Digressions&Impressions

4 April 1979: Foucault on Civil Society (Ferguson vs Smith) (ep XL)

To simplify matters, I will take the most fundamental, almost statutory text regarding the characterization of civil society. This is Ferguson’s famous text, translated into French in 1783 with the title Essais sur l’histoire de la société civile, and which is very close to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the word “nation” in Smith, moreover, having more or less the same meaning as civil society in Ferguson. We have here the political correlate, the correlate in terms of civil society, of what Adam Smith studied in purely economic terms. Ferguson’s civil society is actually the concrete, encompassing element within which the economic men Smith tried to study operate. I would like to pick out three or four essential characteristics of this civil society in Ferguson: first, civil society understood as an historical-natural constant; second, civil society as principle of spontaneous synthesis; third, civil society as permanent matrix of political power; and fourth, civil society as the motor element of history.--Michel Foucault, 4 April, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 12, The Birth of Biopolitics, 298

Foucault had coupled Ferguson and Smith before in lecture 11. There they jointly illustrate the claim that according to eighteenth century doctrine, "not only must government not obstruct the interests of each, but it is impossible for the sovereign to have a point of view on the economic mechanism which totalizes every element and enables them to be combined artificially or voluntarily." (280)* Foucault then uses Ferguson's analysis of the relative success of the English colonies over the French in North America, to support the claim that independent citizens entrusted with their own interests (the English) can outcompete colonies that come with big designs (the French).

In lecture 12, Foucault reminds his audience that eighteenth century social theory (to simplify: prior to, say, Bentham) can't really combine homo oeconomicus with the age's moral-theological-juridical views of criminal (and political) subjects. These are incommensurable paradigms -- Foucault puts it like this: "that homo oeconomicus and the subject of right were therefore not superposable" (292) --, until Benthamite reformers (anticipated by Beccaria and Grouchy) thin out the criminal subject so he conforms to the utilitarian image of man.

Faced with the incommensurability (and some other assumptions about the limits of government knowledge), and prior to that radical move, there are three options: first, "the sovereign will be able to intervene everywhere except in the market." (293). Foucault does not associate any theorist or group with this position. Second, which looks like it, the sovereign remains in control of the market, in particular the preconditions necessary to its functioning, but rather than supervise it actively, it controls it theoretically or passively. It is said to be 'theoretical' because it needs data and evidence on the market's functioning and process in order to get its preconditions (taxes, tariffs, laws, etc.) right. This second position is associated with physiocrats, who are treated as kind of quasi-Ordo-liberals avant la lettre. 

As Foucault notes neither of these first two options is very attractive to the sovereign and so do not really ever get tried out. (It's notable Foucault skips Turgot's moment near power in 1774-1776). That's because neither option solves the problem of incommensurability. To the best of my knowledge Foucault's thesis is original. Instead, a different, third option is used, one that does allow the sovereign the exercise, as I noted before, a governmental technology (296), even if, or perhaps because, that technology (civil society) also helps constitute a new kind of sovereignty.

The way civil society solves this incommensurability is by being a the site of an enlarged interest or what came to be known as (enlightened) self-interest properly understood. Here self-interest is not egoism. (The underlying idea being that egoism is always selfish, but that there are forms of self-interest, like prudence, which may be moral.) Foucault, in summarizing Ferguson puts it like this: "there is a distinct set of non-egoist interests, a distinct interplay of non-egoist, disinterested interests which is much wider than egoism itself." (301) I'd have to check Ferguson, but this seems right.

For Smith, this disinterested interest is an effect of our nature. As he puts in the famous first sentence of TMS, "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” That is, for Smith civil society is itself a site of  important, aesthetic experiences (assuming that 'the pleasure of seeing it' falls under aesthetics). The principle in our nature is sympathy, which makes the sight and mutual recognition of other people's passions pleasurable to us. Importantly, for Smith, as Levy and Peart have argued, sympathy is also a means toward seeing each other as equals. 

Crucially then, on Foucault's interpretation of Ferguson and Smith, civil society can accommodate, even be the grounds of existence of, economic agents without reducing their interests to a profit motive only. (301) The other crucial feature of civil society is that it grounds what we may call tribalism, faction, or community. It does so because in it there is free play of both sympathy and antipathy, which makes us form distinct groups sometimes based on shared interests or repugnancies other times based on shared language, values, religion, heritage, etc. As Foucault writes:

Civil society, Ferguson says, leads the individual to enlist “on the side of one tribe or community.” Civil society is not humanitarian but communitarian. And in fact we see civil society appear in the family, village, and corporation, and, of course, at higher levels, reaching that of the nation in Adam Smith’s sense, [in the sense given to it] at more or less the same time in France. The nation is precisely one of the major forms, [but] only one of the possible forms, of civil society. (302)

What's attractive about Foucault's interpretive framework is that community and political differentiation are a natural by-product of what we may call, 'Scottish social theory.'+ This is so, even though within Scottish social theory, humanity becomes (as Hanley, Debes, Taylor, and Abramson have argued) a key moral ideal.

But I think Foucault's framework is too attractive. For, I suspect Foucault is projecting backward a recently popular idea that the nations of nationalism are themselves a fruit of modernity. Let me explain my unease.

To the best of my knowledge Foucault is the first to suggest that a Smithian 'nation' just is what Ferguson calls 'civil society.' But for Smith 'nations' and 'society' are two distinct analytical categories. And within a nation there can be multiple societies, including different kinds of societies (this is especially so in Scotland with its contrast between Highlands and Lowlands.) And, as I have argued elsewhere, throughout WN when Smith focuses primarily on economic analysis, he writes about “society;” when he focuses on mores or political matters, he will speak of “civilized society” (e.g., WN 1.8.39, 97) or “political society” (1.8.36, 96). And 'civilized' is contrasted with 'savage' or 'barbarous.' (To be sure: for Smith progress to being civilized is good, but unlike many others in the age, he does not treat the civilized as morally superior to the barbarous.) 

Now, despite having 'nations' in the title of WN, Smith is not very interested in characterizing a nation. But it is pretty clear that for Smith nations can both transcend different ages (including the birth of civil society), and come to an end. With previous paragraphs in mind, I now treat the first two characteristics of civil society mentioned above, in turn. (The next two characteristics shall be treated in a follow up post.)

That civil society is a historical constant means (and now Foucault is paraphrasing Ferguson) that "the social bond has no pre-history...it is permanent and indispensable." (299) Following the critics of Hobbes, mankind is by nature a social animal embedded, we would say, in culture. By contrast, while it is true that, in general, Smith treats humans as social animals, it should be clear that on my reading of Smith on society, Smith does not think that civil society is a historical constant.

And, in fact, it is worth noting that right at the start of Wealth of Nations, Smith hints, when commenting on the propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange" that may not be an "original" principle "in human nature of which no further account can be given;" but, rather, and more "probable" is it the historical "consequence of the faculties of reason and speech." And in another work, on the origin of language, Smith offers an account of the development of the cognitive and linguistic building blocks of culture. So, this is an important difference between Ferguson and Smith.

This, and other details recounted in this post, make me suspect that Foucault did not read Smith as carefully as he read Ferguson (at least when preparing lectures 11-12). See also my note * below. (That Foucault treats Smith's analysis of the equivalent of civil society as being offered 'in purely economic terms' suggests that Foucault is drawing on a caricature.) Ironically, Smith's position anticipates Foucault's own: civil society is itself a product of development. And whereas Smith kind of anticipates Marx with a focus on material conditions, Foucault kind of echoes Hayek with his focus (as we have seen last times) on transactions (although relative to Hayek, Foucault wishes to denaturalize the spontaneous order).++

Second, "spontaneous synthesis means there is no explicit contract, no voluntary union, no renunciation of rights, and no delegation of natural rights to someone else; in short, there is no constitution of sovereignty by a sort of pact of subjection." (300) This characteristic is the shared debt of Ferguson and Smith to Hume. In addition, 'spontaneous synthesis' means that the happiness of the whole is constituted by the happiness of its parts understood as individuals and vice versa. This is indeed Ferguson's view. And it is important that even for a republican like Ferguson this is achieved by focusing on the "happiness of individuals" which "is the great end of civil society." (302, Foucault quoting Ferguson). It is also a plausible reading of Smith's position for whom the happiness of common labourers will ensure the flourishing of society. However, in some ways, Ferguson's version of this position is closer to Smith's teacher, Hutcheson (who is the common source), than Smith here. Because Smith sometimes implies that if one is in good health and knows that one is beloved, we will be happy regardless of the circumstances of larger society.**

 

 

 

 

Covid Limbo

Nearly 70,000 cases of covid infection were reported yesterday, 8th January. Of course that’s officially confirmed cases and the real number of infections will be much higher. A small but significant proportion of those people will go on to be hospitalised and a small but significant proportion of them will die in the next few days. As we are often reminded, as if to reassure us, most of these victims will be over 60 and/or have various ‘underlying medical conditions’, but there are at least a couple of important ways in which this narrative of reassurance is both troubling and misleading. First, this narrative, intentionally or not (and I think it often is intentional when seized upon by various covid deniers and ‘lockdown sceptics’) effectively relegates people over 60 and those with ‘underlying conditions’ (and the list of these conditions is much more extensive than people normally realise) to more or less sub-human status: those whose deaths and lives are apparently relatively unimportant. Secondly, the fact is that you just don’t know if you are ‘vulnerable’ or not to this virus – no one can be sure that they are ‘safe’ from it. Indeed it’s currently thought that one in 20 people who develop symptoms on infection might suffer symptoms lasting more than eight weeks and, further, a significant number of those people remain unwell for several months (at least) after infection. This isn’t ‘just’ elderly people or those with ‘pre-existing health conditions’, but includes relatively young, relatively fit and active people like me – I’m 45 and before I became very ill with long covid last summer I used to weight-train in a serious and focused way at least 3 to 4 times a week. There are many, many people in more or less the same position as me currently and, given the rates of infection at the moment, many more will find themselves in a similar place over the next few weeks and months. Those who think – selfishly and incorrectly – that the pandemic is of little concern to them personally really ought to think again.--Ed Rooksby, January 9, 2021 "Nine months in the long limbo of long covid." [HT Chris Brooke]

Last week, I was too depressed to pen a digression. This despite the fact that my very kind and supportive, university's occupational physician suggested that a diary in which I record my progress might be helpful. And there is progress to report: Saturday, nine days ago, was the last truly horrid day of intense headaches. Since, I have barely had any dizziness (the most recurring symptom), much more manageable bouts of insomnia, and much reduced spells of headaches. In addition, on several days I lacked the general sense of fatigue I have tried to describe before (recall here; here; here). In the post quoted at the top of my own, Rooksby, whose symptoms were considerably worse than my own, writes, "it felt like my brain was encased in cotton wool and that I was somehow removed from reality, like I was watching everything – including my own activity – from behind thick glass."  

