Digressions&Impressions

On the Invention of Scientific Progress (by Seneca!)

At the start of chapter 7 of her (1749) Commentary on Newton's Principia, Émilie du Châtelet treats Newton as a decisive breakthrough in generating "some knowledge" of comets' "nature." Indeed, Newton had closed the first edition of the Principia with one of his crowning achievements: a (somewhat clunky) means to calculate the elliptical orbits of comets before ending on some speculative remarks on the ways comets maintain a kind of inter-stellar commerce and are possible sources of life. Du Châtelet then writes, "Seneca seemed to have had an inkling of what would one day be discovered about these celestial bodies, but the seeds of the true principles that he had sown were not allowed to grow by the doctrine of the Peripatetics, who, transmitting from century to century the errors of their master, maintained that comets were meteors and temporary fires." (Translated by Isabelle Bour & Judith P. Zinsser, 337-8) Without explaining Seneca's views, Du Châtelet treats Seneca as a distant and historically uninfluential predecessor to Newton. Because she does not explain in what way Seneca anticipated Newton, we may infer that the point of the passage seems less designed to give credit to Seneca as it is to castigate the Scholastics.*

Some searching on the internet made me realize that Du Châtelet is alluding to chapter 7 of Natural Questions, which is devoted to comets. This book targets (inter alia) Aristotle's views on comets. And so one way to understand Du Châtelet is that she is suggesting like a good Enlightenment thinker that even when the seeds of the truth are available, slavish obedience to intellectual authority will displace the germs that may ripen to fruition in a more open intellectual environment. But Seneca's chapter on comets is more interesting than these remarks indicate.

In the closing lines of Seneca's book [well, the original order--this has come under attack], Seneca suggests his own day and age is a kind of dark ages.** For Seneca describes the way his age is full of moral corruption and licentiousness. He then concludes with:

[In our times] There is no interest in philosophy. [Philosophiae nulla cura est.] Accordingly, so little is found out from those subjects which the ancients left partially investigated that many things which were discovered are being forgotten. But, by Hercules, if we applied ourselves to this with all our might—if youth soberly applied itself to it, if the elders taught it and the younger generation learned it—we would scarcely reach to the bottom where truth is located, which we now seek on the surface of the earth and with slack effort. (Seneca, Natural Questions VII:31)

Seneca's is a call to arms to subsequent generations to study nature (in context 'philosophy' clearly means natural philosophy). But, unusually, rather than promising quick, complete knowledge, he implies not just that his own generation barely has knowledge of nature, but that such knowledge is a distant prospect. Now, this intimates the idea of open-ended inquiry. But I say that because these closing lines echo one of the great set pieces of the chapter, which is worth quoting in full.

Why, then, we marvel at comets, such a rare spectacle in the universe, are not yet grasped by fixed laws and that their origin and end are not known, when their return is at vast intervals? [Quid ergo miramur cometas, tam rarum mundi spectaculum, nondum teneri legibus certis nec initia illorum finesque notescere, quorum ex ingentibus intervallis recursus est?] It has not yet been fifteen hundred years since Greece

Numbered the stars

And gave them names.

And yet there are many nations today that know the sky only by its face and do not yet understand why the moon lacks fulness and why it is obscured in an eclipse. Among us, too, only recently did science produce definite knowledge in these matters. The time will come when diligent research over very long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject. What about the fact that we do not divide our few years in an equal portion at least between study and vice? And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Some day there will be a man who will show in what regions comets have their orbit, why they travel so remote from other celestial bodies, how large they are and what sort they are. Let us be satisfied with what we have found out, and let our descendants also contribute something to the truth...How many animals we have learned about for the first time in this age; how many are not known even now! Many things that are unknown to us the people of a coming age will know. Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate. Some sacred things are not revealed once and for all. Eleusis keeps in reserve something to show to those who revisit there. Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all. We believe that we are her initiates but we are only hanging around the forecourt. Those secrets are not open to all indiscriminately. They are withdrawn and closed up in the inner sanctum. This age will glimpse one of the secrets; the age which comes after us will glimpse another.--Seneca Natural Questions VII.25

So, Seneca admits that genetic and final cause(s) of comets are not known. But he is fairly confident that these will be known some day and that comets have law-governed orbits that will make them return eventually. This does anticipate Newton, as Du Châtelet suggests. Seneca prognosticates (prophecies?) a day in which a science of comets is possible. He does so by embedding it, first, in a larger narrative, in which he dates the birth of (taxonomic) astronomy fifteen hundred year earlier (ca 1400bc) in Greece (surprisingly not Babylonia or Egypt, although he is aware of their interest in the sciences). He notes that this science has made progress since including knowledge of how the different orbits produce phenomena like eclipses and the phases of the Moon. He notes, too, that this knowledge has not been widely dispersed among different peoples.

After having created this historical baseline of the growth of astronomical knowledge, second, he suggests that (a) with time and (b) the division of labor (c) lots more such knowledge will be attained, including (d) entirely unforeseeable knowledge, that (e) will seem entirely obvious to future generations so that (f) they will look back at Seneca's time as ignoramuses ("we believe that we are her initiates but we are only hanging around the forecourt." ). But, (g) there is no reason to think the enterprise of knowledge ever comes to an end ("unless it has in it something for every age to investigate").

This set of commitments (a-g) is characteristic of the idea of open-ended scientific progress. It will be recovered by Bacon and codified by 18th century Newtonians. I am most struck by (f) because once science has a history, every age tends to think of itself as a knowing age, and it is hard to imagine that one's own age will not look impressive to future ones (although it is a conceit of some science fiction like Star Trek)

Now, the reasons behind (g) are not entirely obvious. He makes it sound as if it is property of nature's majesty that it can never be fully known. But, it makes sense if, as I think it does, Seneca's line of argument presupposes that he thinks it is infinite in some (at least temporal) sense. He is clear about that in Letter 36, "none of the objects which vanish from our gaze and are re-absorbed into the world of things, from which they have come forth and are soon to come forth again, is annihilated; they merely end their course and do not perish." (Some -- I am not so sure -- see in this the idea of eternal return, an idea familiar to Seneca from Plato's Laws, book 3.) The universe does not perish, and presumably must take on infinite number of configurations awaiting the gaze(s) of future inquirers.

 

Pursuing the Truth in and about the Philosophy Canon; On The Very Idea of Western Philosophy

What happens in those canonical texts is more than just pursuits of truth and the like. They are also texts that reproduce base ideological forms – or revolutionize them – that are key to reproducing certain kinds of societies. In the case of white Western societies, this means slaving, conquering, and subjugating societies. This is why Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, etc. all had theories of race, nation, genesis of human difference, and justifications for all sorts of slavery, conquest, and domination. In the contemporary academy, most of this part of the white Western Tradition has been forgotten. It’s been relegated to tertiary or boutique concern. But it is not, actually, in terms of the kinds of intellectuals white Western thinkers have always been and wanted to be: genius people who had something to say about the central concerns of their era. Kant’s conception of race is central to his ethics and politics, same with Locke and slavery and conquest, and Hegel’s conception of history has no accidental relation to his depiction of Africa...One could make similar arguments for the place of women in so much of the white Western philosophical tradition, where whole societies are built on the subordination of women and the feminine (thinking here of Philosophy of Right and especially Irigaray’s critique via the figure of Antigone).

