Digressions&Impressions

How to Fix the Referee Crisis in Professional Philosophy

It has come to the point that the most suitable referee(s) for a paper are almost never available. It takes us so long to find reviewers, sometimes a month, six weeks or more (this situation is also exacerbated by the fact that many people don't respond to referee requests at all). This lengthens the span of time even more for the total review process. All sorts of small fixes don't work anymore, e.g., shortening the time that people get to review, asking for alternatives (this is still very much appreciated, but unfortunately alternative referees are just as unavailable). 

Of course, it could be that my editorial experience is atypical--I'm just one scholar.

But it is my strong suspicion that the peer review system is finally broken beyond reasonable repair. We've seen a slow worsening of the situation and the pandemic has finally broken the system. People are burnt out and overburdened, job candidates increasingly desperate.--Helen de Cruz "Seems like the peer review system has given up the ghost" @The Philosophers' Cocoon

De Cruz's piece has generated a huge discussion, not just among the Cocooners, but also (here) at Daily Nous. The situation she describes has been a long time coming (and for once I can claim I partially predicted it (recall here; here)). There are a number of major interlinked reasons for the current status quo (extreme referee shortage): (i) an extreme scarcity of decent tenure track jobs relative to number of PhDs minted. This is a major source of anxiety throughout the profession. (ii) The unreasonably low acceptance rate of philosophy journals such that perfectly competent papers have to be refereed multiple times by a fixed number of referees. (iii) The perceived role that prestige and quality of publications play in hiring. And, perhaps, (iv) the relative ease of free-riding in the current system. The real free riders are universities (who outsource quality control without rewarding it internally--my own university never even asks to list refereeing anywhere) rather than particular individuals. In what follows, I take for granted that the low acceptance rates are functional, that is, maintained in order to produce prestige (recall this post). And the combination of (i-iii) has generated a veritable arms race in publication. In addition, (v) the long delays in refereeing time, have made it prudent to have multiple papers under review at the same time, thus, exacerbating the underlying problem.

In what follows, I take for granted that the norm of regular publication has been good for professional philosophy. Reasonable people can disagree about this. But in my view it has allowed for more fine-grained discussion and for specializations to emerge that have improved quality. Yes, it risks generating hyperspecialized echo-chambers with lowest common denomination salami publications, but these, in turn, generate arbitrage opportunities for people who read widely or who practice what I call synthetic philosophy.

I also take for granted that (i) is entrenched in the political economy of modern universities. I am complicit in it, if you find a way to create a revolution, good for you. But what we can do, as a profession, is to cut the ties between prestige, journal publication, and hiring decisions and so reduce the need for referees. And we can do that if we destroy the role of pre-eminence of journals in manufacturing prestige, and restore them to the role of disseminators of knowledge and sites of discussion. This can be achieved in two steps: first, all the major philosophy journals should commit to publishing, say, 25% of articles received. That's considerably higher than the status quo (Phil Quarterly, publishes just 4% of over 850 papers received.) This will have six obvious effects: it will reduce the load on referees; it will end the excessive role of chance in where your paper is published; it will reduce (but not eliminate) the steep prestige hierarchy of our current journal system; it will reduce the excessive delays in getting work into print caused by the difficulty of finding referees; it will turn most major journals into paper mills; it will increase citation rates within the profession.

One may worry that once journals can't play the role of extreme prestige generators, then it's entrenches the roles of PhD granting departments. I agree, and that would be bad. So, and this is the second step: another institution has to take its place. Luckily, such a practice already exists in neighboring disciplines and is present in incipient form in ours: the article (and book) prize. What we need is a proliferation of prizes in philosophy: conference prizes (which are pre-publication); professional association prizes (of the major and smaller societies); best article prizes by journals themselves; and we need more versions of The Philosopher’s Annual.:) In fact, as Don Ainslie reminded me, there should be more prizes on different grounds too: philosophy has far too few of these, which in turn impacts success in interdisciplinary competitions (e.g. national scholarly societies, grant competitions, etc.).+ 

At this point one may worry that such prizes are easily shaped by politics, and that our time will be spent adjudicating prizes rather than refereeing. On the former, I don't see how politics can be removed from the equation entirely (as it is, the journal system has a major 'trust us' component recall). I do not deny that genuine masked review, when it happens, is a real potential equalizer. And notice that on my proposal, we don't eliminate that. People who come from non prestigious intellectual backgrounds can still use journal publication to become noticed. (But the initial signal's power may well be reduced.) And one can use masked review also in prize committees. Over time prizes that show a good track record in their judgment will become more prestigious, and so complement journals in prestige generation and quality control. 

In a way, my proposal is a variant on, and complements, the post-peer crowd review advocated by Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen which they have defended in print and at Daily Nous (here),* and the ideas promoted by Katzav and Vaessen in a paper in Philosopher's Imprint. (Recall also my post here during the Hypatia controvery, but I had limited the idea for work that might be controversial in various ways and in order to internalize political considerations in a transparent and fruitful way in the review process.) Using prizes is a mechanism to solve the coordination and collective action problem inherent in such proposals, and to assuage worries that non-experts may overwhelm the wisdom of our own crowds.

On the latter concern, this is undeniably true. But I suspect it's more fun to evaluate papers that have already been published -- and so have undergone non trivial quality and editorial control. Also, while writing a prize report is a non-trivial exercise, it's only required for the winning paper(s).  So, on balance I would expect it should reduce the load on those in the profession that are the back-bone of our current referee-system.** 

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.

 

Perry Anderson, and the Political Failure of the Rawlsian Project: Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 3

If we compare the general fortune of these thinkers of the radical Right to that of more conventional eminences of the Centre, there is a pregnant contrast. The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, may have accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of all four put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his reputation with express commitments, is no doubt part of the reason. But it is also to do with the distance between a discourse of justice, however Olympian, and the realities of a society driven by power and profit. The quartet considered here had the political courage of their convictions. But these also went, more largely, with the grain of the social order. So although they could often appear marginal, even eccentric figures to their colleagues, their voice was heard in· the chancelleries. Schmitt counselled Papen and received Kiesinger; Straussians thronged the National Security Council under Reagan, and surround Quayle; Hayek earned formal homage from Thatcher on the floor of the Commons; and Oakeshott, under the anaesthetic Major, has entered the official breviary. Even arcane teaching can reach gentlemen. They are the heirs.--Perry Anderson (1992) "The Intransigent Right" in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, p. 28 [HT Jonathan Kramnick]

Once upon a time political radicals were Utilitarians. I also am going to ignore the acrobatics required to lump Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot together. Rather, my interest in Anderson's comments is in his treatment of the failure of a scholarly community devoted to political philosophy to have political uptake.

Let's stipulate, with the Marxists, that the aim of political philosophy is to shape political life. Here Anderson suggests that the manner of so doing is in terms of what Machiavelli and Hobbes would call 'council' to the politicians by the students of the magister or by the magister himself in person or through his books. Anderson explains the absence of Rawls and Rawlsians in the corridors of contemporary power in virtue of the fact that a discourse of justice does not sell in a social environment devoted to power and profit. The political failure of the Rawlsian project is, then, plainly due to the demand side: successful politicians have no use for it (and lurking behind them an indifferent electorate). But he also hints at something else -- "express commitments" -- is lacking in the Rawlsian "academic industry," which seems to be engaged in cheap talk which, if I sense the drift of his remarks correctly, involves mostly servile people echoing each other, or at least sharing considerable common ground. There is striking evidence of this claim in Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice. She observes that "when [in 1979] Amartya Sen gave the Tanner Lectures, he took for granted that there was no need to justify his focus on equality." (208)+

As I noted in my first two essays (recall here; here) on Forrester's booke, it's easy to exaggerate the political impotence of Rawls' political philosophy in the corridors of power. A year after Anderson wrote these lines, the then most visible public interpreter of Rawls, Norman Daniels -- who started his political career as co-chair of SDS and gave a once famous speech on the steps of University Hall April 9, 1969 -- , was asked to be a member of Hillary Clinton's healthcare taskforce in 1993.* In a nearby possible world America would have had health care provision along Rawlsian lines. (Of course, Anderson will not be impressed by such possibilities.)

