Digressions&Impressions

Plato, Ibn Rushd, Eugenics, and Being an (Accidental) Straussian

Since 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, and this is the manner of its dissolution. Not only for plants that grow from the earth but also for animals that live upon it there is a cycle of bearing and barrenness for soul and body as often as the revolutions of their orbs come full circle, in brief courses for the short-lived and oppositely for the opposite; but the laws of prosperous birth or infertility for your race, the men you have bred to be your rulers will not for all their wisdom ascertain by reasoning combined with sensation, but they will escape them, and there will be a time when they will beget children out of season. Republic, Book 8, 546ab, Translated by Paul Shorey.

In the quoted passage, Socrates confronts (recall here, and here) the limits of his eugenic, breeding program. I tend to describe it (somewhat anachronistically) as his recognition that sexual desire among the carefully, artificially selected beautiful-of-mind-and-body-guardians cannot be controlled and falls outside scientific cognition. At one point, fairly recently, Eric Brown, a distinguished philosopher, who I have looked up to my whole academic career, objected to this characterization as Straussian. (It was not intended as a compliment.) Rather (and I summarize informally) Socrates claims that the cause of the decline of Kallipolis is the reliance on sensation/sense perception. Brown is not alone in this--in the summary to their translation of book 8, Grube/Reeve assert that kallipolis "will decline because the philosopher-kings have to rely on sense perception in putting their eugenics policy in practice." (213) Let's call this the standard reading. By contrast, the "Straussian" reading has an unhealthy interest in sexual desire.*

And, indeed, the standard reading is well grounded in the text. But the Straussian reading is not silly because what sense perception misses is  copulation by the guardians. And what this shows that even a state carefully organized around moderation and properly cultivated dispositions (by way of indoctrination, drilling, censorship, noble lies, and eugenics, etc.) and learning flounders on a mixture of natural drives and cognitive limitations. The standard reading emphasizes these cognitive limitations, whereas the Straussian reading emphasizes the former. The standard reading does justice to the plain meaning of the text. But the Straussian reading is on this point not based on some fancy esoteric numerology+ --  in fact, it's the Socratic eugenicist-philosopher-kings who have to deploy such fancy numerology --, but a fairly straightforward interpretation of why the cognitive limitations induced by sense perception matter.**

So, my objection to the standard reading is not that it is decidedly prudish (although I think that, too, of course), but that it kind of fails to do justice to the very grounds of rejecting the true/healthy city, and to embark on the Kallipolis which is, in part, (recall and more elaborately here) grounded in what's possible for beings like us (the true city assumes we're like pigs/animals). And in analyzing the causes for its decline, it turns out there are limited to improving our human nature (cognitive limitation, sexual desire)* when we are dealing with populations (and population improvement).

As it happens, this week, I am teaching Ibn Rushd's commentary on Plato's Republic (translated from the Hebrew by Ralph Lerner; this Third Treatise 87.20ff.) Here is how he treats the issue in question:

Here the guardians are blamed for the failure of the eugenics problem in two ways: (i) they are not paying sufficient attention to the copulation (of their fellow guardians); (ii) they are not sufficiently ruthless enough in removing or -- to use a term from Al-Farabi -- weeding out the bad offspring that are the product from improper copulation. (Recall that he seems to suggest that Sharia is also offering a breeding program.)

Now, Ibn Rushd's commentary, which presents itself as an epitome that only presents the demonstrable parts of the Republic, here is offering, in one sense, a misleading summary. It's possible that this is due to the manuscript-translation of the Republic he had access to, or to a mistake in the Hebrew translator of Ibn Rushd. But I will assume that the change is deliberate. (There are other places in the commentary where the changes are evidently deliberate.) 

Ibn Rushd is frank about the significance of copulation as the proximate cause of decline (so that's like the Straussian). But what (i)-(ii) have in  common is that he puts much more emphasis on, we may say, a failure of policy, even a loss of nerve, among the guardians (who are in a sense not ruthless enough in spying and killing, that is, the kind of Straussianism associated, fairly or not, with the neocons). And the underlying sensibility is that, while the best regime is certainly not stable, it is in some sense both more attainable (recall) and also more enduring if one were willing to make one's hands dirty.

On the Fate of Conservative Intellectuals, and Their Ideas

It is an unfortunate, but fairly obvious truth that most intellectuals, both on the left or right, don’t have particularly original ideas. Go to the Aspen Ideas Festival, or TED, or any of their ilk and you won’t find much that is genuinely surprising or exciting. Instead, you will find a lot of people whose stock-in-trade is not so much innovation as influence.

This used to be true in some quite specific ways of conservative intellectuals. The conservative movement perceived the need for intellectuals, both to hold their own fractious coalition together through ‘fusionism’ and the like, and to justify their goals to liberals, who dominated the space of serious policy discussions, and could possibly stop them. Liberal policy types, for their part, needed to understand what was happening among conservatives, and perhaps hoped to influence it a little. The result was that conservative intellectuals were in a highly advantageous structural position, serving as the primary link between two different spheres, which didn’t otherwise come much into contact. As network sociology 101 will tell you, this allowed them a fair amount of arbitrage and enough slack that e.g. people like Jonah Goldberg were treated as serious thinkers.

Now, however, the game is up, thanks to an unfortunate concatenation of events. Conservative intellectuals defected en masse from Trump, thinking that it was a fairly cheap gesture of independence, but Trump got elected. Not only did this damage these intellectuals’ personal ties with the new administration and the conservative movement, but it opened up the way for a conservatism that basically didn’t give a fuck about policy ideas and the need to seem ‘serious’ any more. The result is that conservative intellectuals don’t have all that much influence over conservatism any more.

The problem is that without such influence over conservatives, these intellectuals’ capital with liberals and the left is rapidly diminishing too. If conservative intellectuals don’t have much of an audience within conservatism itself, why should people on the opposite side listen to them any more? Their actual ideas are … mostly not that strong. Some of them are good writers (David Frum, for example), but good writing only goes so far. The only plausible case for paying attention to conservative-intellectuals-qua-conservative-intellectuals, is that perhaps the pendulum will swing back after Trump, and the old regime be restored. That might happen, but you wouldn’t want to betting serious money on it.--Henry Farrell "Who has any use for conservative intellectuals?" @CrookedTimber

First, it is important to note what Farrell really gets right here. Most conservative (quasi) public intellectuals really (recall and here)rejected Trump. (And this explains why conservative support for Trump was of such mediocre intellectual quality.) However much they were willing to be in the same party with white nationalists before, and even were partially complicit in facilitating their seat at the table, once they saw that Trump could win most really did become anti/never-Trump figures. (In fact, their rejection really predates that; recall this post and look at the date.) I suspect some of  these intellectuals really have suffered not only loss of status but also of income and friendships. I am not suggesting we need to engage  in massive (to use Kate Mann's useful term) himpathy toward them; but if civilization is possible such acts of local courage are required and it is useful to acknowledge these. (Even if, as seems likely, a lot of them are, thereby, emulating in reverse Oedipal direction the turn from New Deal Democrat to neocon of their (intellectual and real) fathers.)  