Even so, even minor walks or an hour responding to emails can still induce a strange fatigue and irritability toward any kind of noise or disturbance (which helps me recognize the fatigue). And the depression was caused not just by my ongoing inability to read books, but also a sense that every sign of progress is quickly followed by a rude reminder that I am nowhere near recovered. Part of me wonders if the sense of despair isn't itself a by-product of covid given how many other weird (and mostly minor) intermittent neurological/cognitive symptoms I experience.

The university's occupational physician convinced me that I need to take my sick leave seriously. And so I have let go of most of my work related activities. As I decline requests to do tenure files, referee, blurb; postpone research activities related to a number of edited volumes and grants; postpone or cancel public lectures and interviews; withdraw from dissertation defenses; I accept intra-departmental political defeats, and I also register how much stuff I pack into my ordinary self days. 

Perhaps the depression was induced by the following uncanny experience. I watched myself lecture on video last week. The recording of the lecture series is used to substitute for my presence this semester. It's a huge lecture course (400-500 students). And while I am no Sandel, I enjoy and take pride in, allowing my lectures to be interrupted by Q&A throughout.  In watching myself -- and my ridiculously chaotic slides -- I realized that I was not so much explaining the material, but sharing what I found interesting or exciting and tried to explain the grounds of interest, while smuggling in concepts and arguments I am supposed to expose them to. I took a childish pleasure into watching myself lecture.

But my responses to student questions were different altogether. I suddenly realized, as I was watching the recording, that I often had no idea what I would answer then, or could answer now, and I would marvel at how my recorded self would quickly and sometimes humorously manage to process and incorporate the questions into the lecture. He could think much faster, much subtler than I can now!* 

When I mentioned this to the university's occupational physician, she laughed a bit. And said that I should not underestimate the skill with which I could handle complex thought when I was not incapacitated. I did not put quote marks around that because I don't recall the exact wording, but that's because she did use 'incapacitated' (in Dutch: arbeidsongeschikt). 

Rooksby (an accomplished blogger and writer), who I knew from a far distance, seems to have died yesterday (here). And that gives his words a special poignance. It's interesting to me that he has tracked the social implicature of 'underlying conditions' as sub-human-status. Back in the day (March 2020), I registered 'herd-immunity' as code for 'culling' or 'dispensable.' And I even satirized that our pseudo-Darwinian age would be followed by a religious revival that would refer to our era as the 'great culling.' When I feel a bit stronger, I want to collect my thoughts on being an incapacitated, philosopher. 

But I am lucky that I don't feel a stigma that I am incapacitated for work; and grateful for hard-earned victories of earlier generations, that I can draw a salary while being pampered at home by my very busy, hardworking spouse. I do find it frustrating and embarrassing that my already overworked and more junior colleagues have additional work because of my disease. The Dutch government has opened the purse-strings, but not for our underfunded universities. I know better, but can't shake the thought am letting down those that count on my help in their career/professional advancement.

Even so, I spent most of my days watching netflix and daydreaming about invited research leaves in lovely climes. With gradual recovery I am willing to hope that I will be able to read and teach again...although last week I could not quiet altogether my simmering panic I may not. When I was a teenager I saw a documentary about Willem de Kooning's late art, which was so much sparser than his exuberant and overflowing earlier work. Later I learned that he suffered from Alzheimer's. I wonder if my post-covid work will have such clean and elegiac quality.

 

 

 

Three Kinds of Clarity in 'early' Analytic (Carnap, Quine, and Nagel)

Philosophers themselves are at variance as to the "proper" task of philosophy. Many students of the history of philosophy agree, however, that the great texts in philosophy are best understood when viewed as so many reflections upon issues raised by the scientific and social developments of their day. The practice, if not always the explicit intent, of a great deal of philosophy has been to function as a commentary on the intellectual life of man - a commentary whose object is to bring some order and clarity into the propositions certified by the sciences or sanctioned by social needs. The commentaries which philosophers have provided have often been confused and unintelligible: they have frequently proved obstacles to clear conceptions of nature and man and have turned out to be fresh occasions for wonder. Nonetheless, the historical fact that so much of philosophy has been a reflection upon science and society suggests that the business of philosophy is not that of adding to the sum of our knowledge of nature, in the sense in which the sciences add to that knowledge, but of clarifying such knowledge. The "wisdom" of Aristotle, accordingly, is not to be identified with his encyclopedic knowledge or with his speculative interpretation of the science and society of his day; it is to be found in the careful distinctions he drew between the meanings of terms current in his day, and in the light his analyses throw on the confusions that arise when the distinctions are not respected. The task of philosophy, on this point of view, is not to supply a cosmogony or cosmology: its task, which may be pursued by professional scientists no less than by professional philosophers, is to serve as a cathartic to men's beliefs and ideas. In other words, according to this conception of philosophy its aim is to perfect principles of logic and method and to exercise them upon the various statements
occurring in everyday discourse and the sciences.--Ernest Nagel (1938) "The Fight for Clarity: Logical Empiricism" The American Scholar 8.(1): 46

Recall that Carnap and Quine have distinct understandings of clarity. For Carnap clarity is a property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages. Clarity in the hands of Carnap means to capture a kind of demand for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (it very much hopes to prevent equivocation and polysemous use).  Carnapian clarity is really a second-order property of an otherwise esoteric, expert practice.

By contrast, Quine had a tendency, as Greg Frost-Arnold has shown, (i) to associate clarity with more general forms of intelligibility. In later years, Quine might argue that (ii) his program (developed in Word & Object) of the philosopher regimenting scientific language to exhibit its ontological commitments, may also be aiming at a species of clarity (about the 'ontology' of science), alongside systematicity.  He also (iii) came to think of clarity as a more general theoretical virtue of a system. 

The earlier discussion of Carnap and Quine left me a bit puzzled about the to-me-intuitive notion of clarity I had picked up from my teachers as an undergraduate and PhD student. (I assume it is intuitive because of my teachers.) And while I certainly do not want to ignore the contribution of Cambridge (Russell, Moore, etc.) to my intuitive understanding, I think Ernest Nagel gives a sense of where that might have, in part, come from.

The 1938 essay by Nagel that I quote above is, as scholars of analytic philosophy have noted, an important moment in twentieth century philosophy for two reasons. First, the piece partially (re-)introduces logical empiricism to an American audience, while simultaneously defending them from (rather persistent) misrepresentation (in part based on describing the evolution away from strict verificationism). In fact, Nagel puts a kind of neo-Kantian and proto-Foucaultian spin on the mature/more recent version of logical empiricism: "Indeed the proper question is not "what does a statement mean?" but "what are the conditions which empiricists will acknowledge to be necessary for a statement to have meaning? " (51)

Second, the piece aims to contribute to a convergence between what I call the 'scientific wing of pragmatism' (as represented, especially, by Peirce in the essay) and logical empiricism, and so is a signal moment in the development of analytic philosophy. (Regular readers know I treat Nagel as the philosophical prophet of the sociological and conceptual construction, analytic philosophy.) Toward the end of the essay it becomes clear that Nagel sees himself as occupying a (mature) version of the intersection between these two movements.

Okay, while keeping in mind that there are polemical ("fight") purposes being served and that in some sense he is constructing an image of clarity that is to have wide uptake, it may be useful to look at Nagel's version of clarity. For Nagel, the search for clarity is an effect or byproduct from the advanced development and specialization and, so, esotericism of the special sciences. And this means that new criteria of intelligibility distinct from those used in ordinary language are required. As he puts it, "the increased abstractness and generality of modern science require a serious reconsideration and a recasting of those relatively simple canons of intelligibility and validity which are sufficient for the needs of every-day discourse and inquiry." (47-48) So, at a first approximation, Nagel's version of clarity involve the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for  (esoteric) special sciences.

But the reason why this effort at clarification is a philosophical task is, in part, due to a limitation on the professional scientist:

we cannot fall back upon every-day practices and habitual intuitions for aid, and most professional scientists are not sufficiently conscious of their own procedures to enlighten us; special studies must be undertaken by men sensitive to the logical issues involved. Recent methodological studies aim to supply appropriate answers and their main objectives are therefore the following: the careful analysis, formulation and expansion of those intellectual techniques which have been found reliable for controlling our conjectures about the world we inhabit; the appraisal of the import of science and of the conditions for its successful activity; the analysis of scientific concepts and the formulation of logical standards for distinguishing meaningful statements and questions from those which have no accredited meaning.
The movement known at present as "logical empiricism" is a loosely-organized group of philosophers and scientists interested in such problems of method. (48)

We see here (Nagel emphasizes it again later in the essay) the germ of Thomas Kuhn's idea that there is a sense in which ordinary scientists lack proper self-awareness about all there own practices. We might say that a lot of scientific activity (calibration, measurement practices, hidden assumption in the math) is 'black-boxed' and 'taken off-line,' say in the name of cognitive and operational efficiency. To be sure, Nagel is quick to emphasize (and nods to Mach's influence) that interest in the process of clarification, so not just the results, is widespread among "professional scientists" (47 & 58). So, it would be more apt to say that for Nagel clarification is not just developing the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for  (esoteric) special sciences, but also making transparent the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims. 

