What kind of authority is necessary for a philosopher’s vision of how things are with the world to hold sway? What is necessary, to put the question in Austinian terms, for the successful execution of a philosophical speech act? More fundamentally, what is a philosophical speech act? What sort of illocutionary force does a felicitous philosophical speech act wield? Under what conditions is such a speech act felicitous? Let us pose these questions in light of one of Langton’s philosophical speech acts. At the climax of “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” Langton writes: “The claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials: it is not trickery, or ‘sleight of hand’; it is by no means ‘philosophically indefensible.’” What act is being attempted in this passage? Well, at this juncture in her article Langton is epitomizing a claim that she has been trying in the article to defend. She is also engaged in a further act of claiming (that the claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials). If we inspect the felicity conditions for such an act, we will not find that having authority is one of them. But we can say more about Langton’s speech act than that she is lodging a claim. For isn’t she trying to legitimate MacKinnon’s view of the relationship between pornography and sexual subordination, to rank this claim as better justified than the claims that would purport to undermine it, and perhaps even to make it the case that the lodgers of these would-be undermining claims are silenced at the level of the success of their own illocutions—that their attempts to extol pornography will come off as unauthoritative? If so, then by her own lights these actions will misfire to the extent that she lacks the requisite authority. But what is the requisite sort of authority? What authorizes philosophical speech?
The obvious answer is: reason itself. But this answer begs the question of how reason, on any construal of the notion, gets its authority in the culture. All you have to do is look around to conclude that, contrary to the assumption that appears to pervade philosophical writing these days, the culture does not take reason’s authority to be self-evident. Plato, for one, felt this state of affairs to be intolerable: on his view, any philosopher worthy of the name was obligated not just to commune with the forms but to come down from the mountaintop and attempt to attract the citizenry to the sublime, if almost imperceptible, beauty of reason. It was not enough for the philosopher to churn out journal articles on the mountaintop and hope that the hoi polloi would at some later date decide to take an interest in their acts of legitimating, ranking, and so on. To be a philosopher for Plato is to provide a vision of how things are with the world and to attempt to attract people to the project of recognizing themselves—or not, as the case may be—in this vision.
Aristotle agreed with Plato. So did the medievals, and so did any number of modern philosophers. In fact, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that philosophy seems to have beaten a retreat to the proverbial ivy tower. Part of the impetus, of course, has been the increasing specialization and institutionalization of the discipline. But philosophers’ relatively recent reluctance to worry about our authority in the culture also has nobler roots. It is to some extent a product of horror at the way their colleagues’ work had been exploited by dangerous ideologues—how Marx’s investment in humanizing humanity had given way to Stalinist Russia, how Nietzsche’s celebration of human nature had provided grist for the mill of Hitler. The young Rudolph Carnap alludes to this horror in the preface to the Aufbau, as we see in the following passage:We cannot hide from ourselves the fact that trends from philosophical-metaphysical and from religious spheres, which protect themselves against [a scientific, rational, and anti-individualistic conception of philosophy], again exert a strong influence precisely at the present time. Where do we derive the confidence, in spite of this, that our call for clarity, for a science that is free from metaphysics, will prevail?—From the knowledge, or, to put it more cautiously, from the belief, that these opposing powers belong to the past.
Vigorously progressive in his politics, committed to the ideals of socialism, and horrified by the elitism he saw in the metaphysics of, most prominently, his contemporary and compatriot Martin Heidegger, Carnap passionately believed that he was morally and politically obliged to treat philosophy as an at least potentially rigorous science. It is understandable, then, that Carnap in his day and age felt that the cost of philosophizing in the old way—the cost of attempting to arrogate cultural authority by the sheer act of writing—was simply too high. Philosophy was instead to take its carefully circumscribed place in a new world, one grounded not on the philosopher’s personal metaphysical vision but on pure reason itself. The philosopher’s goal, Carnap thought, was to employ reason to make progress on fundamental scientific questions of universal interest and importance. The social and political cost of construing the cultural role of philosophy otherwise, he claimed, was simply too high.
