1. Rawls the hedgehog, Shklar the fox — Shklar’s inversions; 2. History shapes our conceptual resources — Traditions of commentary — Political praxis over political theoria; 3. Versatile stories, different angles — Jeffersonian education, Jacksonian fairness — Political rights without natural rights?; 4. Tradition as mythology — Heroes with warts; 5. Madison: democracy as political grind — Hamilton: democracy as fact hungry; 6. Jefferson: democracy as self-government — Adams: democracy as dangerously self-destructive — Our two aboriginal forces: hope and evil
1. With John Rawls, Judith Shklar will be recognized as one of the two most important politico-moral philosophers of the last half of the 20th century. [1] In 1971, Rawls published the definitive statement of liberal political philosophy in A Theory of Justice, and it not only revitalized the then widely recognized defunct discipline of political theory, but has defined its problems up to the present. Rawls the hedgehog spent the rest of his career restating, reshaping, and extending that powerful, central vision. Shklar the fox, however, while working in the adjacent department to Rawls at Harvard, left behind a fascinatingly variegated corpus of work behind. The most important to posterity, it seems to me, will be Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Faces of Injustice (1990). The latter inverts the traditional role of the political philosopher, fulfilled most grandly by Rawls, thus opening up a vast new space to be filled by theorists: instead of putting justice at the center of a systematic theory, she puts injustice, and she attempts to show how doing so requires us to reprioritize our conceptual resources.
Even more interesting, perhaps though, is the intellectual context in which Ordinary Vices appears. The traditional mode of political thought that puts justice at the center is also largely a Kantian enterprise (to which Rawls did much to give historical shape to). Rawls’s big enemy in Theory was the then-dominant tradition of politico-moral philosophy, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism and Kantianism had been the two overwhelmingly dominant traditions of thinking for nearly two centuries. No sooner had Rawls’ book appeared, however, then did a revival of Aristotelian-edged virtue ethics appear on the scene, rejecting the seesaw between means-end utility and deontological principle. Virtue ethics has been the most fertile tradition, it seems to me, in pure moral philosophy—but no sooner did it get its spurs, then did Shklar invert its paradigm. Reviving Montaigne’s inversion of Renaissance virtue ethics (which was before Kant and Bentham had blotted out virtue-oriented ethical systems like Shaftesbury and Mandeville [2]), Shklar makes an interesting case for placing vice at the center of one’s philosophy if one is committed to liberal democracy.
2. Central to both Rawls and Shklar’s work was an understanding of the historical line of thinkers that give shape to our conceptual resources. [3] Most of Rawls’ work on history was relegated to his lectures on political and moral philosophy that he gave at Harvard, and that have thankfully been published. Shklar wrote important studies on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu, in addition to a whole series of essays on individual thinkers (most collected in her posthumous Political Thinkers and Political Thought (1998)). And part of Rawls and Shklar’s enduring importance will be because of the students they spread into the world, most of whom take very seriously indeed our intellectual inheritance. [4]
Shklar’s life was cut tragically short, and among the work she left unfinished was a bit of writing on the specifically American political intellectual tradition, which has been published as Redeeming American Political Thought (1998). As Dennis Thompson, one of her former students who writes the forward to the collection, reports, Shklar taught the subject many times, but resisted writing a book on it because, she once said, “the subject is too hard” (vii). Thompson cogently notes the irony of this from someone who’d mastered Hegel (let alone everything else she’d written on). But reading her efforts to wrangle American political theory into an explanatory pattern, one begins to not only understand why she thought so, but believe her. Thompson suggests that “the difficulty lay not in the theorists themselves but in the interpretations that commentators had laid upon them” (vii). However, Shklar was never much of a polemical writer, preferring the mode in which the coherence and power of one’s own vision sustained interest, rather than a self-conscious situating in the current conversational milieu. [5] Lack of polemic characterizes these essays as much as elsewhere, which leads me to think that the difficulty didn’t lie in scraping off (sometimes deeply embedded) traditions of commentary.
Implicit in her approach is an attempt to balance numerous conditions and factors in eliciting American political thought. Above all, it seems that what makes American political thought difficult is that its founders were also the founders of American political practice. And this is significantly different than our European traditions. Whatever the brilliance of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel, they didn’t create a constitution and run for president. The fact that Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton created American political praxis didn’t itself make American political thought unique, and in fact Shklar looked somewhat suspiciously, as Thompson points out, at theses about American exceptionalism. After all, other countries have now tried democracy in various forms and have obviously had their own creators of political praxis that have touched off conversations about its functioning. But the flipside to exceptionalism is parochialism, and that has been an accusation about American political theory and Shklar does find it annoying. (See the beginning of “The American Idea of Aristocracy.”) Between exceptionalism and parochialism are the complex relationships Shklar tried to chart between an abstract, theoretical conversation and the historical practices it was intimately bound up with. It was this binding that seemed much more in force than in Europe. Implicit, I think, in Shklar’s book is a thesis about American political thought being itself implicitly an assertion of pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic priority of theoria to praxis.
3. One of the unique features of the book is that it tells what is essentially the same story over and over, from different angles. For some this might be annoying, and if she’d gotten the chance to get this work to press, I’m certain Shklar would’ve eliminated the repetition. But angular overlap, done right, is a strength of the essay as a genre. In fact, it seems a stylistic parallel to James’s pragmatist idea, in “What Pragmatism Means,” that thoughts are instruments and beliefs habits. And the trick about instruments and habits is that you apply them over and over in new, technically unique situations. That’s how you know it is a good instrument or habit—for if it broke down, you’d get a new instrument or habit. Likewise for developmental stories—the more versatile the story, the better equipped it is to explain phenomena, the more likely it is that that story touches on something real and operative.
Shklar’s story moves through three basic stages: the Revolutionary Era that establishes the basic pattern of American political thought; the second generation of antebellum Jacksonian democrats that heroically failed to face the moral problem of slavery; and the post-war rise of the social sciences. The focus of most of the essays is on the first two stages, and hardly move out of the 19th century. The book is split into two, with the first on individual (or grouped) thinkers (like “Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science” or “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson”) and the second on specific topics (like “The Boundaries of Democracy” or “Democratic Customs”). The first section is more polished and overlaps less than the second because most of the second half of the book is the unpublished material. However, the second half contextualizes the first—it’s the larger story that the individual thinkers move in. For example, “An Education for America” begins, “Do we really know what sort of schooling is most likely to make students into good citizens? ... How does American democracy educate its citizens or help them to educate themselves?” (65) It wasn’t until the second section that I understood how the chapter was implicitly answering a Jeffersonian question that Shklar felt attuned to. For “Jefferson promoted a plan for what he called a ‘natural aristocracy’ through a system of education,” effectively “replacing politics with education” (“The American Idea of Aristocracy,” 150). The Jacksonians, despite using “aristocrat” as a term of political damnation, carried the mantle of Jefferson, because for them “education was looked at entirely as an aspect of citizenship” (“Democracy and the Past: Jefferson and His Heirs,” 183). Indeed, it is during the Jacksonian period that the moral point of view of democracy becomes explicit, if looked at and defended differently by our founding traditions of political thought. For when Shklar says in “Democratic Customs” that “voting and education are marks of dignity, not means to other ends,” she’s invoking a very unpragmatic rhetoric, and quite purposefully I take it. She says that for the Jacksonians, “it was ‘special’ privilege and ‘idle’ wealth, not their very existence, that aroused their sense of injustice. It was a struggle for recognition for them, the right to a dignified status as workers and citizens” (193). This polemically moral vision, she says in her presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “Redeeming American Political Theory,” expresses itself as “fairness [being] the very essence of their notion of justice” (99).
“Justice as fairness” is the (very famous) slogan that was the centerpiece of Rawls’s politico-moral philosophy. [6] Its appearance shows how Shklar viewed Rawls’ contribution to the larger frame she generates. But it unfolds legally in American political practice, which she takes to be distinctive. She notes that Tocqueville had already noticed that “all political problems in the United States become legal problems” and says, “since all our rights are inscribed in the Constitution, every citizen can and must claim his or her rights before the judiciary. American political culture is radically legalistic and focused on the courts” (112). If you take a class on human rights, they will find it important to distinguish between natural rights and political rights. Shklar’s point suggests that American political practice makes the notion of “natural rights” moot in working out justice in the American system. This strikes me as another important site for work to be done, for does it mean that we can just do away with the notion of natural human rights? Or does the presumed existence of natural rights motivate the debate about political rights? Can we chuck the metaphysics and just subsist on our “human rights culture,” which Rorty commended, or do we need the rhetoric of “natural” in some more robust form? [7] And is “justice as fairness” an inherently legalistic doctrine, or a moral conception of some kind? Since Rawls tried making a distinction between moral conceptions and the neutrality toward moral conceptions of his theory of justice, the last has seemed a pressing question in trying to understand liberal notions of tolerance. Shklar helps remind us what it means for these ideas to be embodied and acted upon, however we end up botanizing them.
4. Shklar says of John Adams that he sometimes took history to be “a source of mythology” (189). There is something of the mythological, I think, in all forms of tradition—the live workings of the past in the present made self-conscious. The primary reason intellectuals like Shklar dig so deeply into the past is to make us aware of the roots that are providing our nourishment—and so that we can then make an informed decision about whether it is really nutrients we are getting, or rather poison, thus precipitating a self-conscious choice in what traditions we continue to perpetuate.
One thing that commends Shklar’s political intellectual mythology over others is that it is a polytheistic pantheon, not a unified whitewashing of differences. One thing our cultured despisers of the American democratic experiment have too easily gotten off on is the exposing of the warts on the Founding Fathers. Politically and culturally motivated historians through the 19th century are indeed guilty of promoting halos in their pictures through overexposure, which tends to also blot out many defining details. Perhaps American political culture was still too overinfluenced by the divine right tradition of aristocracy, which didn’t like its blemishes noticed and punished those who did. (A culture influenced, I suspect, by the Christian traditions of impiety and blasphemy.) But can we not have heroes, then? Do all pictures of heroes suffer from a whitewashing that is, on this account, a necessary byproduct of the hero-making process? Shklar would think this nonsense. If we had a more Greek mode of tracing our traditions, then we needn’t worry about manipulating the past. [8]
Shklar very resourcefully turns Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton into an in-fighting clan of begetters who disseminated active elements in our current political makeup, both good and bad—or rather, ineffectual when pure and by themselves, but generative when together and conflicting. “Redeeming American Political Theory” might have been the prospectus for the book she didn’t have a chance to write, and it is there she pulls together three of these threads, saying Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton founded “three political sciences in America”: “Jefferson’s was speculative and physiological. Madison’s was institutional and historical, and Hamilton’s was empirical and behavioral. None were perfect, all were prophetic” (94).
5. Madison, who Shklar talks the least of in these essays, “devised a profound theory of political rationality.” Madison is probably best known for Federalist #10, which suggests that we shouldn’t fear the ability for change to quickly sweep a democratic system because factionalism will produce a tug-of-war grinding reform to a creeping minimum. As Shklar says, Madison had a “deeply functional view of democracy.” What attracts Shklar, however, is the bit that we rarely notice—how the experience of this political grind will affect the individual political agent. Madison thought that individual agents will “learn to appreciate the necessity of limiting their interests in response to the rights of other. ... The individual political agent learns to adapt and is forced to become more public-spirited as he accepts and follows the procedures that institutions compel him to follow” (96-7).
Hamilton responded to the “radical democratization of political theory” implied by the Revolution by seeing that “how to assess the behavior and attitudes of the anonymous many who compose the electorate was a wholly novel intellectual task.” What Hamilton set in motion was the assessment of the “tortuous and long road from the individual voter to the public policies of the federal government” (4). Hamilton was no particular fan of democracy—he was the Founder, you’ll recall, who wanted to import a king—and didn’t have a very high opinion of the voters, but he understood that “the modern state ... depended on information.” As Shklar says, “constitutional democracy is inherently a fact hungry political system, in which both those who govern and those who are governed yearn for solid information” (98).
6. If Madison’s political sociology of interest groups and Hamilton’s political science of electoral politics seem the most of interest to a tough-minded political science, Shklar’s tender-minded spirit is most interested in the star-crossed friendship between Jefferson and Adams. The speculative element in Jefferson is what makes him the most admired by Shklar of the four. Time and time again Shklar returns to Jefferson’s dream of “replacing politics with education,” an education that would produce what he calls a “natural aristocracy” (150). Preceding the Jacksonian fear of aristocracy was Adams’s belief that any inequality, separating the few from the many, would turn itself into an oppressive regime. Adams was Calvinistic in this way, being deeply pessimistic about the ability of humanity to side with virtue against corruption. Jefferson and Adams pair nicely with the twin founts of American Romanticism: Emerson and Hawthorne. Jefferson is optimistic in the same way that Emerson was that the American citizen was “capable of self-government” (150), i.e. autonomy, self-reliance. But Adams and Hawthorne were too oppressed by history and their own sense of the self-destructive psychology of the individual to share that optimism.
Thompson suggests that if Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson, then her head was with Adams. I can accept this formula, and it captures quite well how we need to balance these two aboriginal forces in the American spirit: hope and evil. If you hope with your head, that’s when you end up with theological nonsense like the eschatological, providential future-perfect “this will happen—everything will end up for the best.” Likewise, no amount of intellectual evidence can tell you when to or not to hope—you either find it in your heart or not. Conversely, if you believe in the ultimate depravity of humankind with your heart, as Calvinism instructs and as Adams’s great-grandson, Henry Adams, seemed to find himself, then hope may prove impossible, turning a healthy skepticism into a paralyzing nihilism. [9] But understanding, in an intellectual way, that evil indefatigably exists in the world is a mode of tempering one’s optimism about outlook, keeping one tethered to the ground. Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson because she believed ultimately in the autonomy that education promised, and that is why Emerson, Hawthorne, and so many other pieces of literature appear in this and other of her books. Shklar did not believe, with Jefferson, that a natural aristocracy would or should arise, but as indicated by the title of “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson,” she took very seriously the idea that the democratic citizen had much to learn from books specifically, and their authors’ intellectual struggle with the experience of democracy.
Endnotes
[1] Important caveat: only partly due to ignorance, that assessment excludes (generally) all Marxist thinkers. This is because in part thinkers working in the Marxist tradition have (largely) excluded themselves from the conversation surrounding what liberal democracies should do, including the philosophical conversations to which Shklar and others were a part of. Anyone who holds that the “system” is irrevocably corrupt or faulty, and that the only thing to do is get a new system (what Bernard Yack calls the “longing for total revolution”), will inevitably fall back on the activity of diagnosis divorced from proposed action—there's nothing left to do, at that point, but endlessly point out how irredeemable everything is going on around you. And since I believe that Marxism in these forms will fade away because of their inutility, that is another reason why I don't feel bad for my relative ignorance or think it will mar my prediction about Rawls and Shklar. Some thinkers, though, like Foucault and Frank Lentricchia, who fall under this category are nevertheless quite useful. Habermas is so concerned with the functioning of liberal democracies that he hardly counts as being in the Marxist tradition. And there is one branch of what could be thought of as post-Marxist thought—in America known as “communitarianism”—that in the main combines with hope for democracy (even if it would quibble with the qualifier “liberal”). Of these, I suspect Michael Walzer, an important interlocutor of Shklar's and long-time editor of the, roughly, communitarian and thus non-Marxist, leftist rag Dissent magazine, will have the most enduring value.
[2] J. B. Schneewind, in The Invention of Autonomy (1998), tells the most complete story I’ve seen of moral philosophy from the end of the Renaissance and Reformation to Kant. His principle beginning point for modern moral philosophy is Montaigne, but on the revival of virtue (which figured so importantly to, for example, Machiavelli) see Ch. 14, on the now-neglected figures of James Harrington and Shaftesbury. (On Harrington’s importance to British and American political thought, see J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975).)
