Digressions&Impressions

Rawls, Paul's Transformative Experience, and Life plans.

As argued before, Rawls is very sensitive to the significance and roles of epistemic uncertainty in the original position. (In this he is a good student of Frank Knight (recall Arrow's response).) So it should come as little surprise that despite superficial features to the contrary ("full awareness of the relevent facts"), Rawls recognizes various features of uncertainty in his discussion (inspired by Royce) of rational plans of life which extend over the whole of one's life (A Theory of Justice, 358ff). One way this fact is signaled, is Rawls's embrace of Herbert Simon's satisficing in making subplans permissible (367) and (echoing L.J. Savage's treatment of uncertainty) adopting the move from objective to "subjectively rational plan[s]" (366). A nice pay-off of this latter move is that it blocks (many) paternalist impulses and respects autonomy.

Moreover, Rawls recognizes that (i) external circumstances are not always favorable to rational plans--the "achievement of happiness...always presumes a degree of good fortune" (358-9); (ii) in the initial planning stage "only the outlines of [the hierarchically structured sub-] aims and interest can be foreseen, the operative parts of the subplans that provide for them are finally decided upon independently as we go along." (361) That is, there is epistemic uncertainty about both the context in which we wish to execute our plans (that is out of our control) and uncertainty about a lot of details of and the means to implement our plans. While in (i) and (ii) uncertainty is external to our own control, it should be noted that in (ii) part of the uncertainty is also about how we develop as we execute and fulfill our plans. (I return to this feature below.)

Even so, a core commitment of Rawls's approach to a rational plan of life is that "we can choose now which desires we shall have at a later time" (364) as well as the attitudes we might have toward those desires. (Again, Rawls allows some uncertainty about the exact content of the plan, which is why he also sometimes talks of a "class of plans.") That is to say, our earlier self can command how later selves are manifested even if the details of this manifestation are unknown in advance. What allows the earlier self to legislate, as it were, to the later self is the existence of "permanent aims and interests," (361) relative to stable (and favorable) background conditions. In Rawls's hands such planning is explicitly analogous to, but (because of the Knightian suspicion that one has no knowledge of “the likelihoods of the possible circumstances” (134)) not identical with, the kind of utility maximizing models we find in formal epistemology.

This is not the place to articulate the many roles that rational life planning has in Rawls's scheme. Much of the technical debate has involved the kind of risk aversion in the plan(s) we should adopt in the original position. There has, of course, been criticism of the desirability of a rational plan (see this excellent article by Charles Larmore). But to the best of my knowledge there has been no suggestion that the conditions that a rational plan are supposed to meet may not be fulfillable even under fortunate conditions.

L.A. Paul's work on Transformative Experience (TE; here's the book), which is self-consciously articulated as a challenge to first-person rational choice models, also undercuts the viability of the very idea of a rational plan that is held together by -- Rawls's terms -- "permanent aims and interests." Assuming that regular readers of this blog only need to be reminded of what the formal features of TE are, here's a useful introduction to TE:

An epistemically transformative experience is an experience that teaches you something you could not have learned without having that kind of experience. Having that experience gives you new abilities to imagine, recognize, and cognitively model possible future experiences of that kind. A personally transformative experience changes you in some deep and personally fundamental way, for example, by changing your core personal preferences or by changing the way you understand your desires, your defining intrinsic properties, or your self-perspective. A transformative experience, then, is an experience that is both epistemically and personally transformative. Transformative choices and transformative decisions are choices and decisions that centrally involve transformative experiences...[I]n cases of transformative choice, the rationality of an approach to life where we think of ourselves as authoritatively controlling our choices by projecting ourselves forward and considering possible subjective futures is undermined by our cognitive and epistemic limitations.

For the sake of present argument, I stipulate that L.A. Paul's position on TE is not just coherent, but will survive scrutiny (obviously, a big if (see here for my original, critical response.). One consequence of Paul's approach is that rather than merely disclosing or manifesting ourselves through our actions, we may really discover we are not who we wished to be, and could not be so. (See here for some musings on my part.)

