’t been able to provide an account for what separates humans from nonhumans. More particularly, it is by treating intentionality as a property instead of an attribution that heaves Bennett’s project into paradox when she admits she has no separate method for ascertaining the properties of rocks except for the regular human one’s we’ve always employed.
6. Bennett’s confrontation with anthropomorphism, like Spivak’s confrontation with essentialism, emits a general helplessness—for, almost all admit, we can only use human categories. But why should we feel helpless? The reason I think we find ourselves to be helpless or stuck in the position of humanity, rather than, say, thankful or unashamed, is because of the way scientific innovation, technological development, economic consumption, and liberal democracy have all dovetailed into a story about instrumental rationality. This is the story, familiar to us from Germany—be it the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, et al or Heidegger—that the history of the West is the history of Reason increasing our ability to control stuff, including ourselves. In its initial form, the concern seemed to be primarily with us, with succumbing to a “blindly pragmatized thought [that] loses its transcending quality.” [13] Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern was that, not only was our thought simply a means to carry out preexisting and unreflectively held ends, but that the end or purpose of thought had simply become the increased efficiency of means. Unreflectively held purposes dovetails with Heidegger’s discussion of the rhetoric of mathematics and method that took over the natural sciences in the 17th century and was encroaching on the social sciences at the end of the 19th. [14] But what’s worse is that, in Thoreau’s phrase, “men have become the tools of their tools.” [15] The central idea is that we are caught up in the practices we’ve created and have become beholden to them, and that these practices are working out a destructive teleology. And since the increasing obviousness of the consequences of global industrialization, this sensed destruction has become both to ourselves and nonhuman nature. As should be clear, this is a pessimistic narrative that implies that we no longer have the hope of changing (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Heidegger’s conclusion) or that we no longer have the desire to (Thoreau’s fear).
I think it is something like this story that stands behind most posthumanisms. [16] Without it, it's hard to make sense of why we should go in for all the arid metaphysical talk. And while I think there is sufficient plausibility for Thoreau’s fear, I want to quickly sketch an alternative narrative about our theoretical practices that takes the edge off the conclusion that we are now hopeless. This story is drawn from Hans Blumenberg’s account of the transition from ancient and medieval cosmology to modern. Central to this account is the notion that for the ancients, theoretical descriptions of the nonhuman were spiritual exercises meant to relieve the pressures of theory itself. [17] For example, as Blumenburg writes, Epicurus’s “atomistic physics was not meant to satisfy a theoretical interest in reality but rather to argue for the irrelevance of the physical answers to the shaping of life in the world.” [18] “Only insofar as physics could be thought of as producing real human power over nature could natural science potentially serve as the instrument by which to overcome the new radical insecurity of man’s relation to reality” (155). Only when science could demonstrate its practical mastery over life, its “real human power,” could science serve as a mode of overcoming. But overcome what turns out to be the real question. It behooves us to make a distinction between our increased mastery over nonhuman forces indiscriminately killing us off and other forms of overcoming—overcoming our parents, parts of ourselves we dislike, our political enemies, precursor poets, etc.
The upshot of Blumenberg’s story is that we should make finer distinctions among the different projects and practices we’ve put into play over the course of cultural history in order to better grasp why we originally created them so as to better understand why we might continue them. One of the central distinctions Blumenberg makes about the outcome of the 17th century scientific revolution is that philosophers took two divergent paths, that of Cartesian “self-foundation” and Baconian “self-assertion” (see 181-203). [19] As Blumenberg understands it, the mode of self-assertion preceded self-foundation because the central cultural concern they both had eschew was the authority of the ancients (as read by the Scholastics). Thus we find Bacon bashing idols and Descartes retreating to his fireplace. However, as Steven Shapin notes, there was an intense suspicion that accompanied this “intellectual individualism and the rejection of trust and authority.” [20] At this point, it is helpful to make a distinction between the personal and the individual. The individualism common to Bacon and Descartes states that knowledge begins with an individual’s personal experience. The concern, then, is how to make this knowledge portable, intersubjective. This produces different practices intended to depersonalize the knowledge gained firsthand. As Shapin suggests, this amounts to the elaboration of different “practical procedures” (93) such as Boyle’s recommendation “that experimental reports be written in a way that allowed distant readers—not present as firsthand witnesses—to replicate the relevant effects” (107). But another method of depersonalization lies in Descartes’s search for a foundation to knowledge in indubitable certainty. If one could once establish the foundation upon which all knowledge must repose, then one can gain the assent of all inferences from it as common to all because of the necessity created by the demonstration.
It is now generally agreed that Descartes’s foundationalism is an off-shoot of Platonic essentialism, what Dewey called “the quest for certainty” grounded in a “search for the immutable.” [21] What I articulated as the problem of antiessentialism is the problem of searching for replacement practices for the specific theoretical practice of hunting down immutability. Thus this problem becomes paradoxical only if one thinks that a certain set of theoretical practices inevitably ties us into a certain set of self-descriptions and problems—e.g., thinking linguistic practices are necessarily essentializing or thinking intentionality necessary for ethical consideration. Seeing these practices in the light of history, however, can give us a sense of their continuity with other practices motivated for similar purposes and their contingency as practices that can be altered given new situations that require new purposes.
Endnotes
[1] Two examples—N. Katherine Hayles, a major figure (displaying only slight anxiety): “What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety of sites. It is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive)” (How We Became Posthuman (1999), 2); Neil Badmington, writing an introduction (displaying acute anxiety): “What would it mean to view this as an example of posthumanism? The use of such a term is, of course, far from straightforward. Writing in 1947, Martin Heidegger drew attention to the paradoxical status of an ‘-ism,’ observing that…[etc., etc.]. Was I in danger of giving currency to yet another ‘-ism’ devoid of clarity, coherence and credibility” (Posthumanism (2000), ed. Badmington, 1)?
[2] “L’existence précède l’essence” is from Sartre’s essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (translated in Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre—see 348). I pass over the irony of using this essay in this context, though the kernel of my reply is embodied in my discussion of anthropomorphism below.
[3] This is the lesson Richard Rorty draws from “philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michel Foucault” (“A World without Substances or Essences,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 47). Rorty immediately goes on to say that being an “antidualist,” which is how they articulated their antiessentialism, does not mean “that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions. It means rather that they are trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality.”
