Digressions&Impressions

On Crooked Timber.

The last two months have been challenging for me, hence my lack of blogging. They aren’t limited to losing my advisor. But what I have seen running throughout many of these challenges is a kind of a deep psychological that I will call wounds of the heart.

A wound of the heart is an emotional hurt that generates intense, seemingly unbearable psychic stress and that can create long-term damage to one’s personality due to overpowering negative moral emotions, like resentment and hatred, and that may last for the rest of one’s life. They are typically caused by some act by one’s close friends, family, or community. The wounded person believes the act signals that the offending group bears him or her bad will, and that the group does not love or support the wounded person in the way he or she had counted upon in the past. It can overwhelm the wounded person’s agency, leading them to lash out and creating a new harm, and perhaps wounding the hearts of others. When multiple parties to a relationship have wounds of the heart, that can spell the death of the relationship, even if the relationship continues pro forma.--Kevin Vallier The Wounds of the Heart

Because one of my entries into the history of philosophy was by way of Isaiah Berlin, I have always associated his quotation from Kant that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made" with an important truth. To this day the core idea informs my own skeptical liberalism.

But as always the story has wrinkles.

So for years I shared Ingrid Robeyns' sense, appropriately shared at the mother of all philosophical blogs, CT, that Berlin's translation improved on the original, Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. I still do. However, it is not often remarked that Kant added a footnote, to this very sentence; and it is worth noting it, too:

The role of man is very artificial. How it may be with the dwellers on other planets and their nature we do not know. If, however, we carry out well the mandate given us by Nature, we can perhaps flatter ourselves that we may claim among our neighbors in the cosmos no mean rank. Maybe among them each individual can perfectly attain his destiny in his own life. Among us, it is different; only the [human] race can hope to attain it."*

There are really two fine issues here: first, that we may be part of a larger family of planetary denizens. This is an idea that excited Huygens and Newton. And from Kant's pre-critical writings we know (recall) that Kant was much impressed by Newton's ideas on this point. And Kant assumes that, once we get into the habit of  this, we will adopt a perspective in which we are judged by such aliens. Maria Pia Paganelli has suggested -- in commenting on a similar idea in Adam Smith -- that this can be traced by to Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. It's plausible this also influenced Kant because Kant's earlier Universal Natural History is clearly shaped as I argued (based on a suggestion by Martin Schönfeld) by Fontenelle's work. So, Kant's cosmopolitanism here is truly cosmopolitan. I assume this is known among Kant experts, but the thought always delights me. 

Second, in the note Kant articulates the thought that that any attainable future worth having is a collaborative or shared project. I can think no better way of characterizing the liberal project in that it simultaneously holds that we should assume the unreformable weakness of individuals and that as humanity we're in it together. This is why, the more I reflect on it, the more I recognize that global, maybe cosmic (yeah for Star Trek!) federation is the liberal political destiny. 

This morning, in a wistful, apprehensive mood,  I returned to Seneca Letter 50. The letter is really about the comic-from- without-maddening-from-within realization that the more we run away from our problems, and disown them, the more we find them not just sneaking up on us, but defining us:

For what else are you busied with except improving yourself every day, laying aside some error, and coming to understand that the faults which you attribute to circumstances are in yourself? We are indeed apt to ascribe certain faults to the place or to the time; but those faults will follow us, no matter how we change our place.

And yet, I was in no mood to be preached to by Seneca that the way forward is a regimen of self-improvement. My mind drifted back toward's Vallier's post quoted above. As the reach of life has shrunk during this pandemic, and in my solitude, I more easily and directly encounter evidence of how my past wounds create new harms; I re-read, and I recognize myself in the self-portrait he draws. Kevin writes of 'soldiering on.' I wince at the bellicose nature of the phrase, despite seeing the tenderness in the rest of Kevin's words. The soldiering on reminds me of the bit of the part of Seneca -- preparing for death -- I like least.    

Without realizing it I had read on in Seneca. And there, I was surprised to read (in  Richard Gummere's 1917 translation), There is nothing that will not surrender to persistent treatment, to concentrated and careful attention; however much the timber may be bent, you can make it straight again.  [Nihil est, quod non expugnet pertinax opera et intenta ac diligens cura; robora in rectum quamvis flexa revocabis. Curvatas trabes calor explicat et aliter natae in id finguntur, quod usus noster exigit; quanto facilius animus accipit formam, flexibilis et.]

    Of course, Seneca must believe that self-improvement is possible, I think.

But, as I re-read I realize that Seneca thinks this, too, is a collaborative project: "we begin to mold and reconstruct our souls before they are hardened by crookedness" ["ante animum nostrum formare incipimus et recorrigere quam indurescat pravitas eius]. In Kevin's vocabulary, we soldier on in a platoon. Of course, the larger context of the Letter suggests that Seneca thinks we do this under the guidance of a mentor. 

I then remembered Kant. And now looking at what I have written, I am struck by the thought that I have been eavesdropping on a great debate between the two wings of cosmopolitanism: disagreeing about the means, but both claiming that we're in this together. My gloom dissipates. 

 

 

On Paul Lodge, on the Manic

Sass and Pienkos seem to be confusing what it is like to think manically with something very different, namely, what it is like to perceive what one takes to be expressions of the thought processes of manic subjects. Testimony of others, as well as evidence from my own writing on occasions when I was manic or hypomanic, suggest that the factors that Shenton and Solovay identified were present during these episodes. However, my recollections are not of states of mind in which it seemed to me that my thoughts were disordered. To the extent that there was an experience of myself thinking, my thinking felt more appropriate and adequate to its task than normal. The identified factors did not seem problematic; in fact, quite the contrary.

