Digressions&Impressions

Elster's Criticism of Foucault (and Conceptual art)

It is puzzling and thought-provoking that certain paradoxical instruction appear both on the road to wisdom and as the agency of madness.--Elster, Sour Grapes (66)

Conceptual art may impress as a freak of nature can, or a woman preaching according to Dr. Johnson.--Elster, Sour Grapes (82)

There are some vocal philosophy professors that express contempt for English literature professors (hereafter: ELPs). I have never understood this contempt (and not just because my interest in philosophy was nurtured by a wonderful Miltonist--Michael Fixler [recall]).  Perhaps it's envy because ELPs get to read much better prose on an average work-day. More likely it's professional philosophers's abhorrence of multiplicity of meaning (which we understand as equivocation) (PPAMOM) which makes too many of us recoil from the ELPs's craft.  Anyway, I am always astounded by ELPs's ability to discern meaningful structural features in a text, and especially the telling trope or set of metaphors that help disclose a text's significance or conceptual commitments. One good trick that I apply in my own scholarship I learned from ELPs: it is important to pay attention to the minor seeming discordant words/concepts/paragraphs/chapters that do not seem necessary to the main argument in a text. This is especially useful in influential works that have already accumulated commentary/scholarship. (It's also a survival trick: all the low-hanging scholarly fruit tends to picked already.)

Elster's (1983) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality is deservedly a recent classic.* (As I write this it has over 2000 citations.) It is very much a cold-war product and it brilliantly exploits evidence of behavior from differing institutional contexts (culturally and temporally apart) : Imperial Rome (by way of Veyne's Le Pain et le Cirque) and Soviet Russia (by way of Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, which I have ordered). Its main claim is that "preferences underlying a choice may be shaped by the [given] constraints" (vii). The book elegantly weaves conceptual analysis, decision theory, and political theory; it subtly draws on literature, social psychology, and history in ways that are far too uncommon within analytical philosophy. At its best it reminds me of its great historical contemporary, Dennett's Elbow Room (recall). It also represents an important episode in the history of philosophical Marxism: Elster embraces "methodological individualism" in order to combat the "stagnant state" of "Marxist theory." (142) Elster also non-subtly rejects the marriage of Marxism and Freudianism that was (is?) common. In fact, its rejection of Freudian unconscious as a "theoretical entity" ("a highly desirable goal" (152)) is so dogmatic that Elster ties himself in knots over the phenomenon of self-deception, which he takes to be incoherent (despite "massive clinical, fictional and everyday experience attesting to the reality of the phenomenon." (149)) This aim also helps him produce some of his best insights on wishful thinking.

The discordant section in Sour Grapes is Elster's long paragraph on art with its jeremiad against conceptual art. Now in part because of PPAMOM and a moralizing impulse, most philosophers look foolish when we talk about art or novels. Elster, by contrast, makes very good use of novels to illustrate many of his best points. Yet, as the second epigraph to this post reveals, when it comes to conceptual art Elster recycles, in passing, Johnson's misogyny--the most embarrassing moment in the book.+ Elster's theory of artistic creation "involves maximazation under constraints, and that good works of art are local maxima of whatever it is that artists are maximizing." (78) For, an artist's activity "can be understood only on the assumption that there is something which they are trying to maximize, by 'getting it right' (78; emphasis added--ES). Perhaps this is true of Leibniz's Divine Artist (and on some readings Goethe), but it is peculiar understanding of much other art (although I grant that it gives Elster a means toward explaining the nature of a 'minor masterpiece' (81)). Given his theory it is no surprise that Elster has no conceptual room for conceptual art.

Elster's official theory of rejecting conceptual art is, however, instructive: it "certainly violates the principle that the aesthetic value of the work of art should not depend on the time at which is offered to the public." (82; emphasis added) This is a manifestly silly claim because it cannot even begin to do justice to the difference in aesthetic value between an original (prior in time) and a copy (subsequently),--a difference which even the most metaphysically robust account of aesthetic value ought to embrace. As Hume notes, knowledge of the context of production and the intended ways of experiencing a work of art, contributes to aesthetic appreciation and is a condition for the possibility of aesthetic value (Of the Standard Taste).

