Digressions&Impressions

Again, Foucault, Kuhn, Carnap and Incommensurability

Despite the reassuring pleasure that historians of medicine may feel when they recognise in the great ledgers of confinement what they consider to be the timeless, familiar face of psychotic hallucinations, cognitive deficiencies, organic consequences or paranoid states, it is impossible to draw up a coherent nosological map from the descriptions that were used to confine the insane. The formulations that justify confinement are not presentiments of our diseases, but represent instead an experience of madness that occasionally intersects with our pathological analyses, but which could never coincide with them in any coherent manner. The following are some examples taken at random from entries on confinement registers for those of ‘unsound mind’: ‘obstinate plaintiff’, ‘has obsessive recourse to legal procedures’, ‘wicked cheat’, ‘man who spends days and nights deafening others with his songs and shocking their ears with horrible blasphemy’, ‘bill poster’, ‘great liar’, ‘gruff, sad, unquiet spirit’. There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree, and it is for psychiatrists to identify the paranoid in the ‘gruff’, or to diagnose a ‘deranged mind inventing its own devotion’ as a clear case of obsessional neurosis. What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely as a disturbance. Reading through the descriptions next to the names on the register, one is transported back to the world of Brant and Erasmus, a world where madness leads the round of moral failings, the senseless dance of immoral lives.

And yet the experience is quite different. In 1704, an abbot named Bargedé was confined in Saint-Lazare. He was seventy years old, and he was locked up so that he might be ‘treated like the other insane’. His principal occupation was 

lending money at high interest, beyond the most outrageous, odious usury, for the benefit of the priesthood and the Church. He will neither repent from his excesses nor acknowledge that usury is a sin. He takes pride in his greed. Michel Foucault (1961) [2006] History of Madness, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, pp. 132-133

In larger context, Foucault is describing how during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called 'classical age') a great number of people (Foucault suggests a number of 1% of the urban population) were locked up in a system of confinement orthogonal to the juridical system (even though such confinement was often practically indistinguishable from prison--both aimed at moral reform through work and sermons). This 'great confinement' included people with venereal disease, those who engaged in sodomy and libertine practices as well as (inter alia) those who brought dishonor (and financial loss) to their families alongside the mad and frenzied.

To the modern reader the population caught up in the 'great confinement' seems rather heterogeneous in character, but their commonality becomes visible, according to Foucault, when one realizes that it's (moral) disorder that they have in common from the perspective of classical learning. According to Foucault there is "no rigorous distinction between moral failings and madness." (p. 138) Foucault inscribes this (moral disorder of the soul/will) category into a history of 'Western unreason' that helps constitute (by way of negation) the history of early modern rationalism (with special mention of Descartes and Spinoza). Like a true Kantian, Foucault sees (theoretical) reason as shaped by practical decision as constitutive of the whole classical era (see especially p. 139).  My present interest is not to relitigate the great Derrida-Foucault debate over this latter move, or Foucault's tendency to treat -- despite his nominalist sensibilities -- whole cultural eras as de facto organically closed systems (of the kind familiar from nineteenth century historiography).

My interest here is in the first two sentences of the quoted passage. It describes what Thomas Kuhn called 'incommensurability' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's Structure appeared in 1962, and initially there seems to have been no mutual influence. I don't want to make Foucault more precise than he is, but we can fruitfully suggest that for Foucault incommensurability involves the general inability to create a coherent mapping between two theoretical systems based on their purported descriptive content. I phrase it like to capture Foucault's emphasis on 'descriptions' and to allow -- mindful of Earman and Fine ca 1977 -- that some isolated terms may well be so mapped. As an aside, I am not enough of a historian of medicine (or philosopher of psychology) to know whether nosological maps can be used for such an exercise. (It seems like a neat idea!) 

So, Foucault is thinking about ruptures between different successive scientific cultures pretty much from the start of his academic writing (recall this post on the later The Order of Things). In fact, reading History of Madness after reading a lot of Foucault's other writings suggests a great deal of continuity in Foucault's thought--pretty much all the major themes of his later work are foreshadowed in it (and it also helps explain that he often didn't have to start researching from scratch in later writings and lectures). 

In fact, reading Foucault with Kuhn lurking in the background helps one see how important a kind of Kantianism is to Foucault's diagnosis of incommensurability. I quote another passage in the vicinity that I found illuminating:

The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.--pp. 129-130

For Foucault, a concrete a priori is itself the effect of often indirect cultural construction or stabilization. In fact, for Foucault it tends to be an effect of quite large-scale and enduring ('solidly') social institutions (e.g., the law, penal/medical institutions) and material practices/norms. The discontinuity between concrete a priori's track what we may call scientific revolutions in virtue of the fact that systems of knowledge before and after a shift in a concrete a priori cannot possibly be tracking the same system of 'objects' (or 'empirical basis'). 

I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault a system of knowledge cannot be itself a source/cause of what he calls a 'synthesis' that makes a concrete a priori possible. That possibility is explicitly explored in (his discussion of Adam Smith in) his The Order of Things. But on the whole a system of knowledge tends to lag the major cultural shifts that produce a concrete a priori. 

Let me wrap up. A full generation after Structure appeared there was a belated and at the time revisionary realization that Structure could be read as a kind of neo-Kantian text and, as such, was actually not very far removed from Carnap's focus on frameworks and other projects in the vicinity that were committed to various kinds of relativized or constitutive a prioris. This literature started, I think, with Reisch 1991. (My own scholarship has explored [see here; here] the surprising resonances between Kuhn's Structure and the self-conception of economists and the sociology of Talcott Parsons at the start of twentieth century and the peculiar fact that Kuhn's Structure was foreshadowed in Adam Smith's philosophy of science.) I mention Carnap explicitly because not unlike Carnap [see Stone; Sachs, and the literature it inspired], Foucault does not hide his debts to Nietzsche. 

So here's my hypothesis and diagnosis: it would have been much more natural to read Structure as a neo/soft/extended-Kantian text if analytic philosophers had not cut themselves off from developments in Paris. While I do not want to ignore major differences of emphasis on scope between Kuhn and Foucault, their work of 1960 and 1962 has a great deal of family resemblance despite non-trivial differences in intellectual milieus. I actually think this commonality is not an effect of a kind of zeitgeist or the existence of an episteme--as I suggested in this post, it seems to be a natural effect of starting from a broadly domesticated Kantianism. But having said that, that it was so difficult initially to discern the neo-Kantian themes in Kuhn also suggests that not reading the French developments -- by treating 'continental thought' as instances of unreason (which is Foucault's great theme) -- also created a kind of Kuhn loss in the present within analytic philosophy. 

 

 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

Covid Diaries: hermeneutic self-care

On a beautiful Sunday evening I got my AstraZeneca (Oxford) jab at the Francis Crick Institute. They were running ahead of schedule, so they called me (on a foreign mobile phone-number!) to ask me to come in early. It was brilliantly organized; the crew was cheerful -- 'yes, I was ready to make history!' I responded --  and I was in and out of the building under fifteen minutes. Sometimes, I get a glimpse of why the the Brits adore their NHS.

