Digressions&Impressions

Metaphysics, Identity, and Unity of Virtues in Borges

In Book VIII of the Odyssey, we read that the gods weave misfortunes so that future generations will have something to sing about; Mallarmé’s statement, “The world exists to end up in a book,” seems to repeat, some thirty centuries later, the same concept of an aesthetic justification for evils. These two teleologies, however, do not entirely coincide; the former belongs to the era of the spoken word, and the latter to an era of the written word. One speaks of telling the story and the other of books....

Later, Léon Bloy would write:

“There is no human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is. No one knows what he has come to this world to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas correspond, or what his real name is, his imperishable Name in the registry of Light…. History is an immense liturgical text, where the i’s and the periods are not worth less than the versicles or whole chapters, but the importance of both is undeterminable and is profoundly hidden.” (L’Ame de Napoleon, 1912)

 

The world, according to Mallarmé, exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in the world: more exactly, it is the world.--Borges (1951) On the Cult of the Books.

While I was reading Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (about which more soon, because it gave me some ideas about the Principle of Sufficient Reason), I came across a reference to the Book of the Brethren of Purity. Wikipedia sent me to Borges. His essay is, in part, about the problem famously remarked upon, as Borges notes, by Plato that "A teacher selects a pupil, but a book does not select its readers, who may be wicked or stupid." (The problem is also a trope in Borges--recall.) This presupposes, controversially, that a true teacher is capable of reading souls. And it also presupposes that a genuine teacher is capable of discerning wickedness or stupidity in his pupils before, as it were, it's too late. The life and fate of Socrates does not entirely inspire confidence in this matter; we can, as Abe Stone taught me, understand, say, the Meno as a reflection on this. Even if we grant the two controversial presuppositions, modern professional philosophers do not  have the luxury of picking their own pupils, except, perhaps, at the level of a dissertation (or thesis). Even then, in the modern context it would be a bit odd, say, to blame Rawls for misdeeds of his students (if there were any misdeeds) unless these deeds were somehow traceable to Rawls's teaching(s), doctrines, or meta-philosophy. This latter point reminds us that we can't entirely absolve Wittgenstein for the annoying features of his school because Wittgenstein clearly encouraged a kind of cult of personality around him (as witnesses in his own age already noted).    

 

Yet, Borges's essay is framed by a bit of historicized history of metaphysics. (Above I have quoted the first and last paragraphs of the essay.) And, indeed, in this history he also discusses the contributions of the three great Monotheisms of a Book (including a subtle observation on Al-Ghazali and the Brethren of Purity.) The historicization turns on the switch from oral to written culture.

 

One way to understand substance monism, is to understand us as imperfect 'entities' without genuine identity. To be sure, Sub specie aeternitatis there may well be perfect identity (A=A), but from the vantage point of the 'letters' in the text there is none least of all about our own all-too-human identities. Even relying on baptismal naming ceremonies will not do.

 

It is tempting to treat Borges's essay as a geneaology of error. There are two bits of evidence for this in the piece: first, because he treats the Muslims, Jews, and Christians in increasing order of "extravagance." Second, post-Darwin, he may well reject teleology. But we would be underestimating Borges if he drew an inference from extravagance to falsity.

 

Identity (A=A) is trivial, of course, from the perspective of eternity. But when we mortals rely on that perspective to do our own metaphysics, we tacitly rely, as Borges hints, on a teleology that presupposes, as it were, an intelligible and epistemically stabilized reality (with 'entities') available for an infinite knower (that just happens to be substance). It would be professional foolishness to call relying on such identity a form of extravagance. But again, even if it is extravagance, it would not follow it is false.

 

Garber vs Della Rocca, reviewed (I)

The present issue of the Journal for the History of Philosophy (JHP) has a two-tiered debate between Daniel Garber (Princeton) and Michael Della Rocca (Yale) over (i) the status of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) in Spinoza and (ii) the methodology of the history of philosophy. Both (i-ii) are connected to (iii) a more inchoate debate over what philosophy is. That Spinoza and the PSR would be the occasion of such a debate is no surprise; ever since Russell embraced brute facts (and rejected the PSR) and treated Spinoza as an exemplar of non-philosophy (recall), the place of Spinoza within analytical philosophy is not merely a historical question, but also a means at discerning the contested limits of philosophy and an open path toward renewing philosophy. The previous sentence is to side a bit with Della Rocca, who is very clear that "Spinoza’s philosophy can help us to learn or re-learn how to do philosophy in a more productive vein" (533ff) than the analytical status quo. (It is no surprise that much of the most influential Anglo scholarship on Spinoza (from Curley, Bennett, etc.) has been akin to rehabilitation projects in part by reinterpreting Spinoza into fashionable categories and problematics (and to downplay the mystical and therapeutic elements discerned by Russell)).

