Here are two definitions of metaphysics:
1) Metaphysics is the general framework, or understanding, or set of assumptions, that people unconsciously (with various degrees of self-consciousness) interpret, or see, or live in the world. As an activity, it is the attempt to make the unconscious self-conscious and in some cases modify (this activity is also known in some circles as “philosophy”).
2) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to display the basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings of reality (this activity is also sometimes known in some circles as “Platonism,” and in a few circles the acronymic “SOM”).
The above are designed for one purpose—to elaborate my position on “metaphysics,” which is Janus-faced because I have two philosophical parents. Mom (Pirsig) likes the word “metaphysics” and uses it freely to describe his philosophy. Dad (Rorty) doesn’t like the word “metaphysics,” generally because it causes headaches, and occasionally uses it to describe what he’s critiquing. What to do?
Well, it turns out that if you look closely, they are generally using two different definitions of what “metaphysics” is. With these two definitions we can split philosophers up into four groups:
A) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (1).
B) Philosophers who like definition (1) and do definition (2).
C) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (1).
D) Philosophers who like definition (2) and do definition (2).
Exemplars of each type:
A) Pirsig
B) Logical postivists
C) Rorty
D) Plato
The first side of the classifications, who likes which definition, is intended to display which definition of “metaphysics” people are wont to use when they are doing philosophy. The second, who does which, is intended to display—whether or not they understand themselves as doing so—which kind of metaphysics they were enacting. Hence: Pirsig likes and does the first definition and Rorty likes the second, but does the first. This happens because people who like the second definition fall into two categories: 1) unabashed Platonists/SOMists who fight against pragmatists/Pirsigians (D, above) and 2) pragmatists/Pirsigians who use “metaphysics” as the handle on which to grasp their enemy, Platonists/SOMists (C, above). Pirsig doesn’t use the word for that purpose, but I understand his purpose and so don’t get too upset what he uses the word neutrally and Rorty uses it pejoratively. (Also note the logical positivists, who thought they’d swept aside metaphysics, but were later shown to be enacting Plato’s involutions just as assuredly.)
At any rate, classifying stuff, slicing and dicing data, can be fun, but it must always be for some purpose—there is no neutrally motivated cut of the analytic knife (“neutral motivation” being in this context something of an oxymoron). Mine was to move Pirsig and Rorty together, but some questions arise as too how close that can be, and to how useful metaphysics(1) is in capturing the field of metaphysicians who aren’t Platonists. For, surely, metaphysics isn’t a turn inward, a personal investigation as metaphysics(1) seems to imply, but rather is about reality, as metaphysics(2) says. This objector may be quite noncommittal about Platonism, but they are interested in displaying the basic features of reality, not our minds or interpretive structure (or some other clever arrangement of words conveying the same thing). They are interested in creating a linguistic model of reality, much as physics creates a mathematical model of reality. These take seriously the etymological roots of “metaphysics,” noting that, alright, physics can do its thing, but metaphysicians still have to come in and mop up by noting, roughly, what makes physics possible—the structure of reality that escapes the mathematical models of physics.
This thought still seems to run in two different directions at once: in “mopping up,” does the metaphysician describe the basic structure of reality lurking behind the math, or do they describe the interrelation between physics and the rest of the world, or even, the interrelation between the disciplines that describe the world (which includes such “disciplines” as our regular effort at getting by day to day, i.e. “common sense”). After all, isn’t what escapes physics the stuff that chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, etc., do? Isn’t that why other disciplines got set up in the first place?
The fear of floating down the path laid out by metaphysics(1), an investigation into the ways in which we understand the world, is roughly the fear of subjectivism and of losing touch with the world. On the one hand, can we really lay out the basic model of reality by turning inward to the way that we, I, understand my relation to the world? Wouldn’t that just lay bare, simply and only, my relation to the world, leaving dark how everybody else deals with it, let alone how reality actually is? And there we have the other hand: if we just tinker and toy with our understanding of reality, doesn’t that still leave us the question of how our understanding relates to reality, and the question of how reality is (as opposed to how we understand it)?
The fear of losing touch with the world specifically arises with the snide comment: “You seem to want to talk about how we talk about reality, but I want to talk about reality.” This is often punctuated by referencing, for example, the difference between tigers and talking about tigers. When confronted by a ravenous Bengal, wouldn’t it be better to know about tigers, rather than how National Geographic talks about tigers? While on the one hand, there is a very obvious difference between tigers and talk about tigers (one is a tiger, the other is talk) that no one is denying, on the other hand, consider for a moment the fact that, if you actually did know quite a bit about how National Geographic and other professionals talk about tigers, you would also, concurrently, know a lot about tigers—how couldn’t you? Is it possible to somehow learn a lot about the activities of zoologists without learning anything about what they study?
What I want to suggest is that the fear of losing touch with reality because we are focused on something other than reality, how we talk about or our understanding of reality, shouldn’t be all that strong a fear because, under normal circumstances, the two will almost always dovetail. The reason for this is, in fact, the same reason for why the subjectivist fear is misplaced also. The fear of subjectivism arises because we take Descartes’ fear of solipsism too seriously. The fact of the matter is, though, that none of us are isolated monads floating in this soup called “Reality.” There are, in fact, quite a few of us monads floating in the soup and we’ve learned how to communicate with each other about our hopes and dreams, and more importantly for this little dissertation, how we are getting on in the soup. As we communicate with each other, coordinate our actions and the like, if what I believed about reality didn’t coordinate in large measure with what the other person believed about reality, then the communication would fail entirely. Random anomalous communication might be taken to be mistakes (like malaprops), but more systematic anomalies might be taken to be different languages, with attendant “difficulties in translation” for persistent anomalies (like English’s difficulty with the Greek aretê). However, more significant mismeasure between people might be labeled “insanity” and tremendous discontinuity is likely to be referred to as “noise.”
This is the conclusion that was reached by Donald Davidson in his work on philosophy of language, and its coordination with communication and truth. Davidson concluded that most of anyone’s beliefs must be true for communication to work—though that still leaves us in the dark about which ones are the true ones, let alone the problem of figuring out, with significant mismeasure, which person the crazy one. But Davidson’s conclusion does help dispel the Cartesian fear of solipsism—as long as communication works, we have as much certainty as we need that there is not only an External World, but also Other Minds.
So: we can investigate our understanding of reality and not fear subjectivism because it is our understanding we are investigating, most of our beliefs having been engendered by the community we grew up in, and we need not fear losing our grip on reality because this community’s understanding is its reality, in the sense, a very Darwinian one, that an understanding of the world that is around after all this time is one that works, and one that works must be one that largely teaches people how the world is.
A non-Platonist may still have some objection to metaphysics(1). After all, is not Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality more appropriately seen as a model of reality and not simply an understanding through which we see the world? Isn’t it a splicing of reality with Phædrus’ analytic knife, not just a splicing of our assumptions? The feeling behind this objection is that, yeah, investigating the way we individuals function in the world is good, but we also need an ontology, an investigation into how reality is apart from us. “You can show how reality, on the one side, and our experience of reality, on the other, must converge all you want, I think you can still talk about both of them separately and doing so will give us slightly different pieces of knowledge of the world.”
Ontology, study of the reality half of the experience/reality equation, is roughly the study of being, and it is often seen as the investigation into different kinds of being, or existence. Reading a random selection of writings on this topic over the course of the last 2,500 years will get you, not just different answers, but different kinds of answers. The metaphysical imagination has, however, been reigned in over the years, as some of its early speculations, say, in suggesting that water or fire was the root of all existence, were a little wild, indeed. In trying to circumvent all the speculative, metaphysical nonsense of preceding generations, Kant said that, rather than explain what kinds of existence there were (rather more poorly than other disciplines like the New Science), philosophy needed to show what was needed for existence to exist: what are the underpinnings, the structure that shapes the way this house exists?
There are a few problems with transcendental philosophy, but the broad thought—what has to exist for us to be able to do all of the things we are doing—is largely something that can, and should, be done. There is an infinite regress problem that arises, though, if you aren’t careful: unless a Pirsigian, for instance, is going to posit a non-physical kind of existence—which is a dangerous proposition—when somebody asks you what kind of existence the DQ/SQ split has, one of the few routes people feel comfortable anymore with is “it has the existence of a metaphysical proposition,” i.e. it’s something stated by people (which is Pirsig’s answer with “Western ghosts”). This, it is true, creates a circle that some people think is damaging—people need to exist for metaphysics to exist, which needs to exist for physics to exist, which needs to exist for people to exist—but pragmatists think that the circle becomes damaging and silly in equal measure: only by taking it too seriously. Part of what the word “universe” means is “that which would exist whether people do or not” and the only sense in which the universe is dependent on people is the sense in which “universe” is a word, and only people use words.
In the end, we are driven back to the Davidsonian outlook I described earlier: what we say about reality must converge with reality because there is no way we would keep saying these things if they weren’t useful, if they didn’t work, if they got reality drastically wrong. If what I said about the tiger got the tiger wrong, that way of speaking about tigers wouldn’t last. If I said, “tigers are cute and nice and love to play with me,” then I would likely get eaten upon meeting a tiger, and eventually everybody who believed that would get eaten, and thus nobody would be left thinking that about tigers. Forms of life, in Wittgenstein’s sense, evolve just as readily as biological life.
Some recalcitrant might still object, though, that just because a model of reality works doesn’t mean it is the right model, the correct model of reality. Shouldn’t we be searching for this model? Isn’t that what physics does? Since physics searches for the correct model of physical reality, shouldn’t metaphysics search for the correct model of reality in general?
The motivation behind “metaphysics,” under all definitions, but in particular those who want something more reality driven than my potted definition of metaphysics(1), is that there is more to the world, reality, and life than science. We need models of reality that display what this “more” is. This is all well and good, but the analogy with what science still displays the two sides of metaphysics, Platonic and non-Platonic. If metaphysics, like physics, is both a proliferation of hypotheses, of models, of how reality works and a winnowing of better ones, and we are willing to say with Davidson that these models do tell us how reality is, this doesn’t mean that our better and better models get closer to how reality is actually apart from our descriptions, how it should correctly be modeled. Not just Pirsig’s youthful fear of infinitely proliferating theories gets the Platonist here: how does the scientist, or metaphysician, know that he’s found the correct model, as opposed to the best one so far?
The origin of metaphysics, we say following Aristotle, was in trying to explain how reality was, like “water” (Thales) or “fire” (Anaximander) or “One” (Parmenides). The Greeks started to offer models of how reality worked. As some of the cosmologists got better and better at explaining how the “stuff” of the world worked, Plato said grandly that they were merely Giants, and that we should instead hope to be Gods. Plato saw clearly the rising tide of what we now call “science” and staked out quickly that there is more to the world than what it can tell us.
The trouble with Platonism—Plato worked out through history—is that it reduced to, not a set of hypotheses, but a method with which to tell the difference between the right ones and the wrong ones. And since philosophy—the original inquiry—kept spinning out different disciplines that worked out according to their own particular methods the difference between a good and a bad hypothesis, philosophy had to look for a job that it could do. Platonism, distinguished carefully from philosophy/metaphysics(1), settled on looking for the way to tell the difference between a hypothesis that worked (which is what a non-philosophy discipline will tell you) and a hypothesis that is correct—a certification procedure that has itself nothing to do with, say, what physics, psychology, or history does.
And this is, ultimately, the difference between Platonism and metaphysics(1). Metaphysics seeks to investigate our models of reality because they don’t always work the greatest. For instance, some philosophers have thought that Plato was wrong, that all we need are Giants, science, physics (call some of them "logical positivists"). We have learned, however, through experimentation and the testing of models, that Plato was probably right that there was more in the world than what science can describe. But the heart of a pragmatist philosophy of science is, roughly, “Of course, there’s more in this world than what science can describe because we still need more descriptions than scientific ones.” As long as there’s an audience for baseball, there will be a need for more than physics.
Platonism wants more, however. They want to know why and how these models are correct, as opposed to just the best ones available. This aim at correctness is what Pirsig and Rorty both want to deny. Pirsig's journey in ZMM was from the contemporary Subject/Object dilemma to the more deeply rooted problem of dialectic, “the parvenu.” SOM is paradigmatic of modern (post-Cartesian) philosophy, but it has first been infected by the larger problem of the Platonic search for basic, universal, ahistorical underpinnings to reality-as-such, a search that, given the production of individual disciplines of inquiry into how stuff in reality works (physics, psychology, history, etc.), will naturally give way to the production of a method—the dialectic. This is Pirsig's enemy in ZMM, and it is an enemy that is multifaceted in intellectual history.
Some Pirsigians think that materialism is the pernicious enemy that Pirsig was fighting with his philosophy. They believe that the growth of science was the growth of SOM, and both were the growth of our alienation from technology and, ultimately, our world. There are subtle connections between science, technology, SOM and alienation, but I don’t think Pirsig ever quite reduced SOM to what science does—SOM is an add-on to an otherwise wonderful tool called “science.”
