Digressions&Impressions

On Being a Constrained Human

Disabled people are constrained and limited by their bodies....The simple act is that, disabled or non-disabled, we are all limited and constrained by our bodies. To have a body that is any particular wa is to have a body that is limited and constrained in some respects an in comparison to other kinds of bodies. That's just part of what it is  to have a body. Some of us are male, some of us are female. Some of us are tall, some of us are short. Some of us are flexible, some of us are stiff. Some of us are stocky, some of us are willowy. There are all sorts of ways that bodies can be. And each way a body can be comes with some limitations and constraints.

We all adapt our preferences due in part to the limitations of our bodies---that's an utterly ordinary thing to do. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, 132 (emphasis in original).

The quoted passage appears in a very interesting and critical discussion of a species of status quo bias to be found in views of adaptive preferences popular among many professional philosophers. I shall turn to this status quo bias some other time. But in reading this passage (and the chapters that followed it), I had what I take to be an ohhh, I should change my idea about what it's like to be human moment. Let me explain.

At the core of Barnes's book is the idea that all human bodies face constraints.+ (One may, in fact, say that to be without constraints is to be godlike; and humans are not god(s), etc.) In particular, it is part of the nature of what it is to be a human body that all human bodies are in a position of not being able to do some X; with X being something other human bodies can do (or could be/have or can instantiate), and X being really important to some humans.* It is a fairly common conceptual and maybe even phenomenological mistake to think of disability in terms of constraint, but to ignore simultaneously the existence of constraints in the context of (complex) experiences that arise from having other types of bodies (even though those bodies by necessity include all kinds of constraints).**

Notice that Barnes's core idea does not rely on heavy duty metaphysics and is compatible with all kinds of natural philosophies. But it does cause problems for views that think of disability in terms of defects or special imperfections of the sort embraced by some Thomists, Christians, and (somewhat uncharacteristically, but often quite intensely) Utilitarians. I don't mean to suggest all Thomists, Christians, and Utilitarians must embrace the 'disability = defective human being' view; after all, one way to understand Barnes's core idea is to recognize in it a version of Augustinianism in which we are all defective (due to the Fall, desire, etc.). (Of course, the idea is not exclusively Augustinian; the idea of human limits is intrinsic to much Greek tragedy, the Hebrew Bible, etc.)

At The University of Chicago, I had been exposed to a heavy dose of so-called (Pittsburgh based) Wittgenstein-heavy Aristotelianism and Analytical Thomism (inspired by work of Anscombe, Geach, and Foot). While the interest in that tradition is not, I think, primarily to label some forms of life defective (or disabled) [on the contrary, it is really about articulating the conditions of flourishing and virtue], I did encounter the idea there that some ways of being human are evidently defective. Because we live in a culture that celebrates images of young and fit bodies, it is hard to resist the ableism.

While appeal to Darwinism blocks some of the perfectionist strains (although leaves it difficult to say what 'life' or 'flourishing' is), even within Darwinism it is fairly natural to talk about normal (or proper) species functioning and once you allow function-talk there is plenty of space to slide into thinking that some members of a species are less fit, less able to survive, malfunctioning, etc. (After all, Platonic Eugenics was not banished by Darwinism, but rather with nods to 'fitness' made more 'scientific' within it!) While, of course, within Darwinism it is not allowed to make deviations from the 'normal' normative, it is a recurring temptation (and I lacked tools to block it). As Barnes writes (in the Preface):

It's easy to confuse the view from normal with the view from nowhere. And it's uniquely the minority voices which we single out as biased or lacking objectivity.

Maybe it's because I was reading Barnes's book while sick in bed during my official holiday, but the idea that my life is limited and constrained by my body finally grabbed hold of me. (This is a distinct feeling from recognizing one's mortality [recall].) It's not that I am not in awe of my wife, who climbs mountains and heli-skis, but I don't think of my inability to climb Mont Blanc as a limitation; I just don't think about it. Most of my needs for recognition are oriented toward qualities associated with my mind [and officially I am no substance dualist!], and most of my demands on myself are oriented toward my ability to care for others and how I cope with and accommodate their limitations (some other time I'll discuss how this connects to fatherhood, which involves a lot of facilitating a child's bodily constraints). It's not that my life is without constraints: I notice the absence of  time (and sometimes money) regularly.

But I also became this person. Looking back, I recall that I was a competitive tennis-player as a teenager. At some point I must have recognized without much willingness to confront it that I would not become a college varsity player (let alone a pro). What's key here is that we do not ordinarily understand, I think, our own flourishing and way-of-being as determined by such constraints unless someone else (society, etc.) confronts us with our bodily limitations (e.g., in advertisements and popular culture; or other people's lack of attraction to us). After all, we all adapt our preferences due in part to the limitations of our bodies---that's an utterly ordinary thing to do. 

