Digressions&Impressions

On Inclusiveness & the Disdain of Neglected Human Experience

As a consequence of the development of writing, first in the ancient Near East and soon after in Greece, old habits of thought began to die out, and certain other, previously latent, mental faculties began to express themselves. Words were now anchored and, though spellings could change from one generation to another, or one region to another, there were now physical traces that endured, which could be transmitted, consulted and pointed to in settling questions about the use or authority of spoken language.

Writing rapidly turned customs into laws, agreements into contracts, genealogical lore into history. In each case, what had once been fundamentally temporal and singular was transformed into something eternal (as in, ‘outside of time’) and general. Even the simple act of making everyday lists of common objects – an act impossible in a primary oral culture – was already a triumph of abstraction and systematisation. From here it was just one small step to what we now call ‘philosophy’.

...

The freezing in text of dialectical reasoning, with a heavy admixture (however impure or problematic) of poetry, aphorism and myth, became the model for what, in the European tradition, was thought of as ‘philosophy’ for the next few millennia.

Why are these historical reflections important today? Because what is at stake is nothing less than our understanding of the scope and nature of philosophical enquiry.

The Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico wrote in his Scienza Nuova (1725): ‘the order of ideas must follow the order of institutions’. This order was, namely: ‘First the woods, then cultivated fields and huts, next little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers.’ It is implicit for Vico that the philosophers in these academies are not illiterate. The order of ideas is the order of the emergence of the technology of writing.

Within academic philosophy today, there is significant concern arising from how to make philosophy more ‘inclusive’, but no interest at all in questioning Vico’s order, in going back and recuperating what forms of thought might have been left behind in the woods and fields.

The groups ordinarily targeted by philosophy’s ‘inclusivity drive’ already dwell in the cities and share in literacy, even if discriminatory measures often block their full cultivation of it. No arguments are being made for the inclusion of people belonging to cultures that value other forms of knowledge: there are no efforts to recruit philosophers from among Inuit hunters or Hmong peasants.

The practical obstacles to such recruitment from a true cross-section of humanity are obvious. Were it to happen, the simple process of moving from traditional ways of life into academic institutions would at the same time dilute and transform the perspectives that are deserving of more attention. Irrespective of such unhappy outcomes, there is already substantial scholarship on these forms of thought accumulated in philosophy’s neighbouring disciplines – notably history, anthropology, and world literatures – to which philosophers already have access. It’s a literature that could serve as a corrective to the foundational bias, present since the emergence of philosophy as a distinct activity. How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures

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Philosophers still tend to disdain, or at least to conceive as categorically different from their own speciality, the use of language deployed by bards and poets, whether from Siberia or the South Bronx. Again, this disdain leaves out the bulk of human experience. Until it is eradicated, the present talk of the ideal of inclusion will remain mere lip-service.--Justin E H Smith "How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures"Aeon.

Justin Smith is one of our most creative philosophical essayists and he always stimulates reflection on my part (recall). One of the initial oddities of Justin Smith's essay that I quoted above* is that he offers no particular examples of 'disdain;' nor does it name anybody that disdains. He also does not discuss any individuals who are trying to make 'academic philosophy' more 'inclusive.' Rather, Smith is interested in essences; he wishes to make a point about the 'scope and nature of philosophical enquiry.' This surprised me because often when people point to significance of non-standardized philosophy it is accompanied with healthy skepticism of essentialized claims to universality. Not so Smith, and in what follows, we need to keep this aspiration in mind.

For, Smith's piece is a thinly-disguised polemic against an idea of inclusiveness that focuses on cultivating members of (once or still) actively discriminated groups. ("The groups ordinarily targeted by philosophy’s ‘inclusivity drive’ already dwell in the cities and share in literacy, even if discriminatory measures often block their full cultivation of it.") Smith's underlying insight is that this kind of inclusiveness ultimately has (what I will call) a cultural status quo bias built into it (Smith's "foundational bias"). This is an urbane and literate culture. (To be sure: it also involves people that grow up in the countryside educated in state-sponsored schools in modern states.) As Smith's narrative suggests this cultural bias is an endemic feature of the self-conception of philosophy. So, for example, two years ago, I wrote a post about the rejection of rustic wisdom in Plato and the Stoics in a manner that reverberates through the ages in ways also described by Smith. In fact, in my conception of methodological, analytical egalitarianism it is the task of philosophy to make available neglected and overlooked experience.

