Digressions&Impressions

RIP: Arthur Wijnschenk (1971-2020); On Caravan Camp Sollicitude

This morning my sister informed me that she had learned from Maureen Wijnschenk (his sister) that my distant distant cousin, classmate, and friend, Arthur Wijnschenk died. I have known Arthur, and his family, my whole life. Before his coming out he dated my oldest living friend, Liora the youngest daughter of my father's best friend (Chaim), in high school. (I sat next to Arthur at her wedding.) We were not mates in high school, but each in our own way, we tried to escape our childhood environment by fleeing into the wider world--Arthur more boldly and with more panache. But despite cultivating a bad-boy, go-happy, work hard, party harder image, he was loyal to his roots and kept in touch. From my distant perspective, he was one of the early hackers; then let himself be paid by financial firms to protect them from attack; serial entrepreneur (including his favorite, Barcelona Car Tours), moving among Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Madrid,  Barcelona, and even our Amsterdam in restless fashion celebrating each trip with a champagne toast in first class. Even so, he would always track me down all over the world and, when I was broke or trying to make ends meet on an academic salary, would treat me to lavish meals in fancy restaurants always just before they were to become famous.  Often at the end of a night, as I went home, the night would start for him. Sometimes I saw pictures of his adventures in the clubs on social media the next day before he went to the gym.

When my family moved to London a few years, I learned I was not his only regular on his itinerary. There were other distant relatives he kept track off, happily being drawn into their family milestones--giving and accepting nurture along the way. 

I tell you about Arthur, dear readers, not just because I can't think of anything else right now, but because he is one of the proximate causes for my blogging. A decade ago, when I was trying to turn myself into a Dutch public intellectual, I mentioned to him I couldn't get a piece published by any of the main newspapers. Arthur asked to read it. Then told me he had created a website and started advertising the piece on Google up to €50 per day. The effect was shocking: I got an endless stream of hate mail, threats, including death threats, and for many years you could find my name denounced on far-right websites.* To me this was eye-opening because I recognized that one didn't need mainstream media to find an audience; and this helped me reconcile myself to my failure as a public intellectual and develop into this different kind of authorial persona. 

You can read a translation (by his friend Brian Gross) of the piece on NewAPPS. If you look at the NewAPPS archive, you'll see it is one of the very first pieces I published at NewAPPS when it was just a week old (and we had a few dozen daily readers).  Arthur read nearly all of my blogs, always welcoming the pieces in which I dropped my scholarly guard and shared my views in forthright manner. Sometimes, he would send me a quick note thanking me for the occasional, lucid paragraph in the middle of a digressions. 

Eventually Arthur stopped advertising my piece, and discontinued the webserver that hosted it. The right-wing websites that polemicized against it mostly disappeared (today I could only locate one that notes its existence).

Recently, after I won a grant to study debt, just before the corona-lockdown, I was contacted by a leading Dutch banker to come meet with her and discuss. I thought she had read about the grant in the newspaper, but it turned out Arthur had nudged her into meeting me. During our last dinner, a few weeks ago on the back balcony at “Bickers a/d Werf” during one of the endless corona-Summer days, he told me he knew her since his membership of the JOVD, the youth wing of the Dutch main right wing party, and that they had stayed in touch. 

To my delight I found a splendid essay by him (1993) in the JOVDs zine, railing against the internal shenanigans and lack of internal democracy at the JOVD's annual conference -- the article makes clear he was a regular --, and in it he unmasks self-serving careerism and opportunism and he pleads for one-man-one-vote. Anyway, behind the bad boy, there was true engagement. I dont think Arthur had much formal education, or that he was especially bookish, but, not unlike our classmate Arnon Grunberg, he had the gift of an excellent polemicist.+

I mention Arnon not just to name-drop; as it turns out that for a few years we had an intense three-way email correspondence, which started with a note by Arthur to Arnon in September 2000.**  The note congratulates Arnon on his literary success and implies that Arthur is earning money as a porno-producer.*** In our letters we recognized ourselves as prisoners/wardens of 'caravan camp sollicitude' (woonwagenkamp de eenzaamheid).

Because Arthur and I traveled a lot, we started talking about Corona in January. We were both mystified, even outraged by the utter lack of care and reaction by national authorities. We found the role of the WHO mysterious. I tried to nudge him into developing mobile and airport testing capacity. Corona has been very tough for him. It hurt his businesses and undermined his life-style. He was (quite rightly) angered by the ways governments supported better connected businesses than his own. But most importantly it threw him back onto himself.

In response, while he tried to keep his businesses afloat, he checked in almost daily, including with my mom--they both would express concern for the other to me. (Early in the lock-down with PPE shortages everywhere, he surprised her with state of the art face-mask.) I found their mode of contact reassuring, perhaps too re-assuring. 

Arthur and I came from families shaped by the Holocaust, by betrayal and by great acts of compassion and rectitude. It would be tempting here to write something about our shared sense that all of that was not an aberration, that we're sleepwalking into more disaster. So often he would ask me what we could do.

