Digressions&Impressions

Guest post on What is the Real Problem of "Me" Studies? (II)

[This is an invited guest post by Audrey Yap.--ES.]

Yesterday I took up Heath's column on “Me” Studies and took issue with both his framing of the issue and several conclusions. I ended the piece acknowledging that one of the issues he raised was very important, and had to do with the participation of non-oppressed folks in dialogues about oppression. That being said, I did disagree with one of his assumptions, that neither the oppressed nor the non-oppressed are better placed to study oppression, since it seems clear to me that the former are in a much better epistemic position. (Anyone who disagrees with me on this point is very likely to disagree with what follows.)

But this quote raises an important problem:

The problem is that, when you’re studying your own oppression, and you’re obviously a member of the oppressed group in question, people who are basically sympathetic to your situation, but who disagree with your specific claims, are going to be extremely hesitant to challenge you, because they don’t want to appear unsympathetic.--Heath.

What he is describing is a barrier to the participation of non-oppressed folks in important conversations about oppression. Because if all the non-oppressed are allowed to do in these conversations is agree with the claims of the oppressed, their participation seems basically nominal and hardly worthwhile. We should not adopt a stance under which everyone who is oppressed is automatically right whenever they disagree with someone who is privileged. But we do have good reason to think that the oppressed generally know more about their oppression than the privileged do.

My suggestion is to treat issues of oppression like we treat many other cases of specialized knowledge in philosophy, like philosophy of science or mathematics. My training is in philosophy of mathematics, and not every issue raised in that field requires specialized mathematical knowledge. But there are many debates about mathematical practice that require, if not a math background, at least some familiarity with the practice itself. This means that not every philosopher is well-positioned to have an important contribution to, for instance, the question period at a philosophy of math talk. And this does exclude many people from participation in these discussions, even people who would likely be able to make valuable contributions. But because they do not have the background knowledge, they will frequently refrain from participating so as not to appear uninformed or unintelligent.

The situation in many fields that study oppression can be seen as parallel. At least some issues that are raised in discussions of gender make explicit reference to types of experiences that many women have. Other women pointing out that they do not have those experiences can be very helpful, such as bell hooks' criticism of The Feminine Mystique, pointing out that black and lower-class women have always had to work outside the home, and that Friedan's writing about gender was limited to her own white middle-class perspective. But it seems rather unhelpful for a cis man, no matter how sympathetic, to point out that he is personally unfamiliar with those experiences and doubts that they are really so widespread. If this is the sole contribution of the non-oppressed person to the debate, it also seems hardly worth considering, since it seems principally to stem from a lack of knowledge about the subject matter. It is not that his gender prohibits him from making a valuable contribution, but that he has not bothered to gain background knowledge that his gendered experiences have not thus far accorded him. (And even those whose experiences do give them an epistemic advantage in understanding various kinds of oppression still need to reflect on those experiences and read what others say about it!)

It is important for those who study oppression to consider dissenting views. But those who study oppression know that there are already dissenting views in their field. There are substantive disagreements in philosophy of gender, philosophy of race, philosophy of disability (etc) just as there are in any philosophical field. So to say that the only form of disagreement entertained is either the entirely unsympathetic kind, or the kind that would like the views to be even more extreme, seems to neglect what actually goes on in those parts of philosophy. Of course, views that question the very possibility of the field don't generally get included as part of its canon, but faulting that would be like blaming metaphysicians for not embracing the logical empiricists.

Then let's return to the types of scenario that Heath has in mind, in which someone is at a talk that discusses a way in which they are not personally oppressed, but others are. And while they are generally sympathetic to the fact of the oppression, they happen to disagree with a particular point that the speaker makes. And since we are discussing barriers to the entry of studying oppression, this is a field in which they do not happen to work. Now, perhaps not wanting to seem like a bigot is an additional reason to self-censor dissent that doesn't show up in other fields. But this is because inadvertently saying bigoted things is easier to do when discussing oppression than, say, eliminative materialism (though really, plenty of bigoted things are said in all kinds of areas of philosophy). So perhaps the better solution would not be to ask oppressed people to be less sensitive, but rather to ask non-oppressed people to expend more effort to avoid saying bigoted things. I mean, if they're really sympathetic to the fact of oppression, perhaps they would do a bit more to try and avoid perpetuating it. (And this still leaves open lots of modes of engagement, such as asking speakers about the structure of their arguments, or simply asking them for more information.)