Smith does not deny the reality of past discrimination nor does he deny the justness of the cultivation of members of groups that (face(d)) discrimination. Yet, he clearly thinks that the ideal of inclusion that underwrites it is merely symbolic ("lip-service"). Even if one accepts Smith's ultimate position, this is a mistake on his part for two reasons: (i) one should not underestimate the significance of symbolism; (ii) improving the status quo morally and epistemically is still an improvement. Now, Smith claims without argument that there are "perspectives that are deserving of more attention." But he has offered no reason for the comparative claim (about desert).

This is not to deny that Smith has arguments for his position that there is an urbane and literate bias in philosophical culture and that it would be important to rectify this bias--even if Smith were wrong about the empirical assertion that the status quo "leaves out the bulk of human experience." (Population is growing so rapidly during the last two centuries we are fast approaching the stage where most human beings that have ever lived were born some time (say) after 1700.) But let's stipulate that the bias leaves out significant numbers of human experience--this is a kind of egalitarian commitment on Smith's part; all human experience can give rise to "forms of knowledge" worth prompting philosophy. In particular, Smith suggests that the alternative(s) to the culturally biased one is/are all based in 'oral culture.'

Smith does not say much about the characteristics of 'oral culture.' Perhaps there is nothing what such cultures (ranging from the depths of stone-age pre-history to existing societies) have in common. But Smith suggests that the absence of writing prevents "abstraction" and a certain form of "systematisation."  I am skeptical about this claim and the tacit philosophy of mind he relies on. It reminds me a bit too much of early modern, neo-Lockean views about the distinctness of the savage mind where abstraction is lacking. (It is peculiar that Smith fails to note this because he invites us explicitly to reject Vico's schema!)

Moreover, "metrical exigencies" can facilitate abstract thought; Smith confidently asserts that there are no arguments in Lyric poetry. This is odd because the Iliad starts with an argumentative exchange between Agamemnon and Achilles. (One of the underlying issues is the search for an explanation for their lack of success in war.) One may even suggest (but that's for another day) that any systematic constraints generates the means toward abstraction.

There is another reason to be skeptical of Smith's argument. He implies that the philosophical tradition rejects oral culture and sides with "written language" that can settle "questions about the use or authority of spoken language." Now, Smith recognizes this is a problematic claim. As he writes, "It is not orality that philosophy rejects, necessarily: Socrates himself rejected writing, identifying instead with a form of oral culture." One need only have a cursory knowledge of Derrida, to recognize that for much of Platonizing tradition, written traces are thought inferior to the unwritten ideal/form (etc.).

So, in a bold move, Smith suggests spoken urbane/literate philosophy piggy-backs on written language: "the structured, working-through of a question towards an end that has not been predetermined" is the consequence of a written culture ("this practice emerged indirectly from forms of reasoning only actualised with the advent of writing.") Let's grant this point for the sake of argument. It implies, it seems, that in traditional philosophy there is a bias against ways of knowing that do not rely on structured, working-through of a question towards an end that has not been predetermined. It would be nice if Smith had offered a positive characterization of what has been left out and of which knowledge is "accumulated in philosophy’s neighbouring disciplines." (Here's a suggestion he does not consider: proverbial wisdom as codified by enduring sayings and maxims.)

Here's the bottom line: Smith offers a bold program of ways of knowing that are distinct from the (broad tent) tradition we have inherited. He intimates that including these -- broadening the scope of philosophy genuinely -- will change the essential character of philosophy. This is radical in spirit. But he sells the program in a way that affiliates him with reactionaries within the status quo. But of course, most of our professional peers that reject the idea of inclusiveness will also not follow Smith in his explorations of history, anthropology, and world literatures. For some reason I doubt that Smith is bothered by being a solitary walker in these paths. But his path holds the promise of transforming philosophy.

 

 

 

On The Very Idea of Non-Western Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

On the Inner, Intellectual Life

The intellectual life as portrayed in this film [“The Hedgehog”--ES] has four central features:

1) It is a form of the inner life of a person, a place of retreat and reflection.

2) As such it is withdrawn from the world, where ‘the world' is understood in its (originally Platonic, later Christian) sense as the locus of competition and struggle for wealth, power, prestige, and status.

3) It is a source of dignity—made obvious in this case by Renee's low status as an unattractive working-class woman without children and past child-bearing age.

4) It opens space for communion: it allows for profound connection between human beings.