In my view, one very general way to recapitulate the movement of ZMM is 1) Pirsig got caught in problems in the philosophy of science: what is a scientific theory? His solution was to say that a theory is a ghost generated by our evaluation of reality. 2) Pirsig got caught on the horns of the S/O Dilemma: if we have an evaluative relationship to reality, is the value in the subject or in the object? Pirsig's solution was to wonder how everything got split into subject and objects in the first place. 3) Pirsig trails the source to Plato: Plato thought there was a method, dialectic, that could detect Truth wherever it was. Pirsig sided with the Sophists who thought that Truth was an interplay of opinions, i.e. evaluations, between people.
It is the movement from (2) to (3)—or rather, history’s movement from Plato to Galileo’s science—that Pirsig leaves relatively obscure, and it hasn’t helped interpretations of him. With regard to the question of how the activity of science and the philosophical outlook of SOM relate, I would distinguish between two modern manifestations of what I’ve been calling “Platonism”: 1) scientific materialism and 2) Kantian realism. The first is the idea that science is a) the only route to Truth and b) everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. The second is the idea that a) Truth needs a foundation and b) both the mind and the world can only exist because of the other.
The Platonic common denominator of both scientific materialism and Kantian realism are contained in the (a) clauses. I would suggest that the (a) clauses can safely be detached from the (b) clauses, and that doing so eliminates the pernicious enemy Pirsig found in Plato and leaves us with two rather boring propositions. On the one hand, the first (b) clause: everything can be reduced to physical descriptions. Some may recoil, but I would pause and suggest that everything can be reduced to physical descriptions, but we also need more than just these physical descriptions to describe our world. (On reductionism generally, see my “Parable of the Reductionist”.) A metaphysical proposition can be reduced to the physical description of the breath leaving my lungs or the chemical properties of ink or the electrical properties of computer hardware, but doing so wouldn’t tell us anything about what the metaphysical proposition means and so we still would need metaphysical descriptions. The first (b) clause reduces to a bland physicalism which basically says, “Science is great, but we need more than physics to talk about what we want to talk about. Science isn’t the only Truth.” And the second (b) clause reduces to the tidy little transcendental circle I talked about earlier: people need to exist for language to exist, language needs to exist for physics to exist, physics needs to exist for people to exist.
I think the ultimate lesson to be drawn from this discussion is that it is difficult to answer the lead question: what is metaphysics? It is difficult because there have been many historical understandings of what the activity is and how it should be done. Any answer has to deal with a number of objections from slightly different understandings. The route with which I have dealt with the problem of what we are doing when we do philosophy/metaphysics is the route of finding a common enemy—it is a problem-oriented understanding of philosophical discourse. Every language has their own word for “tiger,” but somehow both the English and the French are able to deal with tigers—for the most part. Though I think there is an analogy between natural languages and the idiosyncratic philosophical jargons every particular philosopher develops in isolation from every other philosopher, I do not think everybody must be talking about the same exact thing. Davidson points towards this truth—most of our beliefs must be true, not all of them. This means that Cartesian skepticism is lame, but it does not mean that inquiry into better and better beliefs, better models of reality, must stop, or is pointless.
Philosophical discourse makes progress by assessing how individual jargons deal with the problems of reality. This problem-oriented understanding of philosophy and metaphysics allows us to see that, while Pirsig, Rorty, and Plato all talk differently, there are certain things that can be intertranslated well—and things that cannot. I have named a root that is untranslatable into the languages of Pirsig and Rorty—though they between them speak differently of it—Platonism. Seeing this root well, I think, is a precondition for understanding what more can and cannot be translated between the two, and this general process goes for philosophers generally.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
My Generation
This is something I wrote a little over a year ago. It is technically part of a much larger project that will probably never reach any stage of completion, but I found it in my notes and, though it isn't about anything in particular, it has the virtue of being sustained and liftable. It was also before Obama-fever took over the Left. My cues are from Rorty, obviously so (with some Pirsigian pathos), but the way Obama has swept the Left off its feet, I think, shows that Rorty was tapping into a vein that was far more real than I imagine he even imagined. I wish he'd lived to see it.
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My generation has become deathly cynical and I'm not sure who to blame or how to change it. It's no use simply blaming us, those goddamn kids, nor our parents, those goddamn hippies. Everybody's just responding to their environment and the environment changed, no doubt irrevocably, and we didn't. We don't know how to maintain faith anymore because we now live in a time when just about every object of faith has been exposed as flawed. Intellectuals have been doing it for centuries, that's the basic function of intellectuals, but before the Industrial Age it stayed amongst the very few. The creation of the printing press, the fall of Latin, and the rise of the Modern University changed all that. Education is for everyone now--or at least increasingly so. Well, that's the hope at least. Maybe a goal we still need to work towards. Oh, who am I kidding, college is still only for well-off, white pricks like me.
You see how easy it is? We know too much. Current reality blots out hope for the future. Thanks to the Democrats, colleges were flooded after World War II. And the flooding didn't stop. People began to learn more, know more stuff, the kind of things only the few had known before--namely how corrupt and broken down everything is, how the rich and powerful (kinda' redundant) are always trying (and succeeding) to fuck us over.
Knowledge isn't bad. Unmasking objects of faith isn't bad. Why we should call it an "unmasking" is a better question. The effect of unmaskings is to expose flaws. To call it an "unmasking," however, is to imply that we were lied to, that we were told it was flawless and--surprise!--it wasn't. What is unclear to me is why this should cause us to be cynical rather than simply more self-aware--noticing finally the continuity between governments and religions and, ya' know, every particular person we've ever met. The idea of flawless objects is so absurd, we should wonder how we ever got conned into believing it.
See, again: the cynicism. Because this is exactly what the hippies began to think: they had been had, conned. They began spouting Foucault (fuckin' French), about how Truth is Power and Power Truth. The Man's got the Power and he defines the Truth. Nobody noticed that once you dissolve everything into a power relation, you lose your ability to use "power" as a derogatory epithet--you'd just as well speak of the power to help as the power to hurt.
But such nuance is lost on most people, especially when they're angry and looking around for a stick to beat people with. The question is: why were they so angry? Why do we call our grandparents the "Greatest Generation" and our parents "dirty hippies"?
I think it wasn't only the fact that far more hippies went to college than their parents, but also the fact that our grandparents combined faith in an untarnished object with a war worthy of fighting and our parents an unmasked--absurd--lie with a war that should never have been fought. How does anyone not become disillusioned after that?
So we lost hope. We became cynical. The intellectuals left us without an object--however flawed--to hope for and became preoccupied with an increasingly boring series of unmaskings, an army of academics who'd never heard of the law of diminishing returns. Everyone else was left adrift. We feel powerless to change anything. We have only one vote in millions.
Which is just about the stupidest thing--we have one vote? We is many, and many votes can do many things. When these lazy-ass bastards with opinions till Sunday on what's wrong with everything whine, "Why vote? I only have one," I just wanna' punch them in their stupid ass face--do they really think, after all, that we were better off when only white, landed dudes with slaves were voting? And hey, I'm sure it was a lot fuckin' easier when the King was the only one making any decisions. It just tears me up when--hey, not everyone's got new ideas about where to go or how to get there, but you don't even vote!?
Take [identity obscured]: she has one of the coldest, narrowest circle of sentiments I have ever encountered. She laughed at 9/11, thought they (Americans) were getting what they deserved. She thinks that anybody who joins the military deserves whatever they get if they were stupid enough to join. She'll believe any fool conspiracy, up to and including astrology. I cannot believe someone as intelligent as she could be so malformed--but then I remember that Heidegger was a Nazi and one of the world's greatest philosophers, and if Popper has his way Plato was a fascist.
[Identity obscured] is dumb about politics. I can't make chicken casserole. I guess we're all stupid about something.
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My generation has become deathly cynical and I'm not sure who to blame or how to change it. It's no use simply blaming us, those goddamn kids, nor our parents, those goddamn hippies. Everybody's just responding to their environment and the environment changed, no doubt irrevocably, and we didn't. We don't know how to maintain faith anymore because we now live in a time when just about every object of faith has been exposed as flawed. Intellectuals have been doing it for centuries, that's the basic function of intellectuals, but before the Industrial Age it stayed amongst the very few. The creation of the printing press, the fall of Latin, and the rise of the Modern University changed all that. Education is for everyone now--or at least increasingly so. Well, that's the hope at least. Maybe a goal we still need to work towards. Oh, who am I kidding, college is still only for well-off, white pricks like me.
You see how easy it is? We know too much. Current reality blots out hope for the future. Thanks to the Democrats, colleges were flooded after World War II. And the flooding didn't stop. People began to learn more, know more stuff, the kind of things only the few had known before--namely how corrupt and broken down everything is, how the rich and powerful (kinda' redundant) are always trying (and succeeding) to fuck us over.
Knowledge isn't bad. Unmasking objects of faith isn't bad. Why we should call it an "unmasking" is a better question. The effect of unmaskings is to expose flaws. To call it an "unmasking," however, is to imply that we were lied to, that we were told it was flawless and--surprise!--it wasn't. What is unclear to me is why this should cause us to be cynical rather than simply more self-aware--noticing finally the continuity between governments and religions and, ya' know, every particular person we've ever met. The idea of flawless objects is so absurd, we should wonder how we ever got conned into believing it.
See, again: the cynicism. Because this is exactly what the hippies began to think: they had been had, conned. They began spouting Foucault (fuckin' French), about how Truth is Power and Power Truth. The Man's got the Power and he defines the Truth. Nobody noticed that once you dissolve everything into a power relation, you lose your ability to use "power" as a derogatory epithet--you'd just as well speak of the power to help as the power to hurt.
But such nuance is lost on most people, especially when they're angry and looking around for a stick to beat people with. The question is: why were they so angry? Why do we call our grandparents the "Greatest Generation" and our parents "dirty hippies"?
I think it wasn't only the fact that far more hippies went to college than their parents, but also the fact that our grandparents combined faith in an untarnished object with a war worthy of fighting and our parents an unmasked--absurd--lie with a war that should never have been fought. How does anyone not become disillusioned after that?
So we lost hope. We became cynical. The intellectuals left us without an object--however flawed--to hope for and became preoccupied with an increasingly boring series of unmaskings, an army of academics who'd never heard of the law of diminishing returns. Everyone else was left adrift. We feel powerless to change anything. We have only one vote in millions.
Which is just about the stupidest thing--we have one vote? We is many, and many votes can do many things. When these lazy-ass bastards with opinions till Sunday on what's wrong with everything whine, "Why vote? I only have one," I just wanna' punch them in their stupid ass face--do they really think, after all, that we were better off when only white, landed dudes with slaves were voting? And hey, I'm sure it was a lot fuckin' easier when the King was the only one making any decisions. It just tears me up when--hey, not everyone's got new ideas about where to go or how to get there, but you don't even vote!?
Take [identity obscured]: she has one of the coldest, narrowest circle of sentiments I have ever encountered. She laughed at 9/11, thought they (Americans) were getting what they deserved. She thinks that anybody who joins the military deserves whatever they get if they were stupid enough to join. She'll believe any fool conspiracy, up to and including astrology. I cannot believe someone as intelligent as she could be so malformed--but then I remember that Heidegger was a Nazi and one of the world's greatest philosophers, and if Popper has his way Plato was a fascist.
[Identity obscured] is dumb about politics. I can't make chicken casserole. I guess we're all stupid about something.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
What Happened to Political Philosophy?
*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.
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If you ask a 22-year-old philosophy major for a Great Philosophers shortlist, one that extends until, say, 1950, it would probably go something like this: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre. In fact, it would probably even go in that particular order. However, if you ask for a shortlist of the great political philosophers, that list would likely go something like this: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx. Significantly shorter, yes, but why so little overlap? One might think specialization, and certainly when Plato and Aristotle were at it, everything was more or less "love of wisdom." But if you ask for a list of the great metaphysicians, or epistemologists, you get pretty much the exact same list as the Greats list (though a savvy student will hesitate with metaphysician, and in some cases epistemologist, for everybody after Hegel). And what's with no names from the early part of the 20th century?
What happened to political philosophy?
When students take Philosophy 101, they are typically still taught that there are three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Some students (usually the ones already earmarked for phil-majorhood) will recognize the first two, but almost no one will have ever heard of the third. The professor, of course, will be quick to break down the etymological roots of all three, particularly the last: the study of "value". They will then explain that this branch breaks into the more well-known ethics and aesthetics. Occasionally that will be it--on with the show. Many times, though, the professor will also expand on the many sub-branches that have been created over time to help future majors swim later: philosophy of mind, of language, of science, of art (which has largely replaced "aesthetics"), moral philosophy (mainly the new moniker for philosophical study of "ethics"), political philosophy.
In 101 courses, however, political philosophy is usually overlooked, and sometimes even moral philosophy. Most of the focus remains on metaphysics and epistemology. The reasons for this are, naturally, many and complex, but some general considerations arise to answer some of the anomalies I pointed out earlier.
