Digressions&Impressions

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 Translators-Advocates as Philosophers

I would be unconvinced by an account of translating that passes too quickly over or fails altogether to notice its chance of learning. The chance it offers of becoming expert, becoming-critical, becoming-intimate, becoming a better -- or, if not a better (because are we really getting any better at reading and writing? Is it useful to think of these activities in terms of progress?) -- then certainly a different reader and writer. Translations as the chance -- a translation projects as a means of giving oneself the chance -- of being taught by the other's writing, where answers to the questions of how to be responsible for this writing, and whether or not you or I will be capable of taking responsibility for this writing are, again, in no way given in advance....It's rather to offer a view of translation as a site for learning through reading and writing, through testing and researching, through asking and arguing. Kate Briggs (2017) This Little Art, pp. 207-21o; emphases in original). [HT: Petra Van Brabandt]

One thing Elizabeth Anscombe, John McDowell, Jan Łukasiewicz, Martha Nussbaum, W.D. Ross, and Eleanore Stump have in common is that they produced major translations of complex, philosophical works.  (When I looked up Łukasiewicz I expected to find translations of logic texts, but I learned he produced a translation of Hume's Treatise.) I also believe they did so relatively early in their careers. That they translated is, with the exception, perhaps, of Ross, not a major part of their professional identity. But notable, nevertheless. The list of philosopher-translators is, of course, much longer; plenty of trained and professionally employed philosophers devote considerable attention of their scholarly life to producing editions of translations for use in the classroom and scholarship. But this activity is generally not the way we receive and award professional recognition or credit. This is true, I think, even in (at least some)* areas of the history of philosophy; the fact that, say, Curley, Ariew, Garber, Lennon, Berges (etc.) produce major translations is not the reason why the rest of us admire their work. If anything, if at a conference dinner, we praise the translation too much, we may well be suspected of having a low opinion of their philosophical and scholarly work. 

Last week I noted that absent a translator-advocate, some works of philosophy will always remain obscure outside the home language. I kind of presupposed that in philosophy, a translation alone is not sufficient to make a linguistically distant text available to readers. It will also require philosophical creativity to articulate the significance of such a work to an audience that may be unclear about the problematic and potentially bewildering conceptual framework, not to mention tacit commitments, of such a text. This requires considerable philosophical acuity on the part of  the translator-advocate** because one must understand not only the contemporary philosophical scene to some degree, but be able to learn another, potentially alien approach. That is to say, I tacitly assumed that translator-advocates are over-achieving philosophers, who are also skilled at philosophical politics (recall this post); they can survey multiple cultural traditions and then set in motion arbitrage among them.

Reading This Little Art, a sympathetic and enchanting guide to the art of translation and the meaning of life, made me realize that my assumptions  need some adjustment. (Briggs is a translator of works by Roland Barthes.) I hope to return to her important book some other time (including the question of responsibility--a theme I often digress about). Here I note that she calls attention to an important feature of translation that's also true of philosophical translation. One may think that translation is the skilled repetition of another's writings in a new language. One can hold on to this image of translation even when one grants the creativity and skill that is required for a philosophically sensitive translation (Google translate has not cracked that code yet). But while we tend to think of repetition as a kind of automatic, machine-like mirroring, in translation it is much more akin a copying of and thereby mastering of another's dance moves (as Briggs shows).

Briggs argues persuasively that the process of translation entails an enormous amount of learning prompted by the source text. Some of this learning may well take place before a translation begins, but a lot of is prompted by the text itself. Here it is important to recognize that what one learns is not just the views expressed in the text ("being taught by the other's writing"). But one also often needs to come to understand a far wider context. Reading Briggs brought me back to my own experience (now almost twenty five years ago) of translating Christiaan Huygens' (1688) report to the Directors of the Dutch East India Company On Finding Longitude at Sea with a Pendulum (and a series of letters connected to this report).+ Before I undertook that translation I had taken a number of courses on seventeenth century physics. So, while I was just a bachelor student, I was not a naive translator.

Even so, it's not just that I had to learn an earlier version of Dutch (my language), and become proficient in seventeenth century Dutch natural philosophy--few dictionaries and professional vocabularies had explanations of all the terms I encountered. (I learned that most work on seventeenth century Dutch is done by art historians, book and literary scholars.) I also had to learn about seventeenth century map-making, the actual practices of longitude finding, the rules governing life aboard an East India Company ship, the complex social relationships among Huygens (a Dutch patrician), Volder (a university professor), and Hudde (a Dutch patrician-politician and director of the Company). Along the way, I had to go to three different archives because I had to figure out what had happened to some of the characters and ships mentioned in the text I was translating. Some of this work generated my first scholarly publications (about seventeenth century sea-maps). En passant, I learned about Jesuit scientific expeditions (recall).

Now, the philosophically significant thing I learned was that the rejection of action at a distance was not merely motivated by metaphysical rejection (as Koyré argued and lots of folk have echoed thoughtlessly) or conflicting- paradigm-induced-intolerance, but Huygens had a decent empirical argument. (That argument turned out to be based on flawed data, but that was difficult to know at the time.) Along the way, I fleshed out the significance of my favorite walk-on philosopher (recall this post). But I also learned an enormous amount about what it was like to engage in the overlapping practices of natural philosophy, mixed mathematics, longitude finding, almanac writing, commercial map trade, map-making, and commercial sea-faring (a dangerous activity) at the time. (I also became something of an expert on Johannes Hudde and De Volder.) Much of this learning was utterly unanticipated, and yet it transformed my understanding of the period.

Briggs hints that the practice of translation can transform the practitioner ('a different reader and writer'). This is due not just to being engaged intensely over an extended period with the thoughts of another at an extreme level of detail. But we also have to be engaged with the significant details of the relevant bits of life-world that go into that author's text. Being a philosophical translator may transform us philosophically (see L.A. Paul). Perhaps, this is why, in our community, we prefer not to talk about the art of translation too much.

  

On Wanting To Be A Public Philosopher

• Do you actually want to? 

  • ...nobody should have to be a public philosopher. Although it can be valuable, it can also be risky, and it isn't suitable for every kind of philosopher or for every kind of philosophical work.
  • If you are only here in response to external pressure in this direction, and this is not something you're motivated to do for your own reasons, or for its own sake, IMO you're within your rights to resist that pressure citing the risks and/or the inappropriateness of this kind of work for your situation.

• Be aware of the risks.