Of these four features of intellectual life, it is the notion of withdrawal that is centrally important. It is removal of intellectual life from the world that accounts for its true inwardness—an inwardness distinct from the narcissistic inner tracking of one's social standing. It is the withdrawn person's independence from contests over wealth or status that provides or reveals a dignity that can't be ranked or traded. This dignity, along with the universality of the objects of the intellect—that is, that they are available to everyone—is what opens up space for real communion.--Zena Hitz "Freedom and the Intellectual Life," First Things.  [HT Rachena Kamtekar on Facebook]

In her important essay, Zena Hitz addresses the "crisis of confidence among ourselves [that is, Humanists--ES], a crisis caused by a failure of self-understanding. We are haunted by a sense that what we do is somehow inadequate or pointless." Hitz, whose integrity is exemplary, goes on to criticize the instrumental defenses of the Humanities (sometimes she uses 'Liberal Arts'), which she usefully distinguishes between (i) the effective acquisition of wealth, and (ii) those who think they promote social and political goods.

To be sure, in her evident distaste of these instrumental defenses, Hitz ignores the possibility that at least some of these goods may be (foreseeable or occasional) byproducts of a society in which the intellectual life is allowed to flourish. More seriously, she also seems to think that having a rich inner intellectual life is somehow incompatible with a life of social and political activism. This strikes me as prejudice: while it's true that few of us have large enough souls to combine multiple ways of being in the world, it is my experience -- in observing the genuine political activists among us -- that those most devoted to social change also tend to have rich inner, intellectual lives (percolating in the shadows of all that visible activity) that are, in some sense, at odds with the public engagement. Of course, the nature of this inner world can be transformed, even radically transformed, during the vita activa. Hitz also seems to think (but I am less confident about this) that it's only the intellectual life that can generate (and here she echoes the way I read Seneca [recall]) an axiology of respect and communion that is orthogonal to the life of the market-place. But while this may be true, it needs to be argued because it is not obvious--for, it may be also true of other passionately engaged, shared human activities or play outside the trades and public life.

The previous paragraph is no criticism of Hitz's underlying insight that the intellectual life can facilitate an inner life, one that is sometimes withdrawn from the world, even (to use one of her key terms) ascetic. She is right to emphasize this, for it connects to the ways in which reading books and poems, and engaging with the arts, are an escape, even a life-line within the loneliness and other circumstances of one's life. This sense of escape, which is simultaneously a possible connection to others [to stick with reading, reading allows intimacy with an other's mind], was my original path into the life of the mind with a flashlight reading books under the blankets late at night as a child trying to escape the emotional turmoil that surrounded me; it sustains me, even after decades of being disciplined, as a professional philosopher. In order to avoid confusion, the life of a professional (which is governed, in part, by a credit/gift economy, and differences in status and power) is distinct from the inner life. These Impressions are my attempt to make visible that which is caught in the form of limitation between inner sanctum and outer professional.

The question is, of course, if the respect and communion (I would have said, 'friendship') that flows from the existence of an inner life (a) vindicates the intellectual life as such and (b) vindicates it to a skeptical outside world (or hypothetical taxpayer). It is pretty clear that some of Hitz's (named) targets, who offer an instrumental defense of the humanities, are primarily focused on (b). While I share some of her misgivings about these defenses, Hitz is insufficiently generous to them because she understands (with an appeal to Republic 496d--about which  more below) the true or exemplary (Socrates) philosopher "as someone who retreats from public life." (Elsewhere, with a nod to Republic 592ab I have offered a less quietist interpretation of Socrates.) But unless one has some kind of providentialist belief in the survival of good activities, then Hitz's stance engenders fatalism about the survival of the humanities as an institutionalized or corporate (in the medieval sense) way of life as such.

In fact, the examples that Hitz draws from Augustine, Robert Campin Fra Filippo Lippi all presuppose an institutional structure -- a Church committed to the understanding of the word of God – in which the “affinity between the intellectual and spiritual lives” can be taken for granted. Undoubtedly some such affinity still exists for many individuals and some (but as she notes by no means all) Christian universities; but these do not require any new, public vindication of the intellectual life. Once one accepts the need of disciplined engagement with sacred texts, the Humanities are home-free. Of course, it’s the very doubt about that is the central underlying the cause of the idea that the intellectual life is “inadequate or pointless.” To put it too simply (recall): the Humanities have been the victim of their own (debunking) scientific success.

