Digressions&Impressions

Lincoln on the Future President that Scorns the Constitution and Office

But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?--Never! Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.--It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

Here, then, is a probable case, highly dangerous, and such a one as could not have well existed heretofore.

Another reason which once was; but which, to the same extent, is now no more, has done much in maintaining our institutions thus far. I mean the powerful influence which the interesting scenes of the revolution had upon the passions of the people as distinguished from their judgment. By this influence, the jealousy, envy, and avarice, incident to our nature, and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were, for the time, in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive; while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature, were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest cause--that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.

But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.--Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838, "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois." [emphases in original; HT Mark Norris Lance]

Lincoln was a young man of 28 when he gave the speech I just quoted. The speech reflects on the possible causes of the implosion of then still relative young, United States. He rules out the possibility of a genuine foreign threat, and so suggests that The United States is in control of its own destiny: "As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." The 'we' here refers to the United States, which has the possibility to be immortal (recall), and thus, to be godlike.

The speech identifies two main threats: first, Lincoln address the dangers of lynching, mob justice, and various forms of civil disobedience*--all of which undermine the rule of law. Lincoln notes that any particular violation of the rule may be thought harmless (even just), but generates a slippery slope, "by such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained." This further encourages the lawless and discourages not just the quiet, law-abiding citizens, but also the best citizens which become alienated from government; thereby, such violations undermine "the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours," that is, "the attachment of the People."

In response, Lincoln suggests a civic religion (he calls it a "political religion") in which "reverence" for the laws is preached. He accepts that this means that bad laws, "if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed." (The previous sentence suggests that Lincoln also rejects non-violent civil disobedience.) Lincoln does not invent the idea of a political religion (it goes back to Plato (recall) and his Islamic interpreters (recall here and here) and via Spinoza and Locke becomes explicit in Rousseau's Social Contract), but it is striking that he  makes the rule of law its main dogma and proper aim. 

The second threat Lincoln diagnoses is the one that is originally associated with the destabilizing desire for honor (he "thirsts and burns for distinction") of the great-souled man as portrayed by Plato and Aristotle, and commonly associated with Achilles or Alcibiades as well as Alexander and Caesar. Lincoln's vocabulary is modern ("genius,"), but the point is clear. Any existing political institution will, once established, find it difficult to channel the immoderate desire for recognition that is coupled with the desire of originality (seeking "regions hitherto unexplored"). And Lincoln recognizes in ways that modern democratic theorists constantly fail to do, that this is a permanent threat -- unsolved by modern representative government -- because there will always be dangerous talents in a citizenry.

Lincoln is clear that the constitution is endangered by the immoderate desire for fame*** in talented ambitious people even if this ambition for recognition serves, by executive fiat, a manifest just cause ("emancipating slaves")** because in so doing it pulls down the constitutional edifice. (His position is: bad laws may be repeated, but they must be repealed lawfully.)

So, Lincoln has no doubt that a real danger to Republic may take power by legal means. Such a person succeeds  because he can exploit the people's ordinary mutual "jealousy, envy, and avarice," which are a by-product of the "state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength." The talented and ambitious, would-be-constitution-slayer is aided by the natural disunity of the people, which is caused by mutual hatred and the spirit of revenge. In revolutionary times, these passions were counter-balanced by the very same passions directed toward noble ends:  "the basest principles of our nature, were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest cause--that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty." But this counter-balancing cannot be relied upon once the revolutionary generation and their immediate off-spring has passed the scene (something that requires a rebirth as he recognizes at Gettysburg).

Lincoln's response to the second threat is not encouraging: he claims that the constitutional order can only be protected by "the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent" (that is, educated). Lincoln explains what he means in the final paragraph:

Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.--Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws:

This means that for a constitutional order to survive there must be a precautionary, robust civic religion that embraces the rule of law, widespread moral and political education such that unity is possible. This is a precautionary, enlightenment project worthy of the self-rule project that may make the United States immortal. But, of course, a unified, moral, and intelligent people (recall the second inaugural) would not elect a would-be-tyrant in the first place. That is to say, Lincoln perceives that the very conditions that will let a would-be-constitution-slayer-to-power will also the destruction of the project in self-rule. For Lincoln there is no faith to be offered in the strength of our institutions when the excellent have lost their attachment to them and their vulnerability lies exposed by mediocrity.+

On Preserving the Past with the Struggle for the Future (Arendt on Buber's Zionism)

A passionate Zionist from the time of his first publications at the beginning of the century, Buber has always known how to infuse Zionism with a distinctive spirit. He has an unparalleled way of combining the preservation of the past with the struggle for the future. Now and always, he has reiterated that the renaissance of the Jewish people can only come about through a radical return to its great past and its living religious values. This has won him the hearts and minds of all the young people who, in their journey to a forgotten Judaism, were desperately looking for the spiritual content of that Judaism from which they had been estranged...

He, Buber, succeeded in awakening the souls these assimilated Jews. He succeeded because, with all his profound scholarship, he always remained a modern man in the best sense of the world. He was able to win over the youth because he didn't bury himself or Judaism under a great past, but knew how to rediscover the living roots of this past to build a greater future.--Hannah Arendt (1935) "A Guide for Youth: Martin Buber, in Hannah Arendt The Jewish Writings, 31-3.

l was alerted to the significance of Arendt's early writings by Judith Butler (recall). But Butler treats Arendt as a contrast to Buber largely because she treats Arendt, informed by a 1972 interview with Arendt, as a non-Zionist ("after 1943"). To be sure even in the 1930s Arendt can be quite critical of Buber: in "Antisemitism," Arendt treats "Buber's Zionism" as explaining Jewish "substance" by way of pseudophilosophical profundity. (The Jewish Writings, 56)*

As an aside, one may wonder why, in 1943, the midst of Nazi genocide, Arendt would have moved herself to the non-Zionist camp (at least in her memory thirty years later). The answer can be found in "Zionism Reconsidered" (originally published in 1944). There Arendt writes about her reaction to the (1942) Biltmore program and the (1944) Atlantic City Resolution in which Zionists claim the "whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished' without mention of the fate of local Arabs.