What is nice about this notion of clarity, is  that we see in it the significance of normative epistemology and the philosophy of scientific practice ("One of the most valuable and promising tendencies of logical empiricism is the emphasis it places upon the analysis of ideas
employed in special fields of study, so that the procedures which are relevant to those ideas and which alone make them intelligible are made explicit." (57)) These are two areas of philosophy of science that (under the ongoing influence of Reichenbach) are often orthogonal to each other today. 

I don't mean to suggest this completes my analysis of what Nagel means by clarity. One question one may well ask is what he means by 'intelligibility.' And I hasten to add that Nagel is no friend of the PSR (in the same period he has a polemic against Blanshard's version of the PSR, internal relations, and monism.).  Rather, I think Nagel means by intelligibility something like showing how and the way terms/concepts (etc.) hang together (he's a holist) and function in a system of knowledge and bodies of ordinary practice. I think this because of remarks like this, "the task of philosophy lies in the clarification of terms occurring in scientific and everyday discourse, by exhibiting their interrelations and function in the contexts in which they occur." (59)*

So, finally, Nagel clarification is not just developing the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for (esoteric) special sciences, but also making transparent the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims in part by showing how and the way terms/concepts  hang together and function in a system of knowledge and forms of ordinary practice. Now, one may think that Nagel here echoes a kind of underlaborer to the sciences conception of philosophy (but note those ordinary practices.) However, he also endorses some of the political aims for clarification by "some" logical empiricists:

Certainly the least one can say of logical empiricism is that even if it accomplished nothing else it is a powerful force that aims to introduce rational methods into all fields of inquiry. One of its functions, that of serving as a disinfectant to the thinking of men, would alone justify the continuance and spread of the movement. It rests its case not on an appeal to authority or the emotional needs of men but on an appeal to a persistent effort to think clearly. The movement is an important arm in the interminable warfare against obscurantism and for clarity. (59)+

As I noted before (recall), for Nagel government by discussion is not about achieving authoritative consensus, but rather, as his conception of science and democracy reveal, as the ongoing practice of being responsive to reasons and criticisms based on experimentally controlled facts. Our cognitive practices in science and political life are made possible, and developed and improved by, our socially embedded interactions with each other. For Nagel it is clear that "Perhaps no intellectual tendency is more dangerous than that accompanying the claim that knowledge of human affairs is the exclusive property of men endowed with a "higher insight" - which is not subject to the control of well established experimental methods."" (55) For Nagel, the cultivation of clarity is a contribution to a democratic ethos.

 

Whewell, Newton, Kant, and Hershel's Double Stars

We may observe, however, that the law of gravitation according to the inverse square of the distance, which thus regulates the motions of the solar system, is not confined to that province of the universe, as has been shown by recent researches. It appears by the observations and calculations of Sir John Herschel, that several of the stars, called double stars, consist of a pair of luminous bodies which revolve about each other in ellipses, in such a manner as to show that the force, by which they are attracted to each other, varies according to the law of the inverse square. We thus learn a remarkable fact concerning bodies which seemed so far removed from us that no effort of our science could reach them; and we find that the same law of mutual attraction which we have before traced to the farthest bounds of the solar system, prevails also in spaces at a distance compared with which the orbit of Saturn shrinks into a point. The establishment of such a truth certainly suggests, as highly probably, the prevalence of this law among all the bodies of the universe. And we may therefore suppose, that the same ordinance which gave to the parts of our system that rule by which they fulfil the purposes of their creation, impressed the same rule on the other portions of matter which are scattered in the most remote parts of the universe; and thus gave to their movements the same grounds of simplicity and harmony which we find reason to admire, as far as we can acquire any knowledge of our own more immediate neighbourhood.--William Whewell Astronomy and General Physics, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 1864, (Bridgewater Treatise, "New Edition, with New Preface"),pp 229-230 [HT David Haig]

I quote from the edition of Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise in which he adds a new preface in order to respond to Darwin's Origin (which he quotes, but doesn't name). In the preface, Whewell makes a point of associating Darwin with the system of Epicurean chance, which at the cosmogenic level is to be associated with the nebular hypothesis as developed by Kant and Laplace. In the Bridgewater Treatise Kant is not mentioned only Laplace. (I suspect that Whewell, who was one of the greatest historians of science of his age, was not unfamiliar with the Kantian provenance because he alludes to it in his treatment of copernican turn of the critical philosophy elsewhere.*) So, arguments against one (the nebular hypothesis) reinforce the arguments against the other (Darwinism), and vice versa. 

One may wonder why, after after the empirical success of the Principia, and its Rule 3, anybody would have doubted the universality of the law of gravity. But, as a matter of fact, Newton himself had opened to the door to this possibility, in the 1706 Latin edition of the Opticks which ultimately ended up in Query 31 of the later English edition.+ It reads:

Since Space is Divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe. 

Newton sometimes uses ‘world’ in a metaphysically neutral sense, to mean a solar system or, more generally, a closed (or virtually closed) system of interacting celestial bodies. In the above passage, however, ‘world’ is a metaphysically richer notion. A world in this sense is constituted by the kinds of particles and forces it contains, particles and forces that are ontologically prior to the world they constitute. Moreover, the above passage suggests that within ‘worlds’ of this kind particles and forces are prior, in some sense, to the laws of nature.

For Newton laws are clearly contingent. They are not grounded in God’s immutability (as Descartes’s were), but depend on God’s will. Their contingency stands in stark contrast to the necessity of Newtonian space and time. For Newton, space and time could not have been otherwise and are a consequence of God’s necessary existence. As he writes in the General Scholium to the Principia, “by existing always and every where, [God] constitutes Duration and Space . . . ’Tis allowed by all that the supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always and every where.” Physical laws do not possess such necessity. (Although Newton’s laws are contingent, they are necessary in relation to God’s will. Given God’s edicts, they could not be otherwise. ) As Roger Cotes wrote in the editor’s preface to the second edition: “From this source [God], then, have all the laws that are called laws of nature come, in which many traces of the highest wisdom and counsel certainly appear, but no traces of necessity” (Newton 1999: 397; the denial of necessity distances Newton from the charge of Spinozism and its attack on design arguments.)

In the above passage, the contingency of Newton’s laws is also coupled to the claim that they may not be universal. They may hold of some worlds (in the metaphysical sense), but not all. Their variability has at least two consequences. First, a universe with metaphysically distinct worlds entails causal disconnectedness among (some of) its parts. This disconnectedness appealed to Newton, because it could prevent different solar systems from collapsing in on each other. It thus supports the argument from design of the General Scholium. 

So, while in the eighteenth century the Huygensian claim that the law of gravity only held for celestial bodies in our solar system was defeated by the stronger claim that it held throughout the solar system, including terrestrially, it was not obvious it would hold in other solar systems throughout the galaxy. Huygens (recall here; here) and Newton seemed to posit a universe with tenuously connected solar systems (light could pass among them), even though Newton encouraged us to take or hold true the laws universally in context of inquiry. 

In 1802, Herschel wrote (in the Transaction of the Royal Society):

If, on the contrary, two stars should really be situated very near each other, and at the same time so far insulated as not to be materially affected by the attractions of neighbouring stars, they will then compose a separate system, and remain united by the bond of their own mutual gravitation towards each other. This should be called a real double star; and any two stars that are thus mutually connected, form the binary sidereal system which we are now to consider. (Vol. 92, 481)

Herschel's language here is conditional. But on p. 486 he goes on to claim there is overwhelming empirical evidence for the reality of binary systems. Interestingly, on. p. 485 Herschel claims that Binary systems are themselves causes by law of gravity because their production and the phenomena they give rise to cannot be the effect of "casual situations" that is, chance.

So, from the point of view of physical astronomy, Herschel's discovery of binary systems was analogous to the seventeenth century discovery that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn obeyed Keplerian motion. But from a cosmological perspective, Herschell provided empirical evidence for the hitherto unavailable "simplicity and harmony;" whatever else might be discovered, Hershel showed "a remarkable fact" that the motions of bodies obeyed at least one law or set of laws. This claim which was taken for granted by Descartes on metaphysical grounds, and left open empirically by Huygens and Newton, could now be taken as established, or at least "as highly probable." 

Let me close with three observations. First, Whewell clearly thinks that (strong evidence for) the actual university of the law of gravity points to a single, unified cause of the universe. In itself that does not settle the debate with the systems of necessity and chance, in favor of theism. But it does burden shift in one non-trivial way against the system of chance (but not the system of necessity). 

For, Whewell thinks, not entirely unfairly, that the system of chance must assume that the present laws of nature are themselves the effect of historical evolution. That's the "supposition that the universe has gradually approximated to that state of harmony among the operations of its different parts," (p. 30).** For, the system of chance has, if it accepts the principle of sufficient reason (which it may not, of course) no right to positing, without further explanation, the existence of natural law that governs motions of bodies.++ (The system of necessity gets this posit for free.) 

Second, and this is the burden shifting against the necessitarian, if one accepts the principle of sufficient reason, the now universal law of gravity appears without foundation at all: "no [sufficient] reason, at all satisfactory, can be given why such a law must, of necessity, be what it is." (216) In particular, while gravity is a universal quality of matter there is no reason to think (here Whewell explicitly disagrees with Newton's editor, Cotes) it is a necessary quality (p. 222).

Third, while Whewell's language is still voluntarist ("ordinance"), Whewell changes the character of God's voluntarism. For Newton, theological voluntarism is compatible with God choosing different laws of motion for different parts of the universe. Newton allows the genuine possible that God settled for a dappled universe. Whewell's nature, by contrast, obeys a single ordinance/decree by God, who could choose differently in different parts of the universe, but did not.

 

 

 

 

On Hitz's Lost in Thought

For intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy. This is the case in part because, as the little human things testify, a human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit. Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life. But withdrawal from the world is also necessary because intellectual life is, as I have said, an ascetic practice.