Recall from above that a Rawlsian life-plan is subjectively rational. What's crucial for present purposes is that the very possibility of a transformative experience should undercut our confidence that genuine rational life planning is possible in all respects with regard (and this is key) to one's ""more important aspirations being fulfilled" (Rawls, TJ, p. 359). What Paul shows is that authoritatively legislating to future selves from a first-person perspective is a fragile enterprise with no insurance available.+

The best one can really do in good faith, once one has been reminded of Paul's lessons on TE, and here I quote Frank Knight (1922) is: "For the time being, an individual acts (more or less) as if his conduct were directed to the realization of some end more or less ascertainable, but at best provisional and vague. The person himself is usually aware that it is not really final, not really an "end"; it is only the end of the particular act, and not the ultimate end of that."* (475) (Recall.) But this position is too thin even for Rawls's purposes.

 

 

 

On Rawls and Esotericism

A more far-reaching example concerns John Rawls…A new study of his thought has shown when his A Theory of Justice (1971) is read in conjunction with his later Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000), as well as an unpublished manuscript containing notes for eighteen lectures on Kant and Hegel, it becomes clear that important elements of his theory derive from an elaborate and profound engagement with the thought of Hegel. But while Rawls’s enormous debts to Kant are well-known because amply elaborated in A Theory of Justice, his similar debts to Hegel – was something of a pariah in most analytic philosophy departments of that time – are virtually unknown because completely suppressed. In the six-hundred odd pages of the original edition of A Theory of Justice, there are only two fleeting mentions of his name. It would seem that, fearing the disapproval or at least the noncomprehension of his primary audience, Rawls remained silent about an intellectual relationship that is ultimately crucial for the full understanding of his thought. Needless to say, this limited act of concealment does not rise to the level of full-blown esotericism. The point, however, is that this forceful and high-minded moral philosopher, who was already safely ensconced at  Harvard, was nevertheless moved to take a real step in the direction of esotericism by conditions of “adversity” that fell very far short of genuine censorship or persecution. Once you open your eyes to it, in short, you discover that defensive esotericism is so natural a phenomenon that even in the extremely open and tolerant environments of modern liberal democracies you still come across traces of it with surprising frequency.-- Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, 135. [HT Norma Thompson]

While I was preparing a post on Transformative Experience and Rawls, Scholar.google alerted me to the citation of my first adult publication on Hume's and Smith's friendship in Arnhart's perceptive, critical review of Melzer's book; Arnhart is also critical of Straussianism more generally. (I have never met Arnhart, and I was very pleased by his use of my work in criticism of Straussianism (recall).) Alerted by Thompson's review, I checked Melzer's book online for the treatment of Rawls, which I copied out above. In his footnote to the quoted passage, Melzer cites a Columbia dissertation by Margaret Meek Lange and a German book by Schaub; I was unable  to locate either (but will keep looking).+

What to make of Melzer's interpretation of Rawls?

First, liberal democracies can also generate circumstances of persecution; Rawls lived through wartime censorship during the Second World War and the McCarthy era. George Reisch's scholarship has revealed that the Cold War inhibited public engagement by analytic philosophers (in fact, he credits Rawls with re-starting analytical philosophy's renewed engagement). A Theory of Justice was written during the polarization of the Vietnam war which generated its own censorship practices and fault-lines even at Harvard (recall this post on Railton). Moreover, as Melzer correctly notes, analytical philosophy was (and is) not hospitable to some intellectual enterprises (although the targets can shift--recall this post on Priest). It is, therefore, not silly to explore to what degree such facts shaped Rawls's presentation.++ Having said that, Melzer, who writes in an age of Snowden and Wikileaks, seems a bit too eager to flatter ("extremely open and tolerant environments of modern liberal democracies") some of his intended readers.