Second, there is indeed very little original thought at the Aspen Ideas Festival, or TED,  for folks like (ahh) us (you know, serious academics who stay abreast or even produce the really real intellectual innovation). This lack of genuine thought is true of most of the technocratic liberals, the technological utopians, the eloquent entrepreneurs, and conservative intellectuals that may be showcased in  such places. This is one reason to be suspicious of inviting people whose primary intellectual habitus is that world to campus events and to treat them as genuine academics as opposed to cognitive entertainment events [recall this post on Charles Murray whose ideas never survived serious intellectual scrutiny]).  

But Farrell also underestimates and so misrepresents the role of political intellectuals. First, there is great skill involved to transform original ideas into ideas that can be discussed by policymakers, opinion-makers, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and the general public. My proof for this is introspective. Most academics are awful at it and we know it--yes, such 'we' should be mistrusted (I hear you, Dotson!). But look into your heart of hearts and convince me otherwise [unless you are Martha Nussbaum, Dan Dennett or Danielle Allen]. (And this is why I have argued that public philosophy should be recognized as a distinct intellectual achievement.)

Second, there is also a serious gap between original ideas and actual policy. Such political intellectuals mediate between the two. By this I do not merely mean the familiar distinction between pure and applied research or original model and policy. For it is extremely rare that genuinely original ideas in the policy sciences (public health, economics, political science, etc.) offer actionable policy solutions. And, alas,  what society and policy-makers want and believe that they desperately need is actionable would be solutions that can, in addition, benefit/strengthen one's movement, party, interest group, or ideology (etc.). 

Third, those of us who do not share, say, the conservative outlook read them not just because of their perceived influence. To be sure this is one good reason to read them (especially when they are good writers--as the recent generation of conservatives often  are, alas.) But also because they help challenge us to consider what is thought possible in alternative political bubbles. This is interesting in its own right and also can generate  useful ideas for one's own side.

Let me close with an example. The economist John Quiggin responded to Farrell's piece also (here) at Crookedtimber. As it happens, Quiggin is focused on academics who turn hacks. (That's a different type then the conservative intellectuals Farrell writes about.) In particular, he focuses on academics who are both thought leaders within the profession and have the would be ear of some policy-makers. (In my research on scientific communities I call such people Aggregators. I think such Aggregators are an important site  of moral and epistemic responsibility. And Aggregators can be politically motivated and still be excellent academic scientists/researchers.) One point he makes as illustration is  the following:

There was a time when free-market economists like Milton Friedman saw defense spending as the exemplar of the rent-seeking “iron triangle” (interest groups, bureaucrats and politicians) ensuring that public expenditure is always wasteful. I Don’t suppose that Boskin and the rest have looked at the evidence and concluded that Friedman was wrong. Rather they’ve correctly calculated that heresy on defense spending would see them cast into the outer darkness of irrelevance.

In response I noted (on facebook) that rent-seeking and crony capitalism was once a core theme of the (Chicago school) right. In addition to Friedman, I am thinking of his buddy Stigler, who (recall my post) made important contributions to theorizing rent-seeking behavior. It was also a key element in public choice economics (associated with Buchanan and Tullock [see especially here]).* In part that was animated by their aversion to social planning and the welfare state. But it is often forgotten that a theory of rent-seeking was already available to and deployed  by (nineteenth century) good government Progressivists, who were studied by Max Weber (an important influence on Frank Knight the teacher in some way or another of Stigler, Friedman, and Buchanan (and more indirectly of Tullock). Some other time I'll return this. The point I wish to make is this: while there are Libertarians and conservatives left who have concerns over rent-seeking and crony capitalism, in light of Trump's massive (supply!) shock to the system it seems the theme and ideas associated with it is drifting back to the left including first rate academics, Aggregators, and progressive intellectuals. And it does not require reinventing the wheel if one is familiar with the ideas of one's opponents. For good actionable policy and anti-policy ideas are often adaptable to different ends.  

 

Prologue: On the Political Theory of the Last Jedi (ca 2005)

[This piece, "George Lucas and Knowledge of Souls," first appeared anonymously in 2005 here. It was a response to the (mostly negative critical response to) Revenge of the Sith. I reprint it here because I intend to do a series of posts on The Last Jedi before long.--ES]

Anakin’s Skywalker’s fate is set in motion when some influential Jedi believe he is the Chosen One. It is tricky to interpret prophecy, or its intended time frame. Superstition need not lead to disaster, but the harm grows when the Jedi Council accepts Anakin as apprentice against its own rules (he’s too old) and ignores Yoda’s concerns over the state of his confused soul. (Born in slavery, yours would be confused, too, especially if your mom kept insisting you were result of virgin conception.)

The disorder and pain in Anakin’s Skywalker’s soul are matched by the increasing political disorder and chaos around him. The two are linked through the fatal decisions by the Jedi Council and its peculiar role in the Galactic Republic it serves. The fact that religious (the Jedi lodge in a temple; recall also the belief in prophecy, etc.), military guardians are needed suggests that the inherent instability of the Galactic Republic was once understood. (Perhaps, the Jedi are the source of disorder?) The Jedi’s mistake to train Anakin, who betrays them at the crucial moment, is the immediate cause of the Republic’s demise. (Should one shed tears for the fall of a slave-holding democracy?) But any polity that requires carefully calibrated, supra-legal wisdom to maintain itself is not meant to last. Yoda’s final attempt to save the Republic by fighting Anakin’s politically savvy father figure, Chancellor Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious, Sith Lord, etc), leaves the Senate building in shambles; the Jedi cannot even save the symbols of the republic. (The fate of the Galactic Republic illustrates that by concentrating central power, universal government facilitates the rise of universal dictatorship.) Then again, as Plato taught much to Aristotle's annoyance, even the best designed constitutions may be overcome by circumstances, or bad luck.