The most important reason is Kant. Kant institutionalized (for reasons having to do with his genius, but also because of the birth of modern universities and the professionalization--the professorialization--of philosophy) the historical line of personages that we now recite as the Great Ones by, during the creation of transcendental philosophy, splitting the difference between--what he named as--the traditions of Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). In fact, the very notion of "metaphysics" and "epistemology" as subjects, as different branches of philosophy, didn't really cohere until after Kant. ("Metaphysics," of course, is the name Aristotle's redactor gave to the first collection of writings after the previous collection, the Physics. Epistemology, I believe, wasn't coined until the 19th-century, in German as erkenntnistheorie.) Since Descartes began his philosophy by doubting everything he knew, and Kant then stepped back and wondered how we know anything at all, epistemology has seemed to be the most pressing item on the list, even right before the part where we divvy out the existence of things--how else, after all, would we know?
Epistemology becoming the king of the discipline, however, doesn't explain why the series of great political philosophers differs so much from the other series. It explains why the Great Metaphysicians series looks exactly like the Great Philosophers one, but not why Machiavelli didn't have a theory of knowledge, nor Descartes a theory of the state.
I think the explanation has to run through Plato's distaste for the affairs of humanity. "But Plato wrote the first comprehensive political theory?" It is true, Plato is usually the first stop for political philosophy, but you have to dig into what he was saying--Plato wanted to banish politics. Political, and moral, philosophy were supposed to be those branches where we deal with the Problems of Men, but ever since Plato wiped his brush of Philosophy over the canvas of humanity's interests, banishing Poetry, Politics, and Rhetoric, philosophers who have turned their attention to the temporal have all struggled with the tension between the subject matter's obvious humanness and their desire to rise above it. Plato created the desire to float into the heavens precisely because he wanted to push aside the things that otherwise seem the most distinctively human. Do animals have politics? Do they capture each other's passions with moving oratory? No, but they do all have a mode of being in the world. Our mode would seem to be like Aristotle said, animals with politics, but Plato put his stamp on humanity by suggesting that we were most human, not by doing all these human-y things, but when we rise above, that we were most human when we were rubbing elbows with eternity. Plato did it by creating a new activity that would be definitive of humanity, call it philosophy, theory or contemplation, that would allow us to show off our celestial side.
The impact was that Hobbes and Machiavelli seem to philosophers to be cynics, reveling in the baseness of humanity. To those still marked strongly by Plato, moral--and particularly political--philosophy needed to be devoid of the crass things we do on a regular basis, ego struggles, white lies, above all sex: these things had no place in a proper understanding of ethical behavior. This led to the abortive position of emotivism, and it led to subdisciplines--really, redefinitions of the discipline--like "moral theory" and "metaethics." All of these maneuvers were designed to get the human out of morality. But how the hell do you do that in politics?
Platonism never could figure out what to do with politics because it just seemed so coarse, after all, naturally and essentially having to do with other people. So philosophers have increasingly isolated themselves over 2500 years from the affairs of people. At least in regards to what they do professionally, politics was something they looked oddly at because it was the realm of human action, whereas their domain seems directly opposed to it, the realm of contemplation. They keep trying to affect human action, how we act in the world, but the further we get from Plato, the worse their specifically philosophical attempts seem. The dynamic of Platonism was such that it created a rift between the actual and the ideal, encapsulated in More's re-Platonizing of political philosophy, Utopia. More wanted to affect action, his book was a political tract that was to have real political effect, but Plato's stamp shows it's true colors in how we think of More's coined word today: utopic thinking is something that's out of touch with reality.[fn.1] Think of that old, post-60s Cold War chestnut: "Sure, communism works in theory, but...."
The struggle between Plato and the Sophists was the struggle between sophia and techne. "Loving wisdom" was something that Plato introduced, and it was not what other's had in mind. Pierre Hadot gives us a good reconstruction of what Plato did to wisdom in his What is Ancient Philosophy?. Early philosophers had no notion of philosophia, but they did think of wisdom as a kind of know-how, which is still the most commonly used notion of the word in common sense. Techne we can translate as "skill," and we can see how 5th-century intellectuals before Socrates might have thought sophia and techne very similar notions, wisdom being a generalized know-how and various skills being particular kinds of know-how. The epitaph of Thrasymachus, Plato's punching bag at the beginning of the Republic, read: "My career is sophia," which, in the Sophists adoring naïveté, they thought they could teach. Socrates' strategy and goal was to show that they were full of it by asking them what, exactly, they were teaching. The particular bit they were teaching was arete.
The word has gone through a number of stages of translation, which itself gives us a potted history of philosophy's struggle between theory and practice, contemplation and action. The oldest English translations we were living with at the beginning of the 20th century was arete as "virtue." The trouble with virtue is that it is something we tend to itemize into various virtues, like the virtue of compassion or temperance. So arete seemed to equivocate between various things we could teach, and teach better by knowing what it, in its various particular guises, was (thus lending credence to Plato's turn to the heavens) and a more hard to define general thing, as in, "That person has virtue." They have virtue? What, exactly, do you mean?
What, indeed, and it becomes worse, and Socrates' rancor over the Sophists even more understandable, when we move to arete as "excellence," a translation that started to become popular around the middle of the century. "That person has excellence" doesn't even make much sense in English, but it is closer to what the Greeks meant. How on earth do you teach excellence, in general? The difficulty seems to be that it is only by being more specific to an activity can you describe how one is excellent in it. I think the way we boggle at the question of teaching arete so defined is the degree to which we take Socrates as making an advance in our moral knowledge--he was right to call the Sophists out on teaching arete, for what the hell does it mean to do that generally?
Alexander Nehamas has proposed going even further, and suggests translating arete as "success." Now, on the one hand, this makes sense of the Sophists in a way that "excellence" does not. The Sophists were interested in the affairs of humanity and in Greece, at that time, the only way to make it as a citizen of a city-state, particularly in Athens, was by being able to perform orally in front of an audience. Athens in the 5th century became the seat of the birth of both modern democracy and a modern judiciary. Every citizen was their own politician and their own lawyer, every citizen expected to be able to argue and defend their own viewpoint in politics and their own case in law. Nowadays we bemoan the rise of professional politics as a weakening of the idea of democracy, with its sense of everyone having their own voice. We have a (largely correct) sense that having professional politicians makes it easier for citizens to become uninformed, when the only way for a true democracy to work, as the American Founding Fathers foresaw, is to have an informed electorate. And yet, there is a strong analogy between politics and law, reflected in the view of them the Athenians took--every citizen their own law-maker and -interpreter--and in the history of those activities since: no one bats an eye at the professionalization of law. How can any person be expected to argue the ins and outs of their case when there is such a massive amount to know about law, being the particular kind of thing it is?
The Sophists were performing a much needed service for the Athenians by teaching them how to be successful in their duties as a citizen of Athens. People don't just naturally know to argue and present the best case. You have to learn how to do that, and that's what the Sophists were doing: teaching the Athenian's success in the domains of politics and law. But because of the nature of concepts and language, these ideas were not the evolved notions we have, but still being tried out. The Sophists said they were teaching "success," but--and this is on the other hand--Socrates perceived rightly a problem with teaching a general skill called "virtue" or "excellence" or "success." Like Socrates, we wonder what it could possibly mean to teach "success" generally, an even worse proposition than "excellence."
Plato rectified the matter by giving a particular spin to sophia that distinguished it from techne. Plato took over from Socrates the idea that "wisdom" was actually an an ineffable object. Socrates, noting the absurdity of trying to teach a general techne called arete, called attention to it by asking the teachers what exactly it was they were teaching--give me a definition. Socrates would then dialectically beat the crap out of every definition given, and declare at the end that, if you can't give it a defensible definition, then you must not know what you are doing. QED. Plato thought this brilliant, which it was, a terrific strategy on Socrates' part to make fun of the Sophists. But Plato thought it was more than a terrific way to show up the Sophists, a way of punching up the difficulty in teaching something general, like "success." Plato thought that Socrates was showing us what true wisdom was, which in Socrates' analysis always ended up a blank--no definition ever survives. True wisdom was acknowledging the fact that we were fallen beings (hence Socratic superiority in knowing that you don't know) and turning it into the essence of an activity definitive of humanity.
That was the trap Socrates set for Plato, and that Plato, for lack of knowing how to resolve it, repeated in his writings, indelibly marking the tradition--philosophers must teach something because we are fallen beings who have to act in the world, but the sad truth of it is, we can never have what we most want. Socrates placed wisdom beyond the bounds of reason by showing that if we could not define the essence of an object, we could not teach it. But we've had to go on teaching it anyways. The ultimate parody of the struggle between the Sophists and Platonists, between not knowing what to teach and teaching something, comes to us in the form of an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch. The younger brother asks his older, successful brother for advice for an upcoming interview, whether he has a secret weapon. The older, wiser brother makes him promise not to tell anybody and, noting that it is kind of a long-term strategy, asks him how much time he has. The younger brother says he has only a week, and the older brother says that it still might work. His secret wisdom, the secret to all of his success, the strategy he has employed? "Every time a penny passes through your hands, stick it up your ass. And then spend it." The younger brother first thinks he's joking, and then recoils at the thought that this is what his brother does, this is his secret:
"Thanks Nick, yeah. I thought you were really going to help me. How is sticking pennies up my ass going to help me?"
"You don't just stick them up your ass, you spend them. I told you, it's a long-term strategy. I've been doing this for 11 years now, and every day for the last 11 years, I've stuck $30 in pennies up my ass. I use them for everything, cab rides, movie theaters, groceries."
"What does that accomplish?"
"Will you listen? That's a lot of ass-pennies I've got out there, my friend. And here's where the magic comes in: when I meet someone who intimidates me, who puts me on edge, a real 'hard ass,' I just think to myself, 'they've probably handled one of my ass-pennies.' In fact, they probably got one in their pocket right then. That just seems to sort of give me the upper-hand. I mean, hey, I haven't touched anything that's been in their ass."
And that is what has happened to political philosophy. Plato made wisdom ineffable, which means the secret of life could be, according to the philosophers, sticking pennies in your ass. Nothing is closer to the heart of the human experiment than our negotiations with each other over how we are to function together--but is that the essence of humanity? "Go ahead, defend that thesis. I will destroy it," says the ghost of Socrates. Plato thought the wisdom of Socrates was the idea of an ineffable object of supremacy that was pure and holy and so extraordinarily not human, totally free of humanity's taint. What we should come to acknowledge as the wisdom of Socrates, however, is not the inhumannes of abstraction, but the total inanity of looking for abstract essences that somehow control particular, specific human activities. No general definition of arete is going to tell us how to teach it as a general techne. Though the Sophists thought of themselves as teaching a general skill called "success," careers spent in service to wisdom, what they were actually doing was something more specific, teaching Athenians how to survive in the Greek city-state environment.
Philosophy has been trying to work out the relationship between our self-understanding of what we are doing and what we are actually doing ever since Plato. One direction has been to play out the consequences of Plato's self-understanding of what philosophy was, and since it was directed towards an ineffable object, the effect was to remove philosophy further and further away from anything applicable to the affairs of humanity. Once you could connect it to what we do, a Platonist would come along and go, "Oh, well, that must not be what we should be talking about then," because the very fact that it was useful for humanity showed that it was not what Plato was talking about. The other direction was in the direction of the Sophists, the actual activity of philosophizing, which is a practical activity of teaching people how to think. We know, now, that that is what the Sophists were actually doing (and Socrates doing better) because we know with much better clarity and understanding that thinking is a social activity, even when done alone. The activity of reflection is only possible by the internalizing of a voice different from our own in our mind. We think by making explicit in our minds some thesis which we would otherwise bring out, make into action, but instead of actualizing it, we try and defeat it, play out the consequences of the idea in our head, look for alternatives--all things that involve pretending to be someone or something else with a different viewpoint.
The Greeks were trying to teach us how to think, and though Plato totally misconstrued the activity, we can still see the virtue in philosophy. Political philosophy is that amorphous activity that bounces back and forth between political realities, details, behavior, laws and ideal fulminations of how things might be, should be. Political philosophy has historically been neglected in the canons of disciplines because it is the true king discipline--not philosophy as Kant thought, not science as Comte thought, not religion, not psychology, not linguistics, not history, not any of these. Political philosophy is the great discipline because all other disciplines, all other activities find their place within it. It is the conjunction of the two sides of our humanity, action and contemplation. It is a thing that is almost impossible to foresee how it is to be done well. Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Albert Hirschman, Albert Hofstadter, Thom Hartmann, Paul Krugman, Foucault, Rorty, Pirsig, Harold Bloom, Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Michael Oakeshott, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, Jonathon Lear, Randy Rhodes, Aaron Sorkin, Upton Sinclair, Milan Kundera, Cindy Sheehan, Judith Shklar, Randolph Bourne, Alexis de Toqueville, Jefferson, Dewey, Markos, Stanley Fish, Dan Savage, Elaine Scarry, John Hollander, Walter Ong, Walter Kaufmann, Michael Walzer, Habermas, Adorno, Gadamer, Louis Menand, Clifford Geertz, Ruth Benedict, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Annette Baier--they have all written things that can aid a political philosopher. Some self-consciously do political philosophy, some politics, some subjects related to politics, or philosophy, but a few in a connection that is probably opaque until I relate how I've, at least, found wisdom on their pages relatable to something called "political philosophy."