If those text reproduce ideology, and therefore reproduce empire’s projects of conquest, enslavement, and colonialism, then we can’t just say “nothing is intrinsically wrong.” We in fact have to be open to the notion that these texts are entangled in the most violent, destructive ideas in world history. That they are rooted in whiteness and what whiteness meant in those moments: the right to murder and steal and subjugate...One rarely reads the White Western tradition in this register or with this frame. --John Drabinski Diversity, Neutrality, Philosophy.

In what follows, I ignore if 'the canon' is the relevant target. But see yesterday's post, which was criticized by Leigh Johnson [and implicitly by Protevi] for the androcentocity of my argument (which mentioned female philosophers, but did not name them while some men were). I hope to do better today.

Drabinski offers us a self-consciously historicist enterprise. By 'historicist,' here, I don't just mean the idea that (a) these canonical texts reproduce the ideologies of their age nor just the idea that they (b) produce or even revolutionize the ideologies of their age, nor just the idea that (c) the authors now treated as canonical are understood as "genius people who had something to say about the central concerns of their era" --  Drabinski does not necessarily imply (although he could) that "Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel" intended to belong to the category --, but rather the following three points: first, his package (a-c); second, the invisibility of texts and authors that do not fit his homogenization of the tradition he describes, those that contested the "justifications for" -- and the facts of -- "all sorts of slavery, conquest, and domination" (I return to this below); third, the invisibility of the mechanisms, processes (etc.) that both (i) effaced the contestations and, perhaps later, also effaced (ii) the relegation of the (real) evils of the tradition "to tertiary or boutique concern" (more about which below); and (iii) the production and recycling of boy-wonders that grow into genius (etc.). What the three elements have in common is that they produce a friction-free, flattened narration (I'll call it a 'smooth surface' in the next paragraph).

As an aside, if I am right about this flattening (see below), then Drabinski's version of historicism is an odd practical contradiction because Drabinski "calls us to thinking." Because Drabinski shares his pedagogical experiences, I will remark that any teacher knows that real thinking for oneself -- as opposed to acquiring information -- does not commence from (such) smoothed surfaces. Let me explain.

By effacing the undoubtedly imperfect in their own way -- there are no angels -- dissenters and nay-sayers, Drabinski reinforces a historical injustice in their silencing and he perpetuates not just historical myths about the tradition (that's a shrug), but also fictions about the possibility of thinking. For, by reinforcing such historical injustices, Drabinski effectively denies the possibility in which being opposed to ruling ideologies, in which speaking to the future or making available dissonant perspectives can be conceived; that is to say, he ends up claiming that thinking is impossible (with an exception to be noted below).

By insisting that thought is impossible, we fail to attend to the very aristocratic Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, who decides to translate Mandeville's Fable, which she considers the greatest work on ethics, not just for its defense of luxury (and its free-spiritedness), but almost certainly because Mandeville so clearly shows the social construction of gender. When, at the heart of empire, Annie Besant took on Darwin (and J.S. Mill) in the court-room she understood quite well the complex interactions among birth control, eugenics, and Darwinism in a broader context of political economy. When Sophie de Grouchy and Wollstonecraft praise the cautious Adam Smith, they did so, in part, because they recognized the centrality of his anti-slavery and anti-colonial message.

Moreover, by effacing the mechanisms of myth-generation and canon formation (and enshrining of boy-wonders, and genius, etc.), Drabinski makes the canon and the tradition become a deus-ex-machina, one might say, a myth of the given (if it weren't used already) not a practice of individual curricular decisions, of text-book writers, encyclopedists, publishers, and the self-fashioning, if not propaganda, of successful university professors or bureaucratic administrators (etc). In his scheme, we have the 'happenings' in these texts and we have 'readings,' but we do not receive even hints of the material and educational pre-conditions that help generate if not facilitate the forms of intelligibility and the practices that sustain them; all the small acts of forgetting. His is the production of a virtual plane of action in which all the most important decisions are off-stage. How come celebrities-in-their-own-time, the witty and brilliant, De Gournay, and the earnest and razor-sharp, Van Schuurman, were not transmitted to posteriority? And how can Drabinski allows himself to ignore that the brave philosophical scholars -- e.g., Sarah Hutton, Marcy Lascano, Lisa Shapiro, Margareth Atherton, Eileen O'Neill etc. -- have developed the enterprise of recall?

Now, you may think that Drabinski does think genuine thinking is possible, but only at the "margins." And that, in fact, 'we scholars' know this because, by his lights, we are much better readers of texts produced at those very margins. It's undeniable, that what he calls the situatedness of thoughts and text can be made more evident when one engages with such 'marginalia.' But it's not as if this situatedness is not relentlessly thematized in 'the' (?) tradition: for every Descartes and Carnap who claims that temporal and geographic situation does not matter formally, there is an Ursula Le Guin or an ever so Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf (who challenges patriarchy and also makes available for critical reflection the professional philosopher's self-delusions.)

Drabinki's stance is not just empirically wrong-headed, it's also immoral because it lets people of the hook way too easily. It's not just the (Drabinski-style) prosecution that prefers  such historicism, but also the Great Books defense, which, too easily, will insists that 'everybody-thought-like-that' [the so-called TEDI-syndrom]. Both sides happily embrace a self-aggrandizing narrative of progress in which those that come later are in a better moral epistemological position, and all that 'we' need to do is to apply the latest  moral and political insights we can generate a properly decolonized curriculum, even anti-canon, and, thereby, keep the risks of thinking at arm's length. As if the practical implications of her racialized hierarchy were not available to Margaret Cavendish; as if Hume (or Kant) did not understand that their preference for 'civilization' meant a savage treatment for others (see why and how Hume praises Edward I).

For, the uncomfortable truth is not that we are the racialized and gendered (etc.) inheritors to centuries of evils. Nor is it the fact that the unity of the virtues is false: that philosophical acuity need not entail a proper functioning moral and political compass. (This is why it's okay for Drabinski to relentlessly repeat, "Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, etc.") By all means let's detect and strip Whiteness away. But the very institution of philosophy that has been shaped and will be shaped by conceptual and intellectual decisions, some of them even brave and heroic, that have and, perhaps, will ensure its survival (in terms of flourishing traditions, political economy, access toward the metaphysical truth, etc.) and, -- with the exception, perhaps, of the ancient Cynics -- , thereby, generate loss, sometimes grievous harms, for others.

 

 

 

On The Very Idea of Non-Western Philosophy

The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions.--Jay Garfield & Bryan Van Norden "If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is" New York Times.