Sass and Pienkos also observe that it is useful to think of manic thought in terms of “mattering … or rather of how things matter”. They suggest this partly involves “a form of distraction—an inability to ignore environmental stimuli that are capable of arousing lively but ephemeral interest in the patient, but that, in a normal individual, would remain on the margin of awareness, outside the focus of attention”; or, more prosaically, “there being too many things that matter, and that come to matter too quickly and fleetingly, for the individual”. Here Sass and Pienkos point to another phenomenon that is criterial in DSM-V (“distractibility”). And while they again seem to switch between attempting to describe what it is like for the subject and attempting to describe what the subject is doing (i.e., thinking in a distracted way), Sass and Pienkos do make an observation that I believe is crucial: namely, that mania involves a sense of there being many more things that demand attention than usual.

My own experience concurs with the main features of Sass and Pienkos’ account. But their suggestion that this is all somehow too much for the subject needs qualification. For a proper understanding of these phenomena, it is important to recognize that during at least some manic and hypomanic episodes, there is a sense of an exponential increase in objects of attention. And this brings with it an exhilarating sense of being exposed to an unlimited number of objects and their interconnections all at once, and a sense that one is being offered a window into the true nature of reality. This is not to say that there is never a feeling that this is all too much. Indeed, this feeling is usually a component of the way in which mania and hypomania come to an end, if allowed to run their course without external intervention. And a sense of being overwhelmed may also arise if one feels unable to communicate what one is experiencing to those around one. But for the manic subject, at the heart of the experience is the feeling of successful insight.--Paul Lodge "What Is It Like to Be Manic? " @The Oxonian Review

I have known Paul since his participation in the early modern seminar of April, 2001, that is, nearly my whole academic career. The North American circle of early modern scholars is fairly small, and my supervisor was at the center of much of the intellectual traffic among them in those days. Because we both had a rare scholarly interest in De Volder -- Paul because of De Volder's correspondence with Leibniz; I because he corresponded with Huygens --, we even exchanged some emails. But we did not become friends at first because I found him dour and aloof, which in my insecure moments (which were plenty) I interpreted as arrogance.

Years went by with minor mutual acknowledgment. That changed one morning. I was attending my supervisor's fest at Princeton (september 2014). I was very jet-lagged and trying to find espresso in Princeton early in the morning. And while I was already a coffee-snob, I ended up in the Starbucks on Nassau street which mercifully opens before dawn. (I remember the street name for obvious reasons.) There I found Paul comfortably seated. I joined him. For the next three to four hours we talked; or, I should say, he talked and I listened under the sway of his unexpected charisma and fascinated by the energy of his enthusiasm. I don't think I reveal any improper intimacy, if I say (recall this post) that most of what Paul talked about was his interest in the kind of Christianity exhibited by the great social liberal T.H. Green (see also this post).  

Since my college days I have known that I am fascinated -- with a mixture of intense attraction and repulsion -- by intellectuals who lecture with enthusiastic conviction. I'd like to think this is due to the fact that I find my own thought too conflicted and uncertain, and so I am constantly surprised by what seems to be an entirely different form of consciousness. Despite my mental protests, such enthusiasts have focused my attention, even shaped my interest into Newton, Milton, metaphysics, philosophy of biology amongst other topics. 

Reading Paul's essay in the Oxonian Review brought back the visceral intensity of our two mornings in Princeton. He was not manic, but the heightened awareness of the possible fragility of one's (ahh) orientation toward experience infused his warmth. At the time, I commented on the fact that he seemed a changed person, something he acknowledged. Meeting him almost certainly inspired me to write on my own struggle with depression (recall here).

While I am pretty sure the tendency toward both manic and depressive episodes runs in my own family, the one instance of mania of my own I vividly recall was produced as a side-effect of a heavy prednisone treatment prescribed to me to give me a kind of re-set to reverse the effect of skin allergies. (It worked, although I experienced irritable skin and psyche for another seven years or so.) For about a week, I wasn't just insomniac, but the words streamed out of me often by way of lengthy and spontaneous emails to anybody that crossed my mind. 

I have not had the nerve to reread those letters. In part because I am mortified by what I'll find I thought worth confiding to at 2am to my Dean, my ex-lovers, my accountant, and quite a few professional (ahh) elders, etc. What I do recognize now is the incredible tact of most people. 

But I recognize Paul's claim that in a manic period there being many things that demand attention at once, and that one seems capable, even skilled, at giving them such attention at once. I would describe this as a kind of immersion in the vivid connectedness of things. In these digressions I try to capture this imperfectly with my habit of cross-connections. This involves, as Paul notes, a sense of having been offered a "glimpse into a more truthful relationship to existence." My only quibble is the word 'truthful.' For me, it would be more apt to say, a "glimpse into a more intimate relationship to existence." 

Because of my aversion to the cult of genius, I am often wary of bringing philosophy and mania into association with each other (if only not to encourage the young into experimenting with mind altering drugs); but see this video. And from the perspective of the professional philosopher, there is little reason to do so. Often our ways of analysis encourage (ahh) us to see the disconnectedness of things. We pretend not to notice, perhaps become incapable of noticing, the lateral connections that make any conceptual clarification possible. While I am a critic of the excesses and side-effects* this relentless focus on a clearly defined puzzles produces, at bottom it appeals to my aesthetic sense. 

The aesthetic is not nothing, perhaps it's fundamental.

But sometimes we can experience philosophy as an immersion, an intimate immersion, in which the connectedness-of-the-infinite-cosmos calls out to us. And I can, thus, attest that even a very partial intellectual love of god generates a joy, heightened by the gratitude one is still around to experience it.

 

On Supreme Court Judges and Political Aristocracy

It is often remarked that in the American system of governance, the supreme court has evolved to be a kind of super-legislature with a small number of exceedingly influential judges having life-time tenure. (If you google <"supreme court" super-legislature> yet get almost ten million hits.) If one takes the thought seriously it is kind of surprising that we don't see more politicians and party-activists on the court. I am unsure if Earl Warren was the last major politician to be on the court (he served alongside Hugo Black, who was also a politician-judge), but it's not entirely surprising that Judge Kavanaugh exhibits -- what the founders would have called -- factional tendencies and antipathies.* To be nominated to the Supreme Court one must be seen as advancing the political interests of a particular party/politician(s). 

