Digressions&Impressions

Zadie Smith, Auden, and the Nothing Nothings

Remainder recognizes, with Szymborska’s poem, that we know, in the end, “less than little/And finally as little as nothing,” and so tries always to acknowledge the void that is not ours, the messy remainder we can’t understand or control—the ultimate marker of which is Death itself. We need not ever read a word of Heidegger to step in these murky waters. They flow through the “mainstream” of our canon. Through the negations of Beckett. The paradoxical concrete abstractions of Kafka. The scatological thingy-ness of Joyce at his most antic. The most famous line of Auden (“Poetry makes nothing happen”).--Zadie Smith "Two Directions for the Novel," as reprinted Changing My Mind (91).

One surprising aspect of the paragraph just quoted is that it involves a two-fold dispensability-thesis: first, you don't need philosophy to  read views that are "often mistaken for linguistic or philosophical nihilism," but that, simultaneously, "attend to the damaged and the partial, the absent and the unspeakable." (91). As Smith suggests such views are part of the literary canon. The second bit of this dispensability thesis is that the literary canon has priority not just because Kafka precedes Heidegger historically, but because (as becomes clear near the end of the piece) these views are already articulated and presented in "the ancient plays," that is, Greek tragedy --"The Oresteia, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone" --. Again the point is not just historical priority of Aeschylus and Sophocles preceding Plato, but because on Smith's account these poets get the better of "the dream that Plato started," (76) and that expresses itself in (Smith's terms) lyrical realist novels [e.g. Netherland] that hang on "to the rituals and garments of transcendence," while "knowing they are empty" (81).

That is, the dispensability-thesis is a salvo in the ancient battle between poets and philosophers; on Smith's creative reading of this battle is that she locates it within the literary canon: she takes the realist novel (broadly construed) as emanating from Plato's dream (with Austen, George Eliot, F. Scot Fitzgerald and even Saul Bellow), and she sees a "skewed road" (with Perec, Clarice Lispector, Borroughs, etc) that within the literary canon aspires "to the concrete quality of poetry."* That is, parts of the literary canon, one may even say the inauthentic part, is itself infected by philosophy.

What unites the 'poets' (which, to repeat, includes those on the skewed road) in the literary canon is there "acknowledgment of limitations" (91). It follows from this, and this is something Smith does not claim, that one charge on behalf of the poets (in the literary canon) against the philosophers (in the literary canon) is that the latter do not recognize scarcity, which is intrinsic to the craft as practiced by the former; or, 'the philosophers' work with infinite agents and 'the poets' work with finite agents.

I was reminded -- not just because the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy also (!) takes place within professional philosophy -- of Carnap's (famous (1932) analysis of Heidegger's the nothing nothings as a pseudo-statement (see pp. 69-73), when he introduces his discussion with a footnote in which he claims that "We could just as well have selected passages from any other of the numerous metaphysicians of the present or the past." That is, there is nothing at all special about Heidegger's words -- you don't need to read him -- because at any given time one can encounter some such metaphysician. Heideger's work is, in this sense, exchangeable for any other such work without (much) loss. Carnap is being here not just maliciously funny by suggesting Heidegger is dispensable, but he also reactivates and ties Heidegger's words to a famous metaphysical claim -- to be found in Seneca and Spinoza -- that the true philosopher lacks individuality and that when she intuits the truth she participates in the truth and becomes, thereby, infinite. (I return to this below.) Carnap also goes on to suggest that the whole class of Heideggers can be best understood as musicians that lack musical ability--they are infected by the desire to be theoretical and never learn how to make proper music, and that the true philosophical poet is Nietzsche (80; recall this post on Stone's celebrated piece).

Amusing enough, Carnap recognizes, but has little time for, an objection (that one may well trace back to at least Al-Ghazali and can also be found in Ibn Tufayl) in which one may try to save the metaphysical enterprise by stipulating that infinite beings/intelligence could understand the bits of metaphysics that Carnap finds unintelligible and so convey it to finite beings (like us) in ways that overcome our limitations (72). (The discussion has an afterlife in Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment about Mary.) To put it simply: Carnap does not allow any kind of trade or communication between finite and infinite agents.

My comment on Carnap is not just a cute, over-learned aside (it may be that, too). Smith invites reflection on the Heidegger-Carnap debate not just by mentioning Heidegger, but because she quotes  "the most famous line of Auden:" poetry makes nothing happen, which occurs in the second stanza of (the 1940) In Memory of W. B. Yeats. From the present perspective, one aspect of the beauty of Auden's line is that it expresses (in context) (i) the (potential) futility of poetry, while simultaneously, expressing (ii) the capacity of poetry to make that which is (taken to be) not, be. [To be sure, (ii) is not meaningful the way in which the vacuum of quantum field theory is (recall my notice on the review of Krauss by David Albert.)]** There is, in addition, no doubt that (i) is a meaningful statement and that (ii) can be made to be meaningful (although it may require some fancy logical technique or Beckett's negations).

I should stop here. But I add an extended coda:

I am incompetent at score-keeping the fame of particular lines of poetry, but the significance of Auden's point here is, in part, political. This can be seen by two points: first, Auden's poem acknowledges human limitation as Smith suggests. The poem begins with a particular (Yeats) human's finitude (or death) and ends with recognition of the inevitability of failure:

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

Even so, in these lines Auden suggests that the recognition of finitude can be transformed alchemically, but with toil of labor, in something more. The "words of a dead man" are modified in "the guts of the living," and are capable of "surviving us all." I don't want to suggest that the main point of Auden's poem is to claim that posterior fame (among the discerning elite) for the poet's productions is possible (they escape the finitude of life), but it is one of the points that, indeed, "death can be kept away from the poems." For, such immortality must be earned in the field of poetic politics by instructing "free men." There is a fine line between propaganda and moral education.