Anticipating the moment six weeks ago, my wife had initiated the effort to get me -- a foreign citizen living abroad -- registered in the NHS through her GP. (Long story, but the bureaucratic hurdles to my family arrangements are the effect of Brexit.) It was not a very easy process, not the least because of my foreign phone-number. If I had been able to leave my bedroom, I would have gotten a local phone, but all the High street phone-stores were closed through lockdown anyway.

As it happened, just after I confirmed my booking for the jab, I met my local GP last Thursday for the first time. She was extremely empathetic and informative. She had also had suffered from long haul covid since March 2020, and had just gone back to work full time again after a year of struggles. (I suspected she still struggled with it because she was a bit scattered and very fatigued; she did not deny my observation.) She took her time with my story, referred me for blood-work and to a special long haul covid clinic to see a neurologist. She was adamant that I should not expect much medical help, but that she did expect my convalescence to be enhanced by proper diagnosis of my symptoms. It will help you craft your narrative. I noted quietly, based on a small sample, that while Dutch physicians love their new-age 'energy-levels,' the English are more into hermeneutic self-care. In her view, covid had induced a viral encephalitis in me. After six months you should see real improvement. A bit of mental calculation told me, I was probably near the end of my fourth month.

Maybe it was the emotional let-down of feeling heard, but the next day (after my visit to the local GP) I felt awful. It was a long day of fatigue and headaches. I was concerned because due to my wife's shift, I was alone with my son for three whole days. But Saturday I awoke after a restful sleep and then had my best 48 hours since mid December. (For my covid diaries, see here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here; here; here; here; and here.) We walked all over NW3 to farmer's markets, tennis, table-tennis, and other errands. When I got the jab, the superstitious part of me worried that I was messing with success. 

I was right to be worried. Monday I had a strange new headache. On Tuesday I had a strange new nausea; and on Wednesday I was intensely fatigued. While the blood-test on Tuesday was unavoidable, the whole experience was dispiriting: standing in long queues in a truly ugly building (the Royal Free), and a computer mishap that turned me into Eric Liesser. I very much regretted going to my dental hygienist yesterday (mercifully she turned off the radio for me). But postponing it every other week for the last few months, had felt like giving in to the microbes. I also had a sore arm, but it was not as bad as I had worried.

In order to cheer myself up, I tried reading the final lecture/chapter of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics in order to see if I could still do philosophy and re-start these digressions properly. (I really do want to complete my series on the book this Spring.) It was not a wholly silly plan; I have been reading sci fi for two weeks now. And increasingly the reading has become less effort and pure fun. This has been good for my sanity; I love watching movies endlessly in the theatre, but at home I actually find it tiresome.  I now was almost at the 'being-sick is fun' part of my convalescence. 

Anyway, I have learned that there is a major difference between reading a book without much concentration immersed in a kind of flow and reading a book with concentration in order to, say, write about it. In the second, I am constantly taking mental notes (sometimes I scribble these in the margins) and I am in a perpetual silent conversation with the implied author about the work I am digesting. To be sure the flow is not absent in the second kind of reading, which I find very enjoyable and ordinarily (forgive me) energy enhancing, but it involves a further mental activity that I am clearly incapable of now. What's interesting to me -- switching briefly to auto-phenomenology of disease -- is that I find my hyper-engaged ordinary style of reading no less immersive than the kind of reading without much concentration now. 

As regular readers know, one of the side-effects of my covid (or the encephalitis) is a great deal of irritability when engaged with conversations with more than one person at a time (or having radio or music in the background during a conversation), and any zoom/phone conversations. It's pretty clear to me -- I am, after all, the editor of a volume on sympathy -- that my capacity to engage in even modest sympathetic activity has been greatly reduced. This is why I have compared myself recently to an Asperger's. I had not quite realized before that my manner of reading involved so much mental, dialogic activity.  It's a skill that presupposes a brain that I don't have at the moment.

Interestingly enough, and undoubtedly not a coincidence, a lot of the sci-fi novels I have been reading have been exploring the nature of such dialogic activity by positing brains with two or more minds. It's a nice mirror to all the plot-devices that explore the nature of networked intelligence (and AI). A brain with two minds also is a nice metaphor, thus, for reading and so these sci-fi space operas are engaged in a sly form of intertextuality.

It didn't help me, of course, that in violation of  all teaching manuals, Foucault introduces whole new special jargon in the final lecture! (This prevented me from reading the lecture merely at the surface in the way I am reading social media.) He gets away with it not because he is Foucault, but because he treats his lectures at the Collège de France as serial in nature rather than as self-standing series. (There are cross-references among them.)* It's a bit unfair to say this (and given Derrida's criticism of Searle, ironic), but by the end of the 1970s, he is clearly also understanding himself as a franchise.

 

 

Al-Ghazali on No-Platforming and Inductive Risk

62. I therefore collected and marshaled those utterances [of the Ta‘limites], combining thoroughness and accuracy, and answered them at great length. The result was that one of the Sunnites found fault with me for overstating their argument. He said: “This is an effort on their behalf. For they would have been unable to defend their doctrine by such specious arguments had it not been for your pinpointing and marshaling them.” This criticism is justified in a way. Long ago Ahmad ibn Hanbal found fault with  al-Harith al-Muhasibi — God have mercy on them both! — for his writing books in refutation of the Mu‘tazilites. Al-Harith said: “Refuting innovation is a duty.” Ahmad replied: “Yes, but you have first reported their specious argument and then answered it. What assurance have you that a man may not read the specious argument and it will stick in his mind, but he will pay no attention to the answer, or he will study the answer without understanding its real import?”

63. Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s remark is true. But it concerned a specious argument that had not become widespread and notorious. However, once such an argument becomes widespread, replying to it becomes imperative: and replying is possible only after setting the argument forth. To be sure, one should not burden oneself with a difficulty with which they have not bothered. Nor did I do that. On the contrary, I had heard such argument from one of my associates who frequented my company after he had affiliated himself with them and professed their doctrine. He told me they used to laugh at the works of those who wrote in refutation of them, since those writers had still not grasped their argument. He then cited that argument, relating it in their own words. So I could not personally be content with having it thought that I was unaware of their basic argument, and for that reason I presented it; nor did I want it thought of me that, even though I had heard the argument, I had not grasped it, and for that reason I reported it systematically. My aim was to give the fullest account possible of their specious argumentation and then to prove its error to the hilt.--Al-Ghazali Deliverance of Error", translated by Richard J. McCarthy.

My headline is a bit of click-bait, of course. But when I returned to Al-Ghazali after a year ((recall here; here), here), the quoted passage jumped out at me. (And the fact that he anticipates Pascal's wager, which i learned he develops more greatly in The Alchemy of Happiness, chap. 6, but there is a scholarly literature on that!) The passage is, in fact, part of a larger argument throughout the Deliverance on how to think about dangerous knowledge.