  • Online hate and abuse are disproportionately directed at women, POC, LGBTQ people and other groups who experience discrimination, but anyone can be targeted. There are psychological, emotional, legal, financial, and other risks involved in public-facing work. They are often unpredictable.
  • Hate and abuse do not only occur online, even if they begin there. If you become a public figure your personal safety may be put at risk through e.g. doxxing, stalking, and dangerous physical mail. Academics are typically easy to target as our work addresses and phone numbers are posted freely online by our universities and our physical office spaces are often accessible to anyone.
  • If you belong to a university or other institution, find out what support and protections they provide. If nothing (or too little) is available, you might want to suggest/request/demand that they do better. Especially if your institution, department, or funding agency is actively encouraging you to engage in the risky business of public scholarship, they should support and help you when you do.
  • Some colleagues, in philosophy and elsewhere in the academy, do not respect public-facing scholarship. Some will even view it as evidence that you've lost interest in—or failed at—"real" philosophy. This can be an issue in securing employment as well as for promotion, tenure, and other forms of assessment.
  • Even positive experiences in the public arena can be exhausting and unpredictable. For example, media interest tends to come in viral waves, the timing of which can depend on all kinds of factors beyond your control and won't respect your teaching schedule.

• Have something to say.

  • It should be something you care enough about, and that enough people will want to hear, to make your efforts worthwhile. If you are going to make a serious investment of time, emotional energy, research funding, and other things into public work, you need to believe in your project and your message.
  • I started to do public-facing work in earnest when I started to research the philosophy of love. My work on the epistemology of arithmetic is no less important to me, but it isn't suitable for the same kind of public audience, and that's OK (see above).

• Consider who you want to be in the public arena.

  • If you develop a public profile, you will almost certainly be judged both positively and negatively for pretty much anything you do. Under these circumstances, integrity is challenging but essential. I recommend thinking carefully in advance about your intended public image, persona, personal brand, or whatever you like to call it.
  • I created a list of features I would aim to embody in my public-facing self. You don't need to be that explicit about it, but it helps to have a sense of direction and personal ethics to maintain consistency as you build a platform and audience.
  • Think ahead about your preferences with respect to privacy, as well as those of people around you (such as family members, collaborators, and colleagues). Keep these conversations current—people and situations change.

• Know that you will need different skill sets.

  • Philosophers trained in a typical contemporary philosophy PhD program are not trained to be public philosophers. Don't expect it to be easy to transfer what you already know into the public sphere. Although often ignored, trivialized, or disparaged, everything listed in Part 2 below is an achievement.

  • I've found learning to write and speak for public audiences very challenging. I experienced a steep learning curve. I'm still learning rapidly...--Carrie Jenkins " So You Want To Be A Public Philosopher?" [HT DailyNous; all emphases in original]

I warmly recommend Carrie Jenkins's post to would-be-public philosophers, their would-be-peers and evaluators, and people that love public philosophers (for whatever reason). The piece is full of important insights and suggestions (there is a lot more than I quoted above), and I would echo her focus on integrity (recall). In particular, I really like how she calls attention to the significance of advance planning. Importantly, Jenkins calls attention to the responsibilities of institutions, not the least universities and grant agencies, that encourage public philosophy, but often provide shamefully few resources to support colleagues that are being threatened or abused/harassed from various angles or become targets of political campaigns. (The previous sentence draws on my experiences of my departmental colleagues and myself.) In addition, Jenkins is right to call attention to the reputational risks of doing public philosophy. We do have a lot of colleagues who fail to respect public-facing scholarship, but use it, as she suggests, as a proxy for lack of philosophical ability.

I like how Jenkins speaks of "public-facing" work/scholarship. It is clear that she tries to make it symmetrical with, let's call it, peer-facing scholarship. She is right to emphasize that they draw on different skill sets, and that our professional training does not really prepare us for public-facing work. (Having said that, European universities and grant agencies are increasingly offering seminars to address some of the required skill set as part of graduate training.) Her underlying (tacit) model, however, is that of publicizing insights she developed through her peer-facing expertise.  That is, for Jenkins some peer-facing expertise is suitable for development to a public audience (and some not). That is, this is really a matter of (to use European technocratic-speek) disseminating peer-evaluated research findings to a wide audience.

To be sure, Jenkins's model is compatible with skipping publication in peer-facing outlets (journals) and hybrid versions (publishing some material for fellow experts and other material only in public venues, but with expert-quality documentation available--Piketty did a version of this and, perhaps, also Jenkins in her work on love). But my point is that public philosophy so conceived has an implied directionally from peer-facing expertise to public-facing exposure. There is nothing wrong with this conception. But it is not the only possible conception of the genre (for more of my views on public philosophy, recall here, here on Dotson's service philosophy, and here on some blogging as public philosophy).

Before I get to to that, it is worth noting that even in Jenkins's model of public philosophy, the person, who is a philosopher, and who faces the public, may well change. Jenkins hints at this by calling attention to the many skills and new dispositions one acquires by doing public philosophy. Even leaving aside (due to opportunity costs) that one may not be able to participate with the same dedication and attention to peer-facing philosophy, one may become a different kind of philosopher entirely. Here the metaphor of face is not innocent; by professionally facing others, one also becomes -- go read your Levinas - part of their community. A public-facing orientation generates duties, loyalties, and obligations and these when taken serious, in turn, transform the person. I don't mean the previous sentence to be my last word on it (it's not the first), but as the Hypatia debacle revealed (recall), research ethics are not fully developed within professional philosophy yet.

And this gets me to another possible conception of the genre. It is quite possible for public-facing philosophy to influence or displace peer-facing philosophy. (To give a standard example: Socrates undoubtedly talked quite a bit to Plato, one hopes, but quite possibly spent a lot more time talking to non-philosophers.) By this I mean that public-philosophy entails a receptivity toward the risk that one's peer-facing philosophy is not just influenced by one's engagements with public others, but, more importantly, shaped by one's public-facing activities. For example, and it's not my area of expertise, but it is my sense from reading Judith Butler that gender theory was shaped by (no doubt, theory-mediated) encounters with lived experience that in certain respects ran well in advance of gender theory. (Some such analogous transformative experience occurred to me through my engagements with professional economists--I didn't go native [despite being employed in a social science department], but I look very differently at my own profession and its history now. I am confident plenty of philosophers of mind, say, were changed by their immersion in some of the cognitive sciences.)

The way such public-facing work can shape peer-faced work is unpredictable. Some will start muttering about lowered standards and lack of seriousness--and, indeed, there are genuine risks. But the would-be-shaping of peer-faced scholarship is, in fact, a central argument in favor of public-facing work. As I have noted before, analytical philosophy has low barriers to entry and little in the way of doctrinal or even (much) methodological expertise. At its best, it has a sponge-like capacity to constantly rejuvenate itself -- some would say be disciplined -- by way of outward engagement with mathematics, the other sciences, history, and even the arts, etc. There is no reason to end rejuvenation by way of facing-other-expert-areas. But, in addition, if we are being encouraged to face and transform the public, we should not be afraid to be transformed by it.