Of course, there is a difference between interpreting the constitution in light of one's principles (political or otherwise), which may conflict with other such principles, and being partisan about one's judgments. The former is compatible with certain forms of impartiality about particular cases one is asked to judge; the latter not. In addition, the former is to be expected in a pluralist society. And in practice, the politicians (Presidents and Senators) that get to decide who gets appointed Supreme Court Judge, have embraced the practice -- which is part of a number of useful aspirational fictions that constituted the civic religion of America, say, since 1945 -- in which judges are asked about their judiciary principles as a polite proxy for advancing their interests and ideologies. This proxy is imperfect (as the case of Judge Souter taught the republicans.)  From this perspective, Judge Kavanaugh's partisanship is not so unusual; he is just unusually bad, if not shameless (I return to this below), at hiding and disguising his partisan sensibilities.*

There is another perspective to take on the evolution of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS): it increasingly represents the meritocratic element in the US governance. This is especially striking because the (rather predictable)+ rise and effectiveness of ideological and interest based political parties  undermined the meritocratic hopes the Founders may have had for the vestiges of influence of aristocracy, Senate and electoral college. (In the twentieth centuries political parties themselves became more democratic, too.) That is, the contemporary US Supreme Court is one of the clear places where in American governance a cognitive elite gets to decide the shape of law and policy relatively insulated from democratic control but in terms of public spirit. Another such locus is, say, the Federal Reserve. While there are good grounds to be critical of such insulation (and skeptical about the existence of public spirits), it helps balance what is otherwise a polity ruled primarily by interest. 

For, SCOTUS is importantly unlike the Federal Reserve and say the Army (an institution also notable for its meritocratic spirit), because the judiciary is one of two institutions -- the other is the research intensive academy -- that is also committed to the production and establishment of truth. (I am drawing on Hannah Arendt's ideas here.) Because SCOTUS is a kind of super-legislature, its commitment to truth is, in practice, very imperfect.

Even if Judge Kavanaugh were factually innocent of sexual assault (which I doubt), it is no surprise that he has been turned into the symbol of entitled privilege and patriarchy. The philosopher Kate Manne has correctly noted that the response to Dr. Blasey's accusation has been a "pathological moral tendency to feel sorry exclusively for the alleged male perpetrator ...while relentlessly casting suspicion upon the female accusers." These are instructive and legitimate frames with which to evaluate the present political situation.

Even so, while I take human imperfection as axiomatic in my own understanding of liberal democracy, I was struck by the extent and range of his character imperfections during his hearings. He was loud, bullying, enraged, lacking in civility and self-control, and shameless in his contempt for several US Senators. This is, not unlike the President, not now a man with a warm heart for democratic mores. By speaking of his political critics in conspiratorial tones ('frenzy on the left;' 'outside left wing'), he is, in fact, rejecting the very idea of civic unity among conflicting views.  

Because I am teaching Ibn Rushd's commentary on Plato's Republic this week, I was reminded of a passage I have quoted before:

Such is the case with these virtuous natures when they grow up in these [defective--ES] cities and are badly educated. Hence the causes of the great evils in these cities are none other than these individuals...Their thought and their rulership over the cities: this indeed is the greatest of the causes for the loss of wisdom and the extinguishing its light.--Ibn Rushd, On Plato's Republic, second treatise, 63.27-64.13, translated by R. Lerner.

A student noted today that the defects of the badly educated among the would be cognitive elite are not individual, but caused by impoverished structures. In bad structural circumstances, "the seeds of the best plants will," Ibn Rushd says echoing Socrates (Republic 491), "turn into the very worst of the bad kinds." Judge Kavanaugh was educated at America's elite institutions, and the patterns of his behavior, which are being revealed, represent the debased expression of the values that are permitted to fester among them. All of us who have spent our life-time in academia, are familiar with the sexualized forms of hazing and assault that are encouraged by fraternities, defended by alumni donor networks, and often too tolerated by our college administrations.** While few would advocate the return of strict moral norms on college campuses, Judge Kavanaugh's behavior, which could not have gone unnoticed by many peers, tells us about the gross practical imperfections for what passes as education today.++ 

To be sure, those very same institutions also produced Dr. Blasey (although she did not spent any time at Yale), who spoke eloquently of her understanding of civic duty. So, I am not suggesting they must produce bad character.

Ibn Rushd -- who not unlike Plato was an unabashed epistemocratic elitist -- thought that institutions that purported to promote a meritocracy were among the most dangerous because they could pretend to offer an excellent education, while simultaneously undermining not just the very possibility of the cultivation of excellent moral character, but also (thereby) the polity. And in fact, one cannot escape the thought that President Trump has stuck with Judge Kavanaugh's nomination in virtue of his shameless viciousness and, thereby, undermine the very possibility of thinking about the court in terms of meritocratic, public spiritedness.

 

 

 

On Shame and Exchange (Graham Greene's The Tenth Man)

He had thought that home was something one possessed, but the things  one had possessed were cursed with change; it was what one didn't possess that remained the same and welcomed him.--Graham Greene [1985] ca. 19944] The Tenth Man.

Graham Greene's The Tenth Man was a story intended for a film.* It starts out set in a prison where 30 French hostages are told that three of them will be shot in retaliation for murders in town the night before two of which ("aide-de-camp of the  military governor" and a "sergeant" -- the dead, French girl alongside them explicitly not) must be avenged:

You know what you are here for, living comfortably, on fine rations, while our men work and fight. Well, now you've got to pay the hotel bill....My orders are that one man in every ten shall be shot in this camp...Your allotment then is three. We are quite indifferent as to which three. You can choose for yourself.

What interests me here is not the question of blame (I have deleted that part). Rather it's the logic of exchange here. A German soldier's life has to be compensated by other life. But rather than finding some kind of explicit equivalence between a German soldier's life and a hostage's, the measure picked -- one in every ten -- has an air of the random about it; the lives of the hostages have no intrinsic worth, they can be reduced symbolically to a mere and fully arbitrary ratio. I won't comment here on the many ways these themes (the nature of fair exchange, the role of randomness) return in the short story.

