1. Rawls the hedgehog, Shklar the fox — Shklar’s inversions; 2. History shapes our conceptual resources — Traditions of commentary — Political praxis over political theoria; 3. Versatile stories, different angles — Jeffersonian education, Jacksonian fairness — Political rights without natural rights?; 4. Tradition as mythology — Heroes with warts; 5. Madison: democracy as political grind — Hamilton: democracy as fact hungry; 6. Jefferson: democracy as self-government — Adams: democracy as dangerously self-destructive — Our two aboriginal forces: hope and evil
1. With John Rawls, Judith Shklar will be recognized as one of the two most important politico-moral philosophers of the last half of the 20th century. [1] In 1971, Rawls published the definitive statement of liberal political philosophy in A Theory of Justice, and it not only revitalized the then widely recognized defunct discipline of political theory, but has defined its problems up to the present. Rawls the hedgehog spent the rest of his career restating, reshaping, and extending that powerful, central vision. Shklar the fox, however, while working in the adjacent department to Rawls at Harvard, left behind a fascinatingly variegated corpus of work behind. The most important to posterity, it seems to me, will be Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Faces of Injustice (1990). The latter inverts the traditional role of the political philosopher, fulfilled most grandly by Rawls, thus opening up a vast new space to be filled by theorists: instead of putting justice at the center of a systematic theory, she puts injustice, and she attempts to show how doing so requires us to reprioritize our conceptual resources.
Even more interesting, perhaps though, is the intellectual context in which Ordinary Vices appears. The traditional mode of political thought that puts justice at the center is also largely a Kantian enterprise (to which Rawls did much to give historical shape to). Rawls’s big enemy in Theory was the then-dominant tradition of politico-moral philosophy, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism and Kantianism had been the two overwhelmingly dominant traditions of thinking for nearly two centuries. No sooner had Rawls’ book appeared, however, then did a revival of Aristotelian-edged virtue ethics appear on the scene, rejecting the seesaw between means-end utility and deontological principle. Virtue ethics has been the most fertile tradition, it seems to me, in pure moral philosophy—but no sooner did it get its spurs, then did Shklar invert its paradigm. Reviving Montaigne’s inversion of Renaissance virtue ethics (which was before Kant and Bentham had blotted out virtue-oriented ethical systems like Shaftesbury and Mandeville [2]), Shklar makes an interesting case for placing vice at the center of one’s philosophy if one is committed to liberal democracy.
2. Central to both Rawls and Shklar’s work was an understanding of the historical line of thinkers that give shape to our conceptual resources. [3] Most of Rawls’ work on history was relegated to his lectures on political and moral philosophy that he gave at Harvard, and that have thankfully been published. Shklar wrote important studies on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu, in addition to a whole series of essays on individual thinkers (most collected in her posthumous Political Thinkers and Political Thought (1998)). And part of Rawls and Shklar’s enduring importance will be because of the students they spread into the world, most of whom take very seriously indeed our intellectual inheritance. [4]
Shklar’s life was cut tragically short, and among the work she left unfinished was a bit of writing on the specifically American political intellectual tradition, which has been published as Redeeming American Political Thought (1998). As Dennis Thompson, one of her former students who writes the forward to the collection, reports, Shklar taught the subject many times, but resisted writing a book on it because, she once said, “the subject is too hard” (vii). Thompson cogently notes the irony of this from someone who’d mastered Hegel (let alone everything else she’d written on). But reading her efforts to wrangle American political theory into an explanatory pattern, one begins to not only understand why she thought so, but believe her. Thompson suggests that “the difficulty lay not in the theorists themselves but in the interpretations that commentators had laid upon them” (vii). However, Shklar was never much of a polemical writer, preferring the mode in which the coherence and power of one’s own vision sustained interest, rather than a self-conscious situating in the current conversational milieu. [5] Lack of polemic characterizes these essays as much as elsewhere, which leads me to think that the difficulty didn’t lie in scraping off (sometimes deeply embedded) traditions of commentary.
Implicit in her approach is an attempt to balance numerous conditions and factors in eliciting American political thought. Above all, it seems that what makes American political thought difficult is that its founders were also the founders of American political practice. And this is significantly different than our European traditions. Whatever the brilliance of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel, they didn’t create a constitution and run for president. The fact that Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton created American political praxis didn’t itself make American political thought unique, and in fact Shklar looked somewhat suspiciously, as Thompson points out, at theses about American exceptionalism. After all, other countries have now tried democracy in various forms and have obviously had their own creators of political praxis that have touched off conversations about its functioning. But the flipside to exceptionalism is parochialism, and that has been an accusation about American political theory and Shklar does find it annoying. (See the beginning of “The American Idea of Aristocracy.”) Between exceptionalism and parochialism are the complex relationships Shklar tried to chart between an abstract, theoretical conversation and the historical practices it was intimately bound up with. It was this binding that seemed much more in force than in Europe. Implicit, I think, in Shklar’s book is a thesis about American political thought being itself implicitly an assertion of pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic priority of theoria to praxis.
3. One of the unique features of the book is that it tells what is essentially the same story over and over, from different angles. For some this might be annoying, and if she’d gotten the chance to get this work to press, I’m certain Shklar would’ve eliminated the repetition. But angular overlap, done right, is a strength of the essay as a genre. In fact, it seems a stylistic parallel to James’s pragmatist idea, in “What Pragmatism Means,” that thoughts are instruments and beliefs habits. And the trick about instruments and habits is that you apply them over and over in new, technically unique situations. That’s how you know it is a good instrument or habit—for if it broke down, you’d get a new instrument or habit. Likewise for developmental stories—the more versatile the story, the better equipped it is to explain phenomena, the more likely it is that that story touches on something real and operative.
Shklar’s story moves through three basic stages: the Revolutionary Era that establishes the basic pattern of American political thought; the second generation of antebellum Jacksonian democrats that heroically failed to face the moral problem of slavery; and the post-war rise of the social sciences. The focus of most of the essays is on the first two stages, and hardly move out of the 19th century. The book is split into two, with the first on individual (or grouped) thinkers (like “Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science” or “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson”) and the second on specific topics (like “The Boundaries of Democracy” or “Democratic Customs”). The first section is more polished and overlaps less than the second because most of the second half of the book is the unpublished material. However, the second half contextualizes the first—it’s the larger story that the individual thinkers move in. For example, “An Education for America” begins, “Do we really know what sort of schooling is most likely to make students into good citizens? ... How does American democracy educate its citizens or help them to educate themselves?” (65) It wasn’t until the second section that I understood how the chapter was implicitly answering a Jeffersonian question that Shklar felt attuned to. For “Jefferson promoted a plan for what he called a ‘natural aristocracy’ through a system of education,” effectively “replacing politics with education” (“The American Idea of Aristocracy,” 150). The Jacksonians, despite using “aristocrat” as a term of political damnation, carried the mantle of Jefferson, because for them “education was looked at entirely as an aspect of citizenship” (“Democracy and the Past: Jefferson and His Heirs,” 183). Indeed, it is during the Jacksonian period that the moral point of view of democracy becomes explicit, if looked at and defended differently by our founding traditions of political thought. For when Shklar says in “Democratic Customs” that “voting and education are marks of dignity, not means to other ends,” she’s invoking a very unpragmatic rhetoric, and quite purposefully I take it. She says that for the Jacksonians, “it was ‘special’ privilege and ‘idle’ wealth, not their very existence, that aroused their sense of injustice. It was a struggle for recognition for them, the right to a dignified status as workers and citizens” (193). This polemically moral vision, she says in her presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “Redeeming American Political Theory,” expresses itself as “fairness [being] the very essence of their notion of justice” (99).