[4] Being and Nothingness, 90. In the context of Sartre’s discussion, metastable seems to connote something closer to instability. But see Rorty’s use of Sartre in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: “Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort ‘ironists’ because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called ‘meta-stable’: never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change…” (73-74). Something being subject to change is much different than something ceaselessly changing. I think the lesson is that Sartre’s term is a good description of the terrain of antiessentialism, though it originally had to be deployed with more of the polemical edge of flux.
[5] Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a virtuoso performance showing how ethical and epistemological issues are bound together. Spivak’s term, however, comes from the fact that she does not believe there is any alternative to essentialism, or rather that language is in its nature essentializing. For philosophers like Rorty, as I articulated in note 3, this would be like saying that Platonic dualisms were at the heart of language and unavoidable.
[6] See PMN 32-37. Rorty distinguishes nine different marks of the mental and groups them into three different problem-piles: the problem of consciousness, the problem of reason, and the problem of personhood. I take such refinement of distinction to be the first step toward wisdom in this area.
[7] See On the Genealogy of Morality, 3.28: “If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, has until now had no meaning. This existence on earth contained no goal…. Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a diseased animal…” (117).
[8] From "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy" (1909).
[9] VM, 29
[10] See ibid., 9 for Bennett’s introduction of Latour’s “actant”; her second chapter discusses the “assemblage.”
[11] See ibid., vii.
[12] I am blithely taking on board Daniel Dennett’s mode of discussing intentionality, principally from The Intentional Stance, as if it is obvious, but clearly this is contentious for philosophers of mind. The general idea is that intentionality is a holistic game that a community weasels its way into by members attributing intentionality to each other. This is how functionalists avoid the Cartesian problem of Other Minds—intentional minds are created when all the members attribute them to each other, and there is no deeper problem than that. What is interesting is that, on Dennett and Rorty’s understanding, Dennett is the heir of Darwin and it is only theorists who wish to retain the mind as a mark of humanity’s specialness that resist Dennett’s functionalism.
[13] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), xiii. I’m quoting from the John Cummings translation, though Edmund Jephcott’s recent translation is likely to become canonical. This line in particular just rings better in Cummings’ translation, though I have no other reason for choosing it.
[14] See Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays) especially of the notion of a “procedure” being a “fixed ground plan” (118). This kind of rhetoric about math and method is charted succinctly by Steven Shapin in The Scientific Revolution—see especially 57-64 on the problematic notion of the “mathematization of the universe” (63) and 89-96 on the notion that “method was meant to be all” (90). Shapin’s comment that “there is much to commend a revisionist view that formal methodology is to be understood as a set of rhetorical tools for positioning practices in the culture” (95) might be expanded to include the use of mathematics. See also the opening section of Rorty’s “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in Consequences of Pragmatism) for a pithy polemic about what the philosophical upshot of the scientific revolution should have been.
[15] Walden, Ch. 1
[16] My use of Thoreau is partly intended to lend plausibility to this narrative standing behind Bennett. Bennett has a previous book on Thoreau as a political philosopher.
[17] “Spiritual exercises” is a term taken from Pierre Hadot. See, for example, his Philosophy as a Way of Life.
[18] Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 181
[19] My understanding of self-assertion owes much to Rorty’s use of Blumenberg. See, e.g., his “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others), especially where he calls Bacon “the prophet of self-assertion as opposed to self-grounding” (172).
[20] The Scientific Revolution, 72
[21] “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable” is the second chapter in Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty, which attempts to locate a tradition of philosophical inquiry—specifically metaphysical and epistemological—in our historical and existential condition as beings in the world.
Friday, July 05, 2013
Better and the Best
1. Practical stance against the Best – Platonic prophecy as theory – Romantic prophecy as poetry; 2. Theoretical stance against the Best – Evaluative platonism and robustness – Possible betters vs. actual best; 3. The Village Champion argument – Truth and justification; 4. Sloughing off the relativist with self-referential arguments – Contradiction is a practical infelicity; 5. Practical attitudes should be allowed to trump theory – Absolutes are parasitic, not autonomous – Sellars’ parasitism argument about ‘looks’-talk on ‘is’-talk; 6. Is ‘best’-talk parasitic on ‘better’-talk? 7. You can’t say what’s best without saying what’s worse – Self-justifiers as platonism – Closing aperçu
1. In an interview toward the end of his life, Richard Rorty was asked if he thought that advocates of black reparations had valid and serious arguments. Rorty responded that:
The romantic conception of prophecy, however, is different—it gains its sense, not from theoria, but from poiēsis, “making,” which we get “poetry” from. Rather than seeing something already there, the romantic conception of prophecy rests more on the Renaissance trope of building “castles in the air.” While the platonic conception gains a sense of urgency from its positing of a Best behind a veil that, if only we could just see it, we’d have our blueprint from how to order the world—the romantic conception loses that urgency, but in compensation we get a picture of how toying with castles too far off in the sky can distract us from the reality around us.
2. What undergirds Rorty’s practical stance toward the Best is his theoretical stance against the Best, which is to say against platonism. For Rorty’s stance at the level of theory is that the Best is a mirage because it is circumscribed by our fallibility and our lack of method—for any X said to be the Best, we have to admit something better might come along. Such an admission of fallibility is what then produces the search for a method with which one could know certainly that one has in fact found the Best. Dewey and Rorty thought that this Quest for Certainty showed a lack of maturity, and that we should rather face up to the contingency of our assertions of what is the best.