While (earlier) the story start with the narrator's observation that prison leaves no sense unimpaired, and the sense of proportion is the first to go, the prisoners have no trouble establishing that the only fair approach is drawing lots after rejecting two decision mechanisms, first one based on age, and then, second, one based on marital status and then, third, recognizing that there will be no volunteers. After the three (and the word is significant throughout the novella) "marked" lots are picked, one of the unfortunate, Chavel (a well-to-do-lawyer), in "despair" and with "hysteria" ends up offering "everything I've  got" to exchange his place with somebody else. His offer is finally accepted by a relatively young man, Janvier. Some of the other, poorer) prisoners (including the two other unlucky ones) object, on grounds of fairness, that they cannot buy their lives, but Janvier quells the feeling. He exchanges his life for property and money, and he then immediately writes a will in which it is left for to his "mother and sister in equal shares."

As an aside, the age criterion is rejected on the authority of one of the prisoners, the mayor, without argument. (That is to say, Greene does not let the prisoners develop the incipient arguments they start to mention.) The marital status criterion is rejected because one of the prisoners foresees that splitting the hostages into a privileged class, "the ones who are left to end" who will be hated by the rest (the hostages who will run greater risks). This will undermine the civil peace among the hostages. (The novella would be a good fit not just for a normative ethics class, but also for a political theory course.) The narrator does not comment on the fact that the outcome of the favored decision procedure then gets overturned by another form of privilege.

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the voluntary exchange between Janvier and Chavel is permissible, even morally permissible, and a valid contact. That is, we leave aside both complications surrounding the fact that they are hostages as well as second-thoughts that may originate in the observation that when he offers the trade, Chavel is non compos mentis overcome as he is by fear/panic induced dyspair/hysteria. Even so there is something off, not to say (ahh) polluted, about the contract. This stain is felt both by Chavel and the exchange's other beneficiaries.  Or, to be precise, Janvier's sister prevents his mother from finding out the truth. His sister makes his mother believe that Janvier has made a fortune somewhere (and is still alive). She does so clearly not only to spare her mother the worst kind of grief -- the death of one's child --, but also because her present fortune has a dishonorable source. (Janvier's sister is not grateful; she thinks her dead brother a fool.)

 What's more interesting is that Chavel understands his own act not merely as cowardly (a point repeatedly emphasized), but also -- and this is stressed throughout the novella -- as shameful. Now, sometimes the story suggests that to be cowardly is shameful. Let's accept that. But in addition, the story also suggests that the (remember) permissible trade itself is shameful, too (it's the successful offer that generates his shame).** It's this shame not his lack of money that prevents him resuming his previous life as a lawyer after the war. He is stained by fate (the lot) and his response to it. Once one recognizes this the conclusion of the plot (which has plenty of exciting twists) is fore-ordained: there will have to be compensatory atonement (which happens--Chavel pays with his life at the end).

Bernard Williams has done enough to revive the moral significance of shame; but he has done so at a cost. To simplify, he has done so by removing it from the idea of pollution (with which it is accompanied in his Greek source material) and connected it firmly to (to simplify) one's failure to live up to proper image of oneself or one's worthy norms/standards (etc.) [a point I have long thought is made very nicely in Plato's Laws]. Contemporary philosophers have little room for pollution. In her review of  Williams's Shame of Necessity, Striker may be thought to speak for many that "we may be justifiably grateful to be rid of the notion of pollution." (I got thinking about this sociological fact because of the resistance to my analysis of the role of the piacular in Adam Smith's treatment of moral luck by Keith Hankins and Roger Crisp, both excellent ethicists, who prefer to keep their distance of a pollution-ethic that makes space for a marked/stained agent and prefer the less charged idea of agent-regret when one is the involuntary, blameless cause of another person's harm (recall also this recent post).)

Now, I would not wish to deny that pollution has played -- among other harms -- an oppressive role in (biblically inspired) regulations of sex relations and reinforcing women's subordination. There is no reason to return to such a notion of purity. And I also do not deny that outlooks that embrace pollution (and purity) as a relevant moral category often generate sources of fanaticism. But that, I think, is true risk with most moral outlooks. If we rid ourselves of the notion of pollution we fail to understand not just Oedipus Tyrannus, but also some of the taints, that is, of why sometimes even morally permissible trade can be stained. And this strikes me as a useful idea to maintain given the significance of exchange in our lives.

On Mill and Dignity

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.--J.S. Mill (1863) Utilitarianism, Chapter 2.

ln context, Mill is defending (at least) two claims: first, the thought that utilitarianism is at least compatible with the idea that "some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and valuable than others." But as many others have noted, in the quoted paragraph, Mill has moved from focusing on pleasures to focusing on something more diffused, a "manner of existence," which can come on a scale from "lower grades" to higher grades. Second, he is defending a kind of test -- with an appeal to stipulated, "competent" judges -- to help us figure out what are the more desirable and valuable pleasures. The test, which is both epistemic and constitutive, involves a kind of negative, revealed preference of purportedly competent judges: it involves such a judge's unwillingness to give up higher grades of existence to lower ones (with the exceptions explained away as involving cases of severe depression ["unhappiness so extreme"] and a weakness of will ["however undesirable in their own eyes."] Later in the chapter Mill, allows a few more exceptions.) Here I am not very interested in evaluating these two claims. Rather, I want to focus on the significance of the posited moral psychology of the competent judge.

For, even though Mill says the explanation does not matter much to the argument ("we may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness"), it is very striking that Mill goes on to offer five motives that will help explain the competent judge's unwillingness to forego higher grades of existence: (i) pride; (ii) love of liberty and personal independence; (iii) love of power; (iv) love of excitement; (v) sense of dignity. Mill is explicit that the last three of these (iii-v) are, in fact, present as motives in the competent judge.