We can use Heath's own article as a case study – specifically, his dismissal of a reviewer who finds his use of the term “crazy” to be ableist (but as far as I can tell does not say this is a reason to discount the work as a whole). Rather than consider why someone might find the term problematic, it gets dismissed as an example of the over-the-top language policing that we are supposedly beyond now in academia. If this is the sort of supposedly valuable criticism that philosophy of disability is lacking because people are afraid of seeming ableist, the discipline does not really seem any worse off. Now the criticism I am making here is not that Heath used the term in the first place without knowing that it was potentially problematic. It is in his dismissive reaction to someone's bringing it to his attention that it is a problematic term. There might be some interesting debate to be had over the extent to which “crazy” is problematic in the first place, but there is no evidence of it here. So what this really is, is an illustration of how not to participate in conversations about oppressions that you do not suffer (i.e. By dismissing others' contributions to them)

Of course it is difficult to learn about the nature of oppression and to avoid using prejudiced language. It is also difficult to learn about quantum mechanics and the intricacies of the law. Yet still, we think that in order to be taken as a serious participant in debates about philosophy of quantum mechanics or philosophy of law, one should know something about them. And even these disciplines require some retraining in terms of our common sense ideas about how the world works. The difference is that some, because of their life circumstances, are in a better position to know about oppression than others due to their firsthand experience of it. But that's just a generalization of the claim (that Heath might agree with), that “me” studies are often easier for us than “not-me” studies. But then if he's right about the aims of a humanities education, that just means more privileged people need to do a bit more homework so they can engage in the “not-me” studies of oppression. And if they're upset at at the suggestion that what they say might sometimes perpetuate rather than alleviate oppression, then perhaps they're the ones who lack the temperament and critical thinking skills for philosophy.

Guest post on What is the Real Problem of "Me" Studies? (I)

[This is an invited guest post by Audrey Yap.--ES.]

A recent column by Joseph Heath at Toronto discusses the issue of “‘me’ studies,” which I take to be a phenomenon of people studying too narrowly the circumstances of their own lives. This is in part a problem, Heath writes, because it goes against “the broad intent of a humanistic education, which is to gain some understanding of the extraordinary variety of human experience, both historically and in other cultures – to drive home the idea that different people understand and evaluate the world in fundamentally different ways.” And I agree!--Western philosophy in general has too much in the way of “me” studies, namely straight, upper-middle-class, cis, heterosexual white men studying other straight, upper-middle-class, cis, heterosexual white men. This, as far as I can tell, has narrowed the discipline in general, much to its detriment.

But this isn't the problem that Heath sees. Or rather, this doesn't seem to be what he's talking about when he talks about “me” studies. Rather, the problem area he diagnoses has to do with studying the conditions of one's own oppression. Standpoint theory has long argued that those best positioned to understand the nature and conditions of (a particular kind of) oppression are those who are oppressed (in that particular way). Heath disagrees, writing that neither the oppressed nor the non-oppressed are especially well-positioned to study forms of oppression, since both are biased, simply in different ways. He writes that “the inevitable conclusion is that neither are particularly well-positioned, since both will be biased in the direction of producing theories that are, at some level, self-serving, or self-exculpatory.”

But let's consider the implications of this a little further and entertain the thought that a theory's being self-serving is not sufficient reason for dismissing it. If both oppressed and non-oppressed groups are likely to produce self-serving theories of oppression, what does that mean? After all, it is certainly the interest of an oppressed group to stop being oppressed! Similarly, many groups who are not oppressed benefit (at least indirectly) from the oppression of others. In a world of limited resources, if some people systematically have less access to those resources, it follows that the rest will very likely have more access. This means that it's in the interest of a non-oppressed group to maintain the conditions of oppression. Then, if eliminating oppression is one of our goals, the self-serving nature of the theories produced gives us a clear reason to favour the theories produced by oppressed groups over the theories produced by non-oppressed groups. In fact, given that we want to reduce risk, it can even give us a reason to systematically discount the potentially self-serving theories of the privileged groups, or at least hold them to higher epistemic thresholds.

At the very least all this makes Heath's conclusion seem a little less inevitable.