As an aside, the very same issue of JHP in which the Garber/Della Rocca exchange appears, also has two papers on Kant, one on Aristotle, one on Descartes--all on topics that reflect ongoing debates in scholarship (with undoubtedly fresh and important angles--I know several of the authors and they are all terrific). By contrast, the book-review section includes topics that are a bit more off-the-beaten-track. Obviously the sample size is small (N=1), and Jasper Reid's piece does not fit my claim, but (a quick glance at the other two issues of the present volume also confirm that) the pages of JHP represent a very conservative orientation toward the relevant subject matters of the history of philosophy. This orientation is a key feature of the PGR ecology in the field (recall this post). 

The core interpretive issue between Garber and Della Rocca is, at the surface, the status and content of the PSR in Spinoza. (I say "surface" because below it, they agree that rationalism vs empiricism has to be discarded as an organizing principle in the history of philosophy--about that deepy some other time more.) In Della Rocca's hands the PSR is both (i) the master-principle (hereafter MP) and (ii) has a very broad metaphysical scope--Garber denies both that there are any such MPs to be found in the text of Spinoza (and, thus ruling out the PSR's role as a MP) and that in so far as Spinoza embraces commitments akin to the PSR his texts support readings that are thinner in scope than Della Rocca allows. It is worth noting three features of their exchange: (A) that even if Della Rocca's view on (i) are wrong -- say because there is an alternative, perhaps even more fundamental MP, in Spinoza [say, that truth = existence (recall), or truth = being] from which the PSR follows, his reading of (ii) could still be defended. (B) That upon closer inspection, the debate between Garber and Della Rocca over (ii) really turns into a debate over the explanatory resources available to Spinoza in being able to account for the relationship between what follows from the essence/nature of Substance/God and particular infinite series of modes (and the concomitant metaphysical ruling out of some alternative series). (C) That both offer their readings in terms of fairly traditional textual hermeneutics (despite some of their self-presentation).*

On (B) in Garber's hands the problem is that the way God's nature is (and, thus, the way things follow from it) becomes a "brute fact" that violates the PSR. Della Rocca is right, I think, that there is a response to this complaint from within Spinoza's philosophy to be found in E1p33d (and also 1p16, which goes unmentioned by our protagonists, even though Garber (p. 515) quotes a passage in which Spinoza flags its significance for the debate). Della Rocca admits in a footnote that Spinoza's response is not very satisfying philosophically, but does not elaborate. As textual exegesis I am inclined to agree with Della Rocca, but see the next paragraph. (It is to my supervisor's credit that his students do not form a doctrinal or magisterial school.)

The judgment of the previous paragraph is the consequence of my study of Samuel Clarke's (1705) response to Spinoza (in his Demonstration); Clarke's philosophical views on the relationship between God's nature and God's existence puts him very close to Spinoza's position in E1p33 (about which another time more [recall]), but Clarke also noted that E1p33 generates  two important tensions with other features of the Ethics. First, Clarke discerned that Spinoza stipulates that the ratio of motion to rest in the universe remains the same, where the universe is taken as an infinite individual that keeps its nature or form (see E2p13L4 and E2p13L7). Keeping this ratio fixed is entirely compatible with variation in the actual motion of the universe. All the same, given that we are dealing with a ratio here, Clarke is right that at any given time there is an intelligible sense in which “there might possibly have been originally more or less motion in the universe than there actually was.” That is, if God's fixed nature is expressed in a fixed ratio, then very same substantial nature is compatible with different motions and this variation violates the PSR. So, Garber has discerned a genuine problem, but misplaces the location.

Second, Clarke (and all the Newtonians) can note that the PSR is too granular (and, again, this echoes the spirit of Garber's objection and, perhaps, explains why Della Rocca has to concede that Spinoza's position isn't so impressive); Spinoza is committed to there being sufficient reason for infinite variety in the modes (E1p16 and E1p28). But Spinoza's metaphysics lacks resources to explain the particular (confused though it may be) characteristics of the variety we observe--here Spinoza inherits some of the problems of Cartesian physics (despite his severe criticisms of Descartes) [for more careful account]; Newtonian physics can help explain observed accelerations and the evolution of (relatively) closed systems of bodies (in terms of abstract quantities) over time. Even if Spinoza is right to express caution about overconfidence here, Newtonian physics did put us on the road to a truer philosophy. 