As an aside, like all good essayists, Hitz invites us to re-visit works she discusses, and so I want to go see “The Hedgehog” again. Even so, “The Hedgehog” also comments on its own activity in a way that is ignored by Hitz—the young, bourgeois girl, who is at the center of the narrative, Paloma films her surroundings with her family camera. That is to say, the movie acknowledges the material pre-conditions that make her own activity possible; it does so by reinforcing the implicit contract with the movie’s audience which pretends to sustain the noble ideals of the intellectual life during the performance (and is flattered by the movie that it can partake in it), while not threatening the institutions which prevent the affirmation of those ideals outside the theatre. Paloma’s transformation during the film leaves the “empty bubble that surrounds them” untouched because to do so would be self-defeating (from the perspective of the continued existence of this art).

Let me conclude. Hitz rightly calls us back to the “zeal for Humanist learning,” which springs from an inward experience – I would say ‘joy’ --, that vivifies the intellectual life. This zeal does not need institutions of (note the elevation) higher education and may well be contaminated by them. But in the very passage that Hitz quotes from Plato’s Republic, the person, “who takes refuge” during a “storm of dust or hail driven by the wind,” does so “under a little wall.” At their very best, our universities can be such a little wall—and as we all know, somebody needs to lay the bricks and keep them from keeling over.

Transformative Political Experience

The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgements to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN. Thomas Hobbes, "Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth,"  Leviathan (2:17).

A political transformative experience (hereafter PTE) involves an experience that is both epistemically and politically transformative; PTE arises in situations where collective agents (e.g., social activists or financial regulators) think of themselves as authoritatively controlling their choices by collectively projecting themselves forward and considering possible futures, and their plans are undermined by cognitive and epistemic limitations; thus PTE is -- like Laurie Paul's account of transformative experience (TE) on which it is explicitly modeled* -- a species of epistemic (subjective) true (or Knightian) uncertainty. In particular, PTE is a theory of unforeseen (and, thus, unintended) consequences in which those consequences change political actors in ways they could not have willed. PTE assumes the intelligibility of collective agents (and collective intentionality), but it is compatible with various kinds of methodological individualism (recall this post on Brian Epstein).

A characteristic example (with qualification noted shortly) of such a PTE is the transition during the Hobbesian covenant from a multitude of men in the state of nature to a unity under a common power or commonwealth (see the quote above). The covenant willingly transform the Hobbesian free agent in the state of nature into source of collective agency (the sovereign), which, in turn, makes them into subjects of the sovereign (e.g., "by this institution of a Commonwealth every particular man is author of all the sovereign doth," (Leviathan, 2:18)). The social contract changes the (social) identity of agents. The Hobbesian social contract, the generation of the rule of law, is also a clear response to bad forms of uncertainty (to quote a famous paragraph from L2:13): "there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

I noted I would qualify the example. In Hobbes the most important consequences of the covenant are imagined  (recall "to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly,") to be foreseeable. Hume, whose own theory of the origin of law embraces many Hobbesian elements, criticizes Hobbes on this point: "In vain shou’d we expect to find, in uncultivated nature, a remedy to this inconvenience....The idea of justice can never serve to this purpose...[it] wou’d never have been dream’d of among rude and savage men." (Treatise 3.2.2.8) Here, Hume calls to the cognitive and epistemic limitations of agents living under the state of nature So, a (counter-factual) paradigmatic instance of PTE in the liberal tradition combines Hobbesian collective agency in which the agents' social identity is transformed with a Humean understanding of what those very agents could not have foreseen (and, thus, not intended).

The previous paragraph may suggest that PTE is always a mere fiction (like the Hobbesian/Humean story). But this does not follow. For example, let's assume that British voters decide to vote for Brexit the referendum on 23 June. (Here I treat a referendum as an instance of collective action; if you don't like that imagine your own example.) If they vote fro Brexit they intend -- inter alia -- to transform their citizenship and a whole bunch of constitutive relations with other peoples. All of that is clear even if the content of the transformation will be contested before and after the vote. But what is equally clear is that a whole bunch of consequences on their political identity occasioned or caused by Brexit are now shrouded in mystery. (If you think that nothing much will change, that's fine--it's just that you are not in an epistemically superior position to think so.) It's possible, thus, that Brexit will be an instance of PTE, although perhaps an aversion to transformative experiences (status quo bias) may induce the voters to reject Brexit--I don't know.*