Now despite the fact that I disagree with Heath's “inevitable” conclusion, I do agree with several of his prescriptions, like the thought that we want lots of people from diverse backgrounds to engage with issues of oppression and with each other's ideas on these issues.  So clearly this requires people from non-oppressed groups (people with various kinds of privilege) to confront oppression that they do not suffer. But (as Heath describes it) the non-oppressed do not normally constitute the majority of people who study oppression. One of the reasons Heath considers is that oppressed people are attracted to “me” studies, which are areas that interest them personally. But I don't see why “me” studies should be the domain of oppressed people (which is not an explicit claim Heath makes, but seems to follow from his framing of the issues). After all, it would be equally likely that non-oppressed people gravitate away from studying oppression in favour of issues that seem more reflective of the conditions of their lives. Why, after all, study disability as an able-bodied person, when there are so many other philosophically interesting issues that would never force you to think of the privileges you might enjoy as a result of the body you have? If disabled philosophers studying disability counts as an instance of “me” studies, then so should non-disabled philosophers failing to study disability.

So I absolutely agree with Heath that “me” studies are a problem. But he misdiagnoses its source. The problem is not with the biases of oppressed people studying the conditions of their own oppression. The problem is with the biases of non-oppressed people who ignore issues of oppression in their own work. Much of this stems from the fact that I disagree with Heath's claim that neither the oppressed nor the non-oppressed are better placed to study oppression. Even from personal reflection, I can think of several ways in which I belong to oppressed groups (as a woman of colour, for instance), and several ways in which I belong to non-oppressed groups (as a straight cis person, for instance). It would be absurd for me to claim that I am in just as good a position as a trans person to understand transphobia. Heath's claim that nobody is particularly well-positioned to study oppression might be true in that nobody is perfectly positioned. But the oppressed are at least better positioned than the non-oppressed.

It is also not clear to me that we all live in the same social world that we are studying. We might all be living in a world in which objects tend to fall to the ground when released from a height, and in which humans need to breathe air. But it is not clear that people who use wheelchairs live in the same world as those who do not. After all, what constitutes a straightforward path from a bus stop to a store can look very different to people depending on their membership in one or the other group. Still, while this post has been largely critical of Heath's column, he does raise a very important issue, namely how members of non-oppressed groups can fruitfully participate in dialogues about oppression. This is something I want to talk about in the next post on the subject.

On Kate Manne's "Losing Battle"

[Yo]u have to learn to accept the rejections themselves gracefully...But sometimes, they simply confirm that you are fighting a losing battle. This referee report was one such. The reviewer complained about my use of feminist terms and concepts throughout the paper – e.g., “hegemonic dominance”, “messages that are not only false but oppressive,” and “hermeneutical injustice,” being the specific phrases which they listed as objectionable. And they went on to remark more generally that “the rhetoric of the ms. is such that it will, I think, (1) turn off some readers and (2) distract from the author’s argument. The author brings in some concepts and language which, whatever their merits, seem dubious to many of us in the analytic tradition.”

As a feminist philosopher in the analytic tradition, this is a very disappointing reaction to encounter. Many of us...take the above terms and concepts to be standard, useful, and indeed vital, stock-in-trade. And the people who the reviewer feared would be so “turned off” by the language as to be “distracted” from my argument seem to include the reviewer themselves, ironically. They not only managed to completely miss, but handily illustrated, my central point in the paper. The point being that if one espouses politically marginalized views within philosophy, then one is disproportionately likely to be dismissed, disparaged, silenced, or even excluded from the discipline altogether. One is less likely to be given a platform in leading journals, for one concrete example, in view of which one is of course less likely to be able to earn a living wage, let alone get tenure.

...Feminist philosophy is virtually absent, and plausibly systematically excluded, from top journals...

These points have important epistemic as well as political implications. (This was the main intended lesson of my paper, which the reviewer missed entirely.) Some epistemologists have argued recently that, if you discover that you are in the minority in philosophy, insofar as most of the philosophers who you take to be smarter and more expert than you take a different view, then you should doubt your own judgment. Generally speaking, you should defer to the experts. In my paper, I argued that this idea fails to be compelling when it comes to philosophy, specifically. For suppose that one forms a certain idiosyncratic philosophical view or judgment. It is difficult to know if one’s view is just foolish (as is admittedly quite likely if no one else has ever or would ever share it), or whether one’s natural intellectual allies have been selected against, essentially. For if (e.g.) feminist voices in philosophy have been silenced or suppressed, all I will hear is silence. Much the same goes for my reviewer, naturally.

So should I be especially worried about the plausibility of my position in virtue of the fact that there are admittedly a fair number of smart, knowledgeable analytic philosophers who think like my reviewer, and are dubious about, or even positively contemptuous of, feminist views and methods? I don't think so. For there might have been plenty of smart, knowledgeable feminist philosophers who would have agreed with me, were they only around and given the platform from which to do so. The problem is that people like my reviewer are the ones with most of the power. And the more they wield this power to exclude feminist philosophers, the more their sense of what ‘we’ do will in fact be accurate.