Clearly, Clarke is a hostile critic, and he is reading Spinoza through his engagement with Toland. I would not claim that Clarke gets us (to quote Garber) "the historical Spinoza who lived and worked in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic." (As a historical aside, Spinoza also lived and worked in a the seventeenth-century Dutch Stadhouderschap!) But the proto-reading I have offered here is in some sense more historically grounded than either the one on offer from Della Rocca or, ironically, Garber! For, Della Rocca notes that his interpretation revives a historically important interpretation (associated with Jacobi and British Idealism). As it happens, I have considerable sympathy with that interpretation as a means toward articulating an important, enduring philosophical position (in the way that Garber allows (521)), but the jury is out if it is compatible with seventeenth century views available to Spinoza. (My quick and dirty judgment: no; Spinoza is closer to Averroes and a variety of neo-Platonism!)

One might think that I am being unfair to Garber here because he is very concerned with avoiding terms that are not actor's categories (511ff). But as Dan Schneider has pointed out, when one deploys terms from the past in describing the past, then one is often unwillingly (or unwittingly) siding with one side or another in a past debate. Schneider's observation is important because in philosophy often the key concepts are especially -- if not essentially -- contested. (Recall; see also here.) So, even if we are only trying to understand the past in terms of the actor's intentions (certainly not my program), we have every right, and sometimes a duty if we wish to understand the past, to introduce vocabulary unavailable to the historical actors. As Della Rocca notes, if we wish just to avoid (being a Borges's Pierre Menard and) merely replicate the past in the same words as itself, the business of historians of philosophy starts with going beyond the surface text in some way or another.

While we have made some progress on (i-iii), I have also made some promissory notes (about (A) among other things). So, to be continued...

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)

 

 

History of Philosophy as Anti-Status-Quo?

My frustration with this book is not that it lingers on what Machiavelli says to us, for here Levy is fully persuasive, but that it sets political theoretical debate in the narrowest of terms, between a liberal and a republican concept of liberty in which each is barely distinct from the other. The problem is not with reading Machiavelli out of context. (Against Skinner and even beyond Levy, I see anachronism itself as a totally legitimate intellectual practice.) The problem is with an approach to Machiavelli in which he is made to affirm our present way of life.--Robyn Marasco reviewing David N. Levy, Wily Elites and Spirited Peoples in Machiavelli's Republicanism, Lexington.

I enjoy reading reviews because they often make explicit what is submerged in journal articles and allow the attentive reader to reflect on her own practice. And sometimes they make me feel I am not alone on this planet.

So, one reason to be interested in the history of philosophy is to address something like this question: "How from some privileged (arbitrary?) starting point did 'we' get to here?' (Recall) With 'here' defined as either the the personal views of the historian or, more likely, the thought taken to be the cutting-edge as defined by folk at the top departments (when he was a PhD student). Answering the question is, contrary to what is common thought, not an excuse for celebratory Whig history (although it can certainly degenerate into that, too) because it can also unearth surprises (that is, we've been here before, sorta) or can explain why some important insights have been lost or overlooked, etc. (A nice recent (recall) example is Price's treatment of the fate of metaphysics.) That is to say, an interest in explaining the present status quo can lead to genuine (as opposed to celebratory) historical inquiry; this kind of inquiry treats works/thinkers/movements/ideas of the past as causes of the present (the effect). More subtly, it tends to entail that understanding of the present is thereby completed (it need not entail it because one may also (mistakenly) believe -- with a nod to the genetic fallacy -- that knowledge of the present does not require the causes by which it came about.)

There are others ways of engaging the past in which it is not so much a cause of the present but a means by which one can think critically about the present -- as Marasco suggests can be done with  Machiavelli's writings --, that is, to prevent status quo bias. There may be other ways to combat status quo bias, of course, and, as we have already seen, turning to history may reinforce such bias. (As an aside, history for history's disinterested sake -- in which history is a quietist enterprise, also reinforces such a status quo bias. )

To explore history by which one can think critically about the present relies on a kind of limited symmetry principle in reading and engaging with the past. For, it requires understanding a past thinker first in her own (broadly construed) context to some degree* and then bring her insights & answers about that context to bear on contemporary issues, in part, perhaps by recasting our issues entirely. That is, it requires one to think that the present status quo has not fully assimilated all the insights available in the past and that we do not merely look back as superiors riding the wave of progress, but that thinkers of the past may have equal standing in addressing our situation.