“Justice as fairness” is the (very famous) slogan that was the centerpiece of Rawls’s politico-moral philosophy. [6] Its appearance shows how Shklar viewed Rawls’ contribution to the larger frame she generates. But it unfolds legally in American political practice, which she takes to be distinctive. She notes that Tocqueville had already noticed that “all political problems in the United States become legal problems” and says, “since all our rights are inscribed in the Constitution, every citizen can and must claim his or her rights before the judiciary. American political culture is radically legalistic and focused on the courts” (112). If you take a class on human rights, they will find it important to distinguish between natural rights and political rights. Shklar’s point suggests that American political practice makes the notion of “natural rights” moot in working out justice in the American system. This strikes me as another important site for work to be done, for does it mean that we can just do away with the notion of natural human rights? Or does the presumed existence of natural rights motivate the debate about political rights? Can we chuck the metaphysics and just subsist on our “human rights culture,” which Rorty commended, or do we need the rhetoric of “natural” in some more robust form? [7] And is “justice as fairness” an inherently legalistic doctrine, or a moral conception of some kind? Since Rawls tried making a distinction between moral conceptions and the neutrality toward moral conceptions of his theory of justice, the last has seemed a pressing question in trying to understand liberal notions of tolerance. Shklar helps remind us what it means for these ideas to be embodied and acted upon, however we end up botanizing them.
4. Shklar says of John Adams that he sometimes took history to be “a source of mythology” (189). There is something of the mythological, I think, in all forms of tradition—the live workings of the past in the present made self-conscious. The primary reason intellectuals like Shklar dig so deeply into the past is to make us aware of the roots that are providing our nourishment—and so that we can then make an informed decision about whether it is really nutrients we are getting, or rather poison, thus precipitating a self-conscious choice in what traditions we continue to perpetuate.
One thing that commends Shklar’s political intellectual mythology over others is that it is a polytheistic pantheon, not a unified whitewashing of differences. One thing our cultured despisers of the American democratic experiment have too easily gotten off on is the exposing of the warts on the Founding Fathers. Politically and culturally motivated historians through the 19th century are indeed guilty of promoting halos in their pictures through overexposure, which tends to also blot out many defining details. Perhaps American political culture was still too overinfluenced by the divine right tradition of aristocracy, which didn’t like its blemishes noticed and punished those who did. (A culture influenced, I suspect, by the Christian traditions of impiety and blasphemy.) But can we not have heroes, then? Do all pictures of heroes suffer from a whitewashing that is, on this account, a necessary byproduct of the hero-making process? Shklar would think this nonsense. If we had a more Greek mode of tracing our traditions, then we needn’t worry about manipulating the past. [8]
Shklar very resourcefully turns Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton into an in-fighting clan of begetters who disseminated active elements in our current political makeup, both good and bad—or rather, ineffectual when pure and by themselves, but generative when together and conflicting. “Redeeming American Political Theory” might have been the prospectus for the book she didn’t have a chance to write, and it is there she pulls together three of these threads, saying Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton founded “three political sciences in America”: “Jefferson’s was speculative and physiological. Madison’s was institutional and historical, and Hamilton’s was empirical and behavioral. None were perfect, all were prophetic” (94).
5. Madison, who Shklar talks the least of in these essays, “devised a profound theory of political rationality.” Madison is probably best known for Federalist #10, which suggests that we shouldn’t fear the ability for change to quickly sweep a democratic system because factionalism will produce a tug-of-war grinding reform to a creeping minimum. As Shklar says, Madison had a “deeply functional view of democracy.” What attracts Shklar, however, is the bit that we rarely notice—how the experience of this political grind will affect the individual political agent. Madison thought that individual agents will “learn to appreciate the necessity of limiting their interests in response to the rights of other. ... The individual political agent learns to adapt and is forced to become more public-spirited as he accepts and follows the procedures that institutions compel him to follow” (96-7).
Hamilton responded to the “radical democratization of political theory” implied by the Revolution by seeing that “how to assess the behavior and attitudes of the anonymous many who compose the electorate was a wholly novel intellectual task.” What Hamilton set in motion was the assessment of the “tortuous and long road from the individual voter to the public policies of the federal government” (4). Hamilton was no particular fan of democracy—he was the Founder, you’ll recall, who wanted to import a king—and didn’t have a very high opinion of the voters, but he understood that “the modern state ... depended on information.” As Shklar says, “constitutional democracy is inherently a fact hungry political system, in which both those who govern and those who are governed yearn for solid information” (98).
6. If Madison’s political sociology of interest groups and Hamilton’s political science of electoral politics seem the most of interest to a tough-minded political science, Shklar’s tender-minded spirit is most interested in the star-crossed friendship between Jefferson and Adams. The speculative element in Jefferson is what makes him the most admired by Shklar of the four. Time and time again Shklar returns to Jefferson’s dream of “replacing politics with education,” an education that would produce what he calls a “natural aristocracy” (150). Preceding the Jacksonian fear of aristocracy was Adams’s belief that any inequality, separating the few from the many, would turn itself into an oppressive regime. Adams was Calvinistic in this way, being deeply pessimistic about the ability of humanity to side with virtue against corruption. Jefferson and Adams pair nicely with the twin founts of American Romanticism: Emerson and Hawthorne. Jefferson is optimistic in the same way that Emerson was that the American citizen was “capable of self-government” (150), i.e. autonomy, self-reliance. But Adams and Hawthorne were too oppressed by history and their own sense of the self-destructive psychology of the individual to share that optimism.
Thompson suggests that if Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson, then her head was with Adams. I can accept this formula, and it captures quite well how we need to balance these two aboriginal forces in the American spirit: hope and evil. If you hope with your head, that’s when you end up with theological nonsense like the eschatological, providential future-perfect “this will happen—everything will end up for the best.” Likewise, no amount of intellectual evidence can tell you when to or not to hope—you either find it in your heart or not. Conversely, if you believe in the ultimate depravity of humankind with your heart, as Calvinism instructs and as Adams’s great-grandson, Henry Adams, seemed to find himself, then hope may prove impossible, turning a healthy skepticism into a paralyzing nihilism. [9] But understanding, in an intellectual way, that evil indefatigably exists in the world is a mode of tempering one’s optimism about outlook, keeping one tethered to the ground. Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson because she believed ultimately in the autonomy that education promised, and that is why Emerson, Hawthorne, and so many other pieces of literature appear in this and other of her books. Shklar did not believe, with Jefferson, that a natural aristocracy would or should arise, but as indicated by the title of “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson,” she took very seriously the idea that the democratic citizen had much to learn from books specifically, and their authors’ intellectual struggle with the experience of democracy.
Endnotes
[1] Important caveat: only partly due to ignorance, that assessment excludes (generally) all Marxist thinkers. This is because in part thinkers working in the Marxist tradition have (largely) excluded themselves from the conversation surrounding what liberal democracies should do, including the philosophical conversations to which Shklar and others were a part of. Anyone who holds that the “system” is irrevocably corrupt or faulty, and that the only thing to do is get a new system (what Bernard Yack calls the “longing for total revolution”), will inevitably fall back on the activity of diagnosis divorced from proposed action—there's nothing left to do, at that point, but endlessly point out how irredeemable everything is going on around you. And since I believe that Marxism in these forms will fade away because of their inutility, that is another reason why I don't feel bad for my relative ignorance or think it will mar my prediction about Rawls and Shklar. Some thinkers, though, like Foucault and Frank Lentricchia, who fall under this category are nevertheless quite useful. Habermas is so concerned with the functioning of liberal democracies that he hardly counts as being in the Marxist tradition. And there is one branch of what could be thought of as post-Marxist thought—in America known as “communitarianism”—that in the main combines with hope for democracy (even if it would quibble with the qualifier “liberal”). Of these, I suspect Michael Walzer, an important interlocutor of Shklar's and long-time editor of the, roughly, communitarian and thus non-Marxist, leftist rag Dissent magazine, will have the most enduring value.
[2] J. B. Schneewind, in The Invention of Autonomy (1998), tells the most complete story I’ve seen of moral philosophy from the end of the Renaissance and Reformation to Kant. His principle beginning point for modern moral philosophy is Montaigne, but on the revival of virtue (which figured so importantly to, for example, Machiavelli) see Ch. 14, on the now-neglected figures of James Harrington and Shaftesbury. (On Harrington’s importance to British and American political thought, see J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975).)