Carnap is to be lauded for his relentless thoughtfulness about what he was doing, within both philosophy and the wider world. My beef is neither with Carnap nor with the style of philosophizing he bequeathed to the next century. My worry, rather, is that Carnap’s conception of philosophical reason has come apart from the reasons for his investment in it—that we have inherited his thought but not his thoughtfulness. (Crucially, I could say exactly the same thing about Freud or Wittgenstein or Kant as an ethicist.)
What I am in effect worrying about, then, is whether we can afford to continue to cleave to the narrow conceptions of philosophy we have inherited and their implicit claims to self-evident authority. I am not suggesting that we dumb philosophy down in order to rescue the masses. I am not advocating a return, or forward leap, to any particular style or form of philosophizing. I am not denying that we take tremendous political, social, and moral risks when we attempt to provoke other people to unsettle their settled opinions. I am not encouraging us to aim too high. But I am calling for us to commit ourselves to a grander, more ambitious, and more explicit expression of interest in the question of what it is that we are doing and what licenses our doing it. What would it look like for philosophy to issue an audible call for genuine thinking, to compete, that is, with the penchant for self-anesthetization that contemporary culture encourages? What would it look like for us to aspire above all to have a say in the world?--Nancy Bauer (2015) "On Philosophical Authority" in How to do Things With Pornography, pp. 125-128
Last week, in the context of her criticism of Timothy Williamson, I noted that Bauer's book is full of metaphilosophy. In many ways the quoted passage, which ends chapter 7, is the meta-philosophical core of the book which is why I quoted it length.
In contemporary philosophy, clarity and rigor in argument is often held up as the ideal. And this can be understood in two ways. One sees in getting the argument right a means to facilitate further discussion (about the premises, or significance of the conclusion). I associate this (dialogic) view of argument with my former NewAPPS colleague, Catarina Dutilh Noveas, and it can also be discerned, as a dynamics of progress, in Daniel Stoljar (recall) Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism.
The other way sees that arguments have a silencing effect at the pain of being called, as Nozick noted, 'irrational.' Nozick expressed the idea as follow:
The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premise you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief” Philosophical Explanations, p. 4.*
Bauer's worry about Langton's paper has a family resemblance to Nozick's concern about arguments. I mention Nozick, because there is a natural way to construe Langton's exercise as a kind of legitimate self-defense against the previously successful efforts to delegitimize MacKinnon's views which attempt to end the silencing and subordination of women. To put that in context, in May, I put a tentative syllabus for a feminist theory course online, and a very distinguished legal and political philosopher opined on my facebook page that I should put Langton and not MacKinnon on my syllabus because Langton is far more sophisticated and, after I pushed back, that MacKinnon is philosophically not rigorous. His reaction suggests that indeed Langton has legitimated certain views (and simultaneously and ironically allows some to continue to devalue MacKinnon's contribution). And Langton has become the (ahh) authoritative spokesperson within certain overlapping disciplines -- because conforming to certain standards -- for these views.
Nozick also rejects the self-defense model: "For one's own protection it should not be necessary to argue at all, merely to note publicly what bludgeoning the others are attempting-intellectual satyagraha, to use Gandhi's term for nonviolent resistance." (5) But while this is a noble stance in philosophy, perhaps, it is not apt for the law where it might entail unilateral acquiescence in one's subordination. And while satyagraha is a legitimate political stance, it is not to be prescribed to others (because then it can be a further means of subordination).