Second, what this means is spelled out in a quasi-companion piece (from 1948), Auden calls attention that the great issue of Yeats's life is, how could he take "nonsense seriously." In context, Auden means the kind of new age spirituality being generated in "Southern California" (188-9). Auden admits that his way of expressing his judgment involves a certain kind of British class-based snobbishness. Smith's essay "Two Directions for the Novel," and also her novel On Beauty, repeatedly return to the enduring hold of this class  and its snobbishness on the American literary imagination (despite the existence of Pynchon, Wallace Foster, etc.). What interests me here is that Auden's answer to this question is grounded in the thought that historical-political circumstances determine which nonsense is taken seriously, and, more important, that this is always done in a larger social-political polemical context. For some nonsense may be useful to the poet to "make" one's "private experiences public" and one's "vision of public events personal."(191) Auden is explicit that not any nonsense will do--not all falsehoods are created equal.

According to Auden what makes some nonsense useful is their overlap with commonly believed dogma. (191) This dogma may be religious, but need not be so. As my former colleague, José A Benardete, noted (recall), a poet may invoke pseudo-sentences in the antecedent of a contrary-to-fact conditional and thereby reveal, in the consequent, what no mirror of life could reveal.

 

 

On Judith Butler and Anti-Political-Zionism (I)

It is surely not anti-Jewish or counter-Jewish to offer a critique of the forms of state violence instituted and maintained by political Zionism (which would include the massive dispossessions of Palestinians in 1948, the appropriation of land in 1967, and the recurrent confiscations of Palestinian lands that continues now with the building of the wall and the expansion of the settlements). This alone is important, since Israel claims to represent the Jewish people, and popular opinion tends to assume that Jews "support" Israel without taking account Jewish traditions of anti-Zionism and the presence of Jews in coalitions that oppose the Israeli colonial subjugation of Palestinians....If the critique of Zionism is to be effective and substantial, that claim of [Jewish] exceptionalism has to be refused in favor of more fundamental democratic values. However important it may be to establish Jewish opposition to Zionism, this cannot be done without a critical move that questions the sufficiency of a Jewish framework, however alternative and progressive, as the defining horizon of the ethical. The opposition to Zionism and requires the departure from Jewishness as an exclusionary framework for thinking both ethics and politics.-- Judith Butler (2012) Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, (2).

Let me start with a point of agreement: it is indeed vital to avoid a conflation of what Judith Butler calls 'political' Zionism with Jewishness (not to mention Judaism). There are historically and at present secular Jewish and religious Jewish arguments against such political Zionism, and these should not be effaced from one's understanding or perception of Jewishness. It should be noted at once, however, that the orthodox Jewish, anti-political Zionist movements and arguments are entirely absent in Butler's treatment (recall), and this absence reflects a wider absence of the role of (traditional) Judaism. It's hard to understand Judaism, and its liturgy, without some reference to the idea of Zion. By contrast, Butler's analysis focuses almost entirely on some twentieth century "Jewish" philosophers (Benjamin, Arendt, Levinas), who, in so far as they take Jewish sources seriously, do so within a Kantianizing ethical (and secularizing) framework [the story is more complicated, especially for Benjamin, of course].

While "popular opinion" is wrong to treat 'being Jewish' as entailing 'support' of political Zionism (if it does so), it does not follow, of course, that the State of Israel, or its elected government, does not "represent" the Jewish people. It all turns on what we mean by 'represent.' For, while there are lots of Jews that are un-involved in Israeli elections nor enfranchised to vote in them (and so are not represented in the way electees represent an electorate) and take themselves to be disinterested from afar in Israeli policies, the State does take itself to guard, or represent, the interests of (to quote the Israeli Declaration of Independence) "Jewish people" without Israeli passports. And this interest is, in part, expressed in the so-called Law of return: "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh." But such non-Israeli Jews are under no obligation toward the State of Israel nor do they have any responsibility -- say by way of tacit agreement -- for its policies.+

In her book, with its commitments to (recall above) "fundamental democratic values," (2) Butler constitutes, and speaks on behalf of, a "Jewish Left"(20) or "we on the Left" (93), which can (explicitly) include non-Jews, too. But throughout the book she fails to note that political Zionism is itself a nineteenth century response to a failure of democracy (recall this post on Herzl). Democracies are not always able to secure the safety and flourishing of minority populations--xenophobia, racism, antisemtism, and closed borders (which both keep people out and trap those inside) are always live possibilities within democracy. This is, in fact, what makes the rise of Zionism of enduring theoretical relevance. Political Zionism diagnoses an enduring possibility of democracies' tendency to fail to live up to Liberal ideals. While Butler writes about those that wrote against political Zionism during the Weimar Republic, Butler misses the significance of this fact because she construes Zionism nearly exclusively as a response to the Holocaust (see, especially 182-205; although she acknowledges that for Arendt the rise of fascism is rooted in the refugee crisis at the end of WWI (144)). The Israeli declaration of Independence is more precise on this score: "The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency," (emphasis added).

