Monthly Archives: March 2018

On the alleged revolutionary power of philosophical skepticism

“There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back.”
— J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia

Descartes:

“If I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.”

“For what is more self-evident than the fact that the Supreme Being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists?”

Kant:

This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom — and the most innocent of all that may be called “freedom”: freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. Now I hear the cry from all sides: “Do not argue!” The officer says: “Do not argue–drill!” The tax collector: “Do not argue–pay!” The pastor: “Do not argue–believe!” Only one ruler in the world says: “Argue as much as you please, but obey!”

Ecologies of the Mind

“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.”
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The mind has mountains, to lift a phrase from Hopkins, even for people who have spent all their lives in the flatlands; and most of us would be dazzled if the mountains turned out to yield sacred texts rather than terrors or an empty, confused landscape.”
— Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence

“My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ‘most everywhere.”
— James Joyce

“I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward influence which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.”
— Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

i am a dirty little room
with spiders in the corner of my skull
my mouth a dark pit
into which human droppings disappear
the speck of rust in my heart worries me
many people breathe in and out of me
i am at ease with the world
only the speck of rust worries me
— Wopko Jensma, “Lo Lull” (1973)

The Extraversion of Analytic Philosophy (Variations on a Hountondji theme)

Not for the first time, I’m struck by how much Paulin Hountondji’s critique of African philosophy applies just as forcefully — perhaps, even, more devastatingly — to USian analytic philosophy. The most obvious node of that critique, of course, is that analytic philosophy is largely a variant of ethnophilosophy.

Today, however, a deeper resonance occurred to me as I came across squeals of delight from analytic philosophers whose programs have gotten the nod from the cargo cult PGR report, punctuated by the wounded yawps of those whose programs are — in the dystopian idiom of analytics — “unranked.”

Consider, then, the following passage from Hountondji’s Combats Pour Le Sens: Un Itineraire Africain modified just a tad for the analytic philosophy crowd:

“The quest for rankings is always bound up with a desire for the gaze. It has meaning only in relation to the Other, from whom one wishes to distinguish one’s self at all costs. This is an ambiguous relationship, inasmuch as the assertion of one’s difference goes hand in hand with a passionate urge to have it recognized by the Other. As this recognition is usually long in coming, the desire of the subject, caught in his/her own trap, grows increasingly hollow until it is completely alienated in a restless craving for the slightest gesture, the most cursory glance from the Other.”

Thinking/Thought

Hannah Arendt:

The deals Becher made through Kastner were much simpler than the complicated negotiations with the business magnates; they consisted in fixing a price for the life of each Jew to be rescued. There was considerable haggling over prices, and at one point, it seems, Eichmann also got involved in some of the preliminary discussions. Characteristically, his price was the lowest, a mere two hundred dollars per Jew – not, of course, because he wished to save more Jews but simply because he was not used to thinking big.
— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Factually, my preoccupation with mental activities has two rather different origins. The immediate impulse came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind that phrase, I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought — literary, theological, or philosophic — about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan, “a lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel (“The devil is an angel too” – Unamuno) whose sin is pride (“proud as Lucifer”), namely, that superbia of which only the best are capable: they don’t want to serve God but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own (Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because “the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago’s “I hate the Moor: my cause is hearted”; Claggart’s hatred for Billy Budd’s “barbarian” innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a “depravity according to nature”), or by covetousness, “the root of all evil” (Radix omnium malorum cupiditas). .
However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer — at least the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.
In the setting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as well as had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless, and his cliche-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.
It was this absence of thinking — which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination, to stop and think — that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of commission) possible in default of not just “base motives” (as the law calls them) but of any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition? Is wickedness, however we may define it, this being “determined to prove a villain,” not a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought? To be sure, not in the sense that thinking would ever be able to produce the good deed as its result, as though “virtue could be taught” and learned — only habits and customs can be taught, and we know only too well the alarming speed with which they are unlearned and forgotten when new circumstances demand a change in manners and patterns of behavior. (The fact that we usually teat matters of good and evil in courses in “moral” or “ethics” may indicate how little we know about them, for morals comes from mores and ethics from ethos, the Latin and the Greek words for customs and habit, the Latin word being associated with rules of behavior, whereas the Greek is derived from habitat, like our “habits.”) The absence of thought I was confronted with sprang neither from forgetfulness of former, presumably good manners and habits nor from stupidity in the sense of inability to comprehend — not even in the sense of “moral insanity” for it was just as noticeable in instances that had nothing to do with so-called ethical decisions or matters of conscience.
The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually “condition” them against it? (The very word “conscience” at any rate, points in this direction insofar as it means “to know with and by myself,” a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process.”). And it not this hypothesis enforced by everything we know about conscience, namely, that a “good conscience” is enjoyed as a rule only by really bad people, criminals and such, while only “good people” are capable of having a bad conscience?
–Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