The problem for this line of thought is that a new form of platonist has come along that suggests that you can’t have a notion of what’s better if you don’t have a robust notion of the Best. Rorty wants to deny needing one. This new version is a particular species of the more general form of what I will call evaluative platonism. There are many species, but the basic form is that if you don’t have the Best in mind as a sort of ideal to shoot for, you won’t progress toward anything. The industrial strength version is a full-blooded Platonism, which posits an Absolute Good that can be reached (at least in theory—you can see the Sun outside the Cave, even if you can’t reach it). There are, however, important knock-off brands, the most important of which for my purposes are Peircian end-of-inquiry notions which suggest that one needs a robust focus imaginarius to make sense of inquiry—these are important precisely because of the range of agreement Rorty shares with these other pragmatists. Rorty’s romantic notion isn’t robust enough because it simply expands our repertoire of possible betters without narrowing one of them as the actual best. Since the traditional enemy of the platonist is the relativist, it should be no surprise that that is the epithet pragmatists like Hilary Putnam wield at Rorty for continuing to resist attempts at robustness. [2]
3. To get a sense of how Rorty responds, we might turn to his Village Champion Argument against Jürgen Habermas, another pragmatist admirer of Peirce. Rorty sets the stage by contrasting the Peircian strategy with what I’ve called “full-blooded Platonism”:
4. I think we can be a little more precise than Rorty’s usual mode of sloughing off the relativist as something he needs not be concerned with. The Village Champion Argument carries a lot of force, but there is more in the area than just a stylistic difference. The pattern of Rorty’s mode is set in his infamous APA presidential address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” There he says, succinctly and some might say too perfunctorily, “‘Relativism’ is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinion on an important topic are equally good.” [7] The reason he wishes to dispose of the relativist quickly is because he thinks, rightly, that it hides the real issues at work behind the conflict between pragmatists and platonists. So he says that “if there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute. One would merely use some variant of the self-referential arguments Socrates used against Protagoras.” [8] The argument is like this:
This first step gets us onto pragmatist ground: there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying X and not-X. There are many contexts in which it is fine, like when you say the latter with your fingers crossed or in the context of saying the sentence before this one. Contradiction is, then, a practical infelicity of a special kind. And once this has been identified, we can see the point in Habermas’ notion of a “performative contradiction.” This is part of the idea that you can’t say one thing and do another. And this displays the larger genus that the species of self-refutation falls under with regards to relativism, for it has often been accepted as a refutation of relativism (and nihilism, for that matter) that when someone says “peeing standing up is as good as sitting down” and they then pee sitting down, to say, “if they are both just as good, then on what grounds did you make the choice?” For giving any grounds at all is grounds enough for identifying criteria being used to adjudicate truth from falsity, good from bad. And having done something is ipso facto having made a choice. So the doing contradicts the saying.
5. So what underlies Rorty’s blithe rejection of relativism as a real concern is the pragmatic understanding that to behave at all is to refute the very idea that grounds of choice are all made equal. And while this is true, that our everyday practice refutes every day the theoretical thesis of relativism, it does not refute it at the level of theory. Rorty’s attitude tells us that we shouldn’t care about that, that we cannot, as Emerson says, “spend the day in explanation.” [9] And I think this is true as well, that our practical attitude toward the world should be allowed to trump pressures at the level of theory. [10] However, at the level of theory, it should be possible to show how relativism and platonism go the wrong way at things.
Robert Brandom, I believe, has shown how we might go at this. The charge of relativism leveled by platonists is motivated by the idea that you cannot talk about “betterness” without the Best, whereas heirs to Protagoras think all claims are of the form “X is better than …” with the ellipsis being filled in by specific claims. Brandom, in his notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation, has shown us how charges of relativism leveled at the pragmatist can be refuted by showing how Absolutes, like the Best, are parasitic, and not autonomous.
To understand this argument we need to understand the basic form of Wilfrid Sellars’ master argument in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” against the Myth of the Given and elsewhere. [11] For one example, one project in what Brandom calls the “empiricist core program of the classical analytic project” is to establish phenomenalism. Think of phenomenalism on the model of Berkelyan idealism, whose commitment to empiricism was so powerful that unlike Locke who thought our knowledge starts with our individual experience, he thought all we could know was our individual experience. This gets transposed into the analytic idiom as a reductionist program—the attempt to reduce talk about how things are to talk about how things seem or look. If that reduction can be shown to be successful without remainder, then we’ve shown how we don’t need to talk about how things are, but only about how things seem. (Consider the analogous materialisms about supernatural entities—we can do without talk about witchcraft because we can get along fine in explaining what happens by talking about bad mushrooms. [12]) Reductionism in the analytic idiom is a semantic relation—when you explain what you mean, you are relating your first misunderstood statement with a second, hopefully better understood statement. So when you suggest that when you talk about tables what you are really talking about are clouds of electrons at particular spatialtemporal vectors, you are suggesting a special form of paraphrase. “When you say ‘table,’ you really mean ‘cloud of electrons.’” [13]
So this is what “autonomy” means in this context—if you attempt to explain away a particular vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things are”), you are suggesting that all the work can be done by a different vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things seem”). For this reduction to work, the alternative vocabulary must be independent of the target vocabulary you are reducing into nothingness. If it isn’t, if you need the target vocabulary to use the alternative, then the reduction was misguided because you have a remainder (that being something you need but now can’t explain the existence of or how you do it, etc.). So if you can show that a marked for demolition vocabulary is needed to use the alternative, then you can combat the reductionism. Brandom says that Sellars’ argument “turns on the assertion of the pragmatic dependence of one set of vocabulary-deploying practices-or-abilities on another” [14]:
To review: a reductive semantic relation can be refuted if it can be shown that the target vocabulary to be reduced is needed to use correctly the alternative vocabulary. If so shown, we will see that the alternative vocabulary is parasitic upon the target vocabulary and so the latter not a suitable candidate for reduction. And what we will have shown is that the semantic relation between the two vocabularies is pragmatically mediated. The relationship between saying “seems” and saying “is” is that saying “seems” is mediated by your ability to say “is.”
6. It is beyond my powers to show that what I called evaluative platonism can be so refuted, so the best I can do is suggest the path to be taken. The problem here is that it is beyond my ability to show that the reconstructed versions of platonists that follow Peirce are suggesting a reduction of ‘better’-talk to ‘Best’-talk. That is, roughly, what Plato was after when he set up his divided line between the parasitic world of shadows and the autonomous Realm of Forms, with the Good (i.e., the Best) being most autonomousest of them all (being the sun that produced all the shadows). But we need to acknowledge that Habermas and Putnam need not be suggesting this when they level their criticisms at Rorty for not having a robust enough notion of betterness to make inquiry function right. All they need to say is that ‘better’-talk is intertwined with ‘best’-talk, and Rorty seems to be suggesting that ‘best’-talk can be reduced away without remainder to ‘better’-talk. In other words, the arguments I’ve just elaborated could be the ones used against Rorty to hit back against the Village Champion Argument.
