On Freud, Rawls, Rose, the contrast between Analytic/Continental Philosophy, and Lewis-Kripke

Behind one half of Ferrante’s pen name, Elena, is a tale from Greek mythology. According to a relatively little-known version of the story, Zeus rapes and impregnates, not Leda the swan, but Nemesis, who turns herself into a goose to escape him. She then lays an egg, found by a shepherd and handed to Leda, who nurtures it and out of which Elena is born, who is then raised by Leda, in Ferrante’s suggestive formula, as ‘her daughter-non-daughter’.4 It must be one of the earliest stories of surrogacy, as well as offering a model of motherhood without vested interest because it has embraced a stranger.--Jacuqeline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, p. 146.

One important feature of the distinction between analytical and continental philosophy is that analytical philosophy is when not outright hostile to Freud/Freudianism, in its indifference to it, purportedly untouched by it.* This is most evident in the brief spectacle of the late twentieth century flowering of analytical Marxism--these hard-nosed men (it was really a boys club), which self-consciously set itself against the mushy forms of Marxism found in Paris and Frankfurt (and elsewhere). What's conspicuous about their (the analytical marxist) work is not the elegance and wit of their writings, but their inability to make visible how oppression as a social phenomenon generates, through violence and lies/ideology, the deformation, material and psychic, at the heart of of everybody's lives.+ (Of course, one can state and argue this without Freudian theory, but often without fertility.)

I think I can explain what I have in mind: John Rawls (to be sure no analytical Marxist), who read more widely than most analytic philosophers, discusses Freud briefly several time in Theory of Justice in the context of the significance of moral education. For Rawls Freud is somebody who, first, offers cautionary warnings about taking moral sentiments at face value due to their being rooted in processes of "conflict and stress" (TJ, 459); second, he treats Freud as, we may say,  a Nietzschean, who offers a kind of error theory for the sense of justice (and, in so doing, mistakenly conflates envy and resentment). (Susan Moller Okin has also noticed the first passage. She treats it as evidence of Rawls's blindness to Freud's sexism.) Rawls treats the grounds of the "conflict and stress" as mere psychological process to be overcome in adulthood (with the help, surprisingly enough, of "sound principles" that is, political philosophy) and not as expressing the effects of (ahh) a badly functioning basic structure(s) of society.**  

I have come to think it's not Freudianism's dubious character as a science that accounts for analytic philosophy's hostility/indifference (or early analytic philosophy's flirtation with behaviorism), but rather something that G.A. Cohen mislabels as "acid Freudian skepticism:" that all given identities are at once (too) robust in their fixity and fragile in their vulnerability to fracturing. The effect of this acid is that identity becomes liquid. Such liquidity is played with in Derrida and embraced by Deleuze, and treated at arm's length in the analytic mainstream. For, while one may think that political philosophy and moral education are at the margin's of analytic philosophy's self-understanding -- despite the fact that (recall) the Strawson-Carnap debate pivots on it-- identity is central. I can't, of course, prove this point to you.

However, I think I can make it arresting. I hope you will forgive me if I use Kripke as a representative agent, as an exemplar. I want to return to Kripke's response to Lewis's counterpart theory. This response exhibits more than dispassionate philosophical disagreement. I reproduce most of the relevant footnote from Naming and Necessity:

Lewis's elegant paper also suffers from a purely formal difficulty: on his interpretation of quantified modality, the familiar law (y) ((x)A(x) ⊃ A(y) falls, if A(x) is allowed to contain modal operators. (For example, (∃y) ((x) ◊(x ≠y) is satisfiable but (∃y) ◊ (y ≠ y) is not.) Since Lewis's formal model follows rather naturally from his philosophical views on counterparts, and since the failure of universal instantiation for modal properties is intuitively bizarre, it seems to me that this failure constitutes an additional argument against the plausibility of his philosophical views. There are other, lesser, formal difficulties as well. I cannot elaborate here.

Strictly speaking, Lewis’s view is not a view of ‘transworld identification’. Rather, he thinks that similarities across possible worlds determine a counterpart relation which need be neither symmetric nor transitive. The counterpart of something in another possible world is never identical with the thing itself. Thus if we say ‘Humphrey might have won the election (if only he had done such-and-such), we are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey but to someone else, a “counterpart”.’ Probably, however, Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world.
Thus, Lewis's view seems to me even more bizarre than the usual notions of transworld identification that it replaces. The important issues, however, are common to the two views: the supposition that other possible worlds are like other dimensions of a more inclusive universe, that they can be given only by purely qualitative descriptions, and that therefore either the identity relation or the counterpart relation must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.

