Digressions&Impressions

On the New Alexandria

This is where I believe we are in analytic philosophy. Contrary to the scholastic charge analytic philosophy is not really characterised by formalised debates around niche propositions got from pernickety yet rigorous deductions from esoteric and ultimately pointless theories. For one thing I think the rigour of analytic deductions is much overstated. For another it just misses what has been apparent about analytic philosophy for a number of years, it is an outdated stereotype of the field from a time (perhaps in its recent past, late 20th century for instance) when the field was quite insular and self-satisfied. But nowadays it is apparent that widespread naturalism and the practical turn have each in their own way broke down those doors. Analytic philosophers nowadays are typically very keen to show their work is in good scientific standing, and will have practically interesting consequences for the pressing issues of the day. And what that means is syncretising.

Our political and ethical theories often involve drawing on a mish-mash of sources. First, there is the pertinent philsophical tradition. In analytic philosophy this usually means at least one of Rawls or some other great liberal, Rawls' students, or their students; feminist theory of the recent past; or, in some quarters, libertarian thinkers whose connections to Pinochet were, we are assured, much overstated. These are shown to be able to accommodate or refine views that are taken from the vanguard of very online downwardly mobile frequent social media users ("activists", as academics will refer to them), the common sense of the Euro-American middle class, salient results from legal theory or social psychology, and increasingly nowadays maybe AI or machine learning in its more socio-politically salient aspects. Along the way one may well get some argument or deduction of one part of the framework for the other -- but the energy, the impetus, comes really from the fact that bourgeois common sense, comprehensible bits of social science, shouty people online, and the recent philosophical tradition of one sort or another, are all felt to be authoritative. The payoff is the reconciliation, the sense that one can have one's cake and eat it.

I have a very similar sense for contemporary epistemology and metaphysics. Once again we admit bourgeois common sense, pertinent sciences - again sometimes psychology, but here also linguistics, statistics, physics, biology (more rarely chemistry I do not know why) - and the authoritative works of highly respected recent philosophers, typically Lewis or Kripke, increasingly Carnap, more rarely Wittgenstein, Brandom, or McDowell. Once again arguments can sometimes be had, but they are really in the service of proving coherence rather than anything akin to deduction from accepted first principles. The emotional pay off is, I believe, the achievement of synthesis. We are in a syncretic age.

And I believe that is why we will soon be forgot. The common sense of the bourgeois (which may not even be that common), social science that shan't survive the replication crisis, AI and machine learning (and thus statistical and reasoning capacities) that are manifestly in their infancy, and the theoretical works of people who happened to be good at placing their students in the latter quarter of the 20th century? I just see zero reason to predict that anyone will care what we make of this. It matters to us - we may well have reason to continue to try and organise it, this is our zeitgeist and anyway attempts to make it make sense will probably reveal its weaknesses and thus generate real progress. But we are a syncretising era working with elements whose nature and interrelations no-one shall care about within the space of a generation. 

This is more hopeful than the polemical claim that the present age is scholastic. I think there is more room for creativity in this activity. The attempt to rationalise new socio-ethical movements in the face of decaying empire mean that we join the Alexandrites in trying to provide comfort to a time that needs it. The failures and frictions of our attempts to syncretise will no doubt reveal anomalies that are worth attending to. But I think it is less likely to be of lasting interest than ambitious derivations from first principles. These sort of projects are designed to gain attractiveness from the inner plausibility of their premises, and thus gain a sort of independence from the immediacies of their age. Descartes, Hume, and Spinoza have far more secure places in history. I think this will be felt as a loss because for whatever reason lasting influence does seem to be sought after.--Last Positivist "The New Alexandria" January 28, 2023

If you are not laughing when you learn inter alia that we are a repetition of an out of Africa episode, the joke is on you. But if you are only laughing you may be missing some of the bite here. Before I get to that, I agree with Bright that it is time to retire a whole bunch of external critiques (that we are scientistic and/instrumentalizing, scholastic, deneutered cold war puppies, or speech policing servants of the carceral state) that stem from an unwillingness to read the much more thoroughgoing self-indictments of analytic philosophy (or so I argue).

It is quite natural that on social media the claims about syncretism, scholasticism, and historical memory past and future received much attention. But I call attention to three unpleasant aspects of Bright's analysis: first, our cultural or intellectual world is doomed. For, while we like the Alexandrians may have "hope of righting course" and not yet despair despite the "clear signs of turning for the worse," if the analogy is strict enought, the game is up (and one worries for the fate of our Hypatia). This makes it puzzling why anyone would accept the "zeitgeist;" any "real progress" we generate will be futile. I return below to consider how we should treat this rhetoric.

Second, there is a ludicrious mismatch between our self-image as fearless aimers for truth (or, as Bright allows, fighters for social justice) who follow the argument come what may  and our unwillingness to pay a price for it: in our reflective equilibrium we become reconciled to, even consoled by, our world, but this is no better than a stale confirmation bias if you are bourgeois (or adapted preferences if you are from another class.) While twentieth century continental philosophy was too addicted to the smells and sights of decomposing corpses in the imagery of Baudelaire, we are, in reality, the true decadents who reconcile ourselves by our inability to see our own corpse ahead.

Now, it is quite possible that this is all intended as sober diagnosis. But it is worth noting that there is a subtle connection between these two aspects. The more doomed we are in reality the more our self-imposed aspirations our out of touch with it. We lack, that is, third, self-knowledge. History repeats, as farce only.

Now, it's possible that Bright is preaching quietism in light of our fate; maybe we should keep our heads down and achieve the progress we can. But, this rhetoric can also be a call to arms -- or philosophical prophecy -- in two ways: first, he is baiting us to find within our umwelt the paths that lead to our equivalent of  St. Augustine. That is, some of us must throw our lot in with africana philosophy. (Another route goes to Al-Farabi, and the East). This is The Dream of Scipio as retold by Iain Pears. 

The other possibility is to rebel against our fate and that we really change course and unlearn the many bad intellectual habits that are diagnosed by him; a painful emendation of the mind. For, the intellectual revolution that the moment requires is, if we take his diagnosis seriously, the overthrow of our common sense. And in so far as our intuitions are shaped by our material conditions and practices of social recruitment this is a call to arms to destroy the modern research university, of at least philosophy's place in it. 

Not unlike MacAskill, one wishes to say, Bright is playing the long game for high stakes. But rather than betting the farm on engineering the right sort of population (human or robotic) given existing institutions and philanthropy by the wealthy, Bright is hinting at a different approach less beholden to Mammon. After all, I can't help but notice that his narrative echoes rather neatly Friedrich Engels' variations (see here; and here) on Bauer on the rise of Christianity. We might say, then, that the last waltz is about to be played.

Foucault's Historicism and Societies reconsidered

By "archeology" I would like to designate not exactly a discipline, but a domain of research, which would be the following: in a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores—all refer to a certain implicit knowledge [savoir] special to this society. This knowledge is profoundly different from the bodies of learning [des connaissances] that one can find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious justifications, but it is what makes possible at a given moment the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a pracctice. Thus, in order for the big centers of internment to be opened at the end of the seventeenth century, it was necessary that a certain knowledge of madness be opposed to nonmadness, of order to disorder, and it’s this knowledge [savoir] that I wanted to investigate, as the condition of possibility of knowledge [connaissance], of institutions, of practices.

This style of research has for me the following interests: it allows me to avoid every problem concerning the anteriority of theory in relation to practice, and the reverse. In fact, I deal with practices, institutions and theories on the same plane and according to the same isomorphisms, and I look for the underlying knowledge [savoir] that makes them possible, the stratum of knowledge that constitutes them historically.--Michel Foucault in an interview with Raymond Bellours which appeared in Les Lettres françaises (1966) reprinted as "The Order of Things" in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics: Essential Workks 1954-84, translated by John Johnston but slightly amended by the editors of the reprint, pp. 261-262.*

In general I dislike quoting from interviews with authors commenting on their own work. But I do so here because it very nicely captures a feature of Foucault's commitments (one that does not disappear in his late lectures) that I would like to discuss. (In the interview, Foucault himself goes on to contrast what he does with what Sartre does, so I am not doing justice to his own intentions here.) This feature is known within philosophy as a kind of historicism or even organicism.  By 'historicism' I mean here the idea that an age has certain fundamental characteristics in common and that these help define what we might call its unique nature. 