Many reviewers note that Anakin seals his fate by attempting to avoid the pains (to his wife, himself, etc) he fears. (It also reveals that in his actions, Anakin does not believe he is the Chosen One.) Because Anakin’s fate and that of his children is known, the movie has the air of classic tragedy. The Oedipal themes are easily recognized by us--a knowing age. But it seems to have gone largely unnoticed that the Jedi and the republic they serve are unable to accommodate his desire for honour. (The clunky-ness of the dialogues in the first three Star Wars episodes is at least partly accounted for by the fact that we do not have available to us a ready vocabulary of honour aside from that anchored in legally sanctioned nationalism. Gladiator had it easier by evoking Republican values.) For Anakin is naturally gifted, and is ambitious for recognition of this. Anakin needs empire – in which power rules -- to satisfy his craving for flattery. (He also reveals dynastic imperial ambitions in episode five.) Even Padmé’s love -- one fears part of his attractiveness to her is his ruthlessness -- does not soften him. In their final scene, she shows her lack of insight into his need for acclaim by offering him domestic bliss and a retreat from public life. (Not long thereafter he kills her, too.) Love is impotent sometimes.

A contrast with the Russell Crowe character, Captain Jack Aubrey, in Master and Commander: the far Side of the World is useful.* Aubrey's love of honour is probably no less than Anakin’s. But it serves, rather than undermines, his society because of the external constraints (of space – i.e., the ship as metaphor for home --; of custom and law of British Navy; the size of the crew, etc) set on him and his own understanding of how to employ authority; we should hasten to add, that he also knows how to sublimate his sexual needs through music, exploration, homo-erotic male attachment in war. These constraints, unavailable to Anakin, enable the intensity of Aubrey's exploits to be channelled into ruthless, albeit law abiding behaviour. (The cultivated and urbane taste of the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane approved ecstatically, while savagely, albeit funnily, attacking the monkish code of the Jedi and the general aesthetic of the Star Wars.)

To return to and conclude on my main point: the Jedi have immense powers available to them. Like scientific magicians they can bend nature to their wills. But like many powerful they overestimate their ability to interpret the meaning behind the divine will. Worse still: not unlike other ruling experts, their training fails them in ignoring the political art which presupposes knowledge of souls. This makes them vulnerable to betrayal from within and without. The mature episodes of George Lucas’ space opera do not deserve all the scorn of their snobbish viewers.

On Aftermath

The point was this darkness -- call it what you will -- this darkness and disorganisation were not mere negation, mere absence. They were both aftermath and prelude. The etymology of the word 'aftermath' is 'second mowing', a second crop of grass that is sown and reaped after the harvest is in. Civilisation, order, meaning, belief: these were not sunlit peaks to be reached by a steady climb. They were built and then they fell, were built and fell again or were destroyed. The darkness, the disorganisation that succeeded them had their own existence, their own integrity; were betrothed to civilisation, as sleep is betrothed to activity. In the life of compartments lies the possibility of unity, just as unity contains the prospect of atomisation. Better, in Mrs. Lewis's view, to live the compartmentalised, the disorganised life and feel the stark stirrings of creativity, than to dwell in civilised unity, racked by the impulse to destroy. (5)

[Clytemnestra] is seeking equality. Children will not be born from equality, not will it empires be  built or frontiers expanded, for the pure peace of equality begets nothing. It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before. To beget requires the domination of one thing by the other, the domination of female form by male content; then, in order to nurture what has been begotten, the reverse. Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have  to use violence. To reach aftermath, first there has to be the event itself. (54-5)

The world Creon has inherited is a post-authority, post-familial world: it is aftermath, and Creon has the job of governing it. But how do you make people obey you, respect you, believe in you and in the reality you represent? Creon's idea is that you give  commands and then don't turn back on them, no matter what--a strategy the modern parent, presiding over chaos and unrule, occasionally adopts, only to find themselves insisting on a course of action long after its necessity and even its rationality have passed. (103)

Narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. He says, the violence in the Odyssey is a story told afterwards, in a cave. (121)-Z

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk is greedily treated as a 'memoir' by reviewers (see here; here) and puff profiles. While understandable (the publisher's material encourages it), this focus is peculiar because it ignores the guidance of the title (which is akin to an essay or, to be self-referential, a blog post). This focus on it being a memoir is a bit unfortunate not just because it leads to mistakenly conflating Cusk's biography with narrated details. One example is Camilla Long's careless hatchet job ("the book is crammed with mad, flowery metaphors and hifalutin creative-writing experiments").

Unfortunately, these reviewers ignore the central narrative and structural puzzle of the novel (which reads as a series of lengthy autobiographical blog posts). This is odd because the narrative itself calls attention to the issue: "form...conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. (55) The first seven chapters read as would-be-memoir of the aftermath of a divorce; while the first-person narrator makes no effort at fairness (and seems to think it is deeply ingrained but false move when applied to marriage), the narrative and narrated chronology seems fairly straightforward (with meditative reflections on Greek tragedy thrown in). It can't be fully straightforward because the first chapter has (fractal-like) the same title as the book. But the eight chapter "XYZ" is a series of very short vignettes involving three unnamed men (XYZ): one a therapist (Y), but the other two (X/Z) are undefined: are they hints of an affair that destroyed the narrator's marriage, are they post-marital flings, or are they mere possibilities? It's hard to say. Long is probably right that X is the divorced husband at a later date (see for some evidence here), but we can't be sure.

However, nearly all the reviews (except Long's) are silent on the final (ninth) chapter, which is told from the perspective of a Belgian (I think)* live-in nanny, who grew up in a (shall-we-say) unstable family environment and who witnesses the break-up of her host family in England. But that family is -- pace Long --  not the narrator's family. The book ends with the live-in nanny moving to another family in London (also not the one narrated in the  first seven chapters). Why do I think the nanny is, in some sense, a different story altogether? For two reasons: (i) the division of labor as seen by her in the home does not fit the division of  labor narrated in the first seven chapters; (ii) the emotional/physical collapse of the mom occurs in the nanny's perspective before the divorce and not after (as the narrator implies). Obviously, the two reasons are not decisive; part of the point of the first-person narrative is that the narrator is unreliable in some sense, unwilling to tell us the causes of the marriage's collapse nor quite capable of explaining her own dissolution. The problem is, if we treat the final chapter as the perspective of an impartial bystander, we're still stuck with imperfect access to the underlying facts; the live-in nanny's comprehension of English is so mediocre (she flunked her language test), that she is not a reliable witness. That is, the novel enacts the slipperiness of establishing the narratable 'facts.' 