I don’t think this will end up being the case. My suspicion is that the only way to get the robustness criticism to stick is to reconfigure in such a way that one would ipso facto fall within the bounds of the reductive form of platonism. (That was the form of Rorty’s criticism of Putnam’s labeling of him as a relativist: if I am, so are you!) Further, it is also my suspicion that ‘best’-talk is in fact parasitic upon ‘better’-talk, though I cannot see how to refute the idea that ‘better’-talk is also parasitic upon ‘best’-talk. If they are both parasitic, then they are intertwined, neither being autonomous of the other. So the best I can do is suggest that you can’t get rid of ‘better’-talk.
7. For saying something is “the best” is pragmatically mediated by your ability to say what is better. The Best is parasitic on the better because you can’t specify what is best without specifying what is worse. This is the effect of having to answer “how do you know?” by justifying yourself. And since everyone agrees that the ability to justify is parasitic on the selection of a community, ‘best’-talk is as relative as ‘better’-talk, as much as you may wish that your claim about what is the Best transcends the community it is directed at. For it is simply not the case that your claim “X is the best!” is ipso facto better than “X is better than Y.” Perhaps you mean it more, but then by the same token you’re being less cautious and perhaps more dogmatic. But either way, when did caution or dogmatism tell us anything about the truth of the statements? People can have a terrible attitude and still be right.
Say we back up, though, and say that you won’t specify worse things in justifying the Best. We will concede that justification happens in front of communities, but we’ll avoid the implication of relativism by confining ourselves to an interlocking set of self-justifying things (principles, forms, whatever)—in other words, the community the justification is happening in front of is itself (and we just happen to be onlookers). This is the form of those fuller platonisms. If your justification for the Best, however, is another Best, then you generate a regress, for given the form of the Best, I will want to know what it is better than. “You say ‘the best’—the best of what?” What set does the Best reign supreme over? (Itself? Now it seems like a useless phrase.) So an interlocking set of Bests will generate an infinite regress, and so hence the easy, unanswerable skepticism we can apply to any claim about what is the Best. “How do you know that’s the best? Are you able to survey all possible counterclaims and pronounce upon them beforehand?” To say you can is to pronounce yourself Village Champion, and we all know how quickly such hubris can make you look like the Village Idiot.
The only way to stop the regress is to accept the relative justification as sufficient, and this amounts to rejecting platonism and taking “the best” as expressive of “that I know of”—we might call that a transcendental fallibilism. The warrant for this redescription of what “the best” expresses is the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between the best and the better. You can’t do the best without doing better, but you might be able to do better without doing the best.
Endnotes
[1] Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, 105
[2] See, e.g., Putnam’s “Realism with a Human Face” in his collection of that name and Rorty’s response, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” in Truth and Progress. Rorty’s reaction in that essay boils down to: “We seem, both to me and to philosophers who find the view of both of us absurd, to be in much the same line of business. But Putnam sees us as doing something quite different, and I do not know why” (59). I suspect Putnam’s long-standing use of Rorty as a punching bag has more to do with Rorty standing too close to Derrida and the events of the 1979 Eastern Division APA meeting than any thesis he’s ever promulgated. That’s my suspicion, at least, though I have no particular evidence for judging Putnam’s attitude in the latter case. (His remarks about the French littering his corpus I consider enough for the former.) The best description I’ve come across of what actually happened at the infamous APA meeting is Neil Gross’s description in Richard Rorty, 216-227.
[3] “Universality and Truth,” Rorty and His Critics, 5
[4] The JTB—“justified true belief”—conception of knowledge derives from Plato’s Theaetetus, and most epistemologists have accepted it as the beginning, though not the end, of wisdom in regards to knowledge. For a somewhat embroidered discussion of the relationship of pragmatism to the distinction between truth and justification, see my "Rhetorical Universalism." I say that belief doesn’t play a role in the determination of knowledge because all the belief concept tells you is that it is a claim being held by some person. And if you test that claim by wondering whether a claim being held doesn’t tell you something about its plausibility—like a show of hands, one being better than none—then you need to consider the fact that authority is a structure built into the nature of justification, and so a claim being actually held lending it therefore credence already has the conceptual shape of justification.
[5] Ibid., 6. Rorty is discussing Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms. Though Robert Brandom, who I will be discussing shortly, tells us the title of Between Saying and Doing comes from an old Italian proverb ("between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out"), I think there’s a felicitous ratio with Habermas recorded there—for though Habermas considers himself an heir to American pragmatism, the difference between Habermas’ objects and Brandom’s gerunds suggests a greater commitment to the priority of pragmatics over semantics.
[6] Ibid., 56
[7] Consequences of Pragmatism, 166
[8] Ibid., 167
[9] Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
[10] Every person tired of an interminable conversation with a deaf and dogged interlocutor knows this to be true, but again, only at the level of practice. By this I mean that when the deaf dog retorts that you’re being dogmatic because you haven’t answered their objections, the rules of open inquiry we’ve venerated (explicitly) at least since the Enlightenment demand that we grant their point. However, only recently might we be able to work out the theoretical entitlement for allowing attitude to trump reason-giving, and the overarching reason is why Brandom says that in pragmatist philosophy of language, semantics must answer to pragmatics. Something of this orientation is elaborated in what follows, but on this particular point, at the beginning of Making It Explicit, Brandom justifies it via Wittgenstein’s regress argument about rules, which is roughly that if every statement needs rules to regulate correct interpretation, and those rules need to be stated, then the rules need to have rules—and then those rules need rules, etc. (see 20-23). What stops this regress from being infinite? Nothing, not at least if you haven’t fixed things so that normative attitude precedes normative rule/reason-giving. The trick here is seeing that we do, obviously, have the power to stop regressing. Platonism, in this area, is a form of intellectualism that says that rules precede attitudes, and thus nothing should stop the regress (except for something rule-like, which is where the idea of self-evident principles comes from). So one way to think about pragmatism is as the orientation that accepts our power to stop the regress as not in itself illegitimate, but rather seeks to investigate when it should and should not be. For example, notice how much leeway is in Rorty’s notion of “justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant”—who determines relevancy? That’s a question that would keep platonists up at night, though pragmatists understand that such relevancy is hashed out in the course of inquiry as people determine their attitudes to various communities. Is every attitude that determines our relationship to a community kosher? No, as every angry parent knows. But what about the black separatist, or black radical demanding reparations? That’s justifiably more complex in America. On that particular complexity, of being African-American in America, still the best negotiations are Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. For Rorty’s interesting discussion of Baldwin and Elijah Muhammad, see 11-13 of Achieving Our Country (whose title comes from Baldwin’s book).
