Digressions&Impressions

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.+

 

 

The use of Literary Criticism for a (Liberal) Philosopher

If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one would now remember his name....What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start with the frigid competence of Dubliners and end with the dream-language of Finnegan's Wake, but Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist are part of the trajectory. The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of ‘having something to say’. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can care. Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie.

[Dickens's] radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, ‘Behave decently’, which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, ‘an expression on the human face.’ Orwell (1939) "Charles Dickens"

One of the great joys of reading Orwell's Essays, is to encounter his engagement with fellow writers (Mailer, Swift, Kipling, even Wodehouse, etc.). For, one of Orwell's great gifts is to articulate the political horizon, as it were, of the literary persona behind others' books  in a sympathetic and critical fashion even though he may well disagree intensely.* Orwell simultaneously connects this persona to an image of the historical context of the author (e.g. in explaining why Kiping's outlook is pre-Fascist, "Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902"), the history of English literature as seen by Orwell, and the then present political-literary context. Dickens then comes to stand for a permanent possibility, an exemplar, of a certain kind of (literary) social critic: the moralist. This moralist is characterized early in the essay,

every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane...Useless to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.

A lot of professional, political philosophers are moralists in Dickens's sense, without the comedy or vividness. That is, they would like the existing institutions to live up to the ideals inherent in them and wider social norms.** Unlike Dickens, they often seem happy to coerce others into living up to these ideals. In fact, once  you have been alerted to this -- and I forgot who first got me to notice it -- liberal philosophers (my friends) endlessly prattle on about legitimacy, which is just another way of saying coercion is justified. But, as Orwell points out, Dickens is superior to my friends because (i) Dickens embraces a substantive ideal of the good, "radiant idleness," and (ii) he understands that the underlying problem with the status quo is something fundamental:

There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’.

On (i) Orwell does not need Leni Riefenstahl to remind him of the significance and pull of aesthetic visions (he uses Blake's poetry to make the point).+ What he recognizes, however, is that the liberal-moralist, too, requires it. And this points to the major void of much liberal reflection: because so much of it is formal and not substantive, it is incapable of presenting, let alone endorsing, a common aesthetic good and this puts liberals on the defensive when her ideals need to be mobilized.

On (ii) Orwell is no friend of Dickens's ideal; he reminds the reader that the vision of such idleness is grounded in "£500 a year," that is propertied-rentier income and, so, founded on the coercion needed to protect and stabilize property. But Orwell's more fundamental critique of this vision is its lack of "intellectual curiosity," including its lack of interest in machines, which, Orwell hopes, will create a progressive future if properly embedded in systematic change. (Some other time I'll return to Orwell's engagement with Swift on this very point.) But this (as it were) bright future has to accommodate itself to enduring human need and longing.

Now, Orwell, writes from the perspective of "shrinking world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire." (This from, "Inside the Whale" the 1940 essay on Mailer's Tropic of Cancer.) That is, liberalism's first great retreat. Regular readers know, I think that we are now experiencing the second great retreat.  The retreat may not be halted by casting about for an aesthetic ideal worth having, but I wonder if it is a possibility.

 

 

On Plato's System of Natural Liberty (and Adam Smith's True Religion)

After thirteen years in the profession (and by switching disciplinary affiliation), I finally have the chance to teach, and thereby read through, Plato's Republic -- a text that was central to the DNA of the ongoing discussions in several departments at my graduate institution (The University of Chicago) -- to undergraduates (in a course on Political Utopianism).* Over the years I had checked various passages, to refresh my memory, in the context of my scholarship and blogging, but as I prepared my first class on it (we're doing four three hour sessions), I recognized at once that I had forgotten not just details, but non-trivial features of the book (for example the exchange with Cephalus at the start of Book 1 about which soon). Anyway, teaching the book generated sparkling class discussion and prompted some new impressions.

One striking feature of Book 2 is that the true city (372e)-- Socrates' first city in speech  (369b-372d) -- is introduced as a heuristic for something else (to unearth the nature of justice in the individual):  “Is not the city larger than the man?... Then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the larger object and more easy to apprehend." (368e) In a large-scale, complete (or fully grown) (371e) model distinguishing features may be more available, and (if so) in virtue of size more easily unearthed and analyzed. While this strategy is compatible with certain forms of reductionism, it is notable that in Plato we study (a feature of) a big object in order to understand (that same feature in) the smaller ones (see Gulliver's Travels, Book 2). Obviously, this involves a bet on scale-invariance.

Here I treat the so-called "city of Pigs" (Glaucon's phrase (372d) as Socrates' genuine normative ideal or baseline. The title of this post is, of course, a (serious) joke. But not just a joke. For, Socrates' healthy city has an uncanny resemblance to Smith's system of natural liberty. (In the old Loeb translation Paul Shorey also notes this.) There are, of course, subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences, but  it is worth reminding ourselves of the important similarities: both 'ideal states' have an extensive division of labor and, thus, specialization; a monetized economy; are broadly egalitarian; are open to internal and external trade (that is, generate a surplus of goods and leisure time); are free of slaves; they are pacific; are property-owning; have a minimal state structure; and are famine free (about which more below). They also rely on a non-trivial distinction between necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries (see below).  There is one further important similarity, but that's the  speculative last paragraph below.

