Philosophy: Ethos and Argument

I think bob may have been trying to convey the effect that your post generated in him by analogy with certain other conversations that occasionally happen. Certainly he captured the effect it generated in me! But then, we’re being too — what? Self-performative?

wow, philosophers as hacker nerds …

“Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. This was the only way to get things done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charlene’s crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn’t being told that they were wrong that offended them, though — it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.”

Loren – gah! That bit in Cryptonomicon always hacked me off. A total strawman “Take That!” against left social-science/humanities types on behalf of a wobbly computer-science libertarianism. And he’s damn wrong about the issue..

Steven, damn wrong about which issue — dwarfs vs. hobbits?

careless, yes — sorry.

An anecdote (related to me, IIRC, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong). A well-known feminist philosopher came to Dartmouth (if I am right in my attribution) philosophy department to present a paper. Because the well-known feminist philosopher was well-known beyond philosophy, she attracted a larger than normal audience, including many people from other departments. She presented her paper, which was followed by the usual discussion period. At the end, the chair said, ‘let’s all thank our speaker for a very interesting paper’. A professor from outside the philosophy department interjected: ‘no, let’s apologise to our speaker! I’ve never seen anyone treated so shamefully as she was today”. The speaker responded, “no, no, you don’t understand. I come to philosophy departments to get this kind of response: it’s the only place I can be sure that if folks think my arguments are bad they’ll let me know”.

Loren – the argument about race/class and the booming internet revolution.

For those of you who haven’t read this quite good book, basically, the superstar professor spouts something like “How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?” And “our hero” craps all over this.
http://melanconent.com/lib/rev/cryptonomicon/pigeonholed.html

But the arrogant professor is right, damn it. There’s a huge differential impact of class and race when it comes to who got the goodies of the internet and tech boom of the 90s and who continued to enjoy high unemployment, lousy schools, and insufficient and low-quality public services.

Now Daniel, though I don’t share John’s experience (in the other thread) of never having watched a philosophy seminar degenerate into a pointless shouting match, I have been to a few seminars in economics. I’ve seen speakers dealt with quite savagely, without formules de politesse being used. I’d also note that at the philosophy seminar I attended that _did_ degenerate, the most egregious offender was an economist (though perhaps he was just acting as the Romans do).

I’ve noted a couple of times on John’s thread that it was in the subject of economics that I first noticed the habit of excusing one’s asshole behaviour as being simply robust intellectual inquiry not meant to offend. If philosophers are unpopular among other humanities and social sciences, it seems a fertile ground of inquiry to ask whether it’s because of behavioural similarities to the only discipline which is less popular.

But economically, this is more of a problem for philosophers than economists, because there isn’t an easy “out” from philosophy into the world of professional economics and finance.

@ dsquared #18: it doesn’t seem obvious to me that those form-sentences for disagreeing with fundamental premises should be any less bruising than their philosophy faculty variants. If mathematicians etc. don’t seem bullying to outsiders, I imagine that’s because they don’t discuss maths with outsiders very often. By contrast, people put forward ideas with some sort of (often half-baked) philosophical content all the time. Hence the heartache.

Presumably you don’t want to discourage the practice of challenging basic assumptions altogether. In fact, your alternative recommendations don’t strike me as any more tactful than coming right out and saying: “You’ve started from a mistake.” That’s the sort of thing one should be able to say in any field in which mistakes are possible, of course. But however one dresses it up, it can hurt to hear, especially if you haven’t had the social training to take it in good part. And that’s more or less where John started, if I read him rightly.

Damned, I agree with dsquared! (and not only to his self-assessment!)

I’ll say: as a general rule, ridicule and assholish behavior is fine, helpful, and laudable when directed towards individuals and institutions with social status higher than your own, more powerful than you are. It’s problematic between equals, and outright wrong when aimed at someone below, someone less powerful.