What can account for the oddity of Elster's position? The problem is that his account of aesthetic value is (subtly) modelled on a certain semantics (which is appropriate for eternal nature of truth in, say, mathematics). And it turns out that commitments similar to this semantics operate in the background in his very polemical remarks of Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Elster (pp. 104ff) dislikes a number of things about Foucault's approach: first, he cannot stand Foucault's rhetoric and "eloquence" (including the use of rhetorical questions, the cascade of verbs, etc.); second he dislikes (without explanation) privileging the question Cui bono? (that is "to whose benefit?"--It is ironic to see a Marxist reject such privilege.) More important, he treats Foucault as offering a consequence-explanation. In fact, Elster treats Foucault (and Bourdieu) as offering especially bad consequence explanations--ones that lack a mechanism, a feedback mechanism, and even an intentional agent. Now, indeed, on a certain conception of social science such oversights may well be devestating. (To be sure, Elster refuses even to interpret Foucault more charitably as sketching the constraints/outlines of an explanation that can subsequent guide a seach for mechanism (etc.) by lesser, worker-bee social scientists. In fact, Foucault offers many how-possible mechanisms throughout his book, so Elster is cherry-picking his evidence.)  

But even Elster explicitly notes that in the passage he focuses on, Foucault does not state a consequence-explanation (or says he wishes to offer one). It is more sensible (and charitable) to interpret Foucault as primarily offering an analysis of the (possible) meaning of certain (historically contingent, but) enduring social phenomena in terms of their functions and benefits (that is also compatible with the explanation-sketch that can guide further research). After all, one key (transcendental) claim that Foucault makes about punishment (prison, etc.) is that it is taxonomic--it makes a certain form of knowledge possible. 

Now, while Elster is not really attentive to the transcendental (in the Kantian sense) dimension of Foucault, he, too, recognizes that Foucault is interested in meaning (106).  Yet, because the "search for meaning" (on Elster's account) "dispenses with mechanisms" it "fails dishonourably." Now, it's true that if Foucault were exclusively in the business of offering causal explanations then indeed the absence of mechanism would be pretty serious charge. But, Elster rejects the search for meaning (both in terms of finding of creating meaning); he thinks it is a moral and intellectual fallacy (101ff). It is sort of clear why Elster thinks that a lack of interest in a mechanism is an intellectual fallacy. Why he thinks it is a moral fallacy is less obvious, although he seems to think it (and the embrace of social by-products more generally) instantiates a "misplaced or self-defeating form of instrumental rationality. It is the fallacy of striving, seeking and searching for the things that recede before the hand that reaches out for them. In many cases it takes the form of trying to get something for nothing." (107)** 

In fact, while Elster has quite a bit to say about the moral problems with by-products, we are never really told what's wrong with either the search for meaning as such (so without the aim of offering explanation) or viewing social analysis as an expression or the creation of meaning. That is, if we understand Foucault as understanding himself as part of the world he describes and, in fact, aiming to destabilize it, in part, with the narratives he offers there is nothing mysterious about what's going on. Elster repeatedly insists not just that Foucault's practice and the search for meaning is immoral but also that is dangerous (44). But unless one embraces a very strong status quo bias or has very high risk aversion, that immorality and danger can only be established if we are willing to evaluate Foucault's aims and means on their (foreseeable, consequentialist?) merits (case by case, as it were). 

That is to say, if one is in the grip of a certain positivist understanding of social science and a kind of verificationist theory of meaning, a search for and the creation of meaning is very misguided. It is also misguided if one has a semantics in which social facts are univocal truthmakers of (social) meaning simply waiting out there to be discovered. But if we overcome PPAMOM we can learn from ELPs that often social meaning is, in part, constituted and reconstituted by our utterances and other practices.