I do not mean to suggest that it is not a memoir (I don't care); nor that it is not a meditation on feminism, the novel introduces the theme repeatedly at the start of the novel, and transformative experience;** nor that it is not an extended analysis of divorce from the vantage point of parents and children ("I have two homes...and I have  no home" (64-5)); nor that it does not raise complex questions about the ethics of writing about people known to the author.+ But here I want to close with a reflection on the title. I have to admit that when I first read 'aftermath,' I thought of it as saying, after numbers or after counted order, that is, (a species of) disordered meaninglessness. At times the novel affirms this thought: in reflecting on marriage, the narrator writes, "It is not to dismantle but to conserve it that strength is required, for it will come apart in an instant. It will come apart, that image, and what remains not a new or different image but a pile of pieces that mean nothing at all." (69)

But in the novel we are reminded of the etymology which refers to a seasonal moment after mowing. And the temporal framework is circular. Soon again there will be sowing and another harvest. As the narrator's teacher (Ms. Lewis) insists the aftermath is the unwanted -- by the propertied farmer -- grass after the harvest, which then needs to be mowed too in an eternal return. It is the yearly reminder of the denial that nature does nothing in vain; that from the perspective of man's estate of nature guarded by a benevolent divine there is, in fact, no sufficient reason for this presence and  subsequent activity. It is necessary, but pure waste.

Paradoxically, this perspective, the official story on  aftermath, is introduced by an authority figure (the teacher) who herself seems to advocate for a reversal of values (namely to treat aftermath as the site of freedom and creativity). That is to say, the novel articulates the battle between at least two takes on the nature of marriage, which throughout is treated not just as the ground of traditional political unity (peace by one name, institutionalized violence by the other), but itself also as a site of order, where in one conception one becomes complete in it, whereas in the other, one is annihilated by it. One is tempted into thinking that these are attributes of the same substance.++

Near the end of the book (with a nod to Plato),*** aftermath is equaled with the post-violence survival narrative. It's a backward looking. Reconciliation need not involve  truth. If we listen to its etymology, narrative reconciliation is a renewal (we tell again in order to give birth to something new that represents the old). It is tempting to see in aftermath a form of therapy (and throughout the novel we're invited to do so), but even so, I am more inclined to see it as a means to exert control. Why? Not just because the narrator tells us on the first page, in commenting on one of her daughter's love  of jigsaws and the other's building of silent card houses, that she sees these activities as 'attempts to exert control.' Aftermath is a way to control the narrative, not just about the failed marriage (and perhaps the causes of failure), but also to keep a sense of order while the narrator is presenting us with evidence of her engulfing  dissolution (anorexia, depression, numbness, alienation, etc.)--she seems close to being destroyed by a species of post traumatic stress.  From that perspective the whole narrative is an act of self-definition required by a state of emergency. This last thought is a bit fanciful, I admit, but on the opening page we are told that An argument is only an emergency of self-definition.

That is, we philosophers tend to tell ourselves that arguments are means to compel agreement; I am not the first to note the role of argument as a means of forcing the other into submission or silence. The novelist replies that argument is a means, an exceptional one, to self-definition. And, indeed, arguments never succeed at silencing others; but if we own arguments (as Socrates urged), they make explicit who we (ahh) come to be. To the novel's credit we are left unsure if that's a viable route.

 

 

 

 

On Discussing Teaching

During the academic year, the most consuming element of my professional life is my teaching. However, relatively little of that passion is reflected in these Impressions. Sometimes, I report a new insight or  approach that is the consequence of my class preps or, better yet, classroom discussion (as I note in the footnotes). But while I would be the last person to deny that I teach, in part, to learn new stuff -- and so I often teach material that I am willing to grapple with (anew or for the first time), the great mission and frequent joy of teaching is not just to convey certain material or knowledge, but also, perhaps primarily so, to help others develop themselves as thinkers, writers, reasoners, public speakers, citizens, and human beings. (The order is not necessarily the order of importance and not all of these are the proximate aim of each course.) I don't mean this just in an idealistic sense; except for the few occassions when my salary was de facto covered by a huge endowment or more directly by a research grant -- this covers a lot of my previous academic employment -- it also pays the bills. 

Long before I thought of myself as a would-be-researcher, I knew I wanted to become a college professor. The year after college, my IR teacher, Richard Eichenberg, Ike, (recall) asked me if I wanted TA a section of his Big Intro to IR course. I found it challenging and exhilerating to lead discussion and convey the course material in a way that the students could grasp it. It was not the first time I had to think really about the perspective of another (I had been dating), but it was the first time in which I had to think consciously about the perspective of many others at the same time. In graduate school, I volunteered to TA in my first year, and taught every year of graduate school. So, I have been teaching pretty much without interruption since 1994. It's cliché, but I always say to kids contemplating a career in academia, do try out teaching because while it definitely involves a set of skills and dispositions that can be acquired, if you don't like it you'll be unhappy quite a bit of the time.

Now, before I continue, I don't think of myself as an especially stellar teacher (recall here about my time at Wesleyan; and here my sense of my limitations as a PhD supervisor). And this post is not meant to be one of those let me be sage and share with you my philosophy of education pontifications. To use another cliche, I am still developing as a teacher, and I have, in fact, been confronted with my limitations (my lack of skills in some respects) by returning to a massive political science department after teaching (rather well prepared) philosophy students for most of my adult life. In fact there is no need for me to pontificate about my philosophy of education because there is quite a bit of that in the blogosphere already which relays best practices in teaching (syllabi, class room facilitation, the use of technology, life-long learning, etc.). There is also quite a bit of comraderie with teachers sharing the hilarity and horror that is routine in our jobs (about unread syllabi, mistakes on essays, the excuses for missed deadlines, etc.).

But there is very little, I feel, that does justice to my class room experience with my students  and all the ideosyncratic encounters that I have with them that are, apologies for the jargon, the essence of teaching and being taught as an educator. Because privacy laws and norms have become strict, the only reasonable stance, I feel, is reticence. But this comes at a price: I can't really discuss or write about in depth what I am most passionate about. (Of course, there is an omerta among direct colleagues, so one sometimes shares an annecdote.)

It's not that I think the privacy norms/laws are mistaken, but somewhere there should be a space to develop shared conversations about teaching students, who are not (thereby) reduced to learning outcomes and conversations where one not only focuses on the 'let me tell you what I do that works well [or not] on average with [my] students [or that has been shown to do so in some study]' or on 'how discussing the greats books with kids at selective colleges reinvigorates western civilization.' (All of which also has a place.) And, of course, there should be a place where we all learn from our model-colleagues whose teaching clearly promotes social justice, or combines activism with scholarship, and who we all can admire, but for many of us that's not -- I venture to submit -- really in accord with what we experience.