As Marasco notes, one precondition for such a limited symmetry condition is to avoid using present debates as the means by which one accesses past thinkers. The reservation here is not the wrong-headed one that a past thinker cannot give us new answers to our questions (because they would not find these intelligible due to anachronism, etc.) It is a perfectly legitimate and sometimes insightful enterprise to deploy past thinkers in this fashion. Rather, past thinkers may help us understand more fully the limitations of our questions.      

On Casual Cruelty in Philosophy

I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.

Now, of course, no one has said these things to me specifically. They haven’t said “Hey, Elizabeth Barnes, this is what we think about you!” But they’ve said them about disabled people in general, and I’m a disabled person. Even just thinking about statements like these, as I write this, I feel so much – sadness, rage, and more than a little shame. It’s an odd thing, a hard thing, to try to take these emotions and turn them into interesting philosophy and careful arguments.—Elizabeth Barnes, writing at Philosoph-her [HT Meena Krishnamurthy]

I sometimes fall into despair and think that my professional community, analytical philosophy, -- in which I have invested so much of my life and identity -- cannot be redeemed. It’s one thing to note, echoing Ruth Chang (recall and here), that our intellectual reflexes and moral sentiments are deformed by our disciplinary education; it’s another thing to note that as professionals in a zero-sum institutional environment we often lionize bullies (recall and here & here) and exhibit a party-line attitude toward those that approach philosophy from alternative viewpoints and with different sensibilities. But Barnes, who is one of my favorite metaphysicians, reports something far worse: our “casual assertions” exhibit much cruelty, even inhumanity, qua philosophers.

For, in analytical philosophy, “talks” are carefully prepared because we know that audiences are unforgiving—and that our intended discussion can easily be derailed by zealous scrutiny of details, even our throw-away remarks. (This explains how common it still is to encounter fully read papers.) We pride ourselves on our clarity, rigor, and care, after all, and we prepare focused talks. So, according to the self-image we embrace, we don’t let anything into these talks without some reflection and scrutiny. Barnes’s report reminds us that in the intellectual air we breathe, in the uncontroversial-background-assumptions that we collectively take for granted, there are noxious, even poisonous humors that are fully compatible with civility, politeness, and embracing S5 as the true modal logic.

I saw Barnes’s post widely shared with approval and admiration at blogs and facebook; even so, I puzzle over the lack of sympathetic shame, even embarrassment over our practices. For, Barnes’s experience(s) qua disabled person are not isolated. The history of philosophy is one long record of casually expressed norms of superiority (e.g., recall and here), and there is little reason to think that we do better than earlier generations (because our training is not geared toward preventing it).

As a sociological aside, Barnes notes that she had deferred her work on "social and feminist philosophy – especially philosophical issues related to disability" until after "having established a certain amount of professional security." That Barnes has achieved such security is a great achievement. But her frank admission suggests how deplorable the state of the profession is given that her calculation about deferring such work is -- given existing norms and incentive/reward structures -- eminently rational. We have, as a discipline, undoubtedly missed out on more voices that have never achieved the kind of security Barnes has and, thereby, have missed out on lots of arguments. This suggests that the intellectual status quo is probably more fragile than folk realize because its commitments have not been stress-tested against the best possible arguments. 

Some other time I hope to return to a key theme in Barnes's post, which is about the bind she found herself in because she can't express her justified anger ("you are angry and sad about what is being said about your disability or how you are being treated because of your disability") without further professional cost or more engagements that generate anger and sadness (etc.). But here I want to focus on a feature of the passage quoted at the top of this post. 

Barnes allows, perhaps for rhetorical purposes, that some cruel thoughts are less reprehensible if they would be “conclusions of careful, extended argument.” I am less sure. Arguments are tools at the service of practical reasoning, theoretical rationality, and perhaps, even the path toward truth; they are not, even the "careful, analytically rigorous" ones, self-vindicating in virtue of being “careful arguments.”[1] (Barnes does not suggest this, so we may agree here.) There may be nothing more comical within professional philosophy than witnessing purported hyper-caution about one’s premises and inferential steps that are conjoined with an utter lack of judgment about, say, the nature of the issue at hand. Odds are that if cruelty is the consequence of a careful, extended argument then something has gone wrong somewhere; the lack of reserve in sharing the argument is a further sign that something is amiss.*

Now, most folk don't knowingly exhibit cruelty (one assumes, although sometimes I wonder). But it is not uncommon that when somebody is confronted with the impact of his/her casual cruelty (or carefully argued for cruelty) one often does not encounter a dispassionate attempt at exploring previously accepted norms of superiority, but one receives eloquent statements on the evils of 'political correctness,' the importance of 'freedom of speech,' or the deplorable state of 'call out culture' (or unwillingness to tolerate satire, hypersensitivity, etc.). To be called to account for the unintended, perhaps, consequence of one's (casual) remarks (or careful argument) is no fun, especially if it happens somewhat publicly, and so some defensiveness is to be expected. But it is noteworthy that such a response entails a further lack of recognition of the victim, of the harm(s) done, and even of one's own role as an agent within a variety of moral communities. There is an additional source of shame lurking here; for while Plato and Aristotle restricted the origin of philosophy to wonder, as Barnes more correctly notes, other painful emotions, including "sadness, rage, and more than a little shame," as well as, perhaps, despair, can also be the starting place for true philosophy.

