On How Not to defend the Enlightenment

It is naturally to be expected, therefore, that some one or other of those who are employed in each particular branch of labour should soon find out easier and readier methods of performing their own particular work, wherever the nature of it admits of such improvement. A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the inventions of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it. Whoever has been much accustomed to visit such manufactures, must frequently have been shewn very pretty machines, which were the inventions of such workmen, in order to facilitate and quicken their own particular part of the work. In the first fire-engines, a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication, to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labour.--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.1.8

A recent review by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who is one of my favorite novelists, of Matthew B. Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction makes it seem as if Crawford* is entirely out of step with recent cognitive science and that he makes a number of elementary blunders on early modern philosophy. (As it happens I just read Crawford's book, but what follows does not presuppose intimate knowledge of it.) Newberger Goldstein connects the two points as follows:

Part of Crawford’s argument is based on a philosophy of perception that was put forth in the 1970s by the psychologist James J. Gibson. Gibson and his disciples began with the fact that, as we move around looking at things, the optical input systematically changes. They then went on to make the case that we somehow perceive things “directly,” without mental representations. But Gibson’s theory never explained how we can think about what we see, and it has been marginalized by advances in cognitive neuroscience that have increasingly identified the mental representations Gibson insisted could not exist. Crawford, inheriting the Gibsonians’ lack of interest in language, reasoning, and memory—that is, all those cognitive capacities that use the input of perception—declares that reality is there for the taking. We don’t need to reason our way past the scrim of subjective representations fluttering between us and the world of things. We just need to engage with those things. Anyway, the whole idea of that subjective scrim was foisted on us by—you guessed it—the Enlightenment.

 

Crawford’s argument against the Enlightenment isn’t, to my knowledge, one we’ve heard before, since his rendition of the Enlightenment isn’t, to my knowledge, one we’ve heard before.

Crawford certainly appropriates Gibson's use of affordances, but Newberger Goldstein's review is highly misleading here. For Crawford ignores the mysterious bits of Gibson and primarily relies on work in so-called embodied cognition (he cites and summarizes Alva Noë, Andy Clark, Lawrence Shapiro, Adrian Cussins, and a host of phenomenologists from the past) and he integrates this approach to cognition with some examples of skilled activity (motorcycling, line cooking, organ making, hockey-playing, etc.) and an original focus on political economy. This point is hard to miss if you just read the titles of the first two chapters: "The Jig, The Nudge, and Local Ecology," and "Embodied Perception."  You would never guess from the review that Crawford takes the role of language so seriously that he interrupts his narrative to summarize and comment on the Dreyfus-McDowell debate (to side with McDowell) in a sub-section explicitly titled, "The Role of Language in Acquiring Skill Under Conditions of Risk!" Obviously, in a popularizing book one can't do justice to all the technical details of such a debate, but it is quite remarkable to see it treated so carefully in a book intended for a broad audience.

 

While it is too early to tell, perhaps, if "advances in cognitive neuroscience" will fully vindicate embodied cognition, it is a bit odd to appeal to it to completely dismiss Crawford's approach (which, in turn, is based, in part, on recent advances in robotics--at a key juncture he appeals to Rodney Brooks's classic "Intelligence Without Representation") without even attempting to convey what the actual state of play is on these matters. Perhaps, it was common to dismiss Gibsonian affordances when Newberger Goldstein was in graduate school, but the idea that engaged behavior involves, in part, skill-dependent perception of possibilities (55) is not without evidence.

 

Even if Crawford's position were based on outdated science, the point of Crawford's book is to deploy the idea of embodied cognition in a political and social critique; one notable feature -- that is mentioned only obliquely and dismissively in the review -- is that Crawford offers a critique of the power of corporations and the role of privileged wealth in contemporary America from what is broadly a Conservative perspective that mixes insights from Tocqueville, Iris Murdoch, and (alas) Heidegger. (To offer an analogy: her approach is like dissing Hobbes's political philosophy by noting his outdated philosophy of mind.) Some of his most trenchant comments are reserved for contemporary (political) Libertarians. Goldstein Newberger is, of course, aware of this, but rather than engaging with the details of his position, which is undoubtedly, in part, anti-Enlightenment (to be qualified below), she decides to attack his (purportedly) misreading of the Enlightenment. Since I am something of a scholar on the period I feel I can give an expert evaluation of the debate between Crawford and  Newberger Goldstein.

 

As the passage quoted above from Wealth of Nations suggests, many Enlightenment philosophers played respectful attention to craftsmanship. (In Smith this is not an isolated case see also his critique of stupefying factory labor.) The pinnacle of tendency is undoubtedly Diderot's work in the Encyclopedia. But it is no exaggeration to say that the scientific revolution was, in part, launched by Bacon's and Descartes's respect for the knowledge of artisans and craftsmen and a desire to emulate their achievements and methods in the 'higher' sciences. Not unlike others influenced by Heidegger, Crawford fails to do justice to this non-trivial strain of the Enlightenment and so fails to draw on resources available from them. (About that some other time because this is not the Enlightenment that Newberger Goldstein defends.)

 

Crawford's main idea on the Enlightenment is that "the creeping substitution of virtual reality for reality is a prominent feature of contemporary life, but it also has deep antecedents in Western Thought. It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us, trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions." (73) In his treatment Crawford also focuses on Descartes and Locke with special attention to the relations between Locke's epistemology and political theory.

 

Now, pace Newberger Goldstein the broad outlines of this is a story we have heard before. After all, the very idea that with Descartes there was a separation of mind from world (Kant's Ding-An-Sich goes oddly unmentioned by Newberger Goldstein) by way of abstraction is a trope of Kantian-inspired philosophy; it is, for example, what underwrites the significance of epistemology as first philosophy and some version of this trope gets continued to this day. (Here's evidence from a source that I am hostile to (recall): "The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to  such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose.") I am no fan of this story{See also this post}, but Crawford offers a clever spin on a familiar tale.

 

While there is a lot more to be said about the review and the book, I close with an observation.  Crawford clearly has some sympathies with the counter-Enlightenment; even so I want to qualify that claim in the following sense: he reports on and ably communicates esoteric, technical academic debates in multiple fields and brings these to (well) the masses very much in the spirit of Diderot. Along the way he transforms these debates and -- through his arguments, polemic, and anger -- contributes to them in the service of the less than privileged.** For some reason Newberger Goldstein thinks that a "critic" must "do justice  to those ideas, without distorting them for some polemical purpose." Here Newberger Goldstein misses a great historical irony: the Enlightenment is constituted by polemical texts few of which, if any, do justice to their enemies (Aristotelianism, the clergy, revelation, etc.). That is to say, Crawford's book can be fully understood as itself a contribution to and the unfolding of the Enlightenment. 

 

 

 

 

*Full disclaimer: I met Crawford in Graduate school at The University of Chicago and we have remained in friendly, albeit extremely intermittent contact since.

**If I were urgently to ask to criticize his book on any issue it would be the excessively masculine set of values that he presupposes and advances.