[3] The importance of this feature of their work should be entertained in the context of Anglophone philosophy’s general neglect of history. I would ultimately (and unsurprisingly) blame this on Plato. For some relevant finger-pointing on this score, one might see “What Happened to Political Philosophy?” and maybe also “On Literature’s Accidents.”
[4] It’s possible I’m more partial to Shklar’s students because, unlike the Kantian Rawls, they are more interested in literature and things American. I think the two most notable of Rawls’ students are Christine Korsgaard, who though an unrequited Kantian, has done much to help the general thinking-through of the conceptual requirements of normative autonomy that Kant and Hegel initiated (see, e.g., The Sources of Normativity (1996)), and Susan Neiman, whose Evil in Modern Thought (2002) is an exceptional non-epistemology centered story of modern philosophy and whose Moral Clarity (2008) is an important, nonspecialist book on liberal American moral problems. Foremost among Shklar’s students for me (exempting the unbelievably useful, though not well-enough known, work of the already mentioned Bernard Yack) is George Kateb, whose work on Emerson has been widely recognized by Americanists.
[5] In a number of disciplines, this is beginning to be frowned on as unscholarly, though really it’s a matter of instrumental self-analysis. Richard Rorty described this mode as “strong misreading,” though “misreading” might be misleading in this context. In a precursor piece to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’s more famous use, Rorty describes his theft of Harold Bloom’s term this way: “The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (“Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 151). The key is the reversal of priority of the purposes for which the author wrote for instead the purposes of the reader. The scholar knows a lot about why an author wrote, but the only way to think with a figure from the past is to have purposes of your own. In Rorty’s more careful moments, he distinguishes this as a philosophical mode as opposed to a historical mode. (See his “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” in Truth and Progress.) The trouble with this mode, barring the scholar’s anxiety of it being bullshit, is that anyone can try and be a strong misreader and simply read a text as one wants—there’s just no assurance at an audience who will care for it. So, to compensate for a lack of self-trust (or for the accurate assessment of limitation), a writer might try and engage his compatriots’ views on the subject in the discipline. But such limitation shouldn’t lead us to resent the strength of others. It is, in the end, a gamble, for as Emerson said, “we hope it is more than whim at last” (“Self-Reliance”).
[6] The slogan first appears as the title of the 1958 paper that eventually was transformed into the first chapter of A Theory of Justice. It appears prominently in his major revision of his stance, Political Liberalism (1993), and its the title of the final slim book (2001) that was to serve as both restatement and primer (edited by Erin Kelly, as Rawls fell ill before he could make final revisions and expansions).
[7] See “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in TP. Rorty took the term from Eduardo Rabossi. Shklar wrote twice on this issue, in Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (1964) and American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991). One of her students, Rogers M. Smith, wrote a massive book on the latter’s issue of citizenship in Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions on Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). (Given the nature of writing big books, Smith had been already working on the project when Shklar began her set of lectures that became her book, and the two talked over their work often before her death.)
[8] See Rorty’s related use of “polytheism” in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” in PCP.
[9] There is a “book review” of The Education of Henry Adams Shklar wrote in the collection, but it is somewhat out of place with the rest. For Henry Adams, as Thompson says, “nearly defeat[s] her effort to find something of value in every thinker” (xiii). She was not a big fan of his alienation and irony directed toward the democratic experiment.
Friday, July 04, 2014
Friday, June 27, 2014
Literature as Equipment for Living and as Spiritual Exercise
1. What is a literary scholar, critic?; 2. Kenneth Burke, literary critic — And his idiosyncratic vocabulary; 3. Sociological criticism — Naming a situation strategizes it — Literature as alembicated naming; 4. Acts of distillation — Warehouses of equipment; 5. Life as adventure — Beliefs as habits of action; 6. Spiritual exercises — You only know what you can remember — Cycling through pathways of belief — Reflection as detour from action; 7. Literature as self-help? — You don't only believe what you can remember — The self as equipment; 8. Complex literature and simple assertions; 9. Exercise with the narrative form — A longing for shapeliness; 10. The experience of reading — Acting through literature; 11. Literature is difficult — Not everything should be difficult — Democratic humanism
1. In my English department, the graduate students have formed a small colloquium that regularly meets to discuss someone’s work in progress. What has increasingly become pressing to me as a scholar-in-training is the question of what a scholar is, of my self-image as a literary critic. And this partly because it’s obvious that we grads all individually seem to have different ones, have an increasing variety available to us as critical tradition extends itself, and don’t have a space in which we can reflect together on this kind of self-reflection. There are literary theory courses, but rarely an opportunity to talk together about what it is we do. So I delivered the following as a talk to provoke a discussion about our own, individual self-images as literary critics. I framed the discussion around the two slogans in my title, in part because what I find helpful is to talk about alternative images or metaphors or distinctions for self-definition.
2. “Literature as equipment for living” is a slogan of Kenneth Burke’s. A friend of mine in the department had asked me what I had been reading this past winter break, and I said excitedly, “Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History,” and my friend scrunched up her nose and mouth like she’d eaten a stink bug and replied, “ugh, the rhet-com guy?” Rhetoric and Communications is a growing subdiscipline in English Departments around the country, and rhetoric as a disciplinary study has taken Burke to be the father of contemporary rhetorical theory. There’s often an amusing, though sometimes churlish, rivalry between these two halves of English Departments, but let me say, once and for all, that Burke’s main vocation was literary criticism, and not as a founder of rhetorical theory. In fact, reading his work, it’s hard to imagine a school formed out of it at all. (Side note: Richard Rorty once said to an interviewer asking about Rorty’s criticisms of Paul de Man, “I can imagine being grateful for de Man’s obsessiveness, that is, his habit of reducing to nothingness any given text he reads. When de Man does it it’s interesting, but when you get … thousands of de Man clones, it’s merely formulaic. I don’t think anyone would have objected to de Man if he had been a kind of Kenneth Burke figure, not training up generations of students.” [1] Rorty, apparently, wasn’t acquainted with the other side of some English Departments.)
The idea of literature as equipment for living has its seed in Attitudes Toward History (1937), a book that is part Emersonian-pragmatist in affirming the Optimistic, part speech-act/genre theory (the kind of thing you get out of an Ortega or Lukács or Bakhtin), part quasi-Marxist history, and part idiosyncratic dictionary of a critical vocabulary (things like “alienation,” “transcendence,” “efficiency,” “casuistic stretching,” “character-building by secular prayer,” “being driven into a corner” and—my favorite—“heads I win, tails you lose”). “Equipment for living” is a metaphor that Burke regularly employs, like the pragmatist habit of asking for the “cash-value” of an assertion or how one would “cash out” a metaphor. What follows is an attempt to spell out how I cash out his metaphor, but I begin by taking it to be his master-trope for the relationship between language and action. Here is a characteristic way Burke talks with it—in his discussion of William James, he begins by saying:
3. But literature is not assertoric prose—it does not make assertions, at least not explicitly. Or rather, not explicitly by the author. So we have at least two different pragmatic contexts with which to judge the metaphor. Before I get to talking about what that might mean for us, I want to just keep plunging ahead with literature. In 1938, a year after Attitudes Toward History was published, Burke published an essay entitled “Literature as Equipment for Living,” codifying his thoughts about this metaphor and the orientation it implies for the literary critic. (You can find it in his Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), a book whose first few pages has a line poets love, “the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude” (9). To understand that line’s formal dimension, you have to read it against Yeats [3], but its embodiment of pragmatism I’ll return to momentarily.)
In the essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Burke suggests that what he is up to in his work, and his selection for key critical terms “purpose” and “motivation,” is a “sociological criticism of literature” (293). To unpack this, he takes up the notion of proverbs and says that what they do is name “typical, recurrent situations” in the life of a culture. We then “find” ourselves, as it were, in the proverb and are directed in our thinking by it about our own situation. So, as examples, Burke lists off proverbs for consolation (“The worst luck now, the better for another time”), for vengeance (“fools tie knots and wise men loose them”), for foretelling (“keep your weather eye open”), and for wise living (“first thrive, than wive”). “Proverbs are,” Burke says, “strategies for dealing with situations” (296). And playing off the war metaphor of “strategy,” Burke says as against a baffled interlocutor, that “surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images…. One seeks to ‘direct the larger movements and operations’ in one’s campaign of living” (298). [4]
And so, Burke says, “each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary” for one can think of novels as “the strategic naming of a situation.” They “single out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it” (300).
4. This might be a good place to stop and collect our thoughts and codify some of the issues in play. I like the idea of taking books to name situations and provide the resources for thinking through them. It first of all requires an act of distillation on our part—these acts can be exceedingly useful, even outside the exam structure. What they provide is the framework of a perspective on how the book is to be read, the pattern in it to be called to the fore. For example, I could say that Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady displays the difficulties a woman faces in searching for autonomy in the face of both a culture of monogamy that infantilizes female choice and an aestheticist culture that flattens the moral parameters of autonomy. And what this distillation does is coordinate the ratios between paradigmatic moments in the text that provide the lens with which to read the other moments—for example, Mr. Touchett telling Isabel that “fortunately ladies are not obliged to give reasons,” Isabel telling Mr. Goodwood that she wishes to be free even to commit some atrocity, and Ralph hoping with delight to see what Isabel will do with her money. From this perspective (spoiler!), Isabel going back to Osmond is the inevitable tragedy precisely because it is the attainment of a robust moral autonomy wherein one takes on the burden of one’s choices.
What we don’t need to say is that a novel names only one situation—I think we can wipe away that possible implication from Burke’s formulation and say that novels, like life, are made up of an indefinite number of patterns of experience. And this, in fact, is what makes them such treasure troves for our equipment for living. For while I say “indefinite,” and really do mean it, novels really don’t present something so unmanageable as all that for the precise reason Burke says: they are concerted mobilizations of a finite range of textual phenomena. No matter what future interpretive lens comes down the pike, Isabel Archer will be a woman. Maybe someone will argue someday (or probably already has) that Isabel Archer is not the “lady” of the novel’s “portrait,” but it had better be the case that Goodwood’s got the penis and Isabel the vajj.
5. Now, after Burke’s suggestion about naming there’s the actual image of “equipment for living.” “Equipment” suggests to me a wider metaphorical value than the more narrow war metaphor of “strategy.” I think Burke should absolutely be read against Nietzsche in “Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” but both should be drained of their violence to establish the underlying adventure of life—and no adventurer ever leaves home without his or her equipment, as every D&D player knows. Without your equipment, you are naked and vulnerable. And this equipment, in this case, is language. This, again, dovetails with a certain philosophical pragmatism about language. The central strain of pragmatism from Peirce, James, and Dewey to Rorty and his student Robert Brandom—they all follow Alexander Bain, the American psychologist and, as it happens, rhetorician, in defining beliefs as habits of action. Our beliefs are not just indicators of but also shapers of our actions in the world. Our linguistic formulations are as much a technological development as anything wrought of iron or wood.
6. This leads me to a partial segue to the second term of my title: “spiritual exercises.” This is a term established by Ignatius of Loyola’s 17th century book of that name, but it has been resurrected by Pierre Hadot to talk about a mode of philosophy. Hadot was a colleague of Michel Foucault’s at the Collège de France and was one of the major scholars of ancient philosophy at the end of the last century. (I cannot more highly recommend the English translation of his 1995 book, What Is Ancient Philosophy? as an introduction to Greek philosophy, both for its readability, scope, and erudition.) In an essay entitled “Spiritual Exercises,” and reprinted in his Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot suggests that Ignatius’s Jesuit practices were built out of the resources of the earlier Stoic tradition, which had its own traditions of spiritual exercises (if perhaps avant la lettre). Hadot says that “attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. … Thanks to his spiritual vigilance, the Stoic always has ‘at hand’ (procheiron) the fundamental rule of life: that is, the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” And this for the Stoic, he says, “frees us from the passions, which are always caused by the past or the future—two areas which do not depend on us” (84-85).
If you’re like me, you might say, “well, that sounds wonderful—even bypassing the suspicious idea that the future doesn’t depend on me—but how does this spiritual vigilance work? How do I make sure that my self-consciousness is always awake? You can’t just want something or think you are a certain way for it to be the case.” And this is where I find Stoics to be pragmatists avant la lettre, for one important practical measure is the repetition and memorization of linguistic formula:
The idea of beliefs being but nodes on a spatial graph of interrelating lines is in part a metaphor given substance by Hans Blumenberg, a friend of Hadot’s and one of the great German intellectual historians of the last century, rivaling Heidegger and Habermas for both philosophical depth and acuity. [5] Blumenberg, in a little known but incredibly insightful essay on rhetoric, suggests that rhetoric be in part understood as a form of detour. It is a detour from action. This produces the old trope of the “man of action” and the “man of thought,” Achilles vs. Odysseus, or worse Socrates, who would stop Euthyphro from acting against his father for impiety with all his pesky little questions like, “do you even know what impiety is?” But consider how reasoning works—by inference. We infer one proposition from another, which means you transition from one sentence to another. In justifying your action, you take the time of multiplying sentences, which is time taken away from acting. Clearly for the Stoic this isn’t a bad thing—they want to mute action entirely in some cases, relieving us of our passions that form the fundamental motivations (hello Burke) for acting.
7. Turning back to Burke and “literature as equipment for living,” I pull out one way of thinking about it in terms of using remembered pieces of literature to think through life’s situations. [6] And one way of doing this is by formula—either your own distillation of memorable narrative moments or catchy aphorisms of the text itself. Literature, in this way, becomes part of your armament as you meet the demands of life on the field of battle.
You’ll notice, however, that this has made literature into an assertion-generating enterprise, at least as it relates to one’s life, in the form of these maxims or formulas. But, as I noted in section 3, literature isn’t assertoric prose—aren’t there other ways we might relate to literature that might also be important to living? And also: this is kind of making literature sound like self-help. Before turning this last screw, I want to take up a deficiency in the “equipment for living” metaphor that punches up, I think, one of the most important ethical issues of our time. On its surface, “equipment” suggests—like my description of the body naked and vulnerable without it—that there is an inner or essential or at any rate some self beneath the language that articulates it. This is an image from Romanticism, in part codified by M. H. Abrams’ “lamp,” and it is one pragmatists, at least, have to reject. [7] There is no hidden, ineffable self deep down—it is language all the way down, rhetoric all the way down, equipment all the way down.
And while this might spark a metaphysical argument, I want to first note that a shift from “equipment” to “spiritual exercises” helps articulate the pragmatist perspective. Our linguistified self is better thought of as a muscle, and though you only know what you can remember, you don’t only believe what you can remember in the same way that while you may not know that you have a particular muscle, you use it just the same—however, of course, wanting to throw the baseball harder and knowing what operates the humerus may lead you to pounding those pecks a little harder. (Recall Burke’s “dancing of an attitude” formula.)
But secondly, “equipment all the way down” suggests a new handle on the old fears of relativism and the infinite regress. If it’s equipment all the way down, and the point of equipment is to protect your “self,” then it’s just equipment protecting other equipment. While relativism’s fear is that there’s no non-relative basis upon which to judge one’s values, equipment protecting equipment might produce the more radical fear that one was born into the wrong tribe, given the wrong education. Relativism goes fishing for the bottom of the inferential detours, but this perspective sees that we stop all the time to use the equipment we have, whether or not we know there’s a foundation for it. And in a less radical case, equipment protecting equipment produces the problem of knowing which is the means and which is the end—what is a tool that could be discarded for a better one and what is an essential part of what it is to be me.
8. So, now, back to assertions and literature—as my reintroduction of “spiritual exercises” indicates, one of the reasons why I like books like Portrait of a Lady, Howards End, and Middlemarch, is that they are obviously produced by an extraordinary intelligence working through a complex situation. Solutions are, unlike in philosophy typically, not to the fore here, and one thing I like is thinking through the situations with the author, either via their intermediaries in the form of characters or their tropes via the complex functions of their narrators. This does not, let me hasten to add, work for every book (as my lengthening train of books I have trouble reading attests) as not all books are best named by this meta-perspective.