Second, one important legacy of Rawls on analytical philosophy -- one pointed out to me by Charles Larmore -- is his citation practices (obviously Larmore shouldn't be held responsible for my other ways of approaching Rawls). Whereas Oxbridge (recall) had taught analytical philosophers to do away with most footnotes (if you didn't know whose positions were being discussed obliquely you didn't belong in the game anyway), Rawls created a sense of community by including sources and critics alike into the conversation from the generous Preface onward (with self-critical footnotes on omitted references). It does not follow, of course, from this fact that Rawls would cite everybody and everything that matters to his development or that he would not practice some forms of "suppression," but it is odd to overlook this feature of Rawls (I return to this below).

Third, as a general rule one should be cautious in reading Rawls's later Lectures back into A Theory of Justice; it should especially be avoided as a means toward discovering his "debts" to earlier sources. These Lectures have many aims (including one that Rawls does not mention: the formation of a remarkably cohesive and institutionally successful school), but the least of these is to help the student and scholars retrace Rawls's sources for A Theory of Justice. (Here's one bit of evidence: Rawls effaces his knowledge of the economists--Knight is deleted from the story, and economics is treated as an enterprise distinct from philosophy (recall).)

Fourth, on p. 314 note 16, of A Theory of Justice, Rawls tells the attentive reader (while discussing Arrow and Knight) to "see the footnotes" in Arrow and Knight on particular pages. So, Rawls's note is modest evidence that Rawls is not stating explicitly all that he thinks is relevant in the pages of A Theory of Justice. These notes do, in fact, call attention to further historical sources for Arrow and Knight, and, perhaps, too, Rawls, and help explain the way the intellectual landscape is understood. (Some other time I'll say something about Knight's notes.) In particular, in his notes, Arrow mentions Rousseau and Milton in the context of discussing the 'Idealist' tradition (which in Arrow's presentation also includes Kant and T.H. Green.)** (I return to this footnote in the sixth and final point below.)

Fifth, Hegel clearly matters to Rawls of the Lectures, and I have no doubt he wants his student-audience to understand A Theory of Justice alongside Hegel. We know that Rawls owned and read Hegel's Philosophy of Right in German in a 1955 edition.*** So it is not impossible that Hegel was a very important source to Rawls in the sixties (after all, he cites him in English translation in A Theory of Justice). Rawls is confident enough to insist in a footnote that Hegel, in turn, is indebted to Smith's Wealth of Nations. But A Theory of Justice also calls attention to sources heavily influenced by and engaging with Hegel: in addition to Knight, Marx and Bradley deserve mention. Moreover, we know that Rawls had carefully read Bosanquet, Kelsen, and Schumpeter, and he owned the great Christian Liberal Idealist, Green (with whom Rawls has considerable affinity).

Finally, already in the original preface to A Theory of Justice, Rawls had made it clear that he understood that not all readers could grapple with his "long book" in the same way. He provides several road-maps (which allow one to taste the "essentials of the theory" and the "basic parts of the book" (xviii-xix). Rawls distinguishes among his readers in virtue of them having different conceptions of freedom to follow their "preferences and to look at the problems which most concern" them (xix). This hint shows that Rawls thought himself capable of writing for a heterogeneous audience. In fact, and surprisingly enough, the hint entails that Rawls thought his most careful or patient reader(s) were those most willing and capable to suspend acting on their preferences (self-command). We learn from the part of the book that Rawls tells his reader is safe to skip that "the morality of self-command... becomes truly supererogatory when the individual displays its characteristic virtues of courage, magnanimity, and self-control in actions presupposing great discipline and training" in the service of "superior ends in a manner consistent with justice." (419)

 

 

Christ Among the Scholars, Revisited; or Rembrandt on Parental Authority

⁴¹ Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. ⁴² And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. ⁴³ And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. ⁴⁴ But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day’s journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. ⁴⁵ And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. ⁴⁶ And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. ⁴⁷ And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. ⁴⁸ And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. ⁴⁹ And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? ⁵⁰ And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them. ⁵¹ And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart. ⁵² And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man. Luke 2:40--52

On Saturday, I visited an exhibit on Rembrandt's late works. (It was also my first return to the renovated Rijksmuseum.) I encountered quite a few old favorites, but had never seen Rembrandt's last incomplete work, Simeon with the Christ Child in the Temple, before.  I intend to do a distinct post on it before long. In reflecting on it, I realized that the story is only mentioned in the Gospel according to Luke 2. In re-reading that Gospel my eye fell on the very next episode, Jesus among the scholars (which also can be found only in Luke) quoted above. Rembrandt etched it a number of times (see here), including (unusually) the return trip to Nazareth (with boy Jesus looking up at his mom).