If intellectual life is not an elite property but a piece of the human heritage, it belongs first and fundamentally to ordinary human beings. All intellectual life, no matter how ultimately sophisticated, originates in the human questions arising in and behind ordinary life. Scholarship is exciting in its own right, but it means nothing in a world where there is no first-order reflection, no ordinary thinking about human nature or the structure and origins of the world. Higher study is pointless if literature or philosophy or mathematics or the nature of nature has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people or with paths of understanding one might follow in daily life. So, too, scholarship is owed back in return to ordinary people, in forms of outreach that respect the role of a free intellect in a good human life.

Anyone seeking a good human life benefits from learning in all of its breadth and depth. Nor need one work in a university or attend one to cultivate the virtue of seriousness. Zeal for the fundamentals in life is fueled by aspiration, by imagining forms of human life that we wish to inhabit or become. Our intellectual culture prizes destruction over edification, a thrill of superiority over deep encouragement, and the reinforcement of factional loyalties over common ground. Yet any thoughtful person, not to speak of a writer, artist, critic, or journalist, can seek out examples, living and dead, historical and fictional, of human beings who have strained every nerve to seek more, better, finer, nobler ways of living.

In this book I have been forced to use mostly examples of high achievers in the realm of the intellect: Einstein, Gramsci, Goethe, Augustine. That is because these are the modes of intellectual life one can easily find in a library—the high achievers are worthy of books. One of the diseases of our spectacle-riddled culture is that we forget that the invisible life has all the human splendor of the visible one, and often more. I have had in mind all along, and have appealed to where possible, the humble bookworm, the amateur naturalist, the contemplative taxi driver. If you, like me, are naturally drawn to achievement, collect examples of ordinary thinkers—human beings whose splendor is known only to a few, their family, their neighbors, their coworkers. Settle back in awe from time to time, as I do, in thinking about the vast treasury of thought and experience that will never be available to us.

Let us remind ourselves of the broad scope of human enterprise as well as the depths available to anyone with a bit of time to think. Let us give free play to the human intellect and the human imagination, in an attempt to ground all that is in our hearts in what matters most.--Zena Hitz (2020) Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, 202-203

Lost in Thought is that rare book that is manifestly better, more interesting and more compelling, than the essays (recall here; and here) that gave rise to it. It is also a polemical book, polemicizing against the contamination of the intellectual life by the vices of a "spectacle-ridden" culture. As such, it is a book that hopes to restore, even rebirth, a way of life that it is attacked not just from without (which Hitz mostly ignores), but also from within by its ersatz friends. In particular, some of the most bitter, and cogent, polemical attacks are on fellow academics, especially the "elite professors" (200) who, in an imperial context, are seduced by "prestige and status" (10),  who engage in "cruelty," (9) and who justify their wealthy lifestyles in terms of their instrumental value to society (201-202).

This polemic is situated in the interstices of a veritable gallery of intellectual (and sometimes also Catholic) saints, who are the subject of near perfectly executed vignettes. And while the book is very moralistic, the morals are preached lightly and with self-deprecating humor.  Before I engage with her polemic, it is worth noting that part of the fascination of Hitz's argumeny is that it is framed by an autobiographical conversion narrative. It is especially interesting to me because I was a (very) partial witness to a stage of her journey; we overlapped a bit, as PhD students, at The University of Chicago. But that's for another time.

The passage quoted above is from the epilogue of Hitz's book. Her contrast between the false, and fleeting goods of the spectacle-ridden culture, which always are zero-sum and so conflict ridden, and the enduring if not eternal, shareable treasures of inner life re-activates a contrast familiar from the Stoics and Augustine. I mention this not to undermine the diagnosis -- which is wholly on target --, but to caution against the thinly disguised strain of nostalgia that runs through Hitz's argument (this is why she uses the language of 'restoring' (197ff; see also p. 167)). The quest to preserve a site for human dignity and true learning is always with us, part of the human condition.

Because I agree with so much in Hitz's book, it's taken me awhile to figure out my sense of unease with it. This post is an attempt to clarify this unease. And I want to note two features of her account that trouble me. First, Hitz is no friend of scholarship. I quote the relevant passage again: "[scholarship] means nothing in a world where there is no first-order reflection, no ordinary thinking about human nature or the structure and origins of the world. Higher study is pointless if literature or philosophy or mathematics or the nature of nature has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people or with paths of understanding one might follow in daily life." 

It is important to be clear on what Hitz is not doing here. She is an eloquent critic of the tendency to subordinate education to moral or political ends; she calls this the "false god" of "opionating," (193)/"opionization" that is, "the holding of a viewpoint" or  the "reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions" (p. 167). She is critical of all political and ethical programs that are tempted by this. This is false education. 

So, Hitz's attitude toward scholarship is not that it must serve some direct political or moral end. In addition, we must distinguish what Hitz calls 'learning' from scholarship. She highly values learning for its own sake because "human beings are essentially knowers, or lovers, or both" (112). But scholarship is a form of learning that somehow (we are never told how) dissociated from the original impulse. It is quite clearly a perverted form of learning.

That is, Hitz wants to resist the idea that scholarship, and excellence in scholarship, is self-justifying. It must, in some non-trivial way, be integrated into the life-world of what she calls "ordinary" human lives. This is why she is attracted to agents and representations of agents (ordinary and extraordinary) whose depth consists in part of a rich and dignified intellectual inner life, but who are engaged in what we may call, humane works (e.g. Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, Augustine). And it is to Hitz's credit that what works will count as meaningful can be a wide variety of (possibly conflicting) political and social activities.

It is not entirely clear why Hitz rejects scholarship for its own sake (other than its elitism).  Perhaps her argument is consequentialist-democratic in that she treats it as ultimately selfish ("pointless if...has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people"). Yet, we are not told why the joy of the scholars -- they seem like ordinary people, too, up close -- should not count. 

I believe her more fundamental argument is this: she thinks scholarship for its own sake gives rise to a certain disease of the mind, or a vice, that is characterized by the loss of joy in truth, or what the "ancient monks" call acedia (147). She is right to resist the common translation of 'sloth'; I prefer “a lack of care.” Acedia is distinct from the escapism that, say, Adam Smith thinks is a danger of intellectual life, but it is part of the same species as the 'torpor' which Smith thinks is the effect of the repetitive, work in extensive division of labor.  Notably, the only, authoritative mention of Aquinas in the book is on the nature of acedia (147).

Hitz does not explain why scholarship must give rise to acedia. But she clearly thinks that in so doing it generates the conditions that are conducive to "the pursuit of spectacles." (147) Perhaps, she thinks that the behavior of the elite professors, who are purportedly devoted to a life of scholarship, but glory in cruelty (etc.) is sufficient evidence for her case. But I believe this is a selection effect caused by the incentive structure of the academy, and the way our gaze is oriented toward spectacle and so misses the scholars worth emulating sometimes right in front of us.*

I do not deny that scholars recognize the danger of acedia. Second, our tendency to indulge in esoteric, competitive games and puzzles, are part of our response to it. Let me give a historical example. In the early modern period, the republic of letters had a tradition in which major mathematical and scientific breakthroughs were both announced, and partially hinted at, through anagrams and other puzzles. So, for example, when Galileo saw something unusual nearby Saturn in 1610, he sent out letters with an anagram (here's a fun introduction to the story).

What Hitz ignores is that the otherwise lonely scholarly life is itself organized around competitive emulation in which credit is apportioned in virtue of achievement and excellence. And this competition is practiced and structured in a lot of ways. Hitz mistakenly assimilates this economy to the better known spectacle culture. That is no surprise, because the credit economy of the republic of letters is embedded, perhaps always dangerously so, in a wider institutional economy which is organized along the production and maintenance of prestige hierarchies (which, in turn, are a feature of, and support, our olicharchic culture). This wider institutional economy gives rise to spectacle ridden culture Hitz decries. 

But competitive emulation among equals is the mechanism by which acedia is held at bay. Hitz's distaste for competitive emulation is clear throughout the book not just because she can't find anything to admire in (say) sporting excellence (all the references to sport or negative). But it is exemplified by her analysis of a comment by 'Lenù" (a character in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels--which receive an extended treatment). Lenù, who has just published her own novel and sees it in the bookstore, is quoted as follows:

But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts, which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had the opportunity? (158; emphasis in Hitz.)

The emphasis is in Hitz, but not in Ferrante's original. And I agree with Hitz that what she emphasizes is very important in the passage. But the effect is that Hitz largely effaces the existence and significance of competitive emulation ("which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had the opportunity") Yes, Hitz acknowledges the significance and existence of competition on the next page (159), but she can't find a good place for it in her analysis. In fact, in general Hitz qualifies competition with negative adjectives ('brutal,' 'grinding,' ''cutthroat,' etc.) and analyzes it in terms of examples in which it degenerates into harm and spectacle.

So, despite her fondness of exemplars, this is why 'emulate/emulation' are near absent in her vocabulary; the exception proves the rule (viz "should we emulate the pure uselessness of Aristophanes’ Socrates, choosing intellectual projects that will be certain to provide no one with any good whatsoever? (p. 188)--the answer is clearly no. This echoes a nuanced analysis of the Clouds earlier in the book worth re-reading.)

There is no denying that competitive emulation risks the dangers of the spectacle. But even then it can be (although need not) also excellence in action. And sometimes it is both at once (poetry competitions/slams and wimbledon finals, etc.). This hybridity, and the danger of degeneration repels a certain kind of extreme purist. Of course, a lot of competitive emulation is incapable of ever becoming a spectacle because it holds no interest to those unwilling to try to understand it. 

That is to say, I admire Hitz's desire to promote "forms of outreach that respect the role of a free intellect in a good human life." This is our common ground. But while I am happy to agree with her criticism of universities; I do not share her criticism of scholarship even where it is often too complacent about the conditions that give rise to it. True scholarship owes nothing to anybody; its allegiance is to truth and to the standards of excellence (including beauty) that constitute it.