Now in the passage, Foucault relies on a distinction that in English turn out to track two kinds of knowledge, but for my present purposes I am going to leave aside possible confusion(s) about this. For I am only interested in his account of savoir, which is the common, condition of possibility that makes possible "practices, institutions and theories" (etc.) of a particular age. This is the deep structure, one might say, that makes  a particular kind of (as my former teacher, Jody Azzouni explores in his work) semantic perception possible. That is, under savoir just fall the material and formal (etc.) conditions that make, say, certain practices and theories (etc.) intelligible as possible explanations, possible causes, etc. 

To be sure, if one is in a grip of certain kind of monisms -- that truth just is what Tarski called the 'classical conception' or that causation just is counterfactual dependence (etc.) -- the previous paragraph is a certain kind of relativistic gibberish to you. That's fine. I am not interested here in defending relativism. I would deny that it is gibberish or unintelligible. But if you can't get your head around it, that's fine, too.

Now, Foucault's Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, is an exploration of  the relationship between the two kinds of knowledge in a particular age (which can last for a couple of centuries), as well as the transformation of this relationship from one age to the next, as well as the different contents of both kinds of knowledge in different ages, especially as manifested in different number of what one might call 'human sciences.' One of the effects of this study is that one becomes aware that what counts as a 'science' is itself, in part, structured by or the effect of the underlying stratum. (Again, if one is in the grip of a particular kind of monism then, of course, the idea that different sciences can differ in fundamental character may well be a bit weird.) I like Foucault's approach because it makes visible the fondness accross an age's sciences for say, fixed point theorems, or equilibrium models (etc.) that generate a certain family resemblance among domains of (say) expertise.

My interest here is not in the methodological question of how one can make visibe something implicit that is in a way, simultaneously, an absence from the material one studies. In the qouted passage, Foucault himself hints at one of his techniques; he looks for the effects of certain fundamental contrarieties (in his corpus) and explores how these have certain epistemological, pragmatic, or even generative features that these contrarieties have in common. Unlike the Straussian, for whom the tacit is the true message, for Foucault the tacit is the source of a kind of social unity (to be explained below).

As an aside, it is worth noting, and perhaps this is illuminating to some degree (if not skip this paragraph), that the underlying structure, which one may well think of as a kind of relativized a priori, has certain features in common with the place of a ding-an-sich in Kant's critical philosophy or natura naturans in Spinoza's. That is, in the substratum contrarieties co-exist and rather than being a source of falsity or nonsense, they are productive in  the domains that are conceptualized from or built on them. As I said, if this paragraph is mysterious, please skip it.

From a political perspective, it is interesting that Foucault treats philosophical ideas and everyday opinions as on par (and on the same side of the divide). He explicitly rejects, for the purposes of archeology, the Platonic, Madisonian, Arendtian (etc.) contrast between the domains of truth and  the domains of opinion. But he does not alert his audience to the significance of this rejection. (Later in the interview, when he returns to the status of philosophical ideas, as edifices, he ignores this political distinction, but contrasts these with the kind of playful 'subphilosophies' studied in history of ideas; that is, the contrast between Kant and Fontenelle.) Foucault himself, quite clearly wants to reject the priviliging of theory over practice (see p. 262). 

And the reason I am alert to a kind of (philosophical-)political perspective here, is that Foucault uses the terminology of a 'society' to characterize the kinds of intellectual eras he is interested in. Or to be precise: it seems that within the domain of what Foucault calls an archeology, a society is constituted by different practices, texts, institutions that have a common stratum that makes their unity possible.

For Foucault, societies understood in this way (as a kind of partially invisible structure that makes semantic perception possible, and a certain kind of commonality that infuses the practices of an era), have an origin, a flourishing and endpoints. And the archeologist of society points at, and makes visible to some degree, the structures that are a condition of possibility of a society. Importantly, while societies derive their unity from the lower stratum (savoir), which I playfully compared to a kind of ding-an-sich in character, they (that is, societies) are nothing over and above the practices, institutions, and disciplines that constitute them (or that express this unity).

From a metaphysical perspective one may well wonder if such societies really are compatible with the nominalism (even partial skepticism) one may also discern in Foucault. But here I close on the political question one can ask about the structures delimited by Foucault: to what degree are Foucaultian societies spontaneous orders or are they the partially foreseen effect of certain kind of (intellectual) legislators (what I sometimes call, 'philosophical prophets')?

To be continued.

On Analytic and Continental Clarity (Collingwood and McGuiggan.)

We have, then, two sorts of project, the scientific and the poetic, and two corresponding norms of clarity. Scientists, whose concepts are additions to our experience or (in other words) discrete from other concepts, properly use strictly defined, technical terms to refer to these wholly new and discrete things. This use of language is appropriate to its subject matter and so is content-directedly clear. Poets, whose concepts expand or develop our experience, appropriately do not use technical terms, which would inhibit clarity for them. What is content-directedly clear in poetry is language that is stretched and grown.

What has this all got to do with philosophy? Well, Analytic philosophers often think that philosophy is engaged in the same sort of project as science. Not (normally) exactly the same project, but a project similar enough to it that similar methodologies, and so similar norms of communication, should obtain. In particular, Analytic philosophers characteristically make a virtue of using technical terms(,) as scientists do. Philosophy that fails to adhere to the norms of communication appropriate to this project—such as Continental philosophy or the more theoretical branches of literary criticism, which often ignore or even flout them—is then branded unclear, with the accusation that this is needless naturally consequent. What I have argued in this paper so far should give us reason to think that this dismissal is too quick, and so let us now take seriously Collingwood’s suggestion that “the philosopher must go to school with the poets” (EPM, 214).---James Camien McGuiggan (2022) Scientific, Poetic, and Philosophical Clarity Metaphilosophy 53:5.

McGuiggan tagged me in a twitter thread (here) introducing the paper I have quoted above. I noticed with pleasure and vanity that some of my blog posts are cited rather prominently in the paper, although (mysteriously to me) not the posts I have written on clarity in analytic philosophy (recall here on Carnap and Quine; here on Ernest Nagel). Despite this modest disappointment, I read the paper, and I am very glad I did so. It's a lovely work with lots of clever illustrations from poetry, has useful distinctions, and you get a nice introduction to Collingwood's ideas from an independently minded, but true believer. (And I found the argument an invitation go back and re-read some Collingwood in the future.)

A key distinction is the one between content-directed clarity and audience-directed clarity. Content-directed clarity involves (presentational) form that is appropriate to the content. Whereas audience-directed clarity involves the aptness/fit of the norms of communication that we adopt given our intended audience. This distinction is part of a wider taxonomy (including presentational clarity, clarity of thought, etc.), so don't complain (yet) it's not exhaustive.

Now, content directed clarity and audience directed clarity need not be opposed to or even fully independent of each other. After all, what counts as the proper presentational form apt for particular content, may well be governed, in part, by the norms our communication falls under given our intended audience. (This seems fully compatible with what McGuiggan writes, but if you think it's silly attribute the view to me.) We may, for example, think rightly that a sonnet would be best for a certain content, but decide that a carefully constructed note in Analysis would be more likely to reach most professional philosophers, and advance our careers. On a less dramatic scale such trade-offs are routine in our professional lives (due to word-count restrictions, citational practices, refereeing practices, etc.), and we make them -- sometimes not without anguish -- almost constantly in our publication practices as well as our lectures/colloquia.

If I understand McGuiggan correctly (see the second paragraph quoted above), on his view analytic philosophers criticize or disparage continental philosophy for violating the norms of audience directed clarity that analytic philosophers adhere to. And the reason analytic philosophers do so is that we (pretend my defense of synthetic philosophy is just a thought experiment) falsely assume that continental philosophers are engaged in the same underlying project, and so miss that continental philosophers are shaped by different content-directed standards. Let's call this McGuiggan's Diagnosis or if you prefer, 'McGuiggan's Diagnosis.'

What's neat about McGuiggan's Diagnosis -- and this also lends it some evidence -- is that it helps explain why some analytic philosophers think it's an okay project to translate continental works into the vernacular of analytic philosophy (say for students and for professional advancement) without thinking something really important is lost. This is a thriving genre, so pick your favorite example. (I am not being too sarcastic here because arguably my present Foucault project falls under this genre.)

As an aside, what's odd about McGuiggan's Diagnosis is that if it's true even the most fair-minded least polemical analytic philosophers somehow never grasp what continental philosophy is up to, or, more insidiously, keep quiet about it when we do and our peers attack it unfairly. So, I was a bit sad he did not engage with (say) Kolodny's work on Foucault's cryptonormativity or some of the analytics that turn Heidegger into a fellow pragmatist (and possibly share his theological aims). 