But the assholish behaviour in question is telling someone they’ve made an error. That should be fine to point out in all contexts where errors matter.

all getting a bit “no true Scotsman”

I found this post – unlike the first one – impossible to engage with: it’s a series of generalisations which can’t be tested systematically and can’t even be disconfirmed anecdotally. (Philosopher A was rude? Yeah, but that doesn’t match what I know about philosophers B to K. Economist m was a model of civility? You should have seen him that day when he got challenged by economists n, o and p. Usw.)

I’d put it this way. Firstly, if some philosophers sincerely believe that their style of argument is at rhetoric degree zero – no frills, no politesse, cut to the chase, smartest guy wins – does it follow that they’re correct? I tend to think they’re fooling themselves big-time and mistaking the discourse of their profession for the Language of Truth – which of course most professions do, but it’s a bit ironic in this case.

Conversely, if (as I believe) rhetoric-degree-zero argumentation is itself a style of rhetorical performance, is it a genuinely useful style of performance which gets certain kinds of job done? I think that’s a sustainable claim – although of course it doesn’t follow that it’s the best possible style of performance for those kinds of job, or that other styles might not deliver the goods just as well.

Finally, if (as I believe) r.-d.-z. a. is a style of r. p., is it a style which incorporates elements of what would generally be regarded as impatience, arrogance and rudeness? I think that’s sustainable as well – although it’s quite compatible with the claim that this style is one that gets the job done, philosophically speaking.

Isn’t the problem not that philosophers employ this style but that philosophy produces it? The whole field involves people trying to demonstrate, by reasoning, propositions that are not provable. It’s natural, then, that different people will fail to accept others’ chains of reasoning: natural, too, that because their reasons for not so doing will not be entirely clear, that they will either be suspected of bad faith or stupidity.

Theoretical and theological discussions are always going to be a bit like this. There’s not really any empirical material, any statistics, say, that can be mutually agreed on (even if their meaning is disputed). So it’s all either “you don’t get it” or “you don’t want to get it”.

It’s not the people, it’s the process.

The fact that academic philosophers take a rather detached attitude to their problems

Bit of a factive use on “fact”, there?

#37: not sure what’s eating you here.

JohnH, with detached, do you mean that philosophers are detached from their problems when they are choosing their subjects, or that they are still detached when they haveinvested significant amounts of effort and reputation in the development of their ideas?

I can see how the first is true compared to for example feminist inspired humanists, but the second seems more relevant in this discussion, but I doubt whether philosophers are that much better in distancing themselves from their work than for other academics.

When people feel hurt by a particularly harsh line of questioning, it’s often that second form that plays a role: the suggestion is that your hard and best work can be taken apart in minutes. There might be instances where a more personal or political attachment to a thesis increases the sharp feelings, but those instances seem to me in the minority even in the humanities. (Athough I might be underestimating how politicized American academia is or has been).

In my limited experience it isn’t that philosophers are always successful at detaching themselves from their work. It’s just that, if the work can be dismantled, it ought to be and frequently is, and so getting good at standing apart from it is an important skill to learn. A certain level of sportsmanship is required. This is, as I think someone said on the other thread, a regulative ideal – and no less a part of the professional culture for that. Without it, it would be prohibitively awkward to tell someone that they had made a mistake.

presumably you’d also want to add Prof Leiter to the list, as he demonstrably doesn’t respond to the suggestion “But your fundamental premis (that an irrationalist philosopher like Nietszche can sensibly be treated as if he is making arguments) is simply false” as anything other than a personal attack demanding massive retaliation.

If you look at his interaction with philosophers on philosophy you’ll see that this claim is completely false, especially his interactions with other people working on Nietzsche and jurisprudence. This is clearly so when someone who knows something about the subject makes a point. (You can see an example on his legal philosophy blog now about a disagreement that’s quite fundamental with the legal philosopher Les Green.) He, understandably, has less patience for people he takes not to know much about the subjects.

But Matt, the original topic here was exactly the interaction between philosophers and non-philosophers. JohnH says that philosophers look impolite to the outside, because of manners that are accepted and not perceived as impolite within the philosophic community. D2 suggests that philosophers look impolite to the outside because they are, on average, impolite.