Obviously, Butler has every right to consider xenophobia, racism, antisemitism, and closed borders as inimical to fundamental democratic values (after all, this animates her criticism of Israeli practices) and itself a consequence of the nation-state (which she opposes). One can grant Butler's point at the level of pure theory, but it is not true of, so to speak, the phenomenology of democracies. That is to say, Butler's assumptions presuppose conditions under which political Zionism would not be needed.  Acknowledging the truth of the previous sentence is compatible with Butler's ethical criticisms of the practices that she describes as "colonial subjugation of Palestinians." (For useful critical comments on this kind language, see Benhabib's review.)*

So, what Butler takes to be the inherent flaws of political Zionism is itself a feature of the state system that gives rise to the need for Zionism. In her analysis of Arendt's critique of the nation-state (24-36), Butler (implicitly) recognizes this, too. Butler's own stance embraces a rejection of the nation-state and state-violence. On the former: non-nation states (i.e., multi-ethnic Empires) have also caused trouble for minorities, too; this is why the epistemic neglect of nineteenth century roots of Zionism is so damaging [Herzl was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire]. On the latter: one can reject state-violence, in principle, but still find unilateral disarmament or power sharing a worse option. And Butler is unwilling to fully confront the prudence, if not fear, that may underwrite such stance. Her position presupposes a fundamental revolution in the very nature of the international state system, but somehow one should start with abolishing political Zionism. (Again, that's not intended to give political Zionism a moral-pass on its crimes.) For, Butler confronts the prudential position only (tangentially) by way of (legitimate and important!) criticism Levinas' racist, ethnocentrism, which she treats as an "Ashkenazi presumption"--it is ironic, indeed, that the elitism and racism of Heidegger's Jewish 'students' is meant to stand in for Ashkenazis in general!

I return to Butler's inability to confront genuinely the roots of the Zionist project (including her analysis of Zionist demographic fears) in future post(s). Here I close with an observation. Within the history of Jewish intellectual thought, Butler recognizes the ways in which Hermann Cohen and Hannah Arendt both respresent a kind of "faith in Europe" in which the "Jewish people" are a European nation that combines "German humanism and Jewish messianism" without territory, that is, a (Kantianized) "cultural Zionism (140-1). She acknowledges that Cohen's faith (that is, his German nationalism) is "painful to read;" and while she is critical of Arendt's occasional ethnocentrism, she tends to embrace Arendt's general program of the "dissolution of sovereignty." (146) As a general program for the state system this is a consistent position; but if, in practice, it seems to mean that the Jews should not be sovereign and (only) political Zionism is illegitimate. For, if (nearly) all existing states are illegitimate according to Butler's ethics, as seems to follow from her position, it is again to confuse a symptom (political Zionism)  for its cause (state violence).

I started by noting that Butler often implies she speaks for "the Left." This label does little justice to the ethics of 'alterity' and 'relationality' she develops. In particular, she insists that prior to politics (as represented by her by the liberal social contract [oddly she cannot forfeit Kantianism herself]) we are all in a sense akin to the diasporic Jew, who confronts "irreversible heterogeneity." (State formation is thereby equated with forceful homogenization.) But we get little information on how to think about states without the violent and powerful trappings of sovereignty. Butler is right to think alternatives to the existing political cul-de-sac in Israeli-Palestinian relations. That these alternatives may seem utopian now, is no argument against her. (After all, political Zionism must have seemed utopian to earlier generations.) But 'Jewish' reflection on politics (as can be found in the Hebrew Bible, Maimonides, Spinoza, etc. (recall)) is largely absent in her analysis; she denies herself resources to think about political power (as distinct from the ethical) from within her Galut ethic, and that's an odd place to be for somebody of the Left, especially when we write from within American empire (and its "public opinion"). If reflection on political Zionism wishes to be of philosophical significance, it must do so not just as a critique of state violence, but also as a means toward a proper understanding of the role of power today.

On Fame in Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahh...am I Straussian?; on the Political Theory and Political Philosophy divide

Maybe it's because Digressions lacks a category for 'political theory' and I am halfway through my first semester as an analytically trained philosopher employed as a political theorist in a political science department, but the other day I read (perhaps re-read) Jacob Levy's entertaining and illuminating essay on the distinction between political theory and political philosophy. Levy's essay is just about to become dated because (i) within analytical political philosophy the strangle-hold of Rawlsianism is being broken by what I have called analytical ideology studies (and here, too) associated with recent work by Haslanger, Saul, Stanley, Maitra, etc.;(ii) within political theory there has been an upsurge of what one may call applied continental philosophy drawing on Foucault and Deleuze and the enduringly relevant Arendt, especially, in work on bio-power, neo-liberalism, terrorism studies, migration studies, post-humanist ecological thinking, etc.

While Levy does a very fine job in calling attention to genuine, different methodological and practical commitments between the two 'fields,' ultimately his essay very much reads as describing two families capturing their own territory in closely related institutions. This may not be the main point of Levy's essay, but this conclusion follows from the way the piece is structured ("What is it that differentiates John Rawls, Christine Korsgaard, Thomas Scanlon, Brian Barry, Thomas Nagel, G.A. Cohen, and Joseph Raz, and their students and admirers, from Michael Walzer, Judith Shklar, George Kateb, Sheldon Wolin, and their students and admirers?") Even the group (or school) that is the exception to the fairly robust generalizations is identified in terms of genealogical attributes (e.g., "Students of Leo Strauss...Those influenced by Strauss").*

 

Even so I was personally startled by Levy's piece. Let me explain. While I have Rawlsian teachers (Norm Daniels, Dan Brudney) and studied with those that engaged closely with Rawls (Larmore, Nussbaum), I didn't come from political philosophy to political theory. I came from history and philosophy of science (HPS) with an emphasis on early modern and philosophy of economics. But in reflecting on Levy's essay, I noticed that by his standards I am a Straussian!** Consider the following eight criteria (these are almost all direct quotes):

1. An emphasis on Francis Bacon and Maimonides that is pretty alien to the rest of political theory. 
2. Straussians place great weight on a practice they identify as "philosophy," but mostly they study others who have engaged in that practice rather than engaging in it themselves.
3. Straussians are strongly pro-philosophy (as they understand it) .
4. Straussians are serious critics of social science.
5. Yet almost without exception Straussians are located in political science rather than philosophy departments.
6. Despite 3, contemporary philosophers do not identify Strausians as philosophy.
7. Straussians tend to reach whole books with attention to close readings and eye for details.
8. Straussians ignore Benjamin Constant.