[11] Brandom elaborates this master argument in “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism” in Perspectives on Pragmatism. This particular argument about phenomenalism is the one Sellars forwards in his essay “Phenomenalism,” written around the same time as the more famous attack on the Myth of the Given.
[12] This was, of course, Rorty’s first famous argument in the philosophy of mind, striking an analogy between talk about the mind and talk about demons. Brandom suggests in “Vocabularies of Pragmatism” (in PP) that that argument hinged on the social pragmatism that he would later become famous for, there isolated on a social practice account of minds.
[13] If you noticed a wobble in my vocabulary in this last passage, you’re probably smarter than I am. And hopefully the wobble isn’t pernicious. Given the precision with which analytic reductions have been deployed, I technically slid between the semantic relation between what two things mean and an ontological relation between what two things are. Sloppy, I know, but when you work in the analytic idiom—where “how things are” is, because of the linguistic turn, always paraphrased as “talk about how things are”—it’s easy to do. However, the larger philosophical commitment pragmatists like Rorty and Brandom (if not Peirce, James, and Dewey) are in favor of keeping might be thought of as specifying that the category of “ontological relations” be reduced to another idiom, which is in part semantic. (This would take me too far afoot, but they are not committed to reducing everything to language, the linguistic idealism critics keep foisting on Rorty and Brandom. Brandom thinks they are only committed to what he calls “the entanglement thesis,” which in this context I understand to be the entanglement of pragmatic relations of nonlinguistic bodies with semantic relations of linguistic bodies.) For a recent discussion of Rorty's relationship to anti-analytic pragmatists, see "Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism." For a discussion of the relationship of language to experience after Quine and Sellars, see "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."
[14] In Between Saying and Doing, Brandom develops a very sophisticated apparatus for talking about talking. One area of underdeveloped territory he takes on is beginning to talk about the practices necessary or sufficient for deploying a vocabulary and, conversely, the vocabularies necessary or sufficient for deploying a practice. However, while Brandom favors talk of social practices, his aim in the book is to abstract away from that particular commitment, and so he speaks of (social) practices or (individual) abilities.
[15] BSD 12; this first chapter of his Locke Lectures also appears by itself in Perspectives on Pragmatism, this passage at 169.
1. In an interview toward the end of his life, Richard Rorty was asked if he thought that advocates of black reparations had valid and serious arguments. Rorty responded that:
There are valid and serious arguments, but there are also valid and serious arguments for taxing the citizens of the First World down to the standard of living of the average inhabitant of the Third World, and distributing the proceeds of this taxation to the latter. But since neither set of arguments will lead to any such action being taken, I am not sure how much time we should spend thinking about them, as opposed to thinking about measures that have some chance of actually being carried out. It would be better to think about what might actually be done than to think about what an absolutely perfect world would be like. The best can be an enemy of the better. [1]The stance Rorty is here taking is a practical stance against the Best. Rorty is not against thinking about what the world should be like, as utopic and prophetic thinking is central to how Rorty conceives of the intellectual’s role in democratic culture. But what he is suggesting here is that we cannot spend the day in imagination. Rorty’s conception of prophecy is romantic, not platonic. A platonic conception of prophecy got off the ground when Plato began using metaphors of sight to articulate his sense of philosophy—“theory” derives from theoros, or “onlooker,” “spectator.” Plato’s transformation of the common Greek word for an audience member of a festival is what produced Dewey’s attack on the “spectatorial account of knowledge,” and when theoria was Latinized by contemplatio, it became invested with our derived word “speculation” from speculum, or mirror. Hence Rorty’s devastating attack on platonism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
The romantic conception of prophecy, however, is different—it gains its sense, not from theoria, but from poiēsis, “making,” which we get “poetry” from. Rather than seeing something already there, the romantic conception of prophecy rests more on the Renaissance trope of building “castles in the air.” While the platonic conception gains a sense of urgency from its positing of a Best behind a veil that, if only we could just see it, we’d have our blueprint from how to order the world—the romantic conception loses that urgency, but in compensation we get a picture of how toying with castles too far off in the sky can distract us from the reality around us.
2. What undergirds Rorty’s practical stance toward the Best is his theoretical stance against the Best, which is to say against platonism. For Rorty’s stance at the level of theory is that the Best is a mirage because it is circumscribed by our fallibility and our lack of method—for any X said to be the Best, we have to admit something better might come along. Such an admission of fallibility is what then produces the search for a method with which one could know certainly that one has in fact found the Best. Dewey and Rorty thought that this Quest for Certainty showed a lack of maturity, and that we should rather face up to the contingency of our assertions of what is the best.
The problem for this line of thought is that a new form of platonist has come along that suggests that you can’t have a notion of what’s better if you don’t have a robust notion of the Best. Rorty wants to deny needing one. This new version is a particular species of the more general form of what I will call evaluative platonism. There are many species, but the basic form is that if you don’t have the Best in mind as a sort of ideal to shoot for, you won’t progress toward anything. The industrial strength version is a full-blooded Platonism, which posits an Absolute Good that can be reached (at least in theory—you can see the Sun outside the Cave, even if you can’t reach it). There are, however, important knock-off brands, the most important of which for my purposes are Peircian end-of-inquiry notions which suggest that one needs a robust focus imaginarius to make sense of inquiry—these are important precisely because of the range of agreement Rorty shares with these other pragmatists. Rorty’s romantic notion isn’t robust enough because it simply expands our repertoire of possible betters without narrowing one of them as the actual best. Since the traditional enemy of the platonist is the relativist, it should be no surprise that that is the epithet pragmatists like Hilary Putnam wield at Rorty for continuing to resist attempts at robustness. [2]
3. To get a sense of how Rorty responds, we might turn to his Village Champion Argument against Jürgen Habermas, another pragmatist admirer of Peirce. Rorty sets the stage by contrasting the Peircian strategy with what I’ve called “full-blooded Platonism”:
Instead of arguing that because reality is One, and truth correspondence to that One Reality, Peircians argue that the idea of convergence is built into the presuppositions of discourse. They all agree that the principal reason why reason cannot be naturalized is that reason is normative and norms cannot be naturalized. But, they say, we can make room for the normative without going back to the traditional idea of a duty to correspond to the intrinsic nature of One Reality. We do this by attending to the universalistic character of the idealizing presuppositions of discourse. [3]To “naturalize reason” in this context is to reject the utility of the concept of truth when attempting to figure out what is and is not knowledge—instead, naturalizers argue, justification is all that does any real work. Rorty does not want to collapse the distinction between the two, however, only argue that the T in the JTB conception of knowledge, exactly like the B, does not play an operative role in the determination of what people know. [4] Peircians think that the T does play an operative role, a transcending moment in which more than justification is had. Without the ability to transcend the moment of justification, they think, everything would be relative to a particular audience. Rorty continues:
Habermas’ doctrine of a “transcendent moment” seems to me to run together a commendable willingness to try something new with an empty boast. To say “I’ll try to defend this against all comers” is often, depending upon the circumstances, a commendable attitude. But to say “I can successfully defend this against all comers” is silly. Maybe you can, but you are no more in a position to claim that you can than the village champion is to claim that he can beat the world champion. [5]Rorty later glosses this argument:
When we have finished justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant (perhaps our own intellectual conscience, or our fellow-citizens, or the relevant experts) we need not, and typically do not, make any further claims, much less universal ones. After rehearsing justification, we may say either “That is why I think my assertion true” or “That is why my assertion is true,” or both. Going from the former assertion to the latter is not a philosophically pregnant transition from particularity to universality, or from context-dependence to context-independence. It is merely a stylistic difference. [6]I hope it is apparent how the Village Champion Argument, and therefore the relationship between justification and truth, bears on the relationship between the better and the Best. To claim that X is “the best,” you are asserting the truth of the claim “X is the best.” Rorty’s point is that these assertions are necessarily always in front of some particular audience, and therefore the pragmatic power of any particular claim is relative to an audience.