Be that as it may, since it's not uncommon to insist that continental philosophy is poetry adjacent and analytic science adjacent, I won't complain about this move. (If only because it strengthens my prediction back in 2014 (recall) that Wittgenstein will end up treated as a continental.) One problem with McGuiggan's diagnosis is that he essentializes analytic and continental philosophy. (This is notoriously a dubious move.) In particular, he claims that continental philosophy tries to expand our (possible) experience whereas analytic philosophy tries to account for additions to our experiences. Let me stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this indeed fits, say, Heidegger (an example he repeatedly uses) and your favorite philosopher of logic quite well.

So, I have two reservations (that spring from this essentialization). First, some continental philosophers and some analytic philosophers are manifestly engaged in overlapping enterprises. This is most evident in the revival of post-Kantian metaphysics among continentals and among analytics. When I disagree, say, with Meillassoux's 'speculative realism' or the object oriented ontology of Graham, the disagreements are not primarily about the worth/aims or the presentation of the project(s), it's about the contents of the position. When I disagree with, say, Badiou, I do disagree with the Marxist or revolutionary aims of the project, but I have trouble taking it seriously because of the weight and uses he places on set theory.

To be sure, there are circumstances where there is no overlap in the first order aims. Recently, using Deleuzian tools, Jeff Bell has convinced me that in the 1970s Foucault is trying to state the features that are presupposed such that a stable (what we analytics call) semantics and pragmatics (in Carnap's sense) are or appears to be possible. I don't think analytic philosophers are, at present, really engaged in that project despite our search for grounds or for the conditions of a final language, even if the metaphysical position Foucault arrives at (a pragmatism about pragmatics welded to a kind of realist semantics) is not far removed from ones I am familiar with (say, as Jeff suggests, Putnam at some time.)* That's to say we could get involved in this project. I mention this example because if it is right about Foucault it looks to me as if Foucault's special vocabulary then is primarily due to the need to account for additions to our 'experience.' (I use scare quotes there because we can't really experience directly the conditions that make semantics or even pragmatics possible; perhaps in the latter we can sense their absence when a practice breaks down or has moved on.) I don't mean to deny that, perhaps, Foucault is also interested in creating new additions -- to be a philosophical legislator --, but that's beside the point here.

Second, it's not entirely clear to me that that the contrast between accounting for an addition to experience and for expanding or developing our experience is really all that robust where it matters. By this I don't just mean that there are philosophical poets (Lucretius paradigmatically), but rather that it seems to echo a kind of context of discovery vs context of justification distinction. And the problem with that distinction, for present purposes, is that discovery is never wholly discrete from previously justified or to be justified work. That is, within science (and analytic philosophy) there are going to be moments where new terms are introduced and defined in order to make new experience possible, or to begin to classify/measure (etc.) it (with an eye toward new justification).

For related reasons, I also don't think McGuiggan's approach does full justice to the aims of conceptual engineering or ameliorative analysis in ethics and political philosophy. When 'epistemic injustice' gets complemented by 'epistemic violence' and 'epistemic pollution' these new concepts are introduced to make new diagnoses and new forms of intelligibility of one's experiences possible, but also with an aim to change the conditions that make these experiences possible (even though the term was not around). The point here is not to challenge the coherence of McGuiggan's distinctions, but to suggest that the diagnosis seems to presuppose conditions that are not always present.

 

Canon formation within Analytic Philosophy

One of the perennial complaints of philosophy teachers has concerned the dearth of readily accessible and worthwhile reading material in modern philosophical analysis. As a first step toward improving this situation we have prepared the present volume of selections. Our idea was this: In the tremendous bulk of the periodical literature of recent decades, there is a small percentage of articles definitely worthy of reproduction in an anthology. This material required only proper grouping to provide a usable text for intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.
The project in preliminary form was presented by circular letter to about ninety teachers of philosophy in this country and in England. We asked for responses to our proposed selections, that is, endorsements or rejections of titles contained in a list of about 130 items. We also asked for recommendations of valuable material that we might have overlooked. We are pleased to acknowledge with sincere gratitude the enthusiastic and most helpful reactions received from an impressive majority of our correspondents. Because of the limitations of space we had to exclude, with a heavy heart, several excellent articles by authors from whom we had already obtained permission for reprinting.
With the exception of a very few cases in which it seemed clear from the beginning that an article belonged in our collection, we have pondered our choices seriously and long. In many instances it was extremely difficult for us to make up our minds. The exclusion of any article which was either on our original list or had been recommended by our friends was painful; and here, as everywhere, to choose is to exclude. Recognizing in the end that it would be impossible to make our choices coincide with the valuations of all prospective users of this book, we can only plead that within the given aims and limitations we have selected what, after countless considerations, comparisons and consultations seemed the most suitable body of material available for reprinting.
We have been guided in our selections on the whole by the reactions and suggestions of our correspondents. Since some of our own articles met with a very favorable reaction, we felt it would not appear presumptuous to include them. Generally our tendency was not to concentrate exclusively on the work of the great and the famous thinkers, but rather to select on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices.
The conception of philosophical analysis underlying our selections springs from two major traditions in recent thought, the Cambridge movement deriving from Moore and Russell, and the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, Schlick, Carnap) together with the Scientific Empiricism of the Berlin group (led by Reichenbach). These, together with related developments in America stemming from Realism and Pragmatism, and the relatively independent contributions of the Polish logicians have increasingly merged to create an approach to philosophical problems which we frankly consider a decisive turn in the history of philosophy.
Although it is realized that there are no sharp lines of demarcation between this and other contemporary schools, we could not possibly have attempted to represent them all. Since the clearest and most helpful formulation of an idea is not always the first in order of time, or historically the most representative, we have paid relatively little attention to originality as a condition for inclusion. It was rather the penetration, the finesse, and the challenge of the work which counted most. In some instances we succeeded in grouping together divergent and mutually incompatible contributions around controversial subjects. We have tried to avoid definitely obsolete material. Certainly up-to-date-ness in any significant sense is not a mere function of date of publication. Frege, one of whose contributions we included, and Peirce, whose work is not represented because it is so amply available, have more to say to us than many who are writing today....
Courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language, etc., should find ample material for reading and discussion in this anthology. Although some basic articles in Philosophy of Science, Modern Logic, and Theoretical Ethics have been included, we can conceive of additional volumes of selections, very much needed, in these special fields. We express the hope that others will consider work on anthologies along those lines. May we assure them that such work, while arduous, is at least intrinsically rewarding.--"Preface" by Feigl, H., and W. Sellars. in Readings in Analytic Philosophy." New York (1949), pp. v-vi. [HT Alan Richardson]

An informal social media exchange with Jason Stanley got me thinking about canon formation within analytic philosophy. In particular, I started to reflect on the (temporary, but not trivial) dominance of philosophy of language within analytic philosophy such that many analytic programs organized proseminars for entry level PhD students around familiarity with certain classics of that field (which also includes semantics and some bits of philosophical logic). 

While I don't want to claim that the dominance of such philosophy of language was a contingent fact, it's worth noting that as this dominance developed others who were recognizably influential at the time within analytic philosophy, were pushing for, say, philosophy of science as first philosophy (e.g. Ernest Nagel), and one can easily imagine some others to have pushed epistemology in a foundational role (and certainly in some a background empiricism or sense-data theory does play a non-trivial authoritative role). The reason I deny it is wholly contingent is that, for example, axiology or aesthetics cannot have been, then, the dominant core.

Alan Richardson suggested that it would make sense to look at the textbooks of the 1948-53 period as formative. In particular, it is worth noting that, as Alan reminded [Leonard was one of my teachers] me, Leonard Linsky's (1953) Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, A Collection of Readings, clearly anticipates much of the early canon of the philosophy (of language centered) proseminar. Linsky's book is not the definitive canon -- it lacks "On Denoting" (and has no Frege at all) --, but I hope to discuss it some other time. 