 

On Station Eleven, Civilizational Collapse, and the PSR

We have been blessed...in so many ways, have we not? We are blessed most of all in being alive today. We must ask ourselves, 'Why? Why were spared?'...I submit...that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason....For it has been revealed to me that the plague of twenty years ago was just the beginning, my angels, only an initial culling of the impure, that last year's pestilence was but further preview and there will be more cullings, far more cullings to come. Emily St. John Mandel (2014) Station Eleven, 59-61 [HT Neil Levy]

Pandemics are never welcome. But the present pandemic is badly timed because the Anglophone and cultural heartland of liberal thought, which for better and for worse is the military and financial epicenter of our civilization, has been struggling with a badly bungled aftermath of a massive financial crisis that ended up reinforcing the advantages of the rich and well-connected by impoverishing state capacity and threatening the privileges and self-confidence of those that formed the bedrock of conservative majorities. These have put state power in the hands of celebrity demagogues and political adventurers with no sense of public welfare and common good, and who strategically try to entrench the politics of zero-sum, and with noxious efficiency try to reduce mutual trust in which they thrive. And so the very powers that were left standing after the cold war, are now more fragile than they have been in two centuries. 

The conceit behind Station Eleven, which has a resolutely Canadian orientation, is that a deadly pandemic, much more deadly than Covid-19, arrives in the aftermath of an "economic collapse, or so everyone called it at the time," (218); I quote from an elegiac moment, in fictional time it is supposed to resonate where we were half a decade ago, when Miranda, a shipping executive who had once been married to a famous actor (Arthur Leander), is looking at "the largest shipping fleet ever assembled...fifty miles east of Singapore Harbor" just before she receives word of the death of Arthur and the first inkling that "the fabric" of civilization would be "unravelling" for a true collapse (239). In her marriage, Miranda had been a kept woman and she sublimated her sense of isolation and entrapment with a cartoon entitled, Station Eleven. The cartoon appears in a limited edition and is the plot device that  ends up connecting the main characters of the story and the invitation to have us reflect obliquely on the meaning of the story told.  

Arthur Leander, by then a faded star, dies while performing Lear in Act 4 of Lear. He dies just as he has been asked (by Gloucester) "Dost thou know me?" And one of the very clever conceits of the novel is that the answer to that question, and the double-life between representation or acting and reality, is unfolded as we try to put the pieces together of the intersections of many lives as if they are a scrambled jigsaw puzzle with constant oblique references to the play and the cartoon. 

And just as a version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) -- "Nothing will come of nothing" -- structures the action of Lear, so, too, the PSR drives the action of Station Eleven (in addition the passage quoted above, see also p. 96) as we follow along a traveling troupe of musicians and actors (who perform Shakespeare), the so-called Travelling Symphony. And just as there are many oblique angles in the jigsaw, so the PSR has a multiplicity of meanings. For example, for some characters it entails that no moment has special standing and that "everything passes" (249). For others it is the ground for a new vision of life, such as Tyler (249, spoiler alert: "the prophet" quoted above). The vision is propelled by the explanatory demand "to know that" great suffering "happened for a reason." (259)

I read Station Eleven a month ago and it was uncanny how prescient the early pages of the book were then to the unfolding news. And while aesthetically Cormac McCarthy's The Road hangs like a shadow over the book,* and at times Station Eleven insists on making things too explicit -- "Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Travelling Symphony"  --, there is plenty to admire in St. John Mandel's narrative. And I thought one of the (Sartre inspired) lines captures nicely what makes the present lockdown so harrowing: hell is the absence of the people you long for. (144).

The book stays far from the politics of the pre-pandemic period. A key political point exhibited is that in collapse human diversity reasserts itself; in the state of nature we are shown different kinds of social experiments in human living. At one point the narrator, who turns out to be less omniscient than one realizes, says:

Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm, and these places didn't go out of their way to welcome outsiders. (48)

I don't betray much when I note that in Year Twenty in addition to these towns, there there are more sinister forms of communal life and that one of the most idyllic spots of the former American midwest is a regional airport with enough tranquility and safety to develop a Museum of Civilization.

The book suggests that pandemics unsettle previous commitments about transcendence. The most unsettling new religious vision we're presented with, a veritable "death cult," originates in the grave explanatory demands of the PSR, when a boy searches for the hidden meaning behind his lucky survival "why did they die instead of us." (259; see also 260-261.) The boy's creativity is channeled into a new theology: "A new world requires new gods." (261) And, of course, this new theology will draw on familiar elements. Because in the search for meaning, there is also a desire for the safety we associate with (romanticized) childhood ("we long only for the world we born into." 302))  And I wouldn't be surprised to learn, if I am around in twenty years, that away from the current headlines a new popular religion has originated in our midst. As viruses spread death, deadly memes spread alongside them ("insanity is contagious" (261)). 

Like much of dystopian fiction (recall), Station Eleven presents us less with an image of the future and more with an oblique mirror of our times. I would betray its message if I claimed that civilizational collapse is foreseeable. In the book and, presumably, in reality collapse happens when one is making other plans. But what the history of civilizational collapse also tells us (recall here on Sallust; and more abstractly here) is that it is thinkable in advance and often occurs when the knowledge to prevent it is available yet can't be acted on. In the narrative of Station Eleven, such knowledge is lodged in the surviving plays of Shakespeare, which return from palatial theatres to the circulating knowledge of people in deserted landscapes. But it reminds us, too, that whatever may survive from us beyond collapse, may just be be mere ephemera among the interstices of the cult and culture of celebrity. 

Roger Scruton, Roger Crisp, Pollution, and Modernity in Moral Philosophy (I)

When considering Greek tragedy we observe two striking facts: first, that the tragic fault is seen as a pollution, by which others might be contaminated should it not be purged or purified; second, that the situations portrayed arouse the deepest feelings in us, without our really knowing why. Those facts did not escape the notice of Freud, of course, and he gave a contentious explanation of them. In the Greek tragedy we witness the residue of an older form of moral thinking, an archaeological stratum beneath the realm of personal choice. This older form of thinking, which anthropologists, following Mary Douglas, have called the “ethic of pollution and taboo,” sees moral faults as arising as much by contagion as by deed. It emphasizes purity and purification in sexual and familial relations; and it punishes people not by holding them liable for their actions and opening a path to contrition and forgiveness but by casting them out from the community and readmitting them only if some act of purification has changed their status. One might say that the tragic theater takes us into the hunter-gatherer cave, where things long hidden in darkness are briefly revealed, as though by a flash of lightning. The play is an exorcism, arousing fearful spirits, making them briefly visible, and then expelling them in a mystic act of purification. This revisiting of ancient terrors is a part of overcoming them, and it has its equivalent in our own tragic art, as well as our religious rituals.--Roger Scruton (2017) On Human Nature, Chapter 3, 87-88.

In my blogging, I have been unrelentingly critical of Scruton qua public philosopher. But I had never engaged with any of his books, so I figured a Pandemic would be as good a time as any to survey them independently. But a certain weariness made me opt for the shortest one I could find in my local bookshop. On Human Nature offers plenty of grounds of more criticism (not least its insidious way -- because allowing plausible deniability -- of sneaking in homophobia on p. 119), but today's post will bracket polemics. Rather, I want to use Scruton as a kind of useful exemplar of a philosophical mindset that presupposes successful moral progress associated with modernity. I use him because (i) in many ways he is a critic of modernity -- there is a reason conservatives of various stripes eulogized him so favorably --, and (ii) he is willing to use the language of pollution in his own theorizing (see, especially, chapter 4 of On Human Nature). But my diagnosis of Scruton also applies in crucial ways to philosophers that, at first blush, share very little in common with him (such as Roger Crisp). If you are the kind of philosopher whose response to experiencing Oedipus Rex is, 'I don't get the fuss, he was innocent,' I am probably also talking of you. 

Scruton treats examples of the 'ethic of pollution' even when displayed on the for us ancient, Athenian stage as a kind of prehistoric relic, "an archaeological stratum beneath the realm of personal choice." If I were a scholar of Scruton, I would be tempted to explore how Nietzschean Scruton's reading here is, with a society characterized by  law-governed, Apollonian sensibilities, being made to confront and then jointly excise a collective unconscious rooted in our breeding evolutionary history.

I am going to leave that aside. I  stipulate, by contrast, that modernity (and its cognates) itself presupposes a contrast between (a) the extended present, which is characterized by disenchantment and law-governed practices of moral accountability based on choice and (b) a distant past that involves ethic/practices centered on purity/pollution by way of contagion; (c) in which (a) has largely overcome or displaced (b). My account of modernity decouples it from a particular epoch although often people who understand themselves in light of a conception of modernity often think of it as having occurred once.  

In the sense that I am using 'modernity' here, Scruton is unabashedly modern, although unlike most moderns his views are compatible with the thought that different historical epochs instantiate modernity and that modernity may need or require elements of the pre-moderns to be worth endorsing. The more frequent position is that signs of pre-modern thought are disqualifying or grounds of debunking. Here's Roger Crisp commenting (also in 2017) on the piacular form of agent regret:

Could it really be that the nature of our current sentiments depends on the content of moralities far in the past? In fact, it is hard to see how it could not. Patterns of sentiment once established are, as Williams himself notes, hard, perhaps impossible, to uproot, and this certainly appears to have been the case with those in the western tradition involving pollution. As Mary Douglas pointed out long ago, St Paul’s attempt to characterize the Mosaic law as part of the  ‘old dispensation’ and similar moves within the early Church were unable to override the view, strongly supported by sentiment, that bodily states were relevant to ritual. Douglas focuses in particular on the idea of pollution by blood, noting that even the current Roman ritual for purification of a mother probably derives from the kind of Judaic practice outlined above (Douglas 2002, pp. 75–6).
   [Adam] Smith’s view, then, is that the apologies and assistance offered to the family of a person one has unintentionally and non-negligently killed are the modern analogue of an animal sacrifice....The special relation in question [of agent-regret] is most plausibly seen as involving a secularized version of the notion of ritual uncleanliness and pollution. And if we accept this account of the origin of our sense of the piacular in such cases, I take it that many would see it as providing the basis for a debunking argument credible enough at least to put the onus of justification on the defenders of the result-sensitive sentiments in these cases. Roger Crisp, (2017) "Moral Luck and Equality of Moral Opportunity," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Volume 91, p. 13

I happen to disagree with Crisp's analysis of moral luck (he cites one of my papers somewhat dismissively in a note). And, full disclosure, this post is in some sense motivated by a desire to give a kind of counter-diagnosis to his attempt to burden shift. Here I just want to call attention to the way characteristic features of modernity are on display (leaving aside the grip of Mary Douglas and Bernard Williams on Scruton and Crisp). But rather than treating the ethic of pollution as shaped by earlier stage of civilization (hunter-gathering) as Scruton does, it is now treated as a remnant of the Mosaic law. To put this with the aim of being clever: in Crisp's hands, St. Paul and the early Church try to be modern but fail, whereas the "many" today are confident in their modernity.