One may well suspect that Anderson's Machiavellian focus on the halls of power misses an important step. Unlike, say, Locke or Bentham, it is not entirely obvious that Rawls proposed an art of government. Given the Rawlsian focus on the basic institutions of society, one may well argue that the day to day political tactics of the executive are far less important than the role of ideas in shaping fundamental institutions of society: law, education, healthcare, criminal justice, welfare, etc. So, if one is interested in establishing and diagnosing the failure of the Rawlsian project outside the academy it would be useful to study how and to what extent (or not!) Rawlsian ideas percolated through the law and welfare provisions, etc.

I do not mean to suggest that the lack of political uptake (by the political class) of Rawls during the last half century isn't striking. I have often mused about the fact that as political life seemed to be moving toward the right, political philosophy seemed to have moved leftward. And so I was thrilled that Katrina Forrester addressed the issue in a scholarly context. It's an important sub-theme throughout the book -- where it is often operationalized rather narrowly in terms of the influence of Oxford philosophers on the British Labour Party--, and is, in fact, the major theme of chapter seven, where it is introduced as follows:

Liberal philosophers underestimated how high the New Right would rise. Many did not see or did not object to the process of marketization taking place, whereby social relationships were subordinated to market logic and new aspects of life were commodified. In part this was because they were preoccupied not with the rising right, but the left. For political philosophers, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan initially provided an opportunity to consider the nature of the social democratic left’s egalitarianism. The collapse of affluence during the previous decade, particularly in Britain, had looked at first like it might benefit the socialist left. “In the 1950s many of us thought that inequalities would diminish as society became more prosperous,” wrote the Labour Party grandee and later founder of the Social Democratic Party Roy Jenkins in 1972. “It is now clear that this view was at best oversimplified and at worst just wrong.” Over the course of the 1970s, the Labour Party had responded by returning to ideas of industrial democracy and public ownership. In the United States, even as the traditional working- class constituency of left politics fragmented and was recomposed, and the political efforts to sustain it were abandoned, the Cold War thaw and leftward tilt of academia enabled the radicalization of philosophy, seen in the appeal of anticolonial global redistributive politics and Rawlsian engagements with socialism. With the relationship of capitalism to democracy under scrutiny following the fiscal crises, a socialist resurgence gradually became visible within political philosophy. “The apparent pause in economic growth, the crisis in stabilization policy occasioned by the current inflationary threats and realities, and the loss of purpose in redistributional measures all combine,” Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1978, “to raise anew the question of alternatives to capitalism.” By the 1980s, liberal political philosophy was being pushed to the left. Marxism was poised to enter the philosophical mainstream. Katrina Forrester In The Shadow of Justice, p. 205

Forrester echoes Anderson's point that elite political philosophers simply underestimated the more right wing thinkers amongst them. Lurking in Forrester's description is a very different kind of explanation of the irrelevance of Rawls to political power. In her account, political philosophy is sensitive to and tracking major social changes to which it responds and, one may, say offers solutions to. It just so happens, one might say, that its preferred policies are not popular among the political class (either because it is corrupted or because it senses there is no electoral gain to be had from pursuing democratic socialism). I return to this below. Furthermore, Forrester suggests that the end of the cold war, alongside a perhaps contingent leftward orientation of the academy, facilitated this leftward turn of liberal egalitarianism. I hasten to add, as Forrester notes, that in this period even the theories of analytic Marxists were "populated by individual rather than collective agents and focused on distribution and ownership rather than labor." (206) 

Later in the chapter, Forrester suggests, however, that while political philosophers were tracking something, they did not really understand, or at least failed to register important changes to their own societies:

The irony of this change in focus was that it did not help philosophers identify the transformation in the state they were witnessing. Those [among liberal egalitarian philosophers] most focused on the New Right overlooked the decline of democratic control that followed from the depoliticization, privatization, and weakening of the welfare functions of the state that occurred in the 1980s. By contrast, many who maintained Rawls’s assumptions and sought to deepen liberal philosophy’s democratic procedures did not engage with the radicalization [within philosophy] of egalitarianism.(207) [Insertions added to facilitate discussion--ES]

It's a bit of shame that Forrester does not engage with Melinda Cooper's Family Values (which she cites in different context, see p. 332 n 127). I want to pick up two themes from that book (recall this post; and here). First, Cooper shows that Stateside in non-trivial respects welfare reform (which drew on libertarian and socially conservative ideas) entailed the intensification of the state's involvement with and micro-management of the lives of poor people (who are, say, exposed to invasive drug-testing requirements) not the least massively increased incarceration. These illiberal and inhumane policies were democratically enacted and hugely popular at the time (perhaps still are) not the least because of the racial undertones of such policies. (Forrester notes this, too, on p. 228.)

As an aside, I suspect Forrrester falls victim here, not uncommon among left-leaning-theorists of idealizing (true) democracy, and of being unwilling to countenance that democratic processes often produce manifestly unjust outcomes. (I call this 'democratic innocence'). It's also not obviously true that democratic control really lessened in the 80s. While the administrative state expanded with delegated powers, those powers could be and sometimes were clawed back. In the UK (in the 80s), most changes involved centralization of control, but that does not entail lessening of democratic control. A lot of British privatization created monopoly suppliers that were regulated, and while such regulation was often at arm's length of government and parliament, the absence of de facto democratic control was more due to lack of political will (and perhaps the corrupting influence of revolving doors between industry, politicians, and civil servants) than lack of political power. 

Second, Cooper notes (and I am simplifying here) that by focusing on the male-gendered family wage and by ignoring the emancipatory desires of women and ethnic minorities (pertaining to work, sexuality, life style, etc.), social democratic/left-liberal parties missed out on changes in the electorate that gave the New Right part of its dynamism, and demanded from the Left new kind of reactions. And this suggests that Forrester is right to claim that the philosophers of the age did not understand their own society, but provides the wrong diagnosis of it.*** 

Given the demographics of professional philosophy at the time -- overwhelmingly male and white --, it is no surprise (after the fact) that political philosophers focused either arguing for egalitarian outcomes from individualist premises or doubling down on democratic procedures completely missed the boat on issues pertaining to race, ethnicity, diversity, sexuality, environmental health, etc. Many such issues were discussed in other disciplines, and these were disparaged, or when philosophers did approach them it often entailed giving up on, or delaying greatly, a career at the "elite institutions" (p. 242) that are Forrester's focus. (The career trajectories of, say, Iris Marion Young and Charles Mills are instructive.) That is to say (and now i am using Forrester's vocabulary), the internal politics of (elite) political philosophy left it in a bad epistemic position to develop the conceptual structures needed to be salient for a refashioned Left policy because, in part, its own elite demographics was out of step with social developments.+ And this meant, again quoting Forrester, that while there was conceptual room for "bottom-up challenges to the basic structure, to widen its scope and to include gender, racist, and interpersonal injustices. But there were few top-down reassessments." (237) 

This second point is, thus, in the spirit of Forrester's own analysis. Her book starts, in fact, by telling us "this is the story of the triumph of a small group of influential, affluent, white, mostly male, analytical political philosophers who worked at a handful of elite institutions in the United States and Britain, especially Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford. It is a story that includes few women, except at the margins, and fewer people of color."   (xvii) So, she is highly aware of the facts I am appealing to. Recall from my earlier posts that the official main focus of Forrester's "[i] book is about the politics of political philosophy and [ii] the political implications of conceptual choices." (xxi; numbers added to facilitate discussion.) Now, Forrester is careful not to suggest a causal connection between [i] and [ii]. But nothing prevents it. 

Let me close with two final observation inspired by Cooper. First, Forrester correctly notes "the horizons of philosophers [of that generation] were shaped by defenses and critiques of the market, and so, like nearly everyone else, many misdiagnosed the changes they were living through." (238) It's hard not to agree here. When I started blogging about philosophy of economics, I vowed not to recycle the state vs market debates that had been suffocating twentieth century political philosophy. (It's pretty clear that states constitute markets, and that markets shape states.) But Forrester misses that it was, in part, the dynamic effects of markets (alongside education and immigration) that created the constituencies among the non-wealthy for whom the family wage was not the highest priority.