On the Multiplicity of Intelligence and Philosophical Method

To be honest, I think most philosophers are pretty limited in their intelligences. They may be amazing along a certain dimension of intelligence, but in many cases the other dimensions are atrophied. And moreover, they don't even recognize the multiplicity of intelligences and think the kind they have is either the only one or the most important. That, to my mind, is a serious limitation that negatively affects our discipline.--Sally Haslanger

Haslanger's remarks  about merit have received quite a bit of attention (see here at Dailynous, [recall also my post]), but I have seen no attention focused on the remarks I have quoted. Haslanger is not making the familiar point -- well it's one that I stress and that Ruth Chang has made with forceful clarity-- that philosophical training creates intellectual dispositions or reflexes that undercut the proper functioning of, say, our reactive attitudes or sympathy and, thereby, the possibility of a virtuous life or acting ethically (recall and here).  Rather, she is making the more subtle point that we do not recognize different ways of (for lack of better words) being smart.  Let's stipulate Haslanger is right about this.*

I want to reflect a bit on what follows from this fact for philosophy. (So, let's allow and ignore that it may also generate all kinds of interpersonal and moral challenges for philosophers and their fellow human beings.) Now, it's possible that this oversight is only harmful when we theorize about the capacities of other agents (in philosophy of mind, epistemology, political philosophy, normative theory, philosophy of action, applied ethics, etc.). That is, we theorize smarty-ness in other human beings along too few or impoverished dimensions. Our conception of agency would then be unidimensional in the way that the economist's homo economicus is. This need not be a problem as long as we would recognize this unidimensionality as a disciplinary tick, that allows us to have a lot of efficient conversations and to theorize cleanly (but partially) about the world. It is, however, foreseeable that, in practice, we would come to mistake the model for reality. Thinking like a philosopher would be to assume unidimensional-smartyness-man (or woman).

As an aside, I do think unidimensional-smartyness-man is packaged into a lot of standard forms of analysis and the ways intuitions work in epistemology and philosophy of language. But that's for another time. 

But there is another kind of harm, a methodological one for philosophy. A lot of methodologies that are advocated basically say, do something difficult and rigorous and good things will follow for the discipline. As it happens, I am very good at  this difficult and rigorous method. Example: Timothy Williamson ("Must do Better.") [I only mention it because I have harped on the example before--lately I am a big fan of Williamson.] If intelligence is uni-dimensional then the only question is,' is that the right method for the discipline (or the optimal one given our present knowledge and resources, etc.)?' and, if it is, how do we make sure that a lot of us get on with the program.

But if intelligence is not uni-dimensional, then even if one grants that the difficult and rigorous method proposed by the important person works well to make progress (yeah, okay, let's ignore my qualms) in philosophy, it is by no means obvious that all would-be philosophers can contribute by way of that method. It is, after all, equally possible that there is a second-best (let's stipulate not so rigorous not so terrific method) method that allows some fruitful steps on the path to true philosophy by folk who are smarty in ways distinct from the important person who advocates the difficult and rigorous method. Perhaps, the alternative smarties can contribute quite a lot by following methods more suitable to their intelligence(s). (I think Amia Srinivasian first pointed this out to me as an implication of some of my own views.) That is to say, I am unfamiliar of writings in philosophical methodology that soundly establish that theirs is the unique, only possible method to make progress.

The claim in the previous paragraph is familiar enough from the epistemic advantages of diversity as discussed in epistemology and philosophy of science. But it's also a moral point (again Srinivasian taught me this) that is a way to interpret the second norm of the methodological analytical egalitarianism that I adopt and advocate: experts/philosophers should not promote policies where the down-side risks of implementation are (primarily) shifted onto less fortunate others.  That is, many of us often advocate methods that are good for us -- we can flourish by using them -- and the way we conceive the discipline, but that are not evidently good for others (even if, and often this is a big if, they also conceive the discipline in the same way). So, if unidimensional-smartyness is false (as I stipulated),  then it follows 'we' make others miserable (qua philosophers) by insisting that they adopt the method privileged by 'us' (and suitable for 'us'). 

To be sure, the previous paragraph is not an argument for anything goes. Some methods and strategies may well be self-defeating or not conducive to any path to wisdom, or philosophical progress, given our atrophied natures. But one may then explore what could be done to develop human potentiality.

On hints of a unified Perspectives on the world

I really value the ability to produce such an emotionally coherent philosophy in humanistic thinkers. One -- not the only, nor even the most important, but one -- valuable thing I think we can offer as humanists is placing facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on the world, that they can shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys. I don't think this need be the explicit subject matter of what is done, indeed I think it is often best done kind of obliquely as one focuses on more immediate or precisely formulated problems. Indeed, a lot of what I say here is shaped by my reading of Carnap, who I think also deliberately did this obliquely, and ends up painting a very different picture from Williamson. But some of my favourite thinkers are such precisely because they have the ability to conjure in me a window into their lifeworld. I think analytic philosophy has greater potential to contribute to this kind of humanistic project than even some of its own practitioners admit; and as I develop as a thinker I aspire to have such a vision emerge from my own work.

Eric Schliesser's post... does a great job of not just pointing to Williamson's lifeworld but also exemplifying what it would be to live in it. One gets the sense that even in the face of personal and social catastrophe, even where others cannot be brought to see it, there is still a value to be found in discovering the world as it is and acclimatising to it, terrible tough it may be. The determination to gain that knowledge and comport oneself accordingly just is a good, and that value is invariant across the waxing and waning of fortune---The Sooty Empiric.

In the concluding paragraphs of his generous* and insightful post, Liam Kofi Bright boldly proclaims (in partial response to my post) that he wishes to develop a unified perspective on the world, which will be, perhaps, obliquely available to his discerning readers as well as "shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys." He will reveal this perspective as he addresses other philosophical challenges. Articulating such an aspiration is a means of binding future selves -- assuming these selves value internal consistency over time --, and an invitation to witnesses to become complicit or co-constitutive of the enterprise. It is, however, not mere consistency, but also a claim to a kind of existential philosophical integrity, which, demands from us not just (recall) that our the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere, but that these (public philosophical integrity) are anchored in what he calls an "underlying emotional basis for their work."