4. I think we can be a little more precise than Rorty’s usual mode of sloughing off the relativist as something he needs not be concerned with. The Village Champion Argument carries a lot of force, but there is more in the area than just a stylistic difference. The pattern of Rorty’s mode is set in his infamous APA presidential address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” There he says, succinctly and some might say too perfunctorily, “‘Relativism’ is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinion on an important topic are equally good.” [7] The reason he wishes to dispose of the relativist quickly is because he thinks, rightly, that it hides the real issues at work behind the conflict between pragmatists and platonists. So he says that “if there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute. One would merely use some variant of the self-referential arguments Socrates used against Protagoras.” [8] The argument is like this:
Protagoras: Every view is as good as any other!Since pragmatism is heir to a discernible Protagorean tradition, we are, in fact, better positioned to get back to Plato on this issue. The first step is recognizing what underpins self-referential contradiction arguments. The invalidity of contradiction is the foul incurred when you say both “X” and “not X.” But this is just to say that in the practice of saying thou shalt not incur such violations of the rules of that practice. Following Wittgenstein, one has to think, here, of practices on the analogy of games. You don’t get to count as playing the game of football, as practicing football, if—as many turd to third football comedies have underscored—you jumpkick the quarterback. In some definable Practice of Saying, it is against the rules to hold contradictory claims. (This isn’t to say that there are other practices that involve words in which it is okay to do this. Poetry and lying are the most obvious examples, which is why Plato thought poetry was a form of lying.)
Socrates: Does that include yours?
Protagoras [sensing already the end]: Er, well, yes, it must, then hunh?
Socrates: Okay, so if your view that “every view is as good as any other” is as good as the view that “not every view is as good as any other,” why should we adopt your view over the ones that say yours is shit?
Protagoras: Because…it’s true?
Socrates: Yah, okay, but what grip do you have on truth that is independent of your relativism about goodness? Isn’t goodness in the way of views just truth? How can you have a view that is itself true where others are false, but the false views are just as good? Doesn’t that just make truth an idle curiosity, and therefore your own view idle as well? Can you give me no reason for adopting your view?
Protagoras: I…will…get back to you on that one…
Socrates: Yes, Miss Palin, please do.
This first step gets us onto pragmatist ground: there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying X and not-X. There are many contexts in which it is fine, like when you say the latter with your fingers crossed or in the context of saying the sentence before this one. Contradiction is, then, a practical infelicity of a special kind. And once this has been identified, we can see the point in Habermas’ notion of a “performative contradiction.” This is part of the idea that you can’t say one thing and do another. And this displays the larger genus that the species of self-refutation falls under with regards to relativism, for it has often been accepted as a refutation of relativism (and nihilism, for that matter) that when someone says “peeing standing up is as good as sitting down” and they then pee sitting down, to say, “if they are both just as good, then on what grounds did you make the choice?” For giving any grounds at all is grounds enough for identifying criteria being used to adjudicate truth from falsity, good from bad. And having done something is ipso facto having made a choice. So the doing contradicts the saying.
5. So what underlies Rorty’s blithe rejection of relativism as a real concern is the pragmatic understanding that to behave at all is to refute the very idea that grounds of choice are all made equal. And while this is true, that our everyday practice refutes every day the theoretical thesis of relativism, it does not refute it at the level of theory. Rorty’s attitude tells us that we shouldn’t care about that, that we cannot, as Emerson says, “spend the day in explanation.” [9] And I think this is true as well, that our practical attitude toward the world should be allowed to trump pressures at the level of theory. [10] However, at the level of theory, it should be possible to show how relativism and platonism go the wrong way at things.
Robert Brandom, I believe, has shown how we might go at this. The charge of relativism leveled by platonists is motivated by the idea that you cannot talk about “betterness” without the Best, whereas heirs to Protagoras think all claims are of the form “X is better than …” with the ellipsis being filled in by specific claims. Brandom, in his notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation, has shown us how charges of relativism leveled at the pragmatist can be refuted by showing how Absolutes, like the Best, are parasitic, and not autonomous.