Second, it's natural to read this digression, and suspect that I think demography is destiny and always decisive. By contrast, Forrester's "like nearly everyone else" suggests that knowing one's age is generally out of reach to those in elite echo chambers. (Here she and Anderson end up close together again.) But whatever one thinks of Foucault's interventions in politics, in his theoretical work he clearly understood his own age in a way that those working at "Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford" did not. And while the sample size is incredibly small, one can't help but wonder if the very different educational trajectories and internal gate-keeping didn't (and doesn't continue) to play a role here. To be continued...

 

 

Russell, Locke and Order without Authority

There is, of course, imperialistic commerce, where men are forced to buy at the point of the sword; but this is not the kind that generates Liberal philosophies, which have flourished best in trading cities that have wealth without much military strength. In the present day, the nearest analogue to the commercial cities of antiquity and the middle ages is to be found in small countries such as Switzerland, Holland, and Scandinavia.
    The Liberal creed, in practice, is one of live-and-let-live, of toleration and freedom so far as public order permits, of moderation and absence of fanaticism in political programs. Even democracy, when it becomes fanatical, as it did among Rousseau's disciples in the French Revolution, ceases to be Liberal; indeed, a fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible, as appeared in England under Cromwell and in France under Robespierre. The genuine Liberal does not say "this is true," he says "I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best." And it is only in this limited and undogmatic sense that he will advocate democracy.
    What has theoretical philosophy to say that is relevant to the validity or otherwise of the Liberal outlook?
    The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology. The decisions of the Council of Nicaea are still authoritative, but in science fourth-century opinions no longer carry any weight. In the U.S.S.R. the dicta of Marx on dialectical materialism are so unquestioned that they help to determine the views of geneticists on how to obtain the best breed of wheat, though elsewhere it is thought that experin1ent is the right way to study such problems. Science is empirical, tentative, and undogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. The scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of ·what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.

    Locke, who first developed in detail the empiricist theory of knowledge, preached also religious toleration, representative institutions, and the limitation of governmental power by the system of checks and balances. Few of his doctrines were new, but he developed them in a weighty manner at just the moment when the English government was prepared to accept them. Like the other men of 1688, he was only reluctantly a rebel, and he disliked anarchy as much as he disliked despotism. Both in intellectual and in practical matters he stood for order without authority; this might be taken as the motto both of science and of Liberalism. It depends, clearly, upon consent or assent. In the intellectual world it involves standards of evidence which, after adequate discussion, will lead to a measure of agreement among experts. In the practical world it involves submission to the majority after all parties have had an opportunity to state their case...

    I conclude that, in our day as in the time of Locke, empiricist Liberalism (which is not incompatible with democratic social­ism) is the only philosophy that can be adopted by a man who, on the one hand, demands some scientific evidence for his beliefs, and, on the other hand, desires human happiness more than the prevalence of this or that parry or creed. Our con­fused and difficult world needs various things if it is to escape disaster, and among these one of the most necessary is that, in the nations which still uphold Liberal beliefs, these beliefs should be whole-hearted and profound, not apologetic towards dogmatisms of the right and of the left, but deeply persuaded of the value of liberty, scientific freedom, and mutual forbear­ance. For without these beliefs life on our politically divided but technically unified planet will hardly continue to be pos­sible.--Bertrand Russell (1947) "Philosophy and Politics" in Unpopular Essays (1950),  p. 14-20

Because George Reisch's (2005) How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic is so beautifully written and so carefully argued its thesis has become part of the lore about our intellectual fathers and (fewer) mothers that after a brief flowering of socially relevant philosophy in Red Vienna, they retreated (cowed like little schoolboys--I exclude Anscombe here) into the ivory tower where they could contemplate their crystal clear arguments about minutiae. I suspect this lore is peddled in part by continental philosophers, who after having lost the war,  can feel that they are now on the right side of history, and in part by our kewl kidz who, in order to climb academia's greasy pole, have to burry the previous generation--and better yet if it buries the boring liberalism of Pax Americana.

I exaggerate, of course, but as regular readers know, I think Reisch's book didn't quite capture properly the mainstream liberal alternative (as articulated by Ernest Nagel) to the Sturm und Drang of Neurath and Carnap, and so obscured the political nature and political aims of the disciplinary choices (see here for the scholarly argument). As it happens Reisch mentions the significance of Russell's politics  -- as an important representative of "the anti-Stalinist left" (158) -- throughout his book, and has a whole section on the The Russell Affair, but he does not actually say much about Russell's political theory such as it was and when he does, he treats him as a pacifist and socialist (50). Now Russell's pacificism was heroic, and there is no doubt that Russell's mature heart was a species of socialism (see here for a fine essay).

As the quoted passages above reveal, Russell's socialism was of a kind that is very much part of a broader liberal tradition. And it is worth noting that the essay I quote contains true praise of Popper's Open Society and its Enemies. (This is something one wouldn't expect in light of Reisch's treatment which treats The Open Society as a target of the folk he admires.) Now, Popper's views are also compatible with a kind of liberal, tempered social democracy, so I don't think Russell's admiration is a coincidence. 

But few socialists can bring themselves to write so admiringly of Locke as Russell. And few would be so open about their reservations about democracy, and their "limited" support for it. And so something also goes off track if one merely calls Russell a 'socialist.'

At the start of his then recent, History of Western Philosophy, Russell treats Locke as the representative of a "half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual." (I mention the book in part because Russell self-plagiarizes from it in the essay!)* And later in the book, when he introduces Locke, he says, "The first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy is to be found in Locke, the most influential though by no means the most profound of modern philosophers."  I don't mean to suggest Russell only admires Locke. My favorite passage in the History is this one: "No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite." And while Russell is critical of Locke going all in on the defense of property, he thinks Locke's political philosophy is the least worst (in the History) or the last one standing ("Philosophy and Politics").

Now, unlike Nagel, for whom his liberalism is intrinsic, even constitutive of his philosophy (including his philosophy of science), Russell's political writings are often treated, not the least by Russell, as non-philosophical. And, speaking as a historian, that is not wholly without merit--his political essays are often unlike the works that established his philosophical credentials. Russell himself acknowledges in the "preface" to Unpopular Essays, that his essays "may seem flippant." And they certainly do not seem to belong to what professional philosophy was becoming in the age (under the influence of Carnap and Nagel). But Russell once quite rightly described his "life" -- in a self-authored "obituary" that is, in fact, in dialogue with Hume's little autobiography -- as having "a certain anachronistic consistency, reminiscent of that of the aristocratic rebels of the early nineteenth century." (p. 171) And, crucially, he claims that his principles "governed his actions." That is to say, as these essays articulate these principles are philosophical by the lights and standards of that earlier epoch. And this is the use of 'philosophy' in the final paragraph quotes above (e.g., empiricist Liberalism is the only philosophy).

Order without authority is, of course, an excellent summing up of liberalism,+ even if, too often, there is more than a hint of violence supporting that order. And not unlike the more classically liberal Michael Polanyi, Russell insists that science and liberalism are kind of mirrors of each other (another version of this idea can be found in Ernest Nagel as I argued.) I intend to return occasionally to the character and content of Russell's liberalism (in which there is plenty to criticize). 

But here I want to close with an observation on Russell's claim that "The genuine Liberal does not say "this is true," he says "I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best."" Now, there is a natural, epistemological reading of this such that the 'present circumstances' just refers to the evidence supporting it. (This is, in fact, Nagel's version of pragmatism in the era.) And what I am about to say is not meant to contradict the natural reading. But I also think one could read "present circumstances" as referring to the political and social circumstances of the age--that strikes me as quite plausible in light of the argument Russell is putting forth. And that suggests that the social significance or social effects (including inductive risk) of an opinion enter into its evaluation. And this puts Russell's account into the realm of responsible speech (just like Nagel's political defense of analytic philosophy).

If the previous proposal is plausible, then for Russell a liberal's views are sensitive to political circumstances. So, say, one's defense of democracy is sensitive to the particulars of one's age or place and one's considered judgment how 'human happiness' can be promoted. And so while the non-liberal will see lack of consistency in first order judgments, the liberal will see merely different tactics while aiming for order without authority in the service of happiness. 

 

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. 