I wish I were better at capturing the cocktail of survivor guilt, perseverance, love, and hardness of those we grew up with; the focus on money-making, the impatience with official delusion; the moving between many different worlds at once; the sense of connection with distant relatives who had to stand in for never-born cousins and uncles/aunts. But we rarely talked about the past; we were immersed in a present haunted by omissions and ellipses. Adult friendship is the art of tactful silence. And during the last few years, after my dad died, and as he quietly become a more regular fixture in my life, I learned from him to be more accepting of good fortune as our lives glide too closely alongside the precipice.   

Arthur's mom, (like my own) youthful when she had her first child, died early at the age of 45 from cancer. My heart goes out to his dad, and Maureen. 

 

On Comfort Reading, James Herriot, and Love on the Rocks

Once a upon a time, my wife was having a very crappy day. As it happens the Headcorn railway station in Kent, where she was waiting to catch a train, has a bookcase for books discarded by the public that they use as a charity fundraiser. Her eye fell on the James Herriot paperback pictured below.

Once, we stayed in a delightful bed and breakfast in North Yorkshire, in order to hike in the area. It was a memorable trip because it was my first experience with hiking in England; while it was already late March, the Dales and Moors were covered with snow and had a mesmerizing beauty in their barrenness. When we drove into the village, she pointed to a house and said 'that's James Herriot's house!' Only after she started filling me in, once we were snugly settled in the BnB (which had an astounding breakfast pudding with rhubarb compote), I had vague sense of remembering a TV series, popular forty years ago, which, when it aired in Holland, was called, conveniently, James Herriot.  She had devoured the books as an adolescent. 

When she was telling me the story about the encounter with the James Herriot paperback, I was reminded, once again, that there is, analogous to comfort food, a kind of comfort book. Some books we can safely return to in times of pain. And, oddly enough, despite the fact we know the plot and characters, the sense of escape and adventure may be no less thrilling. In fact, in virtue of our familiarity with these, there is a kind of safety we also feel with old friends.   

While I was pretending to be listening and reflecting on the nature of comfort books, my wife showed me a little rock pictured below. I inferred from the fragment of the last sentence of hers I processed, she found the rock under the James Herriot in the the case. I was now full attention. She said, 'and so I was given a heart.'  (See the two pictures below.)

It turns out there is a facebook group Love on the rocks uk (Painting Rocks ~ Making Smiles). It's mission is this: "Paint a rock, write Facebook love on the rocks uk on the back, take a picture and let us know where your hiding it and then make a stranger smile when they find it! It's free it's easy it's fun! Spread the love." As I write this, it has 96,962 members. While looking for a photo of the rock my wife found, I learned that many of the rock-paintings are delightful, even gorgeous. 

Anyway, the sappy moral of today's digression is that sometimes the kindness of invisible strangers really is heartwarming. Thank you.

On Analysis

Seven or so years ago, near the beginning of my analysis, I explained to my analyst, after some frustrating experiences, how important it was to me that they always engage with the actual content of what I was saying. I took a huge amount of care in expressing myself – choosing exactly the right words, multiplying distinctions in order to communicate with laser precision – and I didn’t want to be ‘interpreted’ before the letter of what I was saying had been fully attended to....Those seven or so years ago, when I implored my analyst to take me at my word, it was, almost needless to say, only the first way, according to which it contrasts with “spirit,” that I had in mind. Two or three years after that, well into the analysis, I was becoming more comfortable and more curious. The tight control over my words – the only real power I could exert to protect myself and ensure the analysis did not unleash anything too scary – came to feel constricting, even suffocating...

 At the end I exclaimed “I’d like to go back to that injunction I made right at the start. Please make an effort to engage with the letter of what I am saying before trying to hear what is unsaid.” To which they replied, with some, subsequently confessed, hyperbole: “You do realize that is literally the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing?!” (One reason to think that the designation of psychoanalysis as “the Jewish science” may be misleading.) In some sense, of course, what they said is obvious. They are listening for what is unconscious, which is unlikely to be found in the obsessively-controlled language that I wield almost like a weapon. But it startled me nonetheless and I decided to write this post to help work through it.--Simon J. Evnine "For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life"

One recurring fascination is the common root of 'analysis' in analytical philosophy that it shares with the 'analysis' in psychoanalysis. I sometimes wonder why analyse and its cognates had such pull over late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Viennese and Cambridge) minds. I was reminded of this by Simon Evnine who regularly calls my attention to his blog, "The Parergon." I hope he does not mind too much being the trigger occasion for these impressions. I treat him here as the everyman of analytic philosophy in which all of us can be substituted into his place, opaque contexts be damned!