The quoted passage are the first few lines of an editorial that has generated huge discussion. It proposes for professional philosophy departments to embrace "faculty" and "curricular diversity" or failing that to rename their departments, "Anglo-European Philosophical Studies." I dislike and reject Garfield & Van Norden's use of the "Western" (or European) vs "non Western" (non-European) philosophy distinction--I reject not in the name of universal, homogeneous reason. Before I get to the substance of my concerns, I offer two examples to motivate my rejection of this distinction:

First, 'Islamic' philosophy is categorized as non-Western (non-European). But this is geographically odd because so much of the best of it (Ibn Rushd, Ibn Tufayl) was written in what we would now call Spain. They sometimes understood themselves as 'Western' and treated earlier generations of Islamic philosophers as writing in the Orient. (Sometimes they also seem to suggest that they are at the periphery far from the main centers of learning [Baghdad, Damascus, etc.]). To treat 'Islamic' philosophy as non-Western is conceptually odd because it so clearly influenced philosophy we characterize as 'Western' in subsequent ages (for example through Italianate Averroests, and eventually Spinoza.) It is also strange in a more important sense, perhaps, nearly ALL of what counts as 'The Golden age of Islamic philosophy' is explicitly or implicitly a commentary on Plato and Aristotle (or a correction to it). [Something similar can be said about "Jewish" philosophy.]

Second,  Franz Fanon -- try divorcing his stuff from Hegel, existentialism, psycho-analytic theory, etc. -- and Du Bois are both enmeshed in 'Western philosophy' (I am not claiming they are enmeshed in the same bit. Their criticisms are as much immanent to (okay) 'Euro-centric' philosophizing as external to it. And, in virtue of being immanent to the tradition, they also revive it and extend it. The previous sentence gets at some of the more philosophical reservations about the terminology.

Before I get to those, I frankly acknowledge that I have political reasons to dislike the distinction between Western vs non-Western. Because I live and work in an environment in which 'Western' is treated as a term of approbation and superiority over other civilizations and philosophies, especially Islam (and Africa) I think it is dangerous when intellectual contributions are (apologies for the jargon) othered by way of negation as strange or alien. Clearly Van Norden and Garfield don't think Western philosophy is superior  or that non-European traditions are inferior. But they unintentionally reinforce the sense that we're talking about extremely distinct and opposed, perhaps even incommensurable, traditions. This may be true in some respects (as they suggest), but it is not true in all respects for all the traditions lumped as 'non-Western.'

A moment's reflection on the fact that Islamic and Jewish philosophy are lumped in with so-called N0n-Western (and non-European) philosophy suggests that Christian philosophy just is Western philosophy. Leaving aside the fact that traditionally, the Christian element in European philosophy has always been traced back to Jerusalem not Athens, the tacit identification of Christian with Western had been thought awkward after, say, Auschwitz. More subtly, it is notable that whole branches of Christianizing philosophy associated with various strands of Greek/Russian Orthodoxy are unfamiliar to even very competent historians of (okay) western philosophy.

So much for terminology. Garfield and Van Norden misrepresent what contemporary professional philosophy is like when they focus on the canon. As I have said before in response to arguments by Nathaniel Coleman, while there is, indeed, a fairly narrow historical canon in professional philosophy, this canon is not central to philosophical education, philosophical method, and professional advancement/success within analytical philosophy. In addition, the way the canonical texts/authors are treated is often extremely a-historical (even by folk who are committed to contextual history of philosophy). That means that, in part, it is not obvious in what sense "broadening the philosophical curriculum" in the way that they suggest really challenges the way philosophy is practiced.

There is a more subtle point lurking here. Some of the texts/authors from these non-Western traditions also express rather sectarian commitments. Some of the Islamic philosophers that I teach use examples that may well be thought racist (whatever their intent) and they call/permit for genocide on certain kind of savages (anticipating some of the worst features of 18th and 19th century European philosophy). It's a bit awkward to promote diversity by removing more tolerant/broad-minded authors in favor of dogmatic types, and this suggests that the underlying vision for their proposals has not been thought out carefully (I extend this point below).

Now you may think I am writing from an ultra-conservative perspective on diversifying the canon. But (as regular readers know) that's not so: as a scholar, I have enthusiastically embraced the recovery of knowledge of and produced by female philosophers in the early modern period and in early analytical philosophy; recovery of forgotten male feminists in the early modern period; and I have started teaching and blogging about Islamic political philosophy. In all cases this has influenced my teaching, my scholarship (and blog posts), and my self-understanding. (I am not suggesting I am a pioneer in any of this.) I do so not just out of curiosity about the unfamiliar. But because I sense that such recovery helps me contribute to the improvement of philosophy today and in the future.

'Philosophy' in the previous sentence stands for the traditions, which are oriented around certain problems and puzzles, and certain non-trivial commitments about the nature of logic and reality (tied together by what I cal 'Tractarian semantics'), as well as some canonical figures/texts and thought experiments, that I have been partially educated in and, perhaps, help extend. It has, as Van Norden & Garfield argue, elements of parochiality and, as I note regularly, as much an elevating as sordid history.* But, as Abe Stone reminded me on Facebook, there is a difference between being a department of (such) philosophy or about that philosophy. When I note the racism or eugenics in certain thought experiments or texts that I teach or admire or use, it calls for a response which, after soul-searching, can generate creative philosophical moves or a reckoning of the problem. It always runs the risk (or joy) of generating a transformative experience of me (and less likely) the tradition (recall). But that's not so when one studies another tradition's philosophy and learns about their commitments. That can be kept at arm's length, undigested, without transforming me or my own traditions.

It does not follow we should not study genuinely other traditions nor should we keep them from our students and ourselves. I agree that even given scarce resources (of time, attention, money), we need to be also outer-oriented. More important, in some parts of the world, where our elite universities are engaged in a peculiarly new form of educational mission -- with host countries paying to have a campus with a liberal arts education that in some ways reflects aspirational values not to mention economic hopes [Garfield teaches at Yale Singapore]+ --, it's quite possible that there a new curriculum and diversity may generate a new form of philosophy that, in turn, will help transform the philosophy practiced in North America, Europe, and many of their former colonies. That's an experiment in the philosophy of education we may see come to fruition in the times of our lives. ** 

 

On the Pre-History of Non Republican Conception of (negative) Liberty; on another ignored (Humean) conception of Liberty

It may now be affirmed of civilized monarchies, what was formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of Laws, not of Men. They are found susceptible of order, method, and constancy, to a surprizing degree. Property is there secure; industry encouraged; the arts flourish; and the prince lives secure among his subjects, like a father among his children.--David Hume "Of Civil Liberty," (paragraph 12).