Nancy Bauer vs Carnap and Langton on Philosophical Authority

    What kind of authority is necessary for a philosopher’s vision of how things are with the world to hold sway? What is necessary, to put the question in Austinian terms, for the successful execution of a philosophical speech act? More fundamentally, what is a philosophical speech act? What sort of illocutionary force does a felicitous philosophical speech act wield? Under what conditions is such a speech act felicitous? Let us pose these questions in light of one of Langton’s philosophical speech acts. At the climax of “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” Langton writes: “The claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials: it is not trickery, or ‘sleight of hand’; it is by no means ‘philosophically indefensible.’” What act is being attempted in this passage? Well, at this juncture in her article Langton is epitomizing a claim that she has been trying in the article to defend. She is also engaged in a further act of claiming (that the claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials). If we inspect the felicity conditions for such an act, we will not find that having authority is one of them. But we can say more about Langton’s speech act than that she is lodging a claim. For isn’t she trying to legitimate MacKinnon’s view of the relationship between pornography and sexual subordination, to rank this claim as better justified than the claims that would purport to undermine it, and perhaps even to make it the case that the lodgers of these would-be undermining claims are silenced at the level of the success of their own illocutions—that their attempts to extol pornography will come off as unauthoritative? If so, then by her own lights these actions will misfire to the extent that she lacks the requisite authority. But what is the requisite sort of authority? What authorizes philosophical speech?
    The obvious answer is: reason itself. But this answer begs the question of how reason, on any construal of the notion, gets its authority in the culture. All you have to do is look around to conclude that, contrary to the assumption that appears to pervade philosophical writing these days, the culture does not take reason’s authority to be self-evident. Plato, for one, felt this state of affairs to be intolerable: on his view, any philosopher worthy of the name was obligated not just to commune with the forms but to come down from the mountaintop and attempt to attract the citizenry to the sublime, if almost imperceptible, beauty of reason. It was not enough for the philosopher to churn out journal articles on the mountaintop and hope that the hoi polloi would at some later date decide to take an interest in their acts of legitimating, ranking, and so on. To be a philosopher for Plato is to provide a vision of how things are with the world and to attempt to attract people to the project of recognizing themselves—or not, as the case may be—in this vision.
    Aristotle agreed with Plato. So did the medievals, and so did any number of modern philosophers. In fact, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that philosophy seems to have beaten a retreat to the proverbial ivy tower. Part of the impetus, of course, has been the increasing specialization and institutionalization of the discipline. But philosophers’ relatively recent reluctance to worry about our authority in the culture also has nobler roots. It is to some extent a product of horror at the way their colleagues’ work had been exploited by dangerous ideologues—how Marx’s investment in humanizing humanity had given way to Stalinist Russia, how Nietzsche’s celebration of human nature had provided grist for the mill of Hitler. The young Rudolph Carnap alludes to this horror in the preface to the Aufbau, as we see in the following passage:

We cannot hide from ourselves the fact that trends from philosophical-metaphysical and from religious spheres, which protect themselves against [a scientific, rational, and anti-individualistic conception of philosophy], again exert a strong influence precisely at the present time. Where do we derive the confidence, in spite of this, that our call for clarity, for a science that is free from metaphysics, will prevail?—From the knowledge, or, to put it more cautiously, from the belief, that these opposing powers belong to the past.

Vigorously progressive in his politics, committed to the ideals of socialism, and horrified by the elitism he saw in the metaphysics of, most prominently, his contemporary and compatriot Martin Heidegger, Carnap passionately believed that he was morally and politically obliged to treat philosophy as an at least potentially rigorous science. It is understandable, then, that Carnap in his day and age felt that the cost of philosophizing in the old way—the cost of attempting to arrogate cultural authority by the sheer act of writing—was simply too high. Philosophy was instead to take its carefully circumscribed place in a new world, one grounded not on the philosopher’s personal metaphysical vision but on pure reason itself. The philosopher’s goal, Carnap thought, was to employ reason to make progress on fundamental scientific questions of universal interest and importance. The social and political cost of construing the cultural role of philosophy otherwise, he claimed, was simply too high.
   Carnap is to be lauded for his relentless thoughtfulness about what he was doing, within both philosophy and the wider world. My beef is neither with Carnap nor with the style of philosophizing he bequeathed to the next century. My worry, rather, is that Carnap’s conception of philosophical reason has come apart from the reasons for his investment in it—that we have inherited his thought but not his thoughtfulness. (Crucially, I could say exactly the same thing about Freud or Wittgenstein or Kant as an ethicist.)
   What I am in effect worrying about, then, is whether we can afford to continue to cleave to the narrow conceptions of philosophy we have inherited and their implicit claims to self-evident authority. I am not suggesting that we dumb philosophy down in order to rescue the masses. I am not advocating a return, or forward leap, to any particular style or form of philosophizing. I am not denying that we take tremendous political, social, and moral risks when we attempt to provoke other people to unsettle their settled opinions. I am not encouraging us to aim too high. But I am calling for us to commit ourselves to a grander, more ambitious, and more explicit expression of interest in the question of what it is that we are doing and what licenses our doing it. What would it look like for philosophy to issue an audible call for genuine thinking, to compete, that is, with the penchant for self-anesthetization that contemporary culture encourages? What would it look like for us to aspire above all to have a say in the world?--Nancy Bauer (2015) "On Philosophical Authority" in How to do Things With Pornography, pp. 125-128 

Last week, in the context of her criticism of Timothy Williamson, I noted that Bauer's book is full of metaphilosophy. In many ways the quoted passage, which ends chapter 7, is the meta-philosophical core of the book which is why I quoted it length. 

In contemporary philosophy, clarity and rigor in argument is often held up as the ideal. And this can be understood in two ways. One sees in getting the argument right a means to facilitate further discussion (about the premises, or significance of the conclusion). I associate this (dialogic) view of argument with my former NewAPPS colleague, Catarina Dutilh Noveas, and it can also be discerned, as a dynamics of progress, in Daniel Stoljar (recall) Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism.

The other way sees that arguments have a silencing effect at the pain of being called, as Nozick noted, 'irrational.' Nozick expressed the idea as follow:

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premise you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief” Philosophical Explanations, p. 4.*

Bauer's worry about Langton's paper has a family resemblance to Nozick's concern about arguments. I mention Nozick, because there is a natural way to construe Langton's exercise as a kind of legitimate self-defense against the previously successful efforts to delegitimize MacKinnon's views which attempt to end the silencing and subordination of women. To put that in context, in May, I put a tentative syllabus for a feminist theory course online, and a very distinguished legal and political philosopher opined on my facebook page that I should put Langton and not MacKinnon on my syllabus because Langton is far more sophisticated and, after I pushed back, that MacKinnon is philosophically not rigorous. His reaction suggests that indeed Langton has legitimated certain views (and simultaneously and ironically allows some to continue to devalue MacKinnon's contribution). And Langton has become the (ahh) authoritative spokesperson within certain overlapping disciplines -- because conforming to certain standards -- for these views.

Nozick also rejects the self-defense model: "For one's own protection it should not be necessary to argue at all, merely to note publicly what bludgeoning the others are attempting-intellectual satyagraha, to use Gandhi's term for nonviolent resistance." (5) But while this is a noble stance in philosophy, perhaps, it is not apt for the law where it might entail unilateral acquiescence in one's subordination. And while satyagraha is a legitimate political stance, it is not to be prescribed to others (because then it can be a further means of subordination). 

In fact, Langton's paper is not just directed at philosophers who did not give MacKinnon's ideas their due (because they mistakenly treated these as incoherent), it is, as the closing sentence of her paper reveals, also designed to open the door to a change in government policy/law.** And the line of influence is pretty clear: if legal philosophers and judges better understand the coherence and legitimacy of MacKinnon's views, they may well prevent courts from rejecting local (and national) anti-porn ordinances. The form of Langton's speech act is perfectly calibrated to try to shape legally influential elite opinion (which has been preventing local democratic majorities from exercising their political authority). So, it strikes me as a mistake to claim that Langton has not properly conceptualized, as Bauer claims "the illocutionary force of her own words." (114)

I mention this because while Bauer recognizes that Langton is "underwriting a particular political position," (120) Bauer also represents Langton as taking a "very carefully circumscribed role with respect to a certain feminist antipornography position...simply to remove a stumbling block--a charge of incoherence---from the path of MacKinnon and like-minded activists" (122). And as should be clear from the long block quote above, Bauer opposes to this a "grander vision of our profession, our capacity to speak in an authoritative voice in our culture, our capacity to call ourselves and others to task of serious reflection." (122) But because the way elite legal opinion co-shapes judicial review, Langton's approach is not a good exemplar for "the irrelevance of contemporary philosophy in the culture at large....for to be worthy of the name feminists must...be committed to serious and social transformation." (116) For, while Langton's approach (writing in P&PA in 1993) may not be known to the culture at large it does help shape social transformation. 