It is noticeable that Simon treats his precision and "care in expressing" in terms of a "weapon." Even when used in self-defense, weapons are explicitly designed to hurt others.* I have noted before (recall) the analytic philosopher's tendency to describe the toolkit of her  craft in terms of surgical (and laser-like) instruments, but in those instances the instruments are meant to heal. Of course, Simon's intent is not to hurt others, but self-protection ("the only real power I could exert to protect myself.")+ 

I do not know a better expression of the fragility at the root of much analytic philosophy. Any badly formulated phrase is a misstep of monumental proportions. The robustness of the whole collapses with the weakest link. This fragility is fueled by "frustrating experiences." Once primed by psychoanalysis, it's hard not to discern the dependent child here. 

I do not mean to suggest that the analytic philosopher's attitude toward rigor  and clarity only expresses fragility. One may as well -- and here I am inspired by Simon's "extravagant letteralism" -- read it as pure holiness (recall here on Carnap). After all, a Torah scroll is disqualified if even a single letter is added or a single letter is deleted. Every sign must be correct. 

A few days ago a lovely blog post by Liam Kofi Bright inspired me to reflect a bit on what the norms of analytic philosophy would have to be if we "conceived of conceptual engineering as a means to enter into lifeworlds of others." I asserted that the non-dominating way of doing so requires a willingness to be transformed by the experience. What I missed saying explicitly then, and I suspect this omission (recall) is part of my professional deformation, is that one cannot (non-dominatingly) enter into the the lifeworld of another without, as Simon shows without saying, being vulnerable.

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 Moving Tables

Divide academic reputation up into three types. There is prestige attached to position -- the department one works for, the career stage one is at, whether one has a named chair, just in general the prestige attached to occupying a role. There is prestige attached to achievement -- here I mean prestige attached to publishing, and especially in certain venues, and being cited, or winning awards, or having established priority on some novel discovery of interest, or being known to have given a talk at conferences of sufficiently high standing, etc. Then there is prestige attached to persona -- this one is a bit harder to succinctly summarise with examples, but it happens that one can get a general reputation for skill or brilliance that precedes one's publications or which is not especially attached to any office one holds. An unpublished grad student in a lowly department can none the less have a high reputation if there is a "buzz" around them, and I mean the prestige attached to persona to pick out whatever makes this possible.--"The Perception of Merit" @The Sooty Empiric

Prompted by this blog post by Daniel Hicks (congrats!) [HT Dailynous], Bright writes about the intersectional uncertainty caused by the interaction of three kinds of prestige.* The whole post is worth reading (including its judicious quotations from Auden). I agree with his phenomenology, but I want to start with a nitpick. I have not yet encountered the third type, "the buzz" surrounding an unpublished grad student in a lowly department. And while it is dangerous to infer from personal experience, I seriously doubt this phenomenon exist.

Of course, I am not denying that buzz around a grad student exists. I have encountered such (the "boy wonder") buzz around the unpublished grad student in a prestigious department (with prestigious supervisors, etc.) And for all the changes in the profession--this phenomenon still exists. Such boy-wonder buzz is a joint construction of the person principally involved and the folk pushing it (by pushing it, we don't need to think of illicit stuff; I just mean invitations to high profile workshops, attendance at the parallel session, inviting buddies to come along, offers to co-author, etc.) So, the buzz surrounding the grad student is not really prestige of the person--it requires skilled anointing by others.

Sometimes such anointing is not very subtle. I have discussed the miserable time I have had on the job-market (2001-2005). The market then was in some senses less brutal -- there were (recall) fewer expectations about publication --, but I did experience being invisible at the smoker, being told at a ball-room interview that the interview was only a courtesy to one of my supervisors, being rejected while being the inside candidate, the cancellation of one of two APA interviews a week before the convention (with the request if I "could remain on standby"), and a number of other indignities (recall here and here). Don't cry for me. 

During this miserable run, my lovely and kind senior colleague Dennis Des Chene (later we became partners in blogging crimes) convinced me to present a paper in a workshop on the emotions he was hosting at WashU. I was very ambivalent about this because I was depressed about being passed over for a job in the department (and did not want to present in front of the folks who had just rejected me for undoubtedly sensible reasons), and the early word after the APA was not promising. I was reflecting primarily on my career options outside academia. But when it rains it pours. As Spring progressed, I was suddenly the back up candidate in multiple tenure track searches. By the time the conference came around, and as the top picks settled on their dream jobs, I started to receive multiple tenure track offers at excellent departments and attractive grants for post-doc positions. When Dennis introduced my talk, he made a point of listing my multiple job possibilities. 

I'll never forget the whatitislike of what followed next. During the subsequent meals I went from the side tables to the main table at the workshop. (It was not a big conference so the effect is undoubtedly exaggerated in my memory.) From being barely noticed, I was suddenly of interest to (ahh) my peers. I recall being quite astonished about this. In the small universe of early modern, I had been anointed. To be sure, at that point I had multiple publications -- precisely because I did not  get a tt job out of graduate school I started publishing, a lot --, and I had landed a job at a very good department. So, it's not like I will ever know what it's like to have a boy-wonder buzz. (I always imagine that such boy-wonders fail to be astonished at attention.)   