If, like Leiter, philosophers are in particular impolite to outsiders (even if for good reasons), that of course would explain the conflict just as well, but it would still be a serious problem in communication.

Zamfir- my point was that it’s false that Leiter treats even fundamental attacks _on his philosophical positions_ as personal attacks. That’s what Daniel suggested, and it’s just not true. Now, he does attack what he sees to be bad claims in a strong way, one that people not used to it will see as impolite. Whether this ought to be seen as such was the subject of the debate and a topic I don’t have a firm opinion on. One more thing that’s true is that Leiter is often (even in the comments of this blog) subject to _personal attacks_. I assume that it’s neither surprising nor wrong for him to treat those as personal attacks.

Daniel- you’re claim was that Leiter treats attacks on his _substantial position_ as _personal attacks_. My claim is that that’s not true. Your reply doesn’t address that at all, as I’m sure you see. One can even be quite rude without it meaning that you’re treating the attack as personal.

One more thing that’s true is that Leiter is often (even in the comments of this blog) subject to personal attacks.

That’s definitely true. And perhaps we should let Leiter rest.

What surprises, and worries, me a bit is that in the many comments in these threads, there is little argument against the view that philosophers are perceived as rude. Some argue that they only look impolite, others that they are impolite, that they have good reasons to be so, that being impolite is efficient, that it’s a men’s thing, etc.

But there is apparently wide agreement that philosophers do look impolite to others.

Re. “philosophers as hacker nerds” (I haven’t finished Cryptonomicon yet but I like it so far, not the kind of thing I usually read though): as I almost posted to the other thread, there is tough questioning and then there is tough questioning. There isn’t enough detail in that passage for me to tell whether when Randy tells people they’re “full of shit,” they’re actually “full of shit” or he is. But, when John introduced the passage about “ethos,” I realized my first thought might be to say, “so does this have anything to do with the rising interest in rhetoric I’ve heard something about,” which I don’t think would be well received, based on past experience, and it’s not totally obvious why this ought to amount to “questioning the central idea of the argument.”

I’m sorry to say, especially as a philosopher on the analytical side, that dsquared is largely right on all counts here.

Philosophers, for the sake of the discipline and our own welfare, would be well advised to ask why few others inside or outside academia like or admire us. To continue to flatter ourselves with versions of thoughts such as “They can’t handle the truth” and “They’re just intellectually jealous” is kind of embarrassing, let alone not productive.

The general observation that “academic philosophers take a rather detached attitude to their problems” is simply not true. I realize, of course, that this is part of the ethos of philosophy–that we are socialized to believe this and hence model this in our style. Perhaps the highly personal attachment that philosophers can have to their problems is much less common or evident among “lemming” types.

Revisionist or contrarian-minded moral and political philosophers will find out quickly how highly personal philosophy can become–on a substantive level. If you’re writing in normative ethics or closely related metaethics, good luck getting through peer review if you aren’t a Kantian, consequentialist, or virtue theorist. (What else could one possibly be?) If you remain impressed by the philosopher’s objective gaze, send a paper challenging the orthodoxy about war and terrorism to a journal that is supposed to be geared to issues of public interest. (Few if any such papers of sufficient quality have ever been written or, at least, sent.)

I wish John were right. I’ve managed to be relatively lucky in my philosophy career so far, but I’m aware of too much disconfirming evidence.

John, after discussion: do you stand by your analogy with ‘personal space’?

Phil, I guess sometimes people only want to talk to true Scotsmen ;-)

Philosophers are detached from their problems like chess players from their kings. Yes and no, in other words.
If you watch two professional players in post-match analysis (ie once the actual contest is supposedly over), it’s very often a massive battle of egos. The loser has an opportunity to mitigate his defeat by out-analysing, showing where the other guy was dead meat if he hadn’t made a silly oversight; the winner has the opportunity to kill his opponent twice over by showing how there was a crushing win at every stage, and he saw them all at the time. (And if the match was drawn, they are basically playing for the ego win now.)