[3] The importance of this feature of their work should be entertained in the context of Anglophone philosophy’s general neglect of history. I would ultimately (and unsurprisingly) blame this on Plato. For some relevant finger-pointing on this score, one might see “What Happened to Political Philosophy?” and maybe also “On Literature’s Accidents.”
[4] It’s possible I’m more partial to Shklar’s students because, unlike the Kantian Rawls, they are more interested in literature and things American. I think the two most notable of Rawls’ students are Christine Korsgaard, who though an unrequited Kantian, has done much to help the general thinking-through of the conceptual requirements of normative autonomy that Kant and Hegel initiated (see, e.g., The Sources of Normativity (1996)), and Susan Neiman, whose Evil in Modern Thought (2002) is an exceptional non-epistemology centered story of modern philosophy and whose Moral Clarity (2008) is an important, nonspecialist book on liberal American moral problems. Foremost among Shklar’s students for me (exempting the unbelievably useful, though not well-enough known, work of the already mentioned Bernard Yack) is George Kateb, whose work on Emerson has been widely recognized by Americanists.
[5] In a number of disciplines, this is beginning to be frowned on as unscholarly, though really it’s a matter of instrumental self-analysis. Richard Rorty described this mode as “strong misreading,” though “misreading” might be misleading in this context. In a precursor piece to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’s more famous use, Rorty describes his theft of Harold Bloom’s term this way: “The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (“Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 151). The key is the reversal of priority of the purposes for which the author wrote for instead the purposes of the reader. The scholar knows a lot about why an author wrote, but the only way to think with a figure from the past is to have purposes of your own. In Rorty’s more careful moments, he distinguishes this as a philosophical mode as opposed to a historical mode. (See his “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” in Truth and Progress.) The trouble with this mode, barring the scholar’s anxiety of it being bullshit, is that anyone can try and be a strong misreader and simply read a text as one wants—there’s just no assurance at an audience who will care for it. So, to compensate for a lack of self-trust (or for the accurate assessment of limitation), a writer might try and engage his compatriots’ views on the subject in the discipline. But such limitation shouldn’t lead us to resent the strength of others. It is, in the end, a gamble, for as Emerson said, “we hope it is more than whim at last” (“Self-Reliance”).
[6] The slogan first appears as the title of the 1958 paper that eventually was transformed into the first chapter of A Theory of Justice. It appears prominently in his major revision of his stance, Political Liberalism (1993), and its the title of the final slim book (2001) that was to serve as both restatement and primer (edited by Erin Kelly, as Rawls fell ill before he could make final revisions and expansions).
[7] See “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in TP. Rorty took the term from Eduardo Rabossi. Shklar wrote twice on this issue, in Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (1964) and American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991). One of her students, Rogers M. Smith, wrote a massive book on the latter’s issue of citizenship in Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions on Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). (Given the nature of writing big books, Smith had been already working on the project when Shklar began her set of lectures that became her book, and the two talked over their work often before her death.)
[8] See Rorty’s related use of “polytheism” in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” in PCP.
[9] There is a “book review” of The Education of Henry Adams Shklar wrote in the collection, but it is somewhat out of place with the rest. For Henry Adams, as Thompson says, “nearly defeat[s] her effort to find something of value in every thinker” (xiii). She was not a big fan of his alienation and irony directed toward the democratic experiment.
Showing posts with label Neiman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neiman. Show all posts
Friday, July 04, 2014
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Philosophy Books for Literature Students
It is a familiar fact that the term “literary criticism” has been stretched further and further in the course of our century. It originally meant comparison and evaluation of plays, poems, and novels – with perhaps an occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past criticism (for example, Dryden’s, Shelley’s, Arnold’s, and Eliot’s prose, as well as their verse). Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. …Whatever the specifics of Rorty’s picture of what a literary critic is today (I say this partly because Rorty was reflecting on this at the end of the ’80s), the historical picture he sketches in the first paragraph is roughly what happened and gets at the consequences we still deal with. Because of further reactions to the “Orwellian-Bloomian culture,” the present state of becoming professionalized in an English department has become even more complicated, as the addition of what we call “New Historicism” and “cultural studies” adds even more kinds of possible books to be familiar with (such as adding “history” to Rorty’s list, which is all I think New Historicism amounts to, their protests to the contrary). This creates a frenetically anxious environment for the would-be practitioner, just coming through the door wanting to learn what’s what. By the mid-’70s, Said was already describing the situation as “less background, less formal training, less prescribed and systematic information, is assumed before one begins to read, write, or work. Thus when one begins to write today one is necessarily more of an autodidact, gathering or making up the knowledge one needs in the course of creating. The influence of the past appears less useful and, as two recent critics, W. J. Bate and Harold Bloom, have argued, more likely to produce anxiety” (Said, Beginnings, 8).
Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism. But for accidental historical reasons, having to do with the way in which intellectuals got jobs in the universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties, the name has stuck. So instead of changing the term “literary criticism” to something like “culture criticism,” we have instead stretched the word “literature” to cover whatever the literary critics criticize. A literary critic in what T. J. Clarke has called the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of New York in the ’30s and ’40s was expected to have read the The Revolution Betrayed and The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as The Wasteland, Man’s Hope, and An American Tragedy. In the present Orwellian-Bloomian culture she is expected to have read The Gulag Archipelago, Philosophical Investigations, and The Order of Things as well as Lolita and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The word “literature” now covers just about every sort of book which might conceivably have moral relevance – might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important. The application of this term has nothing to do with presence of “literary qualities” in a book. Rather than detecting and expounding such qualities, the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased – or, where necessary, sharpened. (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 81-2)
That’s only kind of what Bate and Bloom meant, and perhaps Said’s somewhat sunny slant on being the autodidact is because he was already so well-learned. The past isn’t “more likely to produce anxiety,” it just does—and particularly when you have less background, less training, and no systematically arranged information to peruse. The situation of the young literature student starting out is similar to that of the amateur philosopher—both are autodidacts, with many avenues of thought that could be pursued, which presents both the freedom and the dilemma: I can only go one way at a time, so which shall it be? Given the limits of time and energy, you don’t want to waste your time. But, too, Rorty’s pragmatic sensibility reminds you that at some point, you’re going to want to get a job doing this, which means you’re going to need to fake knowing something. Every tenured professor has a youthful story about a book that everyone else around them seems to have read but that they didn’t learn about until later. The goal of every student looking into the future is to minimize the length of that list of books.
It is in this situation that I make the following short list. The American education system does not prepare a young student very well to pursue philosophy, and it does this by slighting a historical background in the major thinkers. As a matter of cultural conversation, it doesn’t help to know that they were mainly white men who are now dead—if everyone assumes you know something about them, then you’d better know something about them. Who this unidentified “everyone” is, however, has been shrinking, at least in the United States. The fact is that after the ’60s and ’70s, if you were a budding literary critic, it’s quite probable that you read some Continental philosophy, like Derrida or Foucault or Lacan, because that was hot in those days. The trouble for us now is that it isn’t so hot: which means you are much more likely an autodidact trying to pick it up by yourself.
What makes Continental philosophy difficult is that their frame of reference is often either the history of philosophy or really weird descriptions of “common experience” (think: Being and Nothingness or Being and Time). The latter can be very useful in an ad hoc way, but it’s difficult to feel like you’re getting in the middle of a conversation because Continental philosophers often don’t talk to each other, but rather to the major figures of the past. And if you don’t know how to negotiate through those old figures, you can get lost pretty quick. The only way to get through that problem is to learn something about the past. But, as Said pointed out, there are no how-to manuals lying around. And on top of that, the philosophers who speak your language are nattering on to almost exclusively each other about problems only they (so they say) find interesting—this is why no one knows anything about Anglo-American philosophy either.