What Bauer misses is that Stateside, and in places with traditions of constitutional review, the authority of philosophical speech is albeit partially, imperfectly, and indirectly, secured by the constitutional order and the customs/practices and force that secure it. (And if one thinks that philosophy or reason is immanent in the sciences, then the political process institutionalizes philosophy into a powerful force in society in many more (imperfect, partial etc.) ways.) This is why it is not wholly misleading to call constitutional government an Enlightenment project. For contemporary critics (often religious and nationalist in character), these constitutional orders also exhibit the dangers of giving a certain philosophy too much power.+ 

Notice that if this is right, it suggests it is wrong to treat Carnap and others move into the ivory tower as a retreat from political influence. (This is not Bauer's view, but it is sometimes associated with Reisch's influential interpretation of cold war philosophy of science.) For in the proper constitutional order, philosophy's uptake is mediated by judiciary, bureaucracy, technology, and sciences. This is, in fact, a kind of mediated trickle-down of philosophy. 

But this observation actually helps illuminate Bauer's larger project: given the incentives, it is very tempting to speak to fellow elites and not the culture at large if you happen to be a philosopher aiming at political influence. On my view this is, for example a feature of utilitarianism as a technology of government, and helps explain some of its moral failures (when it fails to notice that those not at the table or not as sophisticated with the tools may be harmed badly). Of course, political influence may well fall short of social transformation and so one can, with equal justice, describe the position I have just outlined as a form of pacification of philosophy.

So far I have suggested that Bauer has asked the right question about the authority of philosophical practice. I also have suggested she offers the right diagnoses of most of it, but that it misfires in the case of Langton's project. And while I agree with Bauer that in general, philosophers have 'appropriated' Austin's distinctions against the spirit of Austin's own philosophy, Langton's speech act is an important example of how philosophers can do things with words in our political culture. And I say this even though I agree with Bauer's more methodological criticisms of Langton's approach to claims of pornography's authority (on which I have been silent here).

Now,  I have not suggested that Bauer is wrong to want something different from philosophy. But I think her position is at odds with herself and that her use of Plato exhibits this tension. For even in her depiction of Plato, philosophy does not have an authoritative voice in a culture if by that we mean capable of shaping and even transforming the culture.

Rather, what she shows Plato as doing (and I think this is a plausible and inspiring reading of Plato's philosophy and its role as an instrument to call people to the academy) as being skilled in persuading some to an intellectual way of life in which they are challenged to think autonomously. She never mentions Thoreau, but Thoreau's (delayed, perhaps) effect on the young may be thought an instance of such a true education. This still involves philosophy with a public-facing rhetoric, but it is not a rhetoric aimed at the people at large.  

Yet, feminism has -- by her own lights -- a broader ambition: to end patriarchy, and, thus, to transform society radically. And one may well believe that a kind of mediated trickle-down and the Platonic call to individuals are insufficient if it is divorced from a larger social movement shaping the culture, as it were, from below.  Of course, social movements are populated by individuals who think for themselves and recognize themselves in properly transformed social reality. But if you want an authoritative philosophy apt for that project, I suspect you have to be willing to play with the fire that Carnap warns against.

 

 

On Comedians that Punch Down (Srinivasan/Cowen, and yes Chappelle)

One of the great jokes of the political circumstances of our age is that comedians are the great political commentators of the age. And while it would be silly to claim that David Letterman is solely responsible for the political ascendancy of Donald Trump, it's also true that he helped turn Trump from a New York city character into a national celebrity by repeatedly giving him space for -- I say this with the benefit of hindsight -- test-running his campaign massages. Belatedly, around 2010 Letterman himself grew uneasy about this, calling Trump a racist and sharply demarcating the "circus" (in which Letterman and Trump were both starring (ahh) freaks) from the political arena. The point of the contrast in Letterman's shtick then is to proclaim Trump unfit for office. (The interview with Dr. Phil is still worth re-watching; Jason Zinoman's 2017 New York Times article gives useful background, although does not mention Trump's role in the Central Park five.)

Letterman's underlying instinct that there is a contrast between comedy and politics is an important one. It's no less important than the difference between work-place harassment and comedy. What's  funny and worth having in one context, is oppressive in another.

I am thinking of these matters not just because Plato implies that Aristophanes is responsible for the accusation (and so eventual execution) of Socrates, or the predictable controversy about Dave Chappelle's latest special, and (recall) my struggle with the implications of my admiration for Norm Macdonald, but also because the topic frames the relatively recent, fascinating discussion (or interview) between Tyler Cowen and Amia Srinivasan. 

So, let's first look at how that exchange commences:

COWEN: You’ve described yourself as a utopian feminist. In your vision of utopian feminism, how much room is there for what I would call compartmentalization? Just to give a simple example, if you look at, say, stand-up comedy, a lot of it is sexist or racist, or even if it’s not, it’s perceived as such. What happens to that in the utopia? Do we just compartmentalize and let it continue? Or how do you treat it?

SRINIVASAN: I’m not sure about room for compartmentalization. I do think there’s a lot of room for context. For example, when you’re thinking about the violence in rap lyrics, an obsession that began in the conservative pearl-clutching in the ’80s, you’ve got to think about what those invocations of violence are doing performatively in a piece of art, that is, rap music. It’s not the same thing as someone standing up in the middle of the town square, trying to deliberately incite violence against people.

Not even speaking about the utopia, just speaking about how we should think about performative utterances right now, I think we need to address them with a great deal of contextual sensitivity and think about, in general, what is happening in these particular cases. What seems to be problematic might not be. But then, let’s be honest, if you’ve spent any time in a comedy club — and I recently did that when I was last in LA — there is just a lot of quite naked sexism there.

It’s pretty shocking — despite the fact of this feminist revolution in comedy — just how much stand-up comedy is really quite comedically boring and sexist. Now, there’s this question about — I take it that one of the thoughts you have is something like humor —

COWEN: Right, which has a brutal element to it. How humor fits into utopia is a long-standing puzzle because humor is often brutal, right?

SRINIVASAN: Yes. Look, I don’t think the utopia or the post-revolutionary world is a place without any form of brutality, and it’s certainly not a place without humor. It’s going to have disappointment and heartache and tragedy and tragicomedy. Human foibles will still exist. Heartbreak will exist. With all of those things, you have humor.

What is very limited is the thought — and I’m not suggesting that you’re advocating for this thought — but the thought that you basically need structures of organized political oppression like racism to have humor. The Greeks had humor without having racism. They had other systems of domination, but they had a great and advanced sense of humor, often directed at intellectuals and philosophers, who, I think, are often very much a worthy target.

I think there can be this view on which ending forms of domination and oppression somehow drains life of all that is special and textured about it: humor, love, intimacy, friendship. I just don’t think that’s true. I think, in fact, what the end of domination would do is release us more fully into the specific things that make human life worth living, including humor.

Now, it's quite possible that Cowen surprised Srinivasan with this line of questioning. I recently read (and discussed) Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, and, while she does self-describe as a 'utopian feminist,' and mentions Louis C.K's misdeeds, I don't recall comedy being especially important to her arguments. Having said that Cowen did his homework and seems to have been aware of the fact (as I was not) that Srinivasan has a serious background in theater (as she affirms later in the interview). I hope to return to the meat of the interview some other time.

I was, however, taken aback by Srinivasan's comments that I have just quoted. For, if a post-revolutionary world, feminist or not, cannot do without "brutality," then it is not obviously worth having. Of course, she leaves unclear what 'form of brutality' she foresees, and without further specification there is not much more to say here.*

Second, she thinks that "intellectuals and philosophers" are worthy targets of comedy. Since she is talking about ancient Greece, and is one of our leading philosophers, one might say she forfeits Plato's/Socrates' "ancient quarrel" (Republic, 607b) against Aristophanes on behalf of the rest of us. She does not explain why, but given her comments in context, I assume this is so because the "intellectuals and philosophers" are not at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy and, one might argue, can wield the pen (or feather/keyboard) as sharply as the comedian. I suspect, then, she thinks it's kind of a fair fight that old quarrel between philosophy and the comic poets.