My response to this was a weird mixture of gratification and suspicion. I was self-aware enough to recognize that with a few more bad breaks I was going to leave the profession; and that I was no better a philosopher in the Spring of 2005 than in the Fall of 2004. I had been very invisible at all the APAs--to this day I cherish the two minutes of interest by John Perry in my work, while we were both waiting in line at a hotel Starbucks. 

Bright notes correctly that "the quest for prestige is miserable - in our hearts we know we want the wrong thing." But he does not note it is also a bad delusion. Our profession has extremely steep prestige hierarchies. This means prestige is an extremely scarce good. Only a few will come close "to be loved alone," but the rest of us not.  While this state of affairs may produce social benefits, and undoubtedly generates some goods for those at the very top of those prestige hierarchies (although near the top, the peaks undoubtedly stand out more vividly and, so, annoyingly), participation in this professional state of affairs is irrational for the individuals involved. And yet those who claim to embrace the love of wisdom, reconcile their professional fates, like hamsters in a running wheel, to it.

On the Demise of Feministphilosophers

Many of us, myself included, have become increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues to help us make philosophical and real-world progress. And if I don’t think blogs are a good place to discuss stuff, it becomes a little odd to keep a blog going. Not all of us agree with this, and there may be spin-off blogs by some of our more optimistic members, which we’ll link to. But this site will soon no longer be hosting blog posts. I feel OK about this, and really good about what we’ve accomplished, but I think the time for this blog is now past and we’ve all got other projects underway.--Jennifer Saul, "Closing down FP" Feministphilosophers.

I dislike mono-causal explanations for social affairs, but it would be no exaggeration to say that the portfolio of websites hosted  by or associated with Feministphilosophers (see also the genderedconferencecampaign or 'what is it like being a women in philosophy?) transformed public perceptions of professional philosophy. They didn't just create a whole range of #metoo moments (before the term was invented) in professional philosophy, but they generated a discipline wide discussions (activism, conferences, etc.) about a whole range of professional and philosophical issues that percolated through the profession and made headlines in the international press. What seemed like a culture of silence (recall) frozen eternally, suddenly became an avalanche of bricks in the wall crumbling to dust. As this process unfolded it generated an intense set of public and more subterranean reactions many of which unsympathetic to the (diverse) aims of feministphilosophers, which changed the incentive structure for public speech. (Recall this post.) Philosophy generated its own dark web and with the frisson associated with dangerous thoughts it became a permanent, dissonant even intimidating counterpoint  to feministphilosophers.

Before i comment on Saul's remarks (see also Yap), I turn to Brian Leiter's post which quoted remarks by one of my favorite scholars, Paul Russell:*

There is, in any case, little or nothing about the debate concerning Lenin/Bukharin/Gramsci et al in the SEP. What this shows is that there are significant movements and developments in philosophy (e.g. Marxism) that are still sorely neglected in the SEP. Despite its considerable merits and achievements, the SEP has a rather narrow and contentious conception of what 'philosophy' is. It is arguable that this reflects a deeper problem, with what could be called the "APA outlook". This is an outlook that includes a rather crude understanding of how philosophy can and should be politically "active". It is heavily focused on “professional” issues (and interests) and it is largely disconnected from real world politics and history - lacking any credible understanding of the role that philosophy has had and that it might play outside its narrow academic/professional concerns. 

It is notable that a perfectly sensible point -- that SEP's coverage of the Marxist tradition is rather thin and unbalanced  -- got submerged into a broader polemic. One could have made that point by noting that G.A. Cohen is discussed more frequently than Lenin or Luxemburg (who is curiously missing in Russell's remarks) in the pages of SEP. The SEP is a public treasure, but this kind of thing is not uncommon--there are huge path dependencies and the effects of idiosyncratic views that have shaped its development. (Just recently I noticed that a student or professional interested in the godfather of formal philosophy, and himself a pioneering feminist, Condorcet was badly served by SEP.) The nice thing about SEP is that they welcome corrective feedback and encourage new entries. It is an unfolding encyclopedia not a monument to a fixed view. So Profs. Russell and Leiter could have simply made their point and helped the editors of SEP coordinate a robust number of invitations to  develop entries that provide a better coverage of Marxism and its complex development and history.

But this perfectly sensible criticism is presented by way of contrast with the rich coverage of feminist themes in SEP and not, say, Bayes (which is discussed in huge number of entries many more than feminism). If I had followed Russell's (and Leiter's) style of argument, I would have said (in line with my priors), that the SEP's fondness for Bayes represent an APA outlook (they even use "APA appratichiks"--this gave me the giggles) that favors technocratic (or scientistic) governance, etc. (Sadly no entry on Feminist Bayesianism yet.)