Thinking/Thought

Ghazals: Homage To Ghalib
Adrienne Rich
7/12/68

The clouds are electric in this university.
The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.

When I look at that wall I shall think of you
and of what you did not paint there.

Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:
the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.

The vanishing-point where he appears.
Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.

To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable
is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.

When you read these lines, think of me
and of what I have not written here.

Thinking/Thought

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“Thought must be something unique.” When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we — and our meaning — do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this — is — so. But this paradox (which has the form of a truism) can also be expressed in this way: Thought can be of what is not the case.

Other illusions come from various quarters to attach themselves to the special one spoken of here. Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing.)

Thought is surrounded by a halo. — Its essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it. — It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete — as it were the hardest thing there is

Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, — to see that we must stick to the subjects of our everyday thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.

Language (or thought?) is something unique” — this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions. And now the impressiveness retreats to these illusions, to the problems.

“But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain — behavior accompanied by pain and pain — behavior without any pain?” — Admit it? What greater difference could there be? — “And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.” — Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.
… The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts — which may be about houses, pains, and evil, or anything else you please.

Thinking/Thought

“Denken tut weh” (Thinking hurts)
— Georg Simmel

“The history of thought is the history of its models.”
— Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language

“Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think.”
— Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought”

“I am convinced that there are ways of thinking that we don’t yet know about.”
— Adrienne Rich

“Thinking, like life, is never complete, it is a possibility that never exhausts itself.”
— Vincenzo Di Nicola

“All that we are is the result of our thoughts; it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. If a man speaks or acts with a harmful thought, trouble follows him as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.”
— The Dhammapada

“Writing is thinking. That means that you won’t think unless you do it.”
— Sarah Beckwith

“We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think.”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“Preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly ‘philosophizing.'”
— Martin Heidegger, What is Thinking?

“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

“Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”
— Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Modern Historiography, Narrativity, Moralism

Hayden White:

Historians do not have to report their truths about the real world in narrative form; they may choose other, non-narrative, even anti-narrative, modes of representation, such as the meditation, the anatomy, or the epitome. Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Huizinga, and Braudel, to mention only the most notable masters of modern historiography, refused narrative in certain of their historiographical works, presumably on the assumption that the meaning of the events with which they wished to deal did not lend itself to representation in the narrative mode. They refused to tell a story about the past, or, rather, they did not tell a story with well-marked beginning, middle, and end phases; they did not impose upon the processes that interested them the form that we normally associate with storytelling. While they certainly narrated their accounts of the reality that they perceived, or thought they perceived, to exist within or behind the evidence they had examined, they did not narrativize that reality, did not impose upon it the form of a story. And their example permits us to distinguish between a historical discourse that narrates, on the one side, and a discourse that narrativizes, on the other; between a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story.