Now, people who exhibit modernity in the way I have diagnosed always take its existence for granted, as something obvious. They never treat it as a hypothesis worth establishing. (By contrast, I think modernity in this sense is a kind of ideology.) That's peculiar because it is possible that the ethics of pollution/purity track genuine moral phenomena or features of moral phenomenology.  

As an aside, and to signal what I am claiming, from a metaphysical point of view moral pollution/purity is less weird than, say, a personal god or  property dualism, and on par with (more controversially) the existence of persons and human rights. While, perhaps, a personal god has not survived modernity, the others have flourished just fine. Moral pollution/purity track genuine relations between people and their effects (and the causes on people) and the way people relate to the norms of the community they inhabit. 

The claim of the previous paragraph needs to be established by argument. That's for another time. But modernity would be wrong (or an ideology) if the elimination of purity/pollution means not tracking real relations. And then if modernity were true, it would be impoverished. 

That modernity, while true, is impoverished is, in fact, Scruton's position (but not Crisp's). He wants to claim that inter alia "piety, pollution, and the sacred are necessary to us." He goes on to say, "Without transgressing the ontological assumptions of liberal contractarianism, I want to restore the complete picture of the embodied moral agent, as we know this from the literature, art, and religion of our civilization." (133; one wonders who is included in 'our' here.)

Now, this post is quite long already. So, let me take stock. One can reject modernity either by denying (a), (b) or (c). Or one can show that modernity has a function in practice and thought that is, in a sense, not truth conducive (because, say, being ideological). So, in a series of pandemic-era posts, I am going to argue that we, who are reminded of the significance of contagion,  may never be modern. 

 

Caught between Being and Un-Being: The Secret Service, Political Legitimacy, and the Relative A Priori

We're a bit like the third-person narrator of a novel....He's the one who decides what will what will happen and the one who does the telling, but he can't be challenged or interrogating. Unlike a first-person narrator, he has no name and he's not a character, therefore we believe and trust him; we don't know why he knows what he knows and why he omits what he omits and keeps silent about what he keeps silent about and why it is that he can determine the fate of all his creatures, without once being called into question. It's clear that he both exists and doesn't exists, or that he exists but, at the same time, cannot be found, He's even undetectable. I'm speaking about the narrator, mind, not the author, who is stuck at home and is not responsible for anything his narrator says; even he can't explain why the narrator knows as much as he does. In other words, the omniscient third-person narrator is an accepted convention, and the average reader of novels doesn't usually stop to ask why the narrator takes the floor and doesn't relinquish it for hundreds of pages, droning on in that invisible man's voice, that autonomous external voice that comes from nowhere...Well, we're something similar, an accepted convention, just as one accepts and doesn't object to chance, as one accepts and doesn't dispute accidents or coincidences, illnesses, catastrophes, events fortunate and unfortunate. We can stop a disaster from happening, but rather as a sudden change in the wind direction can save a boat, or a fog can conceal the pursued from their pursuers, or a snowfall can erase the footprints of the former, disorienting the latter and their dogs, or as a black night can stop someone in their tracks and black their view. Or just as the sea parted to make way for the Israelites, then closed again on Pharaoh's army following behind them in order to destroy them. That's what we are, and we really don't represent anyone. Javier Marías Berta Isla (2018) translated by Margaret Jull Costa (2018), p. 119

Regular readers of Marías know (recall) that he has a perhaps excessive fondness for self-referentiality and intertextuality which used to be called postmodern. The settings are often Oxford and Madrid. He also often presents narrations in which spies and secrets play significant role. The passage is quoting a spy-recruiter/handler in the midst of the act of initial recruitment, if not entrapment; the quoted passage is expressed in a pub, The Eagle and Child, in Oxford. The listener (Nevinson) is a Madrid born student at Oxford.  So the quoted passage can be used as a key to interpret the novel, which -- I note -- shifts between different third and first person narrators.

Here I am interested in going in the other direction, and use it to reflect a bit on the nature of spies in liberal democracy. To be sure, the quoted passage makes no such restriction, and you, my dear reader, need not do so either if you so wish. Okay, with that out of the way, let's do some stage-setting. First, I take it that in the passage, "average reader of novels" stand in for the public in a democracy. Not any citizen (or non-citizen) -- because not everybody reads novels --, but those that read the papers, sign petitions, and may even call representatives from time to time.

Second, I take it that the author stands for the government. The government is often taken to be the author of the actions of spy agencies, but the whole point of having spies is to allow the government to deny, plausibly, responsibility for actions she does not want to be held accountable for. And, in fact, governments are, themselves, often, as we have been reminded during the last few years, on a need-to-know basis lest they accidentally or deliberately reveal state secrets (or valuable assets) or are infiltrated by other countries' spies. And, third, spooks are taken to be like third-person narrators. 

Now, the first crucial point to make is that the actions of spies are somehow authorized by the government, but that in so doing they do not represent the government. The functionality of this to government and spooks is pretty obvious so I won't belabor that. But in virtue of being nameless and characterless, the spy simply cannot play the metaphysical, moral, legal, and political role(s) of being a (institutional) person that can held be held accountable or represent. Without a name, there is no object or person to play such roles. 

There is not nothing, of course, because spies do produce (inter alia) intelligence. Strikingly, their epistemic authority does not rely on the methods or causal story that produces their utterances. All of that is black-boxed in the way that miraculous,  learning algorithms spit out stuff. (If you look inside the box all you see is a string of computer code.)* This is also the conceit of the novel, where the life of the spy is left mostly invisible and recounted strictly in terms of the effects on his family and love life. Neither his actions nor his inner life are disclosed.

This is, of course, profoundly unsettling for democratic legitimacy and accountable because it suggests that true, as opposed to ritual, oversight and accountability of intelligence agencies is not really possible (unless one has one's own spies, and then infinite regress looms). For, in a non-trivial sense there is no there, there. I think something similar is happening with oversight of central banks where what they do, and how they do it, and when they do it, has become illegible to parliaments and governments. All that's being tracked are effects, many of which not at all attributable to anything--these days even central bankers (who have a name and are held accountable in some sense, but who are primarily authorized to do stuff), admit they are clueless about the so-called transmission mechanisms (here's the ECB:  "The transmission mechanism is characterised by long, variable and uncertain time lags." Take a look at the accompanying chart.) Spies leave traces, but one can't tell if they are dummies or not.

This much is familiar enough. But, the sting in the passage is not the assumed paraconsistent ontology ("he both exists and doesn't exists"),** but the thought that the shapeless (viz., spies) is constitutive of political life and so while changeable (particular "conventions" are not eternal after all), indispensable to states in the way that any novel to count as a novel must have an implied narrator. 

As an aside, the mechanisms of such kind of constitutive devices are central to the aesthetics, and political theory, pursued by Stanley Cavell and his school. So, I don't mean to suggest the claim is novel to Marías. I also think there is an interesting question whether what is claimed in the quoted passage is really true of novels. It's not impossible that by now there is an avant-garde version of the novel that has dispensed entirely with the shapeless narrator (even as a mechanism to be denied or refuted or mocked), but that has not shaken our stereotype of the nature of the novel.

One may wonder why spy agencies are not a dispensable convention. Perhaps, it is mere self-interest or a useful consoling-to-spies-professional myth that they are indispensable the way numbers are to science? For, one may be tempted, if one has any liberal faith left, to think their existence is a by-product of the global order, which, while not perhaps a Hobbesian state of nature, is full of potential and real enemies. So, if this were right, sleuths are not intrinsic to states, but just a contingent fact of the absence of world-government or federation.

But if we stipulate a benevolent Kantian world federation on liberal principles with no enemies, it is still likely that spying follow naturally. For, the possibility, real or imagined, of anti/non liberal enemies of the state cannot be ruled out. Democratic theorists do often rule out illiberal citizenry by fiat, but we are not interested in them here. And such enemies, even if we stipulate that they are a minority, need not play by liberal rules. So, for the state to be possible over time it, it must have ways to protect itself against enemies who cannot be bought off and are, in principle, not persuadable. 

That is, while the category of the (domestic) enemy of the state lends itself to great abuse, to not acknowledge its possibility, is to put the state at great peril with no chance to correct. Once one has had that thought, a secret reserve/force becomes a live thought. The justification of having unaccountable, unrepresentative forces is to destroy enemies of the people (cf. Pharaoh, Israelites, etc.) Of course, in reality that may be worse than the problem it is purportedly solving. And if one is small, poor, and insignificant enough, one may well decide, reasonably, that one must make do without uncontrolled, invisible forces. 

That is to say, a state without enemies has no need for secret agents. But such a state would then deny the founding myths that secure its legitimacy. 

 

On Plumbing for Capitalism; or, on Indirect Public Philosophy

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn't rise, I don't think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is....There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.,,Recently, however, I have been noticing that this writing is being taken up by philosophy peers as a contribution to the broader public mission of the discipline. It seems, now, there's just no escape.

...

But this isn't what the neoliberal academy means when it encourages “public philosophy”. What it is encouraging, rather, is a variety of “service”, as in, that one-third of the promotion dossier that hangs there at the end, the poor cousin of teaching and research. The academy will try, to the extent possible, to subsume whatever creative work one of its own puts out there, redescribing and repackaging our work as if it were done for the sake of the guild. But there is a limit to what redescription can do. It is very adept at absorbing non-fiction prose writing, less so when it comes to fiction.

