A composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind's eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree. But the imaginative power even of the highest artists is far from precise, and is so apt to be biassed [sic] by special cases that may have struck their fancies, that no two artists agree in any of their typical forms. The merit of the photographic composite is its mechanical precision, being subject to no errors beyond those incidental to all photo graphic productions.--F. Galton (1879) "Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure," The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 134.
The contemporary methods of the history of philosophy are fine-tuned to study texts and arguments. While there are attempts to bring the techniques of the study of material cultures and, even archeology, to bear on it (see J.H. Smith), on the whole these methods are designed to focus on describing, interpreting, and tracing (the influence of) the views of authors, ideas, concepts, and arguments. These methods all treat the sources as evidence, and the scholar as a kind of detective (see Goldenbaum) piecing the material together for some end (historical truth, argumentative progress, conceptual articulation, historical meaning, etc.) [recall this recent post for a partial taxonomy]. It's much more nebulous to try, with the methods of contemporary scholarship, to characterize precisely (the ideas, arguments, views, concepts [etc.] of) a Zeitgeist, a tradition, a collective, and a (dynamic) style.+ In fact, for example, few allow that Zeitgeist is a legitimate concept to be deployed in one's scholarshop. In particular, the question I wish to explore here is how one can begin to characterize a collective way of thinking (arguing, conceptualizing, etc.) when the underlying source materials are composed of individuals who also, as it happens, embrace individuality. What follows is inspired by M.A. Khan's (2004) use of the composite portrait.++
Galton, the leading statistician of his age and a central figure in the development of mathematical economics, developed many of his tools, including the composite portrait, in order to make various components of eugenics properly scientific. Regular readers know I am no friend of eugenics, but I am aware of the the argument that a contaminated source need not pollute all its fruits. Today's statisticians acknowledge that their tools can be abused, and so forthrightly announce in their professional guidelines of the ASA that "using statistics in pursuit of unethical ends is inherently unethical."* (HT Mauricio Suárez) Of course, views on what is ethical are not always stable; while there have always been cogent ethical criticisms of eugenics, there were plenty of ethical arguments in its favor, too (especially in Galton's age).**
Galton's composite portrait is, in one sense, a counterfactual image available to an especially (non-existent) acute artist if such an artist did not have personality, which biases his or her ways of seeing and representing the world. Galton is hinting, here, at two traditions: one is the Platonizing God (the highest artist) which only cognizes essences or types not particulars; the other is the romantic artist who has heightened powers of sensation. If the best artists lacked personality they would each be able to generate the consensus portrait of a certain type. Because the camera lacks personality, and so is unbiased, Galton believes it can be an instrument for portraying types. I leave aside here all the ways in which the camera may well be biased (because I am not interested in defending Galton's particular procedure).
In his 2004 article, Khan (a mathematical economist and a leading philosopher of economics) appropriates the idea of a composite portrait in order to describe the practice*** of offering a composite photograph constituted by the "giants" of the economics "profession," in order to mirror to the contemporary economist by showing her (that is, the professional contemporary economist), "how she looked not too long ago." Now, we can ignore the bit of flattery toward the contemporary economist, who in her very professionalism is no giant at all (qua professionals we are all worker bees), and say that the point of such a composite (in Khan's hands; see also Kahn 2004b) is to characterize the activities of a group of people who helped constitute (to use Kuhnian language) paradigm and profession-generating norms and practices that the contemporary economist will recognize, in some reflected sense, as her own. Now, Khan is interested in the composite portrait not just because of its entanglement with the sordid history of eugenics, but also because it allows him to make available for discussion the complex ethical issues surrounding the fact that one is a member of a larger community with sordid practices, whose past is not fully acknowledged and (recall) whose shadow lingers and intermingles with present practices and the distribution of status and significance in the present credit economy of a profession. So much (recall) for Khan and his aims.