Fair enough. Although it's worth noting -- as the fate of Socrates suggests --, it's not wholly a fair fight because the comedian can attract a much wider audience than the philosopher, and may well be much better at political and social rhetoric (this is one of the sub-themes of the Symposium, after all.) And the consequential afterlife of such public rhetoric can be quite unpredictable. Aristophanes' Clouds may well have been thought harmless to Socrates when it first was performed, but after a plague, disastrous imperial overreach, a civil war and murderous dictatorship, context shifted dramatically. I mention these historical facts because what Letterman himself clearly thought initially was harmless entertainment, became politically potent after a great financial meltdown and a bailout of the rich and connected.

So, lurking in Srinivasan's comments, which, as I suggested, may well be entirely improvised, is the idea that humor, even brutal humor, is fine as long as it does not reinforce a structural hierarchy of some sorts. In addition (I take this from what she says about rap), comedy should not incite violence. 

Now, one natural way to read Srinivasan is that while comedy may not be art (like some rap is), comedy is, in fact, self-justifying. It's just one of those things that make a good life good. And because I agree with her about this (that comedy is self-justifying), and her suggestion that even in a very well ordered (albeit brutal) society there would be comedy, I do not want to exaggerate our differences.

But it does not follow from this that in addition to being good in its own right, comedy serves no social purpose in a disordered, hierarchical society like ours. For, comedy also offers society a mirror, even if it is a crooked or distorted mirror. And, not unlike great utopian fiction, it reflects back to us -- in exaggerated fashion, perhaps, -- the way laws, norms, and mores operate and the effect of them on all of us or some of us. In fact, Aristophanes Lysistrata has an important role to play in combining comedy with the birth pangs of feminist utopianism (if I don't have enough street cred for you to say this, this is the place in which I invoke the authority of De Beauvoir). Much of the old Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central (now available on Netflix) was about offering society a mirror on racial relations that with the benefit of hindsight looks prescient in light of black lives matter. 

Of course, Chappelle's recent special on Netflix, taped in Detroit, has gotten a lot of attention for its explicitly pro-TERF stance and its many transphobic jokes (also a theme in his earlier 2019 special). But if you watch his shows, there is a broader more complicated position. I want to introduce my defense of that claim by first mentioning another theme unrelated to transgender issues. A set of Chappelle's jokes (this is in his earlier 2019 show) is about Michael Jackson's child victims. And some of the jokes clearly minimize the harm done to the children (and others suggest Chappelle does not believe all the allegations). But the set is itself explicitly framed by Chappelle mentioning the fact that 50% of the audience members have probably experienced sexual harassment or worse. And while each of his punchlines can be construed as a belittling of the problem, the overall point is that there is a horrid epidemic of sexual harassment (and it should not just focus on celebrities). 

I think something analogous happens with Chappelle's orientation toward transgender issues. This is an issue he has gotten flack for in the past, and some of that criticism is part of the narrative. (I don't mean to suggest he is fair to his critics or actually responds well to them.) So, for example, there is a series of jokes about how on a road-trip a car, which includes a transgender person (a 'T'), can't make bathroom stops in four states. What's interesting about these jokes is that Chappelle is clearly not at all oblivious to the fact that many states make it inordinately difficult to be transgender; and his sympathies are clearly with the transgender against the states that wish to police bathroom behavior. 

After watching Chappelle's special and his (2019) Sticks & Stones, it seems pretty obvious to me that his underlying political outlook is live and let live (as long as Chappelle can make fun of you). I don't know whether Srinivasan thinks Chappelle is one of the "boring" comedians, but plenty of his jokes are not just transphobic, but also sexist.** (He recycles and repackages Norm Macdonald's sexist jokes about the WNBA. He also repurchases MacDonald's Jacques de Gatineau joke which is not sexist at all.) It would be disingenuous to say that he is merely representing or providing a window on sexism in society. He is also reenacting it.

But I don't think Chappelle is reenacting his transphobia merely for the purpose of putting his finger in the eyes of his critics. For the recent special culminates in a narrative about his relationship to Daphne Dorman a transgender (part-time) comedian, who ended up committing suicide. What's interesting about the narrative is not that Dorman (and later her family) defended Chappelle or that Chappelle set up a trust fund for Dorman's daughter, or that he has had a transgender friend and offered her professional opportunities, or even that Chappelle thinks white transgenders use their racial privilege in ways he rejects. But rather that Chappelle hoped to speak with Dorfman's daughter someday and that he wants to say to her (and now I quote from memory) that he "knew her father. And he was a hell of a woman.” (See here for slightly different rendition.) And whatever else Chappelle is implying with this joke, he is telling his audience that if even a transphobe -- and if you listen to his set he does not present himself as a moral exemplar at all -- like him can recognize and see Daphne Dorman's gender, anyone can. The implicature of the special is, thus, that the transphobes who act on their transphobia politically and economically are the real problem, and that if one recognizes one's own imperfections one can rise above them.

For Chappelle, we are all flawed none of us is really without sin. And his best jokes (and impersonations) have or exhibit, and now I echo Norm Macdonald's considered views about all good comedy, compassion for their targets.

The underlying point is that by being the object of a joke one can also, simultaneously, be humanized. Of course, this is not always true. But even jokes that are experienced as offensive and entrenching subordination also bring the outcasts into the community and into a larger conversation. (This is Chappelle's own defense in the special.) Not all purported jokes or the sets they are part of do this, of course. And my judgment here is fallible. And I also don't think Chappelle's humor is always that funny. (I never found Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central especially funny, but I also recognize that this may be colored by the realization that people like me were its target! Yet, some of the sketches are etched in my memory.)

But let's say I am wrong about all of this. Maybe his transphobic stance (funny or not to some) is simply beyond the pale, and maybe there are no positive consequences from punching down at all in comedy.  I would still argue that when performing, comedians should have an artistic license to mock and insult on par with the academic freedom of academics in academic life. 

For, it's healthy for society to have a place where none of us is above the joke. I don't just think this because it creates a privileged space for politicized or social commentary and for presenting the effects of our follies and foibles. Because of workplace rules and polarization, there are, in fact, few places where controversial and potentially obnoxious views can be aired at all in relatively heterogeneous company (outside echo chambers). And it is not like comedians can say anything. They, too, are regulated by public opinion and the views of their audience. So, the social utility of comedy is not just that it offers us a window into (the effects of) a lot of our social norms and practices, but also that they do so -- despite audience fragmentation and filtering -- in a way that is accessible to a relatively heterogeneous (and potentially large) public. This is, after all, one of the reasons why despite their lack of authority, they are important politically. 

I have gone on longer than is typical in such a Digression. And this reflects my awareness that perhaps I am all wrong here. So, I should stop here. But I wanted to add two more thoughts.

First, at one point, in an interview I think with Larry King, Norman Macdonald says in self-effacing manner, that stand-up comedy is no art. And this may suggest that Srinivasan is right in her implied contrast between rap (an art) and comedy (not an art) in her response to Cowen quoted above. For, Macdonald says, art is capable of multiple interpretations, whereas the job of a stand-up comedian is to make a room or a TV audience have the same reaction at the same time. What's funny about the comment, of course, is that Macdonald was quite capable of generating multiple reactions to his jokes over time (in the same audience). So, comedy is art, after all, but can only show (not say) it. Many of Chappelle's stories and jokes, too, also have multiple layers to them. He is not just creating laughs, but he is also inviting multiple interpretations. (This also suggests I should not be too confident in my own!)

Second, my partial defense of the fruitfulness of even potentially offensive comedy presupposes that comedy knows its proper place and stays in its lane. But as Letterman discovered that assumption is naïve. When a clown is seen as a trickster or noble truth-teller, they can become quite powerful politically in times of instability even potential civil war. (For the contrast between a clown and trickers see this fine essay on Boris Johnson by Alan Finlayson.)  