That is to say, if we want to understand, say, ideology (including our own) -- one of Elster's main aims, and presumably one of the sources of his book's popularity --, we can't just rely on the reality/fiction distinction alongside a set of psychological mechanisms, we also have to make ourselves feel (by way of sympathetic imagination) the significance of a certain set of commitments and, while this should not be opposed to truth it is, in a way, orthogonal to truth.++ After all, even true statements of present social reality can be instances of ideology ((recall) because of status quo bias or unwillingness to question existing background institutions and norms). 

Zany Syncretism

Her commitment to forging continuity between disparate, disjointed systems is what seems important. In this sense, she's a philosopher, pushing the situations that she creates toward a zany syncretism. While Jan Ader's appeal to the present seems wistfully fey, Krystufek's work is more confrontational: she creates fabulous messes and imparts them with logic through her slapstick presence. (Chris Kraus (2011) Where Art belongs, "No More Utopias," 62)

While there are a few famous exemplars of syncretism (Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas, and, perhaps, Deleuze), I would not call them 'zany.' Perhaps, Kierkegaard and McDaniel are the only 'zany syncretists' I am familiar with and then very partially, so.* Yet, the claim is not a throw-away comment not just because the essay is called "No More Utopias," but in the next sentence, Kraus continues, even explains, the thought by insisting that Krystufek's work is governed by 'logic.'

It requires no mention that neither Krystufek nor Kraus is a professional philosopher (nor Ader); an exploration of the formal features of Krystufek's (primarily) visual combinatorial permutations that range over situations (her 'logic') is probably not a very fruitful enterprise if we are looking to establish a general, symbolic logic. Moreover, few professional philosophers aim at creating messes; while some of us practice slapstick, it is rarely recognized as a philosophical virtue. When syncretism exists in professional philosophy today at a self-conscious level, it is often tinged with apologetics (e.g., War and Human Rights, analytical thomism, etc.). 

Even so, all professional philosophers, even the biggest haters of Hegel, recognize that in some sense a mess may be fruitful, if, by generating promising forced moves, it can generate productive tensions that allow for further development (if you wish, a dynamics of reason). John Mikhail's work reminds us, for example, that in Rawls' cold-war kantianism there lurks, also, a naturalist moral psychologist who might have stuff to say about trolleys.

An impatient reader may recognize that I am missing Kraus's point; Krystufek's art is in some sense philosophical. And she (Kraus) is helping us see what sense that is: forging continuity between disparate, disjointed systems by way of some such (to a borrow a phrase from Christine Kanz) combinatorics. Having  seen a whole bunch of pictures of Krystufek's art on a laptop since I first read the lines quoted above, I think I understand what Kraus is saying (to be banal: Krystufek does often blend features of the world together in often funny-in-a-zany-sense ways that generate pictures that have a collage-like-structure); but I did wonder if Kraus's (really) real point isn't more reflexive: she (Kraus) is telling the reader in what sense her (Kraus's) writing, even the novels, is philosophical. In her novels, Kraus (a) at one level forges continuity between disparate, disjointed systems of her life, and is authorial-ly present when she does so, by way of (and this is a further level) (b) forging continuity between disparate, disjointed systems in what she describes (art, academy, late phases of capitalism, the prison-industrial complex, etc.). Both (a) and (b) 'manifest' ("No more Utopias" p. 62) a certain life--obviously (a) more than (b).

So, anything goes?

Not quite. For Krystufek is admired (and explicitly privileged over Ader) for being 'confrontational.' That is to say, if we read Kraus as offering a normative conception of what philosophy might be, it's the potential effects, today, of Krystufek's "messes" that ought to make us value her practice; for these effects, which force the gaze of the viewer not into escapism, but to recognize, inter alia, that "no island, however remote, exists off the grid of ecological tourism;' (p. 69) paradoxically (and somewhat un-clearly) by forcing the viewer to recognize that there is no beyond, it generates hope (p. 70; it need not always do so, of course).

Here I am not interested in the truth of these claims; nor do I wish to advocate that the effect of philosophizing ought to be hope.**  Rather, Kraus offers a broadly consequentialist interpretation of what the value of particular forms of philosophy (and the way it is embedded in an artist's life) might be, that is, in a sense, topic and form-neutral. (I write 'broadly' because the consequences need not be actualized.) One can aim to be a philosopher like Kraus's Krystufek (or Kraus) without accepting that Krystufek is an exemplar worth emulating in (professional) philosophy. This kind of philosopher does not passively describe a given world, but by practicing experiments in living ('pushing the situations that she creates'), she arrests our attention and thereby generates an affective response.