In fact, Langton's paper is not just directed at philosophers who did not give MacKinnon's ideas their due (because they mistakenly treated these as incoherent), it is, as the closing sentence of her paper reveals, also designed to open the door to a change in government policy/law.** And the line of influence is pretty clear: if legal philosophers and judges better understand the coherence and legitimacy of MacKinnon's views, they may well prevent courts from rejecting local (and national) anti-porn ordinances. The form of Langton's speech act is perfectly calibrated to try to shape legally influential elite opinion (which has been preventing local democratic majorities from exercising their political authority). So, it strikes me as a mistake to claim that Langton has not properly conceptualized, as Bauer claims "the illocutionary force of her own words." (114)
I mention this because while Bauer recognizes that Langton is "underwriting a particular political position," (120) Bauer also represents Langton as taking a "very carefully circumscribed role with respect to a certain feminist antipornography position...simply to remove a stumbling block--a charge of incoherence---from the path of MacKinnon and like-minded activists" (122). And as should be clear from the long block quote above, Bauer opposes to this a "grander vision of our profession, our capacity to speak in an authoritative voice in our culture, our capacity to call ourselves and others to task of serious reflection." (122) But because the way elite legal opinion co-shapes judicial review, Langton's approach is not a good exemplar for "the irrelevance of contemporary philosophy in the culture at large....for to be worthy of the name feminists must...be committed to serious and social transformation." (116) For, while Langton's approach (writing in P&PA in 1993) may not be known to the culture at large it does help shape social transformation.
What Bauer misses is that Stateside, and in places with traditions of constitutional review, the authority of philosophical speech is albeit partially, imperfectly, and indirectly, secured by the constitutional order and the customs/practices and force that secure it. (And if one thinks that philosophy or reason is immanent in the sciences, then the political process institutionalizes philosophy into a powerful force in society in many more (imperfect, partial etc.) ways.) This is why it is not wholly misleading to call constitutional government an Enlightenment project. For contemporary critics (often religious and nationalist in character), these constitutional orders also exhibit the dangers of giving a certain philosophy too much power.+
Notice that if this is right, it suggests it is wrong to treat Carnap and others move into the ivory tower as a retreat from political influence. (This is not Bauer's view, but it is sometimes associated with Reisch's influential interpretation of cold war philosophy of science.) For in the proper constitutional order, philosophy's uptake is mediated by judiciary, bureaucracy, technology, and sciences. This is, in fact, a kind of mediated trickle-down of philosophy.
But this observation actually helps illuminate Bauer's larger project: given the incentives, it is very tempting to speak to fellow elites and not the culture at large if you happen to be a philosopher aiming at political influence. On my view this is, for example a feature of utilitarianism as a technology of government, and helps explain some of its moral failures (when it fails to notice that those not at the table or not as sophisticated with the tools may be harmed badly). Of course, political influence may well fall short of social transformation and so one can, with equal justice, describe the position I have just outlined as a form of pacification of philosophy.
So far I have suggested that Bauer has asked the right question about the authority of philosophical practice. I also have suggested she offers the right diagnoses of most of it, but that it misfires in the case of Langton's project. And while I agree with Bauer that in general, philosophers have 'appropriated' Austin's distinctions against the spirit of Austin's own philosophy, Langton's speech act is an important example of how philosophers can do things with words in our political culture. And I say this even though I agree with Bauer's more methodological criticisms of Langton's approach to claims of pornography's authority (on which I have been silent here).
Now, I have not suggested that Bauer is wrong to want something different from philosophy. But I think her position is at odds with herself and that her use of Plato exhibits this tension. For even in her depiction of Plato, philosophy does not have an authoritative voice in a culture if by that we mean capable of shaping and even transforming the culture.
Rather, what she shows Plato as doing (and I think this is a plausible and inspiring reading of Plato's philosophy and its role as an instrument to call people to the academy) as being skilled in persuading some to an intellectual way of life in which they are challenged to think autonomously. She never mentions Thoreau, but Thoreau's (delayed, perhaps) effect on the young may be thought an instance of such a true education. This still involves philosophy with a public-facing rhetoric, but it is not a rhetoric aimed at the people at large.
Yet, feminism has -- by her own lights -- a broader ambition: to end patriarchy, and, thus, to transform society radically. And one may well believe that a kind of mediated trickle-down and the Platonic call to individuals are insufficient if it is divorced from a larger social movement shaping the culture, as it were, from below. Of course, social movements are populated by individuals who think for themselves and recognize themselves in properly transformed social reality. But if you want an authoritative philosophy apt for that project, I suspect you have to be willing to play with the fire that Carnap warns against.
*I thank Catarina for reminding me of this.
+Yes, there is a danger of equivocation in my use of 'philosophy' here; no I don't think I am falling pre to it!
Comments