It is worth noting that systematicity and an embrace of obliqueness both have a complicated status within analytical philosophy. Systematicity bumps up against the tradition of conceiving philosophy as puzzle-solving in the context of an intellectual (and non-hierarchical) division of labor (#noheroes); while deploying hints offends our fondness for clarity and direct/assertoric speech and our distrust of polysemy. For most of my education it never even occurred to me that obliqueness would be deployed in the pale gray threads of our intellectual elders until I learned from Abe Stone the significance of hints in Carnap (recall and in David Lewis, who -- together with Jody Azzouni (recall) -- may be the only major systematic philosopher analytical philosophy has produced).

One way, I think, to distinguish analytical hinting or obliqueness from vulgar Straussianism (which is verboten) is precisely the demand to adhere to the  two-fold coherence that public and existential philosophical integrity demand from us. By contrast, a Straussian is allowed to embrace a noble lie or an esoteric doctrine that contradicts the exoteric doctrine.

It was especially kind of Liam Kofi Bright to note that I was aiming to convey even exemplify what it would be to live in Williamson's lifeworld. Recall that I quoted him as follows,  although language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us. Like the children we make, the meanings we make can have secrets from us. One can recognize this while holding on to (recall) the ideal of clarity as a kind of property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages, that is, to aim for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (etc). In fact, Williamson could have said (but didn't) although formal language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us even if it simultaneously can be a means to greater transparency in many respects. When we construct languages we gain control over some matter, but we also (often unintentionally) produce secrets for ourselves. A continental philosopher would be inclined to start talking about  hidden-ness, but here I'll resist that temptation.

There is quite a bit more to be said about Williamson's remark. But here I wish to close by noting that I have often found my analytical training a hindrance to the task of (to quote Liam Kofi Bright) placing "facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on the world, that they can shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys." By this I do not mean that analytical training is a hindrance in constructing such a lifeworld for oneself or close peers (I think it is not); rather I find my training and the intellectual and emotional dispositions that accompany them a hindrance in recognizing the lifeworlds of others with a different orientation (recall also this post). (This is especially so if I am correcting another person's fallacy also generates an incapacity to listen to the emotional basis of his words.) One way one can understand these daily impressions is as hard exercises in placing other people's "facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on" their "world," which they may, or not, share with others.

 

On the Interior Freedom of an Authentic Liberal Education; Or How the Sheltering Sky nearly ruined my life

Can we imagine college classes being conducted without agendas, either political or scholarly?

If this seems a fantasy, can we imagine ways that the agendas that inevitably emerge would be constantly subject to self-critical eyes?

The small-scale culture of a college — not its rhetoric or its bureaucratic shortcuts — would be the only source of such a possibility.

Consider the serious challenges that an ordinary college lecture class faces in this regard. The content-providing professor proceeds according to his or her preestablished conclusions. Grades are constantly dribbled out in a way that can encourage followers or punish dissenters. The student as content-consumer has little incentive or indeed encouragement to undertake an inquiry where much of anything is at stake.

The architects of the liberal arts program at St. John’s and of the original core curriculum at the University of Chicago had an ingenious solution: Demote the professor to the status of a guide and give students the responsibility for the discussion.

The “teachers,” as my college’s advertising boasts, are the authors of great works, Plato, Newton, Austen or DuBois. Let students pursue the questions they bring to the classroom with the books as interlocutors and with their fellow students and teachers as helpers. Let the faculty step back and ensure that the discussions are careful, respectful and relentlessly pursue the truth. And use grades only to signal to outside institutions the student’s fitness for further study.

A great work is one sufficiently complex and majestic to support conflicting interpretations. But it is also one that exposes questions crucial to humanity: on the just structure of society, yes, but also the existence or nonexistence of divinities; the nature of matter and the laws of nature; the inner workings of mathematics; and the pitfalls of the human mind and heart.

Discussing such works is a bottomless journey, pursued in acknowledged ignorance and punctuated by flashes of insight.

Such discussions train us in respecting others, in facing our own inadequacy and in patiently seeking out the reality of a situation. Training the natural and spontaneous interest of a young person in fundamental questions is an excellent preparation for life.

After all, agendas come and go. The challenge is to maintain a broad perspective in an environment driven by money-making fads and more sinister attempts to exploit human beings in the search for power and profit.

The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth.--Zena Hitz "What is a Safe Space?" Washington Post.

Hitz's article in the Washington Post responds to the debate about safe spaces and trigger warnings, but is really a further articulation, if not development, of her position that a certain kind of education develops interiority (recall her piece in First Things, and my response here). While it is true that the core curriculum and the way of teaching that accompanies it is not political in the sense of taking sides in conventional party politics, she is mistaken to suggest that there is no politics in the conception at all, or that it instantiates a kind of (Weberian) neutrality in which the only politics it produces is an emergent, indirect quality.

The core [recall] she lovingly discusses was developed by President Hutchins at The University of Chicago (and given widespread familiarity by Mortimer Adler) during the Great Depression and is a species of secular humanism (in which, as Hitz notes and exemplifies, religious thought is welcomed). The (slowly evolving) core simultaneously instantiates a great conversation over perennial issues by exemplary minds, and presents the development of thought. Among the self-conscious underlying aims is to produce citizens and thought leaders, and simultaneously be a rescue mission (Wikipedia has a useful intro). I would be the last to suggest that such a rescue mission is not needed today.

The very idea of 'flashes of insight' as a way of knowledge contribution is itself Goethe's contribution to the Romantics (although clearly modeled on a species of religious experience and celebrated in Archimedes Eureka moment), and, in part, an elitist response to the more egalitarian, more democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. To be sure, this is primarily a nobility of the mind acquired through Bildung.