9. However, there is another more recent use of the term “spiritual exercises” that goes some way to opening a window on another use of literature. My way to it is to first go back to Hadot and ask for his reason for choosing the word spiritual:
In Rorty’s late essay, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” [8] Rorty says that
10. The experience of reading these books is an analogue to a religious experience—you don’t exactly come away with any new beliefs or formulae. “It is the experience of reading the novel,” Rorty says, “that makes one into a different sort of person, not the utility of a belief one might have acquired by various other means.” And the reason novels are good at this seems clear: they can show maturation. As a form, prose narrative seems better suited for showing it and thus producing that affective conduit that floods our motivational channels with that vague, life-giving substance we call “hope.”
Seeing various forms of literature as spiritual exercises is seeing them as acting on you and as you acting through them. Novels, especially those like Henry James’s or Conrad’s or Faulkner’s, are difficult forests that seem to have to have paths hewn through every time. I find poetry like Dickinson’s and Stevens’s to be spiritual exercises that I respond to, even if I find myself tripping and stumbling, my muscles distorted at angles they normally don’t find themselves in. What do they equip me for? I don’t know always. But I do like making the effort at spelling it out.
11. But not always. Burke, in his essay on equipment, alludes to his era’s “inspirational literature” and how “it is a strategy for easy consolation” (298). Burke does not shy from this aspect of the sociological approach to rhetorical and literary forms. When I had the chance to teach a course on American Romanticism, on the first day I read them a famous bit by William James in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” whose punchline, after James shows how ignorant he was of the lifeways of po’ Appalachian folk—“losing,” as he says, “the whole inward significance of the situation”—the punchline is: “I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.” [9] I then posed to my students what I took to be the real problem before us: “how do you, the student, who is likely not going to become an English major let alone become a professional literary critic—how do you negotiate a class like this, what with ‘my strange indoor academic ways of life’?”
It seems natural to me to see this as implicitly a question about literary value, or “what is literature?” I confessed that I had no idea how to define literature or the literary, and instead suggested a distinction between works that challenge and those that don’t. To be properly democratic about “taste,” we can be snobs in our private lives, but not in our theories of the public good—you are not a “better person” for enjoying Moby-Dick over Harry Potter; different books have different purposes, and it isn’t clear that non-challenging works aren’t serving a good purpose (relaxation, for example, or derisively, “escapism”). An example is my inability to watch challenging movies, including most dramas—I rationalize it by saying it’s probably because I read challenging books all day, but either way, I’d much rather laugh to Will Ferrell or watch The Bourne Identity for the eighth time than try and watch Cronenberg or Twelve Years a Slave. [10]
The idea behind the occasional elitist stance toward books, and the idea that every democratic humanist believes intimately, is that it is good to be challenged; it is a primary social good to be challenged; it is an intrinsic good to be challenged occasionally. Notice I say “occasionally,” because it cannot be good to be constantly challenged because then you wouldn’t get anything done—this is the intimate relationship between thought and action that I was early talking about under the heading of beliefs as habits of action and detours. But it is good to be challenged sometimes—that’s the problem of sycophants, “yes men”—but where, when, by whom? Who do you trust to challenge you? I take it to be a mark of freedom that every person gets to decide for themselves when they want to be challenged—though in public matters I take it to be much less up to individual choice about when one can be challenged. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to sample a broad array of areas, avenues, ways of challenging oneself. And that’s pretty much it as far as the root of the humanities goes, and so the idea behind a literature class is to put some books under a student’s nose that I enjoy being challenged by and that maybe they will, too. The title of department under which a course is being offered merely tells you what kind of book you’ll most likely encounter in the course, though all bets are off in the actual course.
Endnotes
[1] “Worlds or Words Apart?” in TCF 137
[2] On classical pragmatism’s occasional instrumentalism about truth, see “What Pragmatism Is” or the later “Rhetorical Universalism”. An earlier discussion of truth in the history of philosophy that I still like is “Absolute Truth.”
[3]
[4] Compare this passage to Nietzsche’s most famous passage on truth: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” trans. Kaufmann).
[5] I’ve also deployed it to discuss Brandom’s philosophy of language in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.”
[6] For more on this line of thought about using literature, see my forthcoming “Touchstones.”
[7] Abrams’s book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) is a still standard study of the intellectual tradition of Romanticism’s revolution in understanding how the mind relates to the world via those two metaphors. Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature does for philosophy what Abrams did for the intellectual traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries. (It’s important, in relating those two books and their purview, to remember that people didn’t distinguish the activities of philosophers and poets the way we do now. Abrams’ study is more wide-ranging in its historical depth than Rorty’s, but Rorty’s has more depth in the philosophical significance of the major philosophical figures from Plato to ‘70’s professional philosophy.) Central to the second chapter of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is this point that Romanticism, despite making the important shift away from mirror metaphors (which create representationalist epistemological models like Plato’s and Descartes’), still retains a metaphysically pernicious model of an ineffable self.
[8] Collected finally in The Rorty Reader (2010), eds. Volparil and Bernstein, though it had been available as a manuscript-file for many years at Rorty’s website.
[9] From Talks to Teachers and to Students, in Writings: 1878-1899, 843.
[10] I did try once to rationalize my love of the form of comedy found in Ferrell-Apatow-Stiller by analogizing it to Romanticism. See “Just Bitching.”
1. In my English department, the graduate students have formed a small colloquium that regularly meets to discuss someone’s work in progress. What has increasingly become pressing to me as a scholar-in-training is the question of what a scholar is, of my self-image as a literary critic. And this partly because it’s obvious that we grads all individually seem to have different ones, have an increasing variety available to us as critical tradition extends itself, and don’t have a space in which we can reflect together on this kind of self-reflection. There are literary theory courses, but rarely an opportunity to talk together about what it is we do. So I delivered the following as a talk to provoke a discussion about our own, individual self-images as literary critics. I framed the discussion around the two slogans in my title, in part because what I find helpful is to talk about alternative images or metaphors or distinctions for self-definition.
2. “Literature as equipment for living” is a slogan of Kenneth Burke’s. A friend of mine in the department had asked me what I had been reading this past winter break, and I said excitedly, “Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History,” and my friend scrunched up her nose and mouth like she’d eaten a stink bug and replied, “ugh, the rhet-com guy?” Rhetoric and Communications is a growing subdiscipline in English Departments around the country, and rhetoric as a disciplinary study has taken Burke to be the father of contemporary rhetorical theory. There’s often an amusing, though sometimes churlish, rivalry between these two halves of English Departments, but let me say, once and for all, that Burke’s main vocation was literary criticism, and not as a founder of rhetorical theory. In fact, reading his work, it’s hard to imagine a school formed out of it at all. (Side note: Richard Rorty once said to an interviewer asking about Rorty’s criticisms of Paul de Man, “I can imagine being grateful for de Man’s obsessiveness, that is, his habit of reducing to nothingness any given text he reads. When de Man does it it’s interesting, but when you get … thousands of de Man clones, it’s merely formulaic. I don’t think anyone would have objected to de Man if he had been a kind of Kenneth Burke figure, not training up generations of students.” [1] Rorty, apparently, wasn’t acquainted with the other side of some English Departments.)
The idea of literature as equipment for living has its seed in Attitudes Toward History (1937), a book that is part Emersonian-pragmatist in affirming the Optimistic, part speech-act/genre theory (the kind of thing you get out of an Ortega or Lukács or Bakhtin), part quasi-Marxist history, and part idiosyncratic dictionary of a critical vocabulary (things like “alienation,” “transcendence,” “efficiency,” “casuistic stretching,” “character-building by secular prayer,” “being driven into a corner” and—my favorite—“heads I win, tails you lose”). “Equipment for living” is a metaphor that Burke regularly employs, like the pragmatist habit of asking for the “cash-value” of an assertion or how one would “cash out” a metaphor. What follows is an attempt to spell out how I cash out his metaphor, but I begin by taking it to be his master-trope for the relationship between language and action. Here is a characteristic way Burke talks with it—in his discussion of William James, he begins by saying:
For his philosophic trinity [James] proposed ‘rationality, activity, faith.’ Faith invigorates the power of action; rationality provides method for the act. And since by rationality is meant a willingness to consider all available evidence, it should shape the act by tests of completeness and consistency. All of his fundamental assertions were designed to equip him and others for living. He ‘accepted’ the universe by admitting any faith (in progressive evolution, in God, in the benefits of prayer) that enabled him to have the sense of moving towards something better. … And so strongly did he need the concept of Better rather than the concept of Best, as a way of equipping himself for action, that he rejected absolutism always, preferring even the asymmetry of ‘pluralism,’ a doctrine that outraged his form-loving colleagues. (5-6)One will notice that this is fundamentally a pragmatist stance because it treats language—in this case, assertoric prose—as having an ethical function that swings free of truth. Indeed, by foregrounding assertion as having a function that is not truth-affirming, he risks outraging the same pieties the classical pragmatists did in their own instrumentalism about truth, potted in the misleading formula “truth is what works.” [2]
3. But literature is not assertoric prose—it does not make assertions, at least not explicitly. Or rather, not explicitly by the author. So we have at least two different pragmatic contexts with which to judge the metaphor. Before I get to talking about what that might mean for us, I want to just keep plunging ahead with literature. In 1938, a year after Attitudes Toward History was published, Burke published an essay entitled “Literature as Equipment for Living,” codifying his thoughts about this metaphor and the orientation it implies for the literary critic. (You can find it in his Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), a book whose first few pages has a line poets love, “the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude” (9). To understand that line’s formal dimension, you have to read it against Yeats [3], but its embodiment of pragmatism I’ll return to momentarily.)
In the essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Burke suggests that what he is up to in his work, and his selection for key critical terms “purpose” and “motivation,” is a “sociological criticism of literature” (293). To unpack this, he takes up the notion of proverbs and says that what they do is name “typical, recurrent situations” in the life of a culture. We then “find” ourselves, as it were, in the proverb and are directed in our thinking by it about our own situation. So, as examples, Burke lists off proverbs for consolation (“The worst luck now, the better for another time”), for vengeance (“fools tie knots and wise men loose them”), for foretelling (“keep your weather eye open”), and for wise living (“first thrive, than wive”). “Proverbs are,” Burke says, “strategies for dealing with situations” (296). And playing off the war metaphor of “strategy,” Burke says as against a baffled interlocutor, that “surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images…. One seeks to ‘direct the larger movements and operations’ in one’s campaign of living” (298). [4]
And so, Burke says, “each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary” for one can think of novels as “the strategic naming of a situation.” They “single out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it” (300).
4. This might be a good place to stop and collect our thoughts and codify some of the issues in play. I like the idea of taking books to name situations and provide the resources for thinking through them. It first of all requires an act of distillation on our part—these acts can be exceedingly useful, even outside the exam structure. What they provide is the framework of a perspective on how the book is to be read, the pattern in it to be called to the fore. For example, I could say that Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady displays the difficulties a woman faces in searching for autonomy in the face of both a culture of monogamy that infantilizes female choice and an aestheticist culture that flattens the moral parameters of autonomy. And what this distillation does is coordinate the ratios between paradigmatic moments in the text that provide the lens with which to read the other moments—for example, Mr. Touchett telling Isabel that “fortunately ladies are not obliged to give reasons,” Isabel telling Mr. Goodwood that she wishes to be free even to commit some atrocity, and Ralph hoping with delight to see what Isabel will do with her money. From this perspective (spoiler!), Isabel going back to Osmond is the inevitable tragedy precisely because it is the attainment of a robust moral autonomy wherein one takes on the burden of one’s choices.
What we don’t need to say is that a novel names only one situation—I think we can wipe away that possible implication from Burke’s formulation and say that novels, like life, are made up of an indefinite number of patterns of experience. And this, in fact, is what makes them such treasure troves for our equipment for living. For while I say “indefinite,” and really do mean it, novels really don’t present something so unmanageable as all that for the precise reason Burke says: they are concerted mobilizations of a finite range of textual phenomena. No matter what future interpretive lens comes down the pike, Isabel Archer will be a woman. Maybe someone will argue someday (or probably already has) that Isabel Archer is not the “lady” of the novel’s “portrait,” but it had better be the case that Goodwood’s got the penis and Isabel the vajj.
5. Now, after Burke’s suggestion about naming there’s the actual image of “equipment for living.” “Equipment” suggests to me a wider metaphorical value than the more narrow war metaphor of “strategy.” I think Burke should absolutely be read against Nietzsche in “Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” but both should be drained of their violence to establish the underlying adventure of life—and no adventurer ever leaves home without his or her equipment, as every D&D player knows. Without your equipment, you are naked and vulnerable. And this equipment, in this case, is language. This, again, dovetails with a certain philosophical pragmatism about language. The central strain of pragmatism from Peirce, James, and Dewey to Rorty and his student Robert Brandom—they all follow Alexander Bain, the American psychologist and, as it happens, rhetorician, in defining beliefs as habits of action. Our beliefs are not just indicators of but also shapers of our actions in the world. Our linguistic formulations are as much a technological development as anything wrought of iron or wood.
6. This leads me to a partial segue to the second term of my title: “spiritual exercises.” This is a term established by Ignatius of Loyola’s 17th century book of that name, but it has been resurrected by Pierre Hadot to talk about a mode of philosophy. Hadot was a colleague of Michel Foucault’s at the Collège de France and was one of the major scholars of ancient philosophy at the end of the last century. (I cannot more highly recommend the English translation of his 1995 book, What Is Ancient Philosophy? as an introduction to Greek philosophy, both for its readability, scope, and erudition.) In an essay entitled “Spiritual Exercises,” and reprinted in his Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot suggests that Ignatius’s Jesuit practices were built out of the resources of the earlier Stoic tradition, which had its own traditions of spiritual exercises (if perhaps avant la lettre). Hadot says that “attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. … Thanks to his spiritual vigilance, the Stoic always has ‘at hand’ (procheiron) the fundamental rule of life: that is, the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” And this for the Stoic, he says, “frees us from the passions, which are always caused by the past or the future—two areas which do not depend on us” (84-85).
If you’re like me, you might say, “well, that sounds wonderful—even bypassing the suspicious idea that the future doesn’t depend on me—but how does this spiritual vigilance work? How do I make sure that my self-consciousness is always awake? You can’t just want something or think you are a certain way for it to be the case.” And this is where I find Stoics to be pragmatists avant la lettre, for one important practical measure is the repetition and memorization of linguistic formula:
The exercise of meditation allows us to be reading at the moment when an unexpected – and perhaps dramatic – circumstance occurs. … We must confront life’s difficulties face to face, remembering that they are not evils, since they do not depend on us. This is why we must engrave striking maxims in our memory, so that, when the time comes, they can help us accept such events, which are, after all, part of the course of nature; we will thus have these maxims and sentences ‘at hand.’ What we need are persuasive formulae or arguments (epilogismoi), which we can repeat to ourselves in difficult circumstances, so as to check movements of fear, anger, or sadness. (85)In the oral noetic economy—which is a fancy way of saying how the activity of knowing works in pre-literacy cultures—you only know what you can remember (a formula codified by Walter J. Ong somewhere). I think this goes for us, too, when we are away from our books, trying to figure out what to do at any given moment. If beliefs are habits of action, then reflection is a matter of cycling through your pathways of belief.
The idea of beliefs being but nodes on a spatial graph of interrelating lines is in part a metaphor given substance by Hans Blumenberg, a friend of Hadot’s and one of the great German intellectual historians of the last century, rivaling Heidegger and Habermas for both philosophical depth and acuity. [5] Blumenberg, in a little known but incredibly insightful essay on rhetoric, suggests that rhetoric be in part understood as a form of detour. It is a detour from action. This produces the old trope of the “man of action” and the “man of thought,” Achilles vs. Odysseus, or worse Socrates, who would stop Euthyphro from acting against his father for impiety with all his pesky little questions like, “do you even know what impiety is?” But consider how reasoning works—by inference. We infer one proposition from another, which means you transition from one sentence to another. In justifying your action, you take the time of multiplying sentences, which is time taken away from acting. Clearly for the Stoic this isn’t a bad thing—they want to mute action entirely in some cases, relieving us of our passions that form the fundamental motivations (hello Burke) for acting.