As a speculative aside, it does not follow Mill thinks (i-ii) are always absent in competent judges when they are unwilling to forego a higher grade of existence; he seems reluctant to endorse the presence of pride because its referent is too diffuse (and sometimes used to refer to the wrong sort of feelings). He seems to be suggesting that if (proper) pride were reserved to refer only to estimable feelings, then Mill would readily grant pride's presence in a competent judge's unwillingness to give up higher pleasures. (That is, he comes close to suggesting that Christianity has ruined the uptake of the word 'pride.') The other possible motive (ii), the love of liberty and personal independence, was present as a proper motive in competent judges in Stoic days, but he seems to imply that Stoic thought has exhausted its capacity to motivate competent judges. (This is striking because love of liberty and personal independence are the kind of motives one may associate with Republican thought of the sort propagated by Rousseau which seems to have been influential in the century prior to Mill's Utilitarianism.)

Mill's mention of the self-fulling nature of "an appeal to" the love of liberty and personal independence, "which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it" is important because it shows that Mill is aware of the fact that the language of moral philosophy may reinforce the ends to which it is put. (It need not do so, of course, and there may be self-undermining appeals, too.) That is, in the context of moral inquiry, in addition to explaining a particular motive, we may also wish to ensure the presence of some such motive in our readers. To put this in Mill's terms (from the same chapter) the "capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance;" as the example of the Stoics shows, moral philosophy may well be part of the sustenance for the presence of some noble feelings.  

To return to the main argument, Mill's willingness to grant the presence of these three motives in competent judges when they behave properly -- (iii) love of power; (iv) love of excitement; and (v) sense of dignity -- is notable not just because of his resistance to mono-causal explanations. Of these three, love of power and love of excitement are not exactly moral motives. While Mill clearly thinks the sense of dignity is the better sort of motive here (and I was inclined to re-read Mill on dignity because of my recent invocation of dignity),* he does not suggest, in fact, that the competent judge must purify herself from all other motives except the sense of dignity in order to count as competent. If anything, competent judges remain competent even if their unwillingness to forego certain pleasures/grades of existence follow from entirely a-moral motives (that is, any one of i-iv).

In context, Mill does not say much about any of these motives, despite the dissimilarity among (iii) love of power; (iv) love of excitement; and (v) sense of dignity. But in the rest of the chapter he is clear that the in practice the nobler sort of feelings of a would-be-competent-judge can be corrupted in quite a few ways. This suggest that Mill's strategy here is to rely on the fact that the feelings of the posited, competent judge are robust because they are propped up by heterogeneous and commonly a multiplicity of strong desires.

This matters because, thereby, Mill can try to evade at least two obvious, connected charges: (i) that in the way he sets up the competent judge he is relying on rather delicate/fragile feelings, and (ii) that in articulating the judgments of the competent judge, he is relying on elitist sentiments shared by his readership educated on Plato and Aristotle (as he clearly flirts with doing in the next few passages).

For, by allowing the love of power and love of excitement to play a real motivational role here, Mill is granting quite a bit to, say, a Hobbesian moral psychologist, who is eager to unmask any elitist talk of nobility or dignity and who insists that there is a "general inclination of all mankind for a perpetual and restless desire of power after power." We can, then, understand Mill as saying that even a Hobbes or Thrasymachus will have to agree that the competent judge's judgments are likely because they spring from powerful and, if not actively repressed, enduring motives in us. That is, Mill will not be shamed by any genealogical exposure of the competent judge's motives.

As Mill recognizes, the moral psychology he attributes to the competent judge is not sufficient to defend either of the two claims I have noted at the start of this post. But reflection on this moral psychology helps us grasp, I think, why Mill thought an appeal to a competent judge would not be thought merely special pleading by the elitist.

Against the APA's Code of Conduct

First, I am not a member of the American Philosophical Association (APA). I write about its new Code of Conduct because the APA is the wealthiest and most influential professional association in the discipline. Its views will ramify out toward many corners of the profession as a purported gold standard. In addition, my blogging career started with and has been animated by, in large part, a concern with professional mores. I have also written regularly about the need of such a Code in philosophy (and economics) [for a few examples, see here and here].

Second, I have no doubt that the committee that produced this code was of good will and animated by the noblest aspirations. Some of the members I have known and admired most of my career. The code evinces a concern with fairness and its guidelines represent a response to the ways in which formal and informal power are used and abused. I thought it especially important that it mentions and articulates some of the duties of faculty toward students.

Even so, I want to register my disappointment in and concern over this code. I will largely ignore but just explicitly note the oddity that the whole section on electronic communications seems to be restricted to work done on "institutional equipment, servers, websites, and email;" this does raise concerns (ht Stefan Hessbrüggen) over those faculty that challenge their own institutional practices on "institutional equipment." The code's flaws are three-fold: (i) it is silent on existing abuses and conflicts of interest in the profession; (ii) it has a misguided view on teaching philosophy; (iii) it is a predictable consequence that, as stated, this code will be used to silence and remove folk (from positions) who challenge local or professional abuses. It is especially notable that this code seems to have been written without addressing the widely read and discussed concerns over the abuses of 'civility' and 'collegiality (neither is mentioned much in the code, but there is an emphasis on being a good colleague) articulated by Leigh Johnson and Ed Kazarian at NewAPPS.  I discuss these flaws in turn. First, there are striking omissions:

• Many of the most obvious existing ethical problems in the profession occur in the context of professional ethics. These are cases in which professional ethicists use their status qua ethicist to become company-men who fail to exercise their professional duties to care for (say) animals [recall Lori Gruen's post]; or that advocate/condone torture (and get rewarded with grants, board membership, etc.); in addition, professional (applied) ethicists have been implicated in (recall) not being reflexive about conflict of interest rules and trading sometimes indirectly and occasionally directly their professional status for inappropriate financial and sexual benefits (name your favorite examples or go read the back issues of  my posts at NewApps). 
• In the previous bullet point I hint at a problem with a particular  journal. But professional philosophy has journal practices that can be best described as journal capture, and, more politely, as not conforming (with honorable exception to Ergo) to existing best practices in the academy (recall) this post. Connected to this is that,
• Professional philosophy has citation practices that are primarily about (aspirational) status signaling and club-joining; they do not exhibit much concern with giving credit to other people's contributions or priority. (Strikingly the APA code corrects this imbalance for one's students, but not others.) It is no surprise that professional philosophy exhibits various gendered, racial, and other patterns of exclusion.