I guess John adequately explains why, for instance, Spinoza and Nietzsche in English language philosophy is *so* boring and ends up resembling very little of what is to be found in the actual texts. There are exceptions, of course – Della Rocca and Yovel stand out as does Curley who has a genuine historical sense.

The distinction between ethos and argument is a bit forced and only seems to apply to English language philosophy done in the past couple hundred years. How do we make sense of conceptions of bios theoretikos, for instance? Philosophy wasn’t an occupation for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, but a way of life and this applies generally right up to the modern period, even in the great rationalist systems – think of the stories of people setting their clocks by Kant’s routine, which was only ruined once by his reading Hume or the glee Hegel got from writing Phenomenology of Spirit as Napoleon, the spirit in flesh, march by his tower?

In short, what you are saying seems really myopic and forced – and without much of a sense of the history of thought, a sense that is general throughout contemporary English language philosophy. I’d cite the Routledge “Philosophers” series as an example – why is Locke important today?

think of the stories of people setting their clocks by Kant’s routine, which was only ruined once by his reading Hume

I am pretty sure it was Rousseau’s Emile.

Are the satisfactions of logic aesthetic satisfactions? I think they are, although I would say the same about science qua science, pure science, cosmology and QM for instance, and certainly science is no less useful for it. But utility is not what Feynmann was about.

John, I’m not particularly interested in our history – it was boring then and it is boring now. And, in general, you are less tedious than you were in the past. Having said that…! And apologies if this is a bit chaotic – I walked away from this comment to deal with some phone calls and have lost my train of thought.

You don’t need to make an explicit claim about, as you call it, “the history of philosophy.” (I reject such a characterization; it isn’t the “history of philosophy,” it is philosophy.) You just need to make a claim about philosophy as such and then philosophy as it is practiced in the present can be related to philosophy as it was practiced in the past, which is what I’ve done.

Yes, of course, the opposition between ethos and argument as you present it is more than a little false. The very idea of argument that you are counter-posing to ethos (if only for rhetorical effect!) is itself an ethos! (Not to mention also a form of pathos.) In this light, it can do nothing but ring hollow.

I am making a strong claim here: the idea of philosophy, the practice of philosophy, cannot be separated from the subject engaged in philosophy. This, it would seem, puts me in the camp of what you’ve called “Theory” above. The result of this is either that philosophers – as you’ve presented them in your previous two posts – are lying to themselves about what they are doing or they aren’t doing philosophy as philosophers have historically seen themselves. This, I think, has a lot – in fact, everything – to do with how you characterize contemporary English language philosophers being interested in small problems, in the application of technical procedure through instrumental reason. (Of course, there is not wrong, per se, with technical problems, but it shouldn’t be the bread and butter of philosophy.) Consequently, the result of this is that the historical dimension of philosophy is completely lost. Philosophy is as much a dialogue with contemporaries as it is with the classical thinkers – it is an intersubjective and dialogical process and one that most likely has no terminus (Hegel notwithstanding!).

Understood in such a light, the question should never be, “Why is Locke important today?” This results in an engagement with “Lockean themes” or “Lockean arguments” without ever reading Locke qua Locke. (For instance, Locke becomes “mind=blank slate,” which is false anyway, and any argument that takes up the mind as blank is “Lockean.”) Indeed, “Lockean arguments” can be and routinely are put forward by people who have never read Locke! This is seriously pathological.

Now, by no means am I suggesting that philosophy should be commentary on the classics! (We shouldn’t all strive to be Quentin Skinner or his student.) Although there is nothing wrong with commentary on the classics. Indeed, philosophy graduate students should likely spend more time commenting on the classics than they do.

Put another way, philosophy as you characterize it needs a lot more of what you’ve called ethos.

among a referee’s reasons for rejection were s/he was worried about the argument’s “conservative implications” and that the argument “undermines the emancipatory role of politics in transforming the conditions of social life”.

