Digressions&Impressions

On Not Re-reading, Pirsig

At 78, Robert Pirsig, probably the most widely read philosopher alive, can look back on many ideas of himself. There is the nine-year-old-boy with the off-the-scale IQ of 170, trying to work out how to connect with his classmates in Minnesota. There is the young GI in Korea picking up a curiosity for Buddhism while helping the locals with their English. There is the radical, manic teacher in Montana making his freshmen sweat over a definition of 'quality'. There is the homicidal husband sectioned into a course of electric-shock treatment designed to remove all traces of his past. There is the broken-down father trying to bond with his son on a road trip. There is the best-selling author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, offering solutions to the anxieties of a generation. And there is, for a good many years, the reclusive yachtsman, trying to steer a course away from cultish fame. 2006 The Guardian.

In starting this piece, I remembered the amazement I felt at meeting my classmate, Julio Tuma (who went on to do a PhD in the philosophy of biology), in the first week of graduate school in Hyde Park at The University of Chicago in the sweltering Midwestern heat. Julio was an ex banker, who didn't just ride an old motorcycle, but also repaired it. At the time I decided to interpret it as a kind of providential sign (except that I did not believe in providence) that I had made the right decision going to graduate school at Chicago in philosophy.* (My original, intention, thwarted by fateful comedy of life, had been to study game theory in international relations.)

Let me explain, by way of diversion: a few years ago, an excellent and philosophically subtle, mathematical economist confided to me in a letter that "it dawned on my yesterday that my (very little) knowledge of philosophy is heavily influenced by one of my favourite books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig."

In response I wrote (this is in 2013), I went to The university of Chicago, sent their by the enthusiasm of my English professor (Michael Fixler), who made me read Pirsig alongside Milton and Derrida (and a smattering of Shannon's information theory). Professional philosophers do not tend to admit to liking the book, although I did once write a blog-post about it in homage to Fixler (see here). 

Fixler was a Milton expert, who showed more than a passing likeness to the main character of Bellow's Herzog (Fixler and Bellow met at Chicago so it's not impossible). Fixler's very fine book, Milton and the Kingdoms of God, got overshadowed by the more influential work of Christopher Hill and Stanley Fish. When I met him in the early 1990s, the frail Fixler, who had suffered a bad traffic accident a few years before, was obsessed with a species of structuralism. He was convinced that certain literary structures were not merely robust cultural features, but that they were embedded in biological features of our brain reinforced by constraints of information theory. After being drafted into a course on the metaphysical poets with him my junior year, I took the senior seminar (which turned into a directed reading course) on the afterlife of the fourfold ascent starting with the Phaedrus through Shannon. (I think the idea occurred to him in the mid 70s judging by this publication.) I have no idea what the course was called, but I do remember that Fixler was pleased I discovered the Four Quartets in preparing my term paper, and I always think of Fixler fondly when I stumble across further allusions to the Phaedrus and the fourfold (even when crossed out). 

Fixler was not my introduction to Pirsig (although he did introduce me to Lila). I am pretty sure that I devoured Zen as a trusted companion while traveling alone (by train not motorcycle) in Sweden the Summer before I went to college.+  But by the time I met Fixler, I had taken enough undergraduate courses in philosophy to recognize that Pirsig was not taken seriously by professional philosophers -- unlike, say one of my other teen favorites, Doug Hofdstadter, who was clearly a buddy of  Dennett --; I knew it was best to keep his influence on me quiet.

The fact that autobiographical narrator of Zen loathed professional/academic philosophers -- he creates a memorable portrait of a bullying professor (often taken to be the now, otherwise forgotten [although that's not entirely fair, but about that some other time more] Richard McKeon) at The University of Chicago, who generates acolytes who can parrot empty philosophical phrases -- did not deter me from being excited about going there. (I did not take up riding motorcycles, but did visit Bozeman on a road trip once!) 

Because I do no have photographic memory, I adore re-reading books (recall David Heller's wisdom [here] and Zadie Smith's [here]; I love being surprised by new features in an otherwise familiar text. Even so, I do not re-read many except by teaching them. (This is compensated by another habit of reading books for the first time when I teach them.) The main reason for this is practical: time is limited, and the books I wish to read for the first time growing at a discontinuous rate. However, there are some books I do not re-read because they belong, like a time-stamp, to a particular period of my life (e.g., Sheltering Sky belongs to my teenage years; Anna Karenina and War & Peace are part of my year as an employed office worker 1994/5).

For a long time, I did not re-read Pirsig's Zen because I worried I could not engage it except as a critic. After all, odds were high that as a trained philosopher, I would find the book annoying. I worried that its musings on quality and truth would strike me as sophomoric; that my professional self would laugh at my teenage self for being taken in by Pirsig's (ahh) sophistry. But in writing these lines, I recognize a potentially, more cowardly truth: I did not need Pirsig to remind that there is a non-trivial connection between the post-Platonic institutionalization of philosophy and a a certain kind of aggression (Pirsig does not hide his fierce aggressiveness in encountering it) that moves the university based practice of philosophy inexorably away from excellence.

On the Interior Freedom of an Authentic Liberal Education; Or How the Sheltering Sky nearly ruined my life

Can we imagine college classes being conducted without agendas, either political or scholarly?

If this seems a fantasy, can we imagine ways that the agendas that inevitably emerge would be constantly subject to self-critical eyes?

The small-scale culture of a college — not its rhetoric or its bureaucratic shortcuts — would be the only source of such a possibility.