These omissions are especially notable because the APA's Code explicitly notes that Given the varying public perceptions of philosophy, and the contributions of philosophy to the field of ethics as a domain of philosophical inquiry, the APA encourages its members to consider the connections between the public perception of philosophy and professional conduct as it relates to the values identified here. Philosophers have duties toward representing other people's and cultures' thoughts [see Bruce Janz's facebook post] and also responsibilities given the way our products enter the world of policy and practice. (For example, I have long been surprised that philosophers do not think it problematic when the predictable downside risks of their policy prescription fall on vulnerable and less powerful others.) Not to put too fine point on it, but there is a sense in which this Code does not take philosophical impact on the world serious enough.

To be sure, I am not suggesting that addressing these omissions is always easy and that my perception on these problems is beyond reproach. In effect, APA guidelines on how to think about likely conflicts of interests in the context of our professional and public activities may be useful precisely to generate discussion and awareness of the complexities involved. Some of the issues noted here are hinted at in the APA's code, in part by its appeal to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Professional Ethics (but the AAUP is primarily interested in academic freedom not professional integrity). For example, the AAUP insists that "professors acknowledge academic debt," but professional philosophers have a very curious way of interpreting this duty. So, this is not just a big missed opportunity, it also means that through its silence the APA seems to appear to condone some of the worst problems in our profession.

Second, the Code's understanding of teaching is flawed and also generates serious intellectual problems (I thank Ed Kazarian for discussion). Here are some examples:

• The report suggests that  teachers present "materials in an informed and balanced way, incorporating competing viewpoints in the spirit of fairness and with intellectual honesty." Pedagogically, it can be very useful to make mistakes in one's presentation and then allow oneself to be corrected by one of the students. (I use this trick so that my students learn that I let myself be corrected in public; that was a big deal in an environment in which teachers are never wrong in their lectures.) Also, some syllabi are intentionally biased because (and this is not uncommon in seminars) they wish to develop a particular viewpoint. In addition, in contemporary American culture 'balance' has become a way to correct perceived Liberal bias in a Conservative direction. But, as I learned from Mark Lance, it's rarely used to argue for the incorporation of other viewpoints (anarchist, libertarian, socialist, etc.). Remember, lots of analytical philosophers today have no patience for pomo views, but also (as distinct from their elders) other anti-realist or idealist views. (Full disclosure: I HAVE taught David Lewis alongside Deleuze; it was great fun, but why demand balance.) The APA here has over-reached.
• All of us sometimes encounter (it even made The Onion) overconfident students (often guys) who, perhaps without fully realizing it, monopolize class discussion and fail to acknowledge other students' perspectives even if they have not done the reading (or evince other signs of lack of preparation). Sometimes, it is very important for our pedagogical aims (i.e., "to teach...students how to think, write, and speak clearly; how to read, understand, and critique philosophical texts; and how to develop their own philosophies in conversation with other people") to prevent some such students from intimidating and silencing other students. While I would not always advocate "intentionally embarrassing or belittling them," it can be very useful both for the student in question and for others, that they come to recognize their own blabbering for what it is. How to do this in ways that promotes a healthy and constructive class room requires skill and experience, but the way the Code is worded may well be used to harass the most creative and serious of our teachers. 
• Sometimes what look like no-brainers ("Teachers should assess the academic performance of each student on its merits") turn out to require considerable contextual judgment. I have used teacher discretion strategically in grading to encourage more work or reward achievement of particular individuals (etc.).

Finally, let me discuss some preliminary concerns with the section on bullying and harassment.*

• It is odd and disappointing that the document does not reflect on the obvious ways such statements can be abused to silence and remove folk that question or challenge the professional and institutional status quo. In particular, it seems predictable that if you are vulnerable and try to call out various forms of oppression in a way that others find even mildly unpleasant, you will be accused of bullying and harassment. This is not some naive thought experiment, but lived experience for many of our peers.
• In particular, a certain (let me use a stereotype, sincere apologies to all members involved) Waspy politeness in the service of keeping a shop closed gets a pass in these guidelines, whereas emotive expressions of displeasure can be easily treated as species of bullying and harassment. This Code simply pretends as if this is not a known effect of such policies. For example, I can say very politely (I learned the following point from Amia Srinivasan and Daniela Dover) that you are begging the question and insist that you accept my premises and thereby assert situational power and structure over a conversation and, thus, "diminishes the capacity" of my interlocutor "to function effectively as a teacher, worker, or scholar."
• The problem here is that the guidelines are not treated in context sensitive way in which power differentials and context can make a big difference. For example nobody (least of all me) thinks that Jason Brennan's repeated public ridicule and parody of me (he can't even get my name right here) is problematic. Even my friends call me a ballooner now. (While my name sometimes come up in the blogopshere, I have never seen any complaint about the ridicule of my persona.) There are good reasons for this lack of concern; I am not especially professionally vulnerable. 
• Thus, the blanket ban on and prejudice against professional ridicule is (ahh) ridiculous. It is, after all, no surprise that dictators and tyrants dislike ridicule and satire--it's among the most effective weapons in equalizing power-differences. It is also a very effective way to undermine pretentiousness and visibly challenge professional privilege that cannot be defended on its merits, but hangs on anyway.

Let me stop here (for now). I hope this post generates respectful, wise, and inclusive discussion.:)

 

On Disturbed Aesthetics and True Politics (Swift's A Modest Proposal)

It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms.--Swift (1729).

A Modest Proposal begins (the quoted sentence above) with an ugly sight; we are not called to sympathize with the beggars in rags--looking at them, even reflecting on them, are downers. Rather it's taken for granted that we side with what we might call the disturbed aesthetics of those that encounter an urban landscape filled with miserably dressed, begging poor. In context it is implied that encountering orderly, working poor would not generate such aesthetic revulsion. Rather than fleeing the urban scene to find the sublime in the wild (as Burke would soon urge), some are moved to propose an aesthetic sanitation project. It's this impulse that is at the root of many noble reform projects and Disneyfication, but also of many modern species of tyranny, grandiose and petty.