Arendt's piece on Buber is important to Zionists because it reminds us of the constructive role that Buber's thought can play in the spiritual life of some would-be-Zionists (recall, by contrast, Hazony's dismissal of Buber). In her very brief 1935 essay (originally published in French), Arendt explictly couples Buber with two thinkers. First, with Luther: as fellow translators of the Bible into German. What they achieve is "to interpret the Bible poetically in another language, in accordance with its spirit." (See here for the French!) Second, she couples Buber with Mendelssohn (who also translated the Bible into German but into Hebrew letters in part so that Jews could learn German and emancipate into German life; it is clear that Arendt thinks that Mendelssohn's translation fails to conforms to the spirit of the original). She treats Mendelssohn as the "beginning" of German Jewish history and Buber as "the end." (It is worth reminding ourselves that in 1935, the situation for German Jews was certainly very bleak, but not yet catastrophic--so Arendt was prescient.)

Arendt treats the Bible as "the greatest Jewish possession." (33) It is the "indissoluble link that exists between all of Jewish history--even the most modern--and its great beginning." It is not entirely clear what Arendt means by "modern" in this piece. It is also not entirely clear when 'modernity' begins in Jewish history. I suspect it means the importation of 'philosophy' (in its Athenian guise) into mainstream (elite) Jewish thought. I believe this because the whole essay evokes Maimonides's Guide.+

So, according to Arendt, the significance of Buber is, first, is that he is a successful spiritual teacher of the young not despite his Zionism but because of it. Second, Buber's Zionism is a spiritual Zionism rooted in religious history (and not a rejection of religion). Third, this Zionism is Messianic in so far as it (treats the past) is oriented toward the future.** It is Messianic because Buber treats Zionism as a means for the Jews to make a "vital contribution to the history of mankind," (quoted by Arendt, 33; recall my distinction between negative and Messianic Zionism here and here). That is, for Arendt's Buber the meaning of Zionism has significance -- "the mission God gave" (32) -- to all of humanity. (Of course, it is not Messianic in the sense of embracing charismatic leaders; recall here.) In particular, Buber is praised for being "always aware of how his knowledge can be useful in practical terms; he never shuts out of the future in favor of the past." (32) That is, by  reanimating the past, Buber (and there are traces of Spinoza here) embraces works.

 

Why Not?* In defense of Utopian Thought

Another reason for engaging in ideal theory is that what today seems like a fantasy may one day become quite realistic. It therefore makes sense to aim high. As Brennan observes, throughout most of human history, deaths due to violence were vastly more common than they are today. If someone a thousand years ago described a society like ours, they would likely have been dismissed as utopian. Perhaps similar dramatic advances, that today appear overly utopian, will be made in the future.
I share Brennan’s optimism: we will one day live much better than we do now. Nevertheless, I think utopian theorizing is largely useless.

Compare Ida’s hypothesis, in the flat tire story, that we may one day develop antigravity technology. This might be true, but this possibility has no practical bearing on Ida and Nora’s trip. Antigravity technology is not available to them presently, and they do not know how to make it available. You might think that their present behavior might nevertheless affect their prospects for attaining antigravity technology at some distant future time. But Ida and Nora have no idea whether antigravity will ever be available, nor do they know even in broad outline how it would work. In that context, the speculation that something they do today might somehow help or hinder future antigravity efforts is idle. Discussion of such a possibility does not help them solve any problem or pursue any goal that they have any rational way of pursuing.
The same is true of G. A. Cohen’s speculations about a future society in which everyone interacts like people on a friendly camping trip. We do not have such an option available to us now, we have no idea whether it will ever be available, nor do we know even in broad outline how it would come about. In that context, discussion of this possibility is idle. It does not help us solve any problem or rationally pursue any goal.
I think the future holds great promise: our distant descendants will live much better than we, due not only to technological and economic advancements, but probably to institutional and cultural advancements as well. But we have no way of predicting these developments and no rational way of trying to either help or hinder them. Imagine the position of someone in 1500 A.D., trying to plan for the world of 2016. There is no reasonable way that they could have guessed even roughly what our society would be like. As a result, if anyone in 1500 A.D. made plans for the twenty-first century, those plans are surely worthless. Because the pace of change has dramatically advanced in the past few centuries, the future is even less predictable to us than our world was to the denizens of 1500 A.D. Thus, any plans we might make for the next age are almost surely worthless. The point here is that Brennan’s general observation about the likelihood of progress — even if true — does not give us good reason for engaging in utopian theorizing.
There is no sharp dividing line between possibilities that are too remote to be usefully entertained and those that are close enough to be worthwhile. My claim that Cohen’s utopia is idle speculation is thus a judgment call: in my judgment, a society in which socialism would work would have to be so far from our society that we cannot now productively discuss that society or plan for its arrival.--Michael Huemer "Confessions of a Utopophobe." Social Philosophy and Policy  (2016), 223-224. [HT Hanno Sauer]

This seeems to be Michael Huemer week in the philosophical blogosphere (see Dailynous). The quoted passage is from a larger essay, which defends the methodological use of intuitions in political philosophy. Let me stipulate here, that in this Digression, I am agnostic about the fruitfulness and soundness of methodological use of intuitions in political philosophy. The section I quote is also part of a larger argument against so-called 'ideal theory.' (In fact, the paper is quite helpful in distinguishing between "perfection theory" and strict compliance theory" within ideal theory.)

The oddity of the section is that while it purports to criticize aiming high, it never actually confronts its target. Nobody would deny that at many decision moments ideas about the  distant future are "useless." But it does not follow that ideas about the remote future are inert; it never gets around to discussing how utopian ideas and words about ideals connect to the future. For example, between 1815 and 1940 (say, from Mazzini to Hayek) many different kind of authors articulated different visions for a united Europe in which independent or federated nation-states would no longer be at war with each other. This required both a willingness to imagine the disintegration of the most powerful empires in existence and a leap into speculation about how, say, future republics could be allied in (say) a republican confederation. While some of these texts took the form of a prediction, the point of even the predictions was not scientific prediction, but, rather, to change the beliefs and  commitment of readers and a wider public and, thereby, change future possibilities (not the least by generating a call to action). 