…

Once we have been alerted to the intimate relationship that Hegel suggests exists between law, historicality, and narrativity, we cannot but be struck by the frequency with which narrativity, whether of the fictional or the factual sort, presupposes the existence of a legal system against or on behalf of which the
typical agents of a narrative account militate. And this raises the
suspicion that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized “history,” has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally authority.And indeed, when we look at what is supposed to be the next stage in the evolution of historical representation after the annals form, that is, the chronicle, this suspicion is borne out. The more historically self-conscious the writer of any form of historiography, the more the question of the social system and the law which sustains it, the authority of this law and its justification, and threats to the law occupy his attention. If, as Hegel suggests, historicality as a distinct mode of human existence is unthinkable without the presupposition of a system of law in relation to which a specifically legal subject could be constituted, then historical self-consciousness, the kind of consciousness capable of imagining the need to represent reality as a history, is conceivable only in terms of its interest in law, legality, legitimacy, and so on.

Interest in the social system, which is nothing other than a system of human relationships governed by law, creates the possibility of conceiving the kinds of tensions, conflicts, struggles, and their various kinds of resolutions that we are accustomed to find in any representation of reality presenting itself to us as a history. Perhaps, then, the growth and development of historical consciousness which is attended by a concomitant growth and development of narrative capability (of the sort met with in the chronicle as against the annals form) has something to do with the extent to which the legal system functions as a subject of concern. If every fully realized story, however we define that familiar but conceptually elusive entity, is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence, then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats. Where there is ambiguity or ambivalence regarding the status of the legal system, which is the form in which the subject encounters most immediately the social system in which he is enjoined to achieve a full humanity, the ground on which any closure of a story one might wish to tell about a past, whether it be a public or a private past, is lacking. And this suggests that narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine.

(Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”)

Moral Philosophy as a Set-Up: Debate, Normalization, and the Incorporation of Radical Criticism

Cora Diamond:

A great difference between Murdoch and contemporary moral philosophy lies in the very idea of moral philosophy as such a set of debates. From Murdoch’s point of view, these debates are set up, in the sense in which she speaks of the “world of facts” as something which philosophers have “set up.” What are taken to be “the problems of the field” will invariably involve background ideas — ideas taken to be unproblematic, not in question in the debates that define the field as it is taught. The shaping of such debates depends on a picture of the world and a picture or group of related pictures of the soul; deep moral attitudes are embedded in these pictures. The bringing to awareness of such compelling pictures and of their historical and cultural connections, the opening up of alternative ways of understanding moral philosophy, is itself a task of philosophy, to be set over against the conception of it in terms of a set of debates.

Here I shall borrow an argument made by Talbot Brewer, in relation to Elizabeth Anscombe and her radical criticism of moral philosophy. The force of such criticism is utterly missed, Brewer argues, when an attempt is made to fit it into the structure of moral philosophy as a set of debates. When moral philosophy is set out and taught as involving a “well-defined field of questions,” with “a series of competing answers to these questions,” we make it unnecessary for ourselves or our students to take seriously the “fundamentally conflicting views concerning … the main questions and concerns of the field itself” — a field that is “perpetually concerned with the proper specification of its own focal preoccupations.” He speaks of moral philosophy as having a “fundamentally reflexive subject matter,” a reflexiveness that is inconsistent with setting out the subject in terms of such a set of debates. When we try to take the ideas of a radical critic like Anscombe as a contribution to such debates, we “normalize” her views, pull the sting from them.

While Brewer’s argument — about how radical criticism can be normalized by being fitted into “the debate” — refers directly to Anscombe, it applies also to Murdoch; indeed Brewer brings out the similarity of some of their central concerns. Their view of analytic moral philosophy was that of insiders, but they had double vision: they saw it also in its cultural context, saw its unacknowledged commitment to specific values. They were themselves committed (though in quite different ways) to an understanding of the moral realm deeply at odds with the conventional understanding, hence their sharp awareness of what was taken for granted and what was hidden from view in that understanding of moral philosophy — of what its problems were, how they could be addressed, and what would constitute progress in their resolution.