The final irony is that this is hegemonic dominance par excellence. And it is the fact that it persists, not the concept, which is bullshit.--Kate Manne (of Facebook) [quoted with permission].

I sometimes joke that analytical philosophy has so evolved that it is now easier to get a paper defending the modal intuitiveness of the Trinity published in Philosophical Review than it is to get a hearing for work inspired by, say, De Beauvoir, Fanon or Du Bois. The not-so-funny point is that the methods and technologies deployed by analytical philosophy generate few intellectual barriers to introducing substantive views. This makes it actually easy to discern, if one is willing to do so, that if some views are not being aired, then there are almost always certainly sociological mechanisms that explain the barriers to entry (recall my post on Lewis's intervention on behalf of Priest). 

One interesting, such sociological mechanism is the use of images of science in order to create an image of philosophy that make it reasonable to deny alternative views a hearing or to respond to known objections. By an 'image of science,' I mean a list of characteristics of science, often associated with a bunch of epistemic virtues, that get trotted out in polemical or self-justifying context. Two elements of the most pernicious image of science are (i) the idea that experts mutually adjust (or haggle)--this is a view (recall) that has its clearest expression in the work by Aumann (the game theorist who won a Nobel in economics); (ii) the Kuhnian, technocratic idea that science is about paradigmatic consensus. These underwrite the idea of expert deference within philosophy (which understands itself as producing something akin to scientific knowledge, often with some appeal to inference to best explanation). What is often forgotten is that what (i) and (ii) have in common (and this is true of Aumann as much as it is true of Kuhn) is the commitment that science is usefully thought of as perfectly free market in ideas. But even if one arranges one's institutions of knowledge (journals, promotions, tenures, prizes, grants, etc.) to facilitate the reality of (i) and (ii) [this is sometimes called 'social engineering'], it can still be the case that market of ideas is not free.

The reason why we know that the market of ideas is not free in analytical philosophy is that our methods are, as Katrina Hutcheson notes, often non-transparent [quick example: the nature of analysis (recall and here)], which is why there has been a salutary turn to meta-philosophy, and that our top journals have been run as (often in house) factional fiefdoms. Undoubtedly the latter served a purpose in order to ensure the survival and even dominance of analytical philosophy in light of various competitors. It also lead to a lot of toleration for hyper-analytical approaches in areas where they are manifestly not suitable (quick and dirty example: the philosophy of art).*

Manne titled her Facebook post "Losing Battle." Analytical feminism is not losing the battle (recall my post on analytical ideology studies). I say this because analytical feminism has succeeded at attracting a lot of young talented folk (including Manne!), who, in turn, are mining -- and by the magic of philosophical alchemy are transforming -- rapidly some of the best ideas developed outside of analytical philosophy in order to create something genuinely new and important (e.g. Dotson, Haslanger, Stanley, Langton, Saul, Maitra, Fricker, etc.).**

For those of us with a historical sensibility, this sponge-like ability to absorb, transform -- and sometimes unfairly present as wholly new -- is in fact, one of the beautiful, shameless essences of analytical philosophy. The lack of proper shame, alas, also entails that we regularly generate bullies and gatekeepers that confuse their second-rate philosophical abilities for true philosophy.

On Ignorance

My favorite feature of Daily Nous is the link to non-academic hires; it's not very active, but I return to it every few weeks and I love getting a new impulse to daydream about how trained academic philosophers spread wisdom, positive affect, and conceptual acumen outside the academy serving their newfound companies and communities with integrity. I imagine that those liberated from the academy, spread their wings and flourish. This fantasy is undoubtedly a consequence of my sense that professional philosophy is inhospitable to wisdom and, perhaps, my sense that, despite the presence of collossal brainpower (and astounding resources), it has deeply entrenched means to preserve a status quo bias (perhaps that's related to those very resources).

Sometimes I wonder if I would have recognized the significance of Leibniz if I were an eighteenth century philosophy professor, or Boole in the middle of the nineteenth, or Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth. (To this day Boole's greatness is unrecognized.) I wonder if I would have been receptive to Mary Wollstonecraft or if my heart would have been stone-cold to her call to humanity. Some of these names were obscure in their life time or their best writings unfamiliar to others. And it is not impossible that I would have ignored not just the more radical authors, but also the best-sellers among them with a confident self-assurance that popular philosophy is incompatible with profundity, skill, and insight. How likely would it have been that I would familiarize myself with, say, a Danish religious curmudgeon?