Now, to be sure, Huemer is going after ideal theories that themselves (often) assume without compelling argument that they are required as a "necessary fundational part of normative social theory" (219) and that normative theory "must pursue perfection." (219) Even if one thinks there is space for such foundational and perfectionist inquiry it does not follow, as Huemer correctly argues, that these are needed for all normative purposes.** But it also does not follow that it cannot serve any useful purposes (even if one grants it is pretty useless in some very concrete choice situations).

I have already suggested that ideas can connect the present to the future. And that they can do that in ways distinct from (scientific) prediction in the context of deep uncertainty about how to future will be--I fully agree with Huemer's sense that we have no access to reliable means of long range forecasting about as-of-yet-non-existent technologies (e.g., antigravity). But it does not mean we can't have access to information about its feasibility. For, another obvious way in which the present shapes future possibilities is debt (recall this post). In fact, one annoying feature of Huemer's argument is that he simply assumes that "trying to plan for the world in 2016" is a hopeless task in 1500. It's true that (as Keynes argued) one really cannot make such long range predictions in the same way that buying insurance in 1500 for an event in 2016 is silly (although some versions of portfolio theory can suggest buying some such option as a hedge). Yet, many states did sell perpetual bonds (recall my piece on Stasavage, Machiavelli and Hume). One such (slightly younger) bond is still in existence: "The oldest known bond in the world that still produces interest is the perpetual 2.5% loan worth 1200 guilders, issued in 1624, of the Lekdijk Bovendams water board....it still pays interest." Once ideas and debt start reinforcing each other the shape of the future is much constrained. 

Clearly, the previous paragraph is itself no defense of (Rawlsian) ideal theory nor helpful in taking sides in the debate between Cohen and Brennan. But it is a defense of the potency of certain kinds of "speculations about a future society." While it is, perhaps, quixotic to expect that books are still the medium by which the future is shaped, these speculations (and that can include ideal theory!) may shape the generation of the future they are speculating about (or some alternatives to those speculations) in non-mysterious ways . (I have explored the nature of the genre in terms of philosophical prophecy.) We know, as a historical fact, that, for example, Bacon's imaginative speculations about how to organize a scientific society influenced the deeds of several generations of readers and, somewhat uncannily, he also foresaw many of the problematic social and political byproducts of such a society. (While it is true "there is no reasonable way that they could have guessed even roughly what our society would be like," it is surprising how many crucial fundamental relations of our society were foreseen.) We know that Hume's "Of a Perfect Commonwealth" (recall here and here) influenced an American revolution and its Constitution, etc..

Of course,  it's true that no author ca 1500-1650 guessed the role of YouTube in contemporary education. But it is also true that our conceptual-social-legal-political possibility space is, in part, constituted by speculations in the past that were self-consciously written for the future we inhabit now (and determined by ordinary social forces like the institutions of debt, inheritance law, etc.). This is, in fact, the conceit behind Socratic political philosophy from the start.

Finally, it is especially peculiar to see a university professor write, "any plans we might make for the next age are almost surely worthless." By now we there are many universities that are many hundreds year old! (Even UC Boulder dates back to 1876.) There is no doubt that these corporations have changed in light of many circumstances due to local, contingent decisions. But it is also true that they have generated corporate spirits that have provided continuous stewardship and a willingness to plan for future ages (recall this post, itself a response to Jacob Levy's). This is no coincidence: the whole enterprise of learning and science has long been constituted by the thought that each of us inherits the accomplishments and insights (etc.) of the past and we will do our best to pass these on enriched and transformed by our labors without having a clue about the details to be added by later generations.***

 

On Srinivasian on Nussbaum; on Anger in Politics.

But it is not radical in the sense of being unfamiliar. With the notable exception of black and feminist thinkers who have defended anger as a vital tool of the oppressed, almost all of Western political thought since the Stoics has largely shared Nussbaum’s dim view of anger. Seneca condemned anger as “the most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions,” “closed to reason” and “wholly violent.” It had no place in our personal or political lives.

The liberal tradition in which Nussbaum works has largely inherited this ancient view of things. The public square, if not the private realm, should be a place of cool deliberation rather than hot emotion. But what is radical about Nussbaum’s case against anger is that it puts baldly what is often taken for granted in our political culture. In so doing, Nussbaum inadvertently tells us something about the limits of the liberal worldview she has spent much of her career defending....

But surely many of us experience anger that calls not for revenge but for something else: for the wrongdoer to see just what he has done. Amia Srinivasan A Righteous Fury@The Nation

In her excellent piece, Srinivasan, who is the most exciting young philosopher I am familiar with, has three clear aims at once (two of which on display in the quoted passage: (i) to defend and articulate the constructive political role of the right sort of anger; (ii) to bury the liberal tradition as represented by Nussbaum (and Rawls) and offer "we moderns" a path toward an alternative, political philosophy that draws on "black and feminist thinkers;" in particular, (iii) this alternative view of "politics," recognizes it "is about conflict as much as consensus."+ Most of her piece is devoted to explaining just some of the important political roles of anger, and I will take my agreement over (i) for granted.

I also take for granted, the high stakes presupposed by Srinivasan. For, in passing, she remarks she recognizes that she could well end up with "those of us who might end up against the wall in a revolutionary moment." That is, Srinivasan is acutely aware, not for the first time, of the possibility that with the fracturing of liberalism and the political ascendancy of illiberal forces (as well as the inevitable dislocations and tensions causes by climate change, etc.) we may be entering an age of violent revolution (recall that Trump's brightest defenders expect this, too). 

With Srinivasan I reject the consensus model of politics which I associate with (recall) the technocratic turn in political philosophy (also found in political economy, philosophy of science, etc.) In this model politics aims at justice or efficiency. This image of politics as found in liberal political philosophy (and political economy/economics) is characterized by three features: first, it holds the ideal that with social knowledge and its progress, substantial political disagreement can be eliminated. Second, it presupposes considerable (liberal) value-unanimity in society (this opens the door to all kinds of policy engineering). Third, it is accompanied with  an image of science in which one of the central aims of policy scientists is to achieve consensus (or lack of disagreement).