It's an odd episode with the parents not noticing the absence of their son while they were on the road. Once they noticed it, it seems they mistakenly thought he had moved ahead of them back to their friends and family. At this point, modern folk would initiate an Amber Alert (Child Abduction Emergency), -- what do you mean, you didn't notice his absence for a day? -- but Joseph and Mary backtracked instead. By the time they found Jesus they would have been very anxious. It's no surprise, then, that his mother has no room for relief (at finding him alive) nor pride (at his intellectual understanding) and is rather upset (and clearly takes the situation personally). It's a nice narrative touch. (Joseph's response is unrecorded.)  

I was a bit sad to note that Spinoza does not discuss the episode (Christ among the scholars) because it might have offered a clue to his understanding of his autobiography (not to mention round out his complex Christology--the topic of Jo Van Cauter's dissertation [my student]). In fact, Spinoza is entirely silent on Luke; I am not sure what to make of this.

The episode has two core, interwoven themes in Luke: first, the complex interactions among parental, godly, and intellectual authority.* Second, the mutual incomprehension and misperceptions of family members.  The connection between the two themes is, I suspect, that our expectations of each other's behavior are guided by our perceptions of authority of others and self. Jesus is surprised that his parents didn't know where to find him because he falsely assumes they already understand him. We might say that Mary and Joseph project their concerns (family and friends) onto their expectations of their child, while the boy falsely assumes that his commitments are part of the expectations of his parents's view of him.

Before he has reached manhood (at age thirteen), precocious Jesus is already capable of engaging the scholars on equal, intellectual level. But he has not quite mastered the complexity of human life. There is no guarantee that with age one does master it--after all, the episode exhibits the parents' lack of wisdom in such matters. But the Gospel of Luke is right to insist that one can grow in wisdom despite excelling at intellectual matters. Our intellectual cultivation is only a part of human wisdom.

There is, of course, a third theme in the episode, that occurred to me after my lunch with my father today: Mary's eventual acceptance of her child's nature despite her lack of understanding of his choices. And here I was struck that the father's perception is left out of the matter altogether. (This is, in fact, a recurring theme in Luke 2.) It's as if such treasuring is too much to be hoped for among fathers (the carriers of traditional authority); alternative, what's it's like to be a father is taken as uninteresting to metaphysicians and theologians, that is, lovers of god (Theophilus; see Luke 1:3 [recall here and here]).

And here my mind returns to Rembrandt's gaze at his son Titus. The son's mind's eye is preoccupied with his studies (or, perhaps, something more fascinating). He does not see his father's gaze (which would be a miracle, of course, once you imagine the implied perspective of where the father-the-artist-is-at-work). In his painting, Rembrandt accepts this invisibility and thereby, without showing himself, shows what it ought to be like without allowing us to question what it's really like.

The Classic Put-Down (and being Out of Date); Williamson on Recent History (III)

The compositionality constraint exerted a powerful force in the direction of systematicity. In practice, the only semantic theories to exhibit (rather than merely claim) such a compositional structure were those for formally specified languages. Without such a formal semantics, a philosophy of language looked badly undeveloped to new wavers. It was partly for this reason that Austin was barely mentioned in Oxford philosophy of language by 1973, since he had no formal semantics to offer. The same went for his protégé and in some respects intellectual heir John Searle, whose major work Speech Acts looked out of date from an Oxford perspective almost as soon as it was published in 1969. Timothty Williamson  “How Did We Get Here From There?” (20)

“How Did We Get Here From There?”