As an expert on west European philosophy between 1600-1800, I recognize that the vast majority of authors from that period that are still of interest today, the ones that shaped the ideas that guide our common sense or that challenged it, when first articulated, were not university professors (yes, I have heard of Hutcheson, Kant, and Adam Smith). This is not just true of the brilliant women of the time who were denied access to universities. And, yes, I know that some of the enduring figures aspired to be university professors (Hume) or wanted to be required reading in universities (Descartes, Hobbes), or entertained offers for university positions (Spinoza). Even so, recognized expertise, based on a dissertation or a track-record of journal publication, is not the only road to philosophy; specialization within the intellectual division of labor is just one way to acquire philosophical craft--it's not a necessary consequence of historical development.  

I often suspect that I am so immersed in my scholarly activities (refereeing, grant-writing, journal publication, giving lectures, PhD supervision etc.), and so consumed by ongoing scholarly discussions, that I miss the most important philosophical insights and developments of our times even if, miraculous enough, these would occur within (English language) professional philosophy. (This is not to deny that relative to the period that preceded it between, say, 1514-1781, academic philosophy has had an excellent run since Kant and Dugald Stewart.) I expect that future scholars -- my kind of people -- will scan my D&I contributions and will use it as evidence that, in fact, not even those cosmopolitan analytical philosophers that indulged themselves, and were so indulged, in reading outside the tribe were aware of the great instauration of philosophy started in 2004 in the vast metroplis of...

There is a popular genre of historical writing that is about witnesses to history, that is, people like you and me that just happen to be present at events that become part of historical memory and left a record of their observations. Yet, many of us, almost certainly the vast majority inside and outside the academy, are writing about and contributing to non-history's rapid impressions that disappear without a trace.  

Social Modality and Ideology (on Lippmann, Stanley L.A. Paul and Adam Smith)

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.--Walter Lippmann Public Opinion, Chapter VII (emphases added--ES).

In ch. 5 (ms) of Jason Stanley's "How Propaganda Works," Stanley's calls attention to, and discusses the quoted passage from Lippmann's Public Opinion. Stanley's discussion is excellent, and he deploys Lippmpan's accounts of stereotypes, or in Stanley's terminology, 'scripts,' which structure expectations, to explain both how legitimation of ideology works and to explain the role of ideology in generating resistance to rational revision. (An 'ideology' is "simply a social "script" that governs one's expectations, normative and practical.) Thus, Stanley, who uses Hume and Marx (and others) to motivate his approach to ideology, meets Elster's challenge to the Marxist in Sour Grapes (recall), that is, to supply empirically robust psychological and social mechanisms that can secure a consequence explanation of ideology. (Stanley appeals to empirical work by Payne, Steele, Eberhardt, and others.) In the chapters I have read Stanley does not mention Elster, but, in effect, he helps rehabilitate (alongside work of Gendler, Dotson, Siegel, and Haslanger--all cited and discussed by Stanley) the viability of the notion of ideology.

In the passage quoted from Lippmann, there is a further feature not emphasized by Stanley (but compatible with his approach) that I emphasized above: stereotypes (or social scripts) shape (what I'll call) social modality, that is, the shape of possible experience and counterfactual expectations within it. (Stanley makes a point like this without appealing to counterfactuals and possible world language.) According to Adam Smith in a properly functioning person there is a reciprocal relationship between the habituated mental anticipations of events and sound judgment (recall my discussion here). In my book on Adam Smith (ms) I call this -- in honor of Vernon Smith (in addition a terrific Adam Smith scholar) -- 'ecological rationality.' Homogeneous communities tend to share such ecological rationality. (Recall.)

These scripts exist at the individual and social level, but also at intermediate levels of say, scientific practitioners, journalists, experts like doctors and engineers and interact among each other in complex ways to generate social modalities with individual, disciplinary, class, gendered, race (etc.) perspectives. Many such social modalities are extremely robust anchored as they are in our ordinary cognitive functioning and enduring social institutions (the law, family-structure, discipline formation, the economy, education, etc.). So, in all disciplines there is a built-in tendency toward agreement (which, say in our profession, is reinforced by an image of science that values/promotes consensus along Kuhnian lines). Social modalities also explain the existence of systematically overlooked patterns (epistemic versions of Knightian uncertainty) of the sort recently reinvigorated by L.A. Paul.