Isaiah Berlin on Transformative Political Experience and Faith in Development

THE rich development of historical studies in the nineteenth century transformed men's views about their origins and the importance of growth, development and time. The causes of the emergence of the new historical consciousness were many and diverse. Those most often given are the rapid and profound transformation of human lives and thought in the West by the unparalleled progress of the natural sciences since the Renaissance, by the impact on society of new technology and, in particular, the growth of large-scale industry; the disintegration of the unity of Christendom and the rise of new states, classes, social and political formations, and the search for origins, pedi grees, connections with, or return to, a real or imaginary past. All of this culminated in the most transforming event of all? the French Revolution, which exploded, or at the very least pro foundly altered, some of the most deeply rooted presuppositions and concepts by which men lived. It made men acutely conscious of change and excited interest in the laws that governed it.--Isaiah Berlin (1972) "THE BENT TWIG: A Note on Nationalism," Foreign Affairs.

THE rich development of historical studies in the nineteenth century transformed men's views about their origins and the importance of growth, development and time. The causes of the emergence of the new historical consciousness were many and diverse. Those most often given are the rapid and profound transformation of human lives and thought in the West by the unparalleled progress of the natural sciences since the Renaissance, by the impact on society of new technology and, in particular, the growth of large-scale industry; the disintegration of the unity of Christendom and the rise of new states, classes, social and political formations, and the search for origins, pedigrees, connections with, or return to, a real or imaginary past. All of this culminated in the most transforming event of all--the French Revolution, which exploded, or at the very least profoundly altered, some of the most deeply rooted presuppositions and concepts by which men lived. It made men acutely conscious of change and excited interest in the laws that governed it.--Isaiah Berlin (1972) "THE BENT TWIG: A Note on Nationalism," Foreign Affairs.

The quoted passage is the opening paragraph of Berlin's essay which argues that nationalism “is an inflamed condition of national consciousness which can be, and has on occasion been, tolerant and peaceful. It usually seems to be caused by wounds, some form of collective humiliation.” (17) The response to the collective humiliation can be “pathological” (a word repeated in the piece) and then nationalism becomes dangerous in various ways or, as the narrative implies, it can be worked through in healthier, less virulent ways. This may sound all very dismissive of nationalism (and it is in a certain sense), but Berlin argues, and this is distinctive, that in fact nationalist historical agents themselves understand the goal of nationalism as a means toward national health (vitality) or renewal (or recovery). (29)

In context, Berlin’s interest (or the influential readers of Foreign Affairs) in nationalism is driven (ahhh) anxiety over the wave of decolonization of the 1950s and 60s (see especially the last paragraph, where Berlin grants (with a clever nod to Fanon) that the “brutal and destructive side of modern nationalism” must be “recognized for what it is -- a worldwide response to a profound and natural need on the part of newly liberated slaves – “the decolonized"--a phenomenon unpredicted in the Europe-centered society of the nineteenth century.” (30)

The very last remark points to one of the major themes that frames the essay, and that is how the nineteenth century was a great age of social explanation as well as remarkable philosophical “prophecy.”* In fact the first paragraph of the piece quoted above, argues in historicizing fashion that this great flowering of social explanation was itself a consequence of what I – inspired by L.A. Paul’s work on Transformative Experience call Transformative political Experience (hereafter TPE), that is, an experience that is both epistemically and politically transformative.

TPE arises (recall here and here) in situations where collective agents (e.g., social activists, financial regulators, voters, etc.) think of themselves as authoritatively controlling their choices by collectively projecting themselves forward and considering possible futures and their plans are undermined by cognitive and epistemic limitations (that is, epistemic uncertainty). In particular, it is a political theory of unforeseen consequences in which those consequences change political actors in ways they could not have willed. (That’s compatible with that very same event also creating very foreseeable consequences; it’s not wholly a skeptical concept.)

We can now appreciate one layer of deliberate, rich irony in Berlin’s essay: an transformative political experience with enormous unforeseen consequences (the French revolution) gives rise to epistemic practices – sometimes building on –pre-exiting work [say Scottish Enlightenment thought] -- that try to grasp large scale social change. But these very impressive (sometimes totalizing) epistemic practices (and Berlin is not deflationary about nineteenth century ways of knowing) turn out (with benefit of hindsight) to have non-trivial omissions; these omissions are not due to the obscurity of the topic. (It’s a bit peculiar that Berlin lumps race and nation together here, because the nineteenth century is full of grand, social theorizing about race.) So much for irony, although it’s not entirely clear if Berlin thinks that these omissions themselves are part of a further cycle of social change and the character of social explanation.

As an aside (although it also sets up the final observation below), if we put Berlin’s origin story of transformative political experience – to be sure, he does not argue that the French revolution was the first – alongside L.A. Paul’s account of transformative experience – which I have suggested finds its animating ur-source in Paul’s (perhaps Platonizing) religious conversion experience --, we can see that there may well be many different kinds of historical roads to the concept of transformative experience even if one grants that the very possibility of understanding the French revolution in terms of a transformative experience itself (and I am surely not the first to suggest this) presupposes great familiarity with Pauline conversion.** (The previous sentence is a homage to Berlin’s footnote-less, neo-Ciceronian style!)

I could have ended here. But I wondered how Berlin treats his own perspective. For, after all, not unlike, say, Thomas Kuhn, he presents (the form of) historicist history as if he himself stands outside of history. That is, the historicism is framed by a positivist stance in which the historicist historical phenomena are treated like data and to be evaluated by a trans-historical framework or taxonomy. This is clear in Berlin because while the manifestations of nationalism are idiosyncratic both by the lights of the nationalist agents and according to Berlin, they do fall under a general kind. And maybe there are also further specific historical and social conditions that generate the first possibility of some phenomena falling under the kind – Berlin has a tendency to treat the origins of nationalism as a German, Herderian and Romantic revolt against French cultural and political supremacy (etc.; see 15ff.) --, but, nevertheless, there is genuine social kind (nationalism) and it shares at some level of abstraction in a characteristic (even if not exception-less) set of manifestations and, this is crucial to my final point, development.