 

 

*Lacan, Žižek?

**Other on the hand, I don't think generating hope is all wrong for a philosophy.

Of Four Kinds of Writer's Block

In the imagination there is no daylight and,                                              

Like Wallace Stevens, I know the dark is crucial.                                         

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

These bodies, even lynched, still are thinking.                               

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

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

 

Poetry is a finikin thing of air

That lives uncertainly and not for long

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

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

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

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

On Starting Out as A Fool

No man may know himself, nor how he must appear even to his friends; but I imagine they must have thought me a but of a fool, that day, and even for some time afterward. I was a bit luxuriant then, and fancied that a poet must play the part. There is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.-- Maecenas to Livy (John Williams Augustus: A Novel, 15-16 [emphasis in original--ES])*

I have been hesitant to post about John Williams's (1971) Augustus: A Novel because I have been eager to re-read Yourcenar's (1951) Mémoires d'Hadrien, which, I suspect, inspired Williams, first. But  impressions are fleeting and by their very nature can never complete what they aim for. So, I cut a corner here.

The novel tells an exciting story, but is a serious (sometimes too serious) exploration of the most fundamental political philosophy by way of a mixture of letters and notes/diary fragments by a number of characters. This is a clever device in a novel set in history because it allows the author to introduce relevant material that frames the action rather than engage in lengthy, explanatory asides. Chapter One (of Book 1), the thematic introduction of the book, which contains two letters and two such fragments does not let Augustus speak in his own voice. In fact the four entries give us schematic types. The four 'entries' jump around in time  and exhibit indirect form, a theme explicitly stated at the start of the book:

I am a poet, and incapable of approaching anything very directly.--Maecenas to Livy (12)

And indeed, the book is an extended meditation -- an unfolding -- on art (both in the literary sense and in the art of ruling). The novel reaches its climax with a long set-piece (a letter from a dying, nearly delirious Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus which occupies the whole of Book Three) in which the poetic art and the art of being emperor are said to spring from the same kind of love and involve analogous ordering patterns and self-deceptions. So, the novel calls attention to the oblique status of its presentations. The reader is expected to do some work.

As an aside, we are also warned** that this work of figuring out the oblique point is tricky because of human nature. For, the first chapter closes on: "death and greatness...the two words go around in my head, around and around, until they seem the same." (26) Williams never gives us the latin (Mortem et Magnitudo (allow a gymnasiast his play)), but while there are a great many deaths -- the historical, temporal start of the novel is the final part of the great age of Roman civil war -- the novel is, in fact, also an investigation of the nature of greatness, especially greatness of soul. But in these lines  we are also reminded that the mind has a capacity of conflation, of effacing difference, such that homogeneity results (we might say, there is nothing greater than God, or the universe, and it coincides with death--not a strange thought amidst war). These words ("death and greatness..." etc.) are spoken, as we learn in the novel, by a traitor. (Perhaps some readers will dimly recall this from their school days.)

One of the schematic types (or part-players), a hybrid, poet-politician/patron, (Maecenas) presents himself in the lines quoted at the top of this post, as an anti-philosophical philosopher: "No man may know himself." If true, this would imply that the philosophical life ('know thyself' etc.) is doomed to failure for everybody. If it didn't violate guild-rules on acceptable philosophical speech, it would have the form of a philosophical claim! After all, it's one thing to stake one's claim on the familiar trope that the path or search is more important than the destination; it's another thing to claim that the destination is a kind of two-level mirage (not just no possible self-knowledge, but even no access to the image of you by your intimates).

On using Earlymoderntexts.org in scholarship (with notes on translation)

There is much that could be said in criticism of this paper, but the primary reason for rejection is that the whole argument turns upon a misquotation.