The list below is to help with getting into the Anglo-American conversation, to find an entry point into their conversation (unless you already understand Derrida, in which case go to Samuel Wheeler’s Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy). There’s no particular reason why one would need to, but the anglophone philosophical conversation does have some distinctive things it does better and there is the added bonus of knowing something no one else knows (distinguishability is a valuable intellectual-market commodity). In addition, if you want to know more about the Big Dead Guys, you can’t read just any English-speaker’s introductory version, because they often won’t tell you anything relevant to the way the Continental philosophers are talking about them. (Exemplary exception: Robert Solomon’s Continental Philosophy Since 1750. And also, though a Frenchman, Vincent Descombes’s Modern French Philosophy is a brilliant discussion of the Continental mid-century ferment.) And that’s just what a growing intellectual needs: coin to make your way between disciplines, not burrowing into one extra discipline that might never come in handy. Said’s literary critic as quasi-autodidact is very much right insofar as the problems that a student will become immersed in and seek to solve might take them in any number of directions, and the trick is to be able to very quickly sink into a pile of research without getting lost and going the wrong direction (the problem of the red herring).
What makes the list below what it is is that 1) each philosopher was important at some point to the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, 2) the books in some way recapitulate facets of those conversations, 3) they are also about much bigger fish than those narrow conversations, 4) they are very well-schooled in the history of philosophy and the books enter into that larger sequence, and 5) they all have an eye towards an even larger intellectual conversation that, for example, includes literature. Because of those 5 things, the list below is designed to not waste a literature student’s time.
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre—One of the most important books of moral philosophy in the last 50 years, this was MacIntyre’s first extended attempt to link together work in epistemology, philosophy of action, and the fate of our moral and political cultures. And while disagreement with some of its central claims is almost necessary for anyone who doesn’t think God is a necessary presupposition, it is a fascinating tour de force that takes you through the Greeks and the Enlightenment on the composition of communities. In order to get past the notion that Lyotardian postmodernism means the death of continuity and the birth of free-wheeling relativism, one needs a working notion of tradition and practices. MacIntyre offers an excellent version here, while at the same time arguing (as Marxists will love) that liberalism is still undermining their composition. One interesting facet of the book is his treatment of Jane Austen as a moral philosopher.
Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor—Taylor’s book might be an even larger story with a similar perspective as MacIntyre’s, though their titles effectively give you each of their focuses. Taylor’s story is especially important given the kind of sophistication literature students are to show in handling a “character” as a locus of selfhood—for if a character has a self, it might be useful to know how our notions of what a self is have evolved (and thus plunk an author in their own historical milieu). This was a major entry into the debates about “modernity” (even if I think that word is overused), just as Taylor’s recent A Secular Age is a major entry into the somehow still-ongoing debates about secularization. Taylor and MacIntyre were two major thinkers identified as “communitarians”—the position you get when you want to throw away the worst of Marx and keep the best of Hegel. Hegel’s “beautiful soul” is (with good reason) hot right now, and that description of the Romantic self perfectly complements Taylor’s story, which engages heavily with literary traditions, particularly poetry.
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by Bernard Williams—this book is largely supposed to be about ethics and political philosophy, but it is something like a comprehensive system inasmuch as Williams situates it within a set of relationships with philosophical neighbors like the philosophy of science and of language. The chapters on their interrelations are some of the best of its kind. Williams also has a historical depth of understanding that is nearly matchless, and his unique ability is to distill the past into its heritage for us today without harming it. Transforming the past into a set of problems to be negotiated is an excellent way to make the actual reading of Plato’s Republic or Kant’s Critiques not just a haze of bare understanding of what’s going on.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty—while MacIntyre’s book distills his earlier work on the philosophy of the social sciences and of action and Williams his work on science and language, they don’t go into extraordinary detail on those conversations. Rorty’s book is, by itself, the most comprehensive recapitulation of the minute details of the “core subjects” of the first 100 years of analytic philosophy available (roughly, 1880 to 1980—Frege to Davidson). It is beautifully Hegelian in its ability to tell a progressive story about how one philosophical position was transumed by the next up to this present (late ’70s) moment. Even if disagreeable in its conclusions, its ability to lay bare the reasons for one position against another is the ideal starting point to understanding what philosophers of language and of mind are going on about. It also situates these smaller conversations into a larger story stretching back to the Greeks and makes inroads to connecting the anglophone conversation with the Continental one.
Must We Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell—if it was difficult to choose one book from the array of useful and powerful books from each of the previous authors’ storehouse (it being very difficult not to choose Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), it was particularly difficult to choose which Cavell book to single out. However, given my commitment to the utility of the book to introduce an autodidact into the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, I chose this book on the basis of each essay’s sterling compactness on an array of relevant issues. The Claim of Reason was difficult not to choose, but Cavell’s discussions of Austin, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics and his general performance in the vein of “ordinary language philosophy” (while offering penetrating insight into what the hell that is) are perfect introductions to their subjects and the occasional weirdness of his later work.
Those are my five suggestions, five being a nice round number, though now I will indulge in four more that more or less fail in the “introduction to anglophone conversation” criterion. These are just brilliant.
The Art of Living by Alexander Nehamas—Nehamas is the most eminent philosophical scholar (a philosopher, not a classicist) of Socrates and Plato living today. This book is, actually, an excellent introduction into a host of scholarly problems about reading Plato, with dense endnotes. Its brilliance, however, is in its humane rendering of what the “philosophical life” is, beginning with the impact of Socrates as a figure in the mind of the philosopher. What follows are amazing discussions of silence, discussion, arête, knowledge, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Foucault and, above all, irony. If you work anywhere in the vicinity of the trope of irony, you cannot afford to pass up this book.
The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch—this book is worth getting just for its first essay. Murdoch was a novelist in addition to a philosopher, and she was also a Platonist. Every single person on my list is, in an important (and delimited) sense, an anti-Platonist. So what gives? To my mind, Murdoch offers one of the best, distilled accounts of the problem of the modern notion of the self taken for granted by early liberal theory. In my favorite phrase of hers, it is “a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.” And while Brandom’s Kant, Cavell’s Wittgenstein, and Lear’s Freud should all be friends of ours, Murdoch points out a pressing problem at that stage of the conversation, and in its face presents an excellent discussion of the pressure of context in ethical decision-making. She puts it in Platonic terms of sight, of “contexts of attention,” but its ancestor, I should say, is rather E. M. Forster. For literary critics who want a good illustration of what a “literary point of view” might be as giving a distinct angle on a philosophical topic, there is nothing better than this very short book.
Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar—if much good moral philosophy these days is “virtue-centered” in its approach (in contradistinction to a Kantian-style search for principles), then Shklar offers an extraordinary meditation on its darker flipside (much as she does for liberal discussion of justice in The Faces of Injustice). Shklar moves easily back and forth between contemporary practical problems (international, domestic, personal), theoretical problems, history both social and intellectual, and sources of our moral thinking as diverse Machiavelli, Montaigne, Christianity, James Madison, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Hawthorne.
Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman—if Rorty offers a narrative of what he even puts in scare quotes as the “core subjects” of anglophone philosophy, then Susan Neiman offers a tremendous narrative of the history of modern moral philosophy, which she argues was actually at the core (at least at its early stage in the 18th century). Ranging from close readings of Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Bayle, Voltaire, Freud, and a really interesting one on the Marquis de Sade, Neiman’s story centers on the importance, in particular, of two world-historical events that have shaped in sometimes subtle ways thinking about evil: the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 and the holocaust at Auschwitz. Her understanding of how our thinking about moral responsibility and the sources of evil have changed and might yet still change (with a short, speculative section on September 11) is penetrating and well-worth thinking about.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Rorty's Myopia
I've read numbers of reviews of Rorty's work over the years and I've never been very satisfied by them. Maybe that shouldn't be very surprising. One of the things that is given often is the accusation that Rorty's a little myopic. This happens most often in reference to Rorty's take on the history of philosophy and on political philosophy. For a long time I've thought that comment to be unfair: Rorty delineates what he's going to talk about, and the range of material he feel's comfortable in being authoritative over, so it seems unfair to demand that every person do everything--doesn't it?