It will be found, if I mistake not, a true observation in politics, that the two extremes in government, liberty and slavery, commonly approach nearest to each other; and that, as you depart from the extremes, and mix a little of monarchy with liberty, the government becomes always the more free; and on the other hand, when you mix a little of liberty with monarchy, the yoke becomes always the more grievous and intolerable. In a government, such as that of France, which is absolute, and where law, custom, and religion concur, all of them, to make the people fully satisfied with their condition, the monarch cannot entertain any jealousy against his subjects, and therefore is apt to indulge them in great liberties both of speech and action. In a government altogether republican, such as that of Holland, where there is no magistrate so eminent as to give jealousy to the state, there is no danger in intrusting the magistrates with large discretionary powers; and though many advantages result from such powers, in preserving peace and order, yet they lay a considerable restraint on men’s actions, and make every private citizen pay a great respect to the government. Thus it seems evident, that thetwo extremes of absolute monarchy and of a republic, approach near to each other in some material circumstances. In the first, the magistrate has no jealousy of the people: in the second, the people have none of the magistrate: Which want of jealousy begets a mutual confidence and trust in both cases, and produces a species of liberty in monarchies, and of arbitrary power in republics.--David Hume "Of the Liberty of the Press," (Paragraph 2). [Emphasis added]

in a civilized monarchy, as well as in a republic, the people have security for the enjoyment of their property. David Hume "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," (paragraph 29).

Philip Pettit likes to tell the story (it's a story of decline) how the modern, anti-Republican, account of ('negative') liberty can be traced (via John Lind) back to utilitarians like Bentham and Paley (see here). This account of liberty is the (quoting Bentham) "absence of restraint." (But recall, also, De Grouchy.) As Pettit notes, the consequence of this understanding of liberty is the decoupling of liberty from democracy. Equal absence(s) of restraint is possible, even actual, in democracies and (say) in monarchies.

Now, let's stipulate that Bentham is indeed the source of this (negative) new account of liberty. (Pettit notes that there are anticipations of the view in Hobbes.) But as the quoted paragraphs above show, Bentham's decoupling of liberty from democracy is itself a Humean move. The main point that Hume wishes to make is that freedom can (ought to?) be equated with the rule of law, that is secure property (recall the more expansive position in Adam Smith). That is a Republican trope, but then he he adds that some non-democracies, so-called civilized monarchies -- and he has great fun, of course, in treating Britain's great rival, France, as the exemplar of  this --  can secure the rule of law as well as (republican) democracies. Hume's argument for this point turns on (perhaps optimistic evaluation of) how incentives are structured and are, thus, in part a contingent affair. (They are philosophically interesting because they make us look closely at institutional arrangements as a precondition of liberty.)

But here I want to close on another point of Hume's. He notes that in a monarchy, because the sovereign need not fear (or be anxious of) the citizenry, the rule of law generates "mutual confidence and trust" among the population and this is another species of liberty.  Now, Hume does not say much about the nature of this liberty. But the (Humean) thought behind it seems fairly simple. The (proper functioning) rule of law reduces uncertainty and generates reliable expectations, even if one allows it may generate new kinds of uncertainty. (Its morality may itself rest on the normative umph of habituated, reliable expectations.) The thought then is that if the environment is stable and predictable, people are willing to plan ahead, and become more trusting and this is conducive to a kind of flourishing because we orient ourselves to others in a non-defensive manner. That  is to say, in the right sort of circumstances we become better people: we are freed from suspicion and anxiety and this makes our actions more reasonable (driven by calm passions not violent ones). 

On Trump as the Menace of our Times and Old Habits

My friends on the right are still peddling stories that promote variants of the culture wars insisting that the market place of ideas is functioning especially badly on elite college campuses, where political correctness is generating ideological conformity. Somehow the market in educating (forgive the oversimplified claim to follow) the primarily upper-middle class kids, who excel at taking tests, cannot be trusted to sort itself out one matriculation decision at a time.

My friends on the left are euphorically sharing the Panama Papers, expecting the latest exposure of tax evasion, legal or otherwise, will lead the masses to revolt against the neoliberal 1%. This, despite all the empirical evidence that given a political choice the demos wants crony capitalism to benefit it rather rather than end cronyism.

Old habits die hard. To be sure, free speech and equal burden sharing are noble aims. Yet, the relentless reiteration of familiar wedge issues, disguises the menace of our times: liberal democracy is in retreat. Capable and creative authoritarian and xenophobic politicians are in the ascent not just in recent democracies like Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary, and Poland, but also in longer established ones like Austria, France, and, most fatally of all, the United States.

My data-crunching friends Stateside tell me that Donald Trump will be defeated in a landslide. From their mouth to God's ear. Even so, it is not a comforting thought, if he succeeds in transforming the nature of American politics: normalizing abhorrent ideas (ethnic profiling, deportation of innocents, war crimes, etc.)+ and a dangerous cult of personality. His rise will encourage others to explore xenophobic and polarizing sentiments. Even if, ceteris paribus, demographic trends will make this a non-majoritarian strategy, there is no reason to expect that ceteris will remain paribus. Once America's enemies, which are no friends of democracy and thrive on permanent conflict, recognize that their provocative actions will enhance if not Trump than his would-be-successors, we should expect a steady stream of provocations. Given that Trump openly and regularly flirts with violence, he is signaling that he will play his role in future escalations. It is a familiar fact that cross-border antagonists, which benefit from enmity, are each other's most reliable (indirect) allies.

It is also a familiar historical phenomenon that humane critics of the status quo will find elements to admire in Trump's plans and utterances. The temptation will arise that they will be wooed by deals that will be too good to refuse. After all normal politics is about finding new possibilities to reach one's ends. But all such deals will only strengthen and normalize Trump not the democratic experiment or the rule of law.

Of course, it's not as if the relentless rise of Trump as such is being ignored. And, perhaps, giving him more attention is a mistake. But judging by the existence and liveliness of the old habits, it has not yet sunk in that his democratic (!) ascendancy could represent the onset of one of those periodic crises that endangers our flawed and often petty democracies. The historical record shows that liberal democracies, too, can implode (not just by civil wars, coups, and conquests, but also through the ballot box) and that there are periods in which they implode at alarming rates. A few weeks ago, with my students, I counted more than fifty liberal democracies that had imploded at one point or another (once you pay attention to South America the numbers start to accelerate).

I suspect that when liberal democracies implode they do so, at bottom, when the political, economic, and intellectual elites have stopped believing in a joint enterprise and a common good worth acting on and sacrificing for (recall here; and this post; and also this one on the Roman republic).* But, it is not impossible, that in the moment, our historical counterparts, who may not have understood themselves as belonging to the elite (these are always others), had no clue that their way of life was in mortal danger. 

The beauty of democracy is that in general no single election is a final resolution of social conflict. The next election is within a foreseeable temporal horizon and this allows the partial pacification of conflicts, while sustaining the hope for a better result next time around. The problem is that this hope can also sustain illiberal forces, especially once they recognize that ongoing polarization is a growth strategy that will pay off not, perhaps, by generating an electoral majority, but by producing the failure of nerve common to those that are relentlessly besieged.

 

On the (UN)Happy Philosophy Professor

But why are tenured philosophy professors unhappy? It doesn’t make very much sense. The job security is pretty good. The pay’s not horrible. You have more control over your time and physical space than most other victims of late capitalism. Objectively speaking, your colleagues are less irritating than when you worked at that large retail store in high school. There are always some great students. And, if you are not a total bum, you get an hour or two each day doing what you claim to love. Why the unhappiness? Why so much alcoholism? Why are so many of us taking prescription happy pills?