Williamson's core intellectual vice is not his parochialism (recall), but that he confuses technical sophistication with philosophical significance; this leads to a certain amount of disfiguring small-mindedness (as exemplified in his remark on Searle). He writes as if there is a research-frontier in professional philosophy and if you are not on it, then you're not in the game.+ (This may be true from the perspective of modern grant agencies, but I ignore them here.) I write the previous sentences without much fondness for Searle's philosophical projects and with considerable admiration for Williamson's achievements. But even if we grant Williamson his authoritative judgment, it is striking that in his put-down, he cannot pause to note the accomplishments of Searle's Speech Acts, which has been astonishingly influential (with close to 20,000 citations according to Scholar.Google),++ including on many worthy non-philosophical and normative projects (something not quite on Williamson's radar-screen).

While one should always defend the intrinsic worth of un-applied philosophy, there is no need to be contemptuous of the many ways in which somewhat-non-cutting-edge-philosophical-tools can have up-take within and outside philosophy. It's not as if Williamson has any philosophical resources to argue otherwise--his justification of formal philosophy is -- not unlike Carnap's -- ultimately consequentialist.* From that vantage point a dated tool that can be used is better than an advanced bit of machinery without use.

If being on the technical cutting edge were decisive in philosophy, then we would have been Platonists (yea!) with Gödel a long time ago. More seriously, if being on the cutting edge of the technical research-frontier is the key mark of philosophical success then Alonzo Church (with his students) was the seminal philosopher of the (middle of the) twentieth century; sadly, Church goes unmentioned in Williamson's story. (So does Gödel.) More important, some works are nowhere near the cutting edge, yet they can generate enduring and insightful philosophical projects. From the vantage point of Eudoxus, Plato looks like a bungler; Leibniz is obviously technically superior to and the better philosopher than Locke (and just about anybody else to have ever lived). Yet, it's not just in political philosophy that Leibniz does not hold a candle to Locke (nor Hobbes). On the same theme: if Euler had read Hume, he would have thought him an amateur, but -- as much as I love Euler -- Hume did grasp philosophical problems in a way that eluded Euler. (It's not impossible Euler did think of Kant as a bungler.) Stebbing will remain a role-model long after Dummett is forgotten. Nietzsche is not a very impressive philosopher of physics, but there are enduring reasons for why Carnap embraces him in the midst of his polemics with Heidegger (see Stone here and Sachs here for discussion).

The previous paragraph is not an argument to stay ignorant of technical developments. (Just because my systematicity is informal, it does not mean I don't recognize a better route for others.) But one important reason for the recurring pattern, that the non-technical-whizz-kids-can-contribute-to-philosophy's progress, is that as long as there are no Philosopher-Kings, the call to philosophy is not exhausted by technical problems with given constraints; we are, as of yet, far removed from being an engineering science. Another reason is that good philosophical judgment is not a consequence of technical skill.** (This is why Bradley's judgment is still quotable by Williamson despite Russell's many purported technical knock-out blows and Ayer's cheap shots.) There is also a third reason that is related to the nature of twentieth century analytical philosophy: it was, with one non-trivial exception, not systematic enough. Without full systematicity, even the most formally sophisticated philosophical project is unprotected from its own arbitrary commitments. I'll try to explain this last, undoubtedly cryptic remark in my final post on Williamson's essay, which -- despite being 'informal and unsystematic' (8) -- has quite a bit to say about systematicity, soon.

On Top of the World

While I was thus dividing my thoughts, now turning my attention to some terrestrial object that lay before me, now raising my soul, as I had done my body, to higher planes, it occurred to me to look into my copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, a gift that I owe to your love, and that I always have about me, in memory of both the author and the giver. I [Page 317] opened the compact little volume, small indeed in size, but of infinite charm, with the intention of reading whatever came to hand, for I could happen upon nothing that would be otherwise than edifying and devout. Now it chanced that the tenth book presented itself. My brother, waiting to hear something of St. Augustine's from my lips, stood attentively by. I call him, and God too, to witness that where I first fixed my eyes it was written: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." I was abashed, and, asking my brother (who was anxious to hear more), not to annoy me, I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain...--Petrarca (1336).