In what follows, a composite portrait as a method in the history of philosophy is, as I shall use it, designed to bring out (a) characteristic features of a group's philosophizing in order (b) to illuminate characteristic features that may still resonate in today's philosophy, (c) without claiming that any of these features are present among all the members of the group studied (d) nor demanding that all the members of the group are treated equally.
On (a): it is worth recognizing that characteristic features of a group bias one's presentation to what is unusual about that group as compared to the history of philosophy as such. So, for example, if one grants (for the sake of (ahh) argument) that arguments are characteristic of philosophy and, in fact, the group that will be the subject of one's composite picture is also philosophical in this sense, then in a composite portrait of a group one need not bring out, necessarily, that they argue; but rather one portrays what is unusual about the way they argue or the ends that are pursued by their arguments or the epistemic, cultural, and social dynamics or processes in which these arguments are embedded. That is to say, the composite portrait is intended to bring out and emphasize a certain deviance or distinctiveness shared by the group; it is not meant to capture all the characteristics that compose them.
On (b): it is worth noting that generating a composite portrait may seem to come close to a species of Whig history, but its aim is not to glorify the present, but rather to make visible the often effaced traces of how our (perhaps tacit) self-conceptions came about and, thus, available for discussion. So, a composite portrait has as much family resemblance to Whig history as it does to genealogical approaches.
On (c): the composite portrait is not a perfect blend of the underlying members of the group to be followed by a mechanical operation (of the camera). Rather, it has more in common with the artist's choice in discerning what matters about the group. In particular, the selection of what matters is informed by an understanding of contemporary practices in order to bring out resonances that are still salient.
On (d): it is worth acknowledging that this deviates clearly from Galton's underlying idea. Galton wished to capture a generic yet especially salient (once brought to light) qualities that individuals have in common as a type. Philosophical groups tend not to be so egalitarian: so, for example, as ancient doxagraphers practiced, the distinctive features of founders of a school or tradition tend to be accorded more significance than some of their followers or students.
What a-d have in common is a reliance on the judgment and skill of the philosophical-historical portraitist who must both understand the source materials, be capable of deploying (let's say) a historical camera, and have a sense of which portraits may be used as historical mirrors for one's peers. I recognize that the present discussion is all highly abstract and so life-less. It calls for further exemplars of composite photographs (about which more elsewhere), and, perhaps, it inspires some scholars to use their tools to develop the art of scholarly composite portraiture.
+When styles are wholly (ahh) formal or methodical the hurdles may be overcome more easily, but even in the philosophy of mathematics the notion is not without ambiguity (see Moncuso for useful introduction).
++Khan draws on Leys 1991, which, in turns, draws on the influential (Foucault inspired) Sekula 1986. I should say that this whole post was prompted by methodological discussion and reflection surrounding a paper that I am co-authoring with Andrew Corsa, "True American Philosophy and Magnanimity." I am grateful to Andrew as well as our editor, Sophia Vasalou, for demanding more specificity.
*This leave the status of developing statistical tools for unethical ends in a murky zone. To do so is clearly against the spirit of the guidelines, but nothing in the guidelines suggests one can't use the tools once developed.
** At the founding of analytical philosophy, G.E. Moore rejected deriving ought from is, the naturalistic fallacy, and all that in order to combat darwinian arguments. Darwinian style of ethical argument were routinely deployed in favor of eugenics and Galton's (1879) essay includes a transcription of a letter to Charles Darwin (by yet another scholar) presenting an alternative devise to develop a composite portrait. But it is worth noting that (a) not all arguments in favor of eugenics rely on Darwinian/naturalistic ethics, and (b) Moore does not explicitly mention eugenics among his targets.
***In fact, in his 2004 article, Khan is re-describing the practice of Levy & Peart (2004).
I wonder how many readers of Road to Serfdom looked up the composite photograph reference. Perhaps they thought it a name Hayek made up?
Posted by: David Levy | 08/15/2017 at 04:41 PM