My idea that comedy is an important social safety valve and sometimes an epistemically useful window in a democracy also entails that it may be socially dangerous (as dictators everywhere recognize). My cop-out response here is that thankfully Chappelle's critics have access to influential outlets so that their concerns are also heard. Unlike the popular representation of Mill (which, inspired by Jill Gordon, I don't think captures Mill's views), I doubt the truth prevails over time in the 'marketplace of ideas.' Rather, liberal democracy is also a project in forbearance in which we ought to try to minimize mutual inconvenience and harms. Comedy can produce genuine harms, but it also plays an indispensable social role in helping see a way beyond them.

 

 

 

Norm MacDonald, Lou Jacobi, and the Best Joke of All Time.

One of my imperfections that I have become aware of through marriage is my tendency to wisecrack at inopportune moments, especially during moments of vulnerable intimacy or awkward silences. And when I think I am funny, I'll repeat the wisecrack. I call this 'situational comedy' (although I realize that is confusing given the TV/Radio genre with the same name and probably should have settled on something more pretentious like 'fondness for the absurd'), and I sharply distinguish it from joking and punning. At some point, I decided that repeating the wisecrack -- a word that appeals to the skeptical philosopher in me -- would only enhance the joke; repetition is key to the gag. This tendency makes the awkwardness worse, of course. 

In my defense, there is a skill involved in being funny, to adlib in the moment; it is, in fact, true improv unlike the genre that has the name, which is almost entirely scripted and a really skilled profession. I mention this not to suggest that I have any expertise in jokes or comedy. I am, in fact, terrible at telling actual jokes. And unlike, say, my teacher the late Ted Cohen (recall), who could be funny at will, I lack a theory of why things are funny, or not, when they are.

That I am bad at telling jokes is actually surprising because at one point, in my twenties, I hung out regularly with Lou Jacobi (a family friend--about that some other time more), who would take my to Museums on the Upper East Side. (There is a fascinating short video about Lou.) Lou and I mostly talked about the art we saw, and his showbiz stories, but at one point, we were walking near Lexington, he asked me if I wanted to know the secret of joke-telling. His eyes lit up as he leaned over to me with a conspiratorial glimmer, and I wondered if he was violating some guild-protocol, he whispered, 'always remember the punchline!' And started crackling. 

There is, in fact, no easier way to remember the punchline if it is identical to the set-up. Norman Macdonald repeatedly asserted that the "perfect joke would be if the punchline and the set up were identical," or "almost identical." (I have heard him say different versions.) Macdonald, who died last week, loved this principle, and he used variants on it throughout his time at SNL (see below). 

I sometimes wonder whether it's news to most philosophers that 'A = A' can be funny and even is the structure, or the form, of the perfect joke. (It probably was old hat to Wittgenstein.) Part of the joke of identity is, of course, that the second 'A' (the repetition) is not the original; it's a copy.

After Macdonald died, and in order to forget my frustration over my slow recovery, I binge-watched (and listened) to clips of Macdonald and other comedians discussing Macdonald's craft. They (the comedians) routinely describe him, even before he died, 'as the funniest man I know.' (No, never 'funniest person.') It was odd for me to see that in the days after he died, these very comedians had also binge-watched the same clips I had been binge-watching. Most of them ignored the perfect joke, and would speak about the Bob Saget roast, the moth joke, the ESPYS, the Courtney Thorne-Smith/carrottop mockery, and being fired for joking about OJ Simpson. 

Macdonald has a bad reputation among contemporary moralists and increasingly became a red state hero. And it's true that Macdonald made a lot of fun of the Clintons, and over time became somewhat of a hater. But if you go back to the SNL days, nearly all of his jokes about them express his outrage over the fact that Clinton is a known, serial sexual harasser in plain sight and got away with it. (Something similar is on display in his repeated jokes about Michael Jackson's pedophilia.) His political comedy was moralistic.

I suspect Macdonald, who was incredibly well-read, later regretted that his initial fame was due to his political jokes because he came to deny that hating on others generated real humor. (For example, he loathed Alec Baldwin's Trump because there is no place for any fondness of Trump, but greatly admired Darrell Hammond's Trump.) Rather, in his interviews it's clear that while he dislikes confessional humor, he greatly admires those comics that can do jokes about ordinary life without showing their craft, especially Bob Hope, who could be very funny in virtue of extremely minor facial or posture changes despites his jokes being rather bad. (This is something late Macdonald clearly tried to emulate in his final Netflix show, being funny with bad jokes.) 

In listening to the comedians talking about Macdonald, I realized that their world is not so different from professional philosophy. For, they have a strong norm against plagiarizing each other's jokes, although they allow some to do so as a form of (ahh) intertextual homage. (Macdonald was fond of this privilege, and used it not irregularly especially when roasting his friends in order to pay homage to Don Rickles, Rodney Dangerfield, and this, too, then also get remarked upon by the other comedians.)

As an aside, the moth joke was, I gather, apparently not Macdonald's, but a friend's (although I am sure it has a much longer prehistory). The joke itself is super-corny, and the set up has a rather classical structure of ascending woes, but because O'Brien interrupts a few times, Macdonald has to improvise. The brilliance of the moth joke is not the punchline, but the long-winded delivery of the set-up. This was, in fact, one of the reasons other comedians admire Macdonald because he could make the set up itself more hilarious than the punch-line. This kind of inversion is much harder to pull off than anti-humor. I just love listening and watching repeatedly to the set ups of Macdonald's Jacques de Gatineau joke, the polish joke, the professor of logic joke, and even the Andy Richter joke (which Andy Richter quite rightly did not find funny).  Not to belabor the point, but this focus on the comic potential of the set-up, is itself a key to the borsht belt humor in some of the best sketches on Jacobi's You Don't Have to be Jewish (e.g.,  a 'Call from Long Island'; 'The Reading of the Will'; 'James Bondstein'). 

Also, I noticed that among comedians it is a completely legitimate argument to claim that the fact that Letterman asked Macdonald to be Letterman's final (comic) guest proves that Macdonald is really the funniest. It's a bit like the honor philosophers show each other at a Fest. 

Let me wrap up: when I teach I often wisecrack to end awkward silences. The jokes are pretty bad, but the undergrads find my repetitions funny (I can demonstrate this with hundreds of student evals). What's neat about this is that what is objectively a personality defect --  the badly timed witticism that blocks intimacy with a loved one -- can be made functional in the classroom because it helps the students relax despite the fact that we're discussing very challenging and often politically polarizing material. It does so by marking off, as it were 'once upon a time,' the (cognitive) space in which we are super serious from the outside-world in which people come to blows over the same issues, but we pride ourselves on our detachment. Or, maybe, the students are just laughing at me. 

 

 

 

The Threat of Violence, Republic 1, and the Grounding of Philosophical Exchange

One oddity of Republic 1, is the ever-present threat of violence that hangs over the very existence or possibility of the conversation. This starts explicitly with Polemarchus' insistence that he will not listen to Socrates' persuasion and that he does not need to do so because he outnumbers Socrates (327C). And so Socrates is roped into a banquet at Cephalus' house. And while one may be tempted to treat this as an innocent joke, the initial exchange with Polemarchus can also be treated as an unflattering, structural analogy of the ways pure or direct democracies might treat minorities, and rational deliberation.*

Once alert to the possibility, I noticed that violence of some sort both keeps people (temporarily) out of the conversation and in it. So, Thrasymachus is literally prevented from speaking at first (336b), and then prevented from leaving (344d). And, of course, much of discussion itself, especially after Thasymachus joins, is presented in terms of -- if not lethal then -- a dangerous contest (leaving aside the fact that reputation, honor, money are all said to be at stake).

Now, let's leave aside, or pretend to leave it aside, the manner of the discussion, and renew focus on its partial grounding in the decisions of unnamed many to prevent and promote some to speak. Again, it is tempting to treat this as an analogy of the way pure/direct democracy behaves.  Since most of the 'restrainers' and 'promoters' are left nameless in Socrates' description of these events, they function very much like the choir in a Greek tragedy. We might be clever and notice that Thrasymachus' account of justice (in which the ruling element of the regime legislates law on its own behalf) kind of offers a theory for what is left as analogy earlier. And that Socrates himself claims (recall) that civic violence is the effect of injustice.