What do they all have in common? Nothing. Doing good political philosophy is impossible to define in a way that will predict where you can find wisdom. And that's generalizable to life. And because utterly unpredictable, professionals at it are partly historians and commentators on a diffuse array of writers, thinkers, singers, painters, speakers, as many activities as you can list--the political philosopher creates a canon of wisdom-creators and because it will partly be so idiosyncratic because of its diffuseness (we all find wisdom in different places), it is hard to see that profession as massively important. Which is just as well, because the fact that political philosophy is what it is also makes all of us political philosophers in the required sense, and the notion of specialists in political philosophy either stupid (because Platonic) or just meaning, "Well-read in other wisdom-seekers."
What happened to political philosophy? It has been going through the growing pains one could safely predict of anything that evolves, but in it's peculiar case, it has been the reflection of Humanity's Evolutionary Story as it, in effect, wishes to relate its past, present and future all at once. The mark of Platonism, carried out, makes philosophers understand whatever it is they teach to be effectively like ass-pennies--look, wisdom is ineffable, so as far as anyone can know, sticking these pennies in your ass is going to make you successful and better at life. And yet, philosophers and intellectuals are successful at making humanity better. What 2500 years has taught us is that the self-understanding of what philosophy is that Plato gave us might be the problem.
Endnotes
[1]POSTSCRIPT, JULY 2010: I have since learned that this sentence is wrong about More. I don't know about "re-Platonizing" (I think I just want to distinguish Machiavelli from More, but I don't know enough about the history of predecessors or successors), but Judith Shklar argues that More was Platonic in just the way I was suggesting he wasn't: More had no intent to be politically efficacious. Her two essays on the idea of utopias in Political Thought and Political Thinkers are invaluable to any kind of thinking about this. Shklar further argues that things began to change for political philosophy, beginning to shuck it's Platonic heritage, with what she calls the "birth of historical optimism," which was a combination of the increased exploits of technology--leading to greater material wealth--and the rise of a middle-class that began challenging aristocratic control of power (loosely defined as whatever is at the top of any hierarchy, be it a single king or a host of nobility), and these led to a greater appreciation of history (culminating in Hegel). The interplay between increased theoretical grasp (science) leading to increased causal control (technology) leading to increased material production (industrial) leading to increased wealth (economics) leading to increased power (politics) leading to a different increase of theoretical grasp (i.e., "hey, I think we can change things"), which leads to democracy, is a full story we are getting better and better at telling, but I haven't read anybody that puts it all together in a pithy way.
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If you ask a 22-year-old philosophy major for a Great Philosophers shortlist, one that extends until, say, 1950, it would probably go something like this: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre. In fact, it would probably even go in that particular order. However, if you ask for a shortlist of the great political philosophers, that list would likely go something like this: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx. Significantly shorter, yes, but why so little overlap? One might think specialization, and certainly when Plato and Aristotle were at it, everything was more or less "love of wisdom." But if you ask for a list of the great metaphysicians, or epistemologists, you get pretty much the exact same list as the Greats list (though a savvy student will hesitate with metaphysician, and in some cases epistemologist, for everybody after Hegel). And what's with no names from the early part of the 20th century?
What happened to political philosophy?
When students take Philosophy 101, they are typically still taught that there are three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Some students (usually the ones already earmarked for phil-majorhood) will recognize the first two, but almost no one will have ever heard of the third. The professor, of course, will be quick to break down the etymological roots of all three, particularly the last: the study of "value". They will then explain that this branch breaks into the more well-known ethics and aesthetics. Occasionally that will be it--on with the show. Many times, though, the professor will also expand on the many sub-branches that have been created over time to help future majors swim later: philosophy of mind, of language, of science, of art (which has largely replaced "aesthetics"), moral philosophy (mainly the new moniker for philosophical study of "ethics"), political philosophy.
In 101 courses, however, political philosophy is usually overlooked, and sometimes even moral philosophy. Most of the focus remains on metaphysics and epistemology. The reasons for this are, naturally, many and complex, but some general considerations arise to answer some of the anomalies I pointed out earlier.
The most important reason is Kant. Kant institutionalized (for reasons having to do with his genius, but also because of the birth of modern universities and the professionalization--the professorialization--of philosophy) the historical line of personages that we now recite as the Great Ones by, during the creation of transcendental philosophy, splitting the difference between--what he named as--the traditions of Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). In fact, the very notion of "metaphysics" and "epistemology" as subjects, as different branches of philosophy, didn't really cohere until after Kant. ("Metaphysics," of course, is the name Aristotle's redactor gave to the first collection of writings after the previous collection, the Physics. Epistemology, I believe, wasn't coined until the 19th-century, in German as erkenntnistheorie.) Since Descartes began his philosophy by doubting everything he knew, and Kant then stepped back and wondered how we know anything at all, epistemology has seemed to be the most pressing item on the list, even right before the part where we divvy out the existence of things--how else, after all, would we know?
Epistemology becoming the king of the discipline, however, doesn't explain why the series of great political philosophers differs so much from the other series. It explains why the Great Metaphysicians series looks exactly like the Great Philosophers one, but not why Machiavelli didn't have a theory of knowledge, nor Descartes a theory of the state.
I think the explanation has to run through Plato's distaste for the affairs of humanity. "But Plato wrote the first comprehensive political theory?" It is true, Plato is usually the first stop for political philosophy, but you have to dig into what he was saying--Plato wanted to banish politics. Political, and moral, philosophy were supposed to be those branches where we deal with the Problems of Men, but ever since Plato wiped his brush of Philosophy over the canvas of humanity's interests, banishing Poetry, Politics, and Rhetoric, philosophers who have turned their attention to the temporal have all struggled with the tension between the subject matter's obvious humanness and their desire to rise above it. Plato created the desire to float into the heavens precisely because he wanted to push aside the things that otherwise seem the most distinctively human. Do animals have politics? Do they capture each other's passions with moving oratory? No, but they do all have a mode of being in the world. Our mode would seem to be like Aristotle said, animals with politics, but Plato put his stamp on humanity by suggesting that we were most human, not by doing all these human-y things, but when we rise above, that we were most human when we were rubbing elbows with eternity. Plato did it by creating a new activity that would be definitive of humanity, call it philosophy, theory or contemplation, that would allow us to show off our celestial side.
The impact was that Hobbes and Machiavelli seem to philosophers to be cynics, reveling in the baseness of humanity. To those still marked strongly by Plato, moral--and particularly political--philosophy needed to be devoid of the crass things we do on a regular basis, ego struggles, white lies, above all sex: these things had no place in a proper understanding of ethical behavior. This led to the abortive position of emotivism, and it led to subdisciplines--really, redefinitions of the discipline--like "moral theory" and "metaethics." All of these maneuvers were designed to get the human out of morality. But how the hell do you do that in politics?
Platonism never could figure out what to do with politics because it just seemed so coarse, after all, naturally and essentially having to do with other people. So philosophers have increasingly isolated themselves over 2500 years from the affairs of people. At least in regards to what they do professionally, politics was something they looked oddly at because it was the realm of human action, whereas their domain seems directly opposed to it, the realm of contemplation. They keep trying to affect human action, how we act in the world, but the further we get from Plato, the worse their specifically philosophical attempts seem. The dynamic of Platonism was such that it created a rift between the actual and the ideal, encapsulated in More's re-Platonizing of political philosophy, Utopia. More wanted to affect action, his book was a political tract that was to have real political effect, but Plato's stamp shows it's true colors in how we think of More's coined word today: utopic thinking is something that's out of touch with reality.[fn.1] Think of that old, post-60s Cold War chestnut: "Sure, communism works in theory, but...."
The struggle between Plato and the Sophists was the struggle between sophia and techne. "Loving wisdom" was something that Plato introduced, and it was not what other's had in mind. Pierre Hadot gives us a good reconstruction of what Plato did to wisdom in his What is Ancient Philosophy?. Early philosophers had no notion of philosophia, but they did think of wisdom as a kind of know-how, which is still the most commonly used notion of the word in common sense. Techne we can translate as "skill," and we can see how 5th-century intellectuals before Socrates might have thought sophia and techne very similar notions, wisdom being a generalized know-how and various skills being particular kinds of know-how. The epitaph of Thrasymachus, Plato's punching bag at the beginning of the Republic, read: "My career is sophia," which, in the Sophists adoring naïveté, they thought they could teach. Socrates' strategy and goal was to show that they were full of it by asking them what, exactly, they were teaching. The particular bit they were teaching was arete.
The word has gone through a number of stages of translation, which itself gives us a potted history of philosophy's struggle between theory and practice, contemplation and action. The oldest English translations we were living with at the beginning of the 20th century was arete as "virtue." The trouble with virtue is that it is something we tend to itemize into various virtues, like the virtue of compassion or temperance. So arete seemed to equivocate between various things we could teach, and teach better by knowing what it, in its various particular guises, was (thus lending credence to Plato's turn to the heavens) and a more hard to define general thing, as in, "That person has virtue." They have virtue? What, exactly, do you mean?
What, indeed, and it becomes worse, and Socrates' rancor over the Sophists even more understandable, when we move to arete as "excellence," a translation that started to become popular around the middle of the century. "That person has excellence" doesn't even make much sense in English, but it is closer to what the Greeks meant. How on earth do you teach excellence, in general? The difficulty seems to be that it is only by being more specific to an activity can you describe how one is excellent in it. I think the way we boggle at the question of teaching arete so defined is the degree to which we take Socrates as making an advance in our moral knowledge--he was right to call the Sophists out on teaching arete, for what the hell does it mean to do that generally?
Alexander Nehamas has proposed going even further, and suggests translating arete as "success." Now, on the one hand, this makes sense of the Sophists in a way that "excellence" does not. The Sophists were interested in the affairs of humanity and in Greece, at that time, the only way to make it as a citizen of a city-state, particularly in Athens, was by being able to perform orally in front of an audience. Athens in the 5th century became the seat of the birth of both modern democracy and a modern judiciary. Every citizen was their own politician and their own lawyer, every citizen expected to be able to argue and defend their own viewpoint in politics and their own case in law. Nowadays we bemoan the rise of professional politics as a weakening of the idea of democracy, with its sense of everyone having their own voice. We have a (largely correct) sense that having professional politicians makes it easier for citizens to become uninformed, when the only way for a true democracy to work, as the American Founding Fathers foresaw, is to have an informed electorate. And yet, there is a strong analogy between politics and law, reflected in the view of them the Athenians took--every citizen their own law-maker and -interpreter--and in the history of those activities since: no one bats an eye at the professionalization of law. How can any person be expected to argue the ins and outs of their case when there is such a massive amount to know about law, being the particular kind of thing it is?
The Sophists were performing a much needed service for the Athenians by teaching them how to be successful in their duties as a citizen of Athens. People don't just naturally know to argue and present the best case. You have to learn how to do that, and that's what the Sophists were doing: teaching the Athenian's success in the domains of politics and law. But because of the nature of concepts and language, these ideas were not the evolved notions we have, but still being tried out. The Sophists said they were teaching "success," but--and this is on the other hand--Socrates perceived rightly a problem with teaching a general skill called "virtue" or "excellence" or "success." Like Socrates, we wonder what it could possibly mean to teach "success" generally, an even worse proposition than "excellence."
Plato rectified the matter by giving a particular spin to sophia that distinguished it from techne. Plato took over from Socrates the idea that "wisdom" was actually an an ineffable object. Socrates, noting the absurdity of trying to teach a general techne called arete, called attention to it by asking the teachers what exactly it was they were teaching--give me a definition. Socrates would then dialectically beat the crap out of every definition given, and declare at the end that, if you can't give it a defensible definition, then you must not know what you are doing. QED. Plato thought this brilliant, which it was, a terrific strategy on Socrates' part to make fun of the Sophists. But Plato thought it was more than a terrific way to show up the Sophists, a way of punching up the difficulty in teaching something general, like "success." Plato thought that Socrates was showing us what true wisdom was, which in Socrates' analysis always ended up a blank--no definition ever survives. True wisdom was acknowledging the fact that we were fallen beings (hence Socratic superiority in knowing that you don't know) and turning it into the essence of an activity definitive of humanity.
That was the trap Socrates set for Plato, and that Plato, for lack of knowing how to resolve it, repeated in his writings, indelibly marking the tradition--philosophers must teach something because we are fallen beings who have to act in the world, but the sad truth of it is, we can never have what we most want. Socrates placed wisdom beyond the bounds of reason by showing that if we could not define the essence of an object, we could not teach it. But we've had to go on teaching it anyways. The ultimate parody of the struggle between the Sophists and Platonists, between not knowing what to teach and teaching something, comes to us in the form of an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch. The younger brother asks his older, successful brother for advice for an upcoming interview, whether he has a secret weapon. The older, wiser brother makes him promise not to tell anybody and, noting that it is kind of a long-term strategy, asks him how much time he has. The younger brother says he has only a week, and the older brother says that it still might work. His secret wisdom, the secret to all of his success, the strategy he has employed? "Every time a penny passes through your hands, stick it up your ass. And then spend it." The younger brother first thinks he's joking, and then recoils at the thought that this is what his brother does, this is his secret:
"Thanks Nick, yeah. I thought you were really going to help me. How is sticking pennies up my ass going to help me?"