 

 

Can Philology Save Us? On Justin Smith's vision for the university of the 21st century

For philology may hold out not only the promise of reviving the humanities, but also of reestablishing the lost unity of the human sciences with the sciences of nature. Part of philology's apparent irrelevance today has to do with what we may diagnose as our society's radical and unprecedented presentism. No textual culture in human history has been so indifferent to its own past, and indeed this indifference strongly suggests that, though we continue to Tweet and to 'text' and to share memes that consist in part in strings of words, we are in fact moving into a post-textual era....This presentism not only cuts us off from what was long understood to be a central concern of the human sciences --to know who we are by knowing where we've come from--, it also perpetuates and deepens the contingent and unnecessary separation, as I've suggested, of the human from the natural sciences. Understood as philology, as a search for origins, the human sciences in fact share a great deal with a number of other sorts of inquiry often cordoned off from the human sciences on the other side of what has been called, since C. P. Snow introduced that term in 1959, the 'two-cultures divide'. Philology shares aims and objectives, and sometimes also methods, with archaeology, as also with paleontology, evolutionary biology, and perhaps even those branches of theoretical physics that deal with the distant origins of the universe. All seek to account for how the world got to be the way it is....

History...should be elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science in the emerging universities of the 21st century. It is the best hope for an exit from the current dérive of the humanities, and, much more than this, it is the best hope for overcoming the false and arbitrary rift between the human and the natural sciences. History is considerably larger than philology, yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be. Pollock notes that philology "has been everywhere that texts have been, indeed, in a way that we have yet to fully grasp, everywhere that language has been." This ubiquity was however grasped, for example, by the early Islamic field linguists who went out to build their lexica from the oral poetry of the Bedouins. Nor, at other times in history, as for Leibniz and William Jones, was the boundary of the genealogist's project set at the limits of language, but indeed extended to all the things named in language, to the world itself. In their diminished self-understanding, today's humanists have relinquished all these things to the natural scientists, who for the most part do not know what to make of them. By rediscovering its unity with philology in the shared project of history, natural science stands to gain as much as the humanities do: to rediscover its lofty purpose of enabling us to make sense of the world, and of our place in it.--Justin Smith "A Forgotten Field Could Save the Humanities," The Chronicle of Higher Education. [Behind a paywall; HT DailyNous.]

Justin Smith is probably the most creative and playful historian of (early modern) philosophy today.* So, I was sad to learn that he is "increasingly" leaving it "behind in view of its woeful provincialism." In his piece he also rejects 'localism' (which he associates with a deplorable, it seems, "new strain of identitarianism in the humanities.") He embraces, rather, "a global, rather than provincial," perspective. (He is quoting Sheldon Pollock, but in context he is endorsing it.) From context it's clear that the 'global' is something distinct from the 'universal' (or, at least, the purportedly universal that he associates with Anglo professional philosophy). Presumably, a universal perspective homogenizes, whereas the global makes space for differences due to (again quoting Pollock approvingly) "historicity, constructedness, and changeability," not in the least in the trajectories of knowledge production. This becomes clear from Smith's dazzling display of examples of "early Islamic field linguists,"  the Nietzsche-Wilamowitz debate, William Jones's research on the names of plant species in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, and Leibniz's vision.

It is worth noting that the natural antonyms of the province and 'provincial,' are not just the urbane and broad-minded, but also empire or imperial. And, in fact, the material and administrative precondition for the the global vision is often some kind of empire. And while we tend to think of colonial empires as great projects of subjugation and effacement of local difference, there are empires in which there is unity while respecting provincial diversity--it's these empires that most need (to quote Smith) a "unified project." One way to generate such a project, is to project "the lost unity" (emphasis added). These projects are fueled by restorative nostalgia that is, simultaneously, hyper-modern and a source of immense creativity. Such projects also involve an insistence that perspective matters and that hopeful greatness needs to be projected on a larger canvass. [For an excellent literary treatment of such matters, recall John Williams' novel Augustus.]

While Smith may wish nothing to do with something as crass as a military empire, his project does involve elements of restorative nostalgia (e.g., "elevated to its rightful place, as the reigning science") and a fondness for taking about 'we' when it suits him. He insists, also, that the present view of philology is mistakenly diminutive (see also the "diminished" view of the humanities) and "yet philology itself may be much larger than it is now perceived to be" in order to be more "lofty." In addition, he is not against the (selective, prudent) use of force because he insists that there must be 'compulsory instruction' in order to ensure that certain kinds of forgetting does not occur ("no one ever forgets that in the end there are no truly atemporal sciences.").