But my point here is not to quibble with Hitz's claims about neutrality and politics. Rather, despite the fact that her piece warmed my heart and made me feel in the company of a true educator, I was troubled by it. After a day's mulling, I recognize that something is missing in the closing line of Hitz's piece (recall),  "The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth." To put the point philosophically, freedom is never a safe place. True freedom, even if reduced to interiority (as Hitz suggests), always presupposes (as a kind of constitutive principle) the possibility of making disastrous mistakes from which no practice of self-criticism can save us.

Because (recall) I recently read Gertrude Himmelfarb's (1994) "On Looking into the Abyss," I am reminded of a famous, somewhat facetious remark (which she quotes) by Lionel Trilling in his (1961) "On The Teaching of Modern Literature:"

I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: “Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.

Trilling points to the phenomenon in  which books have lost the capacity to destroy by, say, making a bad or troubled soul worse, and accentuate immoderate desires.  Hitz does not allow for this when she insists that the true guide through these books, in an atmosphere of mutual respect in which young souls are turned toward the good, provides "an excellent preparation for life." But As Trilling reminds, books can also undo life in ways that are not merely a preparatory experience. I think this is true. I can't convince you of this, but the best I can do is offer some hint of an autobiographical remark.

When I was a late teenager, I read Sheltering Sky. I am unsure how I stumbled upon it (I am pretty sure I read it before the movie came out). But it brought me extremely close to suicide. I have no idea why the story of an overconfident American couple who travel through Africa unnerved me so badly, but I was not just physically shaken by the felt experience, but also overwhelmed by the meaningless of life. (When, later, I read Nietzsche, I found him tame and too refined for my taste.) There is a famous passage in the novel (it was used in the film) that while flirting with the pretentious (and bordering on the incoherent) kind of points to the underlying theme of the book (which I have never re-read again):

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

What gets to me in the passage is not the actual remarks about death or the finiteness of life (I know about that), but rather the sneaky claim that everything, even the most constitutive memories happens a very small number (four or five) times, really. Yes, you can try to cheat: by doing a daily exercise to remember the event many more times or by denying that any thought really matters to you, but so doing would also distract from the art of living, of being alive.

Much of professional philosophy blabbers on about truth, rationality, and morality and never allows the sneaky claims. By contrast, the close reading and shared discussion of the texts that Hitz and I both admire makes space for it. The aim is not, of course, to generate a stream of psychiatric patients or suicides in the class-room--a skilled guide and teacher can forestall it often--, but in the very possibility of unsettling even the skilled guide can slip sometimes and make us worse off, genuinely worse off, than before the conversation started.

On the fragility of memory and the fragility of life

This morning I received an email (headlined, "Blast from the Past") from my friend (and sometime collaborator), Andrew Janiak. His sister had found a copy of the program of the New England Undergraduate Philosophy Conference held at Tufts, April 4, 1992 (which Andrew had included in the mail). I had been on the program committee; I was a junior at Tufts at the time, and I was urged to join the program committee because several philosophy professors were aware that I had started to toy with the idea of adding philosophy as a second major (to International Relations, although in the end I dropped IR and double-majored in political science and philosophy--which seems surprisingly prescient a quarter of a century later, but at the time involved an issue of meeting requirements). Participating in organizing and hosting the event was my first exposure to philosophy outside the class-room as a collegial and fun enterprise among peers. The conference had stood out in my memory for three reasons:

• First, that Summer I went on a road-trip through America with one of the organizers; she ended up becoming my first serious girlfriend.
• Second, I was blown away by Jesse Prinz, who gave a presentation, there; we met again at The University of Chicago as graduate students (where he was a few years ahead of me).
• Third, as one of the people who had judged the papers, I had been struck by the fact that while Jesse Prinz went on to become a very famous philosopher, I never heard again about the guy who was awarded first prize for a fascinating paper on the Newcomb Problem. This was especially striking because his presentation of the Newcomb Problem stuck with me ever since (much to the dismay of some of my friends, I am a committed one-boxer [I never let on to Bill Harper about this]). I did not recall his name nor much about him, except that he was clearly insanely smart and a bit idiosyncratic.

Much later I noticed that the two female, co-program chairs, two brilliant seniors, who wanted to improve the world politically and morally, chose to go on to law school and not professional philosophy.

Looking at the program (see below), I was flooded with memories of midnight discussions (qua program committee) about philosophy and, especially, the exhilaration about the wide range of topic and styles of writing that were wholly new to me. Several papers reflected schools of thought and styles of reasoning that were not taught at Tufts at the time, and, thus, required great deal of effort to enter into. The program reveals quite a few names that have gone on to distinguished careers in professional philosophy: in addition to Prinz and Janiak, I recognize Catherine Wearing and Jeremy Bendik Keymer. Maybe others recognize more of these names. (An internet search revealed that several folk got MAs in philosophy and then pursued other careers--this is true of several of the women in the sample.)

As the previous paragraph should make clear, I was reminded of the fragility of memory. For, I was amazed to discover that Andrew Janiak and I had actually first met at this event at Tufts. Until today I had assumed we first met a few  years later (ca 2001) when we were introduced to each other by George Smith while preparing a series of articles for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see here and here). I was also astounded to learn that Bendik Keymer, who was pretty much in the same cohort as I when we were PhD students at Chicago, and I had actually also encountered each other at this event. Part of me wonders if I was aware of the connection to Janiak and Bendik Keymer when we met again as PhD students and forgotten subsequently or, as seems phenonomologically more likely now, that I never made the connection at the time.