As Beiser notes in the final chapter of his wonderful book on the German Historicist Tradition, Max Weber noted that in advanced economies, and increased division of labor, value pluralism is a natural consequence (recall). Given the framework developed by Stanley, we can understand why this so: social modalities will vary in an heterogeneous environment (as the division of labor is). As Stanley notes (and this echoes Smith's move), normative expectations are not immune from this process. 

This generates all kinds of questions (about pluralism, the social ontology of intentional objects that are social modality dependent, the role of a theorist that articulates/practices her subject within a certain entrenched modality, etc.). Here I note just the following: one problem in the vicinity here is that some reasonable expectations are manifestly unjust to outsiders. (Stanley discusses how the institutions of slavery generate ideologically sanctioned legal, commercial, cultural, gendered, racialized (etc.) expectations.) But within a lot of legal and moral areas we cannot really do without some such expectations (see here for an introduction). Life and commercial plans are made within unjust institutional structures by people that are, perhaps, indirectly complicit in them but not responsible for them. (Of course, some may well be responsible or have sufficient privilege within them to generate duties.) That is to say, an intentional violation of an entrenched social modality will generate demands, perhaps some quite reasonable, to be compensated for psychological, political, and commercial losses, including counterfactual ones that will be utterly unexpected.

On Substantial Self-knowledge

The professionalization of the subject has made philosophers of self-knowledge far too comfortable with the idea that their job is to discover technical solutions to technical problems generated by background philosophical assumptions about the nature of knowledge and mind. They may insist that what is philosophically worthwhile can’t be decided by what non-philosophers think is worthwhile, and that it is of no consequence if their questions strike the uninitiated as odd. Philosophy has its own concerns, and all that matters is whether their concerns have a philosophical rationale....

There has to come a point at which philosophy has to address wider concerns, and if self-knowledge is not the kind of thing which philosophers can think about in ways that resonate with the world at large then one fears for the future of the subject. It’s easy for professional philosophers to sneer at popular accounts of self-knowledge in self-help books, but philosophically curious readers of such books are entitled to ask what philosophy has to offer instead. The answer had better not be “Nothing.”--Quassim Cassam writing in the New York Times. [HT Thomas Jacobi]

I think of myself as a cheerleader for analytical existentialism something akin to what Prof. Cassam -- a philosopher I have admired from a distance -- calls "“substantial” self-knowledge." Even so, when he writes "To know yourself would be to know such things as your deepest thoughts, desires and emotions, your character traits, your values, what makes you happy and why you think and do the things you think and do," I notice at once that he leaves out what one might call the 'political self' or the self in (embedded, if not constituted by) society. If these social forms of self-knowledge are present in his remarks they are lurking in the implicit shadows of Cassam's substantial conception. I return to this below.

First, I quoted the first paragraph above because it exemplifies my point of partial agreement with Cassam. It's not difficult to discern a conception of philosophy in it that is most vigorously (and rigorously) articulated by Oxford's Timothy Williamson in the contemporary scene (see the "Methodological Afterword" of his Modal Logic as Metaphysics [recall], where in the name of clarity, philosophy as a professional and esoteric subject is joyfully embraced.) Because of my analytical egalitarian commitments, I am no friend of philosophy as a purely esoteric discipline even though I advocate the need that some philosophy should be allowed to pursue highly technical, trivial questions pushed along by some inner necessity.

Even so, against Cassam, I recognize that esoteric, technical philosophy can be concerned with substantial self-knowledge (you try making sense of, say, Spinoza's Ethics part V without a specialist guide who has mastered extremely technical jargon and conceptual distinctions). In particular, for much of the twentieth century there have been professional philosophers that have used extremely esoteric language to discuss substantial self-knowledge: I mean, of course, so-called 'continental' philosophers who deployed a highly technical language to speak to and teach substantial self-knowledge to different souls/audiences at once (recall my treatment). That is to say, there are political dimension internal to philosophy (the magister and her student will get different things out of the text) and external to philosophy (outsiders get a certain image of philosophy) alongside a potentially politicized conception of self that may or may not be destabilizing to individuals or society.

So, to be precise: it's not so much the professionalism of philosophy, but (i) the division of intellectual labor with a method of problem-solving alongside (ii) a set of noxious distinctions about what genuine philosophy is or is not that removed the pursuit of substantial self-knowledge from the mainstream of analytical philosophy (recall my posts on Russell on Spinoza's vision got treated as somehow not philosophical), including the forgetting of Stebbing.  (I say 'mainstream' because there have always been analytical philosophers who have quietly pursued substantial self-knowledge (recall my post on Jeff McConnell).)