The first type, philosophers who think that philosophy-as-epistemology is too narrow a view of philosophy, is given good voice by Susan Neiman. But there are many others. The trouble with this critique is that is true but unavoidable. Philosophy is the kind of thing that you have to delimit the area you are working in. All things are like that, but philosophy is so amorphous that in no other subject can so many things fit under its mantle comfortably and not connect up to each other. For this very reason Rorty has been shunning the idea that he's an "end of philosophy" philosopher. He intimates such things every so often, but the reason latent in his writings (sometimes quite explicitly) is that he's talking about philosophy that looks to epistemology first. That is the kind of philosophy he's deconstructing. So philosophers who take other kinds of philosophy as primary, and criticize Rorty for missing them, are cutting him at cross-purposes. It's why we see on the backs of the best of these books (like Neiman and Toulmin's) Rorty's praise.
The second type, philosophers and others who that Rorty's political philosophy is too narrow or shallow, is given good voice by people like Richard Bernstein. Like the first, I think it's true, but it again cuts Rorty at cross-purposes. Rorty's political philosophy is very general and rarified and I don't think it cuts us off from anything more we would like to see done in political and social criticism, so-called criticisms of Rorty (and pragmatism) being not radical enough or in favor of the status quo.
In thinking about these kinds of critiques and how I view them is when I realized that thinking that Rorty is mypoic is the exact response he is looking for. When we look at the way Rorty is suggesting that we change the conversation, the response that Rorty isn't talking about the things he should be by his own lights tips us off to the idea that--if that's the only response you have--his work has done its magic. Rorty wants us to shift our attention to the construction of different narratives of philosophy, narratives he doesn't always offer us. Rorty wants us to concentrate on the more concrete in political and moral philosophy. Rorty's myopia is only a bad thing if one also thinks that a philosopher, or any other person, must do everything. Rorty has suggested that what he does is more like what Locke conceived of philosophy, as an underlaborer clearing away conceptual debris. After the debris is cleared, one is opened to the construction of better responses to problems, problems that will be different than the ones engendered by the epistemological debris.
If one is bored by Rorty or thinks he doesn't go far enough, that is not a bad response to have. It means that whatever in Rorty or pragmatism that one might have learned has already been internalized. Rorty wants to induce boredom in the problems he deconstructs so people will move on to other things. Rorty's simple dichotomies are there to be rejected because a good rejection of them will mean that one has evacuated the area in which Rorty was occupying, at which point there's nothing to criticize Rorty for because you've done what Rorty wanted. The only point of criticism is to say that Rorty should move on, too. That Rorty's effectively worked himself out of job, so why doesn't he get a new job? But that might only prove strong if there weren't still people who ended up on the wrong side of Rorty's simple dichotomies, the same people the person bored by Rorty would still need to fight. It's like Rorty's got the backs of all those wanting to do something other than epistemological philosophy, defending their right to do it, and in fact commending them for it.
The first type, philosophers who think that philosophy-as-epistemology is too narrow a view of philosophy, is given good voice by Susan Neiman. But there are many others. The trouble with this critique is that is true but unavoidable. Philosophy is the kind of thing that you have to delimit the area you are working in. All things are like that, but philosophy is so amorphous that in no other subject can so many things fit under its mantle comfortably and not connect up to each other. For this very reason Rorty has been shunning the idea that he's an "end of philosophy" philosopher. He intimates such things every so often, but the reason latent in his writings (sometimes quite explicitly) is that he's talking about philosophy that looks to epistemology first. That is the kind of philosophy he's deconstructing. So philosophers who take other kinds of philosophy as primary, and criticize Rorty for missing them, are cutting him at cross-purposes. It's why we see on the backs of the best of these books (like Neiman and Toulmin's) Rorty's praise.
The second type, philosophers and others who that Rorty's political philosophy is too narrow or shallow, is given good voice by people like Richard Bernstein. Like the first, I think it's true, but it again cuts Rorty at cross-purposes. Rorty's political philosophy is very general and rarified and I don't think it cuts us off from anything more we would like to see done in political and social criticism, so-called criticisms of Rorty (and pragmatism) being not radical enough or in favor of the status quo.
In thinking about these kinds of critiques and how I view them is when I realized that thinking that Rorty is mypoic is the exact response he is looking for. When we look at the way Rorty is suggesting that we change the conversation, the response that Rorty isn't talking about the things he should be by his own lights tips us off to the idea that--if that's the only response you have--his work has done its magic. Rorty wants us to shift our attention to the construction of different narratives of philosophy, narratives he doesn't always offer us. Rorty wants us to concentrate on the more concrete in political and moral philosophy. Rorty's myopia is only a bad thing if one also thinks that a philosopher, or any other person, must do everything. Rorty has suggested that what he does is more like what Locke conceived of philosophy, as an underlaborer clearing away conceptual debris. After the debris is cleared, one is opened to the construction of better responses to problems, problems that will be different than the ones engendered by the epistemological debris.
If one is bored by Rorty or thinks he doesn't go far enough, that is not a bad response to have. It means that whatever in Rorty or pragmatism that one might have learned has already been internalized. Rorty wants to induce boredom in the problems he deconstructs so people will move on to other things. Rorty's simple dichotomies are there to be rejected because a good rejection of them will mean that one has evacuated the area in which Rorty was occupying, at which point there's nothing to criticize Rorty for because you've done what Rorty wanted. The only point of criticism is to say that Rorty should move on, too. That Rorty's effectively worked himself out of job, so why doesn't he get a new job? But that might only prove strong if there weren't still people who ended up on the wrong side of Rorty's simple dichotomies, the same people the person bored by Rorty would still need to fight. It's like Rorty's got the backs of all those wanting to do something other than epistemological philosophy, defending their right to do it, and in fact commending them for it.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Voice, Mind, Heart, Spirit
I first became aware of Arthur Danto while going through Nietzsche studies. His 1965 Nietzsche as Philosopher, despite Walter Kaufmann’s earlier efforts, did the most to make anglophone philosophers aware of Nietzsche as a serious philosopher, or rather, a philosopher to pay attention to. Danto was an able and up and coming analytic philosopher at the time and related Nietzsche to English-speakers by taking him to have philosophical theses that they recognized. I since found out that Danto was an aesthetician and art critic, though I also found a little book of his called Mysticism and Morality which covers Eastern philosophy for Westerners. Obviously a well-rounded guy. The other day I picked up a recent book of his used, The Body/Body Problem, which is a collection of essays. I was particularly excited to read it because its last essay was called “In Their Own Voice: Philosophical Writing and Actual Experience”. This is an area I am particularly interested in.
The essay itself is fairly tricky. Firstly, I should apologize to every teacher, friend, TA, or critic who has yelped at me for being easily distracted and side-tracked—to which I normally respond, “Oh, quiet! It’s part of the larger plan, man! Off my case!” I now know what they mean. Danto moves over several topics in the course of the essay and it’s not entirely clear that they all involve one another. They all do relate to each other, but Danto’s movements are so quick that you don’t realize until later that while he’s talking about blind submission now, he used to be talking about Cavell. So I apologize for snapping at anyone over my penchant for following my mind wherever it goes.
Danto begins his essay with some interesting talk about the difference between philosophers who have to submit papers to editors and philosophers who are requested to give papers. He says that Donald Davidson once told him that he’s never had to submit a paper to editorial review, and comments, “Instead, those parts of his papers which an editor might peremptorily have written ‘Clarify!!!’ next to in the margin have given rise to mighty rivers of commentary and analysis, and doubtless have seen more than one critic through to tenure as a specialist in the philosophy of Donald Davidson.” (228) Danto continues his musing on this topic by noting that, possibly since most of these star philosophers write papers to be read before audiences, they are filled with devices designed to hold an audience’s attention. These interesting insights continue until Danto reaches Wittgenstein (and Heidegger and Dewey), reckoning that the strongest philosophers have the strongest styles, styles others wouldn’t dare try to imitate, at which point he asks, “Does that mean that philosophy and philosopher are inseparable? Or that there is a deep connection between philosophy and voice?” (229)
I tend to want to answer in the affirmative. Ever since Rorty tossed off the locution “philosophy as a kind of writing” while further implanting the latent notion (that only Toulmin pulled out explicitly) of “philosophy as a kind of autobiography,” I’ve been excited and energized by the idea. I take such a slogan to infuse many of the other philosophical positions pragmatists take. However, from those same readings, I know it's not entirely true. Or rather, Danto’s questions cannot be answered entirely in the affirmative. Pragmatists are suspicious of anything deep, especially anything related to that amorphous subject “philosophy.” You can’t help but define philosophy by the very activity of doing it, but every definition eventually bites you in the ass. But if there is something deep about philosophy, it would be the connection between philosopher and philosophy, philosophy and voice, but still—how deep is that?