As I was writing this post organized around the fragility of memory, I googled the other names on the program and received a shock. I was reminded of the fact that the author of that Newcomb Problem paper was named, Jonathan Roorda and that he died of cancer in 1996, aged 25. I recall reading this on the Leiterreport in 2012. His (1997) paper in Journal of Philosophy, closes with a footnote that states that "He was a few months away from completing a Ph.D. dissertation on a probabilistic explication of full belief. He was twenty-five. This article was prepared for publication by his advisor, Richard C. Jeffrey." When I read that footnote, I seem not to have made the connection to the glorious undergraduate paper and presentation at Tufts. What's more, I think it is very likely that I must have read his extended review piece on Kitcher on theory choice (Erkentnisse 2007) because in re-reading it this afternoon I had a few 'aha' moments (some other time more on this paper).

And so this post has been turned into a reminder of the fragility of life and memories--but most of all, carpe diem.

 

 

Necessary Illusions in Love and the Great Machines of Happiness: on Emilie Du Châtelet's Discourse

In order to be happy, one must have freed oneself of prejudices, one must be virtuous, healthy, have tastes and passions, and be susceptible to illusions; for we owe most of our pleasures to illusions, and unhappy is the one who has lost them. Far then, from seeking to make them disappear by the torch of reason, let us try to thicken the varnish that illusion lays on the majority of objects.--Emilie Du Châtelet, Discourse on Happiness [Discours sur le bonheur.] translated by I. Bour & J.P. Zinsser, p. 349.

At the heart of the so-called 'age of reason,' we find an embrace of the utility of illusions. For, according to Du Châtelet illusions are necessary to feel certain pleasures, and these pleasures ("satisfied tastes and passions") make us happy. In order, then, to enjoy some tastes and passions one must be in the grip of certain illusions. It's clear from what follows that according to Du Châtelet not all tastes and passion require illusions. Some goods like -- food or certain 'sensual pleasures' -- can be enjoyed without illusions (but see **). So, on her behalf, I'll distinguish between simple pleasures and complex pleasures. It's only the consummation of complex pleasures that require illusions in order to be enjoyed.

Before I get to the nature of complex pleasures, it is worth marking Du Châtelet's distinction between prejudices [préjugés], which are to be emendated, and illusions. A prejudice "is an opinion that one has accepted without examination, because it would be indefensible otherwise." (p. 352) All inherited tradition, which is tacitly or explicitly assumed correct,  falls under this definition; it is no surprise that religion is Du Châtelet's exemplar of a prejudice. While Du Châtelet is clearly some kind of (Leibnizian) Deist, she is no friend of revealed religion which she thinks makes people unhappy (in this life). As we know from her commentary on Scriptures, she finds these texts to be full of contradictions and absurdities. But the key point for Du Châtelet is that it only requires ordinary intelligence and modest education to correct prejudices. Prejudices are not useful (to healthy souls).*

According to Du Châtelet, an illusion is "not an error." For errors are "always harmful" (354). She defends the "love of study" as a sure means to happiness, especially in independent and magnanimous souls (357--some other time I discuss her self-attribution of magnanimity and her analysis of glory in this context). So, an illusion is a defensible opinion, which gives us an "agreeable feeling" accompanying complex tastes and passions.** Such an opinion one has accepted after scrutiny, even though it's possible, even likely, to be false, but one chooses not to destroy their functionality (355). On an epistemic level Du Châtelet's category of an illusion is close in spirit to the character of Spinoza's universal tenets of faith, which can be beyond rationally knowable, but ought to avoid knowable falsehood. (Of course, Du Châtelet's illusions have a different social role than Spinoza's tenets.) While one can choose to correct or maintain an illusion, one cannot control becoming in the grip of one; it's involuntary and relies on natural mechanisms (physiology, imagination, etc.); in this context she speaks of the "great machines of happiness." She offers as an exemplar optical illusions, which tend not to disappear even when one knows quite a bit about optical science.

Love is sustained by such necessary illusions according to Du Châtelet. Now, it seems that when speaking of 'love,' Du Châtelet has in mind loving another and not being loved, although the fact that one's love may be reciprocated is necessary part of love. That is, she is writing from first-personal perspective and not analyzing the relation or relationship of love. Love involves a kind of pleasure that follows from a giving oneself over to one's feelings of tenderness. Being tender to another feels pleasing, and this just is love. Such tenderness comes in degrees: the love she feels for a plant (which is barely capable of reciprocation) is different from the love she felt for Voltaire. In fact, it's quite clear from context is that Du Châtelet is more interested in passionate tenderness than a wholly calm tenderness.

Love has two further characteristics: (i) it makes "us wish to live"++ and (ii) it promotes  gratitude not to the one that loves us, but to God or Nature.+ That is to say, love indirectly makes us aware of and receptive to something larger than our human selves. For lack of a better word, I'll use 'cosmos' here.

• So, love is a pleasing, passionate tenderness for another that makes us wish to live and makes us receptive to the cosmos.

Interestingly enough, Du Châtelet notes that there can be excessive love such that there is no space for reciprocation. And she thinks men in her social class get turned off by excessive love.

But what, then, are the illusions that accompany love? On this point Du Châtelet is rather terse, despite the fact that she has quite a bit to say about love and, especially, how to comport oneself after a beloved loses interest. This is, I think, also a clue: in love, one must believe that it will last forever.

On Overcoming the Analytic Continental Divide

Let's stipulate that there is, since Ernest Nagel conceptualized it (in 1936), an 'analytical' tradition and that there is also a 'continental' tradition (which coalesced in the 1950s and 60s) in professional philosophy. Let's also stipulate that both traditions have competing schools within them and that sometimes the rivalries among these schools are more lively and more intense than the rivalry between the traditions. Let's stipulate that, in addition to intellectual and, perhaps, ideological contrasts, the traditions compete for jobs, status, scarce resources (etc.) just like the schools within the traditions do. Finally, let's stipulate that there are more traditions and more ways to distinguish among different sensibilities within professional philosophy today and allow that professional philosophy does not exhaust what philosophy sans phrase might be.