This argument Al-Ghazali sprinkles through the text. His favorite metaphor to treat the problem is in terms of snakes and their poison (sometimes he also uses money-changer). So for example, while he thinks the works of the philosophers need to be censored, he clearly also conveys thereby that an informed elite can read them in order  to draw profit from it or learn how to unmask philosophers: "a child must be prevented from handling a snake, not the skilled snake charmer." (par. 53) And a few paragraphs later, he makes the point more explicit "just as the snake charmer must not handle a snake in the presence of his little boy, since he knows that the boy will imitate him thinking he is like his father, but rather must caution his boy against that by being cautious himself in the boy’s presence, so also the man of deep learning must comport himself. Furthermore, when a skilled snake charmer takes a snake and separates the antidote from the poison and draws forth the antidote and renders the poison harmless, he is not free to withhold the antidote from anyone in need of it." (par. 59)*

As an aside, it is clear that Al-Ghazali, not unlike his philosophical targets, thinks the social hierarchy must reflect, in part, the cognitive hierarchy. And the political hierarchy, in turn, must take care of the people. In this instance, the people (the boy) must be protected from harm. These points are also hinted in his treatment of why the philosophers are to be taken as heretics. They (Al-Farabi and Ibn-Sinna) deny, "that men’s bodies will not be assembled on the Last Day, but only disembodied spirits will be rewarded and punished, and the rewards and punishments will be spiritual, not corporal." Now, let's grant Al-Ghazali that this is indeed heretical. It is noteworthy that the problem here is that Al-Ghazali clearly thinks that if ordinary people also come to believe that there are no "corporal rewards and punishments," (par. 47) they are more likely to be licentious and social/political life (and obedience) will become more difficult. But, and to speculate, this only makes sense if Al-Ghazali assumes that ordinary people don't really take talk of disembodied souls that seriously.

Okay, let's turn to the quoted passage above. Al-Ghazali reports that he was criticized for engaging carefully with misguided views and he was (unintentionally) thereby supporting their views. Here the objection is not [A] that in virtue of engaging with misguided views they are made more legitimate (something at the root of no-platforming.) Rather, the objection is that [B] that in virtue of engaging with misguided views these views are thereby strengthened. And while Al-Ghazali is not one of our charitable analytic philosophers, it's clear that in the process of criticizing misguided views, Al-Ghazali spent some time reconstructing them and providing the means by which they could be strengthened. Note that at precisely this moment Al-Ghazali (who undoubtedly takes some pride in his capacity to do a better job at presenting a misguided view than the person peddling the misguided view) acknowledges the reality of the inductive risk (the "criticism is justified in a way,") and in case you missed it, he attributes the point to one of the highest authorities in Islam (Ibn Hanbal, and says it is "true.")

If you engage with misguided and dangerous positions the risk of thereby strengthening those positions is enhanced. Al-Ghazali suggests in light of inductive risk that one should basically ignore misguided views that have little uptake, and should engage with views that are "widespread." He even operationalizes "widespread" in terms of, 'is the cognitive elite aware of the misguided view.' Presumably at that point, a misguided view runs the risk of becoming the norm and/or influence policy. He implies that ignoring the view at such a point becomes riskier than actually accidentally strengthening it. A form of  intellectual damage control is an obligation on the intellectual elite (recall this post on Manski's post-publication review of The Bell Curve.)

I have some sympathy for Al-Ghazali's argument here. (So some of you may wonder why I have not taken on Jordan Peterson yet--thankfully others have done so!) But it strikes me there are two clear concerns. First, as Hume implies in the first Enquiry (E 10.22, SBN 120) it would be better if misguided views would be challenged early in order to prevent uptake in the first place. Preventing the spread of misguided policies is less risky and may, in fact, be less costly and easier. Of course, there are huge opportunity costs involved if one is ever-vigilant against all misguided views. 

As an aside, I have presented Al-Ghazali in terms of a largely consequentialist argument. One may well argue that his own perspective is also deontic or virtue-theoretic; he clearly thinks that there is a duty for him to engage with misguided widespread views. But it is notable that he responds because of reputations costs: "I could not personally be content with having it thought that I was unaware of their basic argument, and for that reason I presented it." (And this form of vanity is also consequentialist.)

Second, Al-Ghazali's response to the objection does not generalize or is not really reassuring. He clearly thinks that because of his brilliance he will end up doing less harm than if he had remained silent. There is a good chance that he will be victorious in the battle of wits/arguments, etc. But this may be an expression of overconfidence. Al-Ghazali clearly thinks not everybody should try to engage with misguided views even if only to refute them. The whole point of the snake metaphor is that skilled snake charmers should be in charge of defanging snakes. But this pushes the problem, which knows no easy solution, back a step:  how does one decide that one is skilled snake charmer? The ones that die in the process of handling snakes may well put the kids in harms way.

On Being Pleasantly Surprised, Even Moved By Badiou

We have to get away from the obsession with language. Speech is of vital importance, but is is caught up in its multiform correlation with the integrality of affirmative experience, and has no constituent syntactic power. To confuse philosophy with grammar or with an inventory of rules is aberrational. Let us abandon, like an old corpse, the idea that natural form of thought is judgment. And above all, do not judge: that is a good axiom for thought.--Alain Badiou on "Gilles Deleuze" (ca 2005) in Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Translated by David Macey (2009), p. 117.

As regular readers know, I have a soft-spot for some of the thinkers (e.g., Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) most reviled by the opinion-leaders of the school in which I learned the toolbox of my profession. But I have never grown fond of Badiou; I find his Maoism abhorrent; his use of set-theory mostly comical. I dislike his writing style (see the first sentence above). But I have a grudging respect for his reading of Spinoza, yet it does not teach you anything you wouldn't know if you read the Ethics carefully. In addition, he once embarrassed friends by not honoring a commitment to headline a conference, too. 

In other words, I don't know what madness possessed me to shell out five British pounds for Pocket Pantheon when Verso had a fire sale. Once I opened the book, I saw he had entertained the thought to call the collection "Funeral Orations,"* but was (luckily) discouraged from using it. The book is a series of "tributes" that jointly function as an introduction to the amazing flowering of  what we may call an affirmative philosophy in Paris from the 1930s to the 1980s.+ A philosophy that was clearly haunted by the heroism, courage, and austerity of Jean Cavaillès, and, in the context of military defeat, the strife of decolonization, and the surprising period of economic growth, adopted Nietzsche as the starting points to overcome Heidegger and Schmitt and the baleful choices they made on behalf of philosophy. And, yet...

I really expected to dislike Badiou's essays--I was expecting him to insert himself into the narrative, becoming the magnetic center of the stars he describes. But Badiou is capable, in fact, of removing himself from the scene of thought, of ignoring his own aspirations; he turns out to be generous and insightful readers of others, capable of (ahh) expressing those he describes and revealing their individuality. All of his essays are invitations to re-readings of the works in light of the lives. 

The quote above is the fourth lesson he ascribes to Deleuze. How to prevent thought from becoming judgment is no easy matter, especially because so much philosophy one encounters casually is about finding justifications for divisive judgment (as the conclusion of an irrefutable argument, a decisive thought experiment, a norm of assertion, etc.).

All writing and reading runs the risk of leading the thought of another.

In Badiou's hands this -- this avoidance of ruling over others, and being ruled by others -- is, in part, the significance of Derrida's method.  The (2005) tribute to Derrida is a virtuoso, touching performance in which he shows the political significance of Derrida's method. Derrida's (metaphysical and methodological) obsession with the non-existent, with the outer edge of vanishing points, where texts show slippage, is revealed as being about the nature of true peace, which is "based upon an agreement" about "that which non-exists," (138). 