To understand this argument we need to understand the basic form of Wilfrid Sellars’ master argument in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” against the Myth of the Given and elsewhere. [11] For one example, one project in what Brandom calls the “empiricist core program of the classical analytic project” is to establish phenomenalism. Think of phenomenalism on the model of Berkelyan idealism, whose commitment to empiricism was so powerful that unlike Locke who thought our knowledge starts with our individual experience, he thought all we could know was our individual experience. This gets transposed into the analytic idiom as a reductionist program—the attempt to reduce talk about how things are to talk about how things seem or look. If that reduction can be shown to be successful without remainder, then we’ve shown how we don’t need to talk about how things are, but only about how things seem. (Consider the analogous materialisms about supernatural entities—we can do without talk about witchcraft because we can get along fine in explaining what happens by talking about bad mushrooms. [12]) Reductionism in the analytic idiom is a semantic relation—when you explain what you mean, you are relating your first misunderstood statement with a second, hopefully better understood statement. So when you suggest that when you talk about tables what you are really talking about are clouds of electrons at particular spatialtemporal vectors, you are suggesting a special form of paraphrase. “When you say ‘table,’ you really mean ‘cloud of electrons.’” [13]
So this is what “autonomy” means in this context—if you attempt to explain away a particular vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things are”), you are suggesting that all the work can be done by a different vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things seem”). For this reduction to work, the alternative vocabulary must be independent of the target vocabulary you are reducing into nothingness. If it isn’t, if you need the target vocabulary to use the alternative, then the reduction was misguided because you have a remainder (that being something you need but now can’t explain the existence of or how you do it, etc.). So if you can show that a marked for demolition vocabulary is needed to use the alternative, then you can combat the reductionism. Brandom says that Sellars’ argument “turns on the assertion of the pragmatic dependence of one set of vocabulary-deploying practices-or-abilities on another” [14]:
Because he thinks part of what one is doing in saying how things merely appear is withholding a commitment to their actually being that way, and because one cannot be understood as withholding a commitment that one cannot undertake, Sellars concludes that one cannot have the ability to say or think how things seem or appear unless one also has the ability to make claims about how things actually are. [15]Sellars argues that ‘is’-talk is pragmatically dependent on ‘looks’-talk because you wouldn’t be able to do (i.e. deploy) the latter without being able to deploy the former. So while you might not be actually deploying ‘is’-talk when you say, “There seems to be water over there,” you are implicitly relying on your grasp of the difference between “there is water over there” and “oh, there only seemed to be water over there—it’s actually a mirage…too bad we’re gonna’ die now.” If you didn’t have a grip on this implicit distinction, and all you had was ‘seems’-talk, then you’d have to say that “there seems to be water over there” was false when it turned out to be a mirage. This would impoverish our ability to say true things, though, for with the distinction in hand I can say two potentially true statements (“there is…” and “there seems…”) while without I can only say one. Now, what that one statement is is a good question, for the way ‘seems’ is being used appears to be the way ‘is’ is normally used—after all, the cases of falsification are exactly the same between “there is…” in our current modes of speech and “there seems…” within the reduced language-game (where “there is…” isn’t used).
To review: a reductive semantic relation can be refuted if it can be shown that the target vocabulary to be reduced is needed to use correctly the alternative vocabulary. If so shown, we will see that the alternative vocabulary is parasitic upon the target vocabulary and so the latter not a suitable candidate for reduction. And what we will have shown is that the semantic relation between the two vocabularies is pragmatically mediated. The relationship between saying “seems” and saying “is” is that saying “seems” is mediated by your ability to say “is.”
6. It is beyond my powers to show that what I called evaluative platonism can be so refuted, so the best I can do is suggest the path to be taken. The problem here is that it is beyond my ability to show that the reconstructed versions of platonists that follow Peirce are suggesting a reduction of ‘better’-talk to ‘Best’-talk. That is, roughly, what Plato was after when he set up his divided line between the parasitic world of shadows and the autonomous Realm of Forms, with the Good (i.e., the Best) being most autonomousest of them all (being the sun that produced all the shadows). But we need to acknowledge that Habermas and Putnam need not be suggesting this when they level their criticisms at Rorty for not having a robust enough notion of betterness to make inquiry function right. All they need to say is that ‘better’-talk is intertwined with ‘best’-talk, and Rorty seems to be suggesting that ‘best’-talk can be reduced away without remainder to ‘better’-talk. In other words, the arguments I’ve just elaborated could be the ones used against Rorty to hit back against the Village Champion Argument.
I don’t think this will end up being the case. My suspicion is that the only way to get the robustness criticism to stick is to reconfigure in such a way that one would ipso facto fall within the bounds of the reductive form of platonism. (That was the form of Rorty’s criticism of Putnam’s labeling of him as a relativist: if I am, so are you!) Further, it is also my suspicion that ‘best’-talk is in fact parasitic upon ‘better’-talk, though I cannot see how to refute the idea that ‘better’-talk is also parasitic upon ‘best’-talk. If they are both parasitic, then they are intertwined, neither being autonomous of the other. So the best I can do is suggest that you can’t get rid of ‘better’-talk.
7. For saying something is “the best” is pragmatically mediated by your ability to say what is better. The Best is parasitic on the better because you can’t specify what is best without specifying what is worse. This is the effect of having to answer “how do you know?” by justifying yourself. And since everyone agrees that the ability to justify is parasitic on the selection of a community, ‘best’-talk is as relative as ‘better’-talk, as much as you may wish that your claim about what is the Best transcends the community it is directed at. For it is simply not the case that your claim “X is the best!” is ipso facto better than “X is better than Y.” Perhaps you mean it more, but then by the same token you’re being less cautious and perhaps more dogmatic. But either way, when did caution or dogmatism tell us anything about the truth of the statements? People can have a terrible attitude and still be right.
Say we back up, though, and say that you won’t specify worse things in justifying the Best. We will concede that justification happens in front of communities, but we’ll avoid the implication of relativism by confining ourselves to an interlocking set of self-justifying things (principles, forms, whatever)—in other words, the community the justification is happening in front of is itself (and we just happen to be onlookers). This is the form of those fuller platonisms. If your justification for the Best, however, is another Best, then you generate a regress, for given the form of the Best, I will want to know what it is better than. “You say ‘the best’—the best of what?” What set does the Best reign supreme over? (Itself? Now it seems like a useless phrase.) So an interlocking set of Bests will generate an infinite regress, and so hence the easy, unanswerable skepticism we can apply to any claim about what is the Best. “How do you know that’s the best? Are you able to survey all possible counterclaims and pronounce upon them beforehand?” To say you can is to pronounce yourself Village Champion, and we all know how quickly such hubris can make you look like the Village Idiot.
The only way to stop the regress is to accept the relative justification as sufficient, and this amounts to rejecting platonism and taking “the best” as expressive of “that I know of”—we might call that a transcendental fallibilism. The warrant for this redescription of what “the best” expresses is the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between the best and the better. You can’t do the best without doing better, but you might be able to do better without doing the best.