This is, however, not the only image of politics available from within a more sober liberalism. For, if a (moral) consensus were really possible politics would not be necessary. If conflict is, as Srinivasan suggests, inevitable, then politics can also be a means of containing and redirecting conflict. Elections are a means to arrange the peaceful transfer of power and by holding them regularly you give the losers and supporters a chance to regroup and hope to win next time  -- no emotion is more conducive to political flourishing than hope --, and thereby, to prevent the threat of civil war.* Liberalism's institutions (the rule of law, the franchise, representative governments, markets, free press, etc.) are all, for all their other purposes, means to manage and redirect conflict to allow imperfect beings to cope. The underlying insight is that the liberal state protects (with considerable status quo bias) the powerful and wealthy, but it does so by giving the rest of us a stake in making living together work. Sometimes the liberal cure is worse than the problem; the liberal state can oppress its own citizens and be bellicose abroad.

This is where resentment and anger enter in at the core of the liberal tradition. As Steve Darwall (2006: 84) has rightly emphasized for Adam Smith, who radically differed from Seneca on this point, resentment is a call for respect. As Smith writes, the object of resentment is “chiefly intent upon, is not so much to make our enemy feel pain in his turn, as . . . to make him sensible that the person whom he injured did not deserve to be treated in that manner. What chiefly enrages us against the man who injures or insults us, is the little account which he seems to make of us.” (TMS 2.3.1.5). This resentment and rage are at the root of the very institution of justice, which simultaneously manages conflict, protects the powerful, and provides us a means to respect each of us equally in front of at least one tribunal.

As I noted earlier in the week (and echoing Plato, Madison, Arendt), justice is one of two institutions of society that can be devoted to truth. (The other being the university.) Politics, by contrast, is the site of often conflicting opinion. Anger, public and private, is a natural byproduct of this state affairs because anger is always, as noted by Isaiah, a symptom of badly arranged or injust institutions or bad political leadership (recall also Hume and Spinoza). So, by disallowing anger, by treating it as a mark of un-reason, one removes, some of the best evidence, early warnings as it were, of political problems. 

None of this is to deny that we moderns may wish to be guided and inspired by black and feminist thinkers as Srinivasan urges. These are, indeed in short supply in the liberal tradition (although I have been urging us to recover Sophie De Grouchy's wise brand of liberalism). Given the wreckage caused by liberal politics and economics (in a broad sense) during the last generation, she may well be speaking for many who wish to give a new set of ideas and ideals a chance. It may well be too late to recover and apply the accumulated wisdom of the liberal tradition even if it transcends "the limits" Srinivasan mistakenly ascribes to its "worldview." But as we stand, I fear, at the edge of the precipice, we must resist the lure of a clean break and the bold march forward and find means to resist the ever encroaching violence.

 

 

 

Zadie Smith, Auden, and the Nothing Nothings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Oxford philosophy, Barthes, Political statecraft and the birth-pangs of Post-modernism; a futuristic impressions

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose “performance” may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his “genius” The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at
the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human person”--Roland Barthes The Death of The Author. Translated by Richard Howard

Barthes organizes his famous argument around a trans-historical "phenomenon:" that is, the possibility of certain symbols to be decoupled from authorial intention. (Yes, Barthes allows he is not sure it was always so.) According to Barthes this always happens when these symbols, which depict human agency, are decoupled from attempts to change behavior. In this decoupling the symbols need not be owned by anybody. (Yes, Barthes is explicitly aware of copy-right and other legal and moral institutions, but he takes such institutions as contingent bits of stabilization of that which is intrinsically unstable [meaning, ownership, etc.].) And once so-decoupled there is no way of knowing to whom a literary text belongs (or what it means). Barthes position is epistemic. (He does not flirt with idealism nor with indeterminate reality.)

The trans-historical phenomenon is itself inscribed in a historical progression that runs through Barthes's account.  Much like his Enlightenment (and Marxist) predecessors we move swiftly from primitive times to civilized times of modernity and to a new age (post-modernity) in which "for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple" modernity. These heroic authors (Mallarme, Valery, and Proust are mentioned) produced work (with an inner progressive logic that drives their innovation) that undermines the "modern figure" of the author, who produces (and legislates meaning to) a fixed text. Barthes does not call them 'heroic' but they have the role of original exemplars in his account.

Modestly, Barthes closes his piece by suggesting that in addition to these authors projecting, in their texts, a new image of an author, the future also needs Barthes's philosophical activity which involves the presentation of a new muthos (although one developed from pre-existing material) in which reader and text co-constitute each other and the meaning of the text, anew, every time. Barthes is explicit in crediting ordinary language philosophy (the "Oxford school") on such performativity. (Barthes, prefigures Judith Butler's later use.) This constitution of literary meaning is not unconstrained; there are symbols (words, sentences, etc.), from which this constitution is constructed, which have been produced by pens, laptops and code, and agents. The point, however, is that Barthes wishes to black-box the pre-conditions that need to be in place for this co-constitution to occur (even though he is constantly gesturing at material forces that play a role in this).

Barthes practices a species of philosophical prophecy in which he stands against society which "proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys," and against the Critic and all other forms of authority ("reason, science, the law') that stabilize and fix facts and "arrest" meanings. (It is astounding to see the Critic being treated as authoritative in such a way.) Barthes's progress of history is, thus, supposed to lead to a form of anarchism (undoubtedly of a Marxist kind--one could look at Barthes's other writings, but that would be cheating given his views on such matters). The moral vision that animates Barthes's analysis of certain images that facilitate forms of social hierarchy is left unspecified. But it has a distaste for hypocrisy and forms of power that make puzzle-solving (in science and criticism) possible because they have narrowed the possibility space (of interpretation, meaning, etc.).