Now, in the interest of privacy, Freudian analysts disguise key biographical and identifying features of their patients in their case histories. I ignore here how successful they were in doing so; I have long toyed with adopting such a practice in order to discuss some of the more interesting and challenging teaching situations I have faced with friends and peers or in the writing about philosophy of education. But besides seeming pretentious, it also seems false to me -- cause I am not interested in cases or symptology; and, also, I have always had the suspicion that the Freudian move to disguise identifying features, ends up changing the substance of the matter.

Now, because teaching is self-justifying, I am not suggesting that the inability to have a sustained conversation about my particular experiences diminishes the teaching. But it does feel like something is missing that could be worthy.

So, it occurred to me to write this post and ask for suggestions on how you reflect on your experiences of/during/with teaching.

 

 

On Taboos & Polarization in Politics & Philosophy

[T]he logical empiricists can be interpreted as engaged in a project of voluntarist racial eliminativism. They did not take themselves to have an in principle argument against racial categorisation of human beings. Their frequent references to biological racial categorisation make it clear that they thought this was something you could coherently do, and it would be inconsistent with their version of conventionalism to argue that one is cognitively mistaken to use an empirically meaningful categorisation scheme. Hence, while the position I am attributing to them is similar to the position that racial taxonomic terms are simply meaningless, it is not quite that – it is not that they thought there was no empirically meaningful way that one could make sense of human racial taxonomy. Rather, it was that they thought one ought not use these terms....As such they adopted a policy of refusing to endorse any instances of racial categories being used as part of empirical explanations, and discouraging racial explanation by rhetorical means.--Liam Kofi Bright (2017) "Logical empiricists on race" Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Liam Kofi Bright reminded me of his paper in response to my post on the method of composite portraiture (which traces back to Galton). [I leave aside here to what degree Bright's paper fits that method.] In his paper he diagnoses a taboo within logical empiricism against (biological) racial explanations of social affairs. The taboo is maintained by an act of self-legislation in the adoption of certain conceptual frameworks (and methods) and a rhetorical-polemical attitude against those that used alternative conceptual frameworks (that included racial explanations). What makes taboos interesting is that, in order to be effective, they require self-command and group discipline/loyalty, that is, esprit des corps. This is possible when a group is reasonably small, shares an important aim, and has a way of controlling entry. Bright does not address the maintenance of the taboo, but in the sentences I skipped, Bright suggests that it is their (i.e., the logical empiricists') shared "political projects" and moral commitments, which are 'external' or 'optative' to the adopted framework that sustains the taboo (a word he does not use), undoubtedly facilitated by informal communication (when they were in the same place) and small numbers. Because Bright reads the logical empiricists in a Kantianizing fashion (with relativized a priori), we may remind ourselves that they are not the first to legislate a taboo within philosophy: in Kant's Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Kant (recall) limits -- as (ahh) Slavoj Žižek point out -- the possible philosophical role of history (as a form of inquiry) into the origin of a legitimate authority on practical grounds.

In his essay, Bright explicitly recognizes that the taboo (racial explanation) is maintained not because using it is meaningless. That is to say, the logical empiricists have not shown that using racial explanation is false. One need not be Freud to recognize one does not need taboos on the evidently false. But it also does not follow that the logical empiricists thought the taboo was hiding the truth. (If anything, using a taboo to hide the truth is self-defeating because one will generate contradictions, internal tensions, etc.) Rather, it's clear that they thought that regardless of the scientific status of racial explanation, there is always a non-trivial risk these get mingled with immoral/inhumane political aims. That is, the members of the Vienna Circle are (recall) engaged in responsible speech because they recognize what we call the inductive risks of legitimizing racial explanations. The polemic with Heidegger centers, in part, on their recognition that his way of philosophizing has noxious consequences (recall Glymour). Taboos can be efficient in preventing the predictable downstream costs and energy of combating the pernicious effects of the damage done by racial explanation (in the service of racial hierarchy, social exclusion, eugenic programs, etc.).

Bright is clear that the logical empiricists engaged in polemical rhetoric against those that violated their taboo. This is significant for two reasons: first, they attempted to impose their internal compact on others (who had not contracted into their program). That is, there is something imperialist to demand from others that they abide by your self-imposed taboo. Second, we can discern here strategies that became all too familiar in their students and heirs in later generations of analytical philosophy; an excessive willingness to use rhetorical means in combating opposing schools.

Given the political moment -- with racial subordination and elimination a live possibility -- it is easy to forgive the logical empiricists willingness to aim to impose their taboo with rhetorical means on others. They were were part of a struggle in which the racialist explanation loving sides were quite willing to support racial hierarchy, and worse. But most of the subsequent academic struggles their students engaged in are not like this; being wrong about when to discusses semantic composition or modal metaphysics does not lead to racial elimination.*

As an extensive aside, Bright recognizes a problematic exception to his argument: Neurath's translation (in 1910 with his first wife Anna Schapire-Neurath) of Galton's work on eugenics, Hereditary genius.** (Speaking of taboos, Neurath's translation goes unmentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Neurath!) Now, Bright could have said that in 1910 logical empiricism did not exist yet and that circumstances between 1910 and, say, the 1930s were different (the founding of the Vienna Circle can be dated to 1928 or so). This would also explain Neurath's apparent change of heart later. This is not Bright's strategy (perhaps because he also quotes from the relatively early (1921) Anti-Spengler.) With a nod to Thomas Uebel's contextual analysis and, more important, the writings of W.E. Du Bois, Bright remarks that a defense of racial breeding need not be a defense of white supremacy. And, undoubtedly, there is logical space between the can wish to breed for all kinds of characteristic without wishing for a racialized polity. And, in fact, in 1910 eugenics was part of a progressive, scientific gospel that influenced all kinds of policies and scientific projects not all of them pertaining to race (see Tim Leonard's book).

Even so, it is worth noting that by 1910, Galton's Heriditary Genius, was an old book (first published in 1869); it draws on Darwin's ideas, but by 1910 was certainly not cutting edge in its science. It has, in fact, a chapter, "The Comparative Worth of Different Races" which is as bad as it sounds.*** Galton, who was the leading statistician of his age, concludes "that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own [Anglo-Saxon]." (In the hierarchy, the negro is still a grade above the "Australian type.") A satirist may note that Galton is, in fact, willing to acknowledge that there were better races than his own, for he remarks that "the average ability of the [long vanished!] Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own." But Galton takes this to be an argument for racial purity because the Athenians allowed too much interbreeding!+ So, Galton's Heriditary Genius clearly embraces the existence of racial hierarchies (and these are not incidentally connected to British empire). But, interestingly enough (and I suspect this may have had some appeal to young Neurath), unlike many German eugenic tracts, Heriditary Genius is not antisemitic. While the Jews are not formerly classified in the racial hierarchy (due to lack of statistical evidence), most of the references to Jews in it are favorable.