The weirdest thing is that a lot of people only fall apart after getting tenure. I don’t have statistics, but off the top of my head I can think of six friends of mine have gone through appalling levels of suffering which commenced immediately after receiving tenure.--Jon Cogburn@Philpers.

Cogburn's piece was shared around the philosophical blogosphere (!) last week. Cogburn (my former NewAPPS buddy) runs through 8 (or if you read carefully, 9) would-be-reasons for his finding(s): 1. Decompression Sickness; 2. Social Stigma; 3. The Impossibility of Doing a Good Job; 4. The Hours; 5. Nobody Cares; 6. Dialectics; 7.Truth Schmooth; 8. I’ll Show You Unhappiness! (and, more halfheartedly) 9. self-selection. His underlying narrative was not criticized publicly.  While the lack of public criticism is unsurprising -- who wants to be the jerk to tell unhappy others, especially professional others, that their unhappiness is idiosyncratic to them? --, it is also surprising because (in my expert opinion) most public utterances about the profession quickly generate counter-narratives. While Cogburn's list of  reasons struck a chord with my observations (especially #1, 3, 5-7), I feel he ignored an important reason for the phenomenon.

 

Cogburn's post reminded me of a moment in my life about a decade ago. I had been hired by Syracuse, and I was invited by a professional mentor to celebrate for drinks on the roof-top of a fancy hotel overlooking the Atlantic an a metropolitan city on a beautiful Summer evening. (This is before my ballooning days, so no jokes were made about it.) The mentor is a big deal in the profession (and still alive, and has always been very supportive and generous, so I am not going 'to out' him), and much to my surprise -- over the second drink or so -- started to express genuine dissatisfaction about not having received an offer from Princeton or NYU.  An hour into that conversation, I decided I don't want to become like this when I grow up. When shortly thereafter I got an offer to leave Syracuse, I realized that all my (non-financial) reasons for staying in upstate NY, where I was not unhappy, could be boiled down to two: (i) amazing colleagues (astounding and rare combination of warmth and philosophical acumen); (ii) the prestige of being at Syracuse and the visibility/possibility/hope it provides to move up in the profession.

 

Time/attention and status are zero-sum and (when it comes to attention) very scarce goods. Unfortunately, in professional philosophy they go together. People get read, cited, and invited because of their status, which, in turn, means they get read, cited, and invited. One of the most regular kvetches I encounter from tenured/senior people is the sense that their work is being ignored. (This also has a non-trivial gender (here and recall) and boy-wonder component to it, of course.) That's to say, professional philosophy has an extreme prestige hierarchy (and, in fact, when we cite we signal prestige). I suspect, but would have to do more research, that the prestige hierarchy is also well correlated with the unequal distribution of other non-trivial success-goods (e.g., salary, teaching-loads, research assistants, office situation, etc.). Even if one is truly focused on truth and philosophical progress/wisdom (etc.), it's hard not to notice that others get more noticed than you. (In my experience, going on tt-track at a good school created a major bump in attention, including small-potato-attention at conferences and workshops almost overnight.)

 

It's a by now familiar social scientific fact, that communities with considerable inequality -- and everybody who is willing to note recognizes that there are many adjuncts that are in an unenviable situation  -- generate lots of stress and unhappiness. (The now classic citation is The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.) Maybe the causal arrow goes in another direction; I am fine with that. Objectively, tenured professors have made it. We are winners in a weighted lottery (that's compatible with the winners also meriting their success--I will remain agnostic here). But when you are conditioned and disciplined to look up (not to mention obsess over rankings) -- for all I know this just accentuates human nature --, then falling short of the top, even if you are a whole lot higher on the prestige-pole than others, can torment a great many souls. It's an open debate if Silver or coming in fourth is the worst place, but subjectively it's probably worse than not making it to the finals.

 

Even if Cogburn were wrong to suggest that, on average, tenured philosophy professors are unhappy, the increasing inequality within the professoriate is unmistakable. Both at the professional level as well as even within departments, it is increasingly a farce to suggest that we're in this together (and that's ignoring all the controversies in which groups are pitched against each other). Obviously some sub-communities and departments (and, of course, there are huge national/institutional differences) do better than others in generating and maintaining comradery within the group; in recognizing insights and argument, or just showing polite interest, regardless where the speaker/author is on the prestige hierarchy.  

 

But why are tenured philosophy professors unhappy? It doesn’t make very much sense. The job security is pretty good. The pay’s not horrible. You have more control over your time and physical space than most other victims of late capitalism. Objectively speaking, your colleagues are less irritating than when you worked at that large retail store in high school. There are always some great students. And, if you are not a total bum, you get an hour or two each day doing what you claim to love. Why the unhappiness? Why so much alcoholism? Why are so many of us taking prescription happy pills?

The weirdest thing is that a lot of people only fall apart after getting tenure. I don’t have statistics, but off the top of my head I can think of six friends of mine have gone through appalling levels of suffering which commenced immediately after receiving tenure.--Jon Cogburn@Philpers.

Cogburn's piece was shared around the philosophical blogosphere (!) last week. Cogburn (my former NewAPPS buddy) runs through 8 (or if you read carefully, 9) would-be-reasons for his finding(s): 1. Decompression Sickness; 2. Social Stigma; 3. The Impossibility of Doing a Good Job; 4. The Hours; 5. Nobody Cares; 6. Dialectics; 7.Truth Schmooth; 8. I’ll Show You Unhappiness! (and, more halfheartedly) 9. self-selection. His underlying narrative was not criticized publicly.  While the lack of public criticism is unsurprising -- who wants to be the jerk to tell unhappy others, especially professional others, that their unhappiness is idiosyncratic to them? --, it is also surprising because (in my expert opinion) most public utterances about the profession quickly generate counter-narratives. While Cogburn's list of  reasons struck a chord with my observations (especially #1, 3, 5-7), I feel he ignored an important reason for the phenomenon.

 

Cogburn's post reminded me of a moment in my life about a decade ago. I had been hired by Syracuse, and I was invited by a professional mentor to celebrate for drinks on the roof-top of a fancy hotel overlooking the Atlantic an a metropolitan city on a beautiful Summer evening. (This is before my ballooning days, so no jokes were made about it.) The mentor is a big deal in the profession (and still alive, and has always been very supportive and generous, so I am not going 'to out' him), and much to my surprise -- over the second drink or so -- started to express genuine dissatisfaction about not having received an offer from Princeton or NYU.  An hour into that conversation, I decided I don't want to become like this when I grow up. When shortly thereafter I got an offer to leave Syracuse, I realized that all my (non-financial) reasons for staying in upstate NY, where I was not unhappy, could be boiled down to two: (i) amazing colleagues (astounding and rare combination of warmth and philosophical acumen); (ii) the prestige of being at Syracuse and the visibility/possibility/hope it provides to move up in the profession.