Many have pointed out to me that the father of counterpart theory is probably Leibnitz. I will not go into such a historical question here. It would also be interesting to compare Lewis's views with the Wheeler-Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I suspect that this view of physics may suffer from philosophical problems analogous to Lewis's counterpart theory; it is certainly very similar in spirit.

Notice that Kripke repeatedly treats Lewis' position as bizarre. (It is quite amazing, actually, to see a formal difficulty itself be explicated in terms of what seems intuitively bizarre.) The one other time (right at the start) in Naming and Necessity where Kripke treats a view as bizarre is  the denial of the indiscernability of identicals. (Notably he treats the denial of it as on par as the denial of the 'law of contradiction.') My point here is not to claim that Kripke's critique of Lewis isn't well motivated or un-argued.++ Kripke is not cheating. And my present purpose is not to defend Lewis (although regular readers know I think counterpart theory grasps something fundamental about self-identity.)

Rather, I am marking that Kripke's hostility (the repeated bizarre) expresses something that goes beyond mere disagreement. As Freud notes in a very different context (dreams, etc.), treating something as bizarre is a mechanism by which we allow ourselves to ignore something important. It's to Kripke's credit that he explains why Lewis' position must be set aside. Kripke says that the most important point (of disagreement) is that for Lewis the identity relation, including self-identity, must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.*** Kripke's emphatic ''bizarre" betrays how he recoils from the (ahh) instability this generates. 

 

 

*Yes, I am familiar with much of Jonathan Lear's work (even studied with him) and David Velleman's writings.

+G.A. Cohen does engage with Freud, but he treats Freud, I think, primarily as (a misguided elitist) theorist who emphasizes the coercive social mechanisms required to make people work because would not wish delaying gratification of desires.

**I can't do justice to all of Elster's reflections on Freud, but crucially he treats these stresses not as caused by capitalism, but as rooted in biology. With enemies like these the bourgeois does not need friends! (He also treats psychoanalytic theory as fundamentally about the individual.) 

++One does wonder how one would read this passage in the world where Wheeler-Everett has become standard?

***This point is much remarked upon; and nearly always it is said that the fact that such resemblance is hard to measure or establish is treated as a problem (not a virtue). I think the point is well taken given Lewis's particular commitments. 

Comments

[Aaron Lercher]

Can two things be the same thing, while having different histories?

Yes, if these things are best understood as modeled by Markov processes. If so, then the future is independent of the past.

But perhaps some might say that this is only a model, not how these things really are. That's why I stipulated that these things are "best" understood as modeled that way, such as random walks or Brownian motion.

[ajkreider]

I'm not sure I see the connection between the centrality of identity to analytical philosophy and hostility towards Freud. It's dubiousness as a science seems more than sufficient.

Whenever a Freudian explanation of some phenomenon is mooted, "Why should we bother accepting it, or even take it seriously?" seem like a challenging enough questions - without wondering what the impact that accepting the explanation has on our notions of identity. The worry is that such explanations don't make anything visible at all, and that the only fertility involved is in birthing multitudes of academic papers with similar armchair "explanations".+

+ For a recent example, consider Kate Manne's Freudian account of why (male) pro-lifers are pro-lifers, in 'Down Girl'.

[Neil Levy]

Cohen knew the mainstream Western Marxist tradition. I attended a seminar he hosted by an Italian Althusserian. It was clear he was very familiar with the tradition.

On another point - the current uncritical embrace of standpoint theory in analytic philosophy seems to ignore “how oppression as a social phenomenon generates, through violence and lies/ideology, the deformation, material and psychic, at the heart of of everybody's lives”, or more specifically how this deformation impacts more strongly on the more oppressed. I think there’s some truth in standpoint theory (which also has continental roots), but it has to be combined with an account of ideology or false consciousness.

[Eric Schliesser]

Perhaps, I misunderstand you; but I didn't mean to suggest that Cohen was unfamiliar with the tradition. (I used 'untouched' not unfamiliar. And I quoted him on Freud!)

I think I agree with your other point (although it is my sense that standpoint theory is more contested in many analytic circles).