Let me return to Bright's article. He establishes the existence of a philosophical taboo in (what I'll call) a highly polarized political context. Bright does not take a stance on the strategy he describes. But I am inclined to think that sometimes such taboos are necessary and useful and that the logical empiricists are in this, and in so many other ways, worth emulating. The opposing camps were part of a larger Kulturkampf where there was a genuine risk that bullets (and worse) would settle the true about racial hierarchy [to be precise: bullets can't settle the truth]. In the context of such high degree of polarization, the voluntary enforcement of taboos can serve a valuable function. They save and harness intellectual resources, they prevent unnecessary mingling of meaningful ideas with awful political and ethical policies, and they prevent the ambitious young from being tempted down unwise and immoral paths.

Of course, the rhetorical and professional enforcement of a taboo comes with a two-fold cost. First, as we have  seen, the very success of the strategy may encourage imitation of certain, imperialist behaviors (involving less dangerous topics) in less existentially polarized contexts. Second, the existence of a taboo is also a temptation for the unscrupulous and ambitious young who find themselves born in later times. They may well think that there are low-hanging fruits which will advance the cause of knowledge (and their career). Sometimes these unwise are lucky and they live in quiet times and their greedy, rashness has no downside.

 

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 Classroom Failures

These reflections were prompted, several semesters ago, by an incident in a seminar I was teaching on ideological critique. The participants were a group of extremely intelligent and widely read graduate students - all impeccably radical. Despite my heroic efforts to focus their attention on particular, concrete examples, such as the controversy that has developed among ethnographers of the northern Kalahari desert, the students persisted in speaking and writing in the most suffocatingly abstract and stereotypical fashion. Things finally blew up when one member of the class, making a class presentation, referred in passing to "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia." The phrase rolled off his tongue as though the individual words were simply syllables of one great polysyllable - stuck together by some sort of syntactical glue. Everyone in the class was quite comfortable with the phrase. It seemed to me that they found it reassuring, rather in the way little children snuggle down in bed when they hear "Once upon a time." All except a rather abrasive German student who interrupted to protest that she, for one, had nothing against classism. Indeed, she said, she regularly judged people according to their economic class, and thought it quite the right way to go about things. The class came to a dead halt, and no one knew what to say. None of the students had ever heard anyone question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia," used as a term of opprobrium. It was as though, in the middle of a class preparing little Catholic boys and girls for First Communion, a smart-mouthed trouble maker had piped up and said, "I can take the Father and the Son, but you can keep the Holy Ghost."

 I pounced on the intervention - as the French have taught us to call it when a student says something in class - and did everything I could to make it the occasion for a searching examination of unacknowledged ideological presuppositions. That was, after all, the subject matter of the course. But it was a total flop. I simply couldn't get the students to see how mind-numbingly banal, how drained of all genuine thought, that phrase had become. I could not even get them to attune their ears to the ugliness of it as language. Freud says somewhere, talking about the dynamics of psychoanalytic therapy, that if there is a single topic that it is not permitted to examine in an analysis, sooner or later the entire analysis comes to be about that topic. I have always found this a profound insight into what happens in the classroom as well. A classroom in which it is socially or pedagogically unacceptable to question the appropriateness of the phrase "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" is a classroom in which neither real teaching nor real learning can take place..--Robert Paul Wolff [recently published but written in the 1990s; HT Brian Leiter]

A few months ago I returned to Wesleyan University to give a guest lecture. Wesleyan was the site of my first professional job out of graduate school (recall and here). I adored my time there; my senior colleagues were all smart, interesting, and great mentors to me. The students were among the best I have ever taught. I had been offered a chance to teach another year as VAP, but when I realized there would be no tenure track opportunity down the road, I decided to try my luck elsewhere.

It's a great delight to return as a warmly welcomed, senior-ish scholar by the folk who gave me my first professional opportunity. And I loved being able to acknowledge their positive role in my professional formation. During my visit, I was reminded, however, that the first course I had taught at Wesleyan had been something of a disaster. I had not forgotten the experience, but was a bit surprised that several of the gang there also still remembered it, too, a decade later. It was an intro to social theory, and I introduced quite a bit of work on race, gender, disability, sexual harassment, etc. Not all the students were receptive to Fanon, Iris Marion Young, etc. (Yes, that also happens at Wesleyan.) In addition, and probably more important, the students had a very strong group identity -- they were in a special undergraduate college together and encountered me in their second or third year -- and I lost control of the class dynamics from the start (maybe even in the first minute), and never regained their trust. Even so, as the years passed about a third (!) of the students contacted me to connect their daily experiences with themes from the course. I also lucked out that Coetzee won a Nobel -- I had taught Disgrace in the course before he won it--, and this caused several students to seek renewed contact with me; anyway the course had lodged in my memory as a ''useful learning experience" (for me).

The quoted passage from Wolff describes a frustrating class-room experience. I have been surprised, however, that Wolff's post has been deployed to discuss contemporary strands of (what used to be called when I was younger) 'political correctness,' rather than as an all-too-common moment of disconnect among teacher, students, and course material because of some pre-existing commitments. (I should not be surprised because the uptake of the piece follows how Wolff frames it.) These disconnects are always a live possibility in philosophy (and presumably other humanities-style) courses that are oriented toward discussion and shared learning. (So, I am exempting large lecture courses and courses aimed at teaching technical skills, say, in logic. The previous sentence does not deny that the disconnects can occur there, too; but these tend to be unusual.) These disconnects tend to exhibit somebody's ideological or psychological commitment or -- since Wolff uses psychoanalysis approvingly -- resistance.

What I am surprised by is that after decades of teaching at different institutions (I warmly recommend his memoirs), Wolff is surprised by the existence of what he takes to be ideological no-goes and mantras [hereafter INGOEMS] in his students. As any modestly attentive reader of Plato can learn, this is the human condition. Of course, the content of such INGOEMS shifts around, and experienced teachers learn to discern and anticipate them and navigate around INGOEMS or use them as...ahhh...learning opportunities if they are or can be made to be relevant to the teaching aims of the course. Of course, not all INGOEMS generate classroom breakdowns (they may be simply irrelevant to the teacher's or students' pedagogical aims).