Of these eight, I fit five or six criteria naturally. (Of course, I am pro-philosophy!)  I have not published much on Bacon, but I teach him nearly every year. (And while I don't teach Maimonides, I am teaching Al-Farabi twice this academic year.) Moreover, while I am not a student of Strauss, at Chicago I took classes with some Straussians, and I have repeatedly written warmly of Cropsey and, my former colleague, Jose Benardete (who was clearly influenced by Strauss, but who does not fit Levy's characterization because Benardete is also a philosopher's philosopher who spent a life-time in a very analytic philosophy department).

What do I make of this? Four observations: first, Straussian themes clearly rubbed off on me at Chicago. I don't think this was primarily work of the faculty there; but rather the cumulative impact of my fellow graduate students (whom I encountered not just in classes but in the famous Chicago workshops [where I also first met Levy!] as well as on the basketball court). It's very hard to take the endless vilification of a whole school of thought seriously when on a daily basis you encounter smart, erudite, and interesting characters doing fascinating research. (Since I have also encountered the kind of Straussian that is easily to caricature.) Second, in the 1990s at Chicago, where Lewis-style metaphysics was not taken seriously, it was by no means obvious that analytical philosophy would endure as a living tradition. It seemed exhausted and focused on narrow (and by no means promising) lines of inquiry. (The most interesting work was in the philosophy of the special sciences.) Third, the eight characteristics are not exclusive to Straussianism. (After all, Putnam is as critical of the fact-value distinction as is Strauss. At Chicago, even philosophy of space-time physics was taugh, in part, by way of close readings of classical texts. [I learned close reading from Ian Mueller and Howard Stein, both far removed from Strauss in lots of ways.]) Finally, I'd like to think that the eight criteria neither exhaust nor track the essential characteristics of my philosophical personality (there is a neo-Heideggerian strain in Straussianism that I am decidedly lukewarm about), but I recognize I am not the right judge.

Luckily, I am about to revisit my interest in Benjamin Constant (recall).

 

 

When will the progress of analytical philosophy be defended without propaganda?

Frege’s article had a galvanizing effect on such philosophers as Bertrand Russell. When the young Russell arrived as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890, philosophy was dominated by the ponderous metaphysics of German idealism, which pounded out propositions purporting to delve into the murky and nebulous features of “the Absolute.” An older Russell once reminisced that he had thought of language as transparent, the medium of thought that could simply be taken for granted. Frege demonstrated otherwise. Instead of trusting language to transport one into intimacy with the Absolute, it might be good to first discover how language manages to do more basic things, in the manner of Frege. Modern philosophy of language and analytic philosophy were both born in this same technical turn taken by philosophy. "What Philosophers Really Know" by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (October 8, 2015, New York Times), reviewing Philosophy of Language: The Classics Explained by Colin McGinn. {HT Liam Kofi Bright & Jason Stanley}

After the string of (self-inflicted) bad press received by Colin McGinn's teaching style and recent academic publications, it's nice to be reminded of some of his academic virtues in Goldsteins review ("McGinn has succeeded brilliantly in demonstrating the substantive progress made in philosophy of language.") The review itself is a pleasure to read and makes useful distinctions among, "philosophy of language," "the linguistic turn," and "ordinary language philosophy," that should help the public better understand analytical philosophy's practices and history. Yet the review is framed as a robust defense of the "cumulative progress of" analytical philosophy. And here the review manages, despite astute observations (as regular readers know, I like her resistance to the idea that consensus is constitutive of expertise), to turn into clownish propaganda.

There are four sure ways of recognizing one is in the realm of analytical propaganda: (i) the origin myths of the rebellion against British Idealism contain obvious blunders: (ii) analytical philosophy's progress contains neither Kuhn loss nor other problems; (iii) obligatory mention of Heidegger as bad guy; (iv) the role of ethics in analytical philosophy's birth is systematically effaced.

On (i): above, I quoted the treatment of British Idealism and Russell. Russell did not attribute to the British Idealists the idea that language could be transparent; it was the view that the youthful Russell entertained himself while writing one of the masterpieces of early analytical philosophy, The Principles of Mathematics. ( Peter Hylton has made the point in print.) His later self, perhaps influenced by the encounter with Wittgenstein's writing, saw the error of his earlier analytical ways! I am no specialist of British Idealism, but I would be amazed if they held something like the transparency of language thesis. They held, rather, (in Bradley's hands) that language was something to be left behind in (the ascent toward) the Absolute (a view shared with folk like Plato and Spinoza and several other early modernists).

Goldstein's treatment of the origin of analytical philosophy, which was undoubtedly common when she was a PhD student, is especially cringe-worthy because it provides a dated view of what's going on in (ahh) the best analytical departments. Here I don't just mean the work by historians of analytical philosophy, but rather the work by metaphysicians like Jonathan Schaffer (in a famous paper) and Michael Della Rocca (in one of my favorite papers), who have returned with a confident and self-critical eye toward the origin myths of analytical philosophy. They show that today we can reflect on the history of analytical philosophy without anxiety.