I know that Cassam knows all of this, but it is very important that we recognize the blocks and path-dependencies that prevent professional (analytic) philosophy from simply jumping into articulating a substantial self-knowledge. After all, we are -- if we take "starting points" seriously -- historically and politically situated selves (recall the first thing I noticed above), even if we, in our cosmopolitan moments, aspire to speak to souls of all ages. Not to ruin a joke: this is why Quine's comment about the meaningless of starting points in Ohio is so important (recall).

"Methodological Afterword,"

Second, and following up on the previous paragraph, I am suspicious of the idea that philosophy must 'resonate' with the world at large if this means we must operate "with a realistic picture of what real human beings are like." This is a dangerous status quo bias, especially when it is coupled with a purportedly depoliticized conception of substantial self-knowledge. Philosophy's demand on us is to articulate not what our self-knowledge is, but rather what our self-knowledge might be, perhaps, after emulating some sage's path to wisdom or, more plausibly, a creative re-modelling of institutions.*

 

Dennett's Faustian Bargain, revisited

For several years, I have been posing the following choice for my fellow philosophers: if Mephistopheles offered you the following two options, which would you choose?

(A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history).

(B) You write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required reading list for centuries to come. 

Some philosophers reluctantly admit that they would have to go for option (B). If they had to choose, they would rather be read than right. Like composers, poets, novelists, and other creators in the arts, they tend to want their work to be experienced, over and over, by millions (billions, if possible!). But they are also tugged in the direction of the scientists’ quest. After all, philosophers are supposed to be trying to get at the truth.

When I have presented the same Faustian bargain to scientists they tend to opt for (A) without any hesitation—it’s a no-brainer for them.--Daniel C. Dennett (2013) “A Faustian Bargain” Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, p. 411.+

Daniel Dennet was one of my undergraduate teachers, and I am pretty sure I heard him try out versions of the “Faustian Bargain” on visiting scholars. (In his book, Intuition Pumps, he describes further variants.) I mention this because at some point, while I was completing my dissertation, I articulated a descendant of the Bargain that I have tried out on some fellow historians of philosophy. It goes something like this:

(A*) You conclusively settle all interpretive problems about the relationship between the infinite and finite in Spinoza’s metaphysics (like Descartes's Circle a notorious problem) such that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, Spinoza becomes easy, and you get a footnote in history).

(B*) You generate interest in a previously overlooked text so that it (not you) gets on the required reading list for centuries to come.   

Most scholars happily and promptly settle for (A*); that’s what we are trained to aim at. The spirit of contemporary scholarship in the history of philosophy has its origins (mediated via Quentin Skinner, perhaps) in Germanic Wissenschaft, after all. But a few respondents are, after some hesitation, tempted by (B*). For, ever since some professional philosophical historians of philosophy started to read canonical works in context, it was likely they would stumble across texts that might seem candidates for (B*). And while getting the past right is a non-trivial task, doing justice to the past and thereby shaping a better future is nobler yet.

Moreover, (B*) is also a near-self-less-act; in it one is the nearly anonymous hand-maiden to another's success. Even if it is motivated (one concludes after reading Nietzsche) by a strange kind of desire for revenge or (echoing Walter Benjamin) by a desire to speak for history's losers, it remains the case that one uses one's skill and judgment to make somebody else's previously overlooked views, insights, or arguments available for discussion. Of course, plenty of scholars are motivated by the true and the good, and (B*) might be one way to promote these. Even so, there is also something quixotic about (B*) because it is so unlikely to succeed. After reflecting on canon-formation throughout history, I suspect that enduring novelty is introduced into the curriculum and people's reading habits not by the conjoined efforts of scholars, but by the ideological and curricular needs of history's proverbial winners who write and rewrite the past to give their own commitments an air of inevitability, the so-called (to adopt a fine phrase by Michael Kremer) 'royal road to me' (recall).

On Escaping Our Gated Community

Rawls himself said in the opening pages of “A Theory of Justice” that we had to start with ideal theory because it was necessary for properly doing the really important thing: non-ideal theory, including the “pressing and urgent matter” of remedying injustice. But what was originally supposed to have been merely a tool has become an end in itself; the presumed antechamber to the real hall of debate is now its main site. Effectively, then, within the geography of the normative, ideal theory functions as a form of white flight. You don’t want to deal with the problems of race and the legacy of white supremacy, so, metaphorically, within the discourse of justice, you retreat from any spaces worryingly close to the inner cities and move instead to the safe and comfortable white spaces, the gated moral communities, of the segregated suburbs, from which they become normatively invisible.--Charles Mills in the New York Times.