Rather than defend Derrida and this reading of Derrida here, I'll just encourage you to reflect on that highest thought; and if you glimpse its potential to go locate Badiou's Pantheon of fourteen lives.

And with that, I wish you a lovely Summer break. I hope  these digressions return in August.

 

 

 

On Disparaging Critical X Studies: A response to Joseph Heath

By evading normative theory, he attempted to draw attention to the problem of judgment. His cryptonormativism was thus not an evasion of the interrogation of his normative stance, but an answer to it. Instead of accounting for where he stood by allying himself with a theory, he turned the question back on his interrogators. ’My position,’ Foucault seemed to argue, ’is to be found in the philosophical life that I lead, in the deep commitments and integrating style that gives my work and judgment their sense and coherence, in the manner in which I have harmonized my bios with my logos.’--Niko Kolodny "The ethics of cryptonormativism: A defense of Foucault’s evasions.' p. 72

I sometimes joke that moving from philosophy into a political science department introduced me to really existing positivists and applied continental philosophy. By ‘applied continental philosophy’ I mean using and extending the concepts of French philosophers (primarily Foucault and Deleuze) or critical theory (Habermas) to make social and political phenomena visible and available for analysis and political response. A version of applied continental philosophy goes by ‘critical X studies’ (as in ‘critical security studies’ or ‘critical middle east studies’). In these fields, philosophy, discourse analysis, social science, and ethnography can be mixed. Like all hybrid practices some of it is rather messy and caught up in specialized jargon* that’s hard to understand to outsiders. But make no mistake, ‘critical X studies’ can also be quite heroic: some of my direct colleagues work with torture victims (see Vivienne Matthies-Boon) in the middle east or document (see Polly Pallister-Wilkins) the plight of refugees in the winter waters of the Mediterranean (etc.) at considerable risk to themselves. The point of these projects isn’t Indiana Jones style heroism, of course, but to describe and explain the cruelties inflicted on people with the misfortune of being born in the wrong region (with the wrong religion, skin-color, and/or gender, etc.)

These misfortunes are not natural disasters—they are man-made and often can be traced, at least in part, to the heavily moralized practices of European and North American statecraft (with ‘humanitarian interventions’ gone awry; with ‘collateral damage’ of bombing campaigns of 'militants’ and, of course, the endless arms deliveries to friendly (‘allied’) dictators (and once allied ‘babarians’), environmentally damaging oil extraction, and rising food prices due to global warming primarily caused by Western consumption.) In often dire, even dangerous circumstances, my colleagues trace individual human suffering to large(r) social causes and political decisions. And they do so with an ethic of responsible research and speech; that is, they theorize the fact that they benefit (publications, careers, etc.) from other people’s misery and they incorporate this fact into their research practices which often generates considerable moral duties on the researcher. In some (but not all) cases these duties shade into ‘activism’ or ‘mobilization’ or ‘charity’ etc. And, all too often, our very own governments are in a tacit, even explicit collusion, with the dictators and ‘barbarians’ to marginalize their attempts at making visible and offering explanations of the suffering.

For Joseph Heath, this is all ‘old-fashioned bafflegab.’ He said so in a blog-post widely and approvingly shared among my friends (both folks with a classically liberal bent and analytic philosophers) on social media. What’s notable about Heath’s post is that he completely misdiagnoses the works he criticizes. He thinks that the folk in ‘critical X studies’ do not know how to make moral arguments and are in the grip of poorly worked out Nietzschean moral perspectivism or even skepticism indebted to Foucault. (“The authors feel a passionate moral commitment to the improvement of society – this is what animates their entire project, compels them to write a book – but they have no idea how to defend these commitments intellectually, and they have also read a great deal of once-fashionable theory that is essentially skeptical about the foundations of these moral commitments (i.e. Foucault, Bourdieu). As a result, they are basically moral noncognitivists, and perhaps even skeptics.”)

Now, before I continue, it’s important to be clear about what Heath gets right: first, ‘critical X studies’ is often informed by a moral indignation (if not despair) and really does try, at least sometimes, to call us to action. And, second, it is also true – about which more below – that there is a mistrust of normative theory (and normative argument) that runs through this literature. Heath is right to remind us that Habermas coined a term, ‘cryptonormativity,’ for this phenomenon. Third, it’s not impossible, of course, that some of the authors of the books he read are really are confused neo-Nietzscheans without adequate grounding in argumentative skills and maybe (fourth) a few of them are really using ‘rhetoric and techniques of social control, such as audience limitation, as a way of securing agreement on their [un-argued for] normative agenda.’ But it is remarkable that Heath basically claims bad faith in ‘critical X studies’ and manages to be obtuse about the very reasons for the existence of cryptonormativity.

Heath overlooks the more likely explanations for the cryptonormativity he has encountered. In a seminal, but overlooked, (1996) paper, Niko Kolodny has put the essential insight succinctly: for the mature Foucault* normative “theory is risky because its practical effects are uncertain.” (67; I use Kolodny here, of course, because his analytic credentials are beyond reproach.) That is, at the heart of Foucault’s stance is a recognition of the reality of and ethical concern over inductive risk and responsible speech. For, anybody familiar with the history of the last few centuries knows (recall) that the specialized, theoretical language of moral expertise is also a fertile tool for social oppression in the hands of the powerful.

As an aside, many analytic philosophers – my people -- insulate themselves from such uncomfortable facts by both allowing themselves to be ignorant of history, sociology, and political science, or by suggesting – ‘it’s not guns that kill people but people that kill people’ -- that the use (or 'abuse') of a theory should have no bearing at all on our evaluation of the theory. This is peculiar because if normative theory and argument are meant to get us to change the status quo, or guide behavior (reform institutions, etc.), how these do so, in practice, is no accidental feature, but (shall we say) it’s core mission. (This is not to deny the beauty and uses for normative theory that is really meant to be ignored in practice.) That is, Foucault’s stance is not an expression of moral skepticism, but an expression of care for others.

The previous two paragraphs are not an argument for the rejection of normative argument or normative theory. It is also not a justification for Foucault’s approach. But the mature Foucault, took responsibility for his words and reflected on the need to address the central problem of all normative theory and that has no easy solution (so far). As Kolodny notes, the challenge of safe-guarding against the all-too-predictable abuses of political and normative theory – and I have blogged a bit about contemporary examples (recall) – led Foucault to reflect not  just on the role of good judgment and character of the theorist, but also on the ethos of theorizing and what I call the philosophical integrity of the theorist (the match between words and actions).

Now, Foucault inspired some bad academic practices. I have railed against the ‘cult of contingency’ that infects some areas of history of science (and history) and historical epistemology. And I have also found myself irritated at the lazy use of ‘neoliberalism’ to describe all of our age’s ills. But Heath’s suggestion that Foucault’s work on Chicago economics and ordno-liberalism is just so much “talk about economic ideas that he didn’t really understand,” is just bluff. Foucault’s work in the area – primarily lectures -- is pioneering and interesting. They are also wonderfully clear: I say so as (ahh) an expert on the history of Chicago economics (go read my papers!) But don’t trust me, take it from one of Foucault’s subjects of study, the Chicago Economist, the late Gary Becker’s evaluation of Foucault (see the note below).*** Of course there are details in Foucault I disagree with, even some of his major interpretations. But that’s to be expected.