For, Berlin assumes (without explanation or defense) that nations and their nationalism develop (and develop in characteristic fashion). Like many twentieth century social scientists, he speaks of “developing nations” (18) and he himself writes, albeit with great empathy and characteristic Verstehen of the idiosyncratic experience of the (ahh) non-developed, from the vantage point of developed nations. (Here he does not hint at the irony of modern social science’s inability to discard the central nationalist and organicist conceptual frame of a nation’s or society’s development.) And Berlin’s very idea of development (with its healthy and pathological trajectories and its insistence that there are “genuinely successful diagnoses of the direction in which Western society was moving” (the reference is to nineteenth century social theory), which again has uncanny resemblance to the commitments that structure, say, development economics (and development studies), includes, thus, first the idea that some collections of nations and their nationalism can develop into (oh the miracles of alchemy) such a thing as ‘Western society’ and, more subtly, a further commitment to the thought that the ills accompanying passionate nationalism have somehow been tamed by this West (from which Berlin is writing). This last point becomes clear by Berlin’s realist aside (he is no ‘naïve’ adherent to “Liberal rationalism” despite the fact that “there is a sense” in which the [quoting Burke] "sophisters, economists and calculators," the rationalists, the Victorian progressives, have won”):

This, faith in countervailing forces -- in multinational corporations which, whatever their relationship with class war and social conflict, at any rate do cross national borders, or in the United Nations as a barrier to unbridled chauvinism-- seems about as realistic (at least so far as lands outside Western Europe are concerned) as Cobden's belief that the development of free trade throughout the world would of itself ensure peace and harmonious cooperation between nations. (24)

This is not to deny that Berlin allows there can be nationalism within “Western” states (he makes a nod to Québécois nationalism in Canada, Scotland and Wales in Great Britain, Basques (but not Catalonians) in Spain, etc.). But these cases are treated as minority, “social resistance to exploitation” to electoral majorities. They are not instances of majoritarian, Western nationalism. In fact, Berlin articulates a now familiar interpretation of nationalist segments of electorates:

“This kind of nationalism is, perhaps, as much a form of social or class resistance as of purely national self-assertion, creating a mood in which men prefer to be ordered about, even if this en tails ill-treatment, by members of their own faith or nation or class to tutelage, however benevolent, on the part of ultimately patronizing superiors from a foreign land or alien class or milieu.” (22)

That is to say, Berlin’s is a non-rationalist liberal that understands that his sides victory will always generate responses that outside the West can generate existential excesses, but within the developed West (and let’s grant him that any nation can develop to become ‘Western’ in his sense [he does not flirt with ethnic or cultural essentialism] only will generate governance problems.

‘So much the worst for liberalism’ some of my favorite readers will mutter. Yes, indeed, but that’s not the end of the story; we may be able to transform liberalism into a doctrine (say, inspired by Shklar’s liberalism of fear) that neither presupposes faith in progress nor assumes a friendly reception among the powerful.

Here's a quick-and-dirty analysis of what went wrong with the election forecasts

Expert Hubris/overconfidence....and wishful thinking.

So, let me first grant that Nate Silver at least tried to warn folk that an outcome pattern like the one we are seeing might be a real possibility. But even his models did not come close to what's happened in lots of states. As he candidly admits the polls were “terrible.” But he was in his peer group relatively cautious (and got flack for that); a lot of very smart people were telling me that Princeton Wang is assuring a HRC WIN.+

Last night, after my graduate seminar, a few of my students, who had lived through the Brexit fiasco and who were rather skeptical of the polls, asked me why I thought that there still was a real possibility that Trump could win (recall). I said that I had noticed that [i] there seemed to be surprisingly few state polls in lots of important places. (Again, in fairness I was alerted to this issue some time during the last six weeks by a comment by Silver.) I wondered if [ii] this apparent paucity wasn't driven by the success of past polling-aggregators which had reduced the impact and newsworthiness of state polls (which are expensive). I also said that [iii] I was surprised to see that so much late campaigning attention being lavished on Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and even Michigan. This suggested to me that the campaign teams were less confident, perhaps, than some of the public forecasters. I also said to my students [while insisting that I was not an expert on political demographics] that [iv] the polls may be missing a shift of elderly (white) Democrats toward Trump (while -- and I did not say this -- everybody was focusing on the Latino/Hispanic surge, and even suggesting that this was deciding the election already before yesterday. The surge turns out to have been real, but its political significance was being hyped by (a) groups that will lobby on behalf of Latino/Hispanic voters and (b) folk that wish to believe that the US is entering a relatively liberal, post-racial age as the public becomes more educated and whites stop being an outright majority). 

Most of the forecasters ultimately rely on Bayesian models. Bayesian models do best in data-rich environments. (For when there is a lot of data, the impact of priors on the outcome diminishes.) Even then they should not be treated as holy, but rather as one instrument among many. It's possible that all that went wrong with the aggregation models is something like [I], that is, not enough high quality data. The problem is that the modelers did a very poor job warning people that we were in an environment in which we should be cautious about their models.

As a non-trivial aside, when Silver warned that a Trump win was at least a real possibility (at various points last week it was about 1/3 chance) others criticized him because he was not sufficiently data-driven. They could do so because he keeps bits of his model secret. (They accused him of punditry and/or being interested in driving traffic to his website. So implicitly people recognize that bias may also be introduced because of modeler-incentives.) His relative lack of transparency made his relative caution less persuasive to other experts (and the public).

But even in data-rich environments we should not place all our bets (yes, I am Dutch!) on Bayesian models. That's because they give you no good signals that you may be in environments in which underlying distributions don't match the models which are calibrated on and developed on past data.  The problem I am talking about here is NOT primarily a problem of fat tails, but rather a problem of not knowing in which possible world you are in. (I was pretty prescient two days ago about this.)

Bayesian models are data-driven. Now that computing power is relatively cheap and we seemingly live in a data-abundant world (but, again, recall [i]-[ii]) Bayesian models get deployed with ever greater frequency in lots of places. In lots of areas of science they get deployed when theory driven models perform poorly both because the world is very complex and even very good theories have trouble tracking it or because we really have no idea what a plausible theory may look like. In policy environments they get deployed because they are taken to give normative guidance to action. Few other theoretical devices are capable of delivering predictive out-performance and normative significance while maintaining clarity and transparency about one's modeling assumptions.++

In late July, I worried in a Facebook exchange (of July 20) with Branden Fitelson (a leading formal philosopher and historian of formal philosophy) that the assumptions underwriting the aggregation models may be dated and that we may be in an environment in which they are not working so well. At the time, Fitelson shared and amplified my concern. He wrote, "there is a deeper kind of unprojectability happening here, which i find really frightening."* The Michigan poling miss during the primary and Brexit had spooked us. Yes, the polls had picked up a late shift to Brexit, but the prediction markets and financial markets (as well as lots of pundits including myself!) had failed to acknowledge their significance. Too many people we knew assumed that the future would be like the past. But they ignored that Trump was actively promoting a rejection of the ordinary political rules of the last two generations (recall).

In my thinking I have treated the events the financial crisis as a decisive refutation of the straightforward applicability to policy environments of the ordinary tools of formal epistemology (including Bayes) as well as the highly specific use (specific to mathematical approaches to wide areas of finance) of treating genuine uncertainty as a species of randomness (which has led to adoption of various statistical devices that are proxies for true randomness). I have long been puzzled that my concerns over true uncertainty have not been more widely shared by epistemologists** and that, instead, we have seen a doubling down on thedevelopment of ever more sophisticated versions of these tools in epistemology and in finance (and elsewhere).