But in so doing, Barthes cuts 'reality' in two. First, there is a material world accompanied by trans-historical phenomona. There is, of course, stage-relativity articulation and felt experience of these phenomena. But they are of a determinate world. One of  the stable phenomena of this world is, in fact, literature. In this material world, identity is stable, but this material world is black-boxed (not unlike a Kantian noumena) in the conditions of possibility of a literary world.  And, second, it is intrinsic to the literary world that in it, by contrast,  'A=A' is not trivial, perhaps not even possible ("all identity is lost" including and "beginning with the very identity of the body that writes"). (But 'literature' can be a whole lot broader than being placed in the Penguin Classics series). In Barthes's terms, "literature is precisely the invention of this voice" in which symbols are decoupled from authorial intention and in which multiplicity of meaning is always a live possibility.

I am not the first to notice that Barthes's position is not fully stable because he flirts with various ways in which the norms of such a literary world displaces the institutions that stabilize social reality and, thereby, encroach on the material world which starts slipping out of reach.* Yet, it does not do so according to Barthes because the reader-"spectator" (that would be you, my friend!) is the site where "multiplicity is collected, united." When we are such spectators 'we' are part of co-constitution of order and intelligibility (and in so-doing construct ourselves).

To turn multiplicity into a collected unity is the political act as such (see Spinoza, Hume, etc.). Thus, in so doing, Barthes turns the paradigmatic instance of a private joy of bourgeois culture into the exemplary political-legislative act.

When one looks at the effect of such conceptual moves on some of the humanities, in which reading is mistaken for political activism, it is easy to find sources of ridicule (and futility given that when we look at the larger culture we see that the cult of Author-God is still very much alive (not just in literary circles, but also in "reason, science, the law.")) But as we move to a world in which all of our doings are traces to be turned into data in large-data-mining operations and algorithmic productions, we will be constituted by some spectators, human or, more likely, robotic as their text to read.

Halley and Seneca's Prophecy of Open Ended Scientific Progress

But Seneca the Philosopher, having consider'd the Phenomena of Two remarkable Comets of his Time, made no Scruple to place them amongst the Coelestial Bodies: believing them to be Stars of equal Duration with the World, tho' he owns their Motions to be govern'd by Laws not as then known or found out. And at last (which was no untrue or vain Prediction) he foretells, that there should be Ages sometime hereafter, to whom Time and Diligence shou'd unfold all these Mysteries, and who shou'd wonder that the Ancients cou'd be ignorant of them, after some lucky Interpreter of Nature had shewn; in what Parts of the Heavens the Comets wander'd, what, and how great they were. Yet almost all the Astronomers differ'd from this Opinion of Seneca; neither did Seneca himself think fit to set down those Phenomena of the Motion, by which he was enabled to maintain his Opinion: Nor the Times of those Appearances, which might be of use to Posterity, in order to the Determining these Things. E. Halley A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets translated (1705)*

Yesterday, I noted that at the start of chapter 7 (on comets) of her (1749) Commentary on Newton's Principia, Émilie du Châtelet writes that "Seneca seemed to have had an inkling of what would one day be discovered about these celestial bodies, but the seeds of the true principles that he had sown were not allowed to grow by the doctrine of the Peripatetics, who, transmitting from century to century the errors of their master, maintained that comets were meteors and temporary fires." (Translated by Isabelle Bour & Judith P. Zinsser, 337-8) I suggested that the point of the passage seems less designed to give credit to Seneca as it is to castigate the Scholastics. I went on to discuss Seneca, who seems to have invented the very idea of open-ended scientific progress within a division of intellectual labor.

Now, it's possible, of course, that Du Châtelet's remark was inspired by her own reading of Seneca. But because her mention of Seneca lacks detail and seems primarily to designed to castigate slavish following intellectual authority, I wondered if she was not relying on another source. I first checked Newton's Principia, but he does not mention Seneca. As the quote paragraph above suggests, I had better luck with Halley's (1705) Astronomiae Cometicae Synopsis. Given that she discusses the comet named after Halley, it is likely she looked at this work in Latin (or in English, which she knew well). One reason to suspect this, is that in Halley's treatment Seneca is indeed paired with Aristotle, who is blamed that the study of comets "lay altogether neglected." But Halley does not blame the Scholastics (or if he does only be implication), although later in his narrative he does make fun of the Schoolmen (but unrelated to Seneca). Nor is her treatment of Aristotle's account of comets as 'meteors and temporary fires' really identical to Halley's treatment of Aristotle's doctrine on comets as sublunary or "airy meteors," that is, "vapours floating in the ether." (Both are fair but by no means complete treatments of Aristotle's Metereology (1.7).) So, it is also unlikely that Du Châtelet is following Halley on Seneca.

The observational start of this science, Halley dates to back to 1337 (crediting the observations by the Byzantine astronomer Nicephorus Gregoras). Halley anticipates many of the points I made about Seneca in yesterday's blog post: he also treats Seneca as a philosophical prophet who is committed to  the idea that (a) with time and (b) the division of labor (c) lots more such knowledge will be attained, including (d) entirely unforeseeable knowledge, that (e) will seem entirely obvious to future generations so that (f) they will look back at Seneca's time as ignoramuses. But, (g) there is no reason to think the enterprise of knowledge ever comes to an end.

So far so good, except that Halley rejects (g), the open-ended nature of science. That is, Halley treats Newton as having completed the science of comets ("unfold all these Mysteries;" see also his evaluation of his own table at the end of the Synopsis: "it might come forth perfect, as a Thing consecrated to Posterity, and to last as long as astronomy it self." ) That Halley rejects (g) is surprising because in his original preface to the Principia, Newton signals his own commitment to (g): "I hope that the principles set down here will shed some light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one." (Translated by I.B. Cohen & Anne Whitman.) To later readers the point is underlined in the third (1726) edition of Principia, as George Smith has emphasized in his scholarship, by the fourth rule of reasoning (first published in the third edition): "In experimental, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exception." Other Newtonians were quick to embrace (g), but they would do so in a manner very different from Seneca and Halley.