On (iv): at one point Goldstein writes, "Analytic philosophy originated with philosophers who also did seminal work in mathematical logic, most notably Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and the alliances with both formal logic and science are among its defining features." She then goes on to offer the gratuitous and obligatory dismissal of Heidegger ((indeed he is coupled, en passant, with "Slavoj Žižek") thus covering (ii)). Goldstein's position makes sense of the self-conception of analytical philosophy as advanced during the early Cold War by influential disciples of the first generation of logical positivism and culminated in Dummett's efforts to turn Frege into the true founder of analytical philosophy. This story effaces the role of one of the founders, G.E. Moore, whose reputation rested and rests, in part, on his work in ethics not logic.

There are two further problems in this narrative: first, by joining analytical philosophy into an "alliance" with science, Goldstein quietly glides over Wittgenstein's philosophical hostility to natural science. It also misses, say, the role of analytical philosophy's practice as friendly critic to science's public roles as manifested in the wonderful work by the second generation analytical philosopher, Stebbing, who is generating more interest both among those who care about analytical philosophy as public philosophy and the nature of responsible speech/propaganda as well as those who wish to recover the roots of metaphysical analysis.

But, more subtly, second, Goldstein's picture completely leaves Sidgwick's role in the origins of analytical philosophy out of the story.* By this I do not merely mean that Rawls, Parfit, Singer (et al) are in (ongoing) conversation with Sidgwick; rather, I also mean that the Cambridge side of analytical philosophy originates in the circle around Sidgwick and students who were preoccupied with a whole range of problems (besides ethics, logic, and linguistic philosophy), including, political economy, philosophy of science, probability, etc. In my view this story has not been fully told yet, but would include, in addition to the names already mentioned, also Ramsey, W.E. Johnson, Broad, and Keynes father and son.

Finally, all change, even the progressive, "technical" ones, can entail losses ("progress" and "technical" are repeated like a mantra in the review). Goldstein wisely (and correctly) places analytical philosophy's progress "more in the discovery of questions, which often includes the discovery of the largeness lurking within seemingly small questions." But she does not reflect on the fact that during this progress some questions may have become harder to ask+ and other worthy questions were regularly overlooked (if not mocked); in closing her review, Goldstein recognizes that there remain questions of enduring interest "not limited to philosophers," but fails to reflect on our tradition's repeated willingness to pretend that the most profound are not really philosophy.
 

 

On not using expert knowledge; Plato and Bacon's Bensalem, reconsidered.

I have read in a book of one of your men, of a Feigned Commonwealth, where the married couple are permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked. This they dislike; for they think it a scorn to give a refusal after so familiar knowledge: but because of many hidden defects in men and women's bodies, they have a more civil way; for they have near every town a couple of pools, (which they call Adam and Eve's pools,) where it is permitted to one of the friends of the men, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them severally bathe naked.--Joabin, the "Good Jew," in Francis Bacon, New Atlantis.

Hard in truth it is for a state thus constituted to be shaken and disturbed; but 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, [546b] 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....And this entire geometrical number is determinative of this thing, of better and inferior births. [546d] And when your guardians, missing this, bring together brides and bridegrooms unseasonably, the offspring will not be well-born or fortunate. Of such offspring the previous generation will establish the best, to be sure, in office, but still these, being unworthy, and having entered in turn into the powers of their fathers, will first as guardians begin to neglect us, paying too little heed to music and then to gymnastics, so that our young men will deteriorate in their culture; and the rulers selected from them [546e] will not approve themselves very efficient guardians for testing.--Plato, Republic, Book VIII.

One of the public goods on Bensalem, "Adam and Eve's pools," is the site of a remarkable practice. A friend can inspect a prospective life-partner naked (and under water?) for "hidden defects." The status of divorce is ambiguous; it does not go mentioned, but there is a strong hint that it may be permitted (about which below). Either way, from the perspective of a mate-seeker this practice puts considerable pressure on one's ability to discern the character of one's friends and to rely on their judgment, self-commandment, and fidelity. Presumably these friends also need to have some knowledge of basic anatomy and be capable of discerning signs of hidden defects (I return to this below).

Sadly, we learn almost nothing about the structure of such moral education on Bensalem; this is surprising because friendship is actually a non-trivial institutions on the island: "three" chosen "friends" aid the head of a house-hold in a kind of two-day family court in which family disputes (about property (recall this post), etc.) are settled just before the "feast of a family" (a kind of fertility feast [recall this post])--the central aim of marriage is, in fact, "propagation" (and, in case you missed it, the narrator repeats that with them "population is so much affected,' and such as with them it seemed to be.") This ad hoc family court provides, "direction...touching marriages," within the extended family.* It is possible that this "direction" can involve recommending divorce. So, friends are involved both in the prospective evaluation of one's marriage partner,** and in providing guidance to one's off-spring in their marriages. (These need not be the same set of friends.)

Now, some other time I'll reflect a bit more on why there would be less "scorn to give a refusal" on Bensalem (as opposed to the practice in Utopia), for in both cases there is "so familiar knowledge," and it is not obvious why one practice is more "civil" or less likely to generate conflicts than the other. Here I want to comment on a peculiarity of the Bensalemite practice.