Brewer brings out the generality of the issue that surfaces in their writings and in the reception of their writings: when moral philosophy is normalized, the problematic character of the relation between the wider culture and the construction of moral philosophy is suppressed. Normalization is a continuing process, as emerges in the recent construction of a debate about the relevance of empirical investigation to moral philosophy, so far as the construction of the debate excludes a conception of empirical investigation like Murdoch’s and takes serious attention to what is available in human experience to be attention to what is available through the methods of the various empirical sciences. Murdoch the explorer begins from the felt tension between moral philosophy shaped in a taken-for-granted way, moral philosophy as we present it to students and to ourselves, these problems, these arguments, these possible approaches — and moral philosophy as continually needing to question what its own concerns are or may be, what modes of thinking it may have cut off from consideration, what conceptual configurations it has built into its own understanding of the world it investigates.

(Cora Diamond, “Murdoch the Explorer”)

Professional Philosophy, Territoriality, Enemyship, and Fantasies of Omniscience

Elizabeth V. Spelman:

At a certain stage in their careers — not only when writing their dissertations or entering the job market, but also simply when on the philosophical prowl – many philosophers we know, maybe even love, maybe even recognize in the mirror, assume, probably quite rightly, that in order to display their professional chops they’ve got to provide ready and palpable evidence of their skill at defining territory and then covering it.

One widely used and reliable approach is to make the territory very small (“The wild dog pack’s territorial nature leads its members to claim an area large enough to support them and any offspring, but not one so large that it requires excessive energy to adequately defend it”) and then corner it, seal it against possible intrusion — a little spray here, a little spray there, a little spray everywhere (Milani). The only way to prevent such intrusion is to anticipate every conceivable question that might occur to your thesis advisor, or prospective employer, or one of those philosopher-vultures (to change the animal metaphor briefly) who perch in the back of conference halls and live off the conceptual carrion of unsuspecting speakers. You better make sure to cover the territory, and to indicate that you know full well where intruders might slip in. Your territory may be a small territory, it may be a territory very few people actually want to occupy anyway, even if they enjoy trying to leave their own scent here and there, but by gum you know every blade of grass, every little once-unturned stone, every chipmunk hole, and you aren’t going to be surprised by anybody who would suggest there might be something in your territory you hadn’t seen or anticipated. It’s your territory and you’ve got it covered.

Whatever ends might be served by presenting one’s philosophical findings or explorations in this way, there wouldn’t seem much — apart from parochial disciplinary rituals — to recommend it as an invitation to a conversation or an inducement to engage in a joint examination….

Hmmm. Who are those philosophical enemies, those potential poachers? Well, for individual philosophers, among the likely candidates for enemy status is that motley crew of fellow “wisdom lovers” I alluded to earlier, lying in wait to expose the gopher holes you’ve failed to notice, tsk tsk tsk. For the whole posse of philosophers, especially the teeth-baring disciplinarians in the front lines, the enemy includes nonphilosophers (some of who somehow, some-where managed to slip into the profession, like slinky felines under the fence) who think they have the right to roam the territory without knowing how to cover it correctly (“Oh, what do those literary critics think they know about Wittgenstein, for God’s sake?”).

But sometimes it seems as if the real enemy the territory-covering activity is meant to subdue is language itself, the primary tool of the philosopher — as if the very medium of our expression carries with it some awful threat of uncontainability, is contaminated with the possibility of untamable sabotage or betrayal. Martin Jay recently has resurrected an example of such philosophica nervosa in Michael Oakeshott’s examination of “experience”: according to Oakeshott, “it must be the ambition of every writer reckless enough the use the word [i.e., “experience”] to escape the ambiguities it contains”(1933, 9). Covering the territory involves not only traversing it, but doing so in such a way as to keep unwanted semantic growth from popping up. I’ve got to know the meaning, indeed every possible meaning, of each word and phrase I use; only then can I control the language I use in such a way that I can mean just this, nothing more, nothing less. Only with such semantic omniscience and omnipotence can I prevent your claiming with any justice that something I said maybe doesn’t mean quite what I think it does, or that it is ambiguous or open to an interpretation I hadn’t imagined.

(Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Philosophical Doggedness”)