Don't misunderstand me, Russell and Leiter are right to ask us to reflect on the ways (recall) the steep economic and prestige hierarchies of professional philosophy, as other academic enterprises, reflect, reinforce, and help recycle (ahh) the superstructure of society. But it is a bit peculiar that they do so in the name of encouraging more focus on "real world politics and history" by complaining about encyclopedia entries about another philosophical movement. It's especially odd because feminism has been a means to advance and develop many marxist projects. (That's actually pretty clear from quite a few entries in SEP! Standpoint epistemology, say, is indebted to marxism.)

It's not that they don't have a point: I checked the number of entries on "social activism" and "political activism" (both negligible. By contrast the number of entries that mentions 'politics' is huge). No to put a fine point on it, and I am pretty bourgeois myself, it strikes me that the interests of capital are served just fine by marxist-feminist infighting over crumbs of online space. Why, if one wishes to advance the demise of capital, one would encourage such zero-sum infighting is one of the mysteries of life that elude me. Anyway, as I have argued, with the shift of global capital toward Asia, philosophical fashions and trends, even identity, will shift, too.

Be that as it may, it's possible that the brief effervescent age of the group philosophy blog is over. Quite a few group blogs have folded, and few new ones, it seems, are breaking out. There are three challenges to such blogs: (i) a lot of coordination time is lost to maintain minimal unity of the group; (ii) it is really difficult to remain fresh (and not to keep returning to same issues over and over again); (iii) because of the prevalence of online harassment and the relative slowness of blog discussions (compared to twitter), folk are increasingly unwilling to leave comments at blogs. 

Plato says somewhere that all created things must perish. So, c'ést la vie. Even so, I worry that Saul's point -- she is "increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues" -- may reflect the success of the war of attrition against feministphilosophers waged by (what above I jokingly called) the dark web. But perhaps her new projects, and those of her collaborators , will prove to be as influential and stimulating to philosophical self-awareness. 

 

 

 

 

The Untapped Innovative Potential of Philosophy Blogs

[This is an invited guest post by Justin Weinberg at DailyNous, part of a symposium to celebrate the blog's fifth anniversary. Go read all of it!--ES]

I want to thank Justin for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I hope he forgives me for ignoring Daily Nous, Leiter Reports, Feminist Philosophers (and the rest), which, for present purposes, I’ll treat as ephemera.

When it comes to form and argument, the philosophical blogosphere exhibits little experimentation. This is surprising for four reasons: first, there are a few barriers to entry—it’s not very expensive to set up and maintain a webpage or dedicated site. Second, a few blogs, which clearly aim to attract advertisers, excepted, blogs can be a labor of love and can ignore the commercial need for attracting eyeballs. Third, and most important, hyperlinks and the ability to combine different media liberate philosophy from previous constraints, which, say, impose linearity or ensconce philosophy in written and spoken words.

Most philosophy in the blogosphere—both the outward looking stuff aimed at that magical entity, the public, as well the more recondite material aimed at the professional aficionado—is continuous with lots of pre-internet age philosophy. What’s changed is the potential, instantaneous reach of one’s conversation/dialogue or lecture (e.g., podcasts), which, together with written essays and arguments, can find truly global audiences. Even the well-funded efforts at using the internet to deliver access to courses, both for profit and not-for-profit, have, while making Michael Sandel even more famous (by academic standards) than he was, not transformed the very idea of a philosophy course or a curriculum.

I do not wish to minimize the significance of valuable online resources (e.g., the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, philpapers, books.google, etc.) and the many online communities, which make the study and research of philosophy easier and less isolated. I can access materials at some of the best libraries without leaving my study. I can participate in online discussion of Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy any time of the day with likeminded enthusiasts. Once the algorithms of Google.translate are perfected (in the manner of Star Trek’s universal translator) we can look forward to an even more globalized, philosophy blogosphere. With liberal arts colleges sprouting up all over the world, we are seeing culturally hybrid curricula shaping new kinds of minds. The cosmopolitan in me rejoices and if mankind can survive the century—not a foregone conclusion—the philosophical future seems bright.

Even so, I am baffled we’re not seeing more innovation that deploys the resources of cheap computing power creatively. Little is done to develop philosophy through, say, spatial or multi-dimensional reasoning. The clever use of hyperlinks could show what happens to arguments or premises in subtly different contexts. While there are fantastically inventive visual presentations of information or of people presenting philosophy (and many terrific memes), I am unaware of attempts to change the visual or tactile experience of philosophy on screen or in virtual reality.

Fourth, underlying the puzzle is the assumption that technology and accessibility of new sources of inspiration influence the development of philosophy. Anybody who reads Plato is reminded that Socrates thought it significant that Anaxagoras’ works circulated in scrolls that could be bought (presumably also after his exile)—see Phaedo 97b, and Apology 26de. Plato records for us Socrates’s ambivalence (or worse) about philosophical writings in the Phaedrus 275. To jump to a period I know better, much philosophical innovation by the Novatores who now have familiar names (Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, etc.) took place outside universities and monasteries; the riches of early modern philosophy were made possible by the cheapness of print and the relative reliability of logistics. Of course, early analytic philosophy was jumpstarted by breakthroughs in conceptual and inferential tools. And Islamic philosophy by translations from the Greeks, etc.