The author's main claim is that the two arguments which appear on p.135 of the Penguin Classics (ed. Woolhouse) edition of the Three Dialogues (pp.185-6 of Jessop & Luce, which is the standard reference for Berkeley and it is annoying that the author does not use it) have different conclusions. The first, allegedly, concludes the falsity of ‘VII. Mind-independent sensible things have those qualities that they are perceived to have’, whereas the second the falsity of ‘VI. Sensible qualities are parts of [inhere in] mind-independent sensible things’. The author quotes the first argument at length on p.8 prior to reconstructing it, a quotation which ends ‘From all of this, shouldn’t it seem to follow that all colors are equally apparent, and that none of the ones that we see are really in any outer object?’. This text is what appears in Jonathan Bennett’s  www.earlymoderntexts.org edition of Berkeley, which does not claim to be faithful to the original and in this case is quite clearly not faithful. What Berkeley actually wrote was: ‘From all of which, should it not seem to follow, that all the colours are equally apparent, and that none of those which we perceive are really inherent in any outward object?’. Apart from the utterly outrageous sloppiness of using a paraphrastic edition aimed at undergraduates in a research article submitted to an elite scholarly journal, and the intellectual dishonesty of giving a reference to the impeccably edited Penguin Classics edition rather than the actual source of the quoted passage, this error shows the author’s argument to be simply mistaken: Berkeley takes VII, the claim about inherence, to be part of the conjunctive conclusion of the first argument.

I would be loathe to impute deliberate deception here, but it is worth noting that while both the quotations illustrating the alleged two versions of the Argument from Perceptual Relativity come from earlymoderntexts.org, the quotations from the Principles on p.1 of the manuscript do appear to come from the Penguin Classics edition, making clear the author had it or a similarly accurate text to hand and wasn’t working entirely from the Bennett paraphrastic edition."--Referee, or Anonymous.

A distinguished philosopher [Anonymous] forwarded the excerpt from the referee report s/he wrote on a recent assignment to me. I quote with permission (even encouragement). I have not read the original paper (and luckily I am not the author!) nor have I double-checked all the relevant sources, so I cannot judge how fair Anonymous is, but I would share Anon.'s irritation if I discovered that a text relied on a suppressed translation (which is known to be un-scholarly). I should mention that Anonymous is not a hyper-specialist historian of philosophy (you know who those are!), but also makes contributions to more 'contemporary' areas. In follow up exchange Anonymous suggested that there are two key issues here:

1. Someone in the profession not being able to see the dangers of using earlymoderntexts.org and what this says about (i) academic standards (why think anything less than the best scholarly edition will do*) in Philosophy as a discipline and (ii) how earlymoderntexts.org might be misleading our students about how scholarship is to be done.

 

2. Referencing a print edition when you have actually used an online source (and without checking the accuracy of the online source).

 

This behaviour would be regarded as highly unprofessional and cast doubt on someone's suitability for an academic job in other humanities disciplines, but seems to be tolerated in (anglophone?) philosophy.

I  agree with Anonymous, although I will qualify my agreement below. First, all translation is an interpretation. Translating complex philosophical texts is much, much harder than figuring out 'gavagai.' This is so, even if you have written the text yourself and are fluent in both languages. You should try translating some time; even if you are not a meaning holist, you'll discover that a lot of philosophical jargon is not stable and uniform across cultural and temporal contexts. (Surprisingly enough, this is even  true of works in the history of physics.) So, leaving aside honest mistakes, all translations involve non-trivial judgments and trade-offs with a complex interplay among style, content, jargon, sentence structure, and even argumentative structure (this list is not exhaustive).

Of Fleeting Impressions, or an author's frailty

The Circumstance which gives Authors an Advantage above all these great Masters, is this, that they can multiply their Originals; or rather can make Copies of their Works, to what Number they please, which shall be as valuable as the Originals themselves. This gives a great Author something like a Prospect of Eternity, but at the same time deprives him of those other Advantages which Artists meet with. The Artist finds greater Returns in Profit, as the Author in Fame. What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?--The Spectator, No. 166. Monday, September 10, 1711. Addison.