Why Philosophy Cannot be (normal science-style) Kuhnian; On Bosanquet & Russell

[Philosophy] can never be revolutionised by discovery, as, for all I know, a particular science may be, and as a particular branch of technique certainly often is. This, I take it, is the meaning of saying that in it you cannot make discoveries. Philosophy rests on the whole spectacle of the ordered universe, and on the judgments of value which are essentially and rationally implied in that visioin. To revolutionise it would be more than to pass from one civilisation to another, though that is perhaps the nearest realisable analogy. It would almost be to pass from one universe to another. In estimating such sayings as these, it must be remembered that philosophy does not make itself. It is in the main a reading of civilisation.
And it cannot fail to be progressive. A limited technique, which is readily revolutionised by a discovery, can hardly be progressive. A whole way of doing is abandoned, and a new one takes its place. But the vision of reality, which embodies the changes of life and knowledge, while retaining the singleness of its first impressions, must necessarily progress so long as thought survives. It must progress, because it incorporates new matter with old. If it dropped the old in passing to the new, then indeed there would be change, but no certainty of progress.--Bernard Bosanquet (1914-15) "Science and Philosophy"

Alex Klein was kind enough to call my attention to Bosanquet's response to Russell's lectures ("On Our Knowledge of an External World.") Bosanquet's target here is the very idea of a scientific philosophy (which Bosanquet traces back to Kant's "famous aspiration to the sure march of science." [Bosanquet is quoting the preface to the second edition of the first Critique]; Bosanquet also notes the indebteness of Russell's epistemology to Kant.) In particular, his target is the picture later associated with Kuhn in which a science is about generating breakthrough, revolutionary discoveries. And, again, anticipating the Kuhnian idea that such a paradigm shift entails (almost) the passing "from one universe to another." Bosanquet explicitly allows that this (Kuhnian) position is true for the sciences (and, to be a bit anachronistic, engineering), but not philosophy.

Bosanquet rightly discerns that if one embraces philosophy as a  (Kuhnian) normal science then one opens the door to revolutionary changes and thereby undercuts the very idea of genuine progress (rather than paradigm-dependent-progress).  This insight does not rest on Bosanquet's conception of philosophy or his faith in progress and the eternity of the human species ("But the vision of reality, which embodies the changes of life and knowledge, while retaining the singleness of its first impressions, must necessarily progress so long as thought survives.")

Preserving first impressions matters a lot in love, of course, and philosophy.

Against Russell's attempt to cleanse philosophy from practical interest and feeling (recall), I have some sympathy for Bosanquet's desire to keep value and human interest within philosophy: ("its object, prima facie, is the universe, with all its activities and values, among which the theories of exact science with their objects form only a certain proportion." (6)) It is no surprise that Russell rids philosophy of sympathy (recall), while Bosanquet embraces a "complete and sympathetic outlook over our world," (17; some other time I'll discuss his attack on relations and his defense of evolutionary thought.)

Even so, Bosanquet is too comfortable in presupposing a like-minded audience and he underestimates the appeal of Russell's philosophy; not just its "cosmopolitan" outlook (against his own embrace of a "national" philosophy), it's appeal to transferable method (as opposed to his own faith in the "judgments of great men" (15)), but especially because Russell has always been clear about his own rejection of the Kuhnian conception of philosophy as normal science.  Russell's scientific philosophy is  methodological ((recall) and one might add an embrace of a certain set of epistemic virtues) not paradigmatic. To put the point from a Kuhnian perspective: Russell is at ease with a kind of permanent change in the content of philosophical claims and this makes it very suitable to the modern age (even if we give up on his theory of theory conception).

Historicizing the Collapse of Kantianism; on Speculative Realism and Knee-Jerk Realism

In 2007 or so, Continental philosophy caught up with the knee-jerk-realist-mood of Analytical metaphysics (recall here), when the four horsemen (Meillasoux, Harman, Brassier, and Hamilton Grant) of Speculative Realism were united in order to reject the Kantian heritage (or correlationism) which had constrained and informed the tradition through phenomenology and its critics. (I learned about this movement from Cogburn here and here.) If we telescope away from the inner logic of technical arguments and rhetorical gestures that led to such rejection, we can still ask the question what might such rejection signify given that it occurs on both sides of the analytical/continental divide?