This uneasy relation to disciplinarily non-specific creation reveals a deep unease about the place of philosophy in the world, and it speaks to the dismal consequences of many decades of retreat from the world by anglophone philosophy that the only means it has to engage with the broader culture is by clunky conjunction...

One thing this dreary arrangement forgets is that there is an old and venerable model for philosophers to engage with culture, not with an “and” but with an “in”. This is what is known as “criticism”. It has often been produced by philosophers, or by people sufficiently immersed in a learned tradition to know as much about philosophy as one would come to know in the process of getting officially licensed by the guild. Lessing did it, Schiller did it, Adorno did it: they wrote about the cultural output of their time, not as a parenthesis in their philosophical careers for the sake of some light-hearted Entspannung, not to show “non-philosophers” that philosophy can be “fun”, but because they were philosophers and it was obvious to them that such endeavours, creative and intellectual at once, were within the scope of their calling. They hated fun, or at least did not consider it something to be valued for its own sake.

I hate fun too, and I have no interest in convincing anyone that philosophy partakes of the fun. I am not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time. I would be happy to do “public philosophy” in a cultural setting in which the bounds of philosophy and non-philosophy, member and non-member, specialized and popular, were differently drawn. But as things are, no way. I'll do my job, I'll do it well, and I'll clock out when I'm done. And I will resist to the end the neoliberal academy's attempt to claim for itself, aided by the emerging system of surveillance capitalism, what is in fact mine alone.--Justin Smith "Against Public Philosophy" [HT Dailynous]

In analytic philosophy, criticism does not have high status so it is no surprise that, in his Parisian (internal) exile, Justin, himself a very fine essayist, overlooks our very own (Danto, Iris Murdoch, and, perhaps, Cavell) in his list of exemplary critics.* Now, Smith does not pause to reflect on the fact that to be art critic today is not a true (Weberian) calling because its main function would be to add value to the billionaire funded corporate, 'neoliberal' art-industry. The spiritual values, and the bourgeois culture that sustained them, that made engagement with art, even Hollywood, so worthy have collapsed.

Even so, it is useful to be reminded that public philosophy (for complications recall here; here; and on Dotson here) need not be exhausted by (i) the contribution to public opinion in the service of some moral or political cause(s), (ii) the dumbed down dissemination of recent pinnacles of thought to the educated in the life-style section(s), or (iii) engagement with fun, low-brow entertainment (so loathed by Justin). It can also be -- let's grant him this -- (iv) the creative expression of philosophical sensitivity not oriented to the eternal motions of the starry skies above, but rather, as critic, immersed in the shadows of one's time tracking sources of ephemeral light. Despite their many distinct skills, motives, and practices (i-iv) have in common an orientation toward a 'public.' (This is so even though it's possible even if most readers of public philosophy are philosophers and their students in some sense.) This public may be narrow or broad; the very possibility of such a public may be a projective construct of the public philosopher's imagination -- this is very much the case in David Hume's philosophy -- or may, in fact, be dispersed in millions of twitter accounts. Hence, public philosophy is aptly named.

In what remains of this digression, I would like to sketch yet an alternative patsh for public philosophy one that is not directly oriented toward a public. One may think this impossible. For, one may well think that if a philosopher is not talking to herself or fellow (professional) philosophers, now or in posterity, or to the public, there is nothing left. But this is a mistake. A philosopher can also be oriented toward a specialist community. We are already quite familiar with something like this in so far that the so-called 'philosophers of X' (biology, physics, economics, law, medicine, cognitive science, etc.) do not just talk to fellow philosophers, but sometimes contribute to, even constitute, the developments in X (recall my interest in (v) synthetic philosophy.) Some philosophy of x or synthetic philosophy is oriented toward the public, but most of it is to fellow academic experts. I hope this is familiar enough so I don't have to recount it here.

But, and now I am getting to the point, there is also expertise outside the academy. In particular, the modern bureaucratic state -- and the international institutions (IMF, World Bank, WHO, WTO, BIS, etc.) that characterize the liberal regime today-- is full of experts that keep the regulatory and administrative state going. They are also, often, non-trivially involved in the development of the details of policy. These experts serve the public, while generally not contributing to the public (unlike, say, their counterparts in think tanks, NGOs, social movements, and political parties). In fact, as Justin notes above, their professional commitments may even prevent them from doing so--or if they can be oriented toward the public, only in very scripted fashion. On the whole, their work is invisible to the public--treated as technique by even serious thinkers.

Yet, for those of us who may wish to improve our governance and, thereby, improve the institutions that shape our lives, including the lives of the vulnerable and those that lack effective voice, being oriented to these public serving, invisible (non-academic) experts may well be an important way to practice public philosophy.+ Philosophers can develop expertise in a field of governance (e.g., public health, bank regulation, defense procurement, anti-trust practice, social insurance, migration, etc.) and orient their philosophical work toward improving or reconstituting it. This already exists (not surprisingly, somewhat quietly), for example, Ryan Muldoon has helped the World Bank; and Nancy Cartwright is developing a more general framework on how to use research to build better social policies. I think of such efforts as indirect public philosophy.

Such (vi) indirect public philosophy is service oriented because it aims toward improving policy and governance; but rather than addressing the public (although that is compatible with it), it engages and collaborates with (primarily non-academic) technocratic experts behind the scenes.** My interest in (vi) is personal. Through funded research I am quietly working on developing a new normative, governance framework for financial debt. I call this -- cf. Locke -- plumbing for capitalism. Some other time, I'll share more on the practice of indirect public philosophy.

 

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn't rise, I don't think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is....There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.,,Recently, however, I have been noticing that this writing is being taken up by philosophy peers as a contribution to the broader public mission of the discipline. It seems, now, there's just no escape.

...

But this isn't what the neoliberal academy means when it encourages “public philosophy”. What it is encouraging, rather, is a variety of “service”, as in, that one-third of the promotion dossier that hangs there at the end, the poor cousin of teaching and research. The academy will try, to the extent possible, to subsume whatever creative work one of its own puts out there, redescribing and repackaging our work as if it were done for the sake of the guild. But there is a limit to what redescription can do. It is very adept at absorbing non-fiction prose writing, less so when it comes to fiction.

This uneasy relation to disciplinarily non-specific creation reveals a deep unease about the place of philosophy in the world, and it speaks to the dismal consequences of many decades of retreat from the world by anglophone philosophy that the only means it has to engage with the broader culture is by clunky conjunction...

One thing this dreary arrangement forgets is that there is an old and venerable model for philosophers to engage with culture, not with an “and” but with an “in”. This is what is known as “criticism”. It has often been produced by philosophers, or by people sufficiently immersed in a learned tradition to know as much about philosophy as one would come to know in the process of getting officially licensed by the guild. Lessing did it, Schiller did it, Adorno did it: they wrote about the cultural output of their time, not as a parenthesis in their philosophical careers for the sake of some light-hearted Entspannung, not to show “non-philosophers” that philosophy can be “fun”, but because they were philosophers and it was obvious to them that such endeavours, creative and intellectual at once, were within the scope of their calling. They hated fun, or at least did not consider it something to be valued for its own sake.

I hate fun too, and I have no interest in convincing anyone that philosophy partakes of the fun. I am not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time. I would be happy to do “public philosophy” in a cultural setting in which the bounds of philosophy and non-philosophy, member and non-member, specialized and popular, were differently drawn. But as things are, no way. I'll do my job, I'll do it well, and I'll clock out when I'm done. And I will resist to the end the neoliberal academy's attempt to claim for itself, aided by the emerging system of surveillance capitalism, what is in fact mine alone.--Justin Smith "Against Public Philosophy" [HT Dailynous]

In analytic philosophy, criticism does not have high status so it is no surprise that, in his Parisian (internal) exile, Justin, himself a very fine essayist, overlooks our very own (Danto, Iris Murdoch, and, perhaps, Cavell) in his list of exemplary critics.* Now, Smith does not pause to reflect on the fact that to be art critic today is not a true (Weberian) calling because its main function would be to add value to the billionaire funded corporate, 'neoliberal' art-industry. The spiritual values, and the bourgeois culture that sustained them, that made engagement with art, even Hollywood, so worthy have collapsed.

Even so, it is useful to be reminded that public philosophy (for complications recall here; here; and on Dotson here) need not be exhausted by (i) the contribution to public opinion in the service of some moral or political cause(s), (ii) the dumbed down dissemination of recent pinnacles of thought to the educated in the life-style section(s), or (iii) engagement with fun, low-brow entertainment (so loathed by Justin). It can also be -- let's grant him this -- (iv) the creative expression of philosophical sensitivity not oriented to the eternal motions of the starry skies above, but rather, as critic, immersed in the shadows of one's time tracking sources of ephemeral light. Despite their many distinct skills, motives, and practices (i-iv) have in common an orientation toward a 'public.' (This is so even though it's possible even if most readers of public philosophy are philosophers and their students in some sense.) This public may be narrow or broad; the very possibility of such a public may be a projective construct of the public philosopher's imagination -- this is very much the case in David Hume's philosophy -- or may, in fact, be dispersed in millions of twitter accounts. Hence, public philosophy is aptly named.

In what remains of this digression, I would like to sketch yet an alternative patsh for public philosophy one that is not directly oriented toward a public. One may think this impossible. For, one may well think that if a philosopher is not talking to herself or fellow (professional) philosophers, now or in posterity, or to the public, there is nothing left. But this is a mistake. A philosopher can also be oriented toward a specialist community. We are already quite familiar with something like this in so far that the so-called 'philosophers of X' (biology, physics, economics, law, medicine, cognitive science, etc.) do not just talk to fellow philosophers, but sometimes contribute to, even constitute, the developments in X (recall my interest in (v) synthetic philosophy.) Some philosophy of x or synthetic philosophy is oriented toward the public, but most of it is to fellow academic experts. I hope this is familiar enough so I don't have to recount it here.