Before I close let me insert an autobiographical note (you can skip the next two paragraphs). Like many analytically trained philosophers of my generation, I was thoroughly convinced that continental philosophy was bullshit (which was reinforced by some assertive opinion-makers and some irresponsible academic behavior among continental luminaries I encountered along the way). When I moved to Leiden (2006), I was baffled to discover terrific logicians who were continental philosophers (not just born in Europe, but doing, say, phenomenology); how could this be? I decided I needed to educate myself, and with the help of my colleagues started reading Husserl and Derrida (etc.).

Then one day, I was asked to be an external examiner on a dissertation by Maarten Van Dyck on Galileo and the scientific revolution in Ghent. I knew some of Maarten’s previous work on Galileo and Huygens (who I have  been studying on and off since my undergrad days with the world’s leading scholars of the history and philosophy of physics). Ghent is a provincial university; its academic staff is largely drawn from its own graduates who often spent their whole academic lives there. The philosophy department is a quirky mix of para-consistent logicians, pragmatist philosophers of science, bioethicists, and Lacanians. (Full disclosure: I was later a proud member of the department.) I started reading the dissertation, which offered a wholly fresh interpretation of Galileo drawing on the work of my teachers and, much to my puzzlement, Foucault (and other French theorists). After I finished the first chapter, I was shaken; I could not read on: there was nothing wrong with my learning, but I came to see my mediocrity: in my analysis, I had not uttered a single genuine thought. When I finally picked up Foucault – Lets mots et les choses – I was flabbergasted to discover a historiography with an awe-inspiring and necessary ambition (and grounded in insane amount of academic labor). I do not think of myself as a follower of Foucault (and warmly recommend Spivak’s criticism of less mature Foucault), but I recoil at the venom directed at him emanating from Lilliput analysts.

Okay, let me close. Heath quotes a (rather long and jargon-filled) sentence from “Métis” by Chris Andersen. (It’s the sentence that inspires Heath’s ‘bafflegab.’) I sincerely think the sentence is (while ugly) fully intelligible if you have spent some time with the relevant literature. But I am not going to waste our time by offering an interpretation of a sentence quoted out of context. Rather, Heath goes on to ask in neo-Popperian fashion, ‘can you think of an event that could happen, in the world, that would cause you to lose confidence in this claim?’ This is a fair question to ask of a social scientist (even a ‘critical X studies’ person); oddly Heath offers no argument or evidence to think that Andersen couldn’t meet the challenge. And this gets me to the nub: Heath completely misses that his own rhetoric (e.g., ‘vituperativeness and rhetorical overkill,’ ‘character assassination;’ ‘incredibly dogmatic’ etc.) is a window – no, no, not into his soul or character [I wouldn’t stoop so low!] –  into a form of academic disparagement that counts as perfectly acceptable in our circles and yet simultaneously seems a perfectly apt description of itself.

On what is Philosophy

For several reasons, then, effective criticism requires the creation of novel theories. To define philosophy in terms of its critical spirit is not, then, to miss its  constructive side; it is to require it. It should, of course, be said, that not all philosophers go in for criticism and construction in equal proportions. Some-perhaps Russell-do; some-such as Nietzsche- are more knockers-down than standers-up; and some of the great  system-builders-perhaps, Spinoza-are more standers-up than knockers-down. As ever with work, there may be a certain division of labour-just as there are theoreticians and experimentalists in physics. Moreover, some philosophers may well be more interested, subjectively, in constructing their own system of thought than in using it to criticise others-just as some theoretical physicists may be more interested, subjectively, in developing the mathematics of their own theory than in putting it to the test. So it can look as though creating systems of thought is an independent part of the philosophical enterprise. But if the argument I have just given is right, it is not. Objectively, its existence is a corollary of the critical nature of philosophy.--Graham Priest (2006) "What is Philosophy" (p. 206).

For Priest, philosophy is a "critical spirit;" it "is precisely that intellectual inquiry in which anything is open to critical challenge and scrutiny." (202) In her famous (2013) response to, and elaboration of, Priest (not just Priest), Kristie Dotson points out that on Priest's view, philosophy is 1) subversive, 2) unsettling, and 3) of universal import (Priest 2006, 202-203). As the first sentence above makes clear, Priest relies on a distinction between effective and (let's say) not-so-effective criticism. Unfortunately, he does not quite explain what he means by it, but from his use we can infer some of the things he he has in mind.

One sense is intellectual (and this is the one that Priest emphasizes): the criticism becomes more (i) intelligible/sensible and even (ii) visible in light of alternative theory (206). To become intelligible and visible are not the same, and Priest does not treat them as such. This does not exhaust the uses of alternative theories in making criticisms effective. But here I just want to note also the sociological sense: (iii) to offer effective criticism means one cannot be ignored. So, if one cannot produce a rival theory one's criticism is ineffective (one may as well keep quiet). Priest does not really discuss this sociological feature, but it hovers in the background because Priest motivates his account through copious and generous quotation of Kuhn's (and Laudan's) philosophy of science (recall this post). That is, the inability to produce a constructive, rival theory is a stepping stone to the silencing or making ineffective of one's criticism. (Obviously, Dotson alerted me to the significance of this.)

As an aside, it is worth noting that Priest seems to imply that effective criticism with older/discarded/unfashionable theories is also not effective. I suspect, but can't prove, that this, too, is a sociological claim. It presumably relies on the idea that old theories were discarded for good reasons and so can't really be revived. (There is, here, then, a kind of rationality assumption akin to efficient market in ideas about the institute of philosophy; the community rejects/discards theories for solid, in the sense of durable, epistemic reason.)

Now, I don't wish to imply that Priest (the philosopher) is especially keen on silencing folk. His work is notable for its ecumenical, inclusive spirit. (The inaugural lecture I am quoting from has a serious engagement with Derrida's views.) But the demand that a criticism has to be couched in a rival theory has the effective effect of making most criticisms impotent. Of course, Priest would allow that in a colloquium talk (during Q&A) or in a seminar one could raise criticisms without absent a novel theory. (He is very good on the norms that govern such settings.)*

The position also makes it much harder to permit reductio as a legitimate form of philosophy if one ends up in skeptical aporia. This anti-skeptical sensibility is quite clear in his criticisms of Rorty's Derrida:

Are Derrida and Rorty playing with us? I doubt it; but if they are, we have no reason to take them seriously, any more than I have to take seriously the things that you tell me if you area musing me with riddles-'As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives ...' This is, in fact, just a special case of a well-known bind that was first observed as long ago as Plato's Theaetetus (171a4-c7). Someone who claims that there is no appropriate notion of truth to which assertion must answer can say anything they like. There is therefore no reason to believe them. They have argued themselves out of the game. (200)

I leave aside here, Priest's rejection of play (recall this post; or Derrida's category of frivolity). But it is not quite right (I was about to say 'true') that "Someone who claims that there is no appropriate notion of truth to which assertion must answer can say anything they like." That really depends on their conception of responsible speech. (And here one may well think there are crucial differences between Rorty and Derrida.) So, for example, if you know that somebody's conception of speech is ethical -- that they care about the prevention of harms, that they recognize the capacity of language to be itself a source of oppression, that they think their words create and bind their selves --, one may well have excellent reason to find their utterances  trustworthy (I almost said 'believable' and 'credible') despite the fact that they are disinclined to invoke truth. This may well require contextual and contrastive judgments of character; of course, such judgments may be inefficient or themselves corrupted.