Consider the serious challenges that an ordinary college lecture class faces in this regard. The content-providing professor proceeds according to his or her preestablished conclusions. Grades are constantly dribbled out in a way that can encourage followers or punish dissenters. The student as content-consumer has little incentive or indeed encouragement to undertake an inquiry where much of anything is at stake.

The architects of the liberal arts program at St. John’s and of the original core curriculum at the University of Chicago had an ingenious solution: Demote the professor to the status of a guide and give students the responsibility for the discussion.

The “teachers,” as my college’s advertising boasts, are the authors of great works, Plato, Newton, Austen or DuBois. Let students pursue the questions they bring to the classroom with the books as interlocutors and with their fellow students and teachers as helpers. Let the faculty step back and ensure that the discussions are careful, respectful and relentlessly pursue the truth. And use grades only to signal to outside institutions the student’s fitness for further study.

A great work is one sufficiently complex and majestic to support conflicting interpretations. But it is also one that exposes questions crucial to humanity: on the just structure of society, yes, but also the existence or nonexistence of divinities; the nature of matter and the laws of nature; the inner workings of mathematics; and the pitfalls of the human mind and heart.

Discussing such works is a bottomless journey, pursued in acknowledged ignorance and punctuated by flashes of insight.

Such discussions train us in respecting others, in facing our own inadequacy and in patiently seeking out the reality of a situation. Training the natural and spontaneous interest of a young person in fundamental questions is an excellent preparation for life.

After all, agendas come and go. The challenge is to maintain a broad perspective in an environment driven by money-making fads and more sinister attempts to exploit human beings in the search for power and profit.

The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth.--Zena Hitz "What is a Safe Space?" Washington Post.

Hitz's article in the Washington Post responds to the debate about safe spaces and trigger warnings, but is really a further articulation, if not development, of her position that a certain kind of education develops interiority (recall her piece in First Things, and my response here). While it is true that the core curriculum and the way of teaching that accompanies it is not political in the sense of taking sides in conventional party politics, she is mistaken to suggest that there is no politics in the conception at all, or that it instantiates a kind of (Weberian) neutrality in which the only politics it produces is an emergent, indirect quality.

The core [recall] she lovingly discusses was developed by President Hutchins at The University of Chicago (and given widespread familiarity by Mortimer Adler) during the Great Depression and is a species of secular humanism (in which, as Hitz notes and exemplifies, religious thought is welcomed). The (slowly evolving) core simultaneously instantiates a great conversation over perennial issues by exemplary minds, and presents the development of thought. Among the self-conscious underlying aims is to produce citizens and thought leaders, and simultaneously be a rescue mission (Wikipedia has a useful intro). I would be the last to suggest that such a rescue mission is not needed today.

The very idea of 'flashes of insight' as a way of knowledge contribution is itself Goethe's contribution to the Romantics (although clearly modeled on a species of religious experience and celebrated in Archimedes Eureka moment), and, in part, an elitist response to the more egalitarian, more democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. To be sure, this is primarily a nobility of the mind acquired through Bildung.

But my point here is not to quibble with Hitz's claims about neutrality and politics. Rather, despite the fact that her piece warmed my heart and made me feel in the company of a true educator, I was troubled by it. After a day's mulling, I recognize that something is missing in the closing line of Hitz's piece (recall),  "The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth." To put the point philosophically, freedom is never a safe place. True freedom, even if reduced to interiority (as Hitz suggests), always presupposes (as a kind of constitutive principle) the possibility of making disastrous mistakes from which no practice of self-criticism can save us.

Because (recall) I recently read Gertrude Himmelfarb's (1994) "On Looking into the Abyss," I am reminded of a famous, somewhat facetious remark (which she quotes) by Lionel Trilling in his (1961) "On The Teaching of Modern Literature:"

I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: “Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.

Trilling points to the phenomenon in  which books have lost the capacity to destroy by, say, making a bad or troubled soul worse, and accentuate immoderate desires.  Hitz does not allow for this when she insists that the true guide through these books, in an atmosphere of mutual respect in which young souls are turned toward the good, provides "an excellent preparation for life." But As Trilling reminds, books can also undo life in ways that are not merely a preparatory experience. I think this is true. I can't convince you of this, but the best I can do is offer some hint of an autobiographical remark.

When I was a late teenager, I read Sheltering Sky. I am unsure how I stumbled upon it (I am pretty sure I read it before the movie came out). But it brought me extremely close to suicide. I have no idea why the story of an overconfident American couple who travel through Africa unnerved me so badly, but I was not just physically shaken by the felt experience, but also overwhelmed by the meaningless of life. (When, later, I read Nietzsche, I found him tame and too refined for my taste.) There is a famous passage in the novel (it was used in the film) that while flirting with the pretentious (and bordering on the incoherent) kind of points to the underlying theme of the book (which I have never re-read again):

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

What gets to me in the passage is not the actual remarks about death or the finiteness of life (I know about that), but rather the sneaky claim that everything, even the most constitutive memories happens a very small number (four or five) times, really. Yes, you can try to cheat: by doing a daily exercise to remember the event many more times or by denying that any thought really matters to you, but so doing would also distract from the art of living, of being alive.