But first I want to focus on the Feigl and Sellars text-book, which explicitly sets the agenda for the other textbooks, and simultaneously helps consolidate, roughly, what counts as analytic philosophy (or in modern philosophical analysis) and not. And, pertinent for my present purposes, they do so by using a kind of partial, snowball sampling method to create a canon of texts worthy of inclusion.+ 

To be sure, their grouping of who is included in the "decisive turn" -- (i) the Cambridge movement, (ii) the Vienna Circle, (iii) the Berlin group, (iv) American Realism and Pragmatism, and (v) the Polish logicians -- is not original. We find this nearly exact combination already in 1936 in Ernest Nagel's two-part essay on "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe."* And certainly there is some contingency in what gets passed on. They themselves note that Peirce would naturally fit their agenda, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see that as time passes on the opportunity costs to find a way to include Peirce into the fold grows so great that effectively -- with the exception of some of his informal essays in the philosophy of science -- he ends up terra incognita for analytic philosophers. 

The influential textbooks of the period are nearly all American. Presumably they were created there not just because it was at the time the wealthiest place around, but also because of the sudden demand due to expansion of Higher Education there. Feigl and Sellars are clearly anticipating fine-grained "courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language" etc.! (And note these are not intended as introductory courses, but "intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.")

One interesting claim that Feigl and Sellars make is that they selected "on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices." This is a rare admission that the canon of analytic texts does not reflect originality, or historical priority, but didactic or pedagogic suitability. To be sure, I am not claiming this remains the case in analytic canon formation once analytic philosophy is suitably securely dominant (relative to "other contemporary schools"), but it is prominent at the start. 

And it is worth remarking that several of the features they explicitly mention are de facto rhetorical in character (e.g., "incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge.") That is to say, these are the texts that will persuade students of many different grades of competence of the pertinence of analysis. Of course, it's left vague what counts as pertinence (or clarity, which by no means (recall) means the same in, say, Quine, Carnap, Nagel, or Stebbing). 

One may suspect that the previous paragraph is written in the spirit of unmasking. But that's not the case. It is essential to our self-understanding that we recognize that many of the standard intellectual virtues we associate with analytic philosophy almost as our second nature are originally pedagogical in character. And that is, of course, to be expected of an intellectual school. To what degree their origin in pedagogical (and recruitment) needs generates intellectual problems today, if any, is something I shall consider an other time.

 

Riker on The Calculus of Consent; some Rawls and Strauss and the confused and unproductive state of Political Theory

As numerous writers have pointed out, political theory as a field of academic concentration has been in a confused and unproductive state for at least the last generation. Most of the academicians who have written about it have been either historians of ideas who speculated about the influence of writer A on writer B or literary critics who simply explicated and criticized the texts of A and B. Very few academicians have had the intellectual courage to play the role of A and B themselves; so that, in consequence, most contemporary political theory has been produced by politicians and journalists. Refusing thus to theorize themselves, most academicians have been limited to a consideration of intellectual primitives or of, what amounts to the same thing, the rantings and ideological tergiversations of half-educated modern pamphleteers. In almost no other field of study do the professionals thus abase themselves before the ancients and the amateurs.

    Not unsurprisingly, there has been much dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and in the last decade or so a number of writers have tried to reorient the study of political theory. Some, like Leo Strauss, have urged a return to the great tradition; but unfortunately the process of return, as it appears in the work of both master and students, has turned out to be an even more sterile historicism than that against which they revolted. Others, like T. D. Weldon and Carl Friedrich, have urged a close and systematic study of words; but again unfortunately, word-study, while a useful preliminary to theorizing, has produced no more than literary criticism and is not properly theory at all. Still others, the political behaviorists, have turned to the theories of contemporary psychology and sociology for a new start in theorizing about politics; and, while these writers have undoubtedly succeeded in generating descriptive theories that can actually be tested empirically, still their theories seem to have more in common with social psychology than with the traditional subject matter of politics. Furthermore, their positivistic character, wholly appropriate for descriptive theories, is far from satisfying to those who believe political theory should be at least partially normative. These three attempts at re-orientation have been useful in the study of history, philosophy, and behavioral science; but they have not added much to political theory itself. Indeed, if these three schools were all we had, it would be fair to say that political theory was no better off than before.

    There is still a fourth school, to which the book here reviewed belongs, which offers some hope of a really successful reorientation of political theory. Since its inspiration is more from economics than any other source and since economics is the social science closest to politics both in the nature of the events abstracted for study and in the process of abstraction, it happens that the works of this school are clearly political in nature. Since economics like politics has a long tradition of normative theorizing, these writings contain normative elements alongside of positive ones. Most important of all, however, they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past. Some of the main works in this fourth school of re-orienters of political theory are: Duncan Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy; Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (although this work has its roots as much in sociological as in economic theory); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and, as an important addition, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent.--William H. Riker (1962) Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Nov., 1962) [Reviewing The Calculus of Consent. by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock], pp. 408-409.

Because I am working on a side project (recall here; here) on the (non-)reception of Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy, I stumbled on this passage in Riker's review of The Calculus of Consent. I also want to situate the passage in the black hole in our collective narrative of what exactly political philosophy could be within analytic philosophy and its sister-discipline political theory pre-Rawls (which was re-opened for me by Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall (recall here; here; here; and here). Somewhat to my own surprise these issues intersect with my interest in neoliberalism and the split between ('positive') economics and ('normative') philosophy.

I suspect most of my readers know who William Riker is (not to be confused with the Star Trek character). He is now widely seen as one of the founders of rational choice theory, and among other achievements introduced game theory and social choice theory into political science. He is, what in an earlier generation disparagingly would have been called (by the sociologist Talcott Parsons [recall]), an exponent of 'economic imperialism.' We call it 'intellectual arbitrage' now. He founded the so-called Rochester School that's associated with the 'behavioral revolution' in political science. When he published the review of Buchanan and Tullock, Riker had just published The Theory of Political Coalitions, which was a major contribution to orientation he promoted.

About half of the review is quoted above. And only after this set-up does Riker discuss the contents of the book. So, the review itself is self-consciously a methodological intervention and cannon creation. 

So, Riker distinguishes four approaches to political theory. First, there is the return to the classics which he (correctly) associates with Leo Strauss. This is treated -- much as Bacon treated final causes -- as sterile. Riker correctly represents Strauss's school as critical of historicism, but then misrepresents, either from confusion or from sincere insult, Strauss as instantiating historicism. (I am unsure he ever engaged with Strauss in substantive fashion elsewhere.)

Second there is a school devoted to "a close and systematic study of words." Riker's criticism of it echoes Isaiah Berlin's (1958) criticism of ordinary language philosophy (recall). T.D Weldon I know primarily as a Kant scholar and as being the supervisor of Wilfrid Sellars. But he is also the author of The Vocabulary of Politics (1953), which in reviews is described as an attempt to apply ordinary language philosophy to politics. A book I, thus, have to read because it is clearly in the event horizon of the black hole of analytic political philosophy whose shadow Rawls has (ahh) blotted out.*

I have to admit that I am puzzled by Riker's inclusion of Friedrich in this category. Friedrich's approach is so eclectic, that I would think he would be hard to categorize. This is not to deny he sometimes focuses on words, too. But this comment (alongside the Strauss as historicist 'mistake') makes me wonder, if Riker actually had carefully studied the schools he is rejecting. Or whether his polemics derive from supreme confidence in his own (sophisticated!) methods. That confidence is not without robust intellectual foundation, but one does wonder if in his polemics with opposing schools there isn't an element of bluster and bluff. (This combination is not unfamiliar to us within analytic philosophy.) I actually suspect that Riker is confusing Friedrich with Felix Oppenheim (who can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be slotted into this category.)

No exemplar of the third school is mentioned. I suspect Talcott Parsons (or those influenced by him) is one of the targets. This school is also engaged in intellectual arbitrage from other social sciences, but Riker finds them wanting. Riker's two criticisms of this approach (not very far removed from his own) are very interesting: first, they produce work that fits social psychology but is in some sense not properly political. One would have liked an extra sentence here because it would have illuminated his own stance toward the subject (or the discipline). Second, on Riker's view political theory ought to be descriptive/empirical (or at least fruitful in generating theoretically salient empirical generations and be an engine for theorizing) and normative/positive. So, the right kind of theory can help us study the political world and tell us how to improve it. (I return to this in the next paragraph.)