As regular readers know, I am no friend of Bayesianism. It's not just because I am bad at math. I think exclusive reliance on Bayesian models breeds expert over-confidence. Some of that was on display during the last few weeks among my philosophical and political science friends that embraced the aggregator models without much critical distance. If I am right about the significance of [ii], then past success generated some of the conditions of present failure.  Soon enough, we will be distracted from reflecting more fully on this, I suspect, by more pressing political developments.

Guest post: Bill Wimsatt on Bennett's Rationality

[Bill Wimsatt responded to my post on Dennett's piece on Jonathan Bennett's (1964) Rationality in Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy. I reprint his letter of September 4, 2016, after modest editing with permission. A copy of Wimsatt's notes  on Bennett's Rationality. These notes are of more than biographical interest, because they anticipate, in brief hints, several developments in later work in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. -ES]

 

Eric--thanks for your lengthy and insightful blogpost, as well as getting Dan to reexamine Bennett's Rationality. I was really fortunate in seeing it early, it was referenced by Paul Grice in a seminar he gave during a semester visiting at Cornell in fall of 1964.*

 

I think that it did have a significant impact on me, although I never published a piece on it. It likely colored my views and approaches to many things. His "evolutionary analysis" paralleled for me the sequential development of more accurate and realistic models of gases that I saw in development of the kinetic theory of gases, and a plausible thing to do as one way of studying a "phylogeny of the metal realm." Given also that I was then writing on function (for my undergrad thesis), reading evolution, and concentrating both on philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology it was  natural. I also read von Frisch at the time, quite possible inspired by Bennett, and was taking Rosenblatt's course on Brain Models and mechanisms only slightly later.  I initially taught both Phil Bio and phil psych at Chicago, but decided to concentrate my research in Bio, since i thought that phil mind was such a mess that even a correct and deep analysis would be lost in a welter of unproductive confusion. (Bennett was an exception).

 

I didn't respond earlier because i wanted to find stuff I had written on Bennett, Download here. I likely first taught Bennett when a TA for Nuel Belnap's course in Phil of Social Sciences at Pitt in fall of 1966 or 1967. (I did so both years, and Belnap let me teach one or two weeks of the course, which was designed for phil and sociology grad students). Download Wimsatt on Bennett's Rationality a mimeo (for class distribution) I did in january of 1970, when (while i was still a post-doc with Lewontin), I co-taught a course with Alan Donagan [at The University of Chicago]. I never thought it suitable for publication because it was largely a commented discussion of Bennett's analysis, though my recognition of some of Bennett's shortcomings (and clearly my appreciation of his many strengths) are found in footnotes there.  There were references in the handout to views of Phil Quinn (my roommate in 1967-68 and 1968-69) and Dick Lewontin (whom I post-doc-ed with starting in summer of 1969.)

 

I remember first reading Dan [Dennett] when his intentional systems paper came out in 1971--and thought--right on, although, as a Simon-inspired Satisfier, I disagreed with his strong separation between the intentional and design stances. I bought Content and Consciousness after that, but never finished it.

 

By the way, I may be a Pitt naturalist, but I brought naturalism to Pitt--I didn't get it there. And neither Paul nor Patty Churchland were naturalists--at least not strong ones, during the time we were together at Pitt. And in one strand, my analysis of levels of organization (put forward in my Reductionism, levels of Organization, and the Mind-Body Problem in 1976) was picked up by Cliff Hooker in his 3-part analysis of reduction in 1981 (as he confirmed for me a decade later).

 

In any case, thank you both (and also especially Jonathan) for stimulating and important reflections. For my money, Jonathan's work had greater impact than is generally realized, and it had at least 2 other admirers (Paul Grice and me).

 

Transformative Political Experience

The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgements to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN. Thomas Hobbes, "Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth,"  Leviathan (2:17).

A political transformative experience (hereafter PTE) involves an experience that is both epistemically and politically transformative; PTE arises in situations where collective agents (e.g., social activists or financial regulators) think of themselves as authoritatively controlling their choices by collectively projecting themselves forward and considering possible futures, and their plans are undermined by cognitive and epistemic limitations; thus PTE is -- like Laurie Paul's account of transformative experience (TE) on which it is explicitly modeled* -- a species of epistemic (subjective) true (or Knightian) uncertainty. In particular, PTE is a theory of unforeseen (and, thus, unintended) consequences in which those consequences change political actors in ways they could not have willed. PTE assumes the intelligibility of collective agents (and collective intentionality), but it is compatible with various kinds of methodological individualism (recall this post on Brian Epstein).

A characteristic example (with qualification noted shortly) of such a PTE is the transition during the Hobbesian covenant from a multitude of men in the state of nature to a unity under a common power or commonwealth (see the quote above). The covenant willingly transform the Hobbesian free agent in the state of nature into source of collective agency (the sovereign), which, in turn, makes them into subjects of the sovereign (e.g., "by this institution of a Commonwealth every particular man is author of all the sovereign doth," (Leviathan, 2:18)). The social contract changes the (social) identity of agents. The Hobbesian social contract, the generation of the rule of law, is also a clear response to bad forms of uncertainty (to quote a famous paragraph from L2:13): "there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

I noted I would qualify the example. In Hobbes the most important consequences of the covenant are imagined  (recall "to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly,") to be foreseeable. Hume, whose own theory of the origin of law embraces many Hobbesian elements, criticizes Hobbes on this point: "In vain shou’d we expect to find, in uncultivated nature, a remedy to this inconvenience....The idea of justice can never serve to this purpose...[it] wou’d never have been dream’d of among rude and savage men." (Treatise 3.2.2.8) Here, Hume calls to the cognitive and epistemic limitations of agents living under the state of nature So, a (counter-factual) paradigmatic instance of PTE in the liberal tradition combines Hobbesian collective agency in which the agents' social identity is transformed with a Humean understanding of what those very agents could not have foreseen (and, thus, not intended).

The previous paragraph may suggest that PTE is always a mere fiction (like the Hobbesian/Humean story). But this does not follow. For example, let's assume that British voters decide to vote for Brexit the referendum on 23 June. (Here I treat a referendum as an instance of collective action; if you don't like that imagine your own example.) If they vote fro Brexit they intend -- inter alia -- to transform their citizenship and a whole bunch of constitutive relations with other peoples. All of that is clear even if the content of the transformation will be contested before and after the vote. But what is equally clear is that a whole bunch of consequences on their political identity occasioned or caused by Brexit are now shrouded in mystery. (If you think that nothing much will change, that's fine--it's just that you are not in an epistemically superior position to think so.) It's possible, thus, that Brexit will be an instance of PTE, although perhaps an aversion to transformative experiences (status quo bias) may induce the voters to reject Brexit--I don't know.*

 

 

Can Philology Save Us? On Justin Smith's vision for the university of the 21st century

For philology may hold out not only the promise of reviving the humanities, but also of reestablishing the lost unity of the human sciences with the sciences of nature. Part of philology's apparent irrelevance today has to do with what we may diagnose as our society's radical and unprecedented presentism. No textual culture in human history has been so indifferent to its own past, and indeed this indifference strongly suggests that, though we continue to Tweet and to 'text' and to share memes that consist in part in strings of words, we are in fact moving into a post-textual era....This presentism not only cuts us off from what was long understood to be a central concern of the human sciences --to know who we are by knowing where we've come from--, it also perpetuates and deepens the contingent and unnecessary separation, as I've suggested, of the human from the natural sciences. Understood as philology, as a search for origins, the human sciences in fact share a great deal with a number of other sorts of inquiry often cordoned off from the human sciences on the other side of what has been called, since C. P. Snow introduced that term in 1959, the 'two-cultures divide'. Philology shares aims and objectives, and sometimes also methods, with archaeology, as also with paleontology, evolutionary biology, and perhaps even those branches of theoretical physics that deal with the distant origins of the universe. All seek to account for how the world got to be the way it is....