 

Time/attention and status are zero-sum and (when it comes to attention) very scarce goods. Unfortunately, in professional philosophy they go together. People get read, cited, and invited because of their status, which, in turn, means they get read, cited, and invited. One of the most regular kvetches I encounter from tenured/senior people is the sense that their work is being ignored. (This also has a non-trivial gender (here and recall) and boy-wonder component to it, of course.) That's to say, professional philosophy has an extreme prestige hierarchy (and, in fact, when we cite we signal prestige). I suspect, but would have to do more research, that the prestige hierarchy is also well correlated with the unequal distribution of other non-trivial success-goods (e.g., salary, teaching-loads, research assistants, office situation, etc.). Even if one is truly focused on truth and philosophical progress/wisdom (etc.), it's hard not to notice that others get more noticed than you. (In my experience, going on tt-track at a good school created a major bump in attention, including small-potato-attention at conferences and workshops almost overnight.)

 

It's a by now familiar social scientific fact, that communities with considerable inequality -- and everybody who is willing to note recognizes that there are many adjuncts that are in an unenviable situation  -- generate lots of stress and unhappiness. (The now classic citation is The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.) Maybe the causal arrow goes in another direction; I am fine with that. Objectively, tenured professors have made it. We are winners in a weighted lottery (that's compatible with the winners also meriting their success--I will remain agnostic here). But when you are conditioned and disciplined to look up (not to mention obsess over rankings) -- for all I know this just accentuates human nature --, then falling short of the top, even if you are a whole lot higher on the prestige-pole than others, can torment a great many souls. It's an open debate if Silver or coming in fourth is the worst place, but subjectively it's probably worse than not making it to the finals.

 

Even if Cogburn were wrong to suggest that, on average, tenured philosophy professors are unhappy, the increasing inequality within the professoriate is unmistakable. Both at the professional level as well as even within departments, it is increasingly a farce to suggest that we're in this together (and that's ignoring all the controversies in which groups are pitched against each other). Obviously some sub-communities and departments (and, of course, there are huge national/institutional differences) do better than others in generating and maintaining comradery within the group; in recognizing insights and argument, or just showing polite interest, regardless where the speaker/author is on the prestige hierarchy.  

It's a Great Time to become a Political Philosopher/Theorist

Nationalist (sometimes racialized) identity politics, promoted by demagogues and irresponsible, profit-seeking media which benefit from the frisson, is resurgent. It's not just confined to the tired, European democracies and post-Communist states, but it has resurfaced, scented with violence, at the center of the imperial power. In its wake population and demography (writing the people) take on a greater urgency not just because of looming conflict due to ecological pressures, but also because ways of lives are re-identified with being on the right side of a (walled) border in superior numbers. Meanwhile, technology is permitting new forms of reproduction and sexual identity, opening up new ways of constituting population. 

Local narratives of irreversible progress have been undermined: Schengenland border controls have returned and even the break up of the three hundred year old Union between Scotland and England is conceivable again. About a decade ago, Stephen Davies presented me with a scenario in which a military coup Stateside was a natural outcome. I laughed at it, and still think it an unlikely development. But I will change my mind if the 2016 election campaign turns violent, which is certainly not impossible given that the most nationalist and dissatisfied bits of the electorate are also armed to the teeth.

Mistrust of electorates* is allowing lotteries and epistemic-aristocracies to gain new audiences among the economic and political elites. Yet, even the hardiest intellectual elitist should take note of the huge technocratic social experiment unfolding at the Ruckertstrasse in Frankfurt: the unaccountable, European central bankers  are deliberately trying to debase the currency by buying up government and corporate debt in unprecedented numbers. What could possibly go wrong? (Answer: asset bubbles, etc.) When the final reckoning is made, Central Bank independence may turn out to be the costliest institutional arrangement devised in the modern era. (Moral: money is too important to be left to experts.)

The possibility of descent into the state of nature is taken seriously again because it is a lived reality in places (Syria, Somalia, etc.). Hospitals are attacked and the use of gas on the battlefield is so routine that news stories about these are increasingly met with a shrug.  The causes of such descent are varied (tyranny, great power politics, reckless arms-sales, un-managed regional rivalries, etc.), but it's accompanied, and given greater ferocity, by a willing resoluteness to die and kill in the name of merciful higher, invisible power(s).

Because of the increased intellectual division of labor, none of the special sciences can provide us with a systemic map to help us navigate the multiplicity of interlocking, simultaneous challenges (although some historians and artists may well try to do so). So, it falls to political philosophy (and theory)--that abandoned orphan of the great parental battle between Carnap and Heidegger--to meet this intellectual and imaginative challenge. Perhaps, its future is being written in Hindi or Hanyu.

 

After Virtue After the Rant

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead...What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them?

The answer in key part is: the exercise or the lack of exercise of the relevant virtues...Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of the relevant intellectual virtues--these corrupt traditions, just they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiment...Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) After Virtue, 222-223.

I often think that analytical philosophy is tainted beyond hope; our complicity in cultures of sexual harassment; our unwillingness to reflect on the patterns of exclusion, intellectual, racial, and personal; our repeated willingness to champion and be championed by intellectual bullies who have offered the world little of permanent value -- love, joy, beauty, etc.; our insistence that we're the party of truth and justice, while being unable to address in a forthright matter all the petty compromises with power and privilege we've made, etc. Of course, these are the predictable by-products of professional advancement. I recognize in myself the despair of a former-idealist; I should be a reactionary by now, but with age I turn the cliche up-side down: I am more critical of, and less comfortable with, the ways of the world than when I was a younger man.

But my heart is softened when I learned from MacIntyre this week that Gilbert Ryle wrote sensibly on Jane Austen's moral philosophizing; Ryle linked it, after distinguishing between a Calvinist and Aristotelian ethic, firmly with the "secular and aesthetic Aristotelianism of Shaftesbury." (No scholar would probably describe Shaftesbury like that now, but, when one reflects on it, Ryle is being insightful.) Not for the first time, I am struck by the fact that the more I learn about the history of analytical philosophy the quirkier -- in a good sense -- our tradition becomes.

Last week, after my rant went viral, with a guilty conscience, I found my copy of After Virtue and I decided to bring it on a conference trip to Austria and read it at earliest possible moment. I had been meaning to re-read it since I wrote this post (on MacIntyre's penetrating criticism of Rorty). Much to my surprise, the book had been clearly unread since I bought it second-hand in Red Lodge, Wyoming, during the Summer of 1992. (A stamp of The Broadway Bookstore is still clearly visible.)

I don't remember buying After Virtue. Judging by google.maps, the book-store is gone, although several others that look familiar are still in Red Lodge--a charming (undoubtedly quite touristy now) Western town that always stuck in my mind as the ideal quiet spot to write novels while having access to some of the comforts of civilization. Perhaps it's also a good place to await the fall of our civilization. (I have not been back.)