 

At the start of chapter 7 of her (1749) Commentary on Newton's Principia, Émilie du Châtelet treats Newton as a decisive breakthrough in generating "some knowledge" of comets' "nature." Indeed, Newton had closed the first edition of the Principia with one of his crowning achievements: a (somewhat clunky) means to calculate the elliptical orbits of comets before ending on some speculative remarks on the ways comets maintain a kind of inter-stellar commerce and are possible sources of life. Du Châtelet then writes, "Seneca seemed to have had an inkling of what would one day be discovered about these celestial bodies, but the seeds of the true principles that he had sown were not allowed to grow by the doctrine of the Peripatetics, who, transmitting from century to century the errors of their master, maintained that comets were meteors and temporary fires." (Translated by Isabelle Bour & Judith P. Zinsser, 337-8) Without explaining Seneca's views, Du Châtelet treats Seneca as a distant and historically uninfluential predecessor to Newton. Because she does not explain in what way Seneca anticipated Newton, we may infer that the point of the passage seems less designed to give credit to Seneca as it is to castigate the Scholastics - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2016/05/on-the-invention-of-progress.html#sthash.k2Anjb9f.dpufMeteorologyMeteorology

On the Invention of Scientific Progress (by Seneca!)

At the start of chapter 7 of her (1749) Commentary on Newton's Principia, Émilie du Châtelet treats Newton as a decisive breakthrough in generating "some knowledge" of comets' "nature." Indeed, Newton had closed the first edition of the Principia with one of his crowning achievements: a (somewhat clunky) means to calculate the elliptical orbits of comets before ending on some speculative remarks on the ways comets maintain a kind of inter-stellar commerce and are possible sources of life. Du Châtelet then writes, "Seneca seemed to have had an inkling of what would one day be discovered about these celestial bodies, but the seeds of the true principles that he had sown were not allowed to grow by the doctrine of the Peripatetics, who, transmitting from century to century the errors of their master, maintained that comets were meteors and temporary fires." (Translated by Isabelle Bour & Judith P. Zinsser, 337-8) Without explaining Seneca's views, Du Châtelet treats Seneca as a distant and historically uninfluential predecessor to Newton. Because she does not explain in what way Seneca anticipated Newton, we may infer that the point of the passage seems less designed to give credit to Seneca as it is to castigate the Scholastics.*

Some searching on the internet made me realize that Du Châtelet is alluding to chapter 7 of Natural Questions, which is devoted to comets. This book targets (inter alia) Aristotle's views on comets. And so one way to understand Du Châtelet is that she is suggesting like a good Enlightenment thinker that even when the seeds of the truth are available, slavish obedience to intellectual authority will displace the germs that may ripen to fruition in a more open intellectual environment. But Seneca's chapter on comets is more interesting than these remarks indicate.

In the closing lines of Seneca's book [well, the original order--this has come under attack], Seneca suggests his own day and age is a kind of dark ages.** For Seneca describes the way his age is full of moral corruption and licentiousness. He then concludes with:

[In our times] There is no interest in philosophy. [Philosophiae nulla cura est.] Accordingly, so little is found out from those subjects which the ancients left partially investigated that many things which were discovered are being forgotten. But, by Hercules, if we applied ourselves to this with all our might—if youth soberly applied itself to it, if the elders taught it and the younger generation learned it—we would scarcely reach to the bottom where truth is located, which we now seek on the surface of the earth and with slack effort. (Seneca, Natural Questions VII:31)

Seneca's is a call to arms to subsequent generations to study nature (in context 'philosophy' clearly means natural philosophy). But, unusually, rather than promising quick, complete knowledge, he implies not just that his own generation barely has knowledge of nature, but that such knowledge is a distant prospect. Now, this intimates the idea of open-ended inquiry. But I say that because these closing lines echo one of the great set pieces of the chapter, which is worth quoting in full.

Why, then, we marvel at comets, such a rare spectacle in the universe, are not yet grasped by fixed laws and that their origin and end are not known, when their return is at vast intervals? [Quid ergo miramur cometas, tam rarum mundi spectaculum, nondum teneri legibus certis nec initia illorum finesque notescere, quorum ex ingentibus intervallis recursus est?] It has not yet been fifteen hundred years since Greece

Numbered the stars

And gave them names.

And yet there are many nations today that know the sky only by its face and do not yet understand why the moon lacks fulness and why it is obscured in an eclipse. Among us, too, only recently did science produce definite knowledge in these matters. The time will come when diligent research over very long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject. What about the fact that we do not divide our few years in an equal portion at least between study and vice? And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Some day there will be a man who will show in what regions comets have their orbit, why they travel so remote from other celestial bodies, how large they are and what sort they are. Let us be satisfied with what we have found out, and let our descendants also contribute something to the truth...How many animals we have learned about for the first time in this age; how many are not known even now! Many things that are unknown to us the people of a coming age will know. Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate. Some sacred things are not revealed once and for all. Eleusis keeps in reserve something to show to those who revisit there. Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all. We believe that we are her initiates but we are only hanging around the forecourt. Those secrets are not open to all indiscriminately. They are withdrawn and closed up in the inner sanctum. This age will glimpse one of the secrets; the age which comes after us will glimpse another.--Seneca Natural Questions VII.25

So, Seneca admits that genetic and final cause(s) of comets are not known. But he is fairly confident that these will be known some day and that comets have law-governed orbits that will make them return eventually. This does anticipate Newton, as Du Châtelet suggests. Seneca prognosticates (prophecies?) a day in which a science of comets is possible. He does so by embedding it, first, in a larger narrative, in which he dates the birth of (taxonomic) astronomy fifteen hundred year earlier (ca 1400bc) in Greece (surprisingly not Babylonia or Egypt, although he is aware of their interest in the sciences). He notes that this science has made progress since including knowledge of how the different orbits produce phenomena like eclipses and the phases of the Moon. He notes, too, that this knowledge has not been widely dispersed among different peoples.

After having created this historical baseline of the growth of astronomical knowledge, second, he suggests that (a) with time and (b) the division of labor (c) lots more such knowledge will be attained, including (d) entirely unforeseeable knowledge, that (e) will seem entirely obvious to future generations so that (f) they will look back at Seneca's time as ignoramuses ("we believe that we are her initiates but we are only hanging around the forecourt." ). But, (g) there is no reason to think the enterprise of knowledge ever comes to an end ("unless it has in it something for every age to investigate").