For most scholars and students the main historical interest in New Atlantis is the account given in it of the House of Salomon, which is kind of intellectual blueprint of The Royal Society and modern institutions of scientific research with a hierarchical division of labor, etc. It's a place where basic research is practiced, and that after several centuries of research, also generates a steady supply of useful technologies and astounding medical insights. (I am really understating their achievements!) They are a bit secretive about these technologies and are cautious about "which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all an oath of secrecy, for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret: though some of those we do reveal sometimes to the state and some not."

Now, its research aims to provide "knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things." That is the members of the House of Salomon are true experts on the "many hidden defects of men and women's bodies." Yet, they do not provide guidance on mate-choice, even though population growth is the central political aim on the island. That's especially odd because the members of the House of Salomon possess the kind of knowledge that eludes the Guardians in Plato's Republic: "Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand, of what matter and commixture what kind of those creatures will arise" (they are even capable, it seems, of preventing the destruction of living beings)!

Whatever the motives of the House of Salomon's lack of interest in a political program of breeding (eugenics), their laissez faire stance toward mate selection suggests self-restraint (from the perspective of politics and philosophy). This is surprising. For it is often said by (Heidegger-ian and neo-Thomistic) critics of technology in modernity, that the Baconian approach generates hubris and a desire to dominate nature (including humankind). That consequence may be true. But the scientific project was launched with the idea (or ideology) that the members of the priestly, scientific elite would obey norms and practices with self-imposed limits. 

On Continental Philosophy as Cultural Capital

Reports of the death of the analytic/continental divide are highly premature, and the rampant claims that this division is "merely sociological" seem to imply (in rather un-Latourian fashion) that sociology deals only with figments of the imagination.--Harman on  Latour, p. 11.

During my last visit to the pre-renovation-era Stedelijk, I attended a friend's wedding in 2002. As it happens it was also the last time I got really plastered at a party because I had falsely assumed dinner would be served at the event. The wedding was an artsy affair because the bride (an editor/writer) and groom (a journalist) had lots of friends and family who were musicians and (Protestant) clergy.  At the time the museum was still controlled by the municipality and private parties were not permitted; but somebody close to the wedding-couple knew a curator. I vividly remember a solitary walk through the darkened, then-still-slightly-shabby museum with an extended meditation on Van Dongen's Anna de Noailles. (I had no idea then she was was a famous artist in her day.)

Yesterday, we went to see the 'Matisse and his friends' exhibit (as I call it) in Het Stedelijk with our son. I was surprised there were fewer crowds than its neighbors (Het Rijks and Het Van Gogh) attracts; we had no wait to enter the exhibit. The expanded building feels very clean.

When I was a kid, there had been obligatory, school-visits to local museums. At most of these, I was more fascinated by other visitors, especially the earnest art-students with their drawing pads who would patiently copy the paintings on the wall, than by the art works on display. But, at Het Stedelijk, I was mesmerized, even frightened, by Edward Kienholz's The Beanery. To this day, when I see a mechanical clock I recall -- by the magic of association -- that installation; and sometimes when I walk into a dive, I encounter clock-heads before my brain tells me I am wrong.

At the end of our visit, we went to the gift-shop to buy a Matisse-post-card. To my surprise, the fancy store had an excellent and broad selection of books in twentieth century (Continental) aesthetics, critical theory, and Continental philosophy more broadly--all attractively displayed in the gift-store. The only analytical philosopher in sight was Danto. I was bemused to see so much once-radical-chic assimilated to a tasteful, bourgeois environment.

But as I reflected on the book display, with my finger-tips sensually caressing the elegantly designed covers, I recognized that these densely argued, jargon-rich books were expected to sell. There is evidently a market for this kind of philosophical elitism--one associated with the twentieth century avant-garde and conceptual art. When I was an undergraduate, and even a PhD student, I was assured, always in passing, over and over again, that Continental philosophy is bullshit and rubbish; that its jargon masked the empty rhetoric of charlatans; of course, I was also repeatedly told that Heidegger was a Nazi (recall, and here). (Nobody ever seemed to notice that if Continental philosophy was fully implicated in Nazism it was the opposite of empty rhetoric.)

The gift-shop, which is managed, at least in part, by the up-market German artsy-chain, Buchhandlung Walther König, offers Lacan, Zizek, Sloterdijk, Butler, Arendt, Deleuze, Badiou, etc. (I even saw a book by Sylvère Lotringer for the first time.) Evidently, Continental philosophy is either status-enhancing and, thus value-added to the art-replicas, post-cards, and glossy catalogs on display in the store, or it is, by now, firmly associated with modern art and part of the same market. I looked around me. I saw several people picking up books and heading toward the cash register. (I bought Harman on Latour.) I scrutinized their faces; I didn't think they were buying these books to be displayed on coffee-tables alongside the heavy-glossy, Works of Brancussi. I wondered how large the public was that would seek out the challenge of grappling with continental philosophers during the holidays.

Whenever analytical philosophers make a public impact, I feel a kind of Humean pride, even when I know I ought to feel better. In Holland several of my former teachers -- Dennett, Nussbaum, etc. -- are TV personalities, and whenever they are featured this pleases me greatly (even if I disagree with their utterances). I don't feel the same emotion when I encounter media attention for Continental philosophers (except, of course, my NewAPPS buddies). In fact, in looking over the book-store display, I felt a soft-jealousy. 

In practice, analytical philosophy is slowly displacing continental philosophy in the modern, grant-driven university research environment of the European Continent; the grant agencies focus on public utility, objective metrics, and embrace a veneer of scientism. We have become little cogs that push the scientific research frontier along. Carnap's bet was prescient.