Much of professional philosophy blabbers on about truth, rationality, and morality and never allows the sneaky claims. By contrast, the close reading and shared discussion of the texts that Hitz and I both admire makes space for it. The aim is not, of course, to generate a stream of psychiatric patients or suicides in the class-room--a skilled guide and teacher can forestall it often--, but in the very possibility of unsettling even the skilled guide can slip sometimes and make us worse off, genuinely worse off, than before the conversation started.

On the Politics of Academic freedom. Or Honour among Chicago Economists (Stigler's Appendix to the Kalven report)

Jacob Levy's recent post got me (recall) to take a fresh look at the (November 1967) Kalven report (named after the jurist). I was startled to learn that both John Hope Franklin and George Stigler (the Chicago economist, who figures in a lot of my blog posts and scholarship) were also on this committee. The report treats the university as a special kind of community. It is special not just because it is a "community of scholars" for the "limited [albeit noble] purpose" of "teaching and research." Rather, it is special for two reasons: (i) it exists for the "long term." That is to say it exists, in part, in order to reproduce students and scholars (recall my post). The significance of (i) is, in part, revealed by (ii) because it "cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions of its existence and effectiveness."

The reason for (ii) is because each member of the community -- the report only recognizes faculty and students -- cannot be compelled at all (neither by a procedure, argument (!), nor force) to conform to other people's views. (It is no surprise that the report does not argue its case; it merely reaffirms "a few old truths and a cherished condition"--that is, it deliberately presents itself as conservative.)* That is to say, the Kalven report embraces the idea that there is no decision mechanism at all that will not inhibit "the full freedom of dissent on which it will thrive." (So no proceduralism.)

I ignore here the objections to this idea of freedom such that even a lone, irrational dissent has to be respected. The report's notion of freedom is one that respects minimal unity, but no more--the individuals that make up the unity remain, as it were, fully sovereign in the unity. The report does not defend this notion of freedom nor does it fully explain it. But it seems to presuppose the anthropological view that in optimal conditions of freedom human disagreement is inevitable (and a good thing). This go well beyond the standard Weberianism of the day, which thought that agreement over the facts was possible. In fact, the report is adamant that the university is to be constituted by the widest possible epistemic and moral diversity. This is the central "faith" of the Kalven Report about the nature of "intellectual inquiry." The university should promote this diversity as much as possible ("widest diversity of views").

As an aside, it is notable that Stigler signed up to this because when it came to the role of consensus and dissent within disciplines, he was an eager student of Merton and an early Kuhnian and thought that expert, paradigm-driven communities could safely ignore dissenters and could aim and establish consensus.

The epistemic and moral diversity has three intended consequences: first, it entails that the university produces "discontent with existing social arrangements and proposes new ones;" second, it fosters "the development of social and political values in society;" third, it generates "power" for the university--this power ("prestige and influence" ) follows from the university's "integrity and intellectual competence." The report does not explore to what degree a society will permit these three consequences, but as I note below it does address the circumstances when society challenges its independence and existence. It is quite notable that the Kalven report does not claim that there is an indirect utility in technological applications. (There is no engineering school at Chicago.) This goes back to Hutchins's oft-quoted (1929) statement:

My view of university training is to unsettle the minds of young men,+ to  widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. It is not a  hardening, or settling process. Education is not to teach men facts,  theories, or laws; it is not to reform them, or amuse them, or to make  them expert technicians in any field; it is to teach them to think, to  think straight if possible; but to think always for themselves.

Despite the fact that the report celebrates cognitive diversity, it proudly notes a "deep consensus," [and here I'll resist making fun of that 'deep'] among itself. Even so, George Stigler appended a "special comment:"

I agree with the report as drafted, except for the statements in the fifth paragraph from the end as to the the role of the university when it is acting in its corporate capacity. As to this matter, I would prefer the statement in the following form:

The university when it acts in its corporate capacity as employer and property owner should, of course, conduct its affairs with honor. The university should not use these corporate activities to foster any moral or political values because use of its facilities will impair its integrity as the home of intellectual freedom.

For those unfamiliar with the complex evolution of thought of Chicago economics, it is somewhat surprising to see one of the two leaders of the school (the other being Stigler's close friend, Milton Friedman), of all people, to appeal to honour. It's less surprising when one realizes that in 1967 Stigler was not yet the economist, who penned (with Gary Becker) "De gustibus non est disputandum." Rather he is the (by then accomplished) student of Frank Knight, who taught that considerations of honor were ineliminable from modern society, even a socialist one.**

Stigler's main point is that the university as a corporate body should maintain a kind of strict neutrality about moral and political values. This Weberianism came naturally to him. (Knight was an early translator of Weber, and Stigler was a keen reader of (early) Talcott Parsons in his scholarly youth.) In fact, on this point Stigler does not depart from the majority of the Kalven report. The report treats the university's neutrality as a (partial?) condition of possibility of its members to engage in political action and social protests" as individuals."

So, what's Stigler opposing?

In that fifth paragraph from below, the Kalven report first explains how the university must act in cases of 'crisis' when its survival is threatened by outsiders. The consensus (including Stigler's) is that then the university must act (it is an 'obligation') to "defend its interests" as a corporate body. Obviously, this opens the door to abuse (not everybody will agree that the state of emergency or the state of necessity is upon us); and so we can safely assume that the Kalven report also quietly presupposes views about judicious leadership.