These two criticisms do not apply to the fourth school (which is Riker's own). From my perspective what is most interesting here is that Riker rejects the very firm distinction entrenched within economics (in word, less so in deed) since the time of Marshall, Sidgwick, and John Neville Keynes, and articulated by Lionel Robbins (and Milton Friedman) between the positive and normative projects.+ The final paragraph of the review actually explains Riker's own stance on this:

If it is assumed that most men are rational and that the appropriate rational behavior is transparently obvious, then the analysis is entirely positive. If it is assumed that rationality is a goal rather than a fact, then the calculus is normative. If it is assumed that the logic of the calculus is not obvious until it is deduced, then again the analysis is normative. (411)

Of course, the problem here is not the willingness to combine empirical and normative aims, but (to use scientistic terminology) that how to think about circumstances of what is 'transparently obvious' to the theorist/expert may not be so to (ahh) 'most men' and, more important, if, in a political context, the latter have to rely on the former for the deductions in the 'logic.' [As a slogan: Riker takes the relationship between theorist and theorized for granted.]

Be that as it may, lurking in the final paragraph that I quoted at the top of the post is the sense that the fourth school is generating a scientific revolution: "Most important of all...they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past." The fourth school has moved beyond the past and is progressive. (Such claims are common among economists of the age.) Interestingly enough the Nobel committee in economics has also recognized the contributions of this school of 'political theory' (including, in addition to Buchanan, Schelling).

After the polemical first half, the rest of the review of Calculus of Consent "list[s] what are for [Riker] some of the most interesting notions in the essay." (409) One important point is that Riker treats Calculus of Consent (not unfairly) as an advance beyond Downs on the question of what the effect is "of differing intensities of concern about particular issues under the rule of simple majority voting." (410)

From the vantage point of thinking about the nature and evolution of political theory at the middle of the twentieth century, the first, main question is actually rather important:

The main question the authors ask is: On what basis does a rational man, situated in a society created by unanimous agreement, consent to the transfer of a particular activity from private to collective decision-making? This question is, of course, a new and more sophisticated form of the question to which the theory of the social contract provided the answer. (409)

In the spirit of progress (we may say), Riker understands Buchanan and Tullock as having surpassed and made obsolete social contract theory. While the historian in me hesitates to disagree with such a well-informed contemporary of them,  Riker somehow misses (presumably for his own polemical purposes) that Buchanan and Tullock themselves present their own work, en passant (but not obliquely) as a contribution to social contract theory. For, throughout Calculus of Consent, they imply both that individuals cannot withdraw from the social contract, as well as (and  more important) that "Insofar as participation in the organization of a community, a State, is mutually advantageous to all parties, the formation of a “social contract” on the basis of unanimous agreement becomes possible." (ch. 17; the whole chapter is relevant, including for understanding why they frequently use scare-quotes around 'social contract,' but not always.)** So, the main question by Riker's lights is answered in terms of a social contract analysis according to Buchanan and Tullock. (The character of their social contract is worth exploring in a digression some time.)

Two final quick promissory thoughts connected to Rawls, since I click-baited you here with Rawls. First, there was a pre-Rawlsian political analytic philosophy. (Riker's second school.) Weldon is an example of this. (So is, perhaps, Felix Oppenheim.)++  And it was noticed by outsiders. But Rawls did not respond to it in The Theory of Justice.*** Oppenheim is cited once respectfully in TJ, and Weldon isn't mentioned. Rather, Rawls took the fourth school, the re-orienters, as his interlocuters and rivals. In fact, in TJ, Rawls also cites Black, Downs, Buchanan and Tullock, and Mancur Olson as authorities. And whatever else he is doing, he is also trying to offer an alternative to their project.+++ That's partially obscured to later readers because he doesn't name them much as targets. But it is worth noting they inherited their own normative project from utilitarianism, which is Rawls' official target. And partially obscured by the fact that after the mid to late 1970s Rawls himself emphasized the normative project in Kantian terms and so it's much harder to see TJ as building on and in competition with Rochester and Virginia.

 

 

On Dutch War Crimes and Perry Anderson on Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot.

    After the debacle of the First World War, and the victory of Bolshevism in Russia, the old political world of landed rulers and limited electorates, modest budgets and stable currencies, had crumbled away. A new kind of mass enfranchisement and expectation gripped Europe, the arrival of a democracy capable of brushing aside, in the pursuit of security or equality, traditional barriers between the tasks of government and the affairs of business - a semi-oligarchic state and a still-hierarchic civil society. Where would popular sovereignty without social liability lead? Communism was, of course, the first and greatest danger. Fascism, which looked to some as if it might be an antidote, proved little better - indeed, in German guise at least, all but identical. But even when these were seen off, there was still the welfare state, a creeping version of the same disease. In the course of six decades, political judgements of this changing scene varied. Strauss and Oakeshott, scornful of liberalism before Hitler came to power, were more circumspect after the war; Hayek, who described himself as a classical liberal during the war, repudiated the term as compromised beyond recovery when he got to America; Schmitt, who never had any truck with liberalism, moved from Catholic authoritarianism to National Socialism, before ending as an informal doyen of the most respectable post-war constitutionalism. But beyond the discrepant local sympathies of these careers - with their splay of temporary identities: Conservative, Zionist, Nazi, Old Whig - they reflected a common theoretical calling....

    But the Stygian cap fits the collective effort of this cluster of thinkers. For these were indeed constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy - seen and feared through the prisms of their theories of law, as the abyss of its absence: to misterion tes anomias, the mystery of lawlessness.

Each put up their own barriers against the danger. The dichotomies which are the signature of their work - the esoteric and the exoteric, the civil and the managerial, the friend and the foe, the lawful and the legislative - are so many cordons. Their function is to hold popular sovereignty at bay. The different gifts displayed in this enterprise, whatever view is taken of it, were remarkable. For all his later tendency to textual dressage, Strauss's range and subtlety as a master of the canon of political philosophy had no equal in his generation. Schmitt's moral instability never impaired an extraordinary capacity to fuse conceptual insight and metaphoric imagination in lightning flashes of illumination around the state. Hayek could seem tactically ingenuous, but he fashioned a theoretical synthesis out of his epistemology and economics whose scope and strength has yet to be supplanted.
    Oakeshott was the literary artist in this gallery.--Perry Anderson (1992) "The Intransigent Right" in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, p. 25-27 [HT Jonathan Kramnick]

The other day (recall here), I quoted the conclusion of Anderson's essay (which contrasts Rawls with the four horseman of the Intransigent Right) in order to introduce my digression on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice. And before I turned to my serious engagement with Forrester, I made a snarky remark about Anderson's 'acrobatics' in order to lump Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot together. I don't plan to withdraw the remark here, but I do regret making it for two reasons: first, I wouldn't want to discourage  anyone from reading Anderson's essay, which is, in fact, very perceptive about these four thinkers and their relations. In fact, at times Anderson practices a kind of judicious, esoteric reading to reveal their core commitments. Along the way he draws on chapter 24 of Leviathan in illuminating ways.

As an aside, when Kramnick (a distinguished literary scholar) mentioned Anderson's essay to me he remarked (I am paraphrasing) that Anderson was more charitable of these four than Rawls (something characteristic of certain kind of Marxists more generally). The veracity of Kramnick's remark can be readily judged not just by comparing the quoted passages above with the paragraph I quoted from in my digression on Forrester, but also by reading his self-standing scornful essay, "Designing Consensus: John Rawls," primarily on Rawls' Political Liberalism.  Nothing like the praise of Hayek's "theoretical synthesis" can be found in Anderson about Rawls.

Second, while lumping people together with Schmitt is generally a sign that we're in the ambit of rhetorical delegitimation, it's not true (as I kind of implied) that these thinkers have nothing important in common. For, I agree with Anderson that the specter that haunts all of them, at a certain of level of abstraction is indeed "the risks of democracy," especially if that is understood in terms of "popular sovereignty." And this is not a trivial communality nor is it something that by itself deserves criticism.

It's worth noting that anyone that worries about minority or civil rights and, say the respect for the kind of rights that are associated with human rights or a bill of rights, or the division of powers is ipse facto also worried about popular sovereignty and the risks of democracy. And there is widespread theoretical agreement that such rights ought to be respected. Yet, one problem that pollutes a lot of contemporary theorizing about democracy is that proponents of popular sovereignty, deliberative democracy, and (alas) public reason tend to take for granted, on some fundamental level, that these rights are respected, or that they are in accord -- I am now using the words of Rawls -- with "the most deep-seated convictions and traditions of a modern democratic state."*

Just yesterday, the Dutch government admitted, after commissioning a new formal historical study in 2017,  that the Netherlands had engaged in all kinds of war crimes toward innocent civilians and enemy combatants in what was Indonesia's war of independence (concluded in 1949). And subsequently these facts were covered it up, and for decades public opinion did not permit these facts to be aired (often under pressure of not especially large groups of veterans), or to be taught in history classes (not even by my teachers who were rather progressive by Dutch standards). This despite the steady drip of materials that suggested the official narrative was hopelessly flawed, and the accumulating evidence of the non-trivial trauma for those that actually witnessed and perpetrated the atrocities. The time it took to admit any of this formally, and to offer (modest) compensation to victims, is of biblical proportions: the generations that experienced had to die off first for a sober and truthful discussion to be possible.