This set of commitments (a-g) is characteristic of the idea of open-ended scientific progress. It will be recovered by Bacon and codified by 18th century Newtonians. I am most struck by (f) because once science has a history, every age tends to think of itself as a knowing age, and it is hard to imagine that one's own age will not look impressive to future ones (although it is a conceit of some science fiction like Star Trek)

Now, the reasons behind (g) are not entirely obvious. He makes it sound as if it is property of nature's majesty that it can never be fully known. But, it makes sense if, as I think it does, Seneca's line of argument presupposes that he thinks it is infinite in some (at least temporal) sense. He is clear about that in Letter 36, "none of the objects which vanish from our gaze and are re-absorbed into the world of things, from which they have come forth and are soon to come forth again, is annihilated; they merely end their course and do not perish." (Some -- I am not so sure -- see in this the idea of eternal return, an idea familiar to Seneca from Plato's Laws, book 3.) The universe does not perish, and presumably must take on infinite number of configurations awaiting the gaze(s) of future inquirers.

 

On The Very Idea of Non-Western Philosophy

The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions.--Jay Garfield & Bryan Van Norden "If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is" New York Times.

The quoted passage are the first few lines of an editorial that has generated huge discussion. It proposes for professional philosophy departments to embrace "faculty" and "curricular diversity" or failing that to rename their departments, "Anglo-European Philosophical Studies." I dislike and reject Garfield & Van Norden's use of the "Western" (or European) vs "non Western" (non-European) philosophy distinction--I reject not in the name of universal, homogeneous reason. Before I get to the substance of my concerns, I offer two examples to motivate my rejection of this distinction:

First, 'Islamic' philosophy is categorized as non-Western (non-European). But this is geographically odd because so much of the best of it (Ibn Rushd, Ibn Tufayl) was written in what we would now call Spain. They sometimes understood themselves as 'Western' and treated earlier generations of Islamic philosophers as writing in the Orient. (Sometimes they also seem to suggest that they are at the periphery far from the main centers of learning [Baghdad, Damascus, etc.]). To treat 'Islamic' philosophy as non-Western is conceptually odd because it so clearly influenced philosophy we characterize as 'Western' in subsequent ages (for example through Italianate Averroests, and eventually Spinoza.) It is also strange in a more important sense, perhaps, nearly ALL of what counts as 'The Golden age of Islamic philosophy' is explicitly or implicitly a commentary on Plato and Aristotle (or a correction to it). [Something similar can be said about "Jewish" philosophy.]

Second,  Franz Fanon -- try divorcing his stuff from Hegel, existentialism, psycho-analytic theory, etc. -- and Du Bois are both enmeshed in 'Western philosophy' (I am not claiming they are enmeshed in the same bit. Their criticisms are as much immanent to (okay) 'Euro-centric' philosophizing as external to it. And, in virtue of being immanent to the tradition, they also revive it and extend it. The previous sentence gets at some of the more philosophical reservations about the terminology.

Before I get to those, I frankly acknowledge that I have political reasons to dislike the distinction between Western vs non-Western. Because I live and work in an environment in which 'Western' is treated as a term of approbation and superiority over other civilizations and philosophies, especially Islam (and Africa) I think it is dangerous when intellectual contributions are (apologies for the jargon) othered by way of negation as strange or alien. Clearly Van Norden and Garfield don't think Western philosophy is superior  or that non-European traditions are inferior. But they unintentionally reinforce the sense that we're talking about extremely distinct and opposed, perhaps even incommensurable, traditions. This may be true in some respects (as they suggest), but it is not true in all respects for all the traditions lumped as 'non-Western.'

A moment's reflection on the fact that Islamic and Jewish philosophy are lumped in with so-called N0n-Western (and non-European) philosophy suggests that Christian philosophy just is Western philosophy. Leaving aside the fact that traditionally, the Christian element in European philosophy has always been traced back to Jerusalem not Athens, the tacit identification of Christian with Western had been thought awkward after, say, Auschwitz. More subtly, it is notable that whole branches of Christianizing philosophy associated with various strands of Greek/Russian Orthodoxy are unfamiliar to even very competent historians of (okay) western philosophy.

So much for terminology. Garfield and Van Norden misrepresent what contemporary professional philosophy is like when they focus on the canon. As I have said before in response to arguments by Nathaniel Coleman, while there is, indeed, a fairly narrow historical canon in professional philosophy, this canon is not central to philosophical education, philosophical method, and professional advancement/success within analytical philosophy. In addition, the way the canonical texts/authors are treated is often extremely a-historical (even by folk who are committed to contextual history of philosophy). That means that, in part, it is not obvious in what sense "broadening the philosophical curriculum" in the way that they suggest really challenges the way philosophy is practiced.

There is a more subtle point lurking here. Some of the texts/authors from these non-Western traditions also express rather sectarian commitments. Some of the Islamic philosophers that I teach use examples that may well be thought racist (whatever their intent) and they call/permit for genocide on certain kind of savages (anticipating some of the worst features of 18th and 19th century European philosophy). It's a bit awkward to promote diversity by removing more tolerant/broad-minded authors in favor of dogmatic types, and this suggests that the underlying vision for their proposals has not been thought out carefully (I extend this point below).

Now you may think I am writing from an ultra-conservative perspective on diversifying the canon. But (as regular readers know) that's not so: as a scholar, I have enthusiastically embraced the recovery of knowledge of and produced by female philosophers in the early modern period and in early analytical philosophy; recovery of forgotten male feminists in the early modern period; and I have started teaching and blogging about Islamic political philosophy. In all cases this has influenced my teaching, my scholarship (and blog posts), and my self-understanding. (I am not suggesting I am a pioneer in any of this.) I do so not just out of curiosity about the unfamiliar. But because I sense that such recovery helps me contribute to the improvement of philosophy today and in the future.