Moreover, it's not like all classroom breakdowns are always bad pedagogy. (They can be, and I have had my share of mishaps--see above.) Philosophy can cut close to the bone, and it is our duty, in fact, to engage with the intellectual passions of our students. As the Meno (and some other Platonic texts) teaches, this entails we also have to accept the danger of failures of education (by the students, and also by the teacher). But it would be a mistake, I think, to blame students for their unwillingness to confront and revise their INGOEMS in the moment in front of their peers (whose judgment they sometimes value more than their teacher's). More important, when INGOEMS are challenged in the classroom, the initial response may be quite negative, but it is worth remembering -- as my Wesleyan colleagues told me already a decade ago when they mentored me -- that the brains and passions of many students are still developing when they encounter us; the better sort of students can be prompted to revisit their intellectual college experiences and may draw on their classroom interactions with us and the texts or arguments we discussed as they trod on their paths toward wisdom (recall). 

 

 

Elster's Criticism of Foucault (and Conceptual art)

It is puzzling and thought-provoking that certain paradoxical instruction appear both on the road to wisdom and as the agency of madness.--Elster, Sour Grapes (66)

Conceptual art may impress as a freak of nature can, or a woman preaching according to Dr. Johnson.--Elster, Sour Grapes (82)

There are some vocal philosophy professors that express contempt for English literature professors (hereafter: ELPs). I have never understood this contempt (and not just because my interest in philosophy was nurtured by a wonderful Miltonist--Michael Fixler [recall]).  Perhaps it's envy because ELPs get to read much better prose on an average work-day. More likely it's professional philosophers's abhorrence of multiplicity of meaning (which we understand as equivocation) (PPAMOM) which makes too many of us recoil from the ELPs's craft.  Anyway, I am always astounded by ELPs's ability to discern meaningful structural features in a text, and especially the telling trope or set of metaphors that help disclose a text's significance or conceptual commitments. One good trick that I apply in my own scholarship I learned from ELPs: it is important to pay attention to the minor seeming discordant words/concepts/paragraphs/chapters that do not seem necessary to the main argument in a text. This is especially useful in influential works that have already accumulated commentary/scholarship. (It's also a survival trick: all the low-hanging scholarly fruit tends to picked already.)

Elster's (1983) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality is deservedly a recent classic.* (As I write this it has over 2000 citations.) It is very much a cold-war product and it brilliantly exploits evidence of behavior from differing institutional contexts (culturally and temporally apart) : Imperial Rome (by way of Veyne's Le Pain et le Cirque) and Soviet Russia (by way of Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, which I have ordered). Its main claim is that "preferences underlying a choice may be shaped by the [given] constraints" (vii). The book elegantly weaves conceptual analysis, decision theory, and political theory; it subtly draws on literature, social psychology, and history in ways that are far too uncommon within analytical philosophy. At its best it reminds me of its great historical contemporary, Dennett's Elbow Room (recall). It also represents an important episode in the history of philosophical Marxism: Elster embraces "methodological individualism" in order to combat the "stagnant state" of "Marxist theory." (142) Elster also non-subtly rejects the marriage of Marxism and Freudianism that was (is?) common. In fact, its rejection of Freudian unconscious as a "theoretical entity" ("a highly desirable goal" (152)) is so dogmatic that Elster ties himself in knots over the phenomenon of self-deception, which he takes to be incoherent (despite "massive clinical, fictional and everyday experience attesting to the reality of the phenomenon." (149)) This aim also helps him produce some of his best insights on wishful thinking.

The discordant section in Sour Grapes is Elster's long paragraph on art with its jeremiad against conceptual art. Now in part because of PPAMOM and a moralizing impulse, most philosophers look foolish when we talk about art or novels. Elster, by contrast, makes very good use of novels to illustrate many of his best points. Yet, as the second epigraph to this post reveals, when it comes to conceptual art Elster recycles, in passing, Johnson's misogyny--the most embarrassing moment in the book.+ Elster's theory of artistic creation "involves maximazation under constraints, and that good works of art are local maxima of whatever it is that artists are maximizing." (78) For, an artist's activity "can be understood only on the assumption that there is something which they are trying to maximize, by 'getting it right' (78; emphasis added--ES). Perhaps this is true of Leibniz's Divine Artist (and on some readings Goethe), but it is peculiar understanding of much other art (although I grant that it gives Elster a means toward explaining the nature of a 'minor masterpiece' (81)). Given his theory it is no surprise that Elster has no conceptual room for conceptual art.

Elster's official theory of rejecting conceptual art is, however, instructive: it "certainly violates the principle that the aesthetic value of the work of art should not depend on the time at which is offered to the public." (82; emphasis added) This is a manifestly silly claim because it cannot even begin to do justice to the difference in aesthetic value between an original (prior in time) and a copy (subsequently),--a difference which even the most metaphysically robust account of aesthetic value ought to embrace. As Hume notes, knowledge of the context of production and the intended ways of experiencing a work of art, contributes to aesthetic appreciation and is a condition for the possibility of aesthetic value (Of the Standard Taste).

What can account for the oddity of Elster's position? The problem is that his account of aesthetic value is (subtly) modelled on a certain semantics (which is appropriate for eternal nature of truth in, say, mathematics). And it turns out that commitments similar to this semantics operate in the background in his very polemical remarks of Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Elster (pp. 104ff) dislikes a number of things about Foucault's approach: first, he cannot stand Foucault's rhetoric and "eloquence" (including the use of rhetorical questions, the cascade of verbs, etc.); second he dislikes (without explanation) privileging the question Cui bono? (that is "to whose benefit?"--It is ironic to see a Marxist reject such privilege.) More important, he treats Foucault as offering a consequence-explanation. In fact, Elster treats Foucault (and Bourdieu) as offering especially bad consequence explanations--ones that lack a mechanism, a feedback mechanism, and even an intentional agent. Now, indeed, on a certain conception of social science such oversights may well be devestating. (To be sure, Elster refuses even to interpret Foucault more charitably as sketching the constraints/outlines of an explanation that can subsequent guide a seach for mechanism (etc.) by lesser, worker-bee social scientists. In fact, Foucault offers many how-possible mechanisms throughout his book, so Elster is cherry-picking his evidence.)  

But even Elster explicitly notes that in the passage he focuses on, Foucault does not state a consequence-explanation (or says he wishes to offer one). It is more sensible (and charitable) to interpret Foucault as primarily offering an analysis of the (possible) meaning of certain (historically contingent, but) enduring social phenomena in terms of their functions and benefits (that is also compatible with the explanation-sketch that can guide further research). After all, one key (transcendental) claim that Foucault makes about punishment (prison, etc.) is that it is taxonomic--it makes a certain form of knowledge possible. 