Rather, Stigler disagrees with the 'deep consensus' only when the majority of the Kalven report go on to argue that in cases when the university comes into conflict with existing social values when it acts as a corporate entity (involving property, income, its awarding of honors, and its membership in other bodies) over and beyond the intellectual activity of its members, that then the situation requires "careful assessment of the consequences." That is to say, the majority of the Kalven report is allowing that the university may adjust its corporate course when it comes into conflict with the rest of society over its corporate activities. It may even adjust its principles and avoid granting honors to socially controversial agents. (The implied contrast is that the university is not supposed to compromise on the intellectual freedom of the students and faculty to research, teach, invite speakers, etc.) 

Stigler, by contrast, is not allowing the possibility of a conflict between the university as a corporate body and social values because he thinks it is possible and desirable for the university as a corporate body to maintain a strict neutrality. Leaving aside if such strict neutrality is genuinely possible (and desirable), it is worth noting that it's this notion of corporate neutrality, (with extreme partiality of its members), that allows him to think that a university as a corporate body can avoidthe possibility of tragic choices. That's to say, Stigler thinks one can avoid politics (or judgment) by a certain institutional posture--here Stigler flirts with a technocratic conception of the corporate body. Even so he is aware -- he helped pioneer the arguments in modern economics -- that officers of the corporate body and its members may well have incentives to pursue otherwise (than neutrality). In his dissent, Stigler, thus, presuppose public spirited university administrators who know how to maintain the stance of neutrality, while the majority of the Kalven committee recognizes that if one wishes to ensure the survival of the academy, politics cannot be eliminated.

 

On De-Romanticizing The University of Chicago

Protecting that community of inquiry means keeping any number of intrusions at bay. And the university is constituted as a system of safe spaces: around here we discuss as economists in order to make progress on our research agenda without constantly having to re-argue our premisses against philosophers pointing out how inadequate they are. In that classroom professors teach and students learn biology, in a discussion that is insulated from anti-scientific anti-vaccine ranting and creationist ranting alike. The students in the Black Students’ Association get together to explore questions of culture and identity, discuss shared experiences of life in a majority-white society or university, or just relax, insulated from the “but affirmative action should be abolished and people should be judged on their merits!” hectoring from each conservative white student who thinks they’re the first to communicate this radical idea. Each of those insulated environments is a part of the larger university whole; each of those debates can happen in other university settings. But in order to make intellectual progress, we create a system of nested and overlapping safe spaces within which we can say to the boring and disruptive critic endlessly repeating first-order objections: “Go away. Hush up. We have work to do.”...My own arguments about this grow out of ideas developed n Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, chapter 11. And see the University of Chicago statement on freedom of expression and the Kalven Report, which are much better statements of governing academic principle than is last week’s letter from Chicago, more concerned with the university itself and less concerned with extramural culture war signalling.--Jacob Levy @BHL.

I have written on the controversy over safe spaces and trigger warnings before, see here and here. [See also Phoebe Maltz.]

It is very hard to convey to folk who have not been there the ways in which The University of Chicago is a distinctive place of higher learning. (Disclosure: I was awarded my PhD there in 2002.) This is due to its location on the South Side of Chicago, its monastic buildings, Chicago's weather, the university's record in research excellence, its orientation toward graduate education -- despite housing a fantastic college with a famous 'core' --, its bureaucratic-administrative maze, and its corporate sense of self.   It's not for all, and it takes a certain personality to survive and thrive there.  There are other places with great research excellence and a distinctive sense of self, but few that combine it.

To get a sense of what this corporate sense of self is about, look at the (January 2015) faculty "Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression" [HT Michael Kremer]. This report invokes and quotes several of the most prominent former presidents of The University of Chicago: Harper, Hutchins, Levi, Gray. It then adds, "The words of Harper, Hutchins, Levi, and Gray capture both the spirit and the promise of the University of Chicago." [The report is also notable because it is clear about the abuses of invocations of civility: "concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas," (emphasis added).*] The real oddity to an outsider is that these names are familiar to me, and that if given the chance, I can also hold forth on ways in which they shaped the university, local housing policy, and discussions about the life of the mind Stateside. (To be sure, each one of them is controversial in interesting ways.)

I mention this because when I read Dean Ellison's letter to the incoming students of the class of 2020, my first reaction was, "This guy must be new to The University of Chicago"** and my second thought was, "OMG The Corporates have taken over The UofC." [On this second point, see this piece by Malloy Owen in the American Conservative!] That is, the Dean's letter does not invoke the corporate spirit that is characteristic of The University of Chicago (in fact it violates it) and it fails to convey the complexity of the issues involved. It is, as Jacob Levy suggests, more charitably read as a form of signalling in the culture wars.

Here are two examples: (i) Dean Ellison invokes civility as a virtue without qualification, despite the known problems with it as a means to control speech; (ii) his letter pretends as if the education of a young mind is not a matter of careful cultivation; (again to quote the faculty report) "the fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission," (emphasis added). The fostering of such an ability requires lots of careful pedagogical and disciplinary choices by instructors, curricula committees, and students alike. These choices will entail, due to constraints on, not to mention opportunity costs of, time and attention that not all objections, that not all viewpoints, and not all possible conversations will occur. (Jacob puts it nicely above, they are partially "insulated environments.")

Rather, Dean Ellison writes as if students arrive on campus fully formed and once there, engage in an "intellectual journey" where they will be asked to respect and participate in "freedom of expression" (which is taken to be a "defining characteristic" of the university). On their journey the students are expected, and I quote, to "explore."