Even so, I don't share in After Virtue's narrative of decline -- it closes with the thought that we have entered  'new dark ages' -- and dreams of a new philosophical prophet to point the way out of our 'barbarism' (MacIntyre uses St. Benedict as exemplar (p. 263)). It's not that I am more optimistic than MacIntyre about our situation since the early 1980s, but rather because I have come to think that all ages, even the relatively prosperous and peaceful ones, are barbarous. That ours is an age of demagoguery and racialized nationalism -- identity politics is not limited to college campuses -- , and of demographic and environmental fears does not distinguish us from others. Even the sincerity of our religious fundamentalists is a recurring possibility. All ages call "men and women of good will" (263) to join in the endless task of minimizing the evils others inflict on each other. History teaches that more often than not those of good will are not up to the task. 

Despite the gloom, or perhaps because of it, After Virtue is a book for adults; I found it exhilarating reading. It offers many complex, interwoven arguments and, despite its relentless earnestness and argumentative and historical short-cuts, each page contains a sentence or two that will stop you in your tracks. Long before academics invented a scholarly industry around neoliberalism as the vice of our times, MacIntyre sets his sights on the bureaucrat's disguise as a technocrat (and the odd alliance with the therapist as exemplars of our times). In chapter 8, MacIntyre defends so-called epistemic versions of Knightian uncertainty in order to undermine claims to managerial expertise. (He seems to be unaware of Knight; I return to that some other time.) Some of the best lines in the book are its critical treatment of the performative theory of self, now associated with Judith Butler, but apparently articulated  by Erving Goffman in the 1950s and 60s.*

Indeed, I discerned I was right to feel guilty for not having mentioned MacIntyre in my rant because my distinction between the practice and the philosophical politics of philosophy that is presupposed in my rant, resonates with MacIntyre's use of a distinction between practice and institutions. And throughout the book he anticipates my own impatience with overblown and self-congratulatory claims of philosophical progress. More important, and much to my surprise, he articulates the ways in which taints from the past cannot be ignored for those that inherit tradition (country, practice, religion, etc.). Despite, or perhaps, because of his fondness for Aristotle, an unmistakable point of his argument is the diagnosis of what we would now call white privilege as a consequence of American slavery (220); he leaves no doubt that history generates obligations to latecomers.

I close with an observation on MacIntyre on Austen. At key junctures in his argument, MacIntyre tacitly corrects Ryle's claim that Austen's outlook is secular, by repeatedly insisting she is "a Christian." Evidently, classifying the past correctly is an urgent task if we fight the corrosion of intellectual narratives.

Locke, Newton, and The Posidonian Argument

Not the real essence, or texture of parts, which we know not. Nor indeed can we rank and sort things, and consequently (which is the end of sorting) denominate them, by their real essences; because we know them not. Our faculties carry us no further towards the knowledge and distinction of substances, than a collection of those sensible ideas which we observe in them; which, however made with the greatest diligence and exactness we are capable of, yet is more remote from the true internal constitution from which those qualities flow, than, as I said, a countryman’s idea is from the inward contrivance of that famous clock at Strasburg, whereof he only sees the outward figure and motions. There is not so contemptible a plant or animal, that does not confound the most enlarged understanding. Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance. When we come to examine the stones we tread on, or the iron we daily handle, we presently find we know not their make; and can give no reason of the different qualities we find in them. It is evident the internal constitution, whereon their properties depend, is unknown to us: for to go no further than the grossest and most obvious we can imagine amongst them...The workmanship of the all-wise and powerful God in the great fabric of the universe, and every part thereof, further exceeds the capacity and comprehension of the most inquisitive and intelligent man, than the best contrivance of the most ingenious man doth the conceptions of the most ignorant of rational creatures. Therefore we in vain pretend to range things into sorts, and dispose them into certain classes under names, by their real essences, that are so far from our discovery or comprehension. A blind man may as soon sort things by their colours, and he that has lost his smell as well distinguish a lily and a rose by their odours, as by those internal constitutions which he knows not.--Locke, Essay 3.6.9

Echoing Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, Locke allows that science begins in wonder. It removes our wonder by way of familiarity with the objects of inquiry and their relations to other objects of inquiry but not, infamously, knowledge of hidden, inner real essences. Here Locke (who, as Alison Peterman has taught me, in turn echoes Spinoza) anticipates the Kantian move in which empirical science becomes knowledge of (the law-governed) relations among the phenomena. This is familiar enough.

In the very same paragraph (3.6.9), Locke also offers a (rather skeptical) version of the prima facie version of the Posidonian argument(recall, here too, here, and yesterday). This argument goes back to Cicero. It contains three elements: (i) a designed, intricate representation of nature; (ii) a savage who grasps the marks of design, and (iii) an argument from human design to God's design:

Our friend Posidonius has recently fashioned a planetarium; each time it revolves, it makes the sun, moon, and planets reproduce the movements which they make over a day and a night in the heavens. Suppose someone carried this to Scythia or to Britain. Surely no one in those barbarous regions would doubt that that planetarium had been constructed by a rational process. Yet our opponents [the Epicureans] here profess uncertainty whether the universe, from which all things take their origin, has come into existence by chance or some necessity, or by divine reason and intelligence.

These three (i-iii) elements are all present in Locke's argument and (as I have shown inspired by Boyle's borrowing from Cicero): (i) the "famous clock at Strasburg," which was also a planetarium; (ii) "the most ignorant of rational creatures;" and (iii) "The workmanship of the all-wise and powerful God." What is unusual about Locke is that here he deploys it not argue for the existence of God; he assumes the validity of the argument in order to suggest that our ignores of hidden workings of nature exceeds the ignorance of the least capable person of the internal mechanism of a complex clock/planetarium. In fact, 3.6.9 repeats the point (with the same tropes) the argument at 3.6.3, where Locke distinguishes real from nominal essences.

As an aside, on the frontispiece of Locke's Essay, an epigraph from Cicero On the Nature of the Gods is coupled with the following passage: As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God, who maketh all things.— Eccles. 11. 5. So, we can say that Essay 3.6.9 is central to the claims that Locke wishes to convey.

As is well known, Essay 3.6.9 anticipates Newton’s treatment of our lack of knowledge of God’s substance in General Scholium.

A blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, not touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of anything is, we know not. In bodies we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known, either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds; much less then have we any idea of the substance of God.

Newton's example (of the blind man) and doctrine are indebted to Locke. So is the appeal to (Lockean) reflection within the mind. But Newton does not mention the Posidonian argument. He is, however, familiar with it (not just from Locke or Boyle) because does, explicitly appeal to Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, to claim that the Ancients agree with his claims about God's omnipresence in the General Scholium in the very sentences before the ones I have just quoted.

As I noted yesterday, the transcendental version of the Posidonian argument requires (as its conclusion) a God of order.* Order is not mentioned in the General Scholium. But there is a tantalizing hint that we are meant to discern it in the General Scholium. (What follows is indebted to Yoram Hazony.) Newton is explicit that his God is the Lord of Lords--that is a nod to Deuteronomy 10:17. That is, his God has dominion. What does this have to do with order? Newton goes on to make clear that God's dominion involves, in particular, his temporal and spatialized dominion: "his duration reaches from Eternity to Eternity; his presence from Infinity to Infinity...He is not Eternity and Infinity, but Eternal and Infinite; he is not Duration and Space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes Duration and Space. Since every particle of Space is always, and every indivisible moment of Duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where...There are given successive parts in duration, co-existent parts in space." (General Scholium, emphases added.) That is to say, Newton links God's ordered existence with Nature's order.