There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible--Burke.

Today's post is an act of escapism after spending a morning serving on a committee that allocates grant money to scientists that have perfected the art of sincere over-promising and diligent accumulation  of strategic publication records; I picked up Cassirer and Kristeller's The Renaissance Philosophy of Man.

I used to associate Mt. Ventoux with the ritualized memorial of the death of Tom Simpson and, more favorably, the awe-inspiring time trial win by Jean-François Bernard in 1987 to be followed by disastrous team-tactics toward Villard-de-Lans. But now I can set those alonside Petrarca's account of his climb* of the mountain which, according to Wikipedia is 1,912 m (6,273 ft). (I read it in Nachod's translation in the Kristeller/Randall volume, but link to another one.) The logician, Buridian, is said to have gotten there first, but Petrarca's account is worth reading if only because of his astute comments about the trickiness of selecting travel companions.

The passage quoted above is near the end of Petrarca's description of his thoughts once he reached the top of the mountain together with his brother and two servants. In fact, the reported thought occurs at the start of sun-set. I am not the first to note that Petrarca, who describes his conflicted will alongside his narrative of the day-long journey up the mountain, echoes the conversion moment in Augustine's Confessions, where, carried along by the chanting kid's voice, which he decides to interpret as a command from God, Augustine picks up Scripture and is inspired to convert to Christianity by Romans 13:13-4, which induces a serenity of heart without doubt [quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt].

Petrarca quotes a passage from the Confessions in which a post-conversion Augustine describes people's hankering after the sublime while lacking self-knowledge.** It is tempting to say that Petrarca treats Augustine as teaching him the significance of the spiritual life.

That's not all false, of course, but it is worth noting that in Petrarca this spiritual journey is re-interpreted as a call to a philosophical life. I don't just claim this just because of the emphasis on self-knowledge. Rather, I recognized (recall this post) Petrarca's quote from Seneca's eight letter (one of those "pagan philosophers"), nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for the soul, if it be great, naught is great, which characterizes the greatness of soul of the self-sufficient, even sublime mind--one that attains immortality by skilled emendation or posthumous fame.

The physical, strenuous exercise of the climb prepares the body for a turn to philosophy, that is, the transformation of a weak, unstable mind into one that can face even death with equanimity. That the turn to philosophy is treated as a transformative, Pauline experience in the manner of our very own L.A. Paul is, of course, no surprise as such. But precisely at that transformative moment Petrarca is not just unable to talk with his pious brother (who had been extolled as the perfect climbing companion),*** but his brother's need is a source of possible irritation. Petrarca's account is so beautiful that one might miss the ugliness of the moment in which fellow-feeling is not permitted.

I do not wish to rule out ways that are philosophical yet permit exquisite co-affectivity rather than a withdrawal from human need, that is, philosophical escapism. But not for the first time I am struck by how alluring philosophical escapism can be felt from within and how discordant it can be seen to be from without; Petrarca's poetic-philosophical-confessional shows that mountaineers can indeed see farther.

Social Modality and Ideology (on Lippmann, Stanley L.A. Paul and Adam Smith)

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.--Walter Lippmann Public Opinion, Chapter VII (emphases added--ES).

In ch. 5 (ms) of Jason Stanley's "How Propaganda Works," Stanley's calls attention to, and discusses the quoted passage from Lippmann's Public Opinion. Stanley's discussion is excellent, and he deploys Lippmpan's accounts of stereotypes, or in Stanley's terminology, 'scripts,' which structure expectations, to explain both how legitimation of ideology works and to explain the role of ideology in generating resistance to rational revision. (An 'ideology' is "simply a social "script" that governs one's expectations, normative and practical.) Thus, Stanley, who uses Hume and Marx (and others) to motivate his approach to ideology, meets Elster's challenge to the Marxist in Sour Grapes (recall), that is, to supply empirically robust psychological and social mechanisms that can secure a consequence explanation of ideology. (Stanley appeals to empirical work by Payne, Steele, Eberhardt, and others.) In the chapters I have read Stanley does not mention Elster, but, in effect, he helps rehabilitate (alongside work of Gendler, Dotson, Siegel, and Haslanger--all cited and discussed by Stanley) the viability of the notion of ideology.