A friend of popular sovereignty may well respond that the Dutch inability to acknowledge their war crimes just shows that our liberal democracy -- which tends to get incredibly high marks for democratic freedom --  is fatally shaped by our colonial heritage. I am by no means unsympathetic to the charge. But I see little reason to believe that popular sovereignty unmediated by parliamentary institutions will do much better (given that it public opinion never really wanted to know the truth).

My reason for mentioning the case is straightforward. From afar the entrenched, small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea are often treated as and seem paragons of democratic virtue (with robust proportional representation and reasonably generous welfare states). But even these exhibit the non-trivial democratic risks and rights violations that ought to concern friends of popular sovereignty. (Google, "Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden" or "Denmark xenophobia.") While it's true that all these places have not abolished capitalism (on the contrary they also tend to do well in economic freedom rankings), they are kind of limit examples that illustrate that even in the best circumstances democracies may misfire greatly. 

To be sure, the claim in the previous paragraph does not require to accept the road to serfdom thesis. While I am not inclined to treat the road to serfdom thesis as an empirical prediction (spoiler: I think Hayek's work belongs in the genre philosophical prophecy), if one were to treat it as an empirical prediction then the small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea have clearly falsified it. And while I am much less sanguine about the state and character of British liberal democracy, its current state also stands as a falsification of it 70+ years after the fact. 

The explicit or implicit theoretical denial of the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty strike me as instances of irresponsible theorizing. (When I am polite I call it 'democratic innocence.') And it is a peculiar feature of far left critics of those concerned with the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty, that they then have to treat Leninism and Stalinism as contingent perversions of the ideal  or, -- and now I am speaking of Anderson -- and criticize Rosa Luxemburg, who almost alone among the friends of popular sovereignty recognized its risk, for lacking a "theory of the conquest of power by the proletariat."**

The problem is, of course, that once one has diagnosed the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty it's very hard to avoid solutions that are inimical to democracy (as the example of Mill's Considerations on Representative Government shows). And it is no surprise that those who do emphasize the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty are often reactionaries of some sort or don't reject temporary despotism. But what follows from this is not that a true friend of democracy should wish away the risks of democracy and ignore the dangers of popular sovereignty in order to avoid being tainted by the charge of 'right-wingism.' Rather, it's incumbent to find ways of navigating these risks in ways in accord with if not the letter then the spirit of democracy. But about that some other time other time more.

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 4.: on the limits of Anarchism

The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve. The man s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. Like you said, I was to count people.--From Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, p. 407 (page-number are from a 2002 adobe e-reader edition)

This post is the fourth in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.; here for pt 3.).

It is commonly claimed that Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed offers a positive representation of a planet-wide anarchist society (on a planet Annares). This is no surprise because the narrative offers extensive details on the functioning of this society. In addition, Ursula Le Guin has herself invited this interpretation by adding a brief clarificatory note to one of her short stories, "The Day Before The Revolution." The story is about a day in the life of Odo, the intellectual visionary, the philosophical prophet, of Annares, where Odo's writing and her exemplary life function as the shared principles and touchstone of the anarchist program. This dedicatory note (recall) is "In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911–1972" explicitly inserts the story into the history of anarchist theorizing mentioning ""early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman."*

In addition, the action of The Dispossessed, which centers on Shevek, is all about the tension (I almost wrote 'dialectic') between an ossified version of anarchism and anarchism as a perpetual work in progress. And so any flaws noted in Annares can charitably be interpreted as evidence of the need for the more dynamic understanding of anarchism "properly conceived," that "was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process." (230) This Shevek attributes to what we may call true Odo-nism. And the narrative of The Dispossessed is itself plausibly understood as a narration of his growth from (recall) political "fool" (123) to this more mature understanding.

So far so good. And in what follows I do not want to deny that the representation of Anarres, a kind of Socratic political theory, is a major contribution to Anarchist thought. It is especially important because this is not an anarchism that turns its back on technology and goes back to nature: "they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods." (124) But in what follows I suggest that Le Guin herself offers hints that there are limitations to Shevek's character (development) which might suggest more fatal flaws in Annares. After all the subtitle of the book is "An Ambiguous Utopia."

But first a relatively small point. So, there are two important features of the political economy of Anarres. First, their economy consists of cooperatives or syndics which are centrally coordinated from the top-down. Now unlike the economies familiar from the Soviet Union and its allied states, this is not a state capitalism. Anarres rejects property and money. Second, the economy has no mechanism to exchange surplus in one sector (say energy in which it is abundant) for needs in another section (say food). The second feature is a consequence of a kind of self-imposed autarky and political rejection of the mother planet, Urras, from which the revolutionaries were (self) exiled. Jointly, these two features make the economy of Anarres rather fragile, especially against famines in which all kinds of transportational and logistical bottle necks develop and in which starvation is a real possibility. In fact, at one point, during the famine Shevek becomes a locally important coordinator who literally decides the rations which might mean life and death for his community (see, especially, p. 407 quoted above).

Now, it's pretty clear that one of the side-effects or perhaps part of Shevek's mission to Urras is, in fact, the opening up of exchange of a commerce in ideas between Anarres and Urras. (And once on Urras he discovers a wider Hainish universe the possibilities of which are expanded by Shevek's intellectual breakthroughs and revealed to us in the last few chapters.) So, there is a sense in which the novel suggests that a truer Anarchism is open to the world/universe. And, so, perhaps this suggest that the limitations on the second feature might be overcome.

However, spatial distance might make planetary exchanges of commodities too slow and too costly to prevent famines. And Shevek's own approach (recall) is to promote nobly communism of knowledge, not trade. So it is by no means obvious that joining the league of worlds would be decisive on this score, and does not solve the coordination problems that are a consequence of central planning.

So, since there is no sign that Shevek is willing to promote the introduction of markets to solve the coordination problems that beset Anarres (and turn it into a more anarcho-capitalist society), it is by no means obvious that these can be solved. As an aside, it is worth noting that the (Hainish) League of Worlds seems loosely modeled on Kantian ideas as presented in Perpetual Peace. And Kant did think that such a League would need to be composed of commercial, trading republics. Some other time, I return to the Hainish League.

The other limitation of Anarres is that for all its egalitarian ethos, it has not, in fact, eliminated patriarchy. What I am about to discuss has long held me up writing about The Dispossessed. Shevek quietly presupposes and leans on women's labor of his scientist partner Tevek, who does menial tasks for him (see especially pp 488-489 and here paging of his manuscript). More important, Shevek sexually assaults the sister of one of his hosts on Urras, Vea. While the alcohol induced assault is very troubling by itself, it's his reaction once sober after that is, perhaps, especially jarring. While he feels humiliated, he never recognizes his own assault for what it is -- rather, he represents Vea as having betrayed him (355) -- and he rejects feeling any "guilt" (356) or shame, and this is crucial, nor does he seek any kind of atonement for it.

Now, that he rejects 'guilt' is no surprise because he has been taught to despise it. Guilt is associated with property, and in the consequentialist ethic of Anarres it's undoubtedly too backward-looking and too reminiscent of the kind of religions they have rejected. One can admire (recall) the cultivated, anticipatory "sensitivity" or sympathy (or empathy) with the pains and "suffering" of others that regulates behavior and mutual aid (393) among these anarchists, while still noticing that the absence of guilt and genuine atonement prevents forms of accountability worth having. They have norms that banish people from society (sending them to asylums), but nothing that allows people to -(ahh) own up to their wrongs to their victims, or themselves. 

And once one faces up to the significance of this sexual assault that Shevek simply sets aside, one notices that there is a structural undertone of always present violence on Anarres. Compared to the wars of the twentieth century, Anarres is quite pacific. But the book is literally book-ended by actual violence in chapter 1 and the threat of violence toward Shevek in the final chapter.  And while Shevek was still a comrade in good standing back home on Anarres, we see him in an unprovoked fist-fight with his near-name sake Shevet for no other reason that the near nominal identity causes a lot of mix-ups. (Shevet is the aggressor.) And once impartial bystanders decide that it would be a 'fair fight' (65) nobody intervenes to stop the punching despite the fact that this is an organicist society with an abundance of internal norm-enforcing social control. And after the fight a girl gives her body to him. 