Surely the time is ripe for a philosophical, avant-garde techno-punk that reboots philosophy outside the academy. During the last decade, there has been a decisive shift in analytic philosophy (our culture’s hegemonic species of philosophy). It used to be that in it knowledge of the cutting edge, or research frontier, of professional philosophy could be mastered by one or two graduate seminars building on a fairly minimal undergraduate curriculum. Now, competent professional philosophers who mind their own business outside the major research universities may find it difficult to understand the arguments in, say, formal epistemology or modal metaphysics. Concept inflation and concept refinement are the characteristics of our age.

My point is not to be critical—I am no enemy of esotericism or the division of labor; but rather to admit that the philosophical historicist in me expects that when philosophy develops subtle refinement and technology can ferment innovation and revolt, the ground will move under our feet.*

*Thanks to Mark Norris Lance John Protevi, and helen de Cruz for encouraging nudges in writing this post.

 

---

When a Continental Philosopher Hasn't Heard the News that The War is Over

This leads me to my conclusion concerning the present volume. It could have profited from an in-depth investigation into the conceptual and philosophical architecture of existentialism and existential thought as they have developed over the last two hundred years. This would have led to the insight that neither neuroscience nor the interaction of empirically grounded psychology and physics with the existentialist tradition are anything very recent. This is not just a matter of historical negligence on the part of the volume; it leads to a very shallow understanding of both existentialism and neuroscience among the majority of the contributors. Many of the older contributions of existentialists to the mind-body/mind-brain-problem, or to articulating the role of modern science for our self-understanding as human beings, are so much more sophisticated that the current volume as a whole does not live up to the standards of first and second-wave of existentialism. More significantly, though, I think we ought to deny that there is even such a thing as "neuroexistentialism". Yet, whatever the validity of this negative existential assertion, it seems clear enough that neuroexistentialism is in pretty bad existential shape.--Markus Gabriel, reviewing Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (eds.), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, Oxford University Press, 2018@NDPR

A decade ago, I think, analytic philosophers grasped that they had won the fraternal war with continental philosophers over jobs in the discipline. While continental philosophy maintained some of its cultural capital -- especially (recall) in the lucrative art market -- its students were increasingly consigned to seeking positions in shrinking humanities programs, whereas philosophy was tapping into science-friendly interdisciplinary programs. Perhaps coincidentally, simultaneously, analytic philosophers turned against the bullying and blood sport culture within the profession. After all, bullies, who are especially status conscious, are  useful to create dominance over other factions and to police unity within the ranks. With the war won, the costs of the toxic culture have become increasingly apparent and intolerable.

The previous paragraph is of course a stylized representation of a messy reality. But one nice consequence of this new state of affairs is an increasing interest among folk to draw on resources from outside one's own traditions -- this is, in fact, how analytic philosophy always replenishes itself -- and a willingness to collaborate with folk, including Continental types, who previously would have been outside the margins of respectability. Another potentially healthy feature is that various sub-field-echo-chambers can draw on wider pool of reviewers and referees. 

Problem is, Markus Gabriel, a mediagenic and high-profile (non-analytic) philosopher in Germany, has no desire to play nice. In the quoted review that raised considerable eyebrows for lots of reasons, he basically charges that (primarily analytic) folk use the term 'existentialism' in a shallow way and have no business messing with that 'tradition.'* (For the record Gabriel doesn't frame the review in terms of the contrast between analytic/continental--so what I am doing is kind of uncharitable.) Now, Gabriel's range of charges is wider than this, but one of his claims is that the third kind of existentialism (articulated by Flanagan and Carusso) seems to "more or less the opposite of the two other forms of existentialism" that constitute the existentialist tradition.  One may say then, cheekily perhaps, that Gabriel objects to a form of intellectual appropriation that ends up undermining the very tradition that is being appropriated (so there is no criticism of appropriation as such, although the spirit of the review is so uncharitable that one wonders if the appropriation itself generated the hostility). Because of the stakes involved, Gabriel is unwilling to review most of the contributions to the volume on their own terms. 

I don't have much evidence for the spin I am putting on the review, but notice that it relies on a distinction between "actual existentialism" and (let's say) fake existentialism. The fake existentialism is the one introduced/coined by Caruso and Flanagan. I offer two observations.

First, Gabriel here tacitly assumes that extending a tradition always must involve a form of continuation such that no essential features of the tradition are undermined. But of course what is thought essential in the tradition is, often, a matter of (quietly or more explicitly) retrofitting of the tradition to the newly extended version of it. The previous sentence is, of course, natural to analytic philosophers, who have a hard time articulating any necessary and/or sufficient condition of their own tradition at any given time, and to those that have reflected on the change course of some traditions in the past.