Now, while Elster is not really attentive to the transcendental (in the Kantian sense) dimension of Foucault, he, too, recognizes that Foucault is interested in meaning (106).  Yet, because the "search for meaning" (on Elster's account) "dispenses with mechanisms" it "fails dishonourably." Now, it's true that if Foucault were exclusively in the business of offering causal explanations then indeed the absence of mechanism would be pretty serious charge. But, Elster rejects the search for meaning (both in terms of finding of creating meaning); he thinks it is a moral and intellectual fallacy (101ff). It is sort of clear why Elster thinks that a lack of interest in a mechanism is an intellectual fallacy. Why he thinks it is a moral fallacy is less obvious, although he seems to think it (and the embrace of social by-products more generally) instantiates a "misplaced or self-defeating form of instrumental rationality. It is the fallacy of striving, seeking and searching for the things that recede before the hand that reaches out for them. In many cases it takes the form of trying to get something for nothing." (107)** 

In fact, while Elster has quite a bit to say about the moral problems with by-products, we are never really told what's wrong with either the search for meaning as such (so without the aim of offering explanation) or viewing social analysis as an expression or the creation of meaning. That is, if we understand Foucault as understanding himself as part of the world he describes and, in fact, aiming to destabilize it, in part, with the narratives he offers there is nothing mysterious about what's going on. Elster repeatedly insists not just that Foucault's practice and the search for meaning is immoral but also that is dangerous (44). But unless one embraces a very strong status quo bias or has very high risk aversion, that immorality and danger can only be established if we are willing to evaluate Foucault's aims and means on their (foreseeable, consequentialist?) merits (case by case, as it were). 

That is to say, if one is in the grip of a certain positivist understanding of social science and a kind of verificationist theory of meaning, a search for and the creation of meaning is very misguided. It is also misguided if one has a semantics in which social facts are univocal truthmakers of (social) meaning simply waiting out there to be discovered. But if we overcome PPAMOM we can learn from ELPs that often social meaning is, in part, constituted and reconstituted by our utterances and other practices.

That is to say, if we want to understand, say, ideology (including our own) -- one of Elster's main aims, and presumably one of the sources of his book's popularity --, we can't just rely on the reality/fiction distinction alongside a set of psychological mechanisms, we also have to make ourselves feel (by way of sympathetic imagination) the significance of a certain set of commitments and, while this should not be opposed to truth it is, in a way, orthogonal to truth.++ After all, even true statements of present social reality can be instances of ideology ((recall) because of status quo bias or unwillingness to question existing background institutions and norms). 

Freud and the Social Contract and Religion

It is a reasonable surmise that after the killing of the father a time followed when the brothers quarreled among themselves for the succession, which each of them wanted to obtain for himself alone. They came to see that these fights were as dangerous as they were futile. This hard-won understanding as well as the memory of the deed of liberation they had achieved together and the attachment that had grown up among them during the time of their exile led at last to a union among them, a sort of social contract. Thus there came into being the first form of a social organization accompanied by a renunciation of instinctual gratification; recognition of mutual obligations; institutions declared sacred, which could not be broken in short the beginnings of morality and law. Each renounced the ideal of gaining for himself the position of father, of possessing his mother or sister. With this the taboo of incest and the law of exogamy came into being. A good part of the power which had become vacant through the father's death passed to the women; the time of the matriarchate followed….The relationship to the totem animal retained the original ambivalency of feeling towards the father. The totem was, on the one hand, the corporeal ancestor and protecting spirit of the clan; he was to be revered and protected. On the other hand, a festival was instituted on which day the same fate was meted out to him as the primeval father had encountered. He was killed and eaten by all the brothers together…This great day was in reality a feast of triumph to celebrate the victory of the united sons over the father.

Where, in this connection, does religion come in? Totemism, with its worship of a father substitute, the ambivalency towards the father which is evidenced by the totem feast, the institution of remembrance festivals and of laws the breaking of which is punished by death--this totemism, I conclude, may be regarded as the earliest appearance of religion in the history of mankind, and it illustrates the close connection existing from the very beginning of time between social institutions and moral obligations. S. Freud MOSES AND MONOTHEISM

There is a lot going in the passage quoted from Freud (and even more with what he wishes to do with it in in the book's overall argument), and I focus on a partial aspect of it here. I propose to read him not as an anthropologist or a social psychologist here (or Biblical exegete), but as a social theorist.

Not unlike others in the pre-Rawlsian social contract tradition, he posits a kind of patriarchal state of nature that precedes the social contract. (The patriarchal rule is reminiscent of the darkest fears that folk project onto Hobbes's or Spinoza's Sovereign.) In the state of nature parricide is followed by civil (family) war—crucially an even worse state of nature. The contract is not a consequence of fear, accumulation, or reason, but a sense of futility. That is to say, on this account, the social contract becomes possible when open-ended civil war exacts high enough costs, but cannot be won. That is, in fact, a very optimistic thought.

On Freud's account, the contract consists, in large part of the development of norms about what counts as reasonable expectation and aspiration (and what is off-limits/taboo). What is notable about Freud's analysis is that he does not share the social contract tradition's obsession with property; he is more focused on the way the contract governs 'real' and symbolic relations among humans, not the things they possess.

Concern with (symbolic) things is left for religion. Regardless of the empirical status of Freud's account of totemism, what I find striking is that the birth of religion is a necessary consequence of the contract (it's what I would call a 'conceptual-necessitation-relation' or a forced move). Not so much (i) as an means of control of the folk that participate in the 'union,' (although its status as a civic religion ensures it is that, too), but as (ii) a way to recognize (in a side-glance-kind-of-way) the inherent instability of the contract, as well as (iii) a means to re-enact in a domesticated way the process that led to the social contract in order to secure the contract and thereby (by reenacting, that is (iii)), ensuring (iv) ongoing recognition of the most important political facts of society. Religion, then, conveys political truth not so much in its cosmology or cosmogony (or metaphysics), but in the practices it instantiates (and re-enacts). Note that on this view religion is not merely functional, but in the practices it cultivates the symbolic source of political wisdom. So, while it may seem that Freud is debunking religion in the book (and throughout the book he calls attention to this possible reading), and I understand the temptation to put him in the company of Marx and Nietzsche, it is, in fact, possible to read Moses and Monotheism as a defense of the idea that philosophy is entirely dispensable in the political life of the community if there is a kind of 'original' religion. (Of course, Freud allows that the religion can be corrupted as much as developed.)

The contract is very gendered in Freud, but despite the fact that it involves only boys as agents, the consequence is the matriarchate. On re-reading, Freud loves this kind of ironic unintended consequence explanation.