Once one is willing to acknowledge that Anarres has more trouble than merely too much politics at the center, one sees that is very much a closed society of walls. This much Shevek himself diagnoses (with the help of his friends). But in so far as we are invited to reflect on the relentless forward looking ethic of Anarres, -- after he assaults Vea, Shevek wastes little time to engage in (a noble) political revolution -- we might well come to think that a society that is so incapable of registering harm done to each other may well be more rotten than just a certain amount of stasis in its cultural and social life. 

Again, this is manifested in troubled gender relations. Part of the political conflict that we are shown between Shevek and his friends with the more establishment critics, is also represented symbolically between his mother Rulag and his friend Bedap. And the reader can't help but wonder if the intensity of the conflict between mother and son isn't fueled by their mutual earlier personal rejection in accord with the anti-family norms of Anarres. The claims of family are treated as instance of property on Anarres, but this means that forms of what we might call natural sympathy are systematically suppressed or discouraged. 

And while one may well end up concluding that the anarchism of Anarres governed by true-Odonism in which a more robust openness to other perspectives may well be the best possible polity given the imperfections of human nature, Le Guin invites us to size up its true shortcomings carefully.+

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gilbert Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gilbert Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door that said, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergrad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one’s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ‘exegetical thinking’: reading one’s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ‘tends’.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith’s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy), so won't repeat it here. But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found in C.D. Broad's (1950) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's Kuhn-loss question is relatively simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is treated more as a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible. 

On the Crisis of Liberalism (VIII): Do We Stand for Civic Republicanism?

So what, exactly, are we seeking to defend? What is the character of a liberal democracy? What does it mean for a society to be liberal, rather than for a person to subscribe to liberal principles, such as the ones Paul laid out almost four years ago?

To answer this question I will discuss five broad topics that make up the core of liberal democracy: liberty, democracy, rule of law, capability, and virtue. Liberty is often called “negative liberty” to emphasize that it is freedom from interference, but I think it is most usefully thought of as the specific freedoms—such as freedom of association, freedom of speech, and property rights—which give a liberal order its dynamism. Democracy under liberalism consists of using electoral systems and mass voting as tools for accountability rather than direct governance. Rule of law is a complicated topic but in practice often boils down to the existence, for ordinary citizens, of legal remedies and actions which will by and large be honored, especially by actors in the government. Finally, a liberal society—an actual liberal democracy in which voter sovereignty is given pride of place alongside other liberal characteristics—cannot survive unless liberal values are broadly held by the electorate. The tendency to live by these values on a relatively consistent basis entails what some have referred to as “liberal virtues.”--Adam Gurri "What is Liberal Democracy?" Liberal Currents

This is the eight post (recall here (I);  here (II); here (III); here (IV); here (V); here (VI); here (VII) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, here,  here; and here) on the current crisis of liberalism (which I date to 2008/9).

One of the few glimmers of hope during the current crisis of liberalism, is that since the rise of Trump, to simplify greatly (spare me your outrage), property-loving classical liberals and  justice/redistribution-loving centrist (say, Rawlsian) liberals have rediscovered that liberalism is a lot more than meets the eye. And for a few years now, Liberal Currents has been leading the way in bringing youthful talent together to think through what liberalism might mean concretely, as worth living, into the future. (Let's hope that they fly a few years under the radar of The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine as the next big thing; we need their insouciance to cashing in for a while longer!) 

Gurri is the 'Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Liberal Currents,' and it says something of the experimental and open spirit that after four years he revisits the principles he wishes to stand for. The first few paragraphs of the piece I quoted deserve your attention, even if you have no time for what follows (so go read it). As friend of Liberal Currents, I hope I am allowed to say, 'we wouldn't be liberals if we didn't disagree over the exact meaning of liberalism'. So, today, I would like to say something about the nature of liberal society, and the values or, in Gurri's  terms, virtues in it. 

In addition to the passage quoted above, there is another paragraph  (that partially repeats the one I quoted) that I disagree with:

A liberal state staffed by people uncommitted to liberalism or to the institutions they serve will not remain a liberal state for long. And a liberal democracy in which liberal values are not broadly shared by the electorate is unlikely to remain a liberal democracy for long, nor to retain its democracy much longer than that.

So, versions of Gurri's position are extremely popular in Europe among well meaning friends of liberal democracy. It is also popular among not-so-well-meaning islamo-phobes and xenophobes. And often it is not entirely easy to distinguish the two. But the position is associated with what is called 'civic republicanism,' or (in debates over immigration/refugees) ‘civic integrationist discourse’* and so-called 'homo-nationalism'. (Gurri's position need not reduce to any of these.) Unfortunately, civic republicanism promotes, in practice, conformity and becomes a stick to make the vulnerable and inarticulate play by the rules of intolerant majorities.

Notice, too, that Gurri's position is much stronger than the Rawlsian overlapping consensus of political liberalism (and public reason), which is, at least in principle, compatible with many citizens holding many private illiberal positions.

My  view is that there is little empirical evidence for the two empirical presuppositions Gurri relies on, viz. (i) a liberal society (or, while not the same thing, liberal democracy) cannot survive unless liberal values are broadly held by the electorate; (ii) A liberal state staffed by people uncommitted to liberalism or to the institutions they serve will not remain a liberal state for long. (I call this the 'Athenian insight' -- not because Athens was liberal, it was not --, but because it trusted its citizens with education in right norms/values/virtues.) While I welcome the existence of widespread support for liberal values and virtues (broadly conceived), there is non-trivial historical experience against both. For example, in the early years of the German federal republic, there was little fondness for liberal democracy among the population, and, while there were a few ORDO, Christian Democratic and Social democratic anti-Nazis, the state was staffed by a generation of (largely unrepentant) ex-Nazi functionaries (see chapter 5 of The Denazification of Germany: A History 1945-1950).

Of the two, there is a grain of (conceptual) truth in (ii). For, on (ii) what BLM has revealed is that the liberal state, even in its core judicial/political function, is staffed by quite a few functionaries who are uncommitted to liberalism (even if we have just learned that federal judges are committed to legal principles and, perhaps, defending elections as a means of picking rulers). That's compatible with designing institutions in such a way that what these functionaries are committed to serves to protect lots of other things we care about in liberal society (property, adhering to traffic rules, etc.).+ Even in bread and butter liberal democracies a sizeable chunk of the electorate is attracted to authoritarian political practices. I first learned this from David Art's Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), but I now work in a department where my comparative colleagues are world experts on this.** 

But leaving aside the empirical facts of the matter. I also think -- and this has a Mill-ian sensibility (J.S. Mill not the father), but I get it from Walter Lippmann -- the survival of a non-totalizing liberalism requires the regular confrontation with robust and thoughtful illiberal values and views within our political system, that is, in which illiberal parties and commitments/ideologies/forms of life are present to maintain, even enervate liberalism’s own vitality as a living creed and, thereby, the vitality of the whole political system. So, on my view of Lippmann (see here), in near defeat (ca 1938), liberalism simultaneously comes to endorse its own fundamental commitments and a commitment to a kind of unreasonable pluralism. 

For, the recurring challenge of both liberal emancipatory mass movements (some of which are not initially understood as liberal at all) and illiberal experiments, practices, and ideologies that helps us epistemically and politically, to figure out what we stand for, what we care about, what constitutively 'we' are (as society, polity, etc.). And this means that an open society will have to accommodate (as Kukathas has argued in Liberal Archipelago) many illiberal voluntary associations (and even parties).  

Obviously, Gurri and others are right that there is a tipping point beyond which the absence of commitment to liberalism among citizens and/or staffers makes it very vulnerable to putsches, usurpation, demagogues, and revolution (etc.). But where that point is is hard to foresee, and involves complex coordination, mobilization, and signaling among citizens. And I also do not deny that two-party duopolies (as the US is) become dangerously unstable if (a strategically important element of) one party rejects fundamentally or gradually the liberal experiment.

I do not deny (recall this post on Popper) that Liberalism, more than most other political ideologies, internalizes the idea that there are considerable uncertainties it ought not wish to eliminate. And, perhaps, we need providential hope that our liberal faith, which has been tested again this week (and may be tested the next few weeks again), will never be extinguished. But even amidst despair, we can strive while our enemies are emboldened to postpone and push back our possible defeat.