History...should be elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science in the emerging universities of the 21st century. It is the best hope for an exit from the current dérive of the humanities, and, much more than this, it is the best hope for overcoming the false and arbitrary rift between the human and the natural sciences. History is considerably larger than philology, yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be. Pollock notes that philology "has been everywhere that texts have been, indeed, in a way that we have yet to fully grasp, everywhere that language has been." This ubiquity was however grasped, for example, by the early Islamic field linguists who went out to build their lexica from the oral poetry of the Bedouins. Nor, at other times in history, as for Leibniz and William Jones, was the boundary of the genealogist's project set at the limits of language, but indeed extended to all the things named in language, to the world itself. In their diminished self-understanding, today's humanists have relinquished all these things to the natural scientists, who for the most part do not know what to make of them. By rediscovering its unity with philology in the shared project of history, natural science stands to gain as much as the humanities do: to rediscover its lofty purpose of enabling us to make sense of the world, and of our place in it.--Justin Smith "A Forgotten Field Could Save the Humanities," The Chronicle of Higher Education. [Behind a paywall; HT DailyNous.]

Justin Smith is probably the most creative and playful historian of (early modern) philosophy today.* So, I was sad to learn that he is "increasingly" leaving it "behind in view of its woeful provincialism." In his piece he also rejects 'localism' (which he associates with a deplorable, it seems, "new strain of identitarianism in the humanities.") He embraces, rather, "a global, rather than provincial," perspective. (He is quoting Sheldon Pollock, but in context he is endorsing it.) From context it's clear that the 'global' is something distinct from the 'universal' (or, at least, the purportedly universal that he associates with Anglo professional philosophy). Presumably, a universal perspective homogenizes, whereas the global makes space for differences due to (again quoting Pollock approvingly) "historicity, constructedness, and changeability," not in the least in the trajectories of knowledge production. This becomes clear from Smith's dazzling display of examples of "early Islamic field linguists,"  the Nietzsche-Wilamowitz debate, William Jones's research on the names of plant species in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, and Leibniz's vision.

It is worth noting that the natural antonyms of the province and 'provincial,' are not just the urbane and broad-minded, but also empire or imperial. And, in fact, the material and administrative precondition for the the global vision is often some kind of empire. And while we tend to think of colonial empires as great projects of subjugation and effacement of local difference, there are empires in which there is unity while respecting provincial diversity--it's these empires that most need (to quote Smith) a "unified project." One way to generate such a project, is to project "the lost unity" (emphasis added). These projects are fueled by restorative nostalgia that is, simultaneously, hyper-modern and a source of immense creativity. Such projects also involve an insistence that perspective matters and that hopeful greatness needs to be projected on a larger canvass. [For an excellent literary treatment of such matters, recall John Williams' novel Augustus.]

While Smith may wish nothing to do with something as crass as a military empire, his project does involve elements of restorative nostalgia (e.g., "elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science") and a fondness for taking about 'we' when it suits him. He insists, also, that the present view of philology is mistakenly diminutive (see also the "diminished" view of the humanities) and "yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be" in order to be more "lofty." In addition, he is not against the (selective, prudent) use of force because he insists that there must be 'compulsory instruction' in order to ensure that certain kinds of forgetting does not occur ("no one ever forgets that in the end there are no truly atemporal sciences.").

Like many who embrace such restorative nostalgia (Carlyle, Nietzsche, etc.), the criticism of the present is acute and insightful:

"Among the humanities, philosophy...is surely the field in which European area studies has most successfully disguised itself as a universal and timeless form of inquiry. How often do we hear philosophy professors demur, when the subject of, say, classical Indian logic comes up, that they "regrettably don't know anything about that." What they really mean is: "My professional identity is wrapped up with my not knowing anything about that." This is something we learn as graduate students: a period of socialization in which we learn not only how to display our knowledge of, and commitment to, a given circumscribed domain, but also learn how to scoff, subtly, at whatever research interest falls even slightly beyond that domain. This is an acquired syndrome, transmitted from faculty to graduate students in the course of their own professional reproduction.**

My sense is that Smith's diagnosis is an apt characterization of our teacher's generation (although we both know exemplars that displayed different attitudes). The new generation of professional philosophers is embracing a different ethic; one in which any topic or puzzle is a legitimate opportunity to display technical virtuosity. Such technical sophistication is, of course, compatible with (although need not entail it) a thin understanding of the topic (and its historicity, etc.)  

An impatient reader sympathetic to (various bits of) Smith's project may suggest that my remarks thus far are distracting from the main agenda of his piece: his research agenda, that is, to combat 'presentism' and to promote a unified project in which the humanities and the sciences jointly "make sense of the world, and of our place in it," in part, by taking our path toward the present seriously. There are certainly opportunities for such thick collaboration between the humanities and (for convenience sake) the life-sciences. (About a decade ago, I penned a series of three papers in which I claimed that the history of astronomy and the history of economics are crucial to astronomy and economics (conceived as a policy science.)) I do hope that some enterprising university Rektor of a "non-Euro-American, university of the 21st century," hires or consults with Justin to help her implement a university with three faculties (a 'faculty of history', a 'faculty of the atemporal sciences', a 'faculty of new stuff') along the lines envisioned by him.

But in his essay, Smith offers us the matter, but not the form of this unity which, thus, becomes unexpectedly its own telos. Smith offers us the institutional strategy without the standard that may justify or vivify it. Without such a vision it is not obvious why the experts of the present and future will join in the shared enterprise (and they will persuade their paymasters to block it). To put the point jokingly, what's missing is the sense in the sense-making (I might say, the utopian concepts). Previously, this form was supplied by (say) revelation or philosophy. By bagging Spinoza's criticism of revelation, Smith cuts himself off from the former. By turning his back on the latter, he seems to leave himself without resources. But, perhaps, he thinks, with the Romantics, that poetry or art can supply the form. That uncertain, transformative path must seem tempting.