Like many who embrace such restorative nostalgia (Carlyle, Nietzsche, etc.), the criticism of the present is acute and insightful:

"Among the humanities, philosophy...is surely the field in which European area studies has most successfully disguised itself as a universal and timeless form of inquiry. How often do we hear philosophy professors demur, when the subject of, say, classical Indian logic comes up, that they "regrettably don't know anything about that." What they really mean is: "My professional identity is wrapped up with my not knowing anything about that." This is something we learn as graduate students: a period of socialization in which we learn not only how to display our knowledge of, and commitment to, a given circumscribed domain, but also learn how to scoff, subtly, at whatever research interest falls even slightly beyond that domain. This is an acquired syndrome, transmitted from faculty to graduate students in the course of their own professional reproduction.**

My sense is that Smith's diagnosis is an apt characterization of our teacher's generation (although we both know exemplars that displayed different attitudes). The new generation of professional philosophers is embracing a different ethic; one in which any topic or puzzle is a legitimate opportunity to display technical virtuosity. Such technical sophistication is, of course, compatible with (although need not entail it) a thin understanding of the topic (and its historicity, etc.)  

An impatient reader sympathetic to (various bits of) Smith's project may suggest that my remarks thus far are distracting from the main agenda of his piece: his research agenda, that is, to combat 'presentism' and to promote a unified project in which the humanities and the sciences jointly "make sense of the world, and of our place in it," in part, by taking our path toward the present seriously. There are certainly opportunities for such thick collaboration between the humanities and (for convenience sake) the life-sciences. (About a decade ago, I penned a series of three papers in which I claimed that the history of astronomy and the history of economics are crucial to astronomy and economics (conceived as a policy science.)) I do hope that some enterprising university Rektor of a "non-Euro-American, university of the 21st century," hires or consults with Justin to help her implement a university with three faculties (a 'faculty of history', a 'faculty of the atemporal sciences', a 'faculty of new stuff') along the lines envisioned by him.

But in his essay, Smith offers us the matter, but not the form of this unity which, thus, becomes unexpectedly its own telos. Smith offers us the institutional strategy without the standard that may justify or vivify it. Without such a vision it is not obvious why the experts of the present and future will join in the shared enterprise (and they will persuade their paymasters to block it). To put the point jokingly, what's missing is the sense in the sense-making (I might say, the utopian concepts). Previously, this form was supplied by (say) revelation or philosophy. By bagging Spinoza's criticism of revelation, Smith cuts himself off from the former. By turning his back on the latter, he seems to leave himself without resources. But, perhaps, he thinks, with the Romantics, that poetry or art can supply the form. That uncertain, transformative path must seem tempting.

A Further note On the Trigger Warnings Controversy

[T]hey bewitch our souls...so that I myself, Menexenus, when thus praised by them feel mightily ennobled, and every time I listen fascinated I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome. And as I am generally accompanied by some strangers, who listen along with me, I become in their eyes also all at once more majestic; for they also manifestly share in my feelings with regard both to me and to the rest of our City, believing it to be more marvellous than before, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker. And this majestic feeling remains with me for over three days: so persistently does the speech and voice of the orator ring in my ears that it is scarcely on the fourth or fifth day that I recover myself and remember that I really am here on earth, whereas till then I almost imagined myself to be living in the Islands of the Blessed,—so expert are our orators.--Plato, Menexenus, 235a-c*

It is odd to read about the scorn ('new infantilism') heaped by self-described friends of a humanistic or classical education -- professors and commentators alike -- on the request for trigger warnings by college students encountering poetic and graphic scenes of rape in their required courses (recall this post to which the current one is a footnote). For in their ridicule, these cosmopolitan, mature types suggest that they do not really believe the once common rhetoric of the transformative potential of literature and the other arts. From their public utterances we may  infer that these false shepherds of culture appear to practice a detached, ironic stance toward the texts and material they teach and study; they seem literally unable to imagine to be swept away by poetry and rhetoric, to be un-moored from one's own identity by film,  and to be captivated by another's train of thought in a work of fiction. They understand themselves as stewards of traditional learning, but they reveal that they read with detached minds and closed hearts who are unable, it seems, to learn from their students' searching questioning.   