Second, Gabriel claims the authority to distinguish between the actual and fake versions of existentialism. This reveals his commitment to the tradition. And he does so in a way in which he denies others the right to speak on its behalf and extend the tradition. Such boundary policing can be quite entertaining to those who enjoy blood sports, and, even for those of us who may find this less than tasteful, can provide an opportunity for learning about deep-seated, otherwise submerged differences. (It tends to be more instructive about the polemicizing reviewer than the work reviewed.) It exhibits what above (and in the title of the post) I call the state of 'war.'  Despite this being an age of global and instant communication, news of the armistice has evidently not reached Bonn.

 

On Writing in the Wake of Deaththreats (Say When Jordan Peterson Comes to Town)

As the Dutch news is now reporting, this week several of my colleagues in my department and faculty have received anonymous death threats and antisemitic hostility because they politely protested a student group's invitation to Jordan Peterson (here's an English version). (One of the targets, Polly Pallister-Wilkens, shared some of the threats on twitter.) For those of you who care about such matters: there was no suggestion to rescind the invitation or to prevent the student group from hosting him. One public letter did propose adding a critical speaker/respondent to the event. (In his measured response, Peterson called his critics,‘cowards, denouncers and totalitarian wannabes’.) I did not sign any of the letters because I do not wish to contribute to Peterson's branding strategy, which clearly relies on courting and escalating such controversy.

Unlike such events Stateside, the event was organized by a non-partisan student group, which has a strong preference for captains of industry, celebrity academics [sic], and political insiders. The regular series started during the financial crisis with a sense of urgency, but the interviews have generally become utterly anodyne, and the main benefit it provides, I think, is a networking opportunity for the students involved. Because it is so regular, and devoid of irony, the series gives a nice window into the public thinking of the social elites of Holland (and Europe). One day a historical sociologist will find it very useful record.

That criticism of a Peterson-event would lead to threats ought not surprise anybody who has a twitter account. Predictably, the cheerleaders of Peterson in the Dutch press ignore the death threats and attack my colleagues for being critics of free speech (etc.) [and routinely conflate free speech and the various (note the plural) academic missions of the university (something I have blogged a bit about, recall , say, here, here, here. here, here, and here.)] I use 'predictably' because Peterson is not the first to produce death threats in his wake. Other colleagues in my department, most of us are rather old-fashioned Weberian social scientists (with expertise on populism, migration, refugees, political trust, elections, communication, gender, etc.), have  received threatening e-mails when certain right-wing Dutch websites report on them.  

A few years ago I signed a letter protesting Dutch policy change on refugees. Readers of an extreme-right site then nominated all us for a list of traitors. (In  our case, the proposed punishment was not death but a one-way ticket to an insane asylum, after the revolution.) 

My first taste in such matters occurred much longer ago, in 2010, when I tried to publish a (road-to-serfdom inspired) piece about the rise of Geert Wilders, in which I claimed he was a consequence of the corruption of the rule of law among Dutch political elites. No Dutch mainstream outlet was willing to take the piece. I then self-published it at NewAPPS, An entrepreneurial friend then advertised a Dutch version on Google, and the piece went viral in the then still somewhat underground world of alt/extreme right websites.* For a few weeks I got anonymous emails with loads of threats and antisemitic slogans. Most were too vague to really concern me. Because we had a newborn child I decided to keep quiet. We did not need more stress. 

One letter was different. It was articulate and signed by a real person, who introduced himself as a business owner. I responded to his letter, and we had a surprisingly amicable correspondence about my argument and Dutch politics. That exchange  petered out.

Either way, public interventions on certain topics can lead to anonymous harassment or intimidation. This is true even in professional philosophy (recall this post).** It is no surprise that awareness of this mechanism leads to anticipatory forms of self-censorship and second-guessing. Did I not sign because because I do not wish to contribute to Peterson's branding strategy or did I want to stay below the radar of local hotheads? Mill wrote that "unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions," but I think he missed that unmeasured vituperation will create a prevailing opinion because it deters people from professing contrary opinions.

In my environment, grant agencies and university presidents want public impact. But they do nothing to protect their employees against the intimidation or help them navigate law enforcement issues. (I'd love to hear otherwise.) So, there is much room for despair. Left to our own devices, we respond by caring for each other and acknowledging to each other that this side of the job exists. 

My own response to these developments has been to study how to be a public thinker (even wrote a book about it), to ignore most anonymous commentary, and to become more strategic about my public interventions. I have already shared (recall) my general strategy on public philosophy, and I would reiterate how important is to plan one's public interventions with some worst-case advance planning. But the reality of being in an environment, a culture really, of permanent harassment directed at academics who do not conform to the routine vitriol directed against refugees, immigrants, and Muslims (etc.), and who defend rule of law against authoritarianism meant that I speak less to a wider public (fewer editorials, fewer public events, etc.) and aim to communicate more directly with decision-makers, opinion-makers, or educations (like you).+  I tell myself this also fits my academic personality better.