Of course, Socrates assumes a differentiated human nature (the differentiation is, in part, explicitly physical [371c & 371e] and natural skill) whereas Smith, as a good analytical egalitarian, assumes (agreeing with Thrasymachus) a roughly uniform human nature: "the difference...between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education." (On analytical egalitarianism see here and here). To be sure, there is also a crucial difference between Smith and Thrasymachus: Smith puts himself (the modeler) inside his model (philosophers are no different in human motivation) [echoing Hobbes and Mandeville], whereas Thrasymachus' vanity (Peart and Levy) leads him to treat his own expertise as somehow distinct from the folk he describes. (It's true that Thrasymachus is not called vain, but his blush (350d) reveals that he recognizes that he is working with an inconsistent model in which he either has to give up on his own elitism and embrace for himself the base -- proto-utility-maximizing -- description he gives of others, or has to insist that in virtue of his expertise he is somehow different from the ordinary agent. And if he, why not others?) But here, in the true city (369b-372d), Socrates does not assume, I think, a hierarchy of types (as he does elsewhere). So, the disagreement with Smith is truly minimal.+

In Socrates's true city, population growth is (to use Smith's terms) regulated by their wealth (372b) and available fertile country (372c)--thereby avoiding poverty and wars of acquisition. That is, there will be (to use Malthus's phrase) a moral check on off-spring. But this is just one of the side constraints. For, more subtly, in Socrates' ideal city, rather than generating luxury surplus, the population is allowed to grow when possible (so that, wealth/income per head stays roughly the same over the time). This is also pretty much Smith's ideal model for the right relationship between food supply, income, and population growth. [It is, I think granted by Socrates that conveniences of life (olives, cheese, salt, etc.) are allowed to grow (within moderation) and this may be culture relative; if the previous sentence is right then Smith's model is very close to Socrates's.]**

There is one very important difference between Socrates's true city and Smith's system of natural liberty. (No, I am not talking about the role of competition or Socrates's embrace of vegetarianism.) In Socrates's true city philosophy is absent. I believe this is due to the fact that philosophy is not needed, as a trade among many, in a healthy and proper functioning state. This presupposes, of course, controversially that philosophy is never purely contemplative nor a basic human need. The previous sentences are compatible with philosophy as a pure leisure activity (about which more below).

Finally, in Socrates's true city, there is room for religion. But this religion is neither the ordinary superstitious religion in which the Gods need to be bribed out of fear  (see, especially, the exchange with Cephalus at 331b) nor the rationalistic religion that Socrates will articulate in the more luxurious city (378ff). But rather, in the true city there is a life-enhancing, joyful religion: "they will feast with their children, drinking of their wine thereto, garlanded and singing hymns to the gods in pleasant fellowship." I had never previously assimilated this proto-Nietzschean strain in Socrates. (I think this feature was in part obscured for me by Nietzsche's polemic against the life-denying, sickly aspects of Platonism.) It is, of course, possible that the symposia will generate philosophical discussions. 

I close with a further, speculative thought. I have long wondered what the content of Adam Smith's pure and rational religion, "such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established" (emphases added) might be. Earlier, I kind of focused on Smith's debts to Locke, Spinoza, and Enlightenment thinkers (like Voltaire and Hume). But in reflecting on the structural similarities between Socrates' ideal city and Smith's regulative ideal, I wondered if Smith, too, -- who insists  that on this point there is consensus among the wise of all ages -- is not signaling his desire for a Socratic, that is, joyful religion. 

Pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established"- - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2015/05/lockes-redefinition-of-religion.html#sthash.RIBiY8MY.dpuf

On Finding a Home

‘we are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom…’--Otto Neurath

[Aristotle’s ghost] freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded. He predicted the same fate to ATTRACTION, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined.--Gulliver's Travels, Chapter VIII of Voyage III.

Today starts the bi-annual HOPOS conference (HOPOS = History of the Philosophy of Science) that my department is hosting in Ghent. Attending this meeting is a kind of intellectual home-coming because it is the only conference where I don't feel I need to justify my academic specialization to fellow philosophers. Even among early modernists, I felt like an outsider as long as I understood myself, and perceived others to look at me, as 'one of those weird Adam Smith guys.'

HOPOS, which has been around a few decades or so, is an anomaly in the profession: unlike other historical-philosophical topics it is not organized around a central figure -- although I often joke it is a coalition of folk that like Carnap and folk that like Newton -- nor characterized by a historical epoch. I am unfamiliar with professional societies devoted to HOM (History of Metaphysics), HOPOL (History of the Philosophy  of Language), HOE (History of Ethics), HOA (History of Aesthetics), etc. It is prima facie odd that a sub-specialization of philosophy, philosophy of science, would merit a society devoted to its history as an area of research (with even its own journal). The oddity of HOPOS (I have been a proud steer at one point) is deepened by the fact that there is a general sense that GPOS (General Philosophy of Science) is being displaced by more specialized sub-disciplines (PoX, that is philosophy of biology, philosophy of economics, philosophy of physics, etc., and even sub-disciplines of these: space/time, QM, etc.). Perhaps, the gradual demise of GPOS is a necessary pre-condition for the rise of HoPoS (history as burying the dead?), but I have never heard anybody say that.

In principle, HoPoS is a way of doing philosophy of science. So, after philosophy of science turned historical, say, with Kuhn, it is natural, albeit not necessary, to become reflexive about this turn and understand one's own activity historically. It's not clear that one could really go meta from HoPoS to, say, HoHoPoS, so it seems the potential infinite regress is blocked at HoPoS. To be concrete: I have long been puzzled and fascinated by the fact that some of the most significant features of Kuhn's Structure, were anticipated in Adam Smith's "The History of Astronomy" (written in the first half of the eighteenth century). Apparently thinking of science as an open-ended succession of revolutions between systems of thought that are in some sense incommensurable with each other is a kind of permanent open possibility in philosophical-logical space. That idea has a history, too (see the quote from Gulliver); it is, in fact, somewhat of a skeptical trope (while researching my dissertation I found a version of it in Montaigne).