By moving to Wittgenstein, Danto proceeds very slowly to answer those questions negatively. The rest of the essay is basically a long, drawn out and unfinished, slowly spoken “Nooooooooowell, maybe.” He moves by first telling us in a parenthetical, after writing “Wittgensteinian ‘truths’”, that “I am employing quotation marks because I want to leave the reader a bit edgy with the idea that there are such things as Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian truths rather than truths which happen to have been uttered by Heidegger or Wittgenstein”. This indeed leaves me a bit edgy. This raises the specter of truth distinguished from rhetoric, the Platonic distinctions that Rorty and Pirsig tell us got us into all of this footnote trouble in the first place. Rortyans would prefer to say that, maybe there aren’t Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian truths, but there are truths we began to speak only after we began to speak Wittgensteinese or Heideggerese.
But still, Danto isn’t entirely off point here. There is a difference between the style a truth (or point) is made in and the truth (or point) that is made. This has to do with translatability, in the ability of a particular point to be made in different styles or vocabularies. We see Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dewey all making the same points when we translate them all into a vocabulary that houses them all, which is what Rorty specializes in. However, not all truths or points can be made in every vocabulary, which is probably the point at which we can call them false. And Danto’s style of making this point, the language or vocabulary, probably makes me suspicious because of his penchant for making the distinction too coarsely between truth and rhetoric. Danto does this, I think, because he takes much more seriously the notion of “representation” than do pragmatists. Danto is at odds with pragmatists over this issue, but Danto, despite being an unrequited user of it in the face of antirepresentationalists like Rorty, seems to use it an ameliorated sense that raises less problems for pragmatists.
The next section of Danto’s paper sees him bridge from Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell on Wittgenstein, providing a tremendously illuminating commentary on Cavell and his style of writing. He eventually makes the point that Cavell mirrors Wittgenstein in that his writing style embodies the philosophy put forward. The style of the Philosophical Investigations embodies Wittgenstein’s suggested attitude towards philosophy (one of therapy) and Cavell’s writings, particularly A Pitch of Philosophy, embodies Cavell’s suggested attitudes towards philosophy (one of dialogic conversation). “…what is the connection, if any, between the what and the how of saying? The philosopher may be the writing, which means that to discipline the writing is to regiment the philosopher. But is there any internal connection between the writing and the thought? Can, that is, any thought be expressed in any voice, even if not all styles will embody or exemplify it?” (238) I have already answered this last question in the negative. Not all thoughts can be expressed in any voice, that is, not all things can be said in every vocabulary. To answer the question positively, as Danto intimates he would, would be to fall for Plato’s fantasy of universal truths that underlie all ephemeral ways of speaking. Rorty’s point in creating what his student Robert Brandom has called the “vocabulary vocabulary” was to dissuade us of such a notion.
But Danto continues by quickly bridging to the topic of blind submission. His comments here, again, are very illuminating. I won’t cover them (except to say that Danto half-imagines a case of blind submission in which a star philosopher writes in defending his own philosophy and a lesser philosopher writes in defending the star’s philosophy, and both of them are equally cogent to the point of flipping a coin over which one to blindly choose for publication—a situation, I have to confess, I daydreamed myself being in with Rorty) and instead skip to the end. One could imagine from what has come before that Danto will land in favor of blind submission—what, afterall, could matter if truth is divorced from rhetoric?—but Danto actually lands a bit on the other side. “The reason voice is relevant to philosophical writing is that philosophical writings by a single person form complex systems and constellations of ideas—they have pasts and futures as well as presents—and the reasons we are interested in voice are those which explain our interest in philosophical creativity. Creative philosophers do not do philosophy by producing atoms of bottom-line ‘good’ philosophy. What they write carries what they have written and what they hope to write as the aura of a total vision.” (242-3)
I have my suspicions about “total vision,” but I see what Danto is talking about. And he’s quite right. “This means that suppression of our facticities results in a distorted representation of the world, the world according to Nobody. And this makes bottom-line philosophy abstract and distorted and surrealistic.” (244) We see Danto’s latent realism rising up again, but his conclusions are resonant: “Philosophy in its professional practice has loosened itself more and more from the world as we really experience it anyway, in our embodied and historical natures, in its drive to secure something disembodied and timeless. And I think a dreadful price, the price of irrelevance, is paid for this: nobody reads philosophy but philosophers. … Let blind review continue, but blind philosophy might to everyone’s profit stop being written. Philosophers should be encouraged to speak in their own voice about the world that means something to them. The freer the voice, the better the philosophy. For now, that is the only connection I see.” (244-5)
That’s not the only connection I see and that’s probably because of Danto’s seeming realism, but I don’t know. I can’t quite put my finger on Danto (least of all through his roaming essay), but I feel like his heart is in the right place—if that is to be discerned from the last pages of a piece. But if that were true, I would have to accept “Good is a noun” and there’s no way I’m swallowing that. But perhaps there’s a difference between a person’s heart and their spirit and perhaps Pirsig’s spirit lies elsewhere from his heart. Mind, heart, spirit: the written lines, the written conclusion, and everything else in between—the lines or otherwise.
This lands us in the lap of translation, or interpretation (which is how Davidson translates that Quineanism), which is where I left us with voice. “Voice” is a metaphor that pragmatists can get along with. Ever since Gadamer and Sellars, Dewey and Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Nietzsche, it’s been harder and harder for philosophers to just assume that we can break away from language, harder for them to use bodily metaphors, and harder for them to use theological metaphors. If Dennett is to be believed, the “mind” isn’t all we thought it was. If Susan Neiman, then the “heart” must include more than good intentions. If Bloom, the “spirit” just is what we make of it. However, I think all three combine to make up the “voice” of a philosopher. This is all like Davidson’s triangulation of world-person-community, which, translated into textual interpretation, plays out into text-writer-reader. Understanding a language takes Davidson’s triangle and understanding a philosopher takes it, too. Interpretation is the collusion of the three parts, and no part can be understood separately.
A philosopher’s voice includes her mind, her heart, and her spirit. It includes how she’s getting to a place, where she’s going, and where she will end up being—the now, the little bit later, and the far into the future. Not all minds are cogent, not all hearts good, not all spirits living—not all arguments sound, conclusions useful, or philosophies engaging. But the philosopher, the voice, includes all of these. Not all of Pirsig’s arguments are successful, not all of Pirsig’s conclusions are acceptable, and not all of his philosophy is interesting. But Pirsig’s voice is powerful and inimitable, capturing our attention still. And though Pirsig’s voice may cease to echo someday, that voice will still be a sharp, loud thunderclap for those who discover him, if one delivered in a room with bad acoustics.
The essay itself is fairly tricky. Firstly, I should apologize to every teacher, friend, TA, or critic who has yelped at me for being easily distracted and side-tracked—to which I normally respond, “Oh, quiet! It’s part of the larger plan, man! Off my case!” I now know what they mean. Danto moves over several topics in the course of the essay and it’s not entirely clear that they all involve one another. They all do relate to each other, but Danto’s movements are so quick that you don’t realize until later that while he’s talking about blind submission now, he used to be talking about Cavell. So I apologize for snapping at anyone over my penchant for following my mind wherever it goes.