In much of Europe we are now a generation or two removed from Christianity, and philosophy's role as a secular placeholder -- in the manner of 19th century aesthetic experience as a secular placeholder for religious experience -- of creative theology and public prophecy is fading; the last gasp of such theology can be found in the Stedelijk's rooms devoted to high conceptual or minimal art of the 1980s (e.g. Sol Lewitt). It is, thus, no surprise that the best Continental philosophy is not emanating from Paris anymore. It's Americans or those that lived Marxism that re-fuel it until, perhaps, our newer immigrant populations re-animate the tradition.

As we left the museum, I regret failing to introduce my son to Kienholz's The Beanery.

Borges and Leo Strauss on Virtue is Knowledge

If instead we begin with the presupposition that Meno is irremediably stupid and wicked, and then go looking for support in the text, we will find it. There are always many things in a Platonic dialogue which depend on our stage directions. This method may involve some danger to our own souls, however. Meno doesn’t do too well in the face of Socrates. But which one of us would? To exaggerate Meno’s arrogance, laziness, smugness, snobbishness, rudeness, failure to pay attention, slavish tendency to follow teachers or common opinions, and so forth, might well be to underestimate our own.--Abraham Stone.

Through the years a man peoples a space with images of provinces, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.--Borges (quoted from this piece by Nada Elia)

In writing about Borges's (1949) Averroës's Search (yesterday), I was reminded of Leo Strauss's (1941) essay, Persecution and the Art of Writing. I hinted at this at the start of my post by calling attention to Borges's awareness of the significance of strategic silences when dealing with theological questions. The practice of esotericism is also alluded to with a nod to the doctrine of "Quran's two faces." (This is merely attributed to "people" not to any of the speakers nor any of the poets and scholars mentioned.)* To what degree Borges's quotations (and misquotations ) of Averroes are also a labyrinth into his own theological views, I leave for another day.** This being Borges, esoterism's comedic twin mirror -- the learned not grasping what is fully present -- is also, perhaps even more fully, present in the story; most readers note that Averroes (who is struggling to understand what Aristotle means by tragedy and comedy) is incapable of recognizing  the performances of comedy and tragedy he is exposed to.

As an aside, and speaking of lacunae: as of yet the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lacks an entry on Averroës!

The main reason to be reminded of Strauss (1941) essay is because Borges's Averroës's Search starts and ends with nods/citations to/of Renan's (1852) Averroès et l'Averroïsme: essai historique. This book is now obscure, but as it happens its author is Strauss's only named target in the text. In particular, Renan is held to be responsible for changing opinion about Averroës, from somebody who is perceived to be hostile to "all religion," to somebody who is a "loyal, even believing, Moslem." (494) One need not be a logician to see that these two options do not exhaust all real possibilities even among "scholars." (Renan's interest in racial hierarchy goes unmentioned.) Averroës later returns in Strauss's essay as one of several thinkers who suffered "a kind of persecution that was more tangible than social ostracism." (499-500; in context Strauss is careful to distinguish between religuous persecution and persecution of free inquiry (500), while also insisting that such ostracisim is the "mildest" species of persecution.)

Now, Strauss lists "axioms" that can naturalize the seeming "miracle" of writing for a minority of one's readers in a publication. The first axiom is that thoughtless readers are careless, and only the thoughtful are careful readers.  (There is also a second axiom which pertains only to twarthing legal persecution.) Strauss recognizes that there is an objection: that there are clever and careful readers who are not trustworthy. His response to this objection is that the literature he is discussing accepts the "Socratic dictum" that "virtue is knowledge." (492) For convienence's sake I call esotericism that accepts this dictum, 'Socratic esotericism.'

Strauss's response to the objection to Socratic esotericism is manifestly unsatisfying as the mere mention of Heidegger -- a very careful reader, after all, -- reminds us. It is an open question to what degree Strauss's learned American readers in 1941 would have been familiar with Heidegger, but Strauss would not have thought it prudent to call attention to his own particular familiarity with Heidegger.*** That is to say, Strauss esoterically introduces another form of -- let's call it 'post-Socratic' -- esotericism: one for authors and readers that do not accept the unity of the virtues and that all knowledge is virtue. While Strauss offers elaborate details on how to pay attention to the signs of Socratic esotericism, he is, shall we say, less explicit on the post Socratic kind.

You may think, 'what does any of this have to do with Borges?' Averroës's Search is preceded by Deutsches Requiem. The story is a lightly edited soliloquy by a self-knowing, and highly literate Nazi with a self-proclaimed passion for "music and metaphysics" who manages to destroy his own compassion. That is to say, if Borges practices esotericism then it will be of a post-Socratic kind. 

 

On Evaluating Philosophical Research Programs

I…believe that very important gains in clarity and fruitfulness are to be had from the introduction of such formally constructed languages. This is a difference of opinion which, despite the fact that it does not concern (in my own terms) a matter with cognitive content, is nonetheless in principle susceptible of a kind of rational resolution. In my view, both programs - mine of formalized languages, Quine's of a more freeflowing and casual use of language - ought to be pursued; and I think that if Quine and I could live, say, for two hundred years, it would be possible at the end of that time for us to agree on which of the two programs had proved more successful.-- Carnap  (1951) as reported by Howard Stein (1992) “Was Carnap Entirely Wrong, After All?” Synthese.

We're only about one third of the way of Carnap's proposed time-frame to evaluate the fruitfulness of the alternative research programs advocated by Quine and Carnap. So, it may be too early to tell, but it may be useful enough to invite progress reports. Here I leave aside the complex interpretive-philosophical issue to what degree Carnap and Quine really agree about each other's characterizations of each other's and their own projects. In particular, it is by no means obvious that the respective metrics for success are really shared. (Quine may like clarity and fruitfulness, too, but he also likes simplicity and continuity with tradition a lot, etc.).