Kant and Kantianizing tendencies made the intellectual world safe for science while respecting our human craving for the existence of normativity, human freedom, and a mindful God worth having. At bottom Kant's project respects cognitive limits by pleasing our ego's vanity; Kantianism reconciles the individual to being law-governed. Its demise marks the assertion of two opposing tendencies: a self-confident theism -- one that does not hide itself in fideism -- and a self-confident scientism. Obviously, these two tendencies need not be opposed which is why they can act so much in concert.

The theists take heart from the fact that secularization is not inevitable. It exposes the inner contradiction at heart of narratives of modernity, which purport to reject providence and final causes while embracing a myth of progress. Religion is, in fact, not dying off with the aged brought up in fading traditions. In fact, in a world in which capitalism and modern technologies make old linkages and boundaries seem obsolete, transnational, theistic religions, which offer the promise of transcendent justice and order are manifestly attractive to many young.  That is to say, while most Christian Metaphysicians are happy to focus on Christianizing metaphysics, they benefit from the renewed vitality of a sincere, political Islam in the face of centuries of colonialism and political defeats.  

The scientistic or technocratic double down on accelerating technological change fueled by both an open-ended scientific process as well as the massive stream of data and the availability of cheap computing power that can handle it.* They are exhilarated by the universal acids lurking in the sciences which respect no imposed limits. The scientistic embrace meritocracy and are at home with the selection procedures and the implicit cultural superiority or genetic hierarchies that accompanies it. Massive economic and educational inequality is, then, both the material and ideological source of their confidence as well as a feature that demands technocratic amelioration.

That is to say, both streams are at bottom not liberal (but not necessarily illiberal), which is about the individual's submission to impartial law which, in turn, recognizes the individual, even though they are the consequence of the victory of liberalism marked by 1989. Each stream can be reconciled with liberalism, but their tendencies ultimately strive toward the absolute (not just understood as God or the PSR, but also absolute contingency, etc.). This is undoubtedly apt for an age of unfolding man-made environmental catastrophes. 

On Diminished Support for Universities

Just a personal note to you, beyond the standard leftist ideologies that you support, do you also welcome ideologies that you reject?  Is it analytical ideology you like or your political team's winning? As someone who doesn't share your politics but benefits from the nonideological portion of your writing, I usually turn off during your political chest beating and fist pumping.  Why don't you interrogate the dominant leftist ideologies that actually control the universities? Getting a sense of how overwhelmingly monolithic university politics actually are might help you to understand why the outside political coalition for supporting universities full of committed ideologues is diminishing. Who wants to fund institutions dedicated to ridiculing and despising them? Thanks again for your insights and writing (especially the nonideological bits!)--Anonymous.

My comments policy has reduced my stress level compared to when I was moderating comments at NewAPPS. I get fewer comments, relatively fewer obnoxious comments, and I can make snap decisions on what to accept without second thoughts. Not surprisingly, when people's views are connected to their public identities they tend to be more cautious, especially when they suspect -- correctly or not -- that their views may hinder things they value, too, like friendships, professional advancement, and reputation (etc.). The benefits of moderation should not be underestimated, but obviously it may also generate a status quo bias. Even if the status quo is very pleasant (at least to those that benefit) this also reduces the opportunity of learning. Balloonists are happy to take the high ground but I recognize that other blogs may have other interests -- some noble (inclusivity, openness and experimentation) and some less so (drive traffic and advertising numbers) -- and will encourage anonymous comments. Anyway, it's nice to be informed so kindly that some of my readers are willing to keep reading me even when they do not agree with my purported ideological positions.

I welcome analytical ideology studies because it is developing useful conceptual tools that will facilitate better analysis of political events and movements; it is also regenerating analytical philosophy as such. This is useful because analytical philosophy had grown too comfortable with technocracy and too quietest in light of major social upheavals. Regardless of the ideological orientation of those most prominent within analytical ideology studies, it is foreseeable that the tools they are developing will be used to analyze many kinds of ideologies and ideological stances, including ones cherished by those active in it today. Analytical philosophy does not have the intellectual resources to prevent this.