Who was refereeing, Howard Kirk?

Always a pleasure, John. I regret having read your posts. It is clear that you are constitutionally incapable of discussion, except when people agree with you.

Re Salient at 45 – I was once asked (at a job talk) whether my project wasn’t more sociology than philosophy (it was about explaining the types of reasoning that mathematicians consider acceptable, and what rational motivations there could be for this). I think the questioner was hoping to provoke some sort of strong clarificatory response from me, but because of how I was thinking of the project at about that time, I just said that maybe it was. I didn’t end up getting the job, and I suspect that this particular comment had something to do with it. Of course, there’s also no reason to expect that I would have gotten that job even with a better response, but the reaction to that response seemed more telling than anything else in the discussion.

@75 – I just thought it was wry. NS is, after all, writing speculative fiction, not political manifestos – which make DD’s shot all the cheaper. Many of the greats of C20 SF had a nasty habit of telling you how to think, even before we get to Elron…..

Besides, anyone who can write a near-3000 page trilogy, one of the main heroes of which is known [accurately] as ‘Half-cock Jack’ can’t be all bad…

whoops–

Question mark after “…first place.”

“English literature scholar” should be possessive.

This is all very interesting, John.

Well, because the reputations of philosophers are substantially due to their negative rejections of what was going on in other humanities departments in the 80’s and 90’s.

Hmmmmm. . . . I certainly wouldn’t know one way or the other since I wasn’t paying that much attention to either English departments (& other humanities departments) or philosophy departments at the time. But did the culture of philosophy change any at that time or was it much the same as it had been before?

Things have quieted down a lot in the English department in the last decade. Theory has sort of faded into the woodwork, without really disappearing. Nothing really new has appeared. It’s a bit puzzling. As a result of nothing really new happening we are still living with psychic echoes of the ghosts of conflicts of decades past.

Well, you might want to give some attention to evolutionary thinking. If E. O. Wilson and Joseph Carroll have their way, it’s going to take over the study of literature from top to bottom, stem to stern, alpha to omega, all of it, lock, stock and barrel.

You’re right, but criticism of an individual who dwells within another discipline might be using the foundations of that discipline in order to construct their argument; therefore a philosopher critiquing a non-philosopher uses philosophy to critique non-philosophy (and of course the reverse is true and happens all the time). I’m simply saying that this doesn’t make sense because of a) continuous, rampant specialization seems to ‘arbitrarily’ intersect schools of thought and the ‘epistemic’ ground anyone is working on is shifting underneath their feet anyway b) the necessity of specialization and academic categorization at times merely designates the logistical inconvenience of bringing together myriad thinkers in order to have a communicate discourse, but that necessity doesn’t require/possess any foundation beyond the academy’s walls.

So people who draw a paycheck ‘doing’ philosophy and people who draw a paycheck ‘doing’ non-philosophy don’t get along at times? I know I am perhaps hideously warping John Holbo’s original argument and reducing it to something it isn’t (I’m going for the ‘grand aerial view’, maybe?). In the case of people informing other individual’s one argument is false and not being able to do so delicately is a case demanding a return to old fashioned decorum, or a case demanding a study of why some ‘academic’ cultures cultivate directness, rudeness, etc. There’s ethos, there’s argument, but the ‘regulative ideal’ bit is hardly consistent here, with whoever we’re discussing.

Then we can imagine a professional setting in which arrogance, impatience and rudeness are tolerated or even valorised, for reasons which may or may not be functional.

I’m not sure I *can* imagine that – because all of those qualities are defined by social context. Spitting on the ground, for example, is rude in some social settings and not in others. An asshole might exhibit rudeness by spitting on the ground – but only in settings where it is rude to do so. In other settings the asshole would have to find a different way to be rude. (If he’s engaging in a behavior without knowing that it’s rude in the community he’s currently in, he’s not a genuine asshole IMO, just ignorant of local social norms.)