7. Turning back to Burke and “literature as equipment for living,” I pull out one way of thinking about it in terms of using remembered pieces of literature to think through life’s situations. [6] And one way of doing this is by formula—either your own distillation of memorable narrative moments or catchy aphorisms of the text itself. Literature, in this way, becomes part of your armament as you meet the demands of life on the field of battle.
You’ll notice, however, that this has made literature into an assertion-generating enterprise, at least as it relates to one’s life, in the form of these maxims or formulas. But, as I noted in section 3, literature isn’t assertoric prose—aren’t there other ways we might relate to literature that might also be important to living? And also: this is kind of making literature sound like self-help. Before turning this last screw, I want to take up a deficiency in the “equipment for living” metaphor that punches up, I think, one of the most important ethical issues of our time. On its surface, “equipment” suggests—like my description of the body naked and vulnerable without it—that there is an inner or essential or at any rate some self beneath the language that articulates it. This is an image from Romanticism, in part codified by M. H. Abrams’ “lamp,” and it is one pragmatists, at least, have to reject. [7] There is no hidden, ineffable self deep down—it is language all the way down, rhetoric all the way down, equipment all the way down.
And while this might spark a metaphysical argument, I want to first note that a shift from “equipment” to “spiritual exercises” helps articulate the pragmatist perspective. Our linguistified self is better thought of as a muscle, and though you only know what you can remember, you don’t only believe what you can remember in the same way that while you may not know that you have a particular muscle, you use it just the same—however, of course, wanting to throw the baseball harder and knowing what operates the humerus may lead you to pounding those pecks a little harder. (Recall Burke’s “dancing of an attitude” formula.)
But secondly, “equipment all the way down” suggests a new handle on the old fears of relativism and the infinite regress. If it’s equipment all the way down, and the point of equipment is to protect your “self,” then it’s just equipment protecting other equipment. While relativism’s fear is that there’s no non-relative basis upon which to judge one’s values, equipment protecting equipment might produce the more radical fear that one was born into the wrong tribe, given the wrong education. Relativism goes fishing for the bottom of the inferential detours, but this perspective sees that we stop all the time to use the equipment we have, whether or not we know there’s a foundation for it. And in a less radical case, equipment protecting equipment produces the problem of knowing which is the means and which is the end—what is a tool that could be discarded for a better one and what is an essential part of what it is to be me.
8. So, now, back to assertions and literature—as my reintroduction of “spiritual exercises” indicates, one of the reasons why I like books like Portrait of a Lady, Howards End, and Middlemarch, is that they are obviously produced by an extraordinary intelligence working through a complex situation. Solutions are, unlike in philosophy typically, not to the fore here, and one thing I like is thinking through the situations with the author, either via their intermediaries in the form of characters or their tropes via the complex functions of their narrators. This does not, let me hasten to add, work for every book (as my lengthening train of books I have trouble reading attests) as not all books are best named by this meta-perspective.
9. However, there is another more recent use of the term “spiritual exercises” that goes some way to opening a window on another use of literature. My way to it is to first go back to Hadot and ask for his reason for choosing the word spiritual:
In the first place, it is no longer quite fashionable these days to use the word ‘spiritual.’ It is nevertheless necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the other adjectives we could use – ‘psychic,’ ‘moral,’ ‘ethical,’ ‘intellectual,’ ‘of thought,’ ‘of the soul’ – covers all the aspects of the reality we want to describe. Since, in these exercises, it is thought which, as it were, takes itself as its own subject-matter, and seeks to modify itself, it would be possible for us to speak in terms of ‘thought exercises.’ Yet the word ‘thought’ does not indicate clearly enough that imagination and sensibility play a very important role in these exercises. For the same reason, we cannot be satisfied with ‘intellectual exercises,’ although such intellectual factors as definition, division, ratiocination, reading, investigation, and rhetorical amplification play a large role in them. ‘Ethical exercises’ is a rather tempting expression, since … the exercises in question contribute in a powerful way to the therapeutics of the passions, and have to do with the conduct of life. Yet, here again, this would be too limited a view of things. …[T]hese exercises in fact correspond to a transformation of our vision of the world, and to metamorphosis of our personality. The word ‘spiritual’ is quite apt to make us understand that these exercises are the result, not merely of thought, but of the individual’s entire psychism. (Philosophy 81-82)This, I think, moves us a long way, especially with its emphasis on metamorphosis, self-transformation, transcendence. However, in the Stoic exercises themselves, the emphasis on maxims moves us back to putting thought first in priority, as does Hadot’s own formula that the exercises are “thought which takes itself as its own subject-matter and seeks to modify itself.” Is there another kind of exercise, one which the narrative form is peculiarly adapted to supplying?
In Rorty’s late essay, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” [8] Rorty says that
the term ‘spiritual development’ is usually used only in reference to the attempt to get in touch with the divine. But it is occasionally used in a broader sense, one in which it covers any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one’s sense of what matters most. In this broader sense of the term, I would urge that the novels of Proust and James help us achieve spiritual growth, and thereby help many of us do what devotional reading helped our ancestors do. (404)Rorty says that “aesthetic” and “moral” won’t do in this context because “beauty” and “moral” importance seem too narrow of categories to describe the sense of exaltation that James and Proust cultists feel when reading them. “This sense of exaltation is not the same thing as being bowled over by the sheer rhetorical or poetic power of one’s favorite passages. Such passages play the role that their favorite passages in sacred scripture play for the religious. They become mantras, and reciting them brings very present help in time of trouble.”
The sense of exaltation I am trying to describe is, instead, a result of reading books as wholes, of following plots through to the end, rather than with being rendered momentarily delirious by a startling poetic figure, a perfectly crafted couplet, or a splendidly balanced antithesis. … Following such careers [as Isabel Archer’s or Christian’s in The Pilgrim’s Progress] lifts up the heart by letting the reader hope that she herself might eventually overcome the immaturity, the confusion, and the incoherence of her days. … For the intellectual who finds James and Proust exalting, it is the hope that she will be able someday to see her life in this world as a work of art – that she will someday be able to look back and bring everything together into some sort of pattern … into a coherent story of maturation. It is the hope for rounded completion and self-recognition, and is more like a longing for shapeliness than like the ambition of transcendence. (405)
10. The experience of reading these books is an analogue to a religious experience—you don’t exactly come away with any new beliefs or formulae. “It is the experience of reading the novel,” Rorty says, “that makes one into a different sort of person, not the utility of a belief one might have acquired by various other means.” And the reason novels are good at this seems clear: they can show maturation. As a form, prose narrative seems better suited for showing it and thus producing that affective conduit that floods our motivational channels with that vague, life-giving substance we call “hope.”
Seeing various forms of literature as spiritual exercises is seeing them as acting on you and as you acting through them. Novels, especially those like Henry James’s or Conrad’s or Faulkner’s, are difficult forests that seem to have to have paths hewn through every time. I find poetry like Dickinson’s and Stevens’s to be spiritual exercises that I respond to, even if I find myself tripping and stumbling, my muscles distorted at angles they normally don’t find themselves in. What do they equip me for? I don’t know always. But I do like making the effort at spelling it out.
11. But not always. Burke, in his essay on equipment, alludes to his era’s “inspirational literature” and how “it is a strategy for easy consolation” (298). Burke does not shy from this aspect of the sociological approach to rhetorical and literary forms. When I had the chance to teach a course on American Romanticism, on the first day I read them a famous bit by William James in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” whose punchline, after James shows how ignorant he was of the lifeways of po’ Appalachian folk—“losing,” as he says, “the whole inward significance of the situation”—the punchline is: “I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.” [9] I then posed to my students what I took to be the real problem before us: “how do you, the student, who is likely not going to become an English major let alone become a professional literary critic—how do you negotiate a class like this, what with ‘my strange indoor academic ways of life’?”
It seems natural to me to see this as implicitly a question about literary value, or “what is literature?” I confessed that I had no idea how to define literature or the literary, and instead suggested a distinction between works that challenge and those that don’t. To be properly democratic about “taste,” we can be snobs in our private lives, but not in our theories of the public good—you are not a “better person” for enjoying Moby-Dick over Harry Potter; different books have different purposes, and it isn’t clear that non-challenging works aren’t serving a good purpose (relaxation, for example, or derisively, “escapism”). An example is my inability to watch challenging movies, including most dramas—I rationalize it by saying it’s probably because I read challenging books all day, but either way, I’d much rather laugh to Will Ferrell or watch The Bourne Identity for the eighth time than try and watch Cronenberg or Twelve Years a Slave. [10]
The idea behind the occasional elitist stance toward books, and the idea that every democratic humanist believes intimately, is that it is good to be challenged; it is a primary social good to be challenged; it is an intrinsic good to be challenged occasionally. Notice I say “occasionally,” because it cannot be good to be constantly challenged because then you wouldn’t get anything done—this is the intimate relationship between thought and action that I was early talking about under the heading of beliefs as habits of action and detours. But it is good to be challenged sometimes—that’s the problem of sycophants, “yes men”—but where, when, by whom? Who do you trust to challenge you? I take it to be a mark of freedom that every person gets to decide for themselves when they want to be challenged—though in public matters I take it to be much less up to individual choice about when one can be challenged. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to sample a broad array of areas, avenues, ways of challenging oneself. And that’s pretty much it as far as the root of the humanities goes, and so the idea behind a literature class is to put some books under a student’s nose that I enjoy being challenged by and that maybe they will, too. The title of department under which a course is being offered merely tells you what kind of book you’ll most likely encounter in the course, though all bets are off in the actual course.
Endnotes
[1] “Worlds or Words Apart?” in TCF 137
[2] On classical pragmatism’s occasional instrumentalism about truth, see “What Pragmatism Is” or the later “Rhetorical Universalism”. An earlier discussion of truth in the history of philosophy that I still like is “Absolute Truth.”
[3]
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- Yeats, “Among School Children”
[4] Compare this passage to Nietzsche’s most famous passage on truth: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” trans. Kaufmann).
[5] I’ve also deployed it to discuss Brandom’s philosophy of language in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.”
[6] For more on this line of thought about using literature, see my forthcoming “Touchstones.”
[7] Abrams’s book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) is a still standard study of the intellectual tradition of Romanticism’s revolution in understanding how the mind relates to the world via those two metaphors. Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature does for philosophy what Abrams did for the intellectual traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries. (It’s important, in relating those two books and their purview, to remember that people didn’t distinguish the activities of philosophers and poets the way we do now. Abrams’ study is more wide-ranging in its historical depth than Rorty’s, but Rorty’s has more depth in the philosophical significance of the major philosophical figures from Plato to ‘70’s professional philosophy.) Central to the second chapter of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is this point that Romanticism, despite making the important shift away from mirror metaphors (which create representationalist epistemological models like Plato’s and Descartes’), still retains a metaphysically pernicious model of an ineffable self.
[8] Collected finally in The Rorty Reader (2010), eds. Volparil and Bernstein, though it had been available as a manuscript-file for many years at Rorty’s website.
[9] From Talks to Teachers and to Students, in Writings: 1878-1899, 843.
[10] I did try once to rationalize my love of the form of comedy found in Ferrell-Apatow-Stiller by analogizing it to Romanticism. See “Just Bitching.”
Friday, June 20, 2014
Rorty's Early Work
1. 1979 — What was actually radical about eliminative materialism; 2. “The Limits of Reductionism” — The rhetoric of moves — The metaphor of conversation; 3. Why republish the early work? — The technical conversation of philosophy; 4. So much missing — In this age of access — Where are the lectures?
1. At the end of his career, Richard Rorty was known as a stylish, philosophical crossdresser and stout reformist liberal who was the prime reason for the renaissance in pragmatism that occurred at the end of the 20th century. In 1979, though, Rorty wasn’t known for any of this. Rorty’s reputation at that time was as an innovator in the philosophy of mind, and for being widely identified with the phrase “the linguistic turn.” The combined effect of the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his delivering the APA Eastern Division Presidential Address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in 1979 was to wipe out memory of that early work. From then on, for those inside the analytic philosophy establishment he was known as the betrayer, and for those outside...well, they didn’t need to know anything about it precisely because he’d betrayed it. In particular, philosophy of mind could get on without him because his innovation—dubbed “eliminative materialism”—was being carried on by people more radical than he anyways, namely the Churchlands.
This neglect has seemed a pity, particularly as the Churchlands’ “eliminative materialism,” as Robert Brandom notes, has nothing much to do with what Rorty pioneered. [1] However, it makes a certain kind of sense since it is also true, as Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia note in their introduction to the new posthumous collection of Rorty’s early analytic work, Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy (2014), that Rorty’s philosophical stance changed remarkably little when viewed from the right angle. Indeed, Brandom shows quite well how Rorty’s eliminative materialism quite naturally leads to his mature position on the contingency of social practices, and thus the optionalness of vocabularies. Rorty’s eliminative materialism was the idea that the mind/body distinction is based on the fact that we use two different vocabularies to describe what goes on between our ears, and that we could plausibly phase out the one that refers to it as “the mind” given certain changes in our technical ability to manipulate the brain, the centerpiece of the other vocabulary we use.
The Churchlands took that point—based on Rorty’s view of our practices of observation and reflection—and made it a reductionist claim, that we should eliminate the Mentalese vocabulary and the folk psychology that goes with it as quickly as possible in order to better talk about the world and ourselves, since, after all, all that’s between our ears is really just a brain. As Rorty’s point was simply that it was possible, going the next step and arguing we should make it actual does have the ring of a more radical step. But from the vantage of his later work, one can see how this is regressive—the Churchlands’ claim is just one more metaphysical claim about Xs really being Ys, and that knowing the Truth will help us say more true things. But thinking of Materialism as the Truth just reifies that particular vocabulary, freezing it into the place where we had before thought only Mentalese could exist. Rorty’s thought flowed from the Nietzschean thawing, the realization that all vocabularies are mortal, and thus all should be judged on their own merits for getting a particular job done, not on the false enthronements of a divine right of philosopher-kings.
2. That Rorty was working his way toward this Nietzschean stance can be seen much more clearly now that Leach and Tartaglia have made Rorty’s early work more widely available. The absolute gem, “The Limits of Reductionism,” (1961) is a wonderful piece of metaphilosophical reflection on philosophical argument, one of a trio of his earliest full essays. He begins with the brazen move of implicitly suggesting that wielders of the epithet “Reductionist!” know not what they wield, for the “general procedure” of inferring from “X has the property of Y” to “X is nothing but Y” is constitutive of abstract thought itself: “all abstract thought takes selected aspects of a subject matter as paradigmatic and ignores other aspects. Thought is reductionistic or nothing, and the criticism only makes sense if it is narrowed down” (39). The idea here is that thinking necessarily uses the “is” to predicate properties, and that rational inquiry can only function if it is legitimate to narrow your inquiry to a single kind of object, with kinds being delimited by the predicate you use to pick it out. [2]
What Rorty is concerned with in the essay is philosophical conversation, how philosophical arguments are traded and for what purpose. Thus the rhetoric of “moves” I’ve already deployed, as in “moves made in a game,” is central to Rorty’s stance and discussions in this early period. What it yields is not only a useful bird’s-eye view of a number of different sites of contention (realists vs. idealists, logical positivists or Marxists or Freudians on the attack, etc.), but an interesting, contextual definition of philosophy. Rorty identifies the three great patterns of argument in the history of Western philosophy as the appeal to simplicity, the appeal to fact, and the appeal to self-referential inconsistency—the latter of which is what the antireductionist is really wielding. What the antireductionist is concerned about is that “the result of the reduction does not permit an account of the reduction itself,” and is thus self-referentially inconsistent.