Either way, Priest's rejection of Derrida is too greedy here, even if it is sociologically effective. Most of Priest's readers will come to his text already agreeing with him that Derrida is not worth taking seriously (even if Priest clearly thinks otherwise). As Dotson implies, once one recognizes that there may be more than one game in town, we may also pay more attention to how the rules of the game we're playing may rule out moves on grounds that narrow the playing field too (ahh) narrowly.

 

On the Significance of Derrida to Analytical Philosophy

In many ways I see Derrida as following Heidegger. But he was more pessimistic than Heidegger about the prospects for good metaphysics. And he paid a kind of attention to language that Heidegger never did. One of the main things that he did was to distinguish between what he called “speech” and what he called “writing”. He meant these terms in a more or less technical way. By “speech” he meant, very roughly, the use of signs whose meanings were intrinsic to them, so that they couldn’t be misinterpreted. By “writing” he meant, again roughly, the use of signs whose meanings were extrinsic to them—that is to say, whose meanings depended on the signs’ association with other signs—so that they could be misinterpreted. And he rejected the idea there was any such thing as “speech”, so understood: there was only “writing”. This was significant, because he also argued that much traditional philosophy, including most traditional metaphysics, tacitly presupposed that there was such a thing as “speech”. This was part of the reason why he was more pessimistic than Heidegger about the prospects for good metaphysics: he was sceptical about how far metaphysics could thrive once it had unshackled itself from the traditional forms that it had taken. And this is all relevant to analytic metaphysicians too, because his arguments about the unacceptability of traditional metaphysics carry over to what they’re doing.

So yes, there is something to be said for analytic metaphysicians reading Derrida and confronting the challenge that he poses to their various enterprises. But his style and approach to philosophy are so different from theirs that it would be silly to pretend that they are liable to find his work anything other than alien. Of course I hope that my book may help in that respect, by casting some of his principal ideas in ways that analytic philosophers will find more familiar and more accessible.--Adrian Moore interviewed @3AM Magazine.[HT Leiterreports]

lt is extremely rare for analytical philosophers to say anything positive about Derrida. (In fact, I kind of enjoyed the scandal it caused me to be doing so [recall here, here, and here].)* It is even more unusual to claim that Derrida may well be relevant to analytic metaphysicians in particular. So, I have decided to read Moore's book because of the interview (so more about that not before long).

In the passage quoted above, Moore (Oxford) hints at a substantive reason for analytic philosophers to take an interest: that Derrida undermines (shall we say) the ground beneath the projects analytic metaphysicians pursue. Somewhat strikingly, Moore claims that Derrida has arguments. (This is often denied.) As presented, Derrida is a thoroughgoing semantic holist, who, thereby, makes impossible certain (presumably realist/non-idealist) metaphysical projects. Right now such holism is a non-starter. (One can say, not entirely unfairly, that it was only through the rejection of Quine's holism that contemporary metaphysics got off the ground.) But presumably Moore thinks that Derrida's version of holism is especially insightful and challenging. Moore does not say what Derrida's arguments are that can pull the analytical metaphysian back from her project.

In the passage, Moore allows that Derrida's style is "alien" to the contemporary analytical metaphysician. One may think, in fact, that Moore believes that for those trained in analytical idiom, Derrida is simply unintelligible because Derrida's idiom is incommensurable (in the Kuhnian sense, say) with ours. But a moment's reflection reveals that there is something peculiar about Moore's stance here (analogous to Kuhn's ability to discuss incommensurable scientific paradigms); for Moore clearly believes that he can read and understand Derrida. (Let's stipulate he can.) And Moore is, of course, a trained analytic metaphysician (although by no means a kneejerk realist). So, Moore implies, strongly, that despite alien first impression there is no fundamental incommensurability between an analytical philosopher and Derrida's writing. (His comprehension of Derrida is a proof of real possibility.)

As an aside, if there is no fundamental incommensurability between an analytical philosopher and Derrida's writing, then many analytical philosophers (who often claim that Derrida is bullshit) are just intellectually lazy or dishonest in their encounters with Derrida.

Be that as it may, Moore does not claim that Derrida's arguments would successfully undermine the project of the analytic metaphysian. They are said only to "challenge" them. One may wonder what the benefit of such relevance is. Moore could be thinking that such a challenge could lead to more subtle reflections on the (semantic, conceptual) foundations of the metaphysician's enterprise. It would be amusing (in a cunning of history sense) if grappling with Derrida created more stable foundations for analytical metaphysics.

Such a result would be unintended by Derrida because Derrida's skepticism about metaphysics is not just, as it were, epistemological; it has a Socratic and political or ethical element. Moore hints at the Socratic element in a touching passage:

As analytic philosophy has developed, and as it has become more and more assured, it has also become, in certain respects, less and less self-conscious. The concern with sense has never diminished. But there is less and less concern with what it is for us to make sense. For the most part, contemporary metaphysicians are more interested in just getting on with the business of making it than agonizing about what it takes for us to do so! Dummett, in that respect, can appear alien.

It is notable that the description of Dummett's philosophy is uncannily similar to the description of Derrida. They are both treated as alien. (I once wrote a whole blog post about asking when Wittgenstein had become a continental philosopher; it had not crossed my mind to ask the same about Dummett.) I have to admit that I used to find the word (and concept) 'alien' innocent--I thought of Martians who could fly away at will. But in our day and age, I think of unwelcome refugees when I hear 'alien.'

The main point of this passage is a decline and fall theme: the loss of self-consciousness. (I leave aside the rather harsh comment on the contemporary metaphysician's interest.) In fact, one may see Moore as saying that the point of an encounter with Derrida is that it would lead to a recovery of self-consciousness.

In the interview Moore does not explain the nature or point of such self-consciousness. And one may well wonder if it prevents one from getting on with the business of making it then is it really worth the agonizing, opportunity costs?

In the interview (which is admittedly brief, so this is not a complaint), Moore says nothing about Derrida's let's call it ethical or practical reasons for cautioning (recall) agains metaphysics, especially its and philosophy's more general tendency to deploy authoritative speech and, thereby, slide into authoritarian practices.  That is, in our jargon, Derrida worries about inductive risk (or, as we learn from Spivak via Dotson, epistemic violence). So understood Derrida's playful, even comic style is, in fact, an instance of responsible speech a topic that should not be alien to analytical philosophers at all (recall).**  

 

Zadie Smith On Being a Teacher and Student

The novels we know best have an architecture.  Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etcetera. It's a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one, Pnin, having read it half a dozen times.--Zadie Smith, "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov," in Changing My Mind, 41.