"You don't just stick them up your ass, you spend them. I told you, it's a long-term strategy. I've been doing this for 11 years now, and every day for the last 11 years, I've stuck $30 in pennies up my ass. I use them for everything, cab rides, movie theaters, groceries."
"What does that accomplish?"
"Will you listen? That's a lot of ass-pennies I've got out there, my friend. And here's where the magic comes in: when I meet someone who intimidates me, who puts me on edge, a real 'hard ass,' I just think to myself, 'they've probably handled one of my ass-pennies.' In fact, they probably got one in their pocket right then. That just seems to sort of give me the upper-hand. I mean, hey, I haven't touched anything that's been in their ass."
And that is what has happened to political philosophy. Plato made wisdom ineffable, which means the secret of life could be, according to the philosophers, sticking pennies in your ass. Nothing is closer to the heart of the human experiment than our negotiations with each other over how we are to function together--but is that the essence of humanity? "Go ahead, defend that thesis. I will destroy it," says the ghost of Socrates. Plato thought the wisdom of Socrates was the idea of an ineffable object of supremacy that was pure and holy and so extraordinarily not human, totally free of humanity's taint. What we should come to acknowledge as the wisdom of Socrates, however, is not the inhumannes of abstraction, but the total inanity of looking for abstract essences that somehow control particular, specific human activities. No general definition of arete is going to tell us how to teach it as a general techne. Though the Sophists thought of themselves as teaching a general skill called "success," careers spent in service to wisdom, what they were actually doing was something more specific, teaching Athenians how to survive in the Greek city-state environment.
Philosophy has been trying to work out the relationship between our self-understanding of what we are doing and what we are actually doing ever since Plato. One direction has been to play out the consequences of Plato's self-understanding of what philosophy was, and since it was directed towards an ineffable object, the effect was to remove philosophy further and further away from anything applicable to the affairs of humanity. Once you could connect it to what we do, a Platonist would come along and go, "Oh, well, that must not be what we should be talking about then," because the very fact that it was useful for humanity showed that it was not what Plato was talking about. The other direction was in the direction of the Sophists, the actual activity of philosophizing, which is a practical activity of teaching people how to think. We know, now, that that is what the Sophists were actually doing (and Socrates doing better) because we know with much better clarity and understanding that thinking is a social activity, even when done alone. The activity of reflection is only possible by the internalizing of a voice different from our own in our mind. We think by making explicit in our minds some thesis which we would otherwise bring out, make into action, but instead of actualizing it, we try and defeat it, play out the consequences of the idea in our head, look for alternatives--all things that involve pretending to be someone or something else with a different viewpoint.
The Greeks were trying to teach us how to think, and though Plato totally misconstrued the activity, we can still see the virtue in philosophy. Political philosophy is that amorphous activity that bounces back and forth between political realities, details, behavior, laws and ideal fulminations of how things might be, should be. Political philosophy has historically been neglected in the canons of disciplines because it is the true king discipline--not philosophy as Kant thought, not science as Comte thought, not religion, not psychology, not linguistics, not history, not any of these. Political philosophy is the great discipline because all other disciplines, all other activities find their place within it. It is the conjunction of the two sides of our humanity, action and contemplation. It is a thing that is almost impossible to foresee how it is to be done well. Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, John Rawls, Albert Hirschman, Albert Hofstadter, Thom Hartmann, Paul Krugman, Foucault, Rorty, Pirsig, Harold Bloom, Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Michael Oakeshott, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, Jonathon Lear, Randy Rhodes, Aaron Sorkin, Upton Sinclair, Milan Kundera, Cindy Sheehan, Judith Shklar, Randolph Bourne, Alexis de Toqueville, Jefferson, Dewey, Markos, Stanley Fish, Dan Savage, Elaine Scarry, John Hollander, Walter Ong, Walter Kaufmann, Michael Walzer, Habermas, Adorno, Gadamer, Louis Menand, Clifford Geertz, Ruth Benedict, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Annette Baier--they have all written things that can aid a political philosopher. Some self-consciously do political philosophy, some politics, some subjects related to politics, or philosophy, but a few in a connection that is probably opaque until I relate how I've, at least, found wisdom on their pages relatable to something called "political philosophy."
What do they all have in common? Nothing. Doing good political philosophy is impossible to define in a way that will predict where you can find wisdom. And that's generalizable to life. And because utterly unpredictable, professionals at it are partly historians and commentators on a diffuse array of writers, thinkers, singers, painters, speakers, as many activities as you can list--the political philosopher creates a canon of wisdom-creators and because it will partly be so idiosyncratic because of its diffuseness (we all find wisdom in different places), it is hard to see that profession as massively important. Which is just as well, because the fact that political philosophy is what it is also makes all of us political philosophers in the required sense, and the notion of specialists in political philosophy either stupid (because Platonic) or just meaning, "Well-read in other wisdom-seekers."
What happened to political philosophy? It has been going through the growing pains one could safely predict of anything that evolves, but in it's peculiar case, it has been the reflection of Humanity's Evolutionary Story as it, in effect, wishes to relate its past, present and future all at once. The mark of Platonism, carried out, makes philosophers understand whatever it is they teach to be effectively like ass-pennies--look, wisdom is ineffable, so as far as anyone can know, sticking these pennies in your ass is going to make you successful and better at life. And yet, philosophers and intellectuals are successful at making humanity better. What 2500 years has taught us is that the self-understanding of what philosophy is that Plato gave us might be the problem.
Endnotes
[1]POSTSCRIPT, JULY 2010: I have since learned that this sentence is wrong about More. I don't know about "re-Platonizing" (I think I just want to distinguish Machiavelli from More, but I don't know enough about the history of predecessors or successors), but Judith Shklar argues that More was Platonic in just the way I was suggesting he wasn't: More had no intent to be politically efficacious. Her two essays on the idea of utopias in Political Thought and Political Thinkers are invaluable to any kind of thinking about this. Shklar further argues that things began to change for political philosophy, beginning to shuck it's Platonic heritage, with what she calls the "birth of historical optimism," which was a combination of the increased exploits of technology--leading to greater material wealth--and the rise of a middle-class that began challenging aristocratic control of power (loosely defined as whatever is at the top of any hierarchy, be it a single king or a host of nobility), and these led to a greater appreciation of history (culminating in Hegel). The interplay between increased theoretical grasp (science) leading to increased causal control (technology) leading to increased material production (industrial) leading to increased wealth (economics) leading to increased power (politics) leading to a different increase of theoretical grasp (i.e., "hey, I think we can change things"), which leads to democracy, is a full story we are getting better and better at telling, but I haven't read anybody that puts it all together in a pithy way.
poem
Faintly forgetting the fervor for a second,
The triune head of the Savior paused his fecund
Story-telling, arguing and parabolas
To look all about at all of the fabulous
Sons and daughters that were playing in his muck.
Curious at their upheaval, they had no luck
In securing the station history secured him.
For his genius created a veil very thin
That hid from his view his impossible constraints
On love and wisdom and life. With silenced complaints,
He created a template for mediocrities.
Revising the words of his beloved Socrates:
"The unexamined life is not yet worth living,
But it will be as soon as seeing is believing."
The triune head of the Savior paused his fecund
Story-telling, arguing and parabolas
To look all about at all of the fabulous
Sons and daughters that were playing in his muck.
Curious at their upheaval, they had no luck
In securing the station history secured him.
For his genius created a veil very thin
That hid from his view his impossible constraints
On love and wisdom and life. With silenced complaints,
He created a template for mediocrities.
Revising the words of his beloved Socrates:
"The unexamined life is not yet worth living,
But it will be as soon as seeing is believing."
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Waiting For More: Gross and Rorty
I thought about being sarcastic and urbane in writing about Neil Gross' new book on Rorty, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the obvious puns coming to mind, but the thought passed as I came to realize that Gross wrote pretty much the book he had intended to write. It is only partly a biography as Gross intends Rorty to be a case study for what Gross calls the "new sociology of ideas." Having only really heard about the book as the first biography, my expectations were for something like what Ray Monk did for Russell and Wittgenstein, though obviously not enough time had passed for something exactly like it. Given this, let me waste no more time and say upfront that if you are looking for a good biography of Rorty's life, keep waiting. This isn't what you are looking for.
I should confess that I didn't read the book straight through. Most of the book is laid out simply as a biography of Rorty's years up to his exodus from Princeton, and so I jumped to the chapters where might lay hidden answers to the most intriguing episodes of his life: his divorce from Amélie and his tenure as president of the Eastern Division of the APA. I read those with great interest and then trailed back to read the whole thing. The book did give me some interesting new details of his life, but no new insights. If you've had the time and obsession to read almost everything Rorty's ever published (small though that number of persons may be), then Rorty pretty much gives you the same insights to his life and work that Gross thinks he is providing. As I read, I began to suspect that Gross was up to something other than biography because, while providing more than a few details and making judicious use of Rorty's unpublished letters, Gross wasn't developing anything like a classic, biographical narrative.
This suspicion was cleared up handily when, after finishing all the biographical chapters, I went back and read his introduction and then his concluding chapters. In the intro, Gross disabuses the reader of the notion that he is writing a biography centered around any of three types: humanistic, contextualist, or poststructualist. The humanistic approach is the kind Monk wrote, whose "goal is to bring life and work together as part of the project of taking measure of a particular intellectual's life, asking after its significance and broader meaning, with special reference to questions of creativity and virtue, the ethics of intellectual and political engagement, the dilemmas of authenticity, the dangers of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and the value of the ideas themselves." (6) Sad for me, since this strikes me as a great thing to do and an enjoyable thing to read, but fair enough: not humanistic. Check.
Gross' "contextualist approach" is exemplified by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. In these, the intellectual historian is interested in "understanding what [a text's] author was trying to do in writing it: what kinds of argumentative moves she or he was attempting to make, against whom, and with what intended effect." (6-7) As I think of Skinner and Pocock as intellectual historians par excellence, this was also disappointing, for they do the kind of work that brings us down to the nitty gritty of what lost-to-time writers' self-image was, of reminding us of what life used to be like and what these writers were saying to themselves about what they did. What Gross called poststructuralist reminds me of what Rorty called Geistesgeschichte: big sweeping stories of where we were to where we are now. In these stories, we tend to ignore what writers thought they were doing to play out what they did to move us further along whatever path we are choosing to highlight. So--not what Hayden White or Foucault were doing? Fine--but what is Gross doing, then? (I should note that the above is not exactly what Gross meant by "poststructuralist," but he suggests that "concern with historical objectivity" and "belief in the singularity of authorial intentionality" (7) is illusory for them, and these are, not only possibly contentious attributions, but certainly philosophical add-ons, not something that conditions the type of histories they write.)
As I said earlier, Gross thinks of himself as writing a case study for the "new sociology of ideas." This endeavor, apparently, is a search "to uncover the relatively autonomous social logics and dynamics, the underlying mechanisms and processes, that shape and structure life in the various social settings intellectuals inhabit: academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary fields, scholarly networks, and so on." (11) Taking off from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, this basically sounds to my ears like doing for the humanities what Kuhn and Latour did for the sciences. Which sounds great, though indeed a little different from the other three approaches.
What emits, however, in the course of the investigation are what I can't help but think are commonsensical platitudes about how intellectuals live their lives and do their work. Gross first describes the "explanatory models" that Bourdieu and Collins have laid out before him, which is basically a focus on the social network of rewards and punishment in academia: "Struggling with other academics to win as much intellectual prestige as they can, they typically end up cleaving to theories, positions, and approaches defined as high status...." "On the whole ... ideas serve strategic functions for thinkers, helping to position them in academic hierarchies...." (12) This, itself, smells of a foul reductionism--we can read ideas as tools in the academic marketplace, and sometimes it pays to do so, but nobody except--if we believe Plato--the Sophists self-consciously did so at a general level. Intellectuals, even the evil post-modernists, do not believe and think the things they do simply because it will get them money and fame.
Which isn't to say that this is all Bourdieu and Collins (on Gross' account) are suggesting. Their larger point, I am to understand, is something more like, "People from socially privileged backgrounds are more likely to rise in the academic hierarchy because the ones raising others were also from socially privileged backgrounds." This is more pointed, but this is, again, part of at least a leftist's common sense, and still says nothing exactly about why intellectuals believe the things they do from their own perspective. "From their own perspective" isn't, however, what the sociologists are after--which is fine. They want to explain the mechanisms of an academic community's reproduction of itself. And in this sense, pointing out the advantages of the rich and/or well-networked (only the latter in Rorty's case) is to the point. My problem is that Gross writes that "these theoretical frameworks are useful in explaining aspects of Rorty's life":
Perhaps it is, and in that case Gross' "new sociology of ideas" would seem much needed, though again very boring on its surface. Gross' major addition is the concept of the "intellectual self-concept" to help combat the aforementioned reductionism and its tendency to flatten out the "richness and complexity of intellectual life," (15) which I take to be a huge understatement. The reason I think so is because of Gross' "central empirical thesis":
It seems to me, even after reading Gross' book, that Rorty's search for great ideas, his push for an environment that would help develop better and better ideas, his search for stimulating conversation--this explains the same phenomena Gross is looking at and this version shows continuity through his whole life and it ties to his own expressed views (not only theoretical but, for instance, his comments about why he liked Princeton's graduate students). In explaining why Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Gross says that Rorty,
I don't think I'm squeamish about what many people take to be concerns that cloud truth--money, status, job security--because Rorty had always been so frank about it. The problem is that this kind of supposition on Gross' part just seems to punch up the fact that ideas can't be reduced to social conditions, that whatever the sociology of knowledge is going to be good for, it's not telling us why particular intellectuals make the choices they do, because self-understanding is the whole bit: Gross' introduction of the "self-concept" concept seems to add back in the bits that originally would've allowed it to differentiate itself from the humanist and contextualist approaches. But then all we get are badly written biographies that don't claim to be biographies, but science, and say things with big, shiny new theoretical toys that everybody, being people who are not only familiar with biographies, but live out their own biographies, already knows and understands, and then calls it an advance. It's just scientists doing badly what humanists already do well.