Now, by all means encourage intellectual exploration in one's curriculum or one's pedagogical choices (in residence halls, in the class-room, in reading lists, etc.), but what we're seeing here is how a college student is being conceived as a (perhaps sophisticated) tourist. Even if they are not meant to be signalling in the culture wars, Dean Ellison's words are marketing-speak. They are unworthy of the great history of the University of Chicago. The University's 1967 Kalven report, (which is mentioned in Dean Ellison's letter as is the faculty report I quoted above), explains how as part of its research and educational mission a university "creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones." (I hope to return to the Kalven report soon.]

Dean Ellison's letter explains how members of the incoming class should expect some "discomfort" on their journey. Perhaps the worst form of discomfort is to recognize that you are in on the dirty secret that you are part of an institution that will merely replicate the existing social arrangements.

 

 

On History of Ideas vs Philosophy

Another and more satisfying answer to the problem has been the assumption that the opposing schools of philosophy do not merely have a common share in error but that they rather share in a common truth. This assumption was held in antiquity by the so-called eclectics and by the Neo-Platonists; it was reasserted on different grounds by Hegel; and it still underlies the better part of the studies devoted to the "history of ideas."--Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pico: An Introduction.

In reading these lines, I had to think of Bill Wimsatt, the philosopher of biology and metaphysician of life, who was one of my teachers in graduate school. Unlike most professional philosophers (who tend to delight in criticism and critical acumen) that I know, Bill's intellectual reflex is to look for common ground when confronted with new material. (This is not to deny that there are positions that Bill dislikes intensely.) Bill's approach is not my intellectual reflex, but these Digressions are, in part, my attempt at self-re-fashioning in light of his example (while not foregoing polemic).

Prior to reading Kristeller's claim, I was familiar with three not necessarily mutually exclusive ways of understanding the nature of history of ideas. First, it is exhibited in the practice of tracing influence(s) within the history of philosophy. Among European (mainland) historians of philosophy, the following practice is a kind of second-nature: X said Y, now let's search for anticipations of Y. The practice is nicely captured by Wikipedia's definition: "The history of ideas is a field of research in historythat deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time." Second, there is Lovejoy's more technical focus on tracing the fate of what he calls 'unit-ideas:'

By the history of ideas I mean something at once more specific and less restricted than the history of philosophy. It is differentiated primarily by the character of the units with which it concerns itself. Though it deals in great part with the same material as the other branches of the history of thought and depends greatly upon their prior labors, it divides that material in a special way, brings the parts of it into new groupings and relations, views it from the standpoint of a distinctive purpose. Its initial procedure may be said—though the parallel has its dangers—to be somewhat analogous to that of analytic chemistry. In dealing with the history of philosophical doctrines, for example, it cuts into the hard-and-fast individual systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unit-ideas.--Arthur Lovejoy The Great Chain of Being, 3.

I like to think of Lovejoy's focus on unit-ideas as an anticipation of contemporary memetics in some respects. Unit-ideas are kind of "mental habits" (15) that are instantiated in different intellectual and conceptual contexts, but that also by their presence generate forced moves (what I call 'conceptual-necessitation relations') or creative innovations.  As others have noted, Lovejoy does not really deploy the term outside the introduction to the book, so it is not entirely clear what he really means by it. (Incidentally, Bill Wimsatt has penetrating contribution to memetics while developing his account of cultural evolution.)

Third, in the works of Isaiah Berlin we find a kind of soft-Hegelian tracing of ideas. Berlin was acutely sensitive to the phenomenon that certain groups of ideas (e.g., ones associated with the Enlightenment) generated critical responses (ones we understand by, e.g., Romanticism, or Anti-Enlightenment Conservativism) that, in turn, would generate responses, and so on. In Berlin this does not become a dynamics of reason or an unfolding of rational history (because Berlin is too tragic to have much faith in progress).

In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Kristeller sees Pico as a contributor to the history of ideas understood in the fourth sense as the search for a common truth among different competing systems. Kristeller emphasizes this is not a search for a hidden esoteric doctrine: rather, it "consists in a number of true statements" shared by different outlooks. Given that it is a search for truth as such -- and not, as in the other three approach to the history ideas, a truth about or of history -- Pico's history of ideas is not opposed to philosophy but, rather, philosophical in a non-trivial sense. It is also receptive to learning from others and, thus, instantiates genuine philosophical virtue.

That's Not Philosophy!

The more I realized this, the more I got angry. Not mainly at my committee, since they started to seem to me like mere mortals who didn't know what to do. I got angry at Wittgenstein. I thought about what Goldfarb said about me not being Wittgenstein, and I realized he had a point. Not about my philosophical capacity, but about the sociological fact that I wasn't seen as a genius, and so I couldn't write the way Wittgenstein did. The more I thought about my prospectus, the more Wittgenstein's hypocrisy became clearer to me. He leveraged his being categorized as a genius to be in academia without in any way taking responsibility for improving academia or even thinking about how others might continue on his path. Seen from this light, the special halo around the Investigations started to seem rather different; that it seemed unique because it was unique, literally unreplicable because the kind of leverage Wittgenstein was able to have as an academic was no longer possible. I realized Wittgenstein still shines brightly because the sun is setting on the way he was able to do philosophy, assuming that he could do philosophy, get to its "deepest impulses", without talking once about the institutional structures which made his writings possible. From this angle, the very thing I loved the most about Wittgenstein's writing - its steadfast individuality and challenge to hierarchy - seemed like an illusion, that the text in a sense was the height of privilege, because it could pretend as if it was written outside an institutional context, as if it was just a person thinking to himself.--Bharath Vallabha "What is a Dissertation?"