At a conference, I recently caught Menachem Fisch engrossed in Dror Wahrman's fascinating Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, which Menachem warmly recommended. The passage from Addison is partially quoted on p. 51; Wahrman cuts it off at "Eternity." In context, Wahrman is not interested in the trade-off between profit for unique works and enduring fame that Addison posits (although fleetingness of life, of print, of identity (etc.) is a major theme of the book). Because duplication undermines scarcity -- it even risks effacing property --, it generates too much supply, and lowers what one might call "exchange value." (As Addison recognizes, the intrinsic or use value remains, and may, in fact, be increased because more folk can enjoy the fruits of one's labor.)* Addison imagines counterfactually, "What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?" Yet, unique properties, which have a huge upside in exchange value, are vulnerable to the destruction wrought by time: statue, buildings, even pictures are fragile--and  even when they survive they may -- despite the necessity of the logicians -- be disassociated from the name that ought to be associated with it.

That is to say, one can be rewarded in money and approbation. If one scribbles in the right sort of medium, one can even hope to rewarded with posthumous applause. Addison's little counterfactual implies, in fact, that the truly talented (Virgil, Homer, Cicero, Aristotle) correctly favor the possibility of extraordinary posthumous fame over extraordinary riches in one's life. As Hume insisted, while subtly correcting Addison's implicit axiology, that there was such a thing as a "most durable, as well as justest fame," and offered as examples:

On Searle on Williams

Yes. Well, Bernard was a very good friend of mine. He had an enormous influence on me of the kind that would be hard to describe because it was mostly just admiration for his sheer intellectual abilities. I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability. And one of the reasons for that is he had all this other stuff going on. He was always on some Royal Commission, or dining in Buckingham Palace...

He could see instantly the flaws in arguments, including his own. This was the fatal element: that Bernard could see the limitations of philosophical theories, but they led to him seeing the limitations of his own theories, and that was partly debilitating.--John Searle interviewed by Tim Crane [HT Dailynous]

Searle's recent interviews have been making a splash (recall). I am a bit sad that in these interviews, nobody knowledgeable interrogates his exchanges with Derrida.

Anyway, Searle's comment on Williams has escaped, I think, scrutiny. Williams's career was not a professional failure; he was at one point Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Deutsch Professor at Berkeley. His books are widely cited (I blogged about his truth book once), and some of his thought experiments have become evergreens in moral philosophy. I read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before I went to graduate school and it assured me that analytical philosophy need not be forfeited to the technicians. (Recently, I wrote a paper on moral luck in which I offer a correction to his account from the vantage point of Adam Smith's treatment.)

Searle's comments remind us of two non-trivial facts: (i) it's very hard to capture in print "the particular fire and light that came from discussions;" (ii) even the most talented and best situated amongst us (e.g. Williams) are unlikely to write "a great book." The two facts are connected, although not by logical entailment. The known professional ways of communicating philosophy -- the journal article, the book -- are both designed to prevent 'fire and light.' Some such affect, "quickness," and "insight" (a key word in the interview with Searle) are not the product of journal articles and books, specially written in the registers of analytical philosophy, in particular; it embraces the ideals of responsible speech in its self-image opposed to purported Heideggerrian nonsense.

On Sincerity

If Plato, having set out to write about the theology of the Athenians, had felt disgusted at it and started to criticize it for containing internal dissent and parents having sex with their children or eating them, and for praising the punishments in revenge for these acts, exercised on their parents by children and by brothers on brothers and other such things; if Plato thus, having taken on such stories, had criticized them in  public, he would, it seems to me, have given the Athenians a reason to show themselves evil again and kill him too as they did Socrates. Because he would not have chosen to live rather than to speak the truth, and because he saw that he could safely reconcile living and speaking the truth, he put Euthyphro forward as the personification of the Athenians, a pretentious man and an idiot, who thinks wrongly about the gods as nobody else, and confronted him with Socrares himself in his usual way of acting in which he used to question everybody with whom he was discussing.--Numenius, On the Secret Doctrines of Plato (fragment 23), translated by Peter Van Nuffelen in Rethinking the Gods (74).