An example: "if an intellectual were to find himself in an institution that celebrated and attempted to foist on him an identity he found noxious, he could make an attempt to exit, do his best to ignore the views of those around him, or even try to change the institution." (280) Gee, really? This is supposed to be a claim that "synthesizes contributions from different lines of social-scientific investigation," (278) but it sounds to me as if he read a lot of boring research and forgot that he didn't himself need to be that boring. It sounds like the classic college freshman conundrum: told to always support my argument, what do I do about commonplaces? So they end up citing articles backing them up on the most obvious of "claims." Normally by the time one graduates, you've figured out what you need support for and what not. But more than a little of Gross' argument seems designed to inaugurate platitudes into a field that you begin to think must have been an absolute desert.
Another example: in explaining Rorty's choice in master's thesis topic, he says,
I think my main disappointment with the book was not its argument with other sociologists, but that it seemed so close to saying something interesting. The idea of a self-concept, that an intellectual's self-understanding is centrally important to understanding their work, may be a commonplace to biography, but it is also something that Rorty argued for years was missing from philosophy. Rorty argued for years that lack of an historical sense in philosophy has handicapped its ability to understand what it was doing. Opening up the table of contents and seeing a chapter titled, "The Theory of Intellectual Self-Concept," caused me to think that some sort of interesting combination of Rorty's biography and his work to illustrate a larger point about philosophy being a kind of autobiography was in the offing, but nothing interesting ever appeared.
For all this, I was still satisfied in reading the book because for whatever it lacks in art and new insight, it is still quite capable in supplying the material and arranging it in pattern that, though not new, is still largely right. Gross was able to stay out of the way of his subject and is entirely neutral to the content of Rorty's ideas, and in fact his portrait is quite sympathetic and rebuts a few of the more pernicious views of Rorty floating around (like his relationship to Peirce and Dewey). However, as I mentioned at the outset, most of what Gross supplies can be gained by reading Rorty himself. If you want pretty much the same picture Gross offers, I would recommend his autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy and Social Hope and the collected interviews in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. One thing Gross does do inadvertently is give us corroborative evidence that Rorty really was being as honest and frank as he seemed to have been all those years.
POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 2016
I was extremely gratified to have run across Bruce Kuklick's review of Gross's book in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Winter 2011, and find that the abstract read: "This review argues that the biographical narrative in Gross’s book is excellent, but that its theory is silly." That is essentially the abstract I would've used, and I find it comforting a heavyweight of American intellectual history agrees with me on pretty much every point I make above. Sometimes in the academic humanities, humanists can feel, in the words of Will Ferrell in Zoolander, like they're taking crazy-pills.
I should confess that I didn't read the book straight through. Most of the book is laid out simply as a biography of Rorty's years up to his exodus from Princeton, and so I jumped to the chapters where might lay hidden answers to the most intriguing episodes of his life: his divorce from Amélie and his tenure as president of the Eastern Division of the APA. I read those with great interest and then trailed back to read the whole thing. The book did give me some interesting new details of his life, but no new insights. If you've had the time and obsession to read almost everything Rorty's ever published (small though that number of persons may be), then Rorty pretty much gives you the same insights to his life and work that Gross thinks he is providing. As I read, I began to suspect that Gross was up to something other than biography because, while providing more than a few details and making judicious use of Rorty's unpublished letters, Gross wasn't developing anything like a classic, biographical narrative.
This suspicion was cleared up handily when, after finishing all the biographical chapters, I went back and read his introduction and then his concluding chapters. In the intro, Gross disabuses the reader of the notion that he is writing a biography centered around any of three types: humanistic, contextualist, or poststructualist. The humanistic approach is the kind Monk wrote, whose "goal is to bring life and work together as part of the project of taking measure of a particular intellectual's life, asking after its significance and broader meaning, with special reference to questions of creativity and virtue, the ethics of intellectual and political engagement, the dilemmas of authenticity, the dangers of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and the value of the ideas themselves." (6) Sad for me, since this strikes me as a great thing to do and an enjoyable thing to read, but fair enough: not humanistic. Check.
Gross' "contextualist approach" is exemplified by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. In these, the intellectual historian is interested in "understanding what [a text's] author was trying to do in writing it: what kinds of argumentative moves she or he was attempting to make, against whom, and with what intended effect." (6-7) As I think of Skinner and Pocock as intellectual historians par excellence, this was also disappointing, for they do the kind of work that brings us down to the nitty gritty of what lost-to-time writers' self-image was, of reminding us of what life used to be like and what these writers were saying to themselves about what they did. What Gross called poststructuralist reminds me of what Rorty called Geistesgeschichte: big sweeping stories of where we were to where we are now. In these stories, we tend to ignore what writers thought they were doing to play out what they did to move us further along whatever path we are choosing to highlight. So--not what Hayden White or Foucault were doing? Fine--but what is Gross doing, then? (I should note that the above is not exactly what Gross meant by "poststructuralist," but he suggests that "concern with historical objectivity" and "belief in the singularity of authorial intentionality" (7) is illusory for them, and these are, not only possibly contentious attributions, but certainly philosophical add-ons, not something that conditions the type of histories they write.)
As I said earlier, Gross thinks of himself as writing a case study for the "new sociology of ideas." This endeavor, apparently, is a search "to uncover the relatively autonomous social logics and dynamics, the underlying mechanisms and processes, that shape and structure life in the various social settings intellectuals inhabit: academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary fields, scholarly networks, and so on." (11) Taking off from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, this basically sounds to my ears like doing for the humanities what Kuhn and Latour did for the sciences. Which sounds great, though indeed a little different from the other three approaches.
What emits, however, in the course of the investigation are what I can't help but think are commonsensical platitudes about how intellectuals live their lives and do their work. Gross first describes the "explanatory models" that Bourdieu and Collins have laid out before him, which is basically a focus on the social network of rewards and punishment in academia: "Struggling with other academics to win as much intellectual prestige as they can, they typically end up cleaving to theories, positions, and approaches defined as high status...." "On the whole ... ideas serve strategic functions for thinkers, helping to position them in academic hierarchies...." (12) This, itself, smells of a foul reductionism--we can read ideas as tools in the academic marketplace, and sometimes it pays to do so, but nobody except--if we believe Plato--the Sophists self-consciously did so at a general level. Intellectuals, even the evil post-modernists, do not believe and think the things they do simply because it will get them money and fame.
Which isn't to say that this is all Bourdieu and Collins (on Gross' account) are suggesting. Their larger point, I am to understand, is something more like, "People from socially privileged backgrounds are more likely to rise in the academic hierarchy because the ones raising others were also from socially privileged backgrounds." This is more pointed, but this is, again, part of at least a leftist's common sense, and still says nothing exactly about why intellectuals believe the things they do from their own perspective. "From their own perspective" isn't, however, what the sociologists are after--which is fine. They want to explain the mechanisms of an academic community's reproduction of itself. And in this sense, pointing out the advantages of the rich and/or well-networked (only the latter in Rorty's case) is to the point. My problem is that Gross writes that "these theoretical frameworks are useful in explaining aspects of Rorty's life":
"Rorty sought to be more at the center of the disciplinary action and so refashioned himself as an analytic philosopher, working to bring himself to the attention of the analytic community. These efforts proved successful, allowing him to convert what was to be a temporary position at Princeton into a tenure-track post and giving him new network connections that made possible his further ascent in the disciplinary status structure." (13)All I can think is that, while all basically true enough, this is quite the effort to use some expensive, theoretical tools for obvious, commonsensical junk that everyone already understands. I can just imagine conservatives seeing this as an indictment, because Gross' subject is Rorty, against post-modern, sophistical relativists, but all Gross is saying is that to get tenure, you have to impress the people giving it out. And to do that, you have to talk about what they think it is important to talk about. This doesn't seem insidious to me, as it might to some who haven't really thought much about cultural reproduction, but it also doesn't strike me as something path-breaking. Is the sociology of knowledge really in such a state?
Perhaps it is, and in that case Gross' "new sociology of ideas" would seem much needed, though again very boring on its surface. Gross' major addition is the concept of the "intellectual self-concept" to help combat the aforementioned reductionism and its tendency to flatten out the "richness and complexity of intellectual life," (15) which I take to be a huge understatement. The reason I think so is because of Gross' "central empirical thesis":
"that the shift in Rorty's thought from technically oriented philosopher to free-ranging pragmatist reflected a shift from a career stage in which status considerations were central to one in which self-concept considerations became central." (15)I would certainly agree that there was a shift, and one thing that Gross' digging suggests is that the financial difficulties his parent's struggled during his childhood left an impression on Rorty, which in part explains the energy with which he pursued retooling from, roughly, a metaphysician to an analytic philosopher (and the fact that he was trained by McKeon explains how he could do so without a significant change in his identity as an intellectual). But everyone knows that Rorty suffered a shift of some sort because he did it on an international stage. Gross' thesis is still too reductionistic, and in fact I think it may get Rorty wrong. I think Rorty may indeed have liked having the high status of an "important philosopher" at Princeton, the number one program in the country, but nothing Gross offers as evidence really solidifies 1) status considerations as ever being central and 2) that self-concept struggles didn't guide in a significant way his behavior at all stages.
It seems to me, even after reading Gross' book, that Rorty's search for great ideas, his push for an environment that would help develop better and better ideas, his search for stimulating conversation--this explains the same phenomena Gross is looking at and this version shows continuity through his whole life and it ties to his own expressed views (not only theoretical but, for instance, his comments about why he liked Princeton's graduate students). In explaining why Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Gross says that Rorty,
"well positioned in a variety of intellectual networks, may have been better able to anticipate what the book's reception would be. In an environment where many humanists were coming to have their doubts about the new rigorism, there would be tremendous interest in a book--particularly one written by an insider--that used 'rigorous' arguments to make a case for why foundationalist versions of analytic philosophy, and by implication its cognates in other fields, were ill conceived. That Rorty may have realized there would be such interest helps explain why he was eager to write the book and, perhaps--with the idea in mind of eventually accumulating status by writing it--why he allowed himself to drift more out of an analytic orbit over the course of the 1970s." (315)This strikes me as just wrong. In the first case, there was no evidence presented that I read to support that Rorty anticipated PMN's positive reception by non-philosophers, and in fact Rorty's said quite a few times in interviews that it still boggled his mind even years after. In the second, it is possible that Rorty may have thought that the book he was writing might help leverage him into a position outside of Princeton, but I certainly don't think it prompted its writing--when Rorty says he was surprised it's because PMN really is an insider book for insiders, written to continue an insider's conversation.
I don't think I'm squeamish about what many people take to be concerns that cloud truth--money, status, job security--because Rorty had always been so frank about it. The problem is that this kind of supposition on Gross' part just seems to punch up the fact that ideas can't be reduced to social conditions, that whatever the sociology of knowledge is going to be good for, it's not telling us why particular intellectuals make the choices they do, because self-understanding is the whole bit: Gross' introduction of the "self-concept" concept seems to add back in the bits that originally would've allowed it to differentiate itself from the humanist and contextualist approaches. But then all we get are badly written biographies that don't claim to be biographies, but science, and say things with big, shiny new theoretical toys that everybody, being people who are not only familiar with biographies, but live out their own biographies, already knows and understands, and then calls it an advance. It's just scientists doing badly what humanists already do well.
An example: "if an intellectual were to find himself in an institution that celebrated and attempted to foist on him an identity he found noxious, he could make an attempt to exit, do his best to ignore the views of those around him, or even try to change the institution." (280) Gee, really? This is supposed to be a claim that "synthesizes contributions from different lines of social-scientific investigation," (278) but it sounds to me as if he read a lot of boring research and forgot that he didn't himself need to be that boring. It sounds like the classic college freshman conundrum: told to always support my argument, what do I do about commonplaces? So they end up citing articles backing them up on the most obvious of "claims." Normally by the time one graduates, you've figured out what you need support for and what not. But more than a little of Gross' argument seems designed to inaugurate platitudes into a field that you begin to think must have been an absolute desert.
Another example: in explaining Rorty's choice in master's thesis topic, he says,
"The theory of intellectual self-concept helps us better explain the intellectual choice at hand. Rorty's time at Chicago occurred during prime identity formation years in his life course and was a period when he was making the transition from one institutional affiliation to another. The institution with which he had been most closely affiliated as a child and young adolescent--his family--had all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation." (304)I think the really difficult thing would be to find a family that doesn't have "all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation."