When I was a student and graduate student such a functional analysis of debates within philosophy of the sort Prof. Mills provides was, well, strictly off-limits. So, I was pleased to see it shared approvingly by so many folk that I admire and respect. For philosophy to properly understand itself and the places -- metaphorical and physical -- it occupies and leaves empty, the 'effective' consequences of our conceptual moves need to be made available for discussion. 

In his comments, Prof. Mills is very careful to distinguish between Rawls's original intent and what happens in that most important no-place: "the geography of the normative." He does not explain the causal factors that might have facilitated the 'retreat.' And normally  this would be the place where I would talk about incentives and institutions, and deepen my argument about why Rawls's  technocratic political ideal -- and perhaps also the very idea of a neutral, formal language -- was so attractive to many (recall). But in re-reading the interview with  Prof. Mills I noted that he is very explicit about one feature of the agency of professional philosophers; he writes, "You don’t want to deal with the problems of race and the legacy of white supremacy."

Now, I take it that Prof. Mills is not merely offering a psychological diagnosis about individuals, but, rather, offering the claim that professional (political) philosophy has evolved in such a way as not being capable -- de facto -- of practicing certain important forms of philosophical inquiry; it allows the proliferation of disciplinary "norms of cognition that so function as to work against successful cognition."* These norms also facilitate the further entrenchment of certain forms of social injustice -- victims are further made cognitively invisible (recall this post).

For the nobler among us the pull of "correcting injustices" is, perhaps, large enough to follow Prof. Mills and "exit Rawlsland." But I also note that Prof. Mills leaves the rest of us an additional argument (no, I don't mean that gated communities filled with the like-minded are very boring places); rather, he promises us better access to a more "realistic perspective" on social reality--one in which our cognition has a better chance of not being (too) empty.

 

Becoming a moral phenomenologist, or: why philosophers might want to engage with social science, or do a bit themselves

[This is a guest-post by Lisa Herzog.--ES]

I am a philosopher, and last year I went on a research trip to Ecuador and Columbia. Yes, you haven’t misread, and this is not The Onion. Let me explain how this came about, and why a philosophers can engage with social scientific research, and even engage in it themselves, a little bit. I do not hold that all philosophers should do this. But I argue that for addressing certain questions, it makes sense. I would like to share my experience and encourage people who do similar things to get in touch – you must be out there, somewhere!

I work in a research project in philosophy on ethical agents in financial markets. It was initiated by Axel Honneth and is based at Frankfurt University; my office is at the Institut für Sozialforschung. This already gives away part of the story: Frankfurt has, of course, a great tradition of critical interdisciplinary research. For this project, Honneth found a partner: a bank that has an explicit mission to support economic development. Its headquarters are in Frankfurt, but it mostly works in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. It started out doing microfinance, at around the same time when Yunus started the movement in Asia, but has now turned towards financial small enterprises, because they take it that this is more promising for supporting sustainable economic improvements for the worst-off.

Before having the good luck of being hired at this project, I had already started empirical work: I was interested in ethical agency in organizations, I wanted to write about it, but I felt I had no sense of what it was like to work in a complex organization. The books I read about it did not give me a feeling of real understanding from the inside. So I threw myself into a series of interviews: I bought a recording device, ordered books on methodology from the library (most of them turned out to be distinctively unhelpful), and reached out for interviewees, starting with friends and acquaintances, and then using a snowball system. I asked all kinds of questions: what are the moral aspects of your job? What are the challenges? How do you relate to your professional role? The answers to these questions were interesting, but what was even more interesting was when interviewees opened up and started to tell their own stories, ask their own questions, and tell me about their doubts and uncertainties.

The project on ethics in financial markets began similarly: I had conversations, mostly with one manager, himself a sociologist by training, who told me about his years of experience in the bank, the struggles, the joys, the challenges, his search for moral narratives to pass on to employees. He arranged meetings with other managers and employees, and opportunities for listening in on training sessions. And he said: ‘you have to see it on the ground.’ My first trip was to Eastern Europe, with a tight schedule of conversations with employees in different roles, accompanying them when they met customers and listening in to courses they taught to newly recruited members. The second trip was the one to Ecuador and Columbia. We had planned a third trip, to Bolivia, but it turned out that some important legal chances in the country’s financial system, the consequences of which I would have wanted to explore, were delayed, so we had to postpone the trip.

Why on earth would one want to do such things?

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.