And it is interesting to see how the man identified with the linguistic turn never really felt comfortable with what it denoted, denying in the essay the usual ways of cashing out the differences between the two putative sides. There are many biographical nuggets like this in these essays, and it’s a little disappointing to see Leach and Tartaglia’s editorial criteria cut Rorty’s “Recent Metaphilosophy” (1961) from being collected. That essay begins with more interesting botanization, the analogy of philosophy to a game, and the first major instance (in, again, one of his first essays) of his deployment of the concept of conversation that he became so identified with in his post-PMN phase, though avant la lettre. Declaring that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules,’” Rorty goes on to draw the conclusion that the goal of philosophy must be communication, then. ”Since communication is the goal, rather than truth (or even agreement), the prospective infinite series is a progress rather than a regress: it becomes a moral duty to keep the series going, lest communication cease.” [5] But as the essay moves on to minute discussion of two philosophers lost to time, it’s understandable that it wasn’t reproduced.
3. But biographical nuggets and removing the tarnish from Rorty’s reputation isn’t reason enough to publish the collection. The only people who would care about those two things are people already motivated enough to find the originals (as I have). After all, we already have several complete bibliographies of Rorty available, so the difficulty of finding far-flung essays is reduced. And digital archives make getting essays from the Review of Metaphysics or the Journal of Philosophy easier than getting a copy of the book—so long as you have access to a major research library. [6] But who else is going to be interested than those already with such access?
Leach and Tartaglia’s reasoning, and their view of why Rorty’s early work should be more widely available, is that it has something to say to the current conversations of philosophy. (Daniel Dennett—a contemporary of Rorty’s and a continuously major figure in late 20th century philosophy of mind—says so as well, in his short preface to the volume.) The editors have two basic categories: Rorty’s metaphilosophy and his stuff on language and mind. His reviews have already been cut (this isn’t a “collected works” project), as well as two (excellent) articles in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy and one essay on Whitehead. [7] But what are his essays on mind and language going to add? A lot of it—in particular “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” and “Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth”—was superseded by Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (And some of them, like “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn’” (1962) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1970), just aren’t that interesting.) And again: people working on the technical problems of anglophone philosophy are going to have access to research libraries with databases to throw pdfs right onto your iPad from home.
Essays collected in a book work differently on our psyche, though, that I cannot deny. But the principles the editors used, I think, should’ve been modified. They say they stopped at 1972 because Rorty began his Consequences of Pragmatism collection in 1972 with “The World Well Lost” and that he could’ve, presumably, selected later essays like “Criteria and Necessity” (1973) if he had wanted to. But this is specious as against the designs of their project because this is about the technical conversation of philosophy—and the reason Rorty says in CP that he doesn’t collect them is because they were technical. So instead of “Realism and Reference” (1976), which is referred to (and thus implicitly “up to date”) in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP), we get the utterly dispensable “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” [8] But more importantly, we’re missing “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” (1979), a great piece of metaphilosophy that bookends nicely “The Limits of Reductionism.”
4. I don’t know what I would’ve done. The criteria Leach and Tartaglia use are kind of arbitrary, but you have to end a book somewhere. When you look out over Rorty’s corpus, though, there are gems everywhere that should be more widely read. The trouble is that there’s no net to capture his career-making (and still fascinating) “Mind-Body Identity, Categories, and Privacy” (1965), the encyclopedia article “Intuition” (1967), “Searle and the Special Powers of the Brain” (1980) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (1982), “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” (1982), and “Against Belatedness” (1983)—and this is just a variegated group up through 1983. ”Mind-Body” has historical interest, “Intuition” is interesting, “Searle” is polemical, “Contemporary” is technical, “Hermeneutics” is about education, and “Against” is a book review of Hans Blumenberg. The four basic editorial choices of criteria for inclusion of Influence, Subject, Audience, or Form cannot get all those pieces in the same book, but they all should be read...by somebody.
I assume somebody’s working on a chronological Collected Works edition of his stuff, ala Dewey’s, or at least it’s an obvious enough idea that somebody at the right moment will put it into motion. In this Age of Access, though, I wonder how needed it is after you get a complete bibliography. I already own copies of all of Rorty’s published material. Granted, some of it I was lucky (finding a copy used of some obscure Catholic Association conference proceedings for the one year Rorty was there—can you imagine the odds?) and then not, in one case; I still have not been able to locate The American Peoples’ Encyclopedia with all the high-powered databases at my library. But what do we really need a Collected Works edition for? If the scholarly apparatus doesn’t add a whole bunch of use-value to it (for example, tracking some of Rorty’s sometimes obscure allusions), then I don’t see why we would. [9] What I would like, however, are his lectures. That would be new, and that would be interesting. I see all these collections of lectures by like John Rawls and Stanley Cavell—Rorty taught for years; was it all extemporaneous? They must be hiding in a file folder somewhere at UC-Irvine. Maybe I’ll be the one to have to drag them out.
Endnotes
[1] See the beginning of Brandom’s essay “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism.
[2] This move is the first instance of a move that Rorty would later use in discussing the antiessentialism common to, e.g., Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson. Derrida’s attack on “logocentrism,” which foregrounded the presupposed center/margin distinction implicit in the project of metaphysics, produced in certain crowds (mainly harboring English departments) the repetitious parroting of “binary thinking!” every time a distinction was made. Rorty claims that Derrida and Davidson are “antidualists,” but “this does not mean that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions” (PSH 47).
[3] For if the Kuhnian perspective is right, that disciplines arise around common sets of problems, but those problems are not “natural” in the sense that the metaphysical tradition has used the term to describe what Reality impresses on us whether we like it or not, then what’s to stop every person from being entitled to set up shop for themselves and work on whatever problem they’ve delimited for themselves? The implicit object-Meinongianism here breeds inquiry-Meinongianism, whereby all it takes for a new one-person discipline to arise is a refusal to answer another person’s question. One might take this to be a reductio ad absurdum, and people have, but I think it forces the right kind of metaphilosophical reflections on the two sides of pragmatism, the Emersonian and the social practice traditions.
[4] I’ve discussed this essay previously in my own “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (I consider it juvenilia, but it mainly presents the content of the essay, so could prove a useful summary.)
[5] “Recent Metaphilosophy,” Review of Metaphysics, Dec. 1961, 301-302. Compare that to “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (PMN 377). Also, read it against note 2, above. David L. Hall’s excellent critical introduction to Rorty’s thought, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (1994), first dug out this early essay and made much of this line for the continuity of Rorty’s philosophy (see 77).
[6] *NOTE ADDED MAY 2015* In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's not that hard to discover that the bibliographies aren't quite complete. Rorty wrote a couple short reviews for the Review of Metaphysics in grad school, run as it was out of Yale and partly by his friend Richard Bernstein. (His first was in 1955 on Nelson Goodman's instantly famous Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.) Also, it is unfortunate that Leach and Tartaglia didn't discover the errata for "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" in the Review of Metaphysics, June 1971. One is a partial misquote of James Cornman on 203, but the other is an entire missing line on 203. It kind of made sense, so it's not too surprising that the original editors of the Review and then Leach and Tartaglia missed it. Here's the sentence reprinted:
[7] Though another essay on Whitehead is included, presumably because the latter, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” isn’t just exegetical. Whitehead is just not part of the current conversation (“we judged that one paper about Whitehead would probably suffice,” say the editors in a footnote on 7), though those still talking about him did reprint “Matter and Event” (1963), the dropped essay, in 1983.
[8] To be fair, I have no idea what’s happening in the technical conversation of contemporary philosophy professors. (I hope this isn’t too much of a frightening reveal.) My suspicion is that Dennett is being generous when he says that the papers he earmarks should be “required reading” for up-and-comers. But despite my lack of definite knowledge about what current philosophy professors are taking seriously, based on the trajectory of it from the 60s to 90s, which I might claim some know-how with, I doubt that these professors are going to find useful, for example, Rorty’s essay on Kant, “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument.” There’s much to be said about the importance of that essay on a number of different fronts, but none of them seem relevant to what I imagine an aggregate of philosophy professors spend their time on. But maybe analytic philosophy has taken a good turn, back to the concerns that Rorty was speaking to. (Though, come to think of it, that would mean philosophy hasn’t gotten any further than they were 50 years ago. Great for my hero; so much wasted time for philosophy. Or not—if this is all a kind of inquiry, then wasted time is never wasted time because you won’t know which tunnel is a dead-end until you reach it, turn around, and say, “Gee, that was a waste of time.”)
[9] I’ll just add here my general unhappiness with Leach and Tartaglia’s introduction. They largely limit themselves to biographical context for each of the essays as they are chronologically published, and this is sometimes useful for somebody who hasn’t read all the interviews or Neil Gross’ book. (See my review “Waiting for More: Gross and Rorty.”) And they make a few good connections between some early parts and Rorty’s later work, and add some useful bits of historical context. But their critical patter is too often genuinely misleading for an amateur acolyte like myself not to be annoyed. One example: during a discussion of his first paper, a compare-and-contrast of Peirce and Wittgenstein, Leach and Tartaglia say that “Peirce was the classical pragmatist for whom the mature Rorty had least sympathy owing to the former’s lack of concern for moral and social issues, a worry foreshadowed here in an ambivalent footnote” (5). I don’t think there’s anything ambivalent about the footnote. After noting that “renewed interest in pragmatism has led to a new interest in Peirce, who somehow seems the most ‘up-to-date’ of the pragmatists” (16), Rorty footnotes, “perhaps because he was neither as concerned with religion and morality as James, nor as interested in social and political issues as Dewey.” This strikes me as ironic, but not ambivalent. The irony is that analytic philosophy can’t countenance James or Dewey because of those commitments, and so they focus on Peirce. It’s an arrow at the analytic establishment’s aridness, not Peirce’s. The reason Leach and Tartaglia’s comment is misleading about the later Rorty’s reason for lacking sympathy in Peirce is because 1) he stated in Consequences of Pragmatism that it was because Peirce was too Kantian and, more importantly, 2) he’s not entitled to have lack of political utility as a reason for lack of sympathy (at least, consciously—but Leach and Tartaglia’s “owing” is ironically ambivalent in articulating which is their claim). The thrust of Rorty’s understanding of the relationship between those sides of a philosopher’s work is that of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: some people are useful for politics, some aren’t. And indeed, Leach and Tartaglia even use Rorty’s use of that idea on Heidegger (i.e. that Heidegger’s politics is irrelevant to our reception of his philosophy) in their introduction just two pages before. It would be strange for Rorty, who was a huge fan of Sellars’ and Brandom’s very unpolitical work, to hold that against Peirce.
1. At the end of his career, Richard Rorty was known as a stylish, philosophical crossdresser and stout reformist liberal who was the prime reason for the renaissance in pragmatism that occurred at the end of the 20th century. In 1979, though, Rorty wasn’t known for any of this. Rorty’s reputation at that time was as an innovator in the philosophy of mind, and for being widely identified with the phrase “the linguistic turn.” The combined effect of the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his delivering the APA Eastern Division Presidential Address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in 1979 was to wipe out memory of that early work. From then on, for those inside the analytic philosophy establishment he was known as the betrayer, and for those outside...well, they didn’t need to know anything about it precisely because he’d betrayed it. In particular, philosophy of mind could get on without him because his innovation—dubbed “eliminative materialism”—was being carried on by people more radical than he anyways, namely the Churchlands.
This neglect has seemed a pity, particularly as the Churchlands’ “eliminative materialism,” as Robert Brandom notes, has nothing much to do with what Rorty pioneered. [1] However, it makes a certain kind of sense since it is also true, as Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia note in their introduction to the new posthumous collection of Rorty’s early analytic work, Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy (2014), that Rorty’s philosophical stance changed remarkably little when viewed from the right angle. Indeed, Brandom shows quite well how Rorty’s eliminative materialism quite naturally leads to his mature position on the contingency of social practices, and thus the optionalness of vocabularies. Rorty’s eliminative materialism was the idea that the mind/body distinction is based on the fact that we use two different vocabularies to describe what goes on between our ears, and that we could plausibly phase out the one that refers to it as “the mind” given certain changes in our technical ability to manipulate the brain, the centerpiece of the other vocabulary we use.
The Churchlands took that point—based on Rorty’s view of our practices of observation and reflection—and made it a reductionist claim, that we should eliminate the Mentalese vocabulary and the folk psychology that goes with it as quickly as possible in order to better talk about the world and ourselves, since, after all, all that’s between our ears is really just a brain. As Rorty’s point was simply that it was possible, going the next step and arguing we should make it actual does have the ring of a more radical step. But from the vantage of his later work, one can see how this is regressive—the Churchlands’ claim is just one more metaphysical claim about Xs really being Ys, and that knowing the Truth will help us say more true things. But thinking of Materialism as the Truth just reifies that particular vocabulary, freezing it into the place where we had before thought only Mentalese could exist. Rorty’s thought flowed from the Nietzschean thawing, the realization that all vocabularies are mortal, and thus all should be judged on their own merits for getting a particular job done, not on the false enthronements of a divine right of philosopher-kings.
2. That Rorty was working his way toward this Nietzschean stance can be seen much more clearly now that Leach and Tartaglia have made Rorty’s early work more widely available. The absolute gem, “The Limits of Reductionism,” (1961) is a wonderful piece of metaphilosophical reflection on philosophical argument, one of a trio of his earliest full essays. He begins with the brazen move of implicitly suggesting that wielders of the epithet “Reductionist!” know not what they wield, for the “general procedure” of inferring from “X has the property of Y” to “X is nothing but Y” is constitutive of abstract thought itself: “all abstract thought takes selected aspects of a subject matter as paradigmatic and ignores other aspects. Thought is reductionistic or nothing, and the criticism only makes sense if it is narrowed down” (39). The idea here is that thinking necessarily uses the “is” to predicate properties, and that rational inquiry can only function if it is legitimate to narrow your inquiry to a single kind of object, with kinds being delimited by the predicate you use to pick it out. [2]
What Rorty is concerned with in the essay is philosophical conversation, how philosophical arguments are traded and for what purpose. Thus the rhetoric of “moves” I’ve already deployed, as in “moves made in a game,” is central to Rorty’s stance and discussions in this early period. What it yields is not only a useful bird’s-eye view of a number of different sites of contention (realists vs. idealists, logical positivists or Marxists or Freudians on the attack, etc.), but an interesting, contextual definition of philosophy. Rorty identifies the three great patterns of argument in the history of Western philosophy as the appeal to simplicity, the appeal to fact, and the appeal to self-referential inconsistency—the latter of which is what the antireductionist is really wielding. What the antireductionist is concerned about is that “the result of the reduction does not permit an account of the reduction itself,” and is thus self-referentially inconsistent.
This treatment of philosophizing as itself a fact in need of explanation is the metaphilosophical attitude par excellence. It is the rhetorical device which moves discussion up to the level on which the questions “Necessary for what?” and “When is a fact not really a fact?” must be raised explicitly. The acceptance of this gambit might indeed be taken as the defining characteristic of that species of discourse which we call “philosophy.” For it is precisely when the gambit is refused, and the reductionist replies that his concern is with a certain delimited subject matter which does not include his own activity of inquiry, that a given type of inquiry is liable to separate itself from philosophy and to set up shop as science. (41)This, I think, is a tremendous insight with significant ramifications for our understanding of inquiry and its relationship to social institutions. [3] From the beginning, Rorty was concerned with metaphilosophy—thinking about why and how we do philosophy—an attitude impressed upon him most by his teacher at Chicago, Richard McKeon. This collection makes available another gem, “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (1967) This is usefully read as a follow up to “Limits,” focusing now on the specific conversational state of analytic philosophers who took the “linguistic turn” and their older colleagues who resisted the turn by continuing to speak of “essences” and “experience.” Rorty again displays his technique of ad hoc botanization, splitting philosophers into the categories of “critical,” “speculative,” and “empirical,” and though this tempest is largely missing from the teapot these days, it is still instructive to watch Rorty go through his motions. [4]
And it is interesting to see how the man identified with the linguistic turn never really felt comfortable with what it denoted, denying in the essay the usual ways of cashing out the differences between the two putative sides. There are many biographical nuggets like this in these essays, and it’s a little disappointing to see Leach and Tartaglia’s editorial criteria cut Rorty’s “Recent Metaphilosophy” (1961) from being collected. That essay begins with more interesting botanization, the analogy of philosophy to a game, and the first major instance (in, again, one of his first essays) of his deployment of the concept of conversation that he became so identified with in his post-PMN phase, though avant la lettre. Declaring that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules,’” Rorty goes on to draw the conclusion that the goal of philosophy must be communication, then. ”Since communication is the goal, rather than truth (or even agreement), the prospective infinite series is a progress rather than a regress: it becomes a moral duty to keep the series going, lest communication cease.” [5] But as the essay moves on to minute discussion of two philosophers lost to time, it’s understandable that it wasn’t reproduced.