Danto begins his essay with some interesting talk about the difference between philosophers who have to submit papers to editors and philosophers who are requested to give papers. He says that Donald Davidson once told him that he’s never had to submit a paper to editorial review, and comments, “Instead, those parts of his papers which an editor might peremptorily have written ‘Clarify!!!’ next to in the margin have given rise to mighty rivers of commentary and analysis, and doubtless have seen more than one critic through to tenure as a specialist in the philosophy of Donald Davidson.” (228) Danto continues his musing on this topic by noting that, possibly since most of these star philosophers write papers to be read before audiences, they are filled with devices designed to hold an audience’s attention. These interesting insights continue until Danto reaches Wittgenstein (and Heidegger and Dewey), reckoning that the strongest philosophers have the strongest styles, styles others wouldn’t dare try to imitate, at which point he asks, “Does that mean that philosophy and philosopher are inseparable? Or that there is a deep connection between philosophy and voice?” (229)
I tend to want to answer in the affirmative. Ever since Rorty tossed off the locution “philosophy as a kind of writing” while further implanting the latent notion (that only Toulmin pulled out explicitly) of “philosophy as a kind of autobiography,” I’ve been excited and energized by the idea. I take such a slogan to infuse many of the other philosophical positions pragmatists take. However, from those same readings, I know it's not entirely true. Or rather, Danto’s questions cannot be answered entirely in the affirmative. Pragmatists are suspicious of anything deep, especially anything related to that amorphous subject “philosophy.” You can’t help but define philosophy by the very activity of doing it, but every definition eventually bites you in the ass. But if there is something deep about philosophy, it would be the connection between philosopher and philosophy, philosophy and voice, but still—how deep is that?
By moving to Wittgenstein, Danto proceeds very slowly to answer those questions negatively. The rest of the essay is basically a long, drawn out and unfinished, slowly spoken “Nooooooooowell, maybe.” He moves by first telling us in a parenthetical, after writing “Wittgensteinian ‘truths’”, that “I am employing quotation marks because I want to leave the reader a bit edgy with the idea that there are such things as Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian truths rather than truths which happen to have been uttered by Heidegger or Wittgenstein”. This indeed leaves me a bit edgy. This raises the specter of truth distinguished from rhetoric, the Platonic distinctions that Rorty and Pirsig tell us got us into all of this footnote trouble in the first place. Rortyans would prefer to say that, maybe there aren’t Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian truths, but there are truths we began to speak only after we began to speak Wittgensteinese or Heideggerese.
But still, Danto isn’t entirely off point here. There is a difference between the style a truth (or point) is made in and the truth (or point) that is made. This has to do with translatability, in the ability of a particular point to be made in different styles or vocabularies. We see Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dewey all making the same points when we translate them all into a vocabulary that houses them all, which is what Rorty specializes in. However, not all truths or points can be made in every vocabulary, which is probably the point at which we can call them false. And Danto’s style of making this point, the language or vocabulary, probably makes me suspicious because of his penchant for making the distinction too coarsely between truth and rhetoric. Danto does this, I think, because he takes much more seriously the notion of “representation” than do pragmatists. Danto is at odds with pragmatists over this issue, but Danto, despite being an unrequited user of it in the face of antirepresentationalists like Rorty, seems to use it an ameliorated sense that raises less problems for pragmatists.
The next section of Danto’s paper sees him bridge from Wittgenstein to Stanley Cavell on Wittgenstein, providing a tremendously illuminating commentary on Cavell and his style of writing. He eventually makes the point that Cavell mirrors Wittgenstein in that his writing style embodies the philosophy put forward. The style of the Philosophical Investigations embodies Wittgenstein’s suggested attitude towards philosophy (one of therapy) and Cavell’s writings, particularly A Pitch of Philosophy, embodies Cavell’s suggested attitudes towards philosophy (one of dialogic conversation). “…what is the connection, if any, between the what and the how of saying? The philosopher may be the writing, which means that to discipline the writing is to regiment the philosopher. But is there any internal connection between the writing and the thought? Can, that is, any thought be expressed in any voice, even if not all styles will embody or exemplify it?” (238) I have already answered this last question in the negative. Not all thoughts can be expressed in any voice, that is, not all things can be said in every vocabulary. To answer the question positively, as Danto intimates he would, would be to fall for Plato’s fantasy of universal truths that underlie all ephemeral ways of speaking. Rorty’s point in creating what his student Robert Brandom has called the “vocabulary vocabulary” was to dissuade us of such a notion.
But Danto continues by quickly bridging to the topic of blind submission. His comments here, again, are very illuminating. I won’t cover them (except to say that Danto half-imagines a case of blind submission in which a star philosopher writes in defending his own philosophy and a lesser philosopher writes in defending the star’s philosophy, and both of them are equally cogent to the point of flipping a coin over which one to blindly choose for publication—a situation, I have to confess, I daydreamed myself being in with Rorty) and instead skip to the end. One could imagine from what has come before that Danto will land in favor of blind submission—what, afterall, could matter if truth is divorced from rhetoric?—but Danto actually lands a bit on the other side. “The reason voice is relevant to philosophical writing is that philosophical writings by a single person form complex systems and constellations of ideas—they have pasts and futures as well as presents—and the reasons we are interested in voice are those which explain our interest in philosophical creativity. Creative philosophers do not do philosophy by producing atoms of bottom-line ‘good’ philosophy. What they write carries what they have written and what they hope to write as the aura of a total vision.” (242-3)
I have my suspicions about “total vision,” but I see what Danto is talking about. And he’s quite right. “This means that suppression of our facticities results in a distorted representation of the world, the world according to Nobody. And this makes bottom-line philosophy abstract and distorted and surrealistic.” (244) We see Danto’s latent realism rising up again, but his conclusions are resonant: “Philosophy in its professional practice has loosened itself more and more from the world as we really experience it anyway, in our embodied and historical natures, in its drive to secure something disembodied and timeless. And I think a dreadful price, the price of irrelevance, is paid for this: nobody reads philosophy but philosophers. … Let blind review continue, but blind philosophy might to everyone’s profit stop being written. Philosophers should be encouraged to speak in their own voice about the world that means something to them. The freer the voice, the better the philosophy. For now, that is the only connection I see.” (244-5)
That’s not the only connection I see and that’s probably because of Danto’s seeming realism, but I don’t know. I can’t quite put my finger on Danto (least of all through his roaming essay), but I feel like his heart is in the right place—if that is to be discerned from the last pages of a piece. But if that were true, I would have to accept “Good is a noun” and there’s no way I’m swallowing that. But perhaps there’s a difference between a person’s heart and their spirit and perhaps Pirsig’s spirit lies elsewhere from his heart. Mind, heart, spirit: the written lines, the written conclusion, and everything else in between—the lines or otherwise.
This lands us in the lap of translation, or interpretation (which is how Davidson translates that Quineanism), which is where I left us with voice. “Voice” is a metaphor that pragmatists can get along with. Ever since Gadamer and Sellars, Dewey and Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Nietzsche, it’s been harder and harder for philosophers to just assume that we can break away from language, harder for them to use bodily metaphors, and harder for them to use theological metaphors. If Dennett is to be believed, the “mind” isn’t all we thought it was. If Susan Neiman, then the “heart” must include more than good intentions. If Bloom, the “spirit” just is what we make of it. However, I think all three combine to make up the “voice” of a philosopher. This is all like Davidson’s triangulation of world-person-community, which, translated into textual interpretation, plays out into text-writer-reader. Understanding a language takes Davidson’s triangle and understanding a philosopher takes it, too. Interpretation is the collusion of the three parts, and no part can be understood separately.
A philosopher’s voice includes her mind, her heart, and her spirit. It includes how she’s getting to a place, where she’s going, and where she will end up being—the now, the little bit later, and the far into the future. Not all minds are cogent, not all hearts good, not all spirits living—not all arguments sound, conclusions useful, or philosophies engaging. But the philosopher, the voice, includes all of these. Not all of Pirsig’s arguments are successful, not all of Pirsig’s conclusions are acceptable, and not all of his philosophy is interesting. But Pirsig’s voice is powerful and inimitable, capturing our attention still. And though Pirsig’s voice may cease to echo someday, that voice will still be a sharp, loud thunderclap for those who discover him, if one delivered in a room with bad acoustics.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Genres of Writing
One of the things that influenced me the most by Rorty were his redescriptions of philosophy as a kind of writing, particularly in "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing" (in Consequences of Pragmatism), which is a precursor to what he wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. This became terribly important for me in opening up the gates of what kind of writing we call what. It makes things much more fluid. Once we get rid of natural kinds, essences given to us by reality itself, the placement of various kinds of writing is determined by tradition, by what other texts they hook up to, not by what kinds of reality they hook up to. This kind of switch is made easier by looking at poetry than physics. For when we look at physics, it would seem obvious that they're talking about something in reality, say, rocks, whereas it is much more difficult to get a handle on what in reality poetry is hooking up to.