I think my main disappointment with the book was not its argument with other sociologists, but that it seemed so close to saying something interesting. The idea of a self-concept, that an intellectual's self-understanding is centrally important to understanding their work, may be a commonplace to biography, but it is also something that Rorty argued for years was missing from philosophy. Rorty argued for years that lack of an historical sense in philosophy has handicapped its ability to understand what it was doing. Opening up the table of contents and seeing a chapter titled, "The Theory of Intellectual Self-Concept," caused me to think that some sort of interesting combination of Rorty's biography and his work to illustrate a larger point about philosophy being a kind of autobiography was in the offing, but nothing interesting ever appeared.
For all this, I was still satisfied in reading the book because for whatever it lacks in art and new insight, it is still quite capable in supplying the material and arranging it in pattern that, though not new, is still largely right. Gross was able to stay out of the way of his subject and is entirely neutral to the content of Rorty's ideas, and in fact his portrait is quite sympathetic and rebuts a few of the more pernicious views of Rorty floating around (like his relationship to Peirce and Dewey). However, as I mentioned at the outset, most of what Gross supplies can be gained by reading Rorty himself. If you want pretty much the same picture Gross offers, I would recommend his autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy and Social Hope and the collected interviews in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. One thing Gross does do inadvertently is give us corroborative evidence that Rorty really was being as honest and frank as he seemed to have been all those years.
POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 2016
I was extremely gratified to have run across Bruce Kuklick's review of Gross's book in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Winter 2011, and find that the abstract read: "This review argues that the biographical narrative in Gross’s book is excellent, but that its theory is silly." That is essentially the abstract I would've used, and I find it comforting a heavyweight of American intellectual history agrees with me on pretty much every point I make above. Sometimes in the academic humanities, humanists can feel, in the words of Will Ferrell in Zoolander, like they're taking crazy-pills.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Free Will and Determinism: The Contours of Moral Responsibilty
Note: This is a paper I wrote for a class on free will in 2002. In looking over my old papers, it turns out I've written quite a bit on free will, which is funny considering how little I'm concerned with it now. This paper, written before I knew much about pragmatism or Rorty, pretty well enunciates why I don't write much about free will anymore--it attempts to dodge the whole question. It also reminds me of "ordinary language philosophy," though this was well before I knew of that, too.
Also, please ignore my arguments, which will prove easy as I myself can't find any. What I do still find useful are my tables.
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In discussing the debate between determinism and free will or in simply discussing the dimensions of free will, it is often claimed that free will has a direct, intrinsic link to moral responsibility. Under the heading “The paradoxical consequences of determinism,” Cornman, Lehrer, and Pappas say: “If, however, it is a consequence of the thesis of determinism that a person’s actions are the inevitable outcome of causal processes that began before he was born and over which he had no control, then, no matter what a person does, he could not have done otherwise. … Consequently, no person may reasonably be held responsible for any of his actions.”[1]
1) Dog A (with rabies) kills person X: we hold dog A responsible.
2) Insane person B (with no control over his actions) kills person X: we hold person B responsible (to an extent).
3) Person C with a gun to their head is forced to kill person X: we do not hold person C responsible.
4) Person D kills person X: we hold person D responsible.
Also, please ignore my arguments, which will prove easy as I myself can't find any. What I do still find useful are my tables.
--------------------
In discussing the debate between determinism and free will or in simply discussing the dimensions of free will, it is often claimed that free will has a direct, intrinsic link to moral responsibility. Under the heading “The paradoxical consequences of determinism,” Cornman, Lehrer, and Pappas say: “If, however, it is a consequence of the thesis of determinism that a person’s actions are the inevitable outcome of causal processes that began before he was born and over which he had no control, then, no matter what a person does, he could not have done otherwise. … Consequently, no person may reasonably be held responsible for any of his actions.”[1]
Dennis Stampe claims that an adequate characterization of free will “should fit with the belief that we are morally responsible for those actions we do in the exercise of the freedom of the will, because we were exercising the freedom of the will.”[2] It’s a common enough claim that it should be asked whether it is actually true or not. In the following, I hope to sketch the contours of our “normal” moral reasoning showing: 1) our normal sense of moral reasoning begins with causal responsibility, 2) moral responsibility is dependent upon a moral standard, and 3) where our free will fits into the picture.
Responsibility means “to be the cause or source of.” If A were to throw a baseball, it could be said that A was responsible for throwing a baseball. Very simply, moral responsibility for one’s actions begins before the determination of the freedom of the will, as is commonly supposed. Moral responsibility begins with causal responsibility, or, rather, moral responsibility begins with the differentiation between individuals (ego differentiation), or (to use another vocabulary) with the differentiation between causal chains (the Matt causal chain vs. the Dennis causal chain). This also works in the case of placing responsibility on a group of people, such as placing the responsibility of slavery upon white Americans (if one were so inclined to do). All white Americans would be considered part of the same causal chain if that is how the chain is broken up.[3]
If responsibility is created by the differentiation of the ego from the Other, from me to you, then responsibility for our actions still has meaning in a determinist system. Contrary to reasoning displayed by Cornman, Lehrer, and Pappas, a person may have no control, but they are still responsible. And think of the changes to the legal system. The penalty for murder would be the same across the board. Insanity as a plea would be removed. The mentally handicapped would be tried as equals to those with full mental capabilities. In fact, everyone would be tried on an equal footing, be they age 2 or 100.
Of course, this is not how we reason. Without considering the metaphysical reality of free will, we reason morally with it as a consideration. As Stampe says, we have a belief that free will is linked somehow with moral responsibility. We typically insert “voluntary action” in place of “free will,” but the effect is still the same. We say, “Person X ate that hot dog freely or voluntarily or of his own free will,” without reference to a metaphysical entity called “free will.” The fact is, even in a deterministic system, a consideration of the freedom of the will could still be used in assigning moral responsibility. What I wish to investigate is how, generally, we reason morally. I hope to sketch the outlines of how we reason about moral responsibility to find how exactly the issue of free will plays into it.
Moral responsibility is the degree to which labels of honor or reproach and/or rewards and punishments are adjudicated based upon moral behavior. Moral behavior is desirable behavior. An objection to this very simple definition may be that it does not account for so called “morally neutral” behavior, such as intelligent, skillful, or beautiful behavior that may also be desirable behavior. A person may have made a shrewd chess move, but we typically do not refer to excellent chess playing as morally sound behavior. However, I think this type of objection begs the question of what moral standard we are using. A moral standard, which tells us what moral behavior is, tells us what is right and wrong. The reason you follow any particular moral standard is because “right action” is behavior you want and “wrong action” is behavior you don’t want, i.e. moral behavior is desirable behavior. The moral standard itself tells us what exactly is morally desirable behavior, such that it can exclude astute chess maneuvering.
It may seem that I’m stretching out the definition of moral behavior and morality in general to proportions that aren’t useful. The problem is that it is difficult to talk about moral responsibility in general without immediately begging the question in favor of a particular moral standard. Moral responsibility is assigned according to a system of morality. Break a moral law and the system tells you how to be punished. Perform a moral duty and the system tells you how to be rewarded. We cannot assign any kind of moral responsibility without recourse to some moral system, even if the system is as simple as “Ye are morally responsible for all thou is causally responsible.” The earlier illustration of causal responsibility as the genesis of moral responsibility is, in fact, not a necessary condition, but a contingent one. Theoretically, we could say that A is responsible for B’s problems even if A had nothing causally to do with them. But we don’t reason this way and so we are already within a moral standard of some kind. What I would like to do is take an example of behavior that would generally be considered immoral: killing person X. This is pretty much universally considered undesirable. I hope to sketch the outlines of how we reason morally by taking four different causes of X’s death and seeing how we assign moral responsibility.
1) Dog A (with rabies) kills person X: we hold dog A responsible.
2) Insane person B (with no control over his actions) kills person X: we hold person B responsible (to an extent).
3) Person C with a gun to their head is forced to kill person X: we do not hold person C responsible.
4) Person D kills person X: we hold person D responsible.
Table 1: (CR=causal responsibility, VA=voluntary action, MR=moral responsibility)
The Killer: -- CR? -- VA? -- MR?
A ------------ yes --- no ---- yes
B ------------ yes ---- no ---- yes
C ------------ yes ---- no ---- no
D ------------ yes --- yes ---- yes
An objection might be raised about assigning moral responsibility to a dog or an insane person. However, as far as I can tell, moral responsibility is as my definition holds: the basis of handing out labels of honor or reproach and/or rewards or punishments. Given that and what moral behavior is (at root, desirable action) we have the ability to say, “That’s a good dog” or “Bad dog!” And we do say those things. Those are labels of honor and reproach. And we punish the dog for doing bad things and reward it for doing good things, all the while knowing that the dog is not exercising any free will. In the case of the dog with rabies we put the dog down for doing something as morally extreme as killing a person. The same goes for the insane person. If an insane person goes out and kills somebody, we punish him (by sending him to a mental hospital or something of the kind) even though he had no free will. The reasoning is that “he was a detriment or destructive to society and/or harmful towards himself or others,” i.e. he is performing undesirable behavior, a.k.a. immoral behavior.
It can be argued that when we say, “Good dog!” we are not giving the dog a moral label, but merely giving the dog positive reinforcement. This is entirely possible, and is quite probable, but the same thing can be said for saying, “Good job!” when a small child has done something desirable. Without that positive reinforcement, how would the child know if he was doing something wrong or good? We give such positive (and negative) reinforcement to develop a moral standard. However, after such reinforcement is handed out, we still tend to label children and dogs as being good or bad based on their past patterns of behavior.
So what we have in Table 1 is a discrepancy. How can dog A and insane person B be held responsible for killing X, while performing a non-voluntary action, and person C not be held responsible, even though he also performed a non-voluntary action? Why the discrepancy? I would argue that there must be another variable in play. The difference between dog A and insane person B and person C is that person C has the ability to exercise voluntary control over his actions, while A and B do not.
Table 2: (AV=ability to exercise voluntary control)
The Killer: -- CR? -- AV? -- VA? -- MR?
A ------------ yes --- no ---- no ---- yes
B ------------ yes --- no ---- no ---- yes
C ------------ yes --- yes --- no ---- no
D ------------ yes --- yes --- yes --- yes
Table 2 bears out a more accurate sketch of moral responsibility than Table 1. We hold dog A and insane person B morally responsible because they had no ability to exercise voluntary control. We, presumably, do this because they cannot control their actions, so we might as well. However, if you do have control over your actions, as person C did, it is presumed that you would not have performed the undesirable action had not extenuating circumstances intervened. Person C could have chosen to take a bullet to the head instead of killing person X.
Normally it would seem unreasonable to ask someone to die instead of performing action Y, which is why, in Table 2, we did not hold person C morally responsible. If action Y had been, say, kicking person X, it certainly does seem unreasonable to ask person C to choose to die. However, it is not quite as clear-cut in the case of person C killing person X. For instance, if person C is driving down the road and person X jumps in front of person C’s car from out of nowhere, thereby killing person X, our legal system wouldn’t convict person C of first degree murder, but possibly of manslaughter.[4] The point is that we find person C answerable for what he has done, though possibly not as responsible as the person who intentionally runs down person X.
This cleaving of moral responsibility into varying degrees of responsibility based on, say, freedom of action or intentionality, is based on the notion of being “answerable, though not fully responsible.” This notion is based on the fact that we conceive of moral responsibility as beginning first with causal responsibility. All of this, however, rests on any particular conception of a moral standard. A moral standard could, theoretically, have absurd reasoning such as “If thou shalt kill a Bob, thou must kill a Roger” which would totally ignore causal responsibility in identifying moral responsibility. While possible, this is clearly not how we reason.
In this short investigation, I hope to have sketched out, in very broad terms, the way in which we normally reason morally. The first step is seeing that moral responsibility rests on a moral standard. The second is that, within a “normal” paradigm of moral reasoning, causal responsibility is the first consideration of moral responsibility. Free will or voluntary action fits into moral reasoning first as “the ability to exercise voluntary control” and only secondly as “the exercising of voluntary control.” This displacement of the consideration of the freedom of the will makes moral reasoning possible in deterministic systems and frees moral responsibility from being necessarily connected to free will making for a more accurate portrayal of how we reason morally.
[1] Cornman, Lehrer, and Pappas
[2] Dennis Stampe in a handout for Philosophy 530 Freedom, Fate, and Choice.
[3] There is one objection to causal responsibility as the beginning of moral responsibility and it runs along these lines: A may be morally responsible for B’s condition even though it had nothing causally to do with it. For instance, the United States is morally responsible for poverty in Africa (assuming for the sake of argument that the United States had nothing to do with poverty in Africa). Our morality says that we should help the poor in Africa. This, though, is best understood as a moral obligation as opposed to a responsibility. We are not responsible for the poverty in Africa, but we are obliged to do something about it. If we do do something about it, then we are morally responsible for what we did i.e. we can then be rewarded or punished.