As an aside, I think it's possible that in the 1970s, or so, it would have looked that Quine's program was winning. One striking, and exciting, feature of the more contemporary scene is that the Carnapian program has been revived (especially in Europe). In fact, I am inclined to think that the two programs have started to generate hybrids. (Some other time I'll discuss evidence for this claim, but lots of formal philosophers in Carnap's sense are also are happy to engage with naturalizing projects in constructive ways, and naturalistic philosophers may happily avail themselves to formal tools.) I am not claiming there are is full hybridization; obviously there are interesting  tensions between, say, formal philosophers of science and those that have taken the practice turn.

I am fascinated by the fact that Carnap -- if he is reported accurately by Stein (his student)* -- would allow a 'rational resolution' for something that is in a sense a question without cognitive content (that is, I  think, because it is for him an external question--one that involves optative commitments). The particular resolution he proposes suggests, in fact, that he may be writing, in part, for posteriority or has a kind of historical sense of his own enterprise. Again, leaving aside the specific criteria, this rational resolution would be consequentialist. (I am treating 'successful' as consequentialist.) This is no surprise, of course, because his version of the principle of tolerance also has a consequentialist flavor. 

Of course, it is quite natural for a scientific philosopher to conceive of (and sell) her own project in terms of a progressive research program. From this vantage point not all consequences are equal. In particular, it's those consequences that track or instantiate some privileged set of scientific virtues that are supposed to trump other consequences. So, for example, that a research program is popular among policy-makers (and only among policy-makers) is not the right sort of consequence from the vantage point of a 'rational resolution' (although certainly it may be useful in other respects if one is looking for jobs). This is not to deny that expected social utility may well be one of the legitimate consequences to evaluate a research program in scientific philosophy, but qua philosophers or truth-seekers we may also think that some non-social consequence may also be very important.

Now, one more thought. Obviously, one may well have a preference for one philosophical research program over another that are based on less consequentialist reasons, and more intrinsic preferences (reasons, virtues, etc.). One sometimes hears scientific philosophers mutter that they are the Enlightenment party (and wink at the vices of Heideggerianism) not just because they think this is beneficial, but also because it is more virtuous or simply more humane (rational, noble, etc.). The most ambitious attempt that I am familiar with this that explores this line of thought (Carnapian philosophy as Enlightenment philosophy) is Carus's book on Carnap: Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment. This book relates Enlightenment to the notion of progress (of which I am a bit suspicious), while holding on to a robust notion of pluralism (which I like). (See Alan Richardson's review for a critical discussion of the use of 'Enlightenment.')  But, of course, within the Enlightenment camp there is fierce disagreement over what the right way of doing philosophy is; it's contested. So, an appeal to Enlightenment values will not deliver straightforward metrics of success.

 

*Full disclosure: Stein was one of my teachers (recall).

If there is a crisis in Heidegger scholarship, it's not what you think

Heidegger scholarship is in crisis these days, and not just because his anti-Semitism has recently been put on full display. The crisis, rather, is that almost ninety years after his major work was published and sixty years after his best work was finished, Heidegger scholars still cannot agree on what he was driving at.--Thomas Sheehan, reviewing Krzysztof Ziarek, Language After Heidegger.

I admire Sheehan's review of Ziarek's book (which I have not read). It tries to be fair to Ziarek (and Heidegger). Not unlike this review, it avoids the hysterical praise and hysterical dismissiveness that characterizes so much of the reception of Heidegger. Even though Sheehan disagrees with Ziarek methodologically and substantially, he tries to be informative and (I hope) fair to the book under review. It also makes a useful  distinction between two approaches in the history of philosophy that goes beyond Heidegger scholarship. I quote:

One approach (the one that I prefer) is to hose down Heidegger’s language to get at what he was trying to articulate, and then to express that in what Milton called “an answerable style.” An alternative approach is the circular one of remaining within Heidegger’s language while attempting to explain it. This approach, which medieval logicians called modus psittacinus (Aristotle, τρόπος ψιττάκινος, Hist. anim. VIII 12, 597b27-29), is widely favored in contemporary Heidegger scholarship

So far so good. So why the critical title to this post? First, I deny that Heidegger's antisemitism  is a source of crisis. Not because it is unproblematic or irrelevant (and for good measure we can throw in other unsavory behavior and silences/evasions by Heidegger); rather Heidegger's problems with complicity in badness (or worse) recur through philosophical history. Those of us that do philosophy in an institutional context would be politically and philosophically naive, if not self-deluded (the worst philosophical sin in light of the Delphic injunction), if we thought that we avoid complicity with badness (of varying horribleness) just because we are not nazi-fellow-travellers. If we fail to confront our own inner (and institutional) Heidegger -- and merely treat him as the easily to be dismissed other --, we don't start the project of understanding our own place/role in the world we claim to wish to understand (change/improve/explain, etc.).  

Second, and less important, Sheehan (and he is not alone) misunderstands the point of the history of philosophy. He thinks that what really, really matters (in the sense of avoiding crisis!) is to get at Heidegger's intentions (and what he means or might have tried to say, etc.). But if Heidegger is fruitful or highly suggestive to ongoing research -- and while it is not my genre there is considerable evidence this is so -- then I do not see any reason to think there is any scholarly crisis at all. Even if some scholars do not intend or understand themselves as contributing to ongoing research, their efforts may (indirectly) do so--and we should rejoice in that rather than despair about getting some professor's mere intentions right.