A rereader [recall] can come to inhabit (p. 43) a limited number of novels. Time is scarce, so it's no surprise that we learn the architecture of only a few novels, although some of us may be surprised to learn how few we learn. Smith does not explain the the upper limit (half a dozen), and is discretely silent on how many rereadings are required to come to know a novel's architecture. As it happens, she provides evidence that she required at least five such re-rereadings; Smith decided to inhabit "Pnin," which is a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita," (42) and later in the essay she admits that only during the "most recent rereading" (that is sixth time she read it) that she thinks "to kneel in front" of her "desk, place a glass of water at eye level and a position a comb, on end, behind it. Zebra cocktail! Nabokov saw it--now I do. And it's beautiful. Gratitude does not seem out of place." (54)

As it happens, on re-reading Smith's essay, I noticed that in between her analysis of Nabokov and Barthes, and the nature of writing and reading, she weaves two other analyses on subjects close to my troubled heart: first, that of the constitution of meaning (which I will largely ignore here); second, that of teaching (which I will focus on). Near the end of her essay, Smith notes that "Whether one quite approves of it or not, it's a Nabokovian assumption that if you work to give him back what he has given to you, this should be reward enough (for you). His students learned this soon enough." (54) Smith then adds a footnote (13) with quote from Nabokov: "My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examination." (54 n. 13). 

On Smith's rendering, Nabokovian teachers demand from their students a mastery of detail both of the subject matter studied (e.g., novels) and the matter taught (the lectures about these novels, etc.). There is no surplus to be generated by the student; she aims to master all, but no more than the subject studied and the lectures taught about the subject. The Nabokovian teacher is godlike, and the student's attitude qua student is a form of gratitude to the teacher for his gifts (recall this post). The student acquires (quite partial) mastery of a subject, and that is its own reward for a certain type of student.

I don't think Smith means to endorse Nabokovian teachers. For, earlier in her essay, she had remarked (i) that there is more than one type of student, and (ii) that the teacher need not force the students into a particular kind of mold (and i-ii are at odds with Nabokovian position):

To observe these two natural, unschooled reactions is fascinating [qua teacher]: they reveal within the famous ideological debate a more intimate and important question of character, into which a teacher should not necessarily intrude. Why not allow each student to find out for himself what kind of rereader he is? No bad blood need to be spilled over it (as it was when I was in college). After all, you can storm the house of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to figure out the cunning design of the place--the house will sand either way. (43)

I am a bit suspicious of the idea that the two reactions she describes -- (A) "to those students who have a tendency to feel humbled before the act of writing, [Barthes'] 'The Death of an Author' is a perverse assault on the privileges of authorship, on the possibility of fixed meaning, even upon 'Truth' itself'  and (B) those students who "are excited to to add to the text's indeterminacy, their own indeterminacy as well" (42) -- are natural and unschooled. Perhaps, they are natural to "writing students" at elite colleges. (For those that like traditional schemas, (A) stands for authority loving types and (B) stands for the freedom-loving types. [Smith tells us she is naturally drawn to (B; 43; see also 49)]) That we teach to multiple souls at once is also a familiar fact of life to teachers who teach in some non-selective environments.

Smith advocates a kind of restraint in which the teacher allows the student to find out for herself what kind of rereader the student is. The problem is that it is not entirely clear that the restraint Smith advocates on the side of teachers also permits the discovery by students of being (say) a kind of Nabokovian rereader. That is to say, it's quite crucial to Smith's advocacy that certain ways of responding to texts are natural and unschooled. But her own text undermines this thought because to become a Nabokovian rereader one must also be schooled by Nabokov or some other teacher that shares in his "vision of total control." (55) This Nabokovian teacher does not permit the existence "of a secondary power directing and diverting," (55)* and so cannot allow a student unschooled nature to remain unschooled inside his classroom.

There is evidence that, Smith recognizes the point of the previous paragraph. Above, I suggested that Smith recognizes two souls. But that's not quite right. She also recognizes a third, educated soul which recognizes that the relationship between author and reader is a "partnership" which is "far more hesitant and delicate than" Barthes's (or Nabokov) allows. In this partnership, author and reader are "stumbling towards meaning simultaneously, together." (56) Smith does not say much to explain that 'simultaneously'--it can't mean what it means either in special relativity or in ordinary common sense. Against Barthes, Smith wants to hold on to the idea that the Author completes the text before the reader reads it. Both writing and reading can be intentional activities, but the meaning of/produced by the text is something that exceeds the Author's intentions, even though she must be willing to (decide to) live with the meaning so unfolded. (An Author can always press delete and restart until the text is submitted.) So, I suspect she means that for Author and reader the meaning of the text is something unfolds as the text unfolds. There is more to be said about her notion of meaning (but that's for another time).

The partnership is a "connection" between the reader and "a consciousness other than" her "own." That is, to read is to connect with bits of somebody else's mind. It is based not on an implicit or explicit contract, but on the reader's "cautious faith." (56) By contrast, writing is an imposition of one's thoughts on imagined/unknown others: "in many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want..." (55 n. 7 quoting Joan Didion)** Smith is clear that these 'many ways' don't exhaust the act of writing, but they are necessarily a part of it (while also exploring this act simultaneously in her novels [recall here and here]).

To reach the point of allowing for some such partnership, one must be taught to be schooled in reflexes that correct or transform the unschooled natural responses. Frustratingly, Smith is not very elaborate on the ways one is taught to become a hesitating (I have used stuttering) rereader (although it's clear that in her case, it means a giving up an exclusive embrace of freedom). But we can discern at least two ingredients: first, the very practice of rereading is a necessary step in such an education. It's only then that you learn that while you can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable, (46, quoting Nabokov). That is, one must become accepting of failure in one's life (51), while not resting in it. Mastery of detail is an indirect means toward recognizing this end.

But second, and this is something that Nabokov does not seem to permit, one must be allowed to recognize that one's loneliness is an original and enduring impulse in reading about another "individual's experience of the world through the unstable medium of language." (56) There is, of course, a lot to be said about all the words in the previous sentence. But here I just want to note that if Smith is right, this requires as a duty on teachers to make space for the recognition of the existence of such loneliness by students (without of course drawing attention to their particular loneliness in front of other students--after all, a a teacher should not necessarily intrude nor embarrass) and then orient this recognition not to their (vain teacherly) selves, but to the thoughts of other worthy, individuals.

 

On Inclusiveness & the Disdain of Neglected Human Experience

As a consequence of the development of writing, first in the ancient Near East and soon after in Greece, old habits of thought began to die out, and certain other, previously latent, mental faculties began to express themselves. Words were now anchored and, though spellings could change from one generation to another, or one region to another, there were now physical traces that endured, which could be transmitted, consulted and pointed to in settling questions about the use or authority of spoken language.

Writing rapidly turned customs into laws, agreements into contracts, genealogical lore into history. In each case, what had once been fundamentally temporal and singular was transformed into something eternal (as in, ‘outside of time’) and general. Even the simple act of making everyday lists of common objects – an act impossible in a primary oral culture – was already a triumph of abstraction and systematisation. From here it was just one small step to what we now call ‘philosophy’.

...

The freezing in text of dialectical reasoning, with a heavy admixture (however impure or problematic) of poetry, aphorism and myth, became the model for what, in the European tradition, was thought of as ‘philosophy’ for the next few millennia.