'Philosophy' in the previous sentence stands for the traditions, which are oriented around certain problems and puzzles, and certain non-trivial commitments about the nature of logic and reality (tied together by what I cal 'Tractarian semantics'), as well as some canonical figures/texts and thought experiments, that I have been partially educated in and, perhaps, help extend. It has, as Van Norden & Garfield argue, elements of parochiality and, as I note regularly, as much an elevating as sordid history.* But, as Abe Stone reminded me on Facebook, there is a difference between being a department of (such) philosophy or about that philosophy. When I note the racism or eugenics in certain thought experiments or texts that I teach or admire or use, it calls for a response which, after soul-searching, can generate creative philosophical moves or a reckoning of the problem. It always runs the risk (or joy) of generating a transformative experience of me (and less likely) the tradition (recall). But that's not so when one studies another tradition's philosophy and learns about their commitments. That can be kept at arm's length, undigested, without transforming me or my own traditions.

It does not follow we should not study genuinely other traditions nor should we keep them from our students and ourselves. I agree that even given scarce resources (of time, attention, money), we need to be also outer-oriented. More important, in some parts of the world, where our elite universities are engaged in a peculiarly new form of educational mission -- with host countries paying to have a campus with a liberal arts education that in some ways reflects aspirational values not to mention economic hopes [Garfield teaches at Yale Singapore]+ --, it's quite possible that there a new curriculum and diversity may generate a new form of philosophy that, in turn, will help transform the philosophy practiced in North America, Europe, and many of their former colonies. That's an experiment in the philosophy of education we may see come to fruition in the times of our lives. ** 

 

After Virtue After the Rant

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead...What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them?

The answer in key part is: the exercise or the lack of exercise of the relevant virtues...Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of the relevant intellectual virtues--these corrupt traditions, just they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiment...Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) After Virtue, 222-223.

I often think that analytical philosophy is tainted beyond hope; our complicity in cultures of sexual harassment; our unwillingness to reflect on the patterns of exclusion, intellectual, racial, and personal; our repeated willingness to champion and be championed by intellectual bullies who have offered the world little of permanent value -- love, joy, beauty, etc.; our insistence that we're the party of truth and justice, while being unable to address in a forthright matter all the petty compromises with power and privilege we've made, etc. Of course, these are the predictable by-products of professional advancement. I recognize in myself the despair of a former-idealist; I should be a reactionary by now, but with age I turn the cliche up-side down: I am more critical of, and less comfortable with, the ways of the world than when I was a younger man.

But my heart is softened when I learned from MacIntyre this week that Gilbert Ryle wrote sensibly on Jane Austen's moral philosophizing; Ryle linked it, after distinguishing between a Calvinist and Aristotelian ethic, firmly with the "secular and aesthetic Aristotelianism of Shaftesbury." (No scholar would probably describe Shaftesbury like that now, but, when one reflects on it, Ryle is being insightful.) Not for the first time, I am struck by the fact that the more I learn about the history of analytical philosophy the quirkier -- in a good sense -- our tradition becomes.

Last week, after my rant went viral, with a guilty conscience, I found my copy of After Virtue and I decided to bring it on a conference trip to Austria and read it at earliest possible moment. I had been meaning to re-read it since I wrote this post (on MacIntyre's penetrating criticism of Rorty). Much to my surprise, the book had been clearly unread since I bought it second-hand in Red Lodge, Wyoming, during the Summer of 1992. (A stamp of The Broadway Bookstore is still clearly visible.)

I don't remember buying After Virtue. Judging by google.maps, the book-store is gone, although several others that look familiar are still in Red Lodge--a charming (undoubtedly quite touristy now) Western town that always stuck in my mind as the ideal quiet spot to write novels while having access to some of the comforts of civilization. Perhaps it's also a good place to await the fall of our civilization. (I have not been back.)

Even so, I don't share in After Virtue's narrative of decline -- it closes with the thought that we have entered  'new dark ages' -- and dreams of a new philosophical prophet to point the way out of our 'barbarism' (MacIntyre uses St. Benedict as exemplar (p. 263)). It's not that I am more optimistic than MacIntyre about our situation since the early 1980s, but rather because I have come to think that all ages, even the relatively prosperous and peaceful ones, are barbarous. That ours is an age of demagoguery and racialized nationalism -- identity politics is not limited to college campuses -- , and of demographic and environmental fears does not distinguish us from others. Even the sincerity of our religious fundamentalists is a recurring possibility. All ages call "men and women of good will" (263) to join in the endless task of minimizing the evils others inflict on each other. History teaches that more often than not those of good will are not up to the task. 

Despite the gloom, or perhaps because of it, After Virtue is a book for adults; I found it exhilarating reading. It offers many complex, interwoven arguments and, despite its relentless earnestness and argumentative and historical short-cuts, each page contains a sentence or two that will stop you in your tracks. Long before academics invented a scholarly industry around neoliberalism as the vice of our times, MacIntyre sets his sights on the bureaucrat's disguise as a technocrat (and the odd alliance with the therapist as exemplars of our times). In chapter 8, MacIntyre defends so-called epistemic versions of Knightian uncertainty in order to undermine claims to managerial expertise. (He seems to be unaware of Knight; I return to that some other time.) Some of the best lines in the book are its critical treatment of the performative theory of self, now associated with Judith Butler, but apparently articulated  by Erving Goffman in the 1950s and 60s.*

Indeed, I discerned I was right to feel guilty for not having mentioned MacIntyre in my rant because my distinction between the practice and the philosophical politics of philosophy that is presupposed in my rant, resonates with MacIntyre's use of a distinction between practice and institutions. And throughout the book he anticipates my own impatience with overblown and self-congratulatory claims of philosophical progress. More important, and much to my surprise, he articulates the ways in which taints from the past cannot be ignored for those that inherit tradition (country, practice, religion, etc.). Despite, or perhaps, because of his fondness for Aristotle, an unmistakable point of his argument is the diagnosis of what we would now call white privilege as a consequence of American slavery (220); he leaves no doubt that history generates obligations to latecomers.

I close with an observation on MacIntyre on Austen. At key junctures in his argument, MacIntyre tacitly corrects Ryle's claim that Austen's outlook is secular, by repeatedly insisting she is "a Christian." Evidently, classifying the past correctly is an urgent task if we fight the corrosion of intellectual narratives.