My eighty-page (or so) preliminary essay, "On The Puppet Image of Plato's Laws 644d," was composed as a line-by-line commentary on an image that had already gripped my imagination when I had taken a graduate seminar with Nathan Tarcov at The University of Chicago. At the time (second half of the 1990s) the so-called preliminary essay -- defined loosely, I think, as 'a publishable paper,' -- was the final hurdle (in lieu of comps that had been abolished a few decades earlier as some of the older faculty would recount) before one would select a committee and write a dissertation prospectus. After a tough transition during the first six months in graduate school, my best friend gave me a Bullmastif (Saggy) [recall] I was thriving at Chicago: I loved soaking up all the books, talking endlessly with other more brilliant grad students from other departments, and meeting stimulating minds from across the university in dog-park. The late Ian Mueller had agreed to chair my preliminary essay, but he was ambivalent about my overconfident choice of other readers: he could not imagine that it would be easy to satisfy Howard Stein and Martha Nussbaum simultaneously.  He respected them both immensely, but knew better than I did that their sensibilities might pull in different directions. I admired them both, and was thrilled to have them as a captive audience for my musings. 

During my research and drafting of the preliminary essay, there was only one premonition of danger ahead. One Summer I had returned to Amsterdam, and in a moment of foolish haste I had put my copy of England's 1921 commentary on the Laws of Plato under my cycle's back-binders. When I parked my bike alongside a canal, my heavily annotated England slid into the water outside my reach.

When I finally turned in my essay, things did not go as I expected. Mueller was decidedly lukewarm about the final product but willing to pass; Howard Stein gave me the highest compliment I have ever received on any of my writings; and, much to my horror, Martha Nussbaum strongly implied that my work really wasn't (professional) philosophy.* Not realizing the gravity of the situation, I dug in, and argued something to the effect that if Plato is philosophy then a commentary on Plato would also be philosophy.  I had assumed that this would clinch the case with the author of a commentary on Aristotle's De Motu Animalium. But it didn't, and my career in professional philosophy came close to ending.

I did eventually pass (with the lowest possible grade) after some cosmetic changes to my essay,* and Martha Nussbaum, whom I continued to admire, and we made our peace later. Arguably, she was trying to do me a favor by getting me to professionalize--something I resisted for a few more years until it was almost too late (recall).

My memories were prompted by Vallabha's essay.

Vallabha is unfair to Wittgenstein, although, perhaps, not the Wittgenstein as taught at Harvard in his time. This is not to deny that the underlying thought of Vallabha -- his anger directed at those privileged academics who fail to take "responsibility for improving academia or even thinking about how others might continue on" their  "path" -- is unjustified. (I recognize the anger and it has fueled much of my polemical blogging during the last half decade.) It is not: it's quite possible that the present generation of professional philosophers (I do not exclude myself) fails miserably on this score. We think badly about institutions and think worse about our discipline's survival (as constrained by demands of justice); as the water is rising one vainly searches for generous and magnanimous souls while the life-rafts leave the underemployed and unlucky behind. Perhaps philosophy's future is in the hands of those like Vallabha, who have turned their backs on the academy--true philosophy's spirit is not essentially tied to the university, and it is possible that it finds shelter in places overlooked by those within the discipline.

Even so, on reading and re-reading Vallabha's fascinating essay, I noted that the key word in it, echoed like a refrain, is 'freedom.' But in Vallabha's hands it is, surprisingly enough, given the criticism of Wittgenstein, a freedom that is coupled with a gift (that is, in his conceptual framework one receives freedom from others or gives/allows it to oneself). Now, I am not suggesting that freedom cannot be so-given--after all, it's the kind of freedom that a paradigmatic Lord (or The Lord) provides to her subjects. To paraphrase Wittgenstein this is like "a gift in a fairy tale;" it feels good from inside, but from afar it looks less impressive. Don't misunderstand me: I have nothing against a gift economy (for all I know it's superior to the one studied by Samuelson, Arrow, et al.); it's by no means obvious that this (freedom as gifted by some deus ex machina without or within) is a freedom worthy of philosophy (if we understand this as an activity that only owes roosters to Asclepius). I prefer an 'analytics' of the gift, where giving proceeds in terms of a (unfolding) relationship of trust (for details see here). Given that so much of the modern academy is structured around zero-sum-goods, each island of mutual trust within it is a little miracle (and a lot of hard work).

On Milton Friedman's Criticism of Libertarian intolerance

I regard the basic human value that underlies my own beliefs as tolerance, based on humility. I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I am right and he is wrong….no simple (practical) principle is really adequate. We do not have all the answers, and there is no simple formula that will give us all the answers. That's why humility, tolerance, is so basic, so fundamental. Milton Friedman (1990) "Say "NO" to intolerance"" Liberty, July 1991,Volume 4(6): 17.) [HT: David M. Levy]

That philosophy [Von Mises's praxeology—ES] converts an asserted body of substantive conclusions into a religion. They do not constitute a set of scientific propositions that you can argue about in terms of empirical evidence. Suppose two people who share von Mises's praxeological view come to contradictory conclusions about anything. How can they reconcile their difference? The only way they can do so is by a purely logical argument. One has to say to the other, "You made a mistake in reasoning." And the other has to say, "No you made a mistake in reasoning." Suppose neither believes he has made a mistake in reasoning. There's only one thing left to do: fight. Karl Popper…takes a different approach. If we disagree, we can say to one another, "You tell me what fact, if any, they [sic] were observed, you would regard as sufficient to contradict your view." And vice versa. Then we can go out and see which, if either, conclusion, the evidence contradicts. The virtue of this modern scientific approach, as proposed by Popper, is that it provides a way in which, at least in principle, we can resolve disagreements without a conflict." (Friedman, 18)