In the passage quoted from Lippmann, there is a further feature not emphasized by Stanley (but compatible with his approach) that I emphasized above: stereotypes (or social scripts) shape (what I'll call) social modality, that is, the shape of possible experience and counterfactual expectations within it. (Stanley makes a point like this without appealing to counterfactuals and possible world language.) According to Adam Smith in a properly functioning person there is a reciprocal relationship between the habituated mental anticipations of events and sound judgment (recall my discussion here). In my book on Adam Smith (ms) I call this -- in honor of Vernon Smith (in addition a terrific Adam Smith scholar) -- 'ecological rationality.' Homogeneous communities tend to share such ecological rationality. (Recall.)

These scripts exist at the individual and social level, but also at intermediate levels of say, scientific practitioners, journalists, experts like doctors and engineers and interact among each other in complex ways to generate social modalities with individual, disciplinary, class, gendered, race (etc.) perspectives. Many such social modalities are extremely robust anchored as they are in our ordinary cognitive functioning and enduring social institutions (the law, family-structure, discipline formation, the economy, education, etc.). So, in all disciplines there is a built-in tendency toward agreement (which, say in our profession, is reinforced by an image of science that values/promotes consensus along Kuhnian lines). Social modalities also explain the existence of systematically overlooked patterns (epistemic versions of Knightian uncertainty) of the sort recently reinvigorated by L.A. Paul.

As Beiser notes in the final chapter of his wonderful book on the German Historicist Tradition, Max Weber noted that in advanced economies, and increased division of labor, value pluralism is a natural consequence (recall). Given the framework developed by Stanley, we can understand why this so: social modalities will vary in an heterogeneous environment (as the division of labor is). As Stanley notes (and this echoes Smith's move), normative expectations are not immune from this process. 

This generates all kinds of questions (about pluralism, the social ontology of intentional objects that are social modality dependent, the role of a theorist that articulates/practices her subject within a certain entrenched modality, etc.). Here I note just the following: one problem in the vicinity here is that some reasonable expectations are manifestly unjust to outsiders. (Stanley discusses how the institutions of slavery generate ideologically sanctioned legal, commercial, cultural, gendered, racialized (etc.) expectations.) But within a lot of legal and moral areas we cannot really do without some such expectations (see here for an introduction). Life and commercial plans are made within unjust institutional structures by people that are, perhaps, indirectly complicit in them but not responsible for them. (Of course, some may well be responsible or have sufficient privilege within them to generate duties.) That is to say, an intentional violation of an entrenched social modality will generate demands, perhaps some quite reasonable, to be compensated for psychological, political, and commercial losses, including counterfactual ones that will be utterly unexpected.

Que sera sera...the future's not ours to see...

Because my beloved is on lecture-tour in South Africa, I sing a different set of lullabies than we would do if she were around to my almost-five-year-old-son before he goes to sleep. I let him choose and he nearly always wants my version of Doris Day's Que sera sera. I picked up the tune from my mom when I was a kid. I adapt the lyrics and improvise the story of his life and connect them to the main events of his day. When I first started doing this, when he was still an infant, I respected the generational structure of the stanzas, but during the last six months my son has encouraged me to focus the lyrics primarily on his life--luckily 'Avi' rhymes well with 'what will be, will be.' By the time I am done he is half-asleep; I wait in the darkness twenty minutes or so before leaving the room (if I don't fall asleep on the rocking chair).