Even so, what I am really interested in here is the thought that some kind of non-trivial (ahh) nudging and silencing may be a pre-condition to philosophical exchange. That such speech-policing is a kind of ground of philosophical life. Now, some readers of Plato may object that the exchanges between Socrates and Cephalus/Polemarchus and Socrates and Thrasymachus are not really philosophical exchanges. There is a hermeneutic tradition that Plato withholds from us Socrates' interaction with a philosophical equal (say Plato). But I don't belong in that tradition (for I think the exchanges with Protagoras and Parmenides are the real deal). And while the exchange with Thrasymachus is hostile and unsatisfying, it is not without intrinsic interest nor is obvious that Socrates really gets the better of Thrasymachus (at least by the end of Book I).

Another line of concern (mixing Stoic and Enlightenment ideas, which can be  traced back to Socrates) is that true (sage-like) philosophers are autonomous givers, receivers, and evaluators of reasons or arguments; that the policing (and canceling) element I have noticed is heteronomous to our beloved activity better left to the market place or spectator sports (etc.). I don't want to take this line of concern lightly. It obviously represents a noble normative ideal, especially when so many of us find ourselves threatened to be sacked or merged away by politicians, demagogues, and bean-counters with little interest in any such ideals, but all-to0-aware of the threats our seminars pose to their (possible) rule.

Even so, it's possible that Plato presents us with the idea that important philosophical contests have to be arranged or structured in ways inimical to the desires of the philosophers themselves. And before you protest this possibility, remember that one of the main claims of the Republic (anticipated in the very discussion of Book I) is that philosophers have to be forced to rule. It's not such a big step from that to they have to be forced and restrained from engaging with each other. 

Let me make this concrete: when there exist rival philosophical schools or traditions it is very tempting to disengage or to vilify or mocking without true engagement. The vilification prevents people from reading works produced in other schools and helps schools to be(come) more unified just reinforcing the benefits from not engaging. And often the opportunity costs of engaging are quite great, while engaging on shared terms is efficient, productive, progressive, etc. (In our intellectual universe it's also fruitful for the parceling out of jobs.)

Of course, there is a cost to non-engaging. And that's that one both misses insights discovered in a different vernacular and that many shared commitments in the in-group/school are never seriously questioned at all. 

The previous two paragraphs are, of course, a metaphor for the analytic-continental (etc.) divides we live in. And I do regret that David Lewis never sought out (say) Deleuze, or was pushed into it (just as circumstances made Carnap a very astute reader of Heidegger). I would admire some leading figures of my analytic tradition more if they weren't obviously so limited that they can only talk to each other. (Yes, I know the young kidz have changed all of that!) And I honestly feel sad that some billionaires give gigantic prizes to philosophers, but do so little to get philosophers to engage with each other. 

To put it in modeling terms, the moment one entertains the idea that the market in philosophical ideas is not efficient, then the possibility that heteronomous-to-philosophy forces can structure that market is not so far-fetched. Now, speaking in my own voice (go back to reading my old digressions), I reject the idea that the market in philosophical ideas is efficient. Of course, it's not unlikely that these heteronomous-to-philosophy-policing-of-speech forces do more damage than good. 

I could stop here. But I am reminded that when we parent and educate, we often police the choices of our wards (in a curriculum, a syllabus, etc.). In fact, even our most noble aspirations, the ones that may involve not knowing the full nature of these aspirations ex ante and not understanding all the ways/mechanisms that lead to them (go read Callard's book, or my digressions about it) are structured by such forced choices. Of course, in such cases the end justifies the means. And perhaps -- no, I am not confident -- that's also true of the policing required to get Socrates and Thrasymachus, like puppets in a wonderful play, to engage. 

 

Covid Diaries Continued...

Last week I conveyed progress about my symptoms  (recall here; here; here; here; here; here; and last week). Inevitably (one of my two favorite jokes, Q: “Are you happy?” A: “Yes, I am happy, aber glücklich bin ich nicht…”),* that was followed by a horrid week-end of headaches. (To be sure the headaches are not as painful as six to eight weeks ago.) It was horrid because now accompanied by a weird nausea. 

So, while I was receiving all kinds of encouraging and optimistic well wishes, I was in no mood to project optimism. Luckily the headaches dissipated again and the start of this week (Monday-Wednesday) was pain free, mildly marred by the by now familiar fatigue (and accompanying hunger). Unfortunately, the last two days the headaches have returned. In both cases I awake in the middle of the night confused why I can't fall back to sleep, eventually I realize that I have a strange pain (which has moved, again, now to the back of my skull). But despite my insomnia, I did not want to skip this update.

As it happens, and perhaps not unrelated, I was shocked and deeply saddened by the news that Dr. Rachelle Dyanne “Dara” Bascara has passed away. (HT: her colleague Nick Cowen). I feel frustrated that my illness prevents me from writing a detailed appreciation now. Heidi Howkins Lockwood has a touching memorial on her facebook page, but I am not sure it is public.

Long before #MeToo was mainstream, Dara was one of the people who bravely broke the conspiracy of silence in the philosophy profession about the predatory culture of sexual harassments that was being tolerated. The shock at what she revealed, as well as the fact that some senior philosophers also criticized her for her actions, convinced me that the magnificent work of (recall) feministphilosophers crew had not yet ended this culture in our time. Her example and our correspondence going back to 2014 nudged me into a series of digressions that have remained among the most read (and friendship ending) pieces I published. Her example got me thinking anew about how to conceptualize the nature of philosophical integrity, the coherence between a philosophical life and thought (which I also digressed upon). 

 

When my family moved to London we got to know each other a bit in person. She was able to combine genuine activism, intellectual profundity, humor, perseverance in the face of much hardship and indifference, and more than a touch of glamour. She always made a point to attend my talks.

 

She was proud of her PhD thesis "Towards a Unified Theory of Oppression," at Birkbeck, and in our last quick chat she told me she was pleased to have a position at Lincoln. But since the Covid lockdowns our interactions had been much reduced. I always silently assumed Dara would have the last laugh. Dara and her family had already overcome shocking circumstances, including (if I recall correctly) a lengthy cover-up of a brutal police murder of her father.+ My sincere condolences to her loved ones, friends, and colleagues.

 

This week we had a Dutch election, and surprisingly my post from four years ago on the topic has held up exceedingly well (recall here). This time around the election campaign was even more focused on values. And foreign affairs barely figured into the campaign. The historic collapse of Social democracy and Christian democracy continued, but now all left-wing parties collapsed along with them. (In fairness, none run an impressive campaign.) Simultaneously, as a group the rise of neo-fascist parties continued, despite splintering and scandal, apace.

 

Democratic left and neo-fascist right (some of which clearly not paying even lip-service to minimal norms of democracy anymore) both have a fifth of the seats in parliament now. (That's not unprecedented: for most of the 1930s Holland was ruled by Colijn, who was not just a war criminal, imperialist and racist, but practically invented 'austerity'; see also this shocking episode on the fate of Chinese living in Holland). But oddly -- it was a year of pandemic mismanagement, unprecedented riots, long simmering exposés on institutional racism and perversion of the rule of law in so-called toeslagenaffaire (childcare benefits scandal) that reached all the way to the most important state actors and prompted a merely symbolic government collapse-- the ruling bourgeois quasi-liberal center (divided in a cosmopolitan and a more conservative branch) came out strengthened and will surely rule again.

 

Since I am a bourgeois liberal the result is probably the best I could hope for given the circumstances. One problem with Dutch multi-party representative democracy is that, despite its many virtues, it lacks good rituals for cleansing of the stalls. Even when a resignation is not just symbolic, the consequence is that many failed politicians get kicked upstairs (into quasi-judicial roles in the council of state) or are parked (as part of a spoils system) as mayors (in Holland these are appointed) and so can still influence people's lives in non-trivial ways. The effect is to give the appearance that nothing changes. My spleen about the election was lessened because my excellent direct departmental colleagues in "Challenges" were all over the media (including TV) as expert commentators.

 

I am always amused that Marx and Engels thought that Holland was a likely place to initiate socialist revolution. I now think that if the Nazis had allowed the Dutch government to continue as before after defeat in May 1940, De Geer would have been reelected. 

 

Hopefully, with Spring sunshine, next week my digression will be more upbeat.