Since my blogging at NewAPPS, I encounter people who think that I am committed to the overcoming of the 'divide' between the two schools. I understand this reaction because (i) some folk at NewAPPS are committed to overcoming some such divide; (ii) despite my analytical training, I sometimes mention continental figures favorably; (iii) I am a regular critic of the bullying, even embarrassing dismissals of continental philosophy by some of my peers in analytical philosophers; and (iv) I tend to ignore caricatures of analytical philosophy by some continental philosophers. But (i-iv) do not represent a commitment to overcoming of any divide between the traditions.

First, I like to see two distinct and vital traditions continue. For, (a) the rivalry and sometimes intense rivalry between the two distinct research traditions/schools can produce vitality for both (as well as to outside schools). After all, (b) mutual emulation and rivalry can inspire excellence. Of course, it's not obvious that after the burst of energy emanating from the initial Heidegger Carnap clash, the existing rivalry generates intellectual vitality to the schools as such. But even if it does not happen at the level of a school, it may happen at a moral local personal or (non-trivially) 'field' level. For example, it's clear that the work on concepts by my (Deleuzian) friend Jeff Bell was vivified by his encounter with Davidson & Lewis; my encounter with folk doing work on historical epistemology (a la Foucault) inspired me to become more ambitious in my own historical projects; some feminist (analytical) epistemologists quite clearly draw on research pioneered in more continental/sts-style scholarship, etc.

Second, I do try to promote more respectful and receptive mutual intellectual engagement. Admittedly, this may get in the way of school-formation, which may rely, in part, on sharply policed boundaries between the two and, for internal cohesion, the positing of a simultaneously unintelligible and moronic other. But I have come to think that the schools (and their conflicting ways of understanding their shared history) have developed resources that could be illuminating to the other. For example, in reading Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude, it struck me that continental philosophers could gain something if they allowed themselves to be more familiar with the analytical treatments of modality and philosophy of science. Meanwhile, while staying with the theme of modality, analytical philosophers can learn something from continental philosophers when it comes to reflecting on the impossible and, say, the ways in which we conceive of semantics can be parochial. These things happen: analytical philosophers have become very interested in the metaphysics of experience and embodied experience, and so have found resources in a (naturalized and somewhat domesticated) phenomenology. Some have flirted with analytical existentialism.

Third, while I am not against folk trying to overcome the divide -- perhaps a Hegelian aufhebung is what is historically necessitated --, my own preference is for more experimentation with hybrids and monstrous mixtures between the schools. For these help make us aware of the unexplored alternatives that our schools generate. Of course, hybrids can be sterile and inefficient; but that need not prevent them from being beautiful and wondrous.*

 

*This post was prompted by discussion with Protevi, Carl Sachs, and Jack Samuel.

Singer on Moral Shifts

As our moral standards shift, however, different characteristics of the historical person become more relevant, and the symbol can develop a different meaning. When Wilson’s name was added to Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs in 1948, Rosa Parks’ famous bus ride was still seven years away, and segregation in the American South was not under serious challenge. Now it is unthinkable. Wilson’s racism therefore becomes more salient.--Peter Singer. [HT Brian Leiter]

In my blogging I tend to be rather critical of Peter Singer (despite my admiration for his contribution to animal rights) because he has a tendency to align the purportedly right thing to do with technocracy (in which the downside risks of elite-policy-making tends to be placed on vulnerable others). But I really like the concluding two paragraphs of his post:

Wilson’s contributions to the university, the US, and the world cannot and should not be erased from history. They should, instead, be recognized in a manner that creates a nuanced conversation about changing values, and includes both his positive achievements and his contributions to America’s racist policies and practices.

At Princeton, one outcome of that conversation should be the education of students and faculty who would otherwise be unaware of the complexity of an important figure in the university’s history. (I certainly have benefited: I have taught at Princeton for 16 years, and I have admired some of Wilson’s foreign-policy positions for much longer; but I owe my knowledge of Wilson’s racism to the BJL.) The end result of the conversation we should be having may well be the recognition that to attach Wilson’s name to a college or school sends a message that misrepresents the values for which the institution stands.

As I said, I really like the drift of these comments. But it is alarming that even Singler, who has spent quite some time reflecting and writing on Sidgwick, only learned of Wilson's racism recently (through student protests); it says something about the way the Utilitarians, the Progressive era, and the great internationalist era that led to the foundation of the League of Nations are remembered. The entanglement with eugenics (even Sidgwick was rather tolerant of it), racism, colonial imperialism, and Apartheid (Smuts was one of the great statesman of the League of Nations) is often effaced from the narrative and self-awareness. Perhaps, because of my growing awareness of these effacements (which I encounter regularly in the shared history of philosophy and economics), I found the paragraph at the top of the post out of sync with the rest of the argument.

 

For, Singer's paragraph comes very close to a false version of moral historicism; it's not quite clear what he takes to be 'unthinkable.' But the idea that challenging segregation was unthinkable in the 30s/40s is very partial history.+ As Singer's own narrative makes clear, President Wilson helped undo much of the progress after Reconstruction (at the Federal level). Moreover, the 1930s and 40s saw the rise of the second Klu Klux Klan and a more general revival of a pro-slavery/pro-racial narratives (this is why the naming of Calhoun College in the 1930s, who was especially known for his defense of slavery, at Yale is not idiosyncratic). To put it in Singer's terms, if there had been a "moral shift," then it was (in many respects) regressive when it comes to race relations in the generation(s) before Rosa Parks.