3. But biographical nuggets and removing the tarnish from Rorty’s reputation isn’t reason enough to publish the collection. The only people who would care about those two things are people already motivated enough to find the originals (as I have). After all, we already have several complete bibliographies of Rorty available, so the difficulty of finding far-flung essays is reduced. And digital archives make getting essays from the Review of Metaphysics or the Journal of Philosophy easier than getting a copy of the book—so long as you have access to a major research library. [6] But who else is going to be interested than those already with such access?
Leach and Tartaglia’s reasoning, and their view of why Rorty’s early work should be more widely available, is that it has something to say to the current conversations of philosophy. (Daniel Dennett—a contemporary of Rorty’s and a continuously major figure in late 20th century philosophy of mind—says so as well, in his short preface to the volume.) The editors have two basic categories: Rorty’s metaphilosophy and his stuff on language and mind. His reviews have already been cut (this isn’t a “collected works” project), as well as two (excellent) articles in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy and one essay on Whitehead. [7] But what are his essays on mind and language going to add? A lot of it—in particular “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” and “Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth”—was superseded by Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (And some of them, like “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn’” (1962) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1970), just aren’t that interesting.) And again: people working on the technical problems of anglophone philosophy are going to have access to research libraries with databases to throw pdfs right onto your iPad from home.
Essays collected in a book work differently on our psyche, though, that I cannot deny. But the principles the editors used, I think, should’ve been modified. They say they stopped at 1972 because Rorty began his Consequences of Pragmatism collection in 1972 with “The World Well Lost” and that he could’ve, presumably, selected later essays like “Criteria and Necessity” (1973) if he had wanted to. But this is specious as against the designs of their project because this is about the technical conversation of philosophy—and the reason Rorty says in CP that he doesn’t collect them is because they were technical. So instead of “Realism and Reference” (1976), which is referred to (and thus implicitly “up to date”) in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP), we get the utterly dispensable “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” [8] But more importantly, we’re missing “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” (1979), a great piece of metaphilosophy that bookends nicely “The Limits of Reductionism.”
4. I don’t know what I would’ve done. The criteria Leach and Tartaglia use are kind of arbitrary, but you have to end a book somewhere. When you look out over Rorty’s corpus, though, there are gems everywhere that should be more widely read. The trouble is that there’s no net to capture his career-making (and still fascinating) “Mind-Body Identity, Categories, and Privacy” (1965), the encyclopedia article “Intuition” (1967), “Searle and the Special Powers of the Brain” (1980) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (1982), “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” (1982), and “Against Belatedness” (1983)—and this is just a variegated group up through 1983. ”Mind-Body” has historical interest, “Intuition” is interesting, “Searle” is polemical, “Contemporary” is technical, “Hermeneutics” is about education, and “Against” is a book review of Hans Blumenberg. The four basic editorial choices of criteria for inclusion of Influence, Subject, Audience, or Form cannot get all those pieces in the same book, but they all should be read...by somebody.
I assume somebody’s working on a chronological Collected Works edition of his stuff, ala Dewey’s, or at least it’s an obvious enough idea that somebody at the right moment will put it into motion. In this Age of Access, though, I wonder how needed it is after you get a complete bibliography. I already own copies of all of Rorty’s published material. Granted, some of it I was lucky (finding a copy used of some obscure Catholic Association conference proceedings for the one year Rorty was there—can you imagine the odds?) and then not, in one case; I still have not been able to locate The American Peoples’ Encyclopedia with all the high-powered databases at my library. But what do we really need a Collected Works edition for? If the scholarly apparatus doesn’t add a whole bunch of use-value to it (for example, tracking some of Rorty’s sometimes obscure allusions), then I don’t see why we would. [9] What I would like, however, are his lectures. That would be new, and that would be interesting. I see all these collections of lectures by like John Rawls and Stanley Cavell—Rorty taught for years; was it all extemporaneous? They must be hiding in a file folder somewhere at UC-Irvine. Maybe I’ll be the one to have to drag them out.
Endnotes
[1] See the beginning of Brandom’s essay “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism.
[2] This move is the first instance of a move that Rorty would later use in discussing the antiessentialism common to, e.g., Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson. Derrida’s attack on “logocentrism,” which foregrounded the presupposed center/margin distinction implicit in the project of metaphysics, produced in certain crowds (mainly harboring English departments) the repetitious parroting of “binary thinking!” every time a distinction was made. Rorty claims that Derrida and Davidson are “antidualists,” but “this does not mean that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions” (PSH 47).
[3] For if the Kuhnian perspective is right, that disciplines arise around common sets of problems, but those problems are not “natural” in the sense that the metaphysical tradition has used the term to describe what Reality impresses on us whether we like it or not, then what’s to stop every person from being entitled to set up shop for themselves and work on whatever problem they’ve delimited for themselves? The implicit object-Meinongianism here breeds inquiry-Meinongianism, whereby all it takes for a new one-person discipline to arise is a refusal to answer another person’s question. One might take this to be a reductio ad absurdum, and people have, but I think it forces the right kind of metaphilosophical reflections on the two sides of pragmatism, the Emersonian and the social practice traditions.
[4] I’ve discussed this essay previously in my own “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (I consider it juvenilia, but it mainly presents the content of the essay, so could prove a useful summary.)
[5] “Recent Metaphilosophy,” Review of Metaphysics, Dec. 1961, 301-302. Compare that to “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (PMN 377). Also, read it against note 2, above. David L. Hall’s excellent critical introduction to Rorty’s thought, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (1994), first dug out this early essay and made much of this line for the continuity of Rorty’s philosophy (see 77).
[6] *NOTE ADDED MAY 2015* In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's not that hard to discover that the bibliographies aren't quite complete. Rorty wrote a couple short reviews for the Review of Metaphysics in grad school, run as it was out of Yale and partly by his friend Richard Bernstein. (His first was in 1955 on Nelson Goodman's instantly famous Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.) Also, it is unfortunate that Leach and Tartaglia didn't discover the errata for "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" in the Review of Metaphysics, June 1971. One is a partial misquote of James Cornman on 203, but the other is an entire missing line on 203. It kind of made sense, so it's not too surprising that the original editors of the Review and then Leach and Tartaglia missed it. Here's the sentence reprinted:
Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."Here's what it should read:
Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language we use. To say that "X's appear to us as F" is merely to say that "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."As you can see, it doesn't really change anything interpretationally. And besides, of the essays reproduced, "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" is the most negligible. If I could fault the editors for anything, it would be reprinting it in the first place.
[7] Though another essay on Whitehead is included, presumably because the latter, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” isn’t just exegetical. Whitehead is just not part of the current conversation (“we judged that one paper about Whitehead would probably suffice,” say the editors in a footnote on 7), though those still talking about him did reprint “Matter and Event” (1963), the dropped essay, in 1983.
[8] To be fair, I have no idea what’s happening in the technical conversation of contemporary philosophy professors. (I hope this isn’t too much of a frightening reveal.) My suspicion is that Dennett is being generous when he says that the papers he earmarks should be “required reading” for up-and-comers. But despite my lack of definite knowledge about what current philosophy professors are taking seriously, based on the trajectory of it from the 60s to 90s, which I might claim some know-how with, I doubt that these professors are going to find useful, for example, Rorty’s essay on Kant, “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument.” There’s much to be said about the importance of that essay on a number of different fronts, but none of them seem relevant to what I imagine an aggregate of philosophy professors spend their time on. But maybe analytic philosophy has taken a good turn, back to the concerns that Rorty was speaking to. (Though, come to think of it, that would mean philosophy hasn’t gotten any further than they were 50 years ago. Great for my hero; so much wasted time for philosophy. Or not—if this is all a kind of inquiry, then wasted time is never wasted time because you won’t know which tunnel is a dead-end until you reach it, turn around, and say, “Gee, that was a waste of time.”)
[9] I’ll just add here my general unhappiness with Leach and Tartaglia’s introduction. They largely limit themselves to biographical context for each of the essays as they are chronologically published, and this is sometimes useful for somebody who hasn’t read all the interviews or Neil Gross’ book. (See my review “Waiting for More: Gross and Rorty.”) And they make a few good connections between some early parts and Rorty’s later work, and add some useful bits of historical context. But their critical patter is too often genuinely misleading for an amateur acolyte like myself not to be annoyed. One example: during a discussion of his first paper, a compare-and-contrast of Peirce and Wittgenstein, Leach and Tartaglia say that “Peirce was the classical pragmatist for whom the mature Rorty had least sympathy owing to the former’s lack of concern for moral and social issues, a worry foreshadowed here in an ambivalent footnote” (5). I don’t think there’s anything ambivalent about the footnote. After noting that “renewed interest in pragmatism has led to a new interest in Peirce, who somehow seems the most ‘up-to-date’ of the pragmatists” (16), Rorty footnotes, “perhaps because he was neither as concerned with religion and morality as James, nor as interested in social and political issues as Dewey.” This strikes me as ironic, but not ambivalent. The irony is that analytic philosophy can’t countenance James or Dewey because of those commitments, and so they focus on Peirce. It’s an arrow at the analytic establishment’s aridness, not Peirce’s. The reason Leach and Tartaglia’s comment is misleading about the later Rorty’s reason for lacking sympathy in Peirce is because 1) he stated in Consequences of Pragmatism that it was because Peirce was too Kantian and, more importantly, 2) he’s not entitled to have lack of political utility as a reason for lack of sympathy (at least, consciously—but Leach and Tartaglia’s “owing” is ironically ambivalent in articulating which is their claim). The thrust of Rorty’s understanding of the relationship between those sides of a philosopher’s work is that of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: some people are useful for politics, some aren’t. And indeed, Leach and Tartaglia even use Rorty’s use of that idea on Heidegger (i.e. that Heidegger’s politics is irrelevant to our reception of his philosophy) in their introduction just two pages before. It would be strange for Rorty, who was a huge fan of Sellars’ and Brandom’s very unpolitical work, to hold that against Peirce.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”
1. Getting Davidson better press — Talking about your own problems; 2. Pragmatic holism — Words are not stilts — Idealism — Linguistic holism; 3. Avoiding idealism; 4. Incommensurable paradigms — Smells like idealism; 5. Close reading the conclusion of “Very Idea” — Empiricism motivated by realism — Conceptual relativity; 6. Truth is between sentences — On the very idea of mediation
1.
I’m not a specialist, but I’ve picked up some things about anglophone philosophy, and I tend to think Rorty was probably right about Davidson’s significance. So what I’d like to do is just provide a little of the context that I understand to be at work to make one of Davidson’s most famous essays more accessible to the layreader, especially students of literature. [2] Davidson once told Rorty “that he had never tried to solve anybody else’s problems, never discussed an issue simply because others were talking about it.” [3] This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can aid in the avoidance of the entropy that sets in quicker for those whose writings are too timely. Most of us are doomed to be only understood within the claustrophobic space of our immediate situation—you could understand what our remarks mean if you knew more about the history of the conversation we were taking part in, but why would you want to? In the hands of a thinker of genius, however, such ignoring of your context can give a freshness because if you know beforehand that these are just your problems, then you are usually more careful to make sure your reader knows what you’re concerned about. Davidson has this freshness, based on his idiosyncrasy, but he is also not completely idiosyncratic—he is taking part in the Conversation of Philosophy, and sometimes in setting up his problems, it’s not always apparent how to situate him in philosophical space. You have to know something about the history of a conversation to understand any conversation. These are just a few notes toward that end.
2. The first thing to know is that if you haven’t already read Willard van Orman Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), there is no point in reading Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974). Davidson generally should be seen, in many aspects, as extending certain basic Quinean ideas, and in “Very Idea” he is pursuing an argument that extends the basic pragmatic holism that underlies that earlier paper. The basic gist of that extremely influential essay is that the empiricist project of analysis—“linguistic analysis” being built into the self-image of anglophone philosophers since Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap—is fundamentally flawed if is based on two very bad ideas. “One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in the meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.” [4] The second dogma represents the specific manifestation of empiricism as a core philosophical project after the linguistic turn. If, as empiricists since Locke have maintained, we are born tabula rasa, a blank slate, then everything is learned and thus rooted in experience. This means you have to build backwards to experience if you think there is anything at a distance from it. This is a kind of atomism, where the goal is to give an account of our conceptual activity by constructing complexities out of simples that can be tied directly to their origin in our immediate experience of the world. Words are like stilts—they each are grounded in the world, and if they aren’t, you’re just floating in the air, unconnected.
The linguistic turn in anglophone philosophy, however, made an important move away from the realm of philosophical action that had animated 18th and 19th-century philosophy—the mind. Experience, for most empiricists, happened in the mind, which is also where conceptual activity occurred because before the linguistic turn, ideas were concepts, not words. [5] Tired of the Hegelian Absolute Idealism of the preceding generation of British philosophy, Russell and G. E. Moore said sucks to that—skip the ideas and go to the only manifestation we deal with. “Philosophical analysis is linguistic analysis” became a kind of fighting faith as this kind of metaphilosophical, methodological viewpoint swept Philosophy Departments. However, part of the motivation for rejecting the Bradleys and the McTaggarts was to move away from a wooly-headed spiritualism and towards an embrace of the natural sciences. The hard, tough natural sciences are empirical, and the founding of analytic philosophy also marked the resurgence of empiricism in philosophy. But empiricism—rooting everything in experience—poses a problem for a philosopher who also thinks that the natural sciences are the best at doing that kind of thing. What’s left for philosophy to do?
Linguistic analysis! We’ll study words and meaning, and how they mean. However, the only way for this to be a distinct project that can’t be taken over by a science is if some of our words aren’t rooted in experience in the requisite way. So the analytic/synthetic distinction took hold as a means to keep something distinctive for philosophers to do, helping the scientists with their words, if you will. The iconic example to establish the plausibility of analyticity—the notion of a statement that depends for its truth only on the meanings of the words composing it—is “A bachelor is an unmarried man.” That statement is true and the shenanigans of married and unmarried men matter not a whit to that judgment. So definitions are a paradigm of the analytic, as opposed to a synthetic statement like “That rock just fell on my foot,” where you’d have to check my foot for a bruise and the vicinity for a proximal and culpable rock.
Against the atomism of trying to give an account of simples connected to experience being put together to create complexes and trying to separate out the “just language” parts from the “experience decides the truth” parts—which the project was foundering on—Quine substituted a holistic picture of our interaction with our environment:
3. One problem this picture has incurred is of avoiding the charge of idealism. The problem of idealism in philosophy in the last 200 years is the problem of avoiding Cartesian solipsism. Descartes inaugurated the problem by means of his radical doubt—if I can doubt everything but that I’m doubting, then at least I know that. The premise of this line of thought, of course, is that a certain primacy is given to knowing, or epistemology. Idealism, however, first got off the ground as a corollary of empiricism, not the rationalism of Descartes. Berkeley felt that the consequence of a thoroughgoing empiricism, an effort to put experience first, led to the belief that the only thing you really know then is your experience—the stuff happening in your own mind. This is the connection between empiricism and phenomenalism, the 20th century manifestation of the notion that the appearances just are the reality.