It's easy to miss the role such disturbed aesthetics plays in Swift's narrator's argument because when he introduces aesthetic pleasure later in the context of luxury consumption by the landed (and commercial) rich, very different, more familiar notions of beauty operate. Such beauty is all about (to use eighteenth century terms) refinement and delicacy as well as status.

To be clear the narrator, who proposes the project of reform, himself is very careful not to reveal if he, too, is one of those urban walkers disturbed by ugliness. But he knows that is how he can grab his audience's first attention, and he is wise enough to understand that one mention is sufficient.

Swift's tale is, as is well known, the dark prophecy of Neoliberalism: he sees through the complex interaction among the mutually supporting inner logic(s) of markets, technocracy, utilitarianism, patriotism, and commodification. But unlike many later critics and observers who use such jargon, Swift, the poet, understands the source or wellspring of their enduring appeal such that passionate human beings might sacrifice all, and especially others, for such cold logics. 

I could end with the previous paragraph. A Modest Proposal is also a tale about the true art of politics. For, Swift implies that if we can recognize the role that disturbed aesthetics plays in driving our politics, we can channel this sanitizing energy into less harmful projects ("other expedients") and social arrangements. This requires not just the shaming of the grossly immoral, but making alternatives attractive to the public by seeming to be responsive to our aesthetic needs. That is to say, politics is also aesthetic prophecy.

On Receiving Applause after Final Lecture; On philosophical Teaching

Famous professors: From what I can tell, sometimes the hype is legit, sometimes not so much. One of my best professors here was a grad student at the time (Hi, Eric Schliesser!), yet, to be fair, many of the big-shots are great teachers. Some, however, are not, and are quite happy with themselves, and this inner joy makes it impossible for them to listen to new ideas, or to [hear] anything they themselves are not saying.--Phoebe Maltz, April 13, 2005.

Two days ago, after I closed discussion on my final lecture in Ghent (on Swift's A Modest Proposal), my undergraduate students in my survey course on early modern political philosophy startled me with an applause. I was so surprised and embarrassed that I looked down and never discerned who the ring-leader(s) was/were, and I only regained full consciousness when the last student had left the class-room.

When I was a PhD student at Chicago several important professors in the department expressed reservations about my academic future. At one point, while I was ABD, I got so discouraged that I needed a break from Hyde Park and I took an informal leave back to my home town, Amsterdam (don't cry for me), for an extended period. (My generous supervisor, Dan Garber (recall), never lost faith and pulled me through.) My main aim was to see if I would recover the joy of researching and writing philosophy. (In those days I still wholly conflated writing a dissertation and writing philosophy.) Away from peer pressure and the monastic life-style on the Midway, I walked my dog in an unfamiliar park, read Hume's History, and reflected on my grim job prospects (recall here and here); I decided that I would only stay with professional philosophy if I could fully embrace the life of a professional philosophy instructor.

I already knew that I liked being the teacher on the stage provided by the class-room (I had taught sections of Intro to International Relations before I went to graduate school), but at Chicago I had grown suspicious of teachers that teach to the crowd. By this I mean those professors who basically convey complex information and knowledge in an efficient and pleasing way (with slick presentations), but who don't...ahh...teach philosophizing. They reminded me of the (undoubtedly virtuous and mildly promising) lawyer-politician I had decided not to become, and that I dreaded I might still be if I would fail at professional philosophy. With hindsight I can see I had fallen under the spell of Ian Mueller (see Stephen Menn's recollection, pp. 216-9 and my own).

I forget which wise soul told me to reflect on the teaching methods of all the teachers that inspired me and to look for what is common in them and use that as my, as it were, exemplar. Over time, I decided that each of them enlarged features of their personality, intellectual and psychological, and used those features to engage with students and, simultaneously, deploy that connection to engage with the material together. At this level of abstraction this included professors who tried hard to convey their hard-won magnificent ideas about the universe (or the texts we were reading) as well the more cautious midwifing-professors (like Ian) who made it difficult to discern their own first order views during class discussion. The problem with this general insight is that it provides little concrete guidance and that to implement it, it presupposes considerable self-knowledge (and luck).

Even so over the years with the help and coaching of senior colleagues and frank students (especially in my first job at Wesleyan), I have evolved a teaching voice that is a mixture of theatricality, confrontation (sometimes playful sometimes earnest or both at once), and attempts at shared discovery, including a willingness to go down garden paths that end in (local) frustration. I have come to think that I am better at teaching methods and skills than content (although I often wonder if I may be deluded about this), so over the years I gave up on giving exams. Even reading my students' papers is an ongoing, painful exercise in discovering the limitations of my teaching skills. 

Judging by more than a decade of teaching evaluations, there is always a sub-set of students that cannot abide me (that is, they clearly do not like my in-class persona), and also find my classes a waste of time. At an intellectual level I accept that one can't be the best teacher for everybody at the same time, although I still stubbornly feel that the true art of philosophical class-room teaching involves mentoring different kinds of souls simultaneously.

While there are few joys associated with aging one ameliorating one is encountering the mature reflections of former students (recall). I feel vindicated when away from the official class-room, with appropriate distance, they can praise me (or express gratitude) for facilitating their art in their experiment in living. And so, yes, part of me worries that my students' applause means that I have also started to teach to the crowd, but I have to admit that I am pleased this is my final memory of teaching on the Blandijnberg....until, of course, I receive their final papers.

Of Four Kinds of Writer's Block

In the imagination there is no daylight and,                                              

Like Wallace Stevens, I know the dark is crucial.                                         

I sing, I grieve in it, I dream what haunts each night:                                                       

These bodies, even lynched, still are thinking.                               

Nothing is final, I’m told. No man shall see the end—

But them, my fathers, lifted into fire, like tongues.--Rickey Laurentiis.    