Therefore, behavior that is socially accepted by community X is ipso facto not rude in community X.

This seems to me the only alternative to setting up a Grand High Arbiter of Rudeness – which dsquared seems to have done unintentionally.

Similar remarks apply to impatience and arrogance – they only make sense compared to a (socially defined) standard of how long you *ought* to wait, or what rights you *ought* to consider yourself entitled to. (A right to not have the truth of your fundamental premises questioned sounds pretty damn arrogant to me.)

Never mind, disregard my comments ; I just read the original post “Philosophy: Mind and Manners” and my comments make little sense now. What wonders due diligence can do.

Philosophers’ ethos just seems to be more ‘scientific’ in spirit; they don’t take criticism personally. I would venture this is a recent 20-21st century attitude, however.

I do long for philosophy symposiums to become like Taiwanese parliamentary meetings, SOMEDAY…

just bullshit wrong

Huh. There was going to be a humorous bit of snarky strikeout here. CT promised me it would happen, and did not deliver. Damn you, CT.

Bianca:

Don’t get me wrong; Stephenson is a great writer, I enjoy his work immensely. I think, however, that this is a case of “writing what you know” – Stephenson knows geeks, computer-science geeks especially. He gets them on a bone-deep level, because he is one. He doesn’t know social sicentists and humanities scholars well, and I would not be shocked if he had an ex-girlfriend who was an annoyingly po-mo analyzer of their relationship. He also has something of a grudge against the university – the Big U is a hilarious novel, where at the end, the science club nukes UMass Amherst.

Or “haven’t” for “hasn’t” you rude rude people. Smiley emoticon!

Bianca – It just struck me after posting that comment that Rand actually got that device from Victor Hugo (of whom she was a great admirer and who is clearly the novelist whose work hers most resembles). I’m actually not one of the knee-jerk detractors of Rand – I’ve finished Atlas Shrugged, which is more than I managed with “Cryptonomicon” – but she does have her little tactics and IMO Stephenson’s books resemble hers in more characteristics than simply price and average length.

Doctor Slack — Well, maybe philosophers are mistaken about their self conception. But the point remains that philosophers don’t go around saying that the quality of an argument is immaterial since arguments are mere rhetoric. Similarly, the point remains that philosophers are annoyed by those who say such things. So what was your point?

Well, late to the party, but I’m with #34 and #68 with respect to the characterization of “philosophy” in paragraph 5 of the post. I won’t go off on the tangent, “why is Wittgenstein considered an Analytic philosopher, when he was attempting to demonstrate the essential impossibility of such a thing?” (A medicine proffered by a single individual could scarcely be of avail in the darkness of these times: philosophy as a medicine for the conduct of life rejoins an ancient Stoic motif). I’ll just state that classically philosophy concerned the attempt to construe the intelligible order of the world at least quasi-systematically for the sake of its indirect implication for the ethical conduct of life. That is, philosophy was always crucially concerned with “ethos”, whether one translates that as personal character or way of life. Academically speaking, once philosophy is de-throned from its overweening pretension, philosophy can be characterized as a discipline as specializing in the elaboration of grounding arguments. But no one thinks anymore that grounds somehow emerge from or penetrate into the absolute core of reality itself; “grounds” are just discursive reasons and themselves essentially groundless. But that means that grounding arguments are no longer of primary concern, but are quite secondary matters. Add to that the problem of argumentative impasses, whereby equally valid arguments can be constructed or elaborated from contrary premises, and the problem of paralogism, whereby arguments elaborated from the same premises can lead to divergent conclusions or convergent conclusions can be arrived at from completely different premises, and the “perfecting” of logical techniques for argumentation can seem quite fruitless or beside the point. Further, the notion that problems can be cleanly and clearly disentangle and isolated in their logical “purity”, so that, say, an ethical or meta-ethical argument need entail no existential, anthropological, historical, epistemic, or, even, vaguely “metaphysical” premises, seems to beg the question and to be