The Letter against Derrida's Honorary Degree, re-examined.

The Times (London). Saturday, May 9, 1992

Sir, The University of Cambridge is to ballot on May 16 on whether M. Jacques Derrida should be allowed to go forward to receive an honorary degree. As philosophers and others who have taken a scholarly and professional interest in M. Derrida's remarkable career over the years, we believe the following might throw some needed light on the public debate that has arisen over this issue.

Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy – in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.

In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.

We submit that, if the works of a physicist (say) were similarly taken to be of merit primarily by those working in other disciplines, this would in itself be sufficient grounds for casting doubt upon the idea that the physicist in question was a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.

Derrida's career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (‘logical phallusies’ and the like), and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.

Certainly he has shown considerable originality in this respect. But again, we submit, such originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.

Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

Derrida's voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all – as every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do) – his works employ a written style that defies comprehension.

Many have been willing to give M. Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts indeed.

When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.

Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.

Yours sincerely,

Barry Smith
(Editor, The Monist)

Hans Albert (University of Mannheim)
David Armstrong (Sydney)
Ruth Barcan Marcus (Yale)
Keith Campbell (Sydney)
Richard Glauser (Neuchâtel)
Rudolf Haller (Graz)
Massimo Mugnai (Florence)
Kevin Mulligan (Geneva)
Lorenzo Peña (Madrid)
Willard van Orman Quine (Harvard)
Wolfgang Röd (Innsbruck)
Karl Schuhmann (Utrecht)
Daniel Schulthess (Neuchâtel)
Peter Simons (Salzburg)
René Thom (Burs-sur-Yvette)
Dallas Willard (Los Angeles)
Jan Wolenski (Cracow)

Internationale Akademie für Philosophie, Obergass 75, 9494S Schaan, Liechtenstein. [Quoted from here.]

Today, I presented a guest-lecture in which I mentioned my transformative experience, qua philosopher of economics, with a distinguished, mathematical economist who used themes from Derrida (and innovated with them) in order to explain and articulate a philosophy of mathematical economics and, thereby, also made feel what the, as it were, life-world of a mathematical economist qua theorist is like. This encounter -- in the years when I was an untenured professor -- made me revisit my conviction that Derrida is bullshit, and made me realize that my acquaintance with Derrida's writings could be charitably described as very indirect. I had accepted the epistemic authority of others (on Derrida) without much thought, and it made me examine how much of my intellectual self-understanding was handed down by others without my conscious mediation. In preparing the lecture I looked up the famous letter protesting the intention to award a honorary degree to Derrida by Cambridge University.

It is sometimes noted that it is extremely unlikely that most of the signers had read much more of Derrida than I had by the time I left graduate school. What is not noted is that it is extremely unlikely that these signers had read much of each other. (Obviously there are exceptions! [No need to remind me that Quine and Barcus Marcus were pretty familiar with each other's work.]) They are an eclectic mix of anglo-phone analytical philosophers, anglo-phone 'analytical' historians of 19th and 20th century philosophy, european and anglophone Husserlians, European 'Austrian' philosophers, European analytical philosophers, and a few whom I wouldn't know how to characterize. Moreover, the use of 'European' is in some sense an anachronism because in the early 1990s there was no shared philosophical space (of the technocratic sort familiar from ERC grant proposals and journal rankings). As it happens, according to Barry Smith's own testimony, the future of European philosophy in the years after the fall of the Berlin wall is one of the main issues at stake; Smith was worried that after the collapse of political Marxism there would be an embrace of Derrida style "nihilism" at the expense of other pre-Marxist (local) "traditions." Smith's letter failed to prevent the awarding of the honorary degree to Derrida. But from the vantage point of two decades, we can say that the take-over of European philosophy by Deconstruction did not happen. As philosophical politics go that's a victory for Smith.

What's striking about the letter is that it tacitly appeals to canons of normal science (hence the analogy with physics): the disciplinary experts drawn from "leading departments" decide merit based on "accepted standards." (Accepted by who? Well, of course, by the members of the leading departments at "distinguished" universities.) The self-serving and self-reinforcing, conservative nature of such reasoning -- and let's stipulate that the letter only expresses uncontroversial truth --  is by now obvious. Known "influence" outside leading departments counts for nothing. We have to remind ourselves that it is not too difficult to construe narratives in light of these norms of "merit," that Descartes, Locke, Hume, Thoreau, Nietzsche would have also fallen obviously short. Given that  professional philosophers operate in a zero-sum institutional environment (for jobs, status, time, appointments, funding, etc.) it is by no means obvious that they even have incentives to collect the kind of evidence that would allow them to offer such utterances in an epistemically reliable matter.

Even if one allows that "clarity and rigour" are the true touchstone of quality in the "eyes of philosophers" (and one ignores my reservations), it is, in fact, somewhat amusing that it's only very recent affair -- with the rise of meta-philosophy -- that the methods of at least some of the signers are being scrutinized with care and attention. Even the friend of clarity and rigour can recognize other criteria (truth, fruitfulness, social/moral utility, etc.) that may trump "clarity and rigour."

Another striking feature of the letter is the utter contempt for the "Dadaists or of the concrete poets" as contributions to philosophy. (What philosophy, if not nihilism? Well, I am no expert, of course, but it be useful to see these as a contribution to the experimental art of living.) Evidently, philosophy is a serious enterprise. Now one need not be friend of Žižek (who makes Derrida seem highminded), to recognize that one, thereby, is in no position to recognize that sometimes -- maybe all the time in our fallen world in which our hands are sullied with innocent blood everywhere -- the stance of the jokester is the only morally responsible stance; undoubtedly there are other more earnest stances that are worth exploring, too.  I am not claiming this is so, but ruling this out a priori is, well, a philosophical mistake.

As an aside, the important point -- lost on the signers -- is that since Socrates we know that all genuine (and ersatz) philosophy always runs the risk of "ridicule" and that such ridicule is unavoidable absent philosophers-kings.

Finally, it is a bit odd (even if indirectly very clear) to see in a letter devoted to defending the standards of clarity and rigour, the same writing characterized as defying "comprehension" -- there is universal consensus ("every reader") assumed over this --, yet also being, somehow, "semi-intelligible" and being "either false or trivial." (Yes, I am sure, that with considerable effort, you -- you are well-trained, after all -- can turn this into a consistent triplet with the help of elegant distinctions.)

Undoubtedly, the infelicities I have noted in the letter to the editor are the consequence of haste, consensus formation among an eclectic group of professional philosophers, and editorial interventions. The letter got polemical work done, and, I am open to the argument that Derrida's philosophical politics merited this kind of response. But in so far as I have had this letter and effort praised to me when I was a student (and heard claims like these marshaled against other philosophers that needed to be rejected), I note that it is more revealing about the commitments of the signers than either about Derrida or the politics of honorary award granting.