It is amusing to note the lack of irony among those (including my anonymous commentator) that applaud the use of state power in order to curtail or prevent the lefty political orientation of university professors. Leaving aside irony (which gets tiresome), American elite universities thrive in insanely competitive global markets. Yes, there are subsidies in all kinds of ways, but the existing patterns of outcomes are a consequence of lots of free and responsible individual choices within the market for higher education among students, their parents, university administrators, and faculty all in light of global developments, changing job markets, and public opinion. For good or for ill the very best public universities quite clearly emulate the elite private ones (Cf. my imitation of Veblen). I welcome ideological competition and it is good that within philosophy some programs self-consciously steer non-standard ideological courses (e.g. Arizona), just as it is great that within the philosophical blogosphere there are different options (recall).

This is not to deny that philosophers and professors more generally can take the political for granted. It is, in fact, to be expected that contestable and controversial values will be contested by political forces--I blog about this in terms of the Socratic Problem. My own read for why "the outside political coalition for supporting universities" has diminished is subtly different than the one proposed by my interlocutor: it has more to do with a decline of a certain form of civic religion in the American heartland much indebted to late 19th century Protestantism in which education is valued alongside dramatic demographic and economics shifts such that the rich can expect to exit safely from local institutions (including public universities). You can help destroy Madison if you expect your kids and grandkids to go to Yale (where they can be taught how to think carefully about ideology). 

I do not deny the claim that there is considerable group-think even among those that pride themselves on independence of thought. I know of tenure cases that strongly appear to be decided on ideological grounds. Like all human institutions, we find sources of corruption within professional philosophy and the academies that support it. We are, I fear, also in the midst of a newfound receptivity toward rule by the intellectual and educated elite among the wealthy and highly educated and an increasing distrust of popular democracy. Ironically, the most vocal supporters of this trend are on the Libertarian right (e.g. Jason Brennan), but in Europe the technocrats are playing with the idea of substituting lotteries for ballot boxes, and the novelists imagine submission to a form of political Islam. Undoubtedly, Stateside, Liberals were too fond of appealing to the sophisticated judgment of elite judges when they could not win elections and, unsurprisingly, we have seen Conservatives emulating their practices: good tricks get emulated which is why the first one to do so bears a heavier responsibility, if history knows any morality.

A Previously Unpublished Letter from Quine to Benardete (Philosophy, Poetry, Ontology, and Wisdom)

A bit of evidence in support of which result the analytical philosopher can ruefully supply on his own, simply by recalling that in his eagerness to travel light he has been prone to regard wisdom as just another piece of excess baggage impeding the progress of traditional philosophy that he has long since dumped by the wayside.6 [6 See in this connection Quine's mention of wisdom in Theories and Things(1981: 193)]

 Quinean poetics reopens this whole issue of wisdom, in connection with the vexed question of what the putative wisdom of the poet might be supposed to consist in, but no longer on the level of airy generality, where it has languished hitherto. Not that the philosopher can expect to be easily credited as a disinterested arbiter of his quarrel with the poet. But if the suspicion of parties is inevitably very strong here, it may yet be overcome by the following line of reflection. Having jettisoned all claims to wisdom and quite ungrudgingly ("with good riddance too"), the analytical philosopher is quite prepared to certify those of the poet, not least because he can always slyly add, "If it is in the pages of the poet that wisdom is to be found, it takes the philosopher to find it!" A fair enough division of the spoils as far as poet and philosopher are concerned, though I fear that some literary critics, even among those who have themselves been happily poaching on philosophy in recent decades, may not be quite so sanguine when (turnabout is fair play) philosophers return the compliment. Which is not to say that the Quinean exegete expects to address the poetic text directly, without the mediation of the literary critic.

Simply as a methodological point, a Quinean gloss will characteristically have a meta-meta-linguistic character, being itself parasitic on the first-order gloss of the critic. So much for ruffled feathers! There is enough anxiety to go around (inevitable, perhaps, when interdisciplinary studies get down to business), for even the poet, while flattered by so much attention, will not be free of it, as he unpacks this figure of parasites preying on parasites.---José A. Benardete  "Metaphysics and Poetry: The Quinean Approach." Poetics Today (Summer, 1996), pp. 129-156

I was delighted with the wit, ingenuity, and erudition that into "Metaphysics and Poetry: The Quinean Approach." What with my intentness on the ontic demands of science and the joy of meeting them as frugally as may be, I never entertained quality instances sive abstract abstract particulars. They are gratuitous for science, and science owes much of its beauty and efficiency to economy of thought and objects. But poetry has its beauty too, or can have, and economy is merely one among the wellsprings of its beauty. To each its own, therefore, and vive le sport. It is refreshing to see my familiar devices in strange applications.

Let me clarify the history of my ontology....Quine to J. Benardete, October 14, 1996.