That works of art, including many thought canonical, can be dangerous to their readers and the society that permits them is an un-cool thought--one that gets suppressed by the banality that pases for a literary education. For, too many of our teachers assume that by branding a work 'fiction' we have created a convention by which it is treated as harmless speech a mere diversion without anything at stake (recall my exchange with the Dutch novelist Grunberg). But dictators and censorious religions (not to mention Plato) know better--imaginative works can inflame the soul and worse--some of them known to incite killing (cf. Charlie Hebdo).

One belittles our civic religion, which embraces a hard-won freedom of speech protected by law and people's hearts, by failing to recognize what is at stake in it: it is not just intended to protect "the language and imagery" of beautiful and harm-free speech. We do not get the (for lack of a more lovely term) freedom-enhancing effects of texts without risking incurring some of the dangerous effects; this is both why free speech is nowhere absolute and the limits of it are constantly contested as well as why the nature of responsible speech is of recurring significance in philosophy and the arts. A true educator recognizes the fragility of the experiment in living that occurs when student and teacher are receptive to (well) the demonic.

The above is not meant to deny the legitimate concern over the spread of trigger warnings if, as is likely, these become yet another instrument of the rent-seeking technocrats that run the modern university by which they curtail and intimidate professors and instructors (see here).** But if one treats the Liberal Arts as merely about lovely language and escapist fantasy, one should not be surprised if the rest of society decides one is dispensable.

 

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.

Ibn Tufayl on Transformative Experience

Suppose a Man born Blind, but of quick Parts, and a good Capacity, a tenacious Memory, and solid Judgment, who had liv'd in the place of his Nativity, till he had by the help of the rest of his Senses, contracted an acquaintance with a great many in the Neighbourhood, and learn'd the several kinds of Animals, and Things inanimate, and the Streets and Houses of the Town, so as to go any where about it without a Guide, and to know such people as he met, and call them, by their names; and knew the names of Colours, and the difference of them by their descriptions and definitions [alone]; and after he had learn'd all this, should have his Eyes open'd: Why, this Man, when he walk'd about the Town, would find every thing to be exactly agreeable to those notions which he had before; and that Colours were such as he had before conceiv'd them to be, by those descriptions he had receiv'd: so that the difference between his apprehensions when blind, and those which he would have now his Eyes were opened, would consist only in these two great Things, one of which is a consequent of the other, viz., a greater Clearness, and extream Delight.--Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail  The Improvement of HUMAN REASON, Exhibited in the LIFE of Hai Ebn Yokdhan [also known as Philosophus Autodidactus], translated by Simon Ockley (1708).*

The great joyous zenith of Ian Mueller's medieval philosophy course (recall), was his treatment of Avicenna's (or Ibn Sinna) flying man argument. He would carefully take you through the argument, step by step sometimes nodding ahead to Descartes, sometimes glancing backward to Augustine. He would note the little slips and offer gentle improvements along the way. But at the end of the treatment, he would sigh softly and whisper, Isn't that something? Awe replacing his more usual embrace of aporia.

It is well known that Ibn Tufayl's [or أبو بكر محمد بن عبد الملك بن محمد بن طفيل القيسي الأندلسي ] twelfth century, philosophical novel is ingenious; its debts to Avicenna, who is acknowledged in the first sentence, is obvious even to a non-specialist like me. Ibn Tufayl was born in Andalusia (present day Spain) and the intellectual patron of Averroes ( أبو الوليد محمد ابن احمد ابن رشد),(recall). But reading the sparkling philosophical prose for the first time produces a kind of shock of the unexpectedly familiar that is not quite identical to what is known.

Ibn Tufayl's treatment of the blind man's color vision is closer to L.A. Paul's pregnant Mary [recall] than to Jackson's color-blind Mary.**  In context, Ibn Tufayl agrees with Paul and Jackson that the discursive does not exhaust the knowable, and that is, in fact, the immediate point of the thought experiment (which is meant to illustrate the nature of a kind of mystical, intuitive knowledge of the highest truth, or union with God). But, strikingly, Ibn Tufayl does not point to the what it's like part of experience that is not knowable (suggesting a lack of anxiety about any purported opposition between the third vs first personal stances). Nor does he use the example to undermine faith in the transferability of testimony or teaching.