 

 

 

The irrational and Ignorance in Natural Life Sentences

Notice that nothing in the epistemic argument here suggests that no prisoners should, in fact, spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars. Instead, the point is that rationality requires that we leave the epistemic door open to acquiring new information. Put bluntly, the argument says that it is irrational for the possibility of parole to be taken off the table at the outset of any sentence....

Nearly all of my students at Stateville are serving natural life sentences. At least a handful of them have been incarcerated since they were teenagers, one since he was 14. While I didn’t know any of their decades-earlier selves, their current selves are some of the most extraordinary students I’ve had in my 15 years of teaching. They are painters and poets, mentors and authors, researchers and advocates. They breathe new life into philosophical questions I’ve been asking for the entirety of my career. And yet we tell these men that who they are now and what they have accomplished matters so little to how they ought to be treated that we won’t even bother to consider it. Rationality demands that we do better.--Jennifer Lackey "The Irrationality of Natural Life Sentences," New York Times.

I  warmly recommend Lackey's Opinionater piece (although I was surprised she did not explore the possible role of the existence of the death penalty in motivating natural life sentence);* she raises important questions about the status quo in the penal code while giving a sense of the significance of philosophy to individuals, including prison populations, and the public. By combining her experiences with analysis, she makes philosophy come alive.

I agree with Lackey's conclusion. Even so, I would argue that it's not always irrational to limit (even severely limit), in the present, the scope of decision-making of future temporal selves or polities: promises, contracts, debts, laws, and treaties all do this; as Elster reminds us, Ulysses did it to listen to the Sirens. 

We may engage in such limitation, or self-binding, for all kinds of reasons, but because Lackey is primarily interested in exploring an "epistemic argument," I note that there is an important epistemic reason to limit the availability of new information, or evidence: doing so can (other things being equal--and of course they may not be equal and in the penal system they are definitely not equal) reduce uncertainty. Enforceable contracts and promises are paradigmatic instruments to reduce (epistemic) uncertainty; they allow, for example, for better and less costly planning and also for more reliable causal inferences.  This is true in low and in so-called high stakes environments. In fact, reducing uncertainty may be more valuable in high stakes environments than allowing new evidence to influence operations. This can sometimes involve eliminating any (or severely restricting) any possible role for new information or evidence. (This is basically a variant of Hume's argument for the extremely strict enforcement of the rule of law.) It's only when a practice is overwhelmingly oriented toward truth, rather than some other end, where epistemic doors have to be kept open (and even, then, there will be constraints -- of time, money, etc. -- that may keep doors closed).

Having said that, nothing in the previous paragraph undermines Lackey's idea that there is something really wrong about ruling "out the possibility of ever considering additional evidence" (that may motivate parole) about the cases she is describing. But I worry that couching it in the terms of contemporary epistemology actually misplaces the problem. Lackey's main argument is described in this passage:

But one argument that is surprisingly absent from these conversations is an epistemic one that has to do with us. For natural life sentences say to all involved that there is no possible piece of information that could be learned between sentencing and death that could bear in any way on the punishment the convicted is said to deserve, short of what might ground an appeal. Nothing. So no matter how much a juvenile is transformed behind bars, and no matter how unrecognizable an elderly prisoner is from his earlier self, this is utterly irrelevant to whether they should be incarcerated. Our absence of knowledge about the future, our ignorance of what is to come, our lack of a crystal ball, is in no way a barrier to determining now what someone’s life ought to be like decades from now.

What Lackey is pointing to here are three, non-trivial moral-political & moral-psychological (if not metaphysical) phenomena (that combine for an argument): (i) persons can change dramatically over time -- let's call this the transformation thesis --, and (ii) imprisonment is imprisonment of whole persons and so the whole characters of these persons matters to the justification of imprisonment. In addition, (iii) imprisonment is justified (at any given time) if the incarcerated person deserves it (at that time). I am going to ignore here the fact that Lackey also sometimes seems to presuppose the unity of the virtues (such that in virtue of her students being wonderful in a variety of ways now implies they are not capable of the kind of crimes now -- let's stipulate that they were rightly convinced [something that may well be worth challenging] -- that landed them in trouble).

Lackey's epistemic argument is, of course, not irrelevant to these three non-trivial moral phenomena, but I submit that if natural life sentences are irrational in the epistemic sense it will be so because we come to believe (not just because the brain-science evidence Lackey provides, but also, say, inspired by the work of Laurie Paul) the truth of the transformation thesis and some version of (ii-iii). But (i-iii) are substantial theses that deserve independent scrutiny. In particular, if one is moved by epistemic arguments in favor of uncertainty reduction and accepts the limitation of the scope of future action, then it is not obvious one will be moved by considerations like (iii). For, one thing natural life sentences do is to remove, fairly or not, questions about future desert from consideration altogether at the time of sentencing. Of course, if one thinks this question is removed unfairly  (as it seems Lackey does), then one can argue this. But at this point we have left epistemology and slid into ethics or political theory (or something in that ballpark).

And, in fact, Lackey herself notes that "public attitudes can evolve, moving away from a zealous “war on crime” approach to one that sees much criminal activity as the result of broader social problems that call for reform." This suggests to me that beneath the epistemological argument she is really appealing to a Dewey-Anderson style argument about the nature of a proper democratic culture in political life (recall): no political decision is final, and democratic life is itself an ongoing, experimental learning (or epistemic) process in which policies, including legal policies, are tried out and evaluated in light of experience. This argument has deep roots in American culture (e.g.,Thoreau). Of course, this kind of theoretical argument also appeals to epistemic virtues and epistemic standards, but, again, the force of the stance that Lackey exhibits is not primarily epistemic, but rather political and moral. And it strikes me as a mistake to consider those that reject this political and moral stance as "irrational."

So, to sum up, this post is not intended to challenge Lackey's core insight. There is something deeply problematic about natural life sentences and the unwillingness to be receptive to new evidence that may allow one to reconsider a decision is part of the problem. Lackey is right to call attention to it. But the reasons for it being problematic are not really epistemic, but moral and political.

Why care about labeling the argument? Lackey explicitly notes that she treats her argument as an addition to the existing moral (legal, etc.) arguments; so I do not want to suggest she is pretending to be offering a unique argument against natural life sentences. (And, as it happens, I defend the role of epistemology in political theory in my inaugural lecture tomorrow.) But, even so, there is in analytical philosophy a recurring temptation to treat moral and political issues as problems of meaning, language, or epistemology and, 'when we go public,' thereby, fail to do justice to the public's moral concerns (even if these concerns are flawed); by treating these as "irrational" we use reason to end conversation, rather than opening it up--and this would be an odd result, especially because Lackey exhibits so much courage to generate the right sorts of conversations.