But, and now I am getting to the point, there is also expertise outside the academy. In particular, the modern bureaucratic state -- and the international institutions (IMF, World Bank, WHO, WTO, BIS, etc.) that characterize the liberal regime today-- is full of experts that keep the regulatory and administrative state going. They are also, often, non-trivially involved in the development of the details of policy. These experts serve the public, while generally not contributing to the public (unlike, say, their counterparts in think tanks, NGOs, social movements, and political parties). In fact, as Justin notes above, their professional commitments may even prevent them from doing so--or if they can be oriented toward the public, only in very scripted fashion. On the whole, their work is invisible to the public--treated as technique by even serious thinkers.

Yet, for those of us who may wish to improve our governance and, thereby, improve the institutions that shape our lives, including the lives of the vulnerable and those that lack effective voice, being oriented to these public serving, invisible (non-academic) experts may well be an important way to practice public philosophy.+ Philosophers can develop expertise in a field of governance (e.g., public health, bank regulation, defense procurement, anti-trust practice, social insurance, migration, etc.) and orient their philosophical work toward improving or reconstituting it. This already exists (not surprisingly, somewhat quietly), for example, Ryan Muldoon has helped the World Bank; and Nancy Cartwright is developing a more general framework on how to use research to build better social policies. I think of such efforts as indirect public philosophy.

Such (vi) indirect public philosophy is service oriented because it aims toward improving policy and governance; but rather than addressing the public (although that is compatible with it), it engages and collaborates with (primarily non-academic) technocratic experts behind the scenes.** My interest in (vi) is personal. Through funded research I am quietly working on developing a new normative, governance framework for financial debt. I call this -- cf. Locke -- plumbing for capitalism. Some other time, I'll share more on the practice of indirect public philosophy.

 

On Callard on Taste, and Badness-promotion

We tend to think of aesthetic disputes as reflecting the least substantive differences between people—you like vanilla, I like chocolate, there’s no arguing over taste, let’s move on. But that point of view may be infected by the wishful thinking of backwards argumentation: given that there is no arguing over taste, those differences had better be unimportant. What if some of them are not?

Consider the fact that the most passionate friendships—those of youth—tend to coalesce around aesthetic passions: movies, music, comics, games. When you meet a stranger and you “click” with them, isn’t it very often because you liked the same book, or movie, or fell in love with the same city or language or artist? Consider real gift-giving, which involves pre-selecting the recipient, by contrast with the self-selection of “whoever might pass by and want it.” Meaningful, personalized gifts tend to succeed precisely when there is some shared aesthetic between the giver and recipient.

...It is striking that Socrates lumps together ethics and aesthetics as the two sources of strife.

The history of ethical thought is a record of the attempt to insert a wedge between those last two kinds of judgments. In both cases, we’ve worked to turn down the heat, but in the aesthetic case it’s by agreeing to disagree, whereas in the moral one it’s by way of the conceit that some kind of unified moral theory—be it Kantianism or Consequentialism—can serve as backdrop for adjudicating all disputes. We can just “weigh” the reasons and see who is “objectively” right and who is “objectively” wrong. In aesthetics we don’t need objectivity and in morality we can have it: strife solved.

I believe there is no scale that resolves all moral disagreements, and that it is not always possible to agree to disagree about the beautiful and the ugly. These claims are not unrelated to one another, or to the fact that the aesthetic and the moral are not as separate as we would like to believe.

I find guns ugly; the gun enthusiasts I know find them beautiful. I find meat delicious; many vegetarians I know have a distaste for it. Whether the ethics drives the aesthetics or vice versa, once they have fused it is to be expected that some of the recalcitrance of a person’s ethical “intuitions” will be due to the fact that they are also visceral aesthetic responses. We pick our friends as much by the contents of their playlists as the contents of their characters—perhaps because we see the contents of their playlists as a not insubstantial part of the contents of their characters.

It is, of course, ridiculous of me to hate the person who gave me that silly bowl, just as it is ridiculous of you to hate the bearded hipster, or the backwoods redneck, or the sleek businessman, or the unwashed hippie, or whichever “type” of person strikes you as having contemptibly bad taste. When political disputes fall along cultural and geographic lines, as they do in our country, it’s hard not to suspect that the divide is as much about aesthetics as about ethics.

The fact that at some fundamental level we remain on the same page—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc.—is not necessarily cause for much optimism. When it is in the aesthetic dimension that people drift apart from one another, the rift between them is not very amenable to rational persuasion. We Americans have become multiple nations in taste.

An aesthetic divide between two human beings is not trivial; it obstructs their ethical relations. The earth-mother aesthetic encoded in the belly bowl ran counter to my vision of parenting a newborn, which involved no breastfeeding, no cloth-diapering, no co-sleeping. If I leave that bowl in the entryway, I am doing so with the hopes of establishing an ethical connection—benefaction—to someone solely on the grounds of a fundamental aesthetic divide. The person who picks up such a bowl is a “different kind of person” from me. I have no doubt that, were I to meet her, I’d find some common ground, but one thing that can’t serve as that common ground is the fact that my trash is her treasure. Or so I saw it.

Ben saw things more amicably. While granting to me the existence of aesthetic divides so profound as to occasion moral offense, he didn’t think the tackiness of the bowl qualified. He asked me to take a step back: surely I wouldn’t want to live in a world of monolithic aesthetic taste. The plurality of aesthetic points of view is a product of the genuine diversity between human beings, and the fact that they are free to judge for themselves what appeals to them. It should occasion respect, not contempt.

But there is a fine line between respecting others’ right to their bad taste, and opting to participate in it. Ben saw that participation from a bird’s eye-view, as autonomy-promotion: helping people enjoy whatever they might like. I saw it from the ground-up, in terms of badness-promotion. The question here is the degree to which peoples’ inability to see eye-to-eye is itself something they can see eye-to-eye about. Is there a way to adjudicate this disagreement between Ben and me? Or is it a difference in taste?--Agnes Callard "Do you want my garbage?"  @The Point. [HT Dailynous]

Agnes Callard is a distinctive and ambitious, fresh voice writing for a wider audience without pandering to the "many." Since there are few of these in the profession, this is very welcome. I use 'ambitious' because she is willing, as the post above suggests, to present herself as speaking to and on behalf of a much larger national 'we' even if, perhaps, especially when, she is being a contrarian. This latter feature was on display in one of her other pieces this past week, which appeared in the New York Times, and (alas) got lots more attention (see for example here).

I thought her NYT piece conflated the pure (politics free) form of philosophy with the institution of professional philosophy where (what I call) a species of philosophical politics is inevitable even as a means to improve philosophy (for, an example, recall this post on David Lewis). In it, she also stipulates (without argument) that philosophical teaching/influencing is about bringing other "people to believe only what they, by their own lights, can see to be justified."  

Now, one feature of professional philosophy I am attracted to emotionally is our freedom to criticize. And when I reflected on today's Digression the nuggets in the previous paragraph where going to be its fuel. But I have come to think that our professional practices overvalue criticism and discourage us to seek out the lovely and handsome in other philosophers.* And, in fact, the part of me that admires Callard is not her persuasiveness, rhetorical or argumentative, if any, but her ability to raise significant questions in a playful-serious way.+ And she does so in virtue of her clear willingness not to see certain alternatives. 

Take, for example, the gun case. This will illustrate both what I mean by a willingness not to see (in this case, it's my limitation), and something about her ruling out. I can find guns aesthetically pleasing objects. The aesthetic involved is one my eighteenth century teachers would call 'fit.' Often it is not solely fit; the beautiful guns draw on other aesthetic features (including speed, a certain kind of faux sexuality, and shininess, precision, etc.). I do so by taking a certain stance toward guns; the one that screens off the gruesomeness of the effects. There is nothing ennobling about hunting or killing people. But I think it's possible, genuinely possible, to admire guns and wish to see them banned. Quite clearly, if I allowed myself to see the gruesomeness of the effect(s), the aesthetic valence of guns might, gestalt-like, change as it clearly does for Callard. But it is not impossible that the gruesomeness would (if one has a Goth sensibility) enhance the aesthetic value. After all, sometimes a joke is funny because it is, in part, in bad taste (for more reflections on that issue see here).

It is possible that the last two sentences reflect, as I imagine Callard would say, a defect of character (in me).  And what I like about her public persona is this very puritanical strain in her [to be contrasted with the amicable], which can be grounded in her sensibility of disgust (read the full essay to grasp what I am talking about it) and then seeks to justify the actions that follow from this sensibility (without, I note, trying to come to grips with her disgust).** I tend to find such sensibility comical in one off situations, yet when others aim to live up to it consistently (and so exhibit integrity), admirable, too. I think we can be plastic about our evaluative criteria depending on extremely minor variations in context. (So, yes, one can value another's integrity, while being a situationist oneself.) 

Of course, she may think the flaw in position may not be of character at all. She may think I mistakenly keep distinct, aesthetic and ethic, that are simply intertwined. (But my appeal to the aesthetic quality of the gruesome is meant to illustrate that I do no such thing.)

Even so, my preference for Callard is not just aesthetic, it's also substantive. She is right to call attention to the significance of aesthetics in our lives, our friendships, and our politics. For example, one cannot understand the grip Trump has on his followers if one ignores aesthetics (recall here and here).++  

She is right that the unwillingness to discuss taste is no evidence for its lack of significance in our lives. But it is surprising she does not note that the silence on difference of taste functions like a taboo (recal and here). As she recognizes it clearly prevents social conflict. And since she grants that it is very possible that aesthetic matters themselves are foundational, these conflicts could not be adjudicated by any arbiter. 

Or at least she invites us to consider that possibility. I am struck, amazed really, by the felt need of adjudication. If Ben and Agnes were in the situation in which a collective decision was necessary, then, indeed, adjudication would be required. But I don't see why one would have to force a decision, and not allow further discussion. 

What Callard does not seem to allow, perhaps cannot see, is that talking about differences in taste, to keep that conversation going despite one's differences (recall here and here) is itself, or can be, a joyful exercise. Adam Smith in presenting the exemplary nature of Hume's life, whose philosophical views he predicted would fail to persuade many, called this, with a nod to Addison and agreeing with Pope, a 'gaiety of temper.' It's an open question for me -- no really this is not an objection! -- if such a temper can facilitate Callard's wish to participate in badness-promotion.