I admire my courageous colleagues who keep serving the public publicly. Perhaps, my prudence is adaptive, or base cowardice. 

 

 

On Public Philosophy and Transgender Rights Campaign

During the past year professional philosophers have struggled with controversies pertaining to transgender issues (recall the Tuvel/Hypatia affaire here and here; and again involving language in journal articles [recall my piece on the open letter to the editors of PPR at Dailynous here;] the debate between Talia Mae Bettcher and Kathleen Stock;[1] the language of the APA philosophy blog [see Leiterreports]), etc. These debates have intersected with wider society and have even led to campaigns to to have faculty removed from their positions in the UK. While I am no friend of calls for civility in debate (recall this post among many), the way this debate is conducted is unedifying and I have already expressed despair that even the philosophers party to the debate seem to be unable to recognize explicitly each other's vulnerabilities. 

I start this post with two preliminary comments. First, as regular readers know, I support so-called public philosophy (recall; which comes in many varieties [see here]) and philosophical activism (which comes in many flavors and in support of many different kinds of causes) of society and the profession. I have long admired the service philosophy of Kristie Dotson (recall), Hugo Bedau's activism against the death penalty, and John Corvino's work on same-sex marriage. (I am sure readers can add to this list their own favorites.)* Such cause/ideal-promoting political activism is both self-justifying and a useful means of discovery of truth. While philosophy can benefit from a measure of distance, cool reflection, and impartiality, it's also the case that engagement with the messy details of lived experience and the arguments generated by political conflict can also be a useful constraint on and source of creativity for philosophical discovery of the nature and properties of an ideal. 

However, I have  long thought that it seems unwise, or at least imprudent, when philosophers qua being philosophers support active politicians and political parties. (That's compatible with doing so qua being citizens of a particular polity). It seems best if one's pursuit of truth and the good is not sullied by and subject to the many tactical compromises and fatal injustices that accompany political life pursued by imperfect beings like us. I rarely see philosophical excellence in support of a politician or party,+ and much that I find cringe-worthy.

Second, transgender people are subject to bigotry, discrimination, harassment, and violence. This is well documented in the UK and US. The evidence also suggests that many transgender victims are also (intersectionally) members of other historically discriminated minority groups, I assume here that the violence occurs in virtue of their being transgender, and that belonging to it means one belongs to (all other things being equal) a vulnerable category of people. So,

• I wholeheartedly support the campaign for transgender rights and protection under the law.***

Regular readers know (recall this post on MLK Jr.) that I also think that human imperfection, self-interest, and bigotry often undermine enforcement of the law and can even make the most beautifully written laws a tool of oppression. What's needed is, thus, also sufficient popular support or opinion and the right dispositions in favor of such rights. Political campaigns are, therefore, crucial to generate such support.** Of course, there is something of a paradox lurking here, because where such support exists the right would not be necessary.

One important feature of new rights is that the costs and (new) down-side risks of these need not be distributed evenly on the population. That's of special concern if these fall on other vulnerable groups. I understand the present campaign against trans rights, which includes some high profile self-described feminist philosophers -- where not informed by or leaning on bigotry -- as aiming to articulate some such risks to vulnerable women, especially those in prisons and among the homeless. I think such concerns eminently reasonable, but that's because there is a reasonable fear of violence and degradation within prisons and fear of violence against the homeless (see here). But rather than fighting transgender rights, the proper response to such concerns for the very vulnerable is, I would think, to join the coalition for thoroughgoing prison reform and better/more resources and conditions for the homeless.++ 

So my preliminaries have turned into a blog post, which was prompted by my momentary reconsideration of my stance on public philosophy.+++ It's true that there is no reason to believe that philosophical activism will always be beneficial. And I am reminded of the fact that even in the pre-internet age (which, let's stipulate, can make any bad thing worse), there was and never is a golden age of civility (as those of us old enough to recall philosophical debates over abortion, LGBTQ rights, or if one pays attention to debates over Zionism/BDS, etc.)---I have often remarked upon the fact that as a discipline we have an all-too-human fondness for philosophical debates as blood-sports and the delicious take-down.

It's a familiar fact that the pursuit of a worthy cause can turn into fanaticism and unpleasant and vindictive (moral) righteousness. And it is known that friends of worthy causes will find it difficult to condemn the excesses because they do not wish to be seen as undermining the worthy cause. For, it's also all-too-common that critics of the worthy cause will use such excesses as a tactic to undermine a cause, and shift debate away from consideration of the underlying evils. Savvy intellectuals recognize the temptation they may benefit from escalation and from hyping an otherwise unworthy critic, inviting abuse from their anonymous followers, with the cycle being renewed etc. And so it can often happen that wisdom is pushed aside or found crouching unnoticed in the margins of the arresting debates. 

In light of such facts people of good will may prefer to retreat to the ivory tower, and pursue their worthy work in undisturbed quiet. Others will note that these facts are part of the eternal return of life's carnival, and will will them...one tweet at a time eternally.