There is, of course, a very commonsense way in which biology and physics are talking about things that aren't just texts. But Kuhn helped us realize that understanding the movement of disciplines like physics through history is nearly impossible without actually looking at the interplay of different physical theories, different texts of physics. And then there are all the ways in which Quine, Sellars, and Davidson have helped us see that we cannot just pull off a description from an object, that such-and-such object is partly constituted by its descriptions, i.e. texts.
The recourse to traditions of writing also makes us wary about defining the distinctions between different traditions or genres of writing too squarely. By seeing texts as relationally defined between themselves, we may begin to see new ways of relationally defining them. For instance, Rorty's way of defining philosophy as "talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell . . . and that lot." (CP, 92) Rorty's little list is written in a way to invite us to put in all the great philosophers, all the great intellectuals we traditionally call philosophers. Rorty, however, suggests that such a definition is almost entirely useless to put to use. To get a tradition to mean something a little more, you need to be a little more selective in who you include in the list. (As an exercise, try and get Augustine and Frege to comment on each other.) Not everybody is doing to same thing, commenting on the same line of texts. What's more, sometimes people are doing more than one thing at a time, and so the shape of, say, Kant's texts will change depending on who you place them in relation to. But who you place them in relation to will depend a lot on what you want to do.
Take the example of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought. Rorty's book delineates a tradition of texts that we might call "epistemology". They are a series of texts that are defined by recourse to a certain problematic and to certain kinds of metaphors, specifically ocular and architectural ones. What Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Russell, Carnap, Ryle, Quine, and Fodor all have in common are a running commentary on the ones before them. And because this sequence looks the way it does, so does the commentary that ends up with Fodor look the way it does. It means that things in Plato and Aristotle that don't hook up with Quine and Fodor are overlooked, not because they are unimportant, but only because they are currently besides the point, they are part of genres outside the one currently being discussed and taken part of.
Rorty's purpose in drawing up that lineage was to cast doubt on the way in which current (early 20th century) Anglophone philosophy was being performed. The three dominant fields of philosophy were philosophy of mind, language, and science. Rorty saw that it wouldn't be enough to simply say that these three subjects were just wrong-headed, or pointless, or boring. He had tell a large story about why these subjects, and not others, arose and took their place at the center of what it meant to be a modern philosopher.
Neiman subtitles her book "An Alternative History of Philosophy". That is very important in seeing what Neiman is up to. She is offering an alternative canon of philosophers in delimiting her subject matter, in seeing what modern philosophy is up to. Instead of Rorty's "Plato to Fodor" canon we get "Leibniz, Bayle, Rousseau, Kant, Sade, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Camus, Arendt". Kant is in both canons, but he almost looks like entirely two different philosophers in the two books because of the different relations of texts Rorty and Neiman put him in. Neiman says in her introduction that
There is, of course, a very commonsense way in which biology and physics are talking about things that aren't just texts. But Kuhn helped us realize that understanding the movement of disciplines like physics through history is nearly impossible without actually looking at the interplay of different physical theories, different texts of physics. And then there are all the ways in which Quine, Sellars, and Davidson have helped us see that we cannot just pull off a description from an object, that such-and-such object is partly constituted by its descriptions, i.e. texts.
The recourse to traditions of writing also makes us wary about defining the distinctions between different traditions or genres of writing too squarely. By seeing texts as relationally defined between themselves, we may begin to see new ways of relationally defining them. For instance, Rorty's way of defining philosophy as "talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell . . . and that lot." (CP, 92) Rorty's little list is written in a way to invite us to put in all the great philosophers, all the great intellectuals we traditionally call philosophers. Rorty, however, suggests that such a definition is almost entirely useless to put to use. To get a tradition to mean something a little more, you need to be a little more selective in who you include in the list. (As an exercise, try and get Augustine and Frege to comment on each other.) Not everybody is doing to same thing, commenting on the same line of texts. What's more, sometimes people are doing more than one thing at a time, and so the shape of, say, Kant's texts will change depending on who you place them in relation to. But who you place them in relation to will depend a lot on what you want to do.
Take the example of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought. Rorty's book delineates a tradition of texts that we might call "epistemology". They are a series of texts that are defined by recourse to a certain problematic and to certain kinds of metaphors, specifically ocular and architectural ones. What Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Russell, Carnap, Ryle, Quine, and Fodor all have in common are a running commentary on the ones before them. And because this sequence looks the way it does, so does the commentary that ends up with Fodor look the way it does. It means that things in Plato and Aristotle that don't hook up with Quine and Fodor are overlooked, not because they are unimportant, but only because they are currently besides the point, they are part of genres outside the one currently being discussed and taken part of.
Rorty's purpose in drawing up that lineage was to cast doubt on the way in which current (early 20th century) Anglophone philosophy was being performed. The three dominant fields of philosophy were philosophy of mind, language, and science. Rorty saw that it wouldn't be enough to simply say that these three subjects were just wrong-headed, or pointless, or boring. He had tell a large story about why these subjects, and not others, arose and took their place at the center of what it meant to be a modern philosopher.
Neiman subtitles her book "An Alternative History of Philosophy". That is very important in seeing what Neiman is up to. She is offering an alternative canon of philosophers in delimiting her subject matter, in seeing what modern philosophy is up to. Instead of Rorty's "Plato to Fodor" canon we get "Leibniz, Bayle, Rousseau, Kant, Sade, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Camus, Arendt". Kant is in both canons, but he almost looks like entirely two different philosophers in the two books because of the different relations of texts Rorty and Neiman put him in. Neiman says in her introduction that
the picture of modern philosophy as centered in epistemology and driven by the desire to ground our representations is so tenacious that some philosophers are prepared to bite the bullet and declare the effort simply wasted. Rorty, for example, finds it easier to reject modern philosophy altogether than to reject the standard accounts of its history. His narrative is more polemical than most, but it's a polemical version of the story told in most philosophy departments in the second half of the twentieth century. (6)
I think Neiman is being a little unfair to Rorty, but I can forgive her because she's essentially right, not that Rorty rejects modern philosophy, but that he's recounting the standard story that most anglophone philosophers tell themselves. He recounts it the way he does specifically to show them that it doesn't end well for them. What Rorty, by his own admission, hasn't done entirely well (or at least as well as some others) is tell an alternative story of philosophy that gives philosophers something else to do. I think it's unfair to criticize Rorty on this point, of not offering an alternative account, for the same reason it would be unfair to criticize the forensic body specialist on (insert your favorite cop show here) for not single-handedly capturing the perpetrator. He played his part, not everybody is suited to do everything. We in fact can catch Neiman at cross-purposes with Rorty by turning over the book to the back cover where, for the 2004 paperback release, we see Rorty adding his praise to other luminaries as Jonathan Ree and Michael Walzer (2004 edition) and Clifford Geertz and Jerome Schneewind (2002 edition): "We badly need alternative histories of philosophy. The story told (by me, among others) cries out for supplementation.... Neiman's snazzy prose makes this book a pleasure to read, as well as an immensely welcome change from the sort of history of philosophy to which we Anglophones have become accustomed."
My point in this detour in examples is about the fluid nature of philosophy, let alone the wider panorama of "the written word." Not all contexts produce something interesting, but putting books into strange relations to other books can sometimes create something fruitful. Not all pieces of writing implicitly comment on Plato, but most produce something we might call wisdom and so can be placed in other traditions of wisdom literature, philosophy, traditions that we can create by situating the books together. All that is needed is a context and a persuasive reason for creating the context, some interesting insight produced by the pattern of texts placed beside each other. Genres of writing are created and all texts sit implicitly aside other texts and sometimes the mere act of writing can create a new genre, a new tradition of commentary.
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