 

On Being a Boring/Bored Academic (Via Huemer and Ernest Nagel)

It wasn’t until much later that I started to get annoyed with the field of philosophy. We give the good stuff to undergraduates — free will, the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, etc. The boring, unimportant material is saved for the academic journals, meant to be read by professors — arguments about whether professor x’s objection to y’s version of such-and-such argument shows that that version of the argument fails to establish its conclusion, etc. The issue of free will, for example, is super-interesting, but the free will literature is some of the boringest stuff you’ll ever encounter. I feel drowsy just thinking about it.--Michael Huemer (Colorado) "What's good and bad about philosophy" [HT DAILYNOUS]

During the past year Huemer wrote a number of blog posts that inspired much buzz (approval and scoffing) in the philo-blogosphere. But while they were on topics of interest to me and known to provoke me into digressions, I did not feel much urge to chime in. In part, my reticence was due because it seemed that his underlying sensibility was one of misery. And I was imaging Yoda telling me to stay away from the dark side. But because I have been miserable during the pandemic, and to the best of my knowledge I had never met Huemer, I also worried that I was projecting my state of mind on to his blog persona. I don't mean to suggest I thought it was merely projection: my virtual diagnosis of him was prompted by his post on the terrible nature of academic writing, in which he writes (inter alia) "academic style isn’t fun to read, and it isn’t fun to write. So who is making us do this?" That reads like an authentic expression of misery to me (perhaps -- now I am glancing over the details of his argument -- prompted by justified rage at referee 2).

Now, continental philosophers have fine theories about the role of boredom in late, or very late, capitalism, say, as a species of alienation for a parasitic class. One can find such theories ending up being marketed in the spectacle of the art world. And it is also easy to become satirical about self-help books that tell us that boredom is the condition of creativity and that letting kids not be bored at all stunts their development. It is also easy to be belittle the sad reality that the very conditions of philosophy are undermined by the dread and nihilist despair of reading the literature. 

For some of you Huemer's diagnoses may not resonate. I have had colleagues for whom digesting and writing for Analysis is sufficient condition for flourishing,--bless their soul. If that's like you, nothing I say is intended to make you feel unhappy about this.

But Huemer's remarks quoted above and his conclusion -- "what we we get is discussions of niggling details, which make no sense and have no interest to you if you haven’t read the specific academic literature from the last 10 years; discussions focused on the literature rather than the issues, filled with qualifications and digressions into potential misunderstandings and errors that you probably would never have been tempted toward in the first place – and all to get to some anodyne, highly qualified claims about incredibly circumscribed questions" -- resonated with me. By contrast, I adore my undergraduate teaching in large part because the material we explore together is so glorious and I love where the students take me as their minds expand. I rarely feel anything like this in reading even the scholarly papers I admire most.* 

As it happens, yesterday I read the following passage in Ernest Nagel back in 1935:

Santayana remarks in one of his books that he would be ashamed to hold views in philosophy which he did not believe in daily life, and that he would deem it dishonest and cowardly to sail under colors in an argument which were not those under which he habitually lived. The precept implied by these comments can serve as a criterion for evaluating the quality of integration which a thinker achieves in his own life but more significantly, it helps to fix the subject matter and task of philosophy, and so to disclose the relevance of the philosophic pursuit to the society which nourishes it. It is a precept which I take for my own wholeheartedly, and one which I wish were taken as a guide in all philosophic inquiry. "Notes Toward a Naturalistic Conception of Logic, republished in Logic Without Metaphysics (1956), p. 39.

Now, 1935 was in the midst of the great depression. And so the question of nourishment was not merely a metaphor. Nagel himself was about to embark on a funded tour of Europe where he would discover and partially help, as I have argued, legislate a very different philosophical scene. 

Even so, it is pretty clear that the conception of philosophy inspired by Santayana, fairly or not, is less likely to be boring than the pointless and dull activity memorably described by Huemer in his post. Nagel discerns a way in which existential concerns with integrity between thought and deed (recall here) are connected to the social purposes of one's society. I recognize that Nagel has anticipated an idea that I have digressed on (and distinguished from other notions in the neighborhood), that a philosopher's philosophical integrity involve the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere. 

I do not mean to deny that there are tensions in Nagel's position. His views are (recall here; here) resolutely pluralist, and, if his "all philosophic inquiry" is not meant to refer to his own, he may be thought inconsistent with his other views here. And he is a bit quick, too quick, to assume that the disclosure to society of the relevance of one's philosophical pursuit will be met by approval of that society. Even a democratic philosophy may irritate, even bore, the masses, after all. 

Now, Nagel is relevant here because there is a sense in which he gave up, in practice, on the commitment he just described. And, there is a further sense that, together with Carnap, as Abe Stone has emphasized (here; here), he helped inaugurate the professional turn of philosophy so familiar to us now and that drives the Huemers among us to existential despair (okay, that was over the top; sorry). Nagel himself recognized all of this, and he discusses it un-sparingly, and appropriately, at the start of a presidential address to the APA in December 1954, where he discuss this feature of "recent analytical literare":

The past quarter century has been for philosophy in many parts of the world a period of acute self-questioning, engendered in no small measure by developments in scientific and logical thought, and in part no doubt by fundamental changes in the social order. In any event, there has come about a general loss of confidence in the competence of philosophy to provide by way of a distinctive intellectual method a basic ground-plan of the cosmos, or for that matter to contribute to knowledge of any primary subject-matter except by becoming a specialized positive science and subjecting itself to the discipline of empirical inquiry. Although the abysses of human ignorance are undeniably profound, it has also become apparent that ignorance, like actual knowledge, is of many special and heterogeneous things; and we have come to think, like the fox and unlike the hedgehog of whom Mr. Isaiah Berlin has recently reminded us, that there are a great many things which are already known or remain to be discovered, but that there is no one "big thing" which, if known, would make everything else coherent and unlock the mystery of creation. In consequence, many of us have ceased to emulate the great system-builders in the history of philosophy. In partial imitation of the strategy of modern science, and in the hope of achieving responsibly held conclusions about matters concerning which we could acquire genuine competence, we have tended to become specialists in our professional activities. We have come to direct our best energies to the resolution of limited problems and puzzles that emerge in the analysis of scientific and ordinary discourse, in the evaluation of claims to knowledge, in the interpretation and validation of ethical and esthetic judgments, and in the assessment of types of human experience. I hope I shall not be regarded as offensive in stating my impression that the majority of the best minds among us have turned away from the conception of the philosopher as the spectator of all time and existence, and have concentrated on restricted but manageable questions, with almost deliberate unconcern for the bearing of their often minute investigations upon an inclusive view of nature and man.
Some of us, I know, are distressed by the widespread scepticism of the traditional claims for a philosophia perennis, and have dismissed as utterly trivial most if not all the products of various current forms of analytical philosophy. I do not share this distress, nor do I think the dismissal is uniformly perspicacious and warranted. For in my judgment, the scepticism which many deplore is well-founded. Even though a fair-sized portion of recent analytical literature seems inconsequential also to me, analytical philosophy in our own day is the continuation of a major philosophic tradition, and can count substantial feats of clarification among its assets. Concentration on limited and determinate problems has yielded valuable fruits, not least in the form of an increased and refreshing sensitivity to the demands of responsible discourse.

Nagel reminds us that the very best criticisms of analytic philosophy have been stated within the tradition. More subtly, his idea that ignorance is not univocal strikes me as worthy of ongoing rediscovery. More pertinent here, Nagel grants de facto that philosophical professionalization and specialization necessarily involves generating the conditions of mental mutilation. Huemer's spleen was foreseen by the legislators/prophets of our tradition and - oh amor fati --  willed eternally in the name of the greater good and responsibility. 

Nagel thinks the bitter medicine worth our pain. He does offer some remedy: "a philosopher...owes it to himself to articulate, if only occasionally, what sort of world he thinks he inhabits, and to make clear to himself where approximately lies the center of his convictions." Allowing for the unfortunately gendered language, this is salutary advice. I suspect the readability of many philosophy papers would be helped, and the sanity of their authors enhanced, if it were normal to add a paragraph, say at the end of the introduction, that linked the minute arguments to follow to the geography and significance of their philosophical convictions. While this would be undoubtedly comical too, I hope referee 2 can get behind this as an innocent convention. With online publishing the political economy of this modest proposal should be not too constraining.