Rather, what he points to is that new experiences that add to the empirical base or foundation of one's knowledge can be transformative of one's emotional state. One need not agree with Ibn Tufayl's particular diagnosis that it's joy that will follow the new-found color-clarity of experience in order to recognize that transformative experiences may generate intellectual sentiments (wonder, admiration, surprise, joy etc.)

One may find my classification of joy among the intellectual sentiments a bit dubious. For example, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Adam Smith omits joy in his list of intellectual sentiment; and while he recognizes a form of joy subsequent to intellectual tranquility, he tends to understand joy as one of the more natural passions. Even so, we may say in proto-Spinozistic terms that for Ibn Tufayl joy is consequence of  the mind's movement toward greater perfection.

 

Christ Among the Scholars, Revisited; or Rembrandt on Parental Authority

⁴¹ Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. ⁴² And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. ⁴³ And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. ⁴⁴ But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day’s journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. ⁴⁵ And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. ⁴⁶ And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. ⁴⁷ And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. ⁴⁸ And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. ⁴⁹ And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? ⁵⁰ And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them. ⁵¹ And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart. ⁵² And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man. Luke 2:40--52

On Saturday, I visited an exhibit on Rembrandt's late works. (It was also my first return to the renovated Rijksmuseum.) I encountered quite a few old favorites, but had never seen Rembrandt's last incomplete work, Simeon with the Christ Child in the Temple, before.  I intend to do a distinct post on it before long. In reflecting on it, I realized that the story is only mentioned in the Gospel according to Luke 2. In re-reading that Gospel my eye fell on the very next episode, Jesus among the scholars (which also can be found only in Luke) quoted above. Rembrandt etched it a number of times (see here), including (unusually) the return trip to Nazareth (with boy Jesus looking up at his mom).

It's an odd episode with the parents not noticing the absence of their son while they were on the road. Once they noticed it, it seems they mistakenly thought he had moved ahead of them back to their friends and family. At this point, modern folk would initiate an Amber Alert (Child Abduction Emergency), -- what do you mean, you didn't notice his absence for a day? -- but Joseph and Mary backtracked instead. By the time they found Jesus they would have been very anxious. It's no surprise, then, that his mother has no room for relief (at finding him alive) nor pride (at his intellectual understanding) and is rather upset (and clearly takes the situation personally). It's a nice narrative touch. (Joseph's response is unrecorded.)  

I was a bit sad to note that Spinoza does not discuss the episode (Christ among the scholars) because it might have offered a clue to his understanding of his autobiography (not to mention round out his complex Christology--the topic of Jo Van Cauter's dissertation [my student]). In fact, Spinoza is entirely silent on Luke; I am not sure what to make of this.

The episode has two core, interwoven themes in Luke: first, the complex interactions among parental, godly, and intellectual authority.* Second, the mutual incomprehension and misperceptions of family members.  The connection between the two themes is, I suspect, that our expectations of each other's behavior are guided by our perceptions of authority of others and self. Jesus is surprised that his parents didn't know where to find him because he falsely assumes they already understand him. We might say that Mary and Joseph project their concerns (family and friends) onto their expectations of their child, while the boy falsely assumes that his commitments are part of the expectations of his parents's view of him.

Before he has reached manhood (at age thirteen), precocious Jesus is already capable of engaging the scholars on equal, intellectual level. But he has not quite mastered the complexity of human life. There is no guarantee that with age one does master it--after all, the episode exhibits the parents' lack of wisdom in such matters. But the Gospel of Luke is right to insist that one can grow in wisdom despite excelling at intellectual matters. Our intellectual cultivation is only a part of human wisdom.

There is, of course, a third theme in the episode, that occurred to me after my lunch with my father today: Mary's eventual acceptance of her child's nature despite her lack of understanding of his choices. And here I was struck that the father's perception is left out of the matter altogether. (This is, in fact, a recurring theme in Luke 2.) It's as if such treasuring is too much to be hoped for among fathers (the carriers of traditional authority); alternative, what's it's like to be a father is taken as uninteresting to metaphysicians and theologians, that is, lovers of god (Theophilus; see Luke 1:3 [recall here and here]).

And here my mind returns to Rembrandt's gaze at his son Titus. The son's mind's eye is preoccupied with his studies (or, perhaps, something more fascinating). He does not see his father's gaze (which would be a miracle, of course, once you imagine the implied perspective of where the father-the-artist-is-at-work). In his painting, Rembrandt accepts this invisibility and thereby, without showing himself, shows what it ought to be like without allowing us to question what it's really like.

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.