Let me take a real example. How many times have you heard someone say that the answer to a problem is that you simply have to make it private property. But is private property such an obvious notion? Does it come out of the soul?...So simply saying "private property" is a mantra, not an answer. Simply saying "use the market" is not an answer." (18-9)

The passages quoted from Milton Friedman are from a short speech delivered to a Libertarian audience in which he criticizes Von Mises and Ayn Rand on a number of issues calling them "both extremely intolerant." (18) While he mentions their personal intolerance, he is especially keen to emphasize their methodological intolerance. (Unsurprisingly, his analysis has been met with considerable irritation; see here and here for more online responses.) Here I focus on what these passages reveal about Friedman's commitments. I focus on four issues.

First, when faced with the transition problem, that is, how to move from – let's stipulate -- a misguided status quo to a just outcome, Friedman does not embrace what has become known as 'shock-therapy' in a general sense. He rejects it for moral and economic (or technocratic) reasons. Rather, he prefers (a) non-violent, (b) technocratic solutions (he mentions two of his signature examples: school vouchers and negative income tax) or mechanisms that (i) leave most background institutions intact, and (ii) produce – again let's stipulate – imperfect albeit more just and efficient outcomes and (iii) that are defeasible policy-interventions in light of further "experience." I would argue that (i) and (iii) are deviations from shock therapy. But the deviation is not total because his stance is compatible with gradualist and non-gradualist approaches. Sometimes Friedman is willing to advocate non-gradualist approaches; the most famous case is Chile, of course. But (in addition to military rule and other political turmoil), Chile was suffering from hyperinflation, and so Friedman's monetary shock therapy was a response to a clear economic challenge not a template for all policy.

I noted that his argument for his approach to the transition problem is, in part, moral because of Friedman's emphasis on "the responsibilities that we have." This ('we') is a theorist's responsibility for it covers those that advocate/theorize about a just social outcome (or "utopia"). He writes:

You can simply describe the utopian solution, and leave it to somebody else how we get from here to there. That's not only a practical problem. It's a problem of the responsibilities that we have….You have to have some mechanism of going from here to there….We may very well agree on the direction we want to go in, but just how we're going to go there and how far we're going to go, that's a much more difficult problem. (19)

So, it is misleading to think that Friedman always advocated shock therapy and argued to let the market simply take care of itself.

The Technocratic Conception of Politics (The Economists and Rawls redux)

By a 'technocratic conception of politics,' (recall) I mean to capture the following three features of an enduring image of politics present in (social) science: first, it is characterized by the ideal that with social knowledge and its progress, substantial political disagreement can be eliminated. Here is a very striking instance of the claim from Milton Friedman's (1976) Nobel lecture: "Many countries around the world are today experiencing socially destructive inflation, abnormally high unemployment, misuse of economic resources, and, in some cases, the suppression of human freedom not because evil men deliberately sought to achieve these results, nor because of differences in values among their citizens, but because of erroneous judgments about the consequences of government measures: errors that at least in principle are capable of being corrected by the progress of positive economic science." The context of the passage is the furor surrounding his association with the so-called 'Chicago Boys' in Chile and the assassination of his Chilean critic Orlando Letelier (recall).

In particular, second, this ideal of conflict-free politics presupposes (as is clear from the quoted passage in Friedman's Nobel lecture) considerable value-unanimity in society. So, for example, in a famous article, the Chicago-school economists, Stigler and Becker write, "one may usefully treat tastes as stable over time and similar among people;" establishing this point "is the central task of this essay." When value-unanimity is granted then ordinary welfare economics is possible as a kind of (social) engineering science (recall).

Third, the conception requires an image of science in which one of the central aims of policy scientists is to achieve consensus (or lack of disagreement). In modern economics this idea goes back at least to Sidgwick's (1887) Principles of Political Economy (recall; for some prehistory on Hume). It was a central feature of Lionel Robbins's influential methodological restatement (1932) of what economics is: "Surely, for the sake of securing what agreement we can in a world in which avoidable differences of opinion are all too common, it is worth while carefully delimiting those fields of enquiry where this kind of settlement is possible from those where it is not to be hoped for —it is worth while delimiting the neutral area of science from the more disputable area of moral and political philosophy." This image of science was made widely popular by Thomas Kuhn in Structure (1960), but via Talcott Parsons's Weberianism and others it was already well known in mid-twentieth century social science.

It is worth emphasizing that the expectation of consensus was by no means universal. Friedman's sometime co-author, Savage, insists in The Foundations of Statistics, that "we must be prepared to find reasoning inadequate to bring about complete agreement." (1954 [1972]:7; see also 3, 67ff.) But this view became a minority position (cf. Aumann).