With the revival of fortunes of murderous religions and the accompanying rise of the data-mining, national security state I expect that interest in esoteric doctrines and dummy doctrines to rise as well. For, the art of reconciling truth-speaking with living is in high demand when one can be killed for one's views* or receive a one way, lifetime ticket to one's local Guantanamo Bay based on secret intelligence. Some such deeds -- e.g., Socrates's death -- are legally sanctioned.

In the quoted passage, Numenius treats Plato's Euthyphro as a "theological treatise" (Van Nuffelen, 74) in which Athenian popular theology is criticized indirectly. It is endemic of the disdain for Straussianism and anything having to do with esotericism in professional philosophy (recall and here) that the Stanford Encyclopedia article devoted to Numenius, treats the fragment (one of the few surviving ones!) in a single, passing sentence. The Euthyphro is traditionally "classified as Plato's first work....Numenius' interpretation of it, as a hidden refutation of Athenian religion, implies that Plato, from the outset, chose to conceal his true doctrines, or at leas those that would seem offensive to the Athenians." (Van Nuffelen, 77) Given that many of Plato's dialogues contain doctrines that are critical of the Athenians, one wonders how on Numenius's account, the distinction between, say, mildly annoying to and dangerously offensive to Athenians was drawn by Plato. Perhaps, Numenius thought that when Plato felt "disgusted" by popular opinion (note the relish with which Numenius describes incest and cannibalism), he had to be careful to state his own opposing views. (Numenius may have been guided by reflection on Leontius's reaction upon seeing "the corpses that lay at the place of public execution" in Republic 439e?)  

On Sebald, and Self-Perpetuating Compulsions

Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.… How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill.…What I found most surprising in the course of these observations is the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing. There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at that crucial age when, as Keller remarks, one every day runs the risk of becoming simpleminded and longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one's head.… Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible. From the writer's point of view, there is almost nothing to be said in its defense, so little does it have to offer by way of gratification.--W.G. Sebald, quoted in Troy Jollimore's stimulating review. [HT L.A. Paul]

Alone in my circle of bourgeois scholars, I often find Sebald mildly irritating because he sells an intoxicating mixture of learnedness, nostalgia, and suggestions of depth to be found in imaginative engagement with the details of living --all irresistible to folk like us. I always struggled to express my irritation, but Jollimore helpfully quotes Sebald's preference for "something that is small and self-contained," which is for him "a moral and aesthetic ideal." While I instinctively admire Sebald's aversion against "large-scale things...in architecture or evolutionary leaps," his ideal leaves little room for expansiveness, natural and moral and systematically partakes in the humanistic project of self-domestication (recall). Sebald's moral and aesthetic preferences are a thinly disguised longing for control, even in the face of genuine self-knowledge that such control remains elusive. His is intrinsically a conservative aesthetic that offers a spirited consolation (by withholding ordinary forms of consolation) to those, I fear, that recoil the inevitable excesses in living. Of course, I wouldn't find Sebald irritating if I didn't recognize myself in these longings.

Can one be funny in analytical philosophy?

IT is sometimes said that the world might itself be vague. Rather than vagueness being a deficiency in our mode of describing the world, it would then be a necessary feature of any true description of it. It is also said that amongst the statements which may not have a determinate truth value as a result of their vagueness are identity statements. Combining these two views we would arrive at the idea that the world might contain certain objects about which it is a fact that they have fuzzy boundaries. --Gareth Evans

"Is Gareth Evans (the philosopher) funny?" I ask myself in reflecting on his famous "Can There Be Vague Objects?"*

By this I do not mean the kind of funny in which one uses a principle denied by the opponent as an undisputed premise in one's argument against them.** This kind of funny is generally an expression of situational power--one can assert and get away with it. It is a byproduct that accompanies the clever in a certain milieu.

I also do not mean the kind of funny that presents itself as rigor, yet does not axiomatize or stipulate the rules of the sentential operator.*** In fairness to Evans, there is funniness here because Evans might respond that this problem, while real, is really his unnamed opponent's problem. It's not clear that the principled metaphysical indeterminatist has a right to a definite logic of vagueness.