Ordinarily, if I think about it at all, I associate the song with the importance of story-telling and a kind of amor fati. Sometimes my digressions drift, one associated impression too far, toward the very possibility of knowing too much. But last night, I noticed that the lyrics to Que sera sera (also) describe epistemic uncertainty ("the future's not ours to see"). And, not for the first time, yet always a familiar surprise, I recognize that my enduring intellectual commitments pre-date whatever philosophical skill I have developed.

Why Analytical Existentialism Matters

[Due to technical issues with Typepad yesterday, I am running this for another day.--ES]

Analytical Existentialism is the use of an analytical style to investigate topics that matter to us as human beings capable of feelings and anxieties or joys while doing justice to our first-personal (even phenomological) perspective on these topics (recall this post on Laurie Paul; and this post on Ruth Chang). While Laurie Paul's work has revealed the potential and thrill of analytical existentialism in our times, I was introduced to analytical existentialism around 1991 or 1992 by Jeff McConnell, an instructor at Tufts. If you get a BA from Harvard, a PhD from MIT, and teach at Tufts you are not exactly obscure, but Jeff has published little (this is the only article I am familiar with). I took 'intro to philosophy' and 'existentialism' with Jeff. The 'intro to philosophy' course included Plato's Meno, Descartes's Meditations, Kant's Prolegomena (I think), and a lot of readings from Ammerman's Classics of Analytical Philosophy volume. (We may have also read from the Rorty volume.) In the course on 'existentialism' we read Kierkegaard and Heidegger and such figures, as well as some readings from analytical authors (e.g., Munitz, Nagel, etc.) on topics like 'death,' but the course was really an excuse for Jeff to try out ways to develop the most precise and rigorous was of asking the question 'why do I exist,' (as asked from the first person-perspective). 

I learned that Jeff was working on a manuscript on the topic -- why do I exist? -- by accident; once, I was accompanying John Rawls to his car in the company of Jeff after a key-note that Rawls had given at Tufts. We got lost in the College-Avenue car-park looking for Rawls' car. It was a grey and drizzly day, and I was burning to ask Rawls some questions. (The key one for me was how Rawls would answer the Nietzschean that claimed all value is will to power.) But by the time we had found the car, we were running late for dinner, and all three of us were a mixture of embarrassed, hungry, tired, and contemplative. As we were driving on Mass Ave, Rawls turned to Jeff. (They were both sitting in the front seats, so I was straining to lean forward.) 'Are you still working on why you exist?' 'Yes, Jack," Jeff said, and he added something about how he had made progress on his manuscript. I wouldn't say that Rawls snickered, but I had the distinct impression he chuckled. Quite possibly, it was a warm and generous laugh, but the conversation seems to have ended there (in my memory--for all I know Jeff said a lot more).

On Sebald, and Self-Perpetuating Compulsions

Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.… How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill.…What I found most surprising in the course of these observations is the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing. There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at that crucial age when, as Keller remarks, one every day runs the risk of becoming simpleminded and longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one's head.… Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible. From the writer's point of view, there is almost nothing to be said in its defense, so little does it have to offer by way of gratification.--W.G. Sebald, quoted in Troy Jollimore's stimulating review. [HT L.A. Paul]

Alone in my circle of bourgeois scholars, I often find Sebald mildly irritating because he sells an intoxicating mixture of learnedness, nostalgia, and suggestions of depth to be found in imaginative engagement with the details of living --all irresistible to folk like us. I always struggled to express my irritation, but Jollimore helpfully quotes Sebald's preference for "something that is small and self-contained," which is for him "a moral and aesthetic ideal." While I instinctively admire Sebald's aversion against "large-scale things...in architecture or evolutionary leaps," his ideal leaves little room for expansiveness, natural and moral and systematically partakes in the humanistic project of self-domestication (recall). Sebald's moral and aesthetic preferences are a thinly disguised longing for control, even in the face of genuine self-knowledge that such control remains elusive. His is intrinsically a conservative aesthetic that offers a spirited consolation (by withholding ordinary forms of consolation) to those, I fear, that recoil the inevitable excesses in living. Of course, I wouldn't find Sebald irritating if I didn't recognize myself in these longings.