Endnotes
[1] Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, 105
[2] See, e.g., Putnam’s “Realism with a Human Face” in his collection of that name and Rorty’s response, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” in Truth and Progress. Rorty’s reaction in that essay boils down to: “We seem, both to me and to philosophers who find the view of both of us absurd, to be in much the same line of business. But Putnam sees us as doing something quite different, and I do not know why” (59). I suspect Putnam’s long-standing use of Rorty as a punching bag has more to do with Rorty standing too close to Derrida and the events of the 1979 Eastern Division APA meeting than any thesis he’s ever promulgated. That’s my suspicion, at least, though I have no particular evidence for judging Putnam’s attitude in the latter case. (His remarks about the French littering his corpus I consider enough for the former.) The best description I’ve come across of what actually happened at the infamous APA meeting is Neil Gross’s description in Richard Rorty, 216-227.
[3] “Universality and Truth,” Rorty and His Critics, 5
[4] The JTB—“justified true belief”—conception of knowledge derives from Plato’s Theaetetus, and most epistemologists have accepted it as the beginning, though not the end, of wisdom in regards to knowledge. For a somewhat embroidered discussion of the relationship of pragmatism to the distinction between truth and justification, see my "Rhetorical Universalism." I say that belief doesn’t play a role in the determination of knowledge because all the belief concept tells you is that it is a claim being held by some person. And if you test that claim by wondering whether a claim being held doesn’t tell you something about its plausibility—like a show of hands, one being better than none—then you need to consider the fact that authority is a structure built into the nature of justification, and so a claim being actually held lending it therefore credence already has the conceptual shape of justification.
[5] Ibid., 6. Rorty is discussing Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms. Though Robert Brandom, who I will be discussing shortly, tells us the title of Between Saying and Doing comes from an old Italian proverb ("between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out"), I think there’s a felicitous ratio with Habermas recorded there—for though Habermas considers himself an heir to American pragmatism, the difference between Habermas’ objects and Brandom’s gerunds suggests a greater commitment to the priority of pragmatics over semantics.
[6] Ibid., 56
[7] Consequences of Pragmatism, 166
[8] Ibid., 167
[9] Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
[10] Every person tired of an interminable conversation with a deaf and dogged interlocutor knows this to be true, but again, only at the level of practice. By this I mean that when the deaf dog retorts that you’re being dogmatic because you haven’t answered their objections, the rules of open inquiry we’ve venerated (explicitly) at least since the Enlightenment demand that we grant their point. However, only recently might we be able to work out the theoretical entitlement for allowing attitude to trump reason-giving, and the overarching reason is why Brandom says that in pragmatist philosophy of language, semantics must answer to pragmatics. Something of this orientation is elaborated in what follows, but on this particular point, at the beginning of Making It Explicit, Brandom justifies it via Wittgenstein’s regress argument about rules, which is roughly that if every statement needs rules to regulate correct interpretation, and those rules need to be stated, then the rules need to have rules—and then those rules need rules, etc. (see 20-23). What stops this regress from being infinite? Nothing, not at least if you haven’t fixed things so that normative attitude precedes normative rule/reason-giving. The trick here is seeing that we do, obviously, have the power to stop regressing. Platonism, in this area, is a form of intellectualism that says that rules precede attitudes, and thus nothing should stop the regress (except for something rule-like, which is where the idea of self-evident principles comes from). So one way to think about pragmatism is as the orientation that accepts our power to stop the regress as not in itself illegitimate, but rather seeks to investigate when it should and should not be. For example, notice how much leeway is in Rorty’s notion of “justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant”—who determines relevancy? That’s a question that would keep platonists up at night, though pragmatists understand that such relevancy is hashed out in the course of inquiry as people determine their attitudes to various communities. Is every attitude that determines our relationship to a community kosher? No, as every angry parent knows. But what about the black separatist, or black radical demanding reparations? That’s justifiably more complex in America. On that particular complexity, of being African-American in America, still the best negotiations are Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. For Rorty’s interesting discussion of Baldwin and Elijah Muhammad, see 11-13 of Achieving Our Country (whose title comes from Baldwin’s book).
[11] Brandom elaborates this master argument in “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism” in Perspectives on Pragmatism. This particular argument about phenomenalism is the one Sellars forwards in his essay “Phenomenalism,” written around the same time as the more famous attack on the Myth of the Given.
[12] This was, of course, Rorty’s first famous argument in the philosophy of mind, striking an analogy between talk about the mind and talk about demons. Brandom suggests in “Vocabularies of Pragmatism” (in PP) that that argument hinged on the social pragmatism that he would later become famous for, there isolated on a social practice account of minds.
[13] If you noticed a wobble in my vocabulary in this last passage, you’re probably smarter than I am. And hopefully the wobble isn’t pernicious. Given the precision with which analytic reductions have been deployed, I technically slid between the semantic relation between what two things mean and an ontological relation between what two things are. Sloppy, I know, but when you work in the analytic idiom—where “how things are” is, because of the linguistic turn, always paraphrased as “talk about how things are”—it’s easy to do. However, the larger philosophical commitment pragmatists like Rorty and Brandom (if not Peirce, James, and Dewey) are in favor of keeping might be thought of as specifying that the category of “ontological relations” be reduced to another idiom, which is in part semantic. (This would take me too far afoot, but they are not committed to reducing everything to language, the linguistic idealism critics keep foisting on Rorty and Brandom. Brandom thinks they are only committed to what he calls “the entanglement thesis,” which in this context I understand to be the entanglement of pragmatic relations of nonlinguistic bodies with semantic relations of linguistic bodies.) For a recent discussion of Rorty's relationship to anti-analytic pragmatists, see "Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism." For a discussion of the relationship of language to experience after Quine and Sellars, see "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."
[14] In Between Saying and Doing, Brandom develops a very sophisticated apparatus for talking about talking. One area of underdeveloped territory he takes on is beginning to talk about the practices necessary or sufficient for deploying a vocabulary and, conversely, the vocabularies necessary or sufficient for deploying a practice. However, while Brandom favors talk of social practices, his aim in the book is to abstract away from that particular commitment, and so he speaks of (social) practices or (individual) abilities.
[15] BSD 12; this first chapter of his Locke Lectures also appears by itself in Perspectives on Pragmatism, this passage at 169.
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