On Carnap, Luck and Necessity in Samuelson's *Foundations* of Economics

By 1983 we were all, so to speak, mathematical economists...This is as it should be. Soft and hard sciences are cumulative disciplines. We each bring our contributions of "value added" to the pot of progress. In Max Planck's much-quoted words: Science progresses funeral by funeral. Inside tomorrow's physics treatise will be the lasting truths of Isaac Newton and also of the professor who works down the hall from you. Something of the same goes for economics, where often the dance must proceed Two Steps Forward and One Step Back.--Paul A. Samuelson 1998 (1378-9)

Had I remained on the Chicago Midway, I might well have missed out on the three revolutions that remade mainstream economics: the Keynesian Revolution, the Imperfect-Competition Revolution, and the Mathematical-Economics Revolution. Instead I had a front-row seat.--Paul A. Samuelson (1379)

Had I been a strict constitutionalist, I might well have stopped there. The result would have been a shorter 200-page book with one fully integrated theme.--Paul A. Samuelson (1384)

Reading widely, I was a child of my time, but it was the internal logic of the economic puzzles that guided Foundations' growth.--Paul A. Samuelson (1375 [emphasis in original])

The historian of economics, Roger Backhouse, has long been prodding me to pay closer attention to Paul Samuelson, who was the economist's economist for much of the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, in commenting on my work on the pre-history of Kuhnian ideas within Chicago economics, he insisted that I should not underestimate the significance of Samuelson (the very anthithesis of a Chicago economist, despite having done a BA there). And, indeed, in reading Samuelson's reflections on his own achievement on his seminal Foundations of Economic Analysis a half century later, I was struck by the Kuhnian imagery, including his self-presentation as a would-be-revolutionary (rather than "strict constitutionalist") and the focus on how puzzle-solving  (rather than external influences) led to the breakthroughs. 

But I wondered to what degree the evidence from 1998 wasn't itself a consequence of Kuhn's influence. Nudged by Backhouse I was directed to the following passage in Samuelson's Foundations:

[A]t a time when pure economic theory has undergone a revolution of thought—from statical to dynamical modes. While many earlier foreshadowings can be found in the literature, we may date this upheaval from the publication of Ragnar Frisch’s Cassel Volume essay [1933--ES] of only a decade ago. The resulting change in outlook can be compared to that of the transition from classical to quantum mechanics. And just as in the field of physics it was well that the relationship between the old and the new theories could be in part clarified, so in our field a similar investigation seems in order. (Samuelson 1947, p. 284)

So, Samuelson was very explicit about that fact that he was participating in a scientific revolution that was initiated before him. In an "age of specialization," Samuelson thought of himself as the 'last generalist' because after his framework setting work, the end of "upheaval," there would only be a need for esoteric specialist work. In Samuelson's hands the revolution has an air of inevitability.

On Keynes, Chicago Economics, and Social Engineering

"It is quite another thing to conclude that therefore ends of good policy are beyond the realm of scientific discussion. For surely the primary requisite of a working social system is a consensus on ends. The individual members of society must agree upon the major ends which that society is to seek. If any large share of the population actively disagrees with the society's ends, and in particular if it believes that the system is unfair by the group's criteria, the social system will surely disintegrate, probably with violence.

This is almost axiomatic in modern social theory…

At the level of economic policy, then, it is totally misleading to talk of ends as individual and random [as new welfare theorists do—ES]; they are fundamentally collective and organized.

If this conclusion be accepted, and accept it we must, the economist may properly exceed the narrow confines of economic analysis. He may cultivate a second discipline, the determination of the ends of his society particularly relevant to economic policy. This discipline might be called, following J.N. Keynes, applied ethics.7

7 See his Scope and Method of Political Economy (4^th edition: London 1930) especially chap. II. I did not realize how neglected this excellent book has become until, when I recently referred to it, several friends expressed surprise that I did not know Keynes's middle name was Maynard! –GJ Stigler (1943) "The New Welfare Economics" American Economics Review, 33(2): 357-8.

At the very start of his famous (1953) methodology paper, Milton Friedman calls attention to a three-fold distinction he inherits from the logician-economist, J.N. Keynes (yes, father of that more famous philosopher-economist, J.M. Keynes): "In his admirable book on The Scope and Method of Political Economy, John Neville Keynes distinguishes among "a positive science ... a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is; a normative or regulative science...[,] a body of systematized knowledge discussing criteria of what ought to be...[,]an art... [,] a system of rules for the attainment of a given end"; comments that "confusion between them is common and has been the source of many mischievous errors"; and urges the importance of "recognizing a distinct positive science of political economy."* Friedman admits that he is primarily interested in articulating the nature and methodology of positive economics, and along the way he wishes to argue that "positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments." (By contrast, according to Friedman normative economics presupposes positive economics.) In what follows, I accept these distinctions by stipulation.

Neither Stigler nor Friedman, follow Keynes slavishly (recall this post, too). In particular, in the passage quoted at the top of this post, Stigler offers a world-historical innovation over Keynes that will have far-reaching consequences in economics and the way it understands itself as a policy science. In Keynes, "applied ethics" (that is, normative or regulative economics) is the business of philosophers not economists. And one of the main reasons it is the business of philosophers (and not economists) is that Keynes does not expect consensus over the ends of society to emerge. As he writes, "There is a further reason why a positive science of political economy should receive distinct and independent recognition. With the advance of knowledge, it may be possible to come to a general agreement in regard to what is or what may be in the economic world, sooner than any similar agreement is attainable in regard to the rules by which economics of individuals and communities should be guided. The former requires only that there as to the facts; the latter may be prevented by conflicting ideals." (50-51) So, Keynes's proposed strategy is to remove (applied) ethics as much as possible from economics so that economics can quickly hasten to become a mature (in a proto-Kuhnian sense) science.