[4] Though our legal system may not be a good source of sound moral reasoning in every case, it is a good guide of how we might typically reason in some cases.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Reason
Note: I wrote this in 2000, for a class on the history of science. I've done little editing and I still think it does a decent job in setting a certain pallet, a way of perceiving the history of philosophy (that I was already imbibing from Pirsig, but later drank more fully from Rorty).
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In the history of Western thought, the possibility (or impossibility) of change was a question that pushed early thinkers to some of the most important philosophical distinctions of their time period and ours. These distinctions would leave their mark on philosophical inquiry and would not be fully taken up until the Modern era. Some of the most important distinctions were defined by the Eleatics (led by Parmenides), Plato, and Aristotle. While all three theories of change did not grow out of a vacuum, Parmenides more or less followed the force of his own logic, Plato kept Parmenides’ conclusions close at hand, and Aristotle’s theory grew in direct response to both of them. All three also used reason as the primary gateway to knowledge. But in their responses to the problem of change, each one integrates the material world more than the last. This integration allows more satisfactory models, but poses significant problems in itself. Parmenides never runs into these problems because he rejects the material world outright as an illusion. So to address these problems in Plato and Aristotle we must first identify Parmenides’ answer to the problem of change and its consequences: to both change and to the use of reason.
Parmenides’ argument is easily constructed in an analysis of the statement “A becomes B.” In this statement, it can be seen that A is not B because if A=B then there would be no need for change: A is already B. As it is, A is not B and so “A” can be replaced by “not B”. The statement “not B becomes B”, though, does not make sense to Parmenides. A cannot become B unless A has some of B already in it, but for Parmenides this would violate its essential not-Bness: A cannot have any of B in it because A is not B. It is through this kind of argument and logic that Parmenides says that change is impossible and that A does equal B, which equals C ad infinitum. As David C. Lindberg, in his magisterial history of Western science, says,
Enter Plato. The force of Parmenides’ argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is truly stunning, but not quite satisfactory. Plato agrees that the underlying reality must be unchanging, but disagrees that this must be all that reality is. It is here that Plato enunciates the first great metaphysical distinction, between appearance and reality, which Parmenides had used, but not in a systematic way. It is encapsulated in Plato’s divided line, which he elaborates in The Republic. Plato designates the underlying reality as the Realm of Forms. The Realm of Forms is incorporeal, perfect, eternal, insensible, and changeless. In contrast to the Realm of Forms is the material world. It is everything that the Realm of Forms is not: corporeal, imperfect, transitory, sensible, and changing. The divided line separates the two. Plato says that the material world is a reflection of the Realm of Forms and that while the Realm of Forms is completely stable and unchanging, the material world, the reflection, does change as can be plainly seen in everyday life. In this way Plato supplies a rational, fixed underlying reality while still allowing the material world some relevance.
One challenge to this argument would be to question how the Realm of Forms interacts with the material world. How can things that are corporeal interact with things that are insensible? Plato answers this in two ways. First, through a series of arguments, Plato shows that, while we cannot sense the Forms now, our souls were in the Realm of Forms before they were placed in material bodies. We can gain access to the Forms, then, by a process of anamnesis or recollection. Through contemplation we are able to recall the Forms. (Plato does this notably in the Meno by showing how he can teach even a slave the basic mathematics: something that clearly only could be done if a Realm of Forms existed.)
Plato also answered this challenge in the form of the Allegory of the Cave. In summary, the Allegory describes people whose only known reality is the back wall of a cave where they can make shadow puppets. One day, one person ventures outside and discovers that the cave and the shadow puppets are not all that exists. In fact, he realizes that the shadows are really only reflections of the sun. It is through this analogy that Plato shows that the Forms (specifically the Form of the Good) represented by the sun, “illuminates” the material world. Without the Forms, the material world would not, could not exist.
It is important to notice here that Plato is continuing with Parmenides’ placement of reason as the pinnacle of knowledge. The process of anamnesis can also be called “reason.” It is through reason, which Plato made into a method called the “dialectic,” that we can reach the Forms. Plato merely adds a material world to account for the change of our senses. The change is real, but not as important as the unchanging, reason begotten by the Forms.
There is one other important distinction to make before we move to Aristotle. It is the distinction between the General and the Particular. The distinction has actually already been made. The General can be equated to the Realm of Forms and the Particular to the material world. This is important because the difference between Plato and Aristotle can be termed a difference in orientation to the General and the Particular. Plato believes and argues that what is real is the Forms or the General and statements about what is real are found in the material world or the Particular. Aristotle, on the other hand, is just the reverse. What is real is the Particular and statements about what is real is the General. With this distinction in hand we can turn to Aristotle.
Aristotle believes that what is real is the material world and all that the material world is contingent upon. To Aristotle, the Realm of Forms are really just properties possessed by the material Particular, or substance. And like Plato and Parmenides, Aristotle designates that the ultimate reality be unchanging. But how do we account for change now, if the material world, represented as substance and properties, is now unchanging?
To account for change, Aristotle goes back to Parmenides. Parmenides made a distinction between Being and non-Being. Aristotle sees this and says that Being can split into two different types of Being: Potential and Actual Being. So Aristotle agrees with Parmenides that a thing cannot move from non-Being to Being. However, when change occurs, Aristotle says that it is Potential Being changing into Actual Being. Take an acorn and a tree for example. In Parmenides’ model, an acorn (non-tree) cannot change into a tree. In Aristotle’s model, however, an acorn (potential tree) can change into a tree (actual tree) because the acorn houses tree-ness in the form of potentiality. So Aristotle also accounts for change and places an even greater emphasis on the material world than Plato.
What is important about these three philosophers is their use of reason. Each one placed reason on the highest pedestal, but Plato and Aristotle each successively put more and more emphasis on the material world and the senses. The question that arises then is why didn’t they question the use of reason? Parmenides used only reason and he found that change was impossible. He stuck to his guns and followed his own argument to its logical conclusion. But instead of looking around himself and seeing the fallacy of his conclusions, he declared that his use of reason had detected a flaw in the senses and that all the “evidence” to the contrary is illusory. But why does the flaw exist in the senses? Nothing in logic dictates that the flaw be placed upon the senses. It's just as logical to think that the flaw exists in the instrument of argumentation used: reason itself. Parmenides doesn’t think so and neither do Plato or Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle add the senses back into reality to some degree, but the philosophical question that arises out of the problem of change is “How much do the senses and reason play in reality?” Once you let a little in, who’s to say how much? And so the philosophical lines between the Rationalists and Empiricists of the Modern era, who would drag “reality” between these two polar points of reason and the senses, were drawn 2,000 years before the culmination point during the 17th century.
[1] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnnings of Western Science, University of Chicago Press: 1992, p. 33
--------------------
In the history of Western thought, the possibility (or impossibility) of change was a question that pushed early thinkers to some of the most important philosophical distinctions of their time period and ours. These distinctions would leave their mark on philosophical inquiry and would not be fully taken up until the Modern era. Some of the most important distinctions were defined by the Eleatics (led by Parmenides), Plato, and Aristotle. While all three theories of change did not grow out of a vacuum, Parmenides more or less followed the force of his own logic, Plato kept Parmenides’ conclusions close at hand, and Aristotle’s theory grew in direct response to both of them. All three also used reason as the primary gateway to knowledge. But in their responses to the problem of change, each one integrates the material world more than the last. This integration allows more satisfactory models, but poses significant problems in itself. Parmenides never runs into these problems because he rejects the material world outright as an illusion. So to address these problems in Plato and Aristotle we must first identify Parmenides’ answer to the problem of change and its consequences: to both change and to the use of reason.
Parmenides’ argument is easily constructed in an analysis of the statement “A becomes B.” In this statement, it can be seen that A is not B because if A=B then there would be no need for change: A is already B. As it is, A is not B and so “A” can be replaced by “not B”. The statement “not B becomes B”, though, does not make sense to Parmenides. A cannot become B unless A has some of B already in it, but for Parmenides this would violate its essential not-Bness: A cannot have any of B in it because A is not B. It is through this kind of argument and logic that Parmenides says that change is impossible and that A does equal B, which equals C ad infinitum. As David C. Lindberg, in his magisterial history of Western science, says,
“What does one do if experience suggests the reality of change, while careful argumentation (with due attention to the rules of logic) unambiguously teaches its impossibility? For Parmenides and Zeno, the answer was clear: the rational process must prevail.”[1]And so Parmenides declares that all change is merely an elaborate illusion and the underlying reality is a completely stable, unchanging monism.
Enter Plato. The force of Parmenides’ argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is truly stunning, but not quite satisfactory. Plato agrees that the underlying reality must be unchanging, but disagrees that this must be all that reality is. It is here that Plato enunciates the first great metaphysical distinction, between appearance and reality, which Parmenides had used, but not in a systematic way. It is encapsulated in Plato’s divided line, which he elaborates in The Republic. Plato designates the underlying reality as the Realm of Forms. The Realm of Forms is incorporeal, perfect, eternal, insensible, and changeless. In contrast to the Realm of Forms is the material world. It is everything that the Realm of Forms is not: corporeal, imperfect, transitory, sensible, and changing. The divided line separates the two. Plato says that the material world is a reflection of the Realm of Forms and that while the Realm of Forms is completely stable and unchanging, the material world, the reflection, does change as can be plainly seen in everyday life. In this way Plato supplies a rational, fixed underlying reality while still allowing the material world some relevance.
One challenge to this argument would be to question how the Realm of Forms interacts with the material world. How can things that are corporeal interact with things that are insensible? Plato answers this in two ways. First, through a series of arguments, Plato shows that, while we cannot sense the Forms now, our souls were in the Realm of Forms before they were placed in material bodies. We can gain access to the Forms, then, by a process of anamnesis or recollection. Through contemplation we are able to recall the Forms. (Plato does this notably in the Meno by showing how he can teach even a slave the basic mathematics: something that clearly only could be done if a Realm of Forms existed.)
Plato also answered this challenge in the form of the Allegory of the Cave. In summary, the Allegory describes people whose only known reality is the back wall of a cave where they can make shadow puppets. One day, one person ventures outside and discovers that the cave and the shadow puppets are not all that exists. In fact, he realizes that the shadows are really only reflections of the sun. It is through this analogy that Plato shows that the Forms (specifically the Form of the Good) represented by the sun, “illuminates” the material world. Without the Forms, the material world would not, could not exist.
It is important to notice here that Plato is continuing with Parmenides’ placement of reason as the pinnacle of knowledge. The process of anamnesis can also be called “reason.” It is through reason, which Plato made into a method called the “dialectic,” that we can reach the Forms. Plato merely adds a material world to account for the change of our senses. The change is real, but not as important as the unchanging, reason begotten by the Forms.
There is one other important distinction to make before we move to Aristotle. It is the distinction between the General and the Particular. The distinction has actually already been made. The General can be equated to the Realm of Forms and the Particular to the material world. This is important because the difference between Plato and Aristotle can be termed a difference in orientation to the General and the Particular. Plato believes and argues that what is real is the Forms or the General and statements about what is real are found in the material world or the Particular. Aristotle, on the other hand, is just the reverse. What is real is the Particular and statements about what is real is the General. With this distinction in hand we can turn to Aristotle.
Aristotle believes that what is real is the material world and all that the material world is contingent upon. To Aristotle, the Realm of Forms are really just properties possessed by the material Particular, or substance. And like Plato and Parmenides, Aristotle designates that the ultimate reality be unchanging. But how do we account for change now, if the material world, represented as substance and properties, is now unchanging?
To account for change, Aristotle goes back to Parmenides. Parmenides made a distinction between Being and non-Being. Aristotle sees this and says that Being can split into two different types of Being: Potential and Actual Being. So Aristotle agrees with Parmenides that a thing cannot move from non-Being to Being. However, when change occurs, Aristotle says that it is Potential Being changing into Actual Being. Take an acorn and a tree for example. In Parmenides’ model, an acorn (non-tree) cannot change into a tree. In Aristotle’s model, however, an acorn (potential tree) can change into a tree (actual tree) because the acorn houses tree-ness in the form of potentiality. So Aristotle also accounts for change and places an even greater emphasis on the material world than Plato.
What is important about these three philosophers is their use of reason. Each one placed reason on the highest pedestal, but Plato and Aristotle each successively put more and more emphasis on the material world and the senses. The question that arises then is why didn’t they question the use of reason? Parmenides used only reason and he found that change was impossible. He stuck to his guns and followed his own argument to its logical conclusion. But instead of looking around himself and seeing the fallacy of his conclusions, he declared that his use of reason had detected a flaw in the senses and that all the “evidence” to the contrary is illusory. But why does the flaw exist in the senses? Nothing in logic dictates that the flaw be placed upon the senses. It's just as logical to think that the flaw exists in the instrument of argumentation used: reason itself. Parmenides doesn’t think so and neither do Plato or Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle add the senses back into reality to some degree, but the philosophical question that arises out of the problem of change is “How much do the senses and reason play in reality?” Once you let a little in, who’s to say how much? And so the philosophical lines between the Rationalists and Empiricists of the Modern era, who would drag “reality” between these two polar points of reason and the senses, were drawn 2,000 years before the culmination point during the 17th century.
[1] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnnings of Western Science, University of Chicago Press: 1992, p. 33
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