 

In fact, in nearly every generation there are courageous and humane voices that opposed the worst versions of racism and eugenics (this is also true when we go back further in time). The NAACP (with a very significant role for the philosopher, W.E.B. Du Bois, the fascinating Oswald Villard , Mary Ovington, etc.) has its roots in the Niagara Movement itself a response to the disenfranchisement and racism promoted by Wilson's Democratic party. In fact, the founders and the first generation(s) of the NAACP represent such an interesting cross-section of ideologies and life-stories that the very idea that there was no "serious challenge" to segregation is just itself a version of such narrative effacement.*

 

Perhaps, Singer can find the time to read a biography of Thurgood Marshall or simply learn about the significance of Smith vs Allwright (1944)?  The history of philosophy is intertwined with the history of political and legal theory (President Wilson was a political scientist with a Hopkins PhD, after all); we owe it to our students to do homework on and understand the institutions and privileges we have inherited and develop.

 

 

When the Top Just War Ethicist Calls for Proxy War

[A]irstrikes against targets within the cities that the Islamic State controls will almost inevitably cause disproportionate harm to innocents. The West must not adopt the tactics of Assad. Ground forces capable of discriminating between Islamic State militants and civilians will almost certainly be necessary to dislodge the militants from the cities they control. And expelling them is essential, as the caliphate cannot exist in the eyes of its devotees in the absence of territorial control.
Yet to send Western soldiers into combat against the militants would be perceived by Islamic State members and potential recruits as confirmation of prophesies in which they believe — fantasies involving the reappearance of Crusaders in their Holy Land. For this reason and others, it is important that the forces that purge the cities and towns should consist predominantly of soldiers indigenous to the region: Shiites, Kurds and, one hopes, Sunnis who detest the barbarism of their co-religionists in the Islamic State.--Jeff McMahan "Syria is a Modern Holocaust," The Washington Post.

Professor McMahan is writing in the "In Theory" section of the Post, apparently invited to write on just war theory (a topic on which he is an acknowledged expert); the Post reminds its readers that he is the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford." Oddly, what follows has little to do with just war theory. Rather, McMahan, who repeatedly talks about what "we" and "the West" must do (and should have done during the Holocaust), actively calls for the continuation of air-bombing of "Islamic State’s sources of revenue are appropriate and should continue, provided they can be carried out without significant harm to innocent bystanders;" in addition he advocates a proxy-war in order to "purge" the soldiers from the territory they hold.*

I turn to the internal tensions with and problems of McMahan's position below, but the reason why I am interested in commenting on his editorial is -- not because I am mistrustful of the deployment of the no more Auschwitz analogy (which I am), but -- because it is a salutary reminder of the ways in which analytical ethics is especially unsuited for commentary on political, newsy events of the day (recall this post).  Too much such ethics when used in the public is either merely in the service of politics or exemplary of the dangers of doing ethics without political history and little knowledge of the world (or both). I am mistrustful of such analytic ethics because it does not serve to make -- invisible or vilified! -- others more humane to any of the combatants and outsiders.

First. the interesting bit: I am unfamiliar with an earlier instance of a call for Humanitarian intervention by proxy (without UN seal of approval). For, the core of McMahan's position is that intervention is required not so much from "self-defense" to prevent future "massacres" in the "West," (that "threat" is called relatively "minor,") but rather to end "monstrous crimes" that the Islamic State directs against its own subjects and that "have been occurring for more than a year while we have stood by and allowed them to continue. It is shameful that the aim of defeating the Islamic State has become an urgent priority in the West only after we ourselves have come to feel threatened."+ In addition to our shame, McMahan invokes his "visceral repugnance" at the "daily atrocities perpetrated by members of the Islamic State." That's the humanitarian part. But rather than calling for boots on the grounds supplied by the hegemonic powers (USA, UK, NATO, etc.) in the context of, say, a UN Resolution (international institutions and international law as such are notably absent in McMahan's piece),** McMahan invites us to let proxies do the 'purging.' McMahan is short on specifics, but presumably he advocates sending arms and money (as well as provide training) to states and non-state actors allied against Islamic State. So, by 'proxy' he does not mean sending mercenaries. 

Leaving aside to what degree it is cowardly to ask others to die for your principles, it is notable that while McMahan's rhetoric is about some (undefined) we and 'the West' that is contrasted with barbarism -- not reflecting on the fact that Auschwitz/Birkenau is part of the history of 'the West' -- the actual killing and dying is farmed out to some indigenous others ("Shiites, Kurds and, one hopes, Sunnis"). The opposite of barbarism is probably either civilization or humanity. The problem is, it's hard to make the case that we are humane -- as McMahan recognizes with admirable clarity -- given that we have policies that 'turn away the principal victims" of Islamic State.

I discern in McMahan's piece two reasons for urging fighting by proxy: (i) indigenous soldiers will do better at not killing innocents; (ii) indigenous soldiers are less likely to generate further radicalizations of innocents. This (i-ii) may be true sometimes. But (i-ii) are not obvious in the circumstances at hand (in which he advocates ongoing bombing by 'the West!'). On (i) McMahan is essentially advocating taking sides in (multi-fronted) civil war. But it is a trope going back to, I think, Aristotle that civil wars are the most ferocious wars. While the trope may be false -- WWI and WWII were not primarily civil wars, yet plenty ferocious --, it is pretty clear that civil wars tend to be very savage/dirty, and the wars within Syria and Iraq can be understood, in part, as being part of ongoing Shiite/Sunni civil wars (and Kurdish wars of independence). On (ii) within Islam Apostasy is a very serious crime that in many Islamic countries generates criminal punishment. If indigenous soldiers are understood as apostates (and/or belonging to apostate sects) it is by no means obvious why having them do the fighting this should prevent further radicalization. If 'we in the West' could have learned anything from our own history, it is that intra-religious civil war tends to be barbaric (cf. Thirty year war; much of the 16th and 17th century, etc.)