As is well known, the General Scholium is an epilogue to the Principia Mathematica. We can, thus, summarize Newton's position as follows:

(I)                There is a God of order

(II)              A condition of the possibility of (an intended) successful scientific representation or concrete model of (a region of) nature is that nature is orderly;

(III)            Nature's hidden order (could not be the product of chance [as suggested by Epicureanism] or necessity [as suggested by Spinozism]), can only be constituted by God;

(IV)             Science is successful.

(V)             ∴  Science gives us some (indirect) access to the constitution of God's order, which is why "to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy."

That is, (I-IV) just presuppose the transcendental version of the Posidonian argument:

*Recall:

(I)                A condition of the possibility of (an intended) successful scientific representation or concrete model of (a region of) nature is that (a region of) nature is orderly;

(II)              Nature's hidden order could not be the product of chance [as suggested by Epicureanism] or necessity [as suggested by Spinozism], but only by God;

(III)               Science is successful.

(IV)             ∴ There is a God (of order)

 

(I)                A condition of the possibility of (an intended) successful scientific representation or concrete model of (a region of) nature is that (a region of) nature is orderly

(II)              Nature's hidden order could not be the product of chance [as suggested by Epicureanism] or necessity [as suggested by Spinozism], but only by God

(III)               Science is successful.

(IV)             ∴ There is a God (of order)

- See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2016/05/on-order-simplicity.html#sthash.N4mn2csH.dpuf

On Order & Simplicity (and transcendental arguments) in Newton and Scientific Models

9. To choose those constructions which without straining reduce things to the greatest simplicity. The reason of this is manifest by the precedent Rule. Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, & not in the multiplicity & confusion of things. As the world, which to the naked eye exhibits the greatest variety of objects, appears very simple in its internall constitution when surveyed by a philosophic understanding, & so much the simpler by how much the better it is understood, so it is in these visions. It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order & not of confusion. And therefore as they that would understand the frame of the world must indeavour to reduce their knowledg to all possible simplicity, so it must be in seeking to understand these visions. And they that shall do otherwise do not onely make sure never to understand them, but derogate from the perfection of the prophesy; & make it suspicious also that their designe is not to understand it but to shuffle it of & confound the understandings of men by making it intricate & confused.--Isaac Newton ca 1670s-1680s, Rules for methodising | construing the Apocalyps. in Untitled Treatise on Revelation (section 1.1) [HT Eliot Sober]

Laurie Paul called my attention to Sober's essay on simplicity, which discusses, in passing, the passage quoted from Newton's papers. In the passage, Newton draws a distinction between confusing appearances (which exhibit "multiplicity") and an orderly and simple hidden (internal) constitution. I note here that his language is rather Rationalist (a "philosophic understanding" grasps the hidden constitution of things), but in context it's clear that the interpretation of Scriptures (or prophetic visions) and of nature (they are treated as analogous enterprises) is also an empirical matter (note the role of "observation").*

Sober does not mention the role of order, which in Newton is resolutely coupled with simplicity. Before I get to that it's worth noting explicitly, Newton's doctrine of simplicity here. Even so there is a subtle distinction between order and simplicity. Let me first explain simplicity. For, note the difference between (i) simplicity being a feature of God's works, especially the internal constitution of things and (i*) simplicity being a cognitive feature accompanying a philosophical understanding of that internal constitution of things. Truth just is when (i) and (i*) match. It also turns out that the simplicity in (i*) also involves (i**) a property or virtue of a successful epistemic reduction to a more limited number of elements. Newton is here echoing Boyle (as Yoram Hazony has argued in a different context). To be sure, a 'construction' is what we would call an 'intepretation,' but for reasons that will become clear below, I am going to be happy to trade on an equivocation in which 'construction' also evokes a concrete model.

Order, however, is a feature (I am inclined to say, a perfection) of God: "He is the God of order"--this evokes 1 Corinthians 14:33-40. (There order seems to really mean 'peaceful,' especially of prayer-service & preaching -- sadly, in context women are treated as a source of disorder.) A natural reading is that God's order explains the absence of confusion (that is, order) in the hidden constitution of nature.

That God is the God of order is a feature, not a bug, of a very  important argument that I have dubbed (recall, here too, and here) the 'transcendental version of the Posidonian argument' that can be traced back to Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods.  (Some version of it is clearly articulated in Boyle and Clarke.) It can be rendered as follows:

(I)                A condition of the possibility of (an intended) successful scientific representation or concrete model of (a region of) nature is that (a region of) nature is orderly

(II)              Nature's hidden order could not be the product of chance [as suggested by Epicureanism] or necessity [as suggested by Spinozism], but only by God

(III)               Science is successful.

(IV)             ∴ There is a God (of order)

I have worded [II] in such a way as to allow that God may just emanate his order to Nature. I have worded [I] to allow concrete models -- e.g., a portable planetarium -- to play a key role in the argument (as they do in Cicero, Boyle, and Clarke). In addition, I'll stipulate that one way to cash out a successful scientific representation or concrete model of the hidden structure of nature, is in terms of simplicity, epistemic reduction, and representational accuracy. Obviously, the first two premises may well be thought controversial (and here I am ignoring different kinds of interpretations we may put on these premises). Some other time I'll explore how reasonable they would have been in the early modern period (and how they can be seen to presuppose a commitment to PSR).

This argument violates what we may call a 'neutrality requirement.' The thought behind the neutrality requirement is that when science plays a rule in establishing facts/features/stuff/phenomena (etc.)about the world -- like its hidden structure or order --, it ought to be neutral with regard to these facts (features, etc.). The neutrality requirement, we may say a lack of bias, underwrites the epistemic authority of science in the context of controversy.  The transcendental version of the Posidonian argument violates the neutrality requirement when it comes to order; it presupposes it.

As the eminent Spinoza and Kant scholar, Ursula Renz (who likes transcendental arguments), noted in recent discussion of some of this material, violating neutrality requirements just is what transcendental arguments do. (This is just another way of explaining the way in which transcendental arguments tend to feel circular.) This is worth emphasizing because we live in a philosophical culture that is attracted to at least one rather influential transcendental argument (the so-called Quine-Putnam indispensability argument which appeals to the authority of science to argue for the existence of [or ontological commitment to] mathematical objects which are indispensable for science functioning).**

Here I do not wish to prove that Newton was explicitly familiar with the Posidonian argument (that's for another time, although if Dennett is right about Descartes then there is a direct source, but Boyle is also a possible source; later he can learn about itfrom Locke and Clarke). But it is worth noting here that he explicitly accepts its conclusion, tacitly assumes the truth of (II), and can be charitably read to be committed to (I). Every scientific success he generates, firms up his commitment to its conclusion, and, in turn, spurs on his science.