This is troubling, for it seems like admitting that the only thing you can really be sure of is in your own mind, and that is reality. Kant’s transcendental argument, about what we think of as empirical reality needing the categories of the mind, hoped to avoid this problem of idealism, so that as the old formula has it, only a transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. But given his descendents in German Idealism, who had other agendas, idealism has remained the bugbear of realists, those who demand a robust sense of a world out there. When you look at Quine’s holistic picture, it seems nice, but realists want to know an awful lot about why there’s such radical underdetermination and how one defuses the problem of connecting to reality attendant to the relative independence of the inside of one’s web of beliefs.
4. These are the problems Davidson concentrated some of his most original work on. For in the time between Quine’s “Two Dogmas” and Davidson’s “Very Idea,” a revolution had occurred in the philosophy of science, which given the fighting faiths of analytic philosophy was a very important subground. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962. In it Kuhn made the argument that scientific theories and experiments were elaborated within in what he called paradigms. A paradigm for Kuhn is essentially the guiding assumptions that undergird the conceptual content of those theories and experiments. [10] Given the nature of the relationship between assumptions, inferences, and conclusions, however, this means that if you change your root assumptions, it doesn’t make sense to say the old conclusions are false—you simply can’t draw them from your new assumptions. [11] Kuhn drew from this kind of consideration the conclusion that different scientific paradigms were incommensurable, that paradigm shifts in scientific activity—such as the shift from geocentric, Ptolemaic astronomy to the heliocentric, Copernican—are not logical transitions from the falsification of assumptions, but rhetorical transitions by simply replacing one set of assumptions with another. But this means, then, that proponents of alternative paradigms beg the question over each other in argument because they are working from different assumptions. Paradigms are incommensurable because from each standpoint one cannot attain a position in which to even judge whether the other is true. And thus Kuhn was led to his most regretted line, that “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” [12]
“Works in a different world”—smells just like idealism. It’s against this background that Davidson intervenes, collecting together the linguist-anthropologists Sapir and Whorf, the calm Kuhn and the fiery Feyerebend, and his mentor Quine—quoting the passage I pointed to above as the holistic picture—as all suggesting a picture of different conceptual schemes organizing a world that is otherwise a blank without such organization. The criterion that seems to be implicitly at work in all of them to tell when we actually have different conceptual schemes at work is failure of translation. This philosophical perspective then infers from this failure an inability to translate between them.
Davidson doesn’t think there’s a “between” here. He thinks that whatever the picture of language is that has given rise to what Hilary Putnam called the “cookie-cutter view of reality” is false. He calls the scheme/content distinction, that between “organizing system and something waiting to be organized,” “a dogma of empiricism”—“the third, and perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism.” [13]
5. The above should put you in a better position to read the essay. (I’m not confident enough to think it’s sufficient, but it might be a good start.) The view of Davidson articulated above is pretty much that of Richard Rorty. [14] In what follows, I’d like to close read Davidson’s conclusion in order to bring out how the above interacts with his specific mode of articulation. The final paragraph of “Very Idea” runs like this:
The thing to understand in this context is how this is empiricism through the looking glass of Kant. What Davidson is saying in the first two sentences might be paraphrased as “you might think that we are giving up on objectivity if we give up the idea of an uninterpreted reality and thus sink into relativism [first sentence], but it is that very idea of an ‘uninterpreted reality’ that produces the possibility of relativism.” That’s what Davidson means when he says “this kind of relativity goes by the board”—i.e., we can’t even make sense of this vulgar relativism without the dogma, so none of its considerations, objections, concerns, or arguments are relevant.
In the rest of the paragraph, then, Davidson is trying to reconstrue what we should mean by conceptual relativity and objectivity. At this point, it is important to not construe Davidson as having identified language with conceptual schemes. At the beginning of the essay, he says, “We may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme.” [17] But what Davidson is doing at the beginning of the essay is leading us dialectically through the inside of this line of thought. We might paraphrase his mode this way: “we may accept this hypothesis about how to understand language, so if we do, this is how it would have to work...oh, it doesn’t work the way we need it to...guess we have to reject it.” (Obviously there are two points at which the mechanics of the argument might be criticized, then: whether Davidson has correctly gotten a handle on how it has to work and whether he’s identified things we need to be done by the theory.) Everything at the beginning leads up to his famous line about the third dogma. He’s attempting to show how contemporaneous discussions of “incommensurability,” then white hot because of Kuhn and Feyerabend’s explosive fight with the Popperians, run back through Quine’s gauntlet of the two dogmas, and how Quine then isn’t enough to show what the problem is with radical incommensurability of languages/schemes/vocabulary.
6. So here’s the last two sentences again: “Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” To understand what Davidson is saying here I find it helpful to think of Alfred Tarski’s Convention T (which Davidson, I think, has in the back of his mind). “Claim ‘P’ is true if and only if P.” Here’s the famous example: “The claim ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” (I’ve thrown in the shorthand of “if and only if.”) This is now sometimes called the disquotational theory/definition of truth: take off the quotes to find out what needs to be the case for the sentence to be true. (Lately this is also called the deflationary theory of truth.)
Davidson is saying here, first, what Rorty repeats in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: truth is a property that only holds in languages, between sentences (“relative to language”). So, there is a kind of relativity here, since I might say “Snow is white” or “I think snow is white” or “La neige est blanche,” all of which might say the same thing. However, these three claims are as objective as can be, Davidson thinks, because we already know how to judge their truth by the way the world is. Snow is white if snow is white; likewise, since the French use their sentence in exactly the same contexts as our English one, we can say the two sentences say exactly the same thing, talk about the same world. “I think snow is white” can express the same thing as the first two, but Tarski shows us that it might also tell us something slightly different: “The claim ‘I think snow is white’ is true iff I think snow is white.” And depending on who is using that sentence, you might come up with different answers, unlike “snow is white.” For why would we say that the claim “I think snow is white” is true tout court just because I happen to think so? (“I” is what they call an indexical, like “here” and “now”—they refer very differently depending on context, and thus can radically change truth-values.)
When Davidson says “unmediated touch,” what he’s saying here is the same as when Rorty rejects the metaphor of thinking of language as a medium. Davidson shouldn’t have said “reestablish,” for his real point is that we couldn’t possibly be in a position where we weren’t in contact with the world in such a way that our common modes of adjudicating the truth of sentences might globally be suspicious. (This the Cartesian threat of skepticism.) Rorty’s argument goes backwards to Hegel, whose attack on “immediacy” in the Phenomenology of Spirit is the first attack on the Kantian framework that Davidson is, we could say, rephrasing in the analytic idiom. [20] Rorty wants to say that language is more like an arm than it is a veil (or a map). That means “snow” is just as connected to snow as your hand.
There are a number of more general problems scared up by this discussion, most especially how we are to understand Davidson’s argument’s relationship to Kuhnian notions of radical conceptual shifts. Kuhn is ostensibly a target, so does Davidson’s argument require us to reject Kuhnian paradigm shifts? I will return to these problems.
Endnotes
[1] Richard Rorty, “Out of the Matrix,” Oct. 5, 2003 in the Boston Globe
[2] I should add that literary critics have not remained completely ignorant of Davidson’s work. (And putting it that way, I hasten to add, makes it sound like it’s their fault, when it isn’t. Really, it isn’t anybody’s fault—and that’s despite the tone in the body, above, where it sounds like I’m sliding blame in the direction of the philosophers. That’s a rhetoric I’ve more picked up from Rorty than I should feel entitled to. In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly tired of people complaining about how their particular hero has been “ignored” or someone else’s hero was “anticipated” by theirs—and you can probably find me making such complaints, but I’d really rather weed that out. They sound so uncouth in others, so why should I keep it up as well? In our lengthening age, who actually has time to stay abreast of everyone? Why can’t we learn to lay off the horn, and just show people why we happen to like so-and-so and leave omniscience to the gods? Scholars have an interest in promulgating a sense that there are certain things you need to know to be considered in the club—the problem is that there are a lot of different clubs now, and generally this is a good thing. I have more thoughts about this in “Do We Need a Center, or Generalities?.”) There is a very good collection of essays edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock, Literary Theory After Davidson, and though a philosopher, Samuel Wheeler III’s book, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, is of inestimable value for literary critics desiring an approach to Davidson because of their general familiarity with Derrida and de Man.
[3] “In Memoriam,” 318 in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2006
[4] Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 20 in his From a Logical Point of View
[5] I say “most empiricists” because many pragmatists would like to include pragmatism within the ranks of empiricism. In particular, for James and Dewey, everything was experience—they collapsed the distinction between experience and world that is needed to constitute the idea of a mind radically distinct from the world, and thus create the possibility of being out of touch with it, a problem hovering in the background of all of this. For a different version of this story about the foundation and demolition of analytic empiricism at the hands of Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty that discusses its relationship to the pre-linguistic turn maneuvers of James and Dewey, see my “Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn.”
[6] Quine, “Two Dogmas,” 42-43
[7] Brandom, as he likes to cutely point out, technically does not believe in belief. In his systematic philosophy of language, he avoids it in the official account, though provides the means of seeing how to move back and forth between various common ways of understanding the concept of “belief.” See in particular his Making It Explicit, 195-6. He’s also proud of the fact, and his Ph.D. dissertation advisor Rorty is as well, that “experience” does not appear once in that massive book, though that is tangential to the issues here.
[8] When did this web of belief become a biological construct? Sleight of hand, given that it would take me too far afoot to justify the suitability of this picture for humans, though clearly it won’t work, say, for actual amoeba who have an environment but no language. This is a problem that needs an account, and some of Brandom’s best work goes some way in justifying the analytic’s fighting faith in thinking that it’s a good idea to just avoid talking about “mind” and “experience” given how other animals probably have them and instead find a way of talking about the specific problems that arise for us language-users. Brandom calls this the demarcation problem and it is terribly important, particularly for various ecologically-minded intellectual movements, e.g. forms of “posthumanism.” (I apply this Brandomian insight to posthumanism and give the example of one particular treatment of intentionality in “Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization,” sections 3-5.)
[9] Rorty gives a Davidsonian account of this kind of thing—with a picture!—in his “Non-reductive Physicalism” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth.
[10] They are much more interestingly complex than this—for example, the nature of an exemplar in Kuhn’s vocabulary points in a particularly pragmatic-attitudinal direction, as opposed to my reduction of the paradigm to a semantic-conceptual essence—but for my purposes this may suffice.
[11] Say you have an argument like this:
[12] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., 121. A new fourth edition, with a long essay by the most important philosopher-historian working after Kuhn, Ian Hacking, has recently come out, and the pagination is near-identical to the 3rd, but not quite. (Note: I’m not counting Foucault in that evaluation because he worked out of a different tradition than Kuhn. Interestingly, however, Hacking is the heir of both Kuhn and Foucault, being one of the earliest and still most cogent commentators and appreciators of Foucault’s project.) There are significant differences in pagination from the 3rd to the earlier ones.
[13] Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in Inquires into Truth and Interpretation, 189
[14] One of Rorty’s more infamous essays, “The World Well Lost” (in Consequences of Pragmatism), is in fact an excited extrapolation of the argument Davidson makes in “Very Idea,” except that Rorty published it a year before Davidson got around to publishing his. (Rorty, similarly to Kuhn, later regretted the rhetoric of that essay.) Rorty’s most thorough treatment of what he takes the importance of Davidson to be is his “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth” (in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth).
[15] “Very Idea,” 198
[16] In Note 5, I suggested that James and Dewey considered themselves empiricists of a different stripe, and talking about motivation—the connections and relative priority given to different doctrines—is another way of articulating kinds of difference within camps marked out by isms. For example, one might think of James and Dewey as empiricists who aren’t realists and Davidson and Brandom as kinds of post-linguistic turn, analytic philosophers who are neither empiricists nor realists.
[17] “Very Idea,” 184
[18] See CIS 4-5
[19] See CIS, Ch. 1, esp. 10-13
[20] An earlier important attack on immediacy in the Hegelian tradition was Sellars’s in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”
1.
Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s writings are not easy for the nonspecialist to grasp. Neither are those of Kant and Hegel. But the work of original and imaginative philosophers such as these, in the course of generations, gradually comes to have an influence on the entire culture. Their criticisms of our intellectual heritage change our sense of what it is important to think about. A couple centuries from now, historians of philosophy will be writing about the changes in the human self-image that Donald Davidson’s writings helped bring about. [1]Richard Rorty, who was a personal friend of Davidson’s, wrote this shortly after Davidson’s death. So this strong claim has two strikes against it: 1) friendship often colors and 2) interesting prophesies are often wrong. But as amplification, and from someone deeply immersed in intellectual history, it’s a striking thing to say about a philosopher no one outside of small coteries of isolated individuals—called Anglophone Philosophy Departments—has heard of. Not so with Wittgenstein, who gets good press amongst other departments, even if there aren’t many who really know what he was on about. However, Wittgenstein was an eccentric person and carried out his philosophy eccentrically—he just seems more interesting, and so attracts the mind at a more superficial level. Davidson, so far as I know, led a quiet life carrying out a philosophical project amongst a group of fellows who increasingly separated themselves from the life of other disciplines.
I’m not a specialist, but I’ve picked up some things about anglophone philosophy, and I tend to think Rorty was probably right about Davidson’s significance. So what I’d like to do is just provide a little of the context that I understand to be at work to make one of Davidson’s most famous essays more accessible to the layreader, especially students of literature. [2] Davidson once told Rorty “that he had never tried to solve anybody else’s problems, never discussed an issue simply because others were talking about it.” [3] This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can aid in the avoidance of the entropy that sets in quicker for those whose writings are too timely. Most of us are doomed to be only understood within the claustrophobic space of our immediate situation—you could understand what our remarks mean if you knew more about the history of the conversation we were taking part in, but why would you want to? In the hands of a thinker of genius, however, such ignoring of your context can give a freshness because if you know beforehand that these are just your problems, then you are usually more careful to make sure your reader knows what you’re concerned about. Davidson has this freshness, based on his idiosyncrasy, but he is also not completely idiosyncratic—he is taking part in the Conversation of Philosophy, and sometimes in setting up his problems, it’s not always apparent how to situate him in philosophical space. You have to know something about the history of a conversation to understand any conversation. These are just a few notes toward that end.
2. The first thing to know is that if you haven’t already read Willard van Orman Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), there is no point in reading Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974). Davidson generally should be seen, in many aspects, as extending certain basic Quinean ideas, and in “Very Idea” he is pursuing an argument that extends the basic pragmatic holism that underlies that earlier paper. The basic gist of that extremely influential essay is that the empiricist project of analysis—“linguistic analysis” being built into the self-image of anglophone philosophers since Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap—is fundamentally flawed if is based on two very bad ideas. “One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in the meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.” [4] The second dogma represents the specific manifestation of empiricism as a core philosophical project after the linguistic turn. If, as empiricists since Locke have maintained, we are born tabula rasa, a blank slate, then everything is learned and thus rooted in experience. This means you have to build backwards to experience if you think there is anything at a distance from it. This is a kind of atomism, where the goal is to give an account of our conceptual activity by constructing complexities out of simples that can be tied directly to their origin in our immediate experience of the world. Words are like stilts—they each are grounded in the world, and if they aren’t, you’re just floating in the air, unconnected.
The linguistic turn in anglophone philosophy, however, made an important move away from the realm of philosophical action that had animated 18th and 19th-century philosophy—the mind. Experience, for most empiricists, happened in the mind, which is also where conceptual activity occurred because before the linguistic turn, ideas were concepts, not words. [5] Tired of the Hegelian Absolute Idealism of the preceding generation of British philosophy, Russell and G. E. Moore said sucks to that—skip the ideas and go to the only manifestation we deal with. “Philosophical analysis is linguistic analysis” became a kind of fighting faith as this kind of metaphilosophical, methodological viewpoint swept Philosophy Departments. However, part of the motivation for rejecting the Bradleys and the McTaggarts was to move away from a wooly-headed spiritualism and towards an embrace of the natural sciences. The hard, tough natural sciences are empirical, and the founding of analytic philosophy also marked the resurgence of empiricism in philosophy. But empiricism—rooting everything in experience—poses a problem for a philosopher who also thinks that the natural sciences are the best at doing that kind of thing. What’s left for philosophy to do?