Moreover, after three or four decades of fighting by Islamic proxy (going back to the Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan), we should by now be aware of the downside to this strategy.  By arming groups that are enemies of one's enemies and that one does not control, one opens the door(s) to having those very same groups aim their fire at us. This is by now such a familiar fact, one can only express surprise it does not figure in McMahan's analysis at all. I am not claiming this will happen (the long-term, strategic interests of the Kurds may well be pro-Western), but it has happened and is also part of the back-story behind the rise of Islamic State (which is, in part, composed of Iraqi officers we armed to fight Iran, and other folk we encouraged to fight Assad).

As an aside, here I am not devoting much attention to the morality and practicality of humanitarian intervention; humanitarian interventions are not always unmitigated goods (latest example: Libyia 2011). Either way, if one advocates for humanitarian intervention by one's fellow citizens then it strikes me as more legitimate to talk of us/we.

So, to sum up. It is possible that McMahan's position is, in fact, the wisest political one to take (to put it crudely: it minimizes our losses in the short run). For all I know the alternatives may really be worse. But it is not obvious that it is the most ethical course. If anything, if we reflect on the nature of responsible public speech, McMahan's essay falls short of the demand to avoid advocating policies when all the knowable downside risks fall all on others (that are neither represented in our political processes nor imaginatively treated as being part of 'us'). Perhaps  this demand is sometimes excessive, but when it comes to matters of life and death (war) it is a minimal obligation.++

 

On Fame in Philosophy

That which Epicurus could promise his friend, this I promise you, Lucilius. I shall find favour among later generations; I can take with me names that will endure as long as mine [habebo apud posteros gratiam, possum mecum duratura nomina educere.] --Seneca, Letter XXI

Seneca reveals that he writes for two (possibly three) audiences: his official addressee and 'student,' Lucilius, and posteriority. (The third audience is composed of his contemporaries who may read the letters addressed to Lucilius.) It follows from this remark that Seneca understands his letters not only as particular advice to a particular person, but also -- for lack of a better word -- as exemplary. This is one reason why in my series on Seneca's Letters, I have been paying attention to the different personalities and character types encountered along the way. Seneca teaches how to teach and reach different souls at once. Let me give an example of this last point.

Regular readers may recall that this is not the first Letter in which Seneca reveals that he is "doing business with later generations" [posterorum negotium ago] [that's from Letter 8, recall]. So this is at least the second explicit reminder of one of the points of the second Letter: he is writing in order to generate an enduring text. By repeating the point he allows that careless readers catch it. That I do so, too, is a reminder that my daily digressions are meant to entertain and instruct multiple audiences.

To more careful readers Seneca also reveals something about his self-understanding: not all fame is enduring, but all fame is a kind of magnet (I almost wrote 'reference magnet' but decided that has become a technical term) that brings other people and material into its orbit. From that vantage point, for example, the enduring Rawls is fairly generous (he names lots of folk in Theory of Justice [such that the omissions almost become more revealing [recall]]).

But enduring fame in philosophy is not just about name recognition, Seneca claims. The philosopher must also live honorably [honeste esse vivendum]. This is no easy matter, as enduring reflection on Seneca's life has revealed. In fact, in the previous letter, Seneca had distinguished between being a true teacher and being a true philosopher, and identified himself (or so I argued) with the former not the latter. He is only a partial exemplar of the philosophical life. As Thoreau puts it to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

Professional philosophers that teach in universities often express the thought that what we do should not be confused with the art of living; we are better at subtle distinctions (which even Thoreau grants is part of philosophy). It is, after all, true that the standards for tenure and for research excellence are only loosely connected with the kind of lived integrity we find in the lives of, say, Wollstonecraft or Spinoza. (To say this is not to ignore their blemishes.)

But it does not follow that the love of wisdom is irrelevant in the stories we hand down about our analytical teachers; I have been, in fact, amazed how often the stories that I was told about older generations did not emphasize intellectual doctrines but rather focused on questions of character: at Chicago I heard multiple stories about Carnap's social conscience; Dummett's generosity toward refugees (which he also defended intellectually) may well endure long after his theory of truth; Russell's courageous pacifism may well be remembered long after analytical philosophy is forgotten; Stebbing's heroic public integrity and private generosity toward refugees will be rediscovered by generations looking for a philosophical exemplar of virtue (cf. Heidegger). These stories suggest that even analytical philosophers -- who always self-identified in opposition to purportedly irresponsible philosophical projects -- believe there is more to the philosophical life than puzzle-solving and clarifying concepts.

So, even those of us that teach in universities can point the way toward the road of true philosophy, as teachers, without either publishing in it or being ourselves true philosophers. How to do this without sounding peevish or moralistic is no easy matter. We teach not just by our writings, our class personae, but also in our moments of exemplary behavior. If our students inside and outside the classroom find their ways onto such a path, then this may generate the conditions for a worthy, enduring fame. 

Seneca, of course, is not allowed to promise something the delivery of which he cannot ensure even if we recognize that by so promising it, he makes it more likely that the desired outcome occurs.  History favors such bravura.