 

Poetry is a finikin thing of air

That lives uncertainly and not for long

Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.--Wallace Stevens.

I am often teased by my peers that I write so much;* I frequently answer truthfully that I am no perfectionist and that I have always worked with low (and very low) teaching loads with courses that directly (or indirectly) fed into my research. So, I may be utterly unqualified to write about writer's blog -- 'look who thinks he is nothing!' --, but I am intimately familiar with four kinds of staring at a blank page:

1. I have nothing to say despite (or, perhaps, because) having embraced the image of being a poet or philosopher. No, no (you suspicious mind) not so much from some purported high status that is derived from these venerable terms 'poet,' ('philosopher'), nor with the idea that if I wear black and smoke Gitanes, some beautiful woman will whisper her phone-number into my ear while I babble on about Rilke and Sartre.  No, it's because I regularly have sensory overload, where each pleasure and each pain has an exquisite and hitherto ignored delicacy so that I assume that the world requires me to channel the cosmic fire into words. Even so I stare at blank pages recognizing the painful truth that, perhaps as of yet, I have nothing to say of enduring consequence (few do I learn over the years, but that offers little consolation). Professional philosophy solves this problem by after considerable education, inserting us into a tradition that either embraces the intellectual division of labor, which bequeaths each of us open-problems, or  that allows us to re-tell the same historical story with minor, corrective variations in both cases advancing 'the discussion.' It's possible that if one is 'productive' enough, or mesmerized by chasing the next career step (dissertation, a job, tenure, etc.), one forgets this kind of writer's block.** I have speculated that the existence of  this kind of half-forgetting helps explain some of the professional bullying we encounter.

2. I lack skill. At some point half way through my graduate education and a few years out after the PhD, I could spot problems in what I read and I could sense that an alternative might be philosophically more satisfying, but I didn't know how to start organizing my thoughts. Sometimes the blank space would be filled with extensive notes, and long copiously footnoted excerpts from others (many of my dissertation chapters started like this), but even so I would be unable to find a path from the complexity I perceive (and that I think eminently worth sharing) to something that might count as intelligible to an outsider. Within analytical philosophy, this problem is solved by decomposing the complex mess to something that one can take a stance on, a thesis, (and then argue for while recognizing and incorporating a sub-set of  the innumerable objections one might discern.) In addition, there are tacit templates for journal articles that help set further constraints. At some point, practice, repeated feedback from more skilled others, and, eventually, repeat 'success,' evaporated this kind of writer's block. I re-encountered a version of this kind of writer's block, when I started to write for non-professional audiences or new formats (e.g., newspaper editorials, interdisciplinary venues, blogging, etc.), but without accompanying panic (hence, the past-tense in this paragraph): decomposing and practicing in the new genre always removed the writer's block over time.

On Triple-Marginalization

Third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. Needless to say, in philosophy the case is similar, if not worse. The study of philosophy often excludes anything outside of Western philosophy, and this is true even if one studies philosophy in Asia [11]....Often, scholars from India or China are proud of their own long tradition and philosophy and believe that they can make some contribution to philosophy in the West. However, much to their disappointment, they discover that their “inclusion” is not in itself a sign of engagement from outside their own group. They are ghettoized, with no apparent connection to the rest of the academic community. Often the only way the engagement might occur is if they conform to the methods of Western philosophy, using European or Anglo philosophy as a framework to explain their own ideas, thereby enforcing the Eurocentrism that discredits them in the first place. [18]"  Yoko Arisaka (2000) "Asian Women: Invisibility, Locations, and Claims to Philosophy"  [HT Audrey Yap & Tom Digby; see also this piece.]

If, in addition to self-knowledge, one of the main aims of philosophy is to conceptualize and articulate situations, feelings and experiences that would otherwise remain overlooked, even to ourselves,[1] -- and it is --, then in the passage above Arisaka is not doing arm-chair sociology of knowledge, but philosophy. Not everything needs to be made ‘available’ for discussion, but the need for our philosophical activity is especially important if something is made or remains overlooked because of existing injustice or oppression, ruling ideology, existing scientific commitments, bureaucratic practices, taxonomic categories, or even our ordinary psychological functioning (etc.). So, while I do not want to overvalue what words and concepts can do in the face of oppression -- and certainly do not mean to imply that freedom of expression resolves all problems or deny that it can generate its own problems --, words and concepts allow us to name problems or celebrate features of our lives that deserve more attention. We also ought not to underestimate the significance of this task; even the most powerful tyrants never feel so secure as to remove all censorship (explicit or tacit).

Arisaka's analysis is all the more poignant because she makes available for discussion professional philosophy's lack of receptivity and patterns of exclusion. Our present patterns of exclusion tend to reflect the conceptual sedimentations and professional choices of the past. But we should not assume that philosophy's patterns are merely local. Given the significance even generality of the enduring philosophical concepts -- past and present -- they are embedded in lots of other human activities. So, much conventional wisdom or tacit assumptions are the consequence of hard-won philosophical insight, and oversight, of the past.

Arisaka describes a very common phenomenon within professional philosophy:* if you work outside assumed-to-be-familiar ('core') areas it's your responsibility to supply the common framework that makes comprehension possible. Obviously this entails huge opportunity costs (one is busy re-packaging one's insights into mainstream vocabulary, say, rather than doing research, etc.) and, as Arisaka notes, philosophical (and psychological) distortions. Even when appointments in a non-core-field are made, they often go to folk that are very good at the re-packaging part, and then it's such folk -- hired to appease a Dean or to provide 'teaching coverage' -- that define professional excellence in the sub-field (and, in so doing, deflate whatever  potential for insight that might emanate from outside the 'core'). This is one reason why often at many leading departments the specialist-non-core-hires often do work on themes that do not define a new cutting-edge for philosophy, but seem to reflect past fashions renforcing the sense of non-significance. (Exercise for the reader: trace out research on Plato, Spinoza or Hume (etc.), through the idealist, logical positivist, naturalist, and metaphysical phases. [And 'history of philosophy' is not marginal in Western philosophy!])