Linguistic analysis! We’ll study words and meaning, and how they mean. However, the only way for this to be a distinct project that can’t be taken over by a science is if some of our words aren’t rooted in experience in the requisite way. So the analytic/synthetic distinction took hold as a means to keep something distinctive for philosophers to do, helping the scientists with their words, if you will. The iconic example to establish the plausibility of analyticity—the notion of a statement that depends for its truth only on the meanings of the words composing it—is “A bachelor is an unmarried man.” That statement is true and the shenanigans of married and unmarried men matter not a whit to that judgment. So definitions are a paradigm of the analytic, as opposed to a synthetic statement like “That rock just fell on my foot,” where you’d have to check my foot for a bruise and the vicinity for a proximal and culpable rock.
Against the atomism of trying to give an account of simples connected to experience being put together to create complexes and trying to separate out the “just language” parts from the “experience decides the truth” parts—which the project was foundering on—Quine substituted a holistic picture of our interaction with our environment:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. … But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole. [6]This is, essentially, the picture that holists like Davidson, Rorty, and Robert Brandom all wish to remain loyal to. The only difference is that all three are a lot less likely to conflate what Quine elsewhere calls the “web of belief” that is described here with “total science.” With that metaphor of the self as a web of belief, Rorty and Brandom in particular take the further step of thinking of belief as Alexander Bain did—as a habit of action. [7] In this case, one of the most relevant habits of action here is the action we take to articulate a belief in words. The core idea here is that our beliefs, and the sentences we use to articulate them, mean what they do both because of their relationship to each other and the whole of them to the environing world. The use of any particular word or sentence is underdetermined by the world by itself. “Snow is white” might be true, but why use it instead of “La neige est blanche”? Both are true, but only in relationship to their home language in English or French and the world doesn’t tell you which one to use. The picture here is of a self as a kind of amoeba, whose permeable sides can be crossed in specific ways. On the inside are linguistically articulable beliefs and on the outside is the organism’s environment. [8] What Brandom calls language-entries (i.e. “perception”) and language-exists (i.e. “action”) are fundamental to how this self interacts with its environment. [9]
3. One problem this picture has incurred is of avoiding the charge of idealism. The problem of idealism in philosophy in the last 200 years is the problem of avoiding Cartesian solipsism. Descartes inaugurated the problem by means of his radical doubt—if I can doubt everything but that I’m doubting, then at least I know that. The premise of this line of thought, of course, is that a certain primacy is given to knowing, or epistemology. Idealism, however, first got off the ground as a corollary of empiricism, not the rationalism of Descartes. Berkeley felt that the consequence of a thoroughgoing empiricism, an effort to put experience first, led to the belief that the only thing you really know then is your experience—the stuff happening in your own mind. This is the connection between empiricism and phenomenalism, the 20th century manifestation of the notion that the appearances just are the reality.
This is troubling, for it seems like admitting that the only thing you can really be sure of is in your own mind, and that is reality. Kant’s transcendental argument, about what we think of as empirical reality needing the categories of the mind, hoped to avoid this problem of idealism, so that as the old formula has it, only a transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. But given his descendents in German Idealism, who had other agendas, idealism has remained the bugbear of realists, those who demand a robust sense of a world out there. When you look at Quine’s holistic picture, it seems nice, but realists want to know an awful lot about why there’s such radical underdetermination and how one defuses the problem of connecting to reality attendant to the relative independence of the inside of one’s web of beliefs.
4. These are the problems Davidson concentrated some of his most original work on. For in the time between Quine’s “Two Dogmas” and Davidson’s “Very Idea,” a revolution had occurred in the philosophy of science, which given the fighting faiths of analytic philosophy was a very important subground. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962. In it Kuhn made the argument that scientific theories and experiments were elaborated within in what he called paradigms. A paradigm for Kuhn is essentially the guiding assumptions that undergird the conceptual content of those theories and experiments. [10] Given the nature of the relationship between assumptions, inferences, and conclusions, however, this means that if you change your root assumptions, it doesn’t make sense to say the old conclusions are false—you simply can’t draw them from your new assumptions. [11] Kuhn drew from this kind of consideration the conclusion that different scientific paradigms were incommensurable, that paradigm shifts in scientific activity—such as the shift from geocentric, Ptolemaic astronomy to the heliocentric, Copernican—are not logical transitions from the falsification of assumptions, but rhetorical transitions by simply replacing one set of assumptions with another. But this means, then, that proponents of alternative paradigms beg the question over each other in argument because they are working from different assumptions. Paradigms are incommensurable because from each standpoint one cannot attain a position in which to even judge whether the other is true. And thus Kuhn was led to his most regretted line, that “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” [12]
“Works in a different world”—smells just like idealism. It’s against this background that Davidson intervenes, collecting together the linguist-anthropologists Sapir and Whorf, the calm Kuhn and the fiery Feyerebend, and his mentor Quine—quoting the passage I pointed to above as the holistic picture—as all suggesting a picture of different conceptual schemes organizing a world that is otherwise a blank without such organization. The criterion that seems to be implicitly at work in all of them to tell when we actually have different conceptual schemes at work is failure of translation. This philosophical perspective then infers from this failure an inability to translate between them.
Davidson doesn’t think there’s a “between” here. He thinks that whatever the picture of language is that has given rise to what Hilary Putnam called the “cookie-cutter view of reality” is false. He calls the scheme/content distinction, that between “organizing system and something waiting to be organized,” “a dogma of empiricism”—“the third, and perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism.” [13]
5. The above should put you in a better position to read the essay. (I’m not confident enough to think it’s sufficient, but it might be a good start.) The view of Davidson articulated above is pretty much that of Richard Rorty. [14] In what follows, I’d like to close read Davidson’s conclusion in order to bring out how the above interacts with his specific mode of articulation. The final paragraph of “Very Idea” runs like this:
In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. [15]As I’ve tried to suggest above, in the program of empiricism as a motivation for analysis, the idea was to reduce words to nonwords, to get back behind the complex mechanics of semantic meaning to the atomistic simples directly tied to reality or experience, the individuated things that made some sentences true and not others. If there was not some “uninterpreted reality,” empiricists thought, then we’d have no hold on reality for it would just be a morass of relativism—words pointing to words in a nightmarish Cartesian solipsism. This is empiricism itself motivated by realism. [16]
The thing to understand in this context is how this is empiricism through the looking glass of Kant. What Davidson is saying in the first two sentences might be paraphrased as “you might think that we are giving up on objectivity if we give up the idea of an uninterpreted reality and thus sink into relativism [first sentence], but it is that very idea of an ‘uninterpreted reality’ that produces the possibility of relativism.” That’s what Davidson means when he says “this kind of relativity goes by the board”—i.e., we can’t even make sense of this vulgar relativism without the dogma, so none of its considerations, objections, concerns, or arguments are relevant.
In the rest of the paragraph, then, Davidson is trying to reconstrue what we should mean by conceptual relativity and objectivity. At this point, it is important to not construe Davidson as having identified language with conceptual schemes. At the beginning of the essay, he says, “We may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme.” [17] But what Davidson is doing at the beginning of the essay is leading us dialectically through the inside of this line of thought. We might paraphrase his mode this way: “we may accept this hypothesis about how to understand language, so if we do, this is how it would have to work...oh, it doesn’t work the way we need it to...guess we have to reject it.” (Obviously there are two points at which the mechanics of the argument might be criticized, then: whether Davidson has correctly gotten a handle on how it has to work and whether he’s identified things we need to be done by the theory.) Everything at the beginning leads up to his famous line about the third dogma. He’s attempting to show how contemporaneous discussions of “incommensurability,” then white hot because of Kuhn and Feyerabend’s explosive fight with the Popperians, run back through Quine’s gauntlet of the two dogmas, and how Quine then isn’t enough to show what the problem is with radical incommensurability of languages/schemes/vocabulary.
6. So here’s the last two sentences again: “Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” To understand what Davidson is saying here I find it helpful to think of Alfred Tarski’s Convention T (which Davidson, I think, has in the back of his mind). “Claim ‘P’ is true if and only if P.” Here’s the famous example: “The claim ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” (I’ve thrown in the shorthand of “if and only if.”) This is now sometimes called the disquotational theory/definition of truth: take off the quotes to find out what needs to be the case for the sentence to be true. (Lately this is also called the deflationary theory of truth.)
Davidson is saying here, first, what Rorty repeats in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: truth is a property that only holds in languages, between sentences (“relative to language”). So, there is a kind of relativity here, since I might say “Snow is white” or “I think snow is white” or “La neige est blanche,” all of which might say the same thing. However, these three claims are as objective as can be, Davidson thinks, because we already know how to judge their truth by the way the world is. Snow is white if snow is white; likewise, since the French use their sentence in exactly the same contexts as our English one, we can say the two sentences say exactly the same thing, talk about the same world. “I think snow is white” can express the same thing as the first two, but Tarski shows us that it might also tell us something slightly different: “The claim ‘I think snow is white’ is true iff I think snow is white.” And depending on who is using that sentence, you might come up with different answers, unlike “snow is white.” For why would we say that the claim “I think snow is white” is true tout court just because I happen to think so? (“I” is what they call an indexical, like “here” and “now”—they refer very differently depending on context, and thus can radically change truth-values.)
When Davidson says “unmediated touch,” what he’s saying here is the same as when Rorty rejects the metaphor of thinking of language as a medium. Davidson shouldn’t have said “reestablish,” for his real point is that we couldn’t possibly be in a position where we weren’t in contact with the world in such a way that our common modes of adjudicating the truth of sentences might globally be suspicious. (This the Cartesian threat of skepticism.) Rorty’s argument goes backwards to Hegel, whose attack on “immediacy” in the Phenomenology of Spirit is the first attack on the Kantian framework that Davidson is, we could say, rephrasing in the analytic idiom. [20] Rorty wants to say that language is more like an arm than it is a veil (or a map). That means “snow” is just as connected to snow as your hand.
There are a number of more general problems scared up by this discussion, most especially how we are to understand Davidson’s argument’s relationship to Kuhnian notions of radical conceptual shifts. Kuhn is ostensibly a target, so does Davidson’s argument require us to reject Kuhnian paradigm shifts? I will return to these problems.
Endnotes
[1] Richard Rorty, “Out of the Matrix,” Oct. 5, 2003 in the Boston Globe
[2] I should add that literary critics have not remained completely ignorant of Davidson’s work. (And putting it that way, I hasten to add, makes it sound like it’s their fault, when it isn’t. Really, it isn’t anybody’s fault—and that’s despite the tone in the body, above, where it sounds like I’m sliding blame in the direction of the philosophers. That’s a rhetoric I’ve more picked up from Rorty than I should feel entitled to. In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly tired of people complaining about how their particular hero has been “ignored” or someone else’s hero was “anticipated” by theirs—and you can probably find me making such complaints, but I’d really rather weed that out. They sound so uncouth in others, so why should I keep it up as well? In our lengthening age, who actually has time to stay abreast of everyone? Why can’t we learn to lay off the horn, and just show people why we happen to like so-and-so and leave omniscience to the gods? Scholars have an interest in promulgating a sense that there are certain things you need to know to be considered in the club—the problem is that there are a lot of different clubs now, and generally this is a good thing. I have more thoughts about this in “Do We Need a Center, or Generalities?.”) There is a very good collection of essays edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock, Literary Theory After Davidson, and though a philosopher, Samuel Wheeler III’s book, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, is of inestimable value for literary critics desiring an approach to Davidson because of their general familiarity with Derrida and de Man.
[3] “In Memoriam,” 318 in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2006
[4] Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 20 in his From a Logical Point of View
[5] I say “most empiricists” because many pragmatists would like to include pragmatism within the ranks of empiricism. In particular, for James and Dewey, everything was experience—they collapsed the distinction between experience and world that is needed to constitute the idea of a mind radically distinct from the world, and thus create the possibility of being out of touch with it, a problem hovering in the background of all of this. For a different version of this story about the foundation and demolition of analytic empiricism at the hands of Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty that discusses its relationship to the pre-linguistic turn maneuvers of James and Dewey, see my “Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn.”
[6] Quine, “Two Dogmas,” 42-43
[7] Brandom, as he likes to cutely point out, technically does not believe in belief. In his systematic philosophy of language, he avoids it in the official account, though provides the means of seeing how to move back and forth between various common ways of understanding the concept of “belief.” See in particular his Making It Explicit, 195-6. He’s also proud of the fact, and his Ph.D. dissertation advisor Rorty is as well, that “experience” does not appear once in that massive book, though that is tangential to the issues here.
[8] When did this web of belief become a biological construct? Sleight of hand, given that it would take me too far afoot to justify the suitability of this picture for humans, though clearly it won’t work, say, for actual amoeba who have an environment but no language. This is a problem that needs an account, and some of Brandom’s best work goes some way in justifying the analytic’s fighting faith in thinking that it’s a good idea to just avoid talking about “mind” and “experience” given how other animals probably have them and instead find a way of talking about the specific problems that arise for us language-users. Brandom calls this the demarcation problem and it is terribly important, particularly for various ecologically-minded intellectual movements, e.g. forms of “posthumanism.” (I apply this Brandomian insight to posthumanism and give the example of one particular treatment of intentionality in “Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization,” sections 3-5.)
[9] Rorty gives a Davidsonian account of this kind of thing—with a picture!—in his “Non-reductive Physicalism” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth.
[10] They are much more interestingly complex than this—for example, the nature of an exemplar in Kuhn’s vocabulary points in a particularly pragmatic-attitudinal direction, as opposed to my reduction of the paradigm to a semantic-conceptual essence—but for my purposes this may suffice.
[11] Say you have an argument like this:
Assumptions: P and If P, then QThis codifies in symbolic notation the inference from the two premises, (1) and (2), which are assumed to be true, to the conclusion (3). But what if you had a different set of assumptions?
1. P
2. If P, then Q
3 Q
Assumptions: P and RThere is no inference to be drawn from just P and R. Does that, then, make Q false? Nope—it doesn’t, in fact, say anything at all about Q or the conditional If P, then Q.
1. P
2. R
3 …
[12] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., 121. A new fourth edition, with a long essay by the most important philosopher-historian working after Kuhn, Ian Hacking, has recently come out, and the pagination is near-identical to the 3rd, but not quite. (Note: I’m not counting Foucault in that evaluation because he worked out of a different tradition than Kuhn. Interestingly, however, Hacking is the heir of both Kuhn and Foucault, being one of the earliest and still most cogent commentators and appreciators of Foucault’s project.) There are significant differences in pagination from the 3rd to the earlier ones.
[13] Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in Inquires into Truth and Interpretation, 189
[14] One of Rorty’s more infamous essays, “The World Well Lost” (in Consequences of Pragmatism), is in fact an excited extrapolation of the argument Davidson makes in “Very Idea,” except that Rorty published it a year before Davidson got around to publishing his. (Rorty, similarly to Kuhn, later regretted the rhetoric of that essay.) Rorty’s most thorough treatment of what he takes the importance of Davidson to be is his “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth” (in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth).
[15] “Very Idea,” 198
[16] In Note 5, I suggested that James and Dewey considered themselves empiricists of a different stripe, and talking about motivation—the connections and relative priority given to different doctrines—is another way of articulating kinds of difference within camps marked out by isms. For example, one might think of James and Dewey as empiricists who aren’t realists and Davidson and Brandom as kinds of post-linguistic turn, analytic philosophers who are neither empiricists nor realists.
[17] “Very Idea,” 184
[18] See CIS 4-5
[19] See CIS, Ch. 1, esp. 10-13
[20] An earlier important attack on immediacy in the Hegelian tradition was Sellars’s in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”
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