A few weeks ago, at Dailynous there was a discussion about an old article by Quine in Newsday 1979. One of the commentators noted that Quine's piece had been reprinted in Theories and Things. Sadly the discussion failed to notedthat there already existed a very substantial response to Quine's piece  in the scholarly literature: José A. Benardete's "Metaphysics and Poetry: The Quinean Approach," partially quoted above. Benardete's observations deserves further reflection (I have made some tentative comments in this lecture in honor of my former colleague). 

Below I reproduce a transcript of a letter from Quine in response to Benardete's piece. (I did not correct the typos.) I thank Diego Benardete for calling my attention to it, and I thank the Quine estate, especially Douglas Quine, and José Benardete for allowing me to reproduce it on Digressions. I also thank Dan Dennett for helping me contact Douglas Quine. The piece is of interest primarily for Quine's brief intellectual autobiography, but it also acknowledges one of the technical points (on tropes) in Benardete's piece. [A pdf file copy of the original is available to scholars upon request.]

On History of Ideas vs Philosophy

Another and more satisfying answer to the problem has been the assumption that the opposing schools of philosophy do not merely have a common share in error but that they rather share in a common truth. This assumption was held in antiquity by the so-called eclectics and by the Neo-Platonists; it was reasserted on different grounds by Hegel; and it still underlies the better part of the studies devoted to the "history of ideas."--Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pico: An Introduction.

In reading these lines, I had to think of Bill Wimsatt, the philosopher of biology and metaphysician of life, who was one of my teachers in graduate school. Unlike most professional philosophers (who tend to delight in criticism and critical acumen) that I know, Bill's intellectual reflex is to look for common ground when confronted with new material. (This is not to deny that there are positions that Bill dislikes intensely.) Bill's approach is not my intellectual reflex, but these Digressions are, in part, my attempt at self-re-fashioning in light of his example (while not foregoing polemic).

Prior to reading Kristeller's claim, I was familiar with three not necessarily mutually exclusive ways of understanding the nature of history of ideas. First, it is exhibited in the practice of tracing influence(s) within the history of philosophy. Among European (mainland) historians of philosophy, the following practice is a kind of second-nature: X said Y, now let's search for anticipations of Y. The practice is nicely captured by Wikipedia's definition: "The history of ideas is a field of research in historythat deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time." Second, there is Lovejoy's more technical focus on tracing the fate of what he calls 'unit-ideas:'

By the history of ideas I mean something at once more specific and less restricted than the history of philosophy. It is differentiated primarily by the character of the units with which it concerns itself. Though it deals in great part with the same material as the other branches of the history of thought and depends greatly upon their prior labors, it divides that material in a special way, brings the parts of it into new groupings and relations, views it from the standpoint of a distinctive purpose. Its initial procedure may be said—though the parallel has its dangers—to be somewhat analogous to that of analytic chemistry. In dealing with the history of philosophical doctrines, for example, it cuts into the hard-and-fast individual systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unit-ideas.--Arthur Lovejoy The Great Chain of Being, 3.

I like to think of Lovejoy's focus on unit-ideas as an anticipation of contemporary memetics in some respects. Unit-ideas are kind of "mental habits" (15) that are instantiated in different intellectual and conceptual contexts, but that also by their presence generate forced moves (what I call 'conceptual-necessitation relations') or creative innovations.  As others have noted, Lovejoy does not really deploy the term outside the introduction to the book, so it is not entirely clear what he really means by it. (Incidentally, Bill Wimsatt has penetrating contribution to memetics while developing his account of cultural evolution.)

Third, in the works of Isaiah Berlin we find a kind of soft-Hegelian tracing of ideas. Berlin was acutely sensitive to the phenomenon that certain groups of ideas (e.g., ones associated with the Enlightenment) generated critical responses (ones we understand by, e.g., Romanticism, or Anti-Enlightenment Conservativism) that, in turn, would generate responses, and so on. In Berlin this does not become a dynamics of reason or an unfolding of rational history (because Berlin is too tragic to have much faith in progress).

In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Kristeller sees Pico as a contributor to the history of ideas understood in the fourth sense as the search for a common truth among different competing systems. Kristeller emphasizes this is not a search for a hidden esoteric doctrine: rather, it "consists in a number of true statements" shared by different outlooks. Given that it is a search for truth as such -- and not, as in the other three approach to the history ideas, a truth about or of history -- Pico's history of ideas is not opposed to philosophy but, rather, philosophical in a non-trivial sense. It is also receptive to learning from others and, thus, instantiates genuine philosophical virtue.