Why are these historical reflections important today? Because what is at stake is nothing less than our understanding of the scope and nature of philosophical enquiry.

The Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico wrote in his Scienza Nuova (1725): ‘the order of ideas must follow the order of institutions’. This order was, namely: ‘First the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers.’ It is implicit for Vico that the philosophers in these academies are not illiterate. The order of ideas is the order of the emergence of the technology of writing.

Within academic philosophy today, there is significant concern arising from how to make philosophy more ‘inclusive’, but no interest at all in questioning Vico’s order, in going back and recuperating what forms of thought might have been left behind in the woods and fields.

The groups ordinarily targeted by philosophy’s ‘inclusivity drive’ already dwell in the cities and share in literacy, even if discriminatory measures often block their full cultivation of it. No arguments are being made for the inclusion of people belonging to cultures that value other forms of knowledge: there are no efforts to recruit philosophers from among Inuit hunters or Hmong peasants.

The practical obstacles to such recruitment from a true cross-section of humanity are obvious. Were it to happen, the simple process of moving from traditional ways of life into academic institutions would at the same time dilute and transform the perspectives that are deserving of more attention. Irrespective of such unhappy outcomes, there is already substantial scholarship on these forms of thought accumulated in philosophy’s neighbouring disciplines – notably history, anthropology, and world literatures – to which philosophers already have access. It’s a literature that could serve as a corrective to the foundational bias, present since the emergence of philosophy as a distinct activity. How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures

...

Philosophers still tend to disdain, or at least to conceive as categorically different from their own speciality, the use of language deployed by bards and poets, whether from Siberia or the South Bronx. Again, this disdain leaves out the bulk of human experience. Until it is eradicated, the present talk of the ideal of inclusion will remain mere lip-service.--Justin E H Smith "How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures"Aeon.

Justin Smith is one of our most creative philosophical essayists and he always stimulates reflection on my part (recall). One of the initial oddities of Justin Smith's essay that I quoted above* is that he offers no particular examples of 'disdain;' nor does it name anybody that disdains. He also does not discuss any individuals who are trying to make 'academic philosophy' more 'inclusive.' Rather, Smith is interested in essences; he wishes to make a point about the 'scope and nature of philosophical enquiry.' This surprised me because often when people point to significance of non-standardized philosophy it is accompanied with healthy skepticism of essentialized claims to universality. Not so Smith, and in what follows, we need to keep this aspiration in mind.

For, Smith's piece is a thinly-disguised polemic against an idea of inclusiveness that focuses on cultivating members of (once or still) actively discriminated groups. ("The groups ordinarily targeted by philosophy’s ‘inclusivity drive’ already dwell in the cities and share in literacy, even if discriminatory measures often block their full cultivation of it.") Smith's underlying insight is that this kind of inclusiveness ultimately has (what I will call) a cultural status quo bias built into it (Smith's "foundational bias"). This is an urbane and literate culture. (To be sure: it also involves people that grow up in the countryside educated in state-sponsored schools in modern states.) As Smith's narrative suggests this cultural bias is an endemic feature of the self-conception of philosophy. So, for example, two years ago, I wrote a post about the rejection of rustic wisdom in Plato and the Stoics in a manner that reverberates through the ages in ways also described by Smith. In fact, in my conception of methodological, analytical egalitarianism it is the task of philosophy to make available neglected and overlooked experience.

Smith does not deny the reality of past discrimination nor does he deny the justness of the cultivation of members of groups that (face(d)) discrimination. Yet, he clearly thinks that the ideal of inclusion that underwrites it is merely symbolic ("lip-service"). Even if one accepts Smith's ultimate position, this is a mistake on his part for two reasons: (i) one should not underestimate the significance of symbolism; (ii) improving the status quo morally and epistemically is still an improvement. Now, Smith claims without argument that there are "perspectives that are deserving of more attention." But he has offered no reason for the comparative claim (about desert).

This is not to deny that Smith has arguments for his position that there is an urbane and literate bias in philosophical culture and that it would be important to rectify this bias--even if Smith were wrong about the empirical assertion that the status quo "leaves out the bulk of human experience." (Population is growing so rapidly during the last two centuries we are fast approaching the stage where most human beings that have ever lived were born some time (say) after 1700.) But let's stipulate that the bias leaves out significant numbers of human experience--this is a kind of egalitarian commitment on Smith's part; all human experience can give rise to "forms of knowledge" worth prompting philosophy. In particular, Smith suggests that the alternative(s) to the culturally biased one is/are all based in 'oral culture.'

Smith does not say much about the characteristics of 'oral culture.' Perhaps there is nothing what such cultures (ranging from the depths of stone-age pre-history to existing societies) have in common. But Smith suggests that the absence of writing prevents "abstraction" and a certain form of "systematisation."  I am skeptical about this claim and the tacit philosophy of mind he relies on. It reminds me a bit too much of early modern, neo-Lockean views about the distinctness of the savage mind where abstraction is lacking. (It is peculiar that Smith fails to note this because he invites us explicitly to reject Vico's schema!)

Moreover, "metrical exigencies" can facilitate abstract thought; Smith confidently asserts that there are no arguments in Lyric poetry. This is odd because the Iliad starts with an argumentative exchange between Agamemnon and Achilles. (One of the underlying issues is the search for an explanation for their lack of success in war.) One may even suggest (but that's for another day) that any systematic constraints generates the means toward abstraction.

There is another reason to be skeptical of Smith's argument. He implies that the philosophical tradition rejects oral culture and sides with "written language" that can settle "questions about the use or authority of spoken language." Now, Smith recognizes this is a problematic claim. As he writes, "It is not orality that philosophy rejects, necessarily: Socrates himself rejected writing, identifying instead with a form of oral culture." One need only have a cursory knowledge of Derrida, to recognize that for much of Platonizing tradition, written traces are thought inferior to the unwritten ideal/form (etc.).

So, in a bold move, Smith suggests spoken urbane/literate philosophy piggy-backs on written language: "the structured, working-through of a question towards an end that has not been predetermined" is the consequence of a written culture ("this practice emerged indirectly from forms of reasoning only actualised with the advent of writing.") Let's grant this point for the sake of argument. It implies, it seems, that in traditional philosophy there is a bias against ways of knowing that do not rely on structured, working-through of a question towards an end that has not been predetermined. It would be nice if Smith had offered a positive characterization of what has been left out and of which knowledge is "accumulated in philosophy’s neighbouring disciplines." (Here's a suggestion he does not consider: proverbial wisdom as codified by enduring sayings and maxims.)

Here's the bottom line: Smith offers a bold program of ways of knowing that are distinct from the (broad tent) tradition we have inherited. He intimates that including these -- broadening the scope of philosophy genuinely -- will change the essential character of philosophy. This is radical in spirit. But he sells the program in a way that affiliates him with reactionaries within the status quo. But of course, most of our professional peers that reject the idea of inclusiveness will also not follow Smith in his explorations of history, anthropology, and world literatures. For some reason I doubt that Smith is bothered by being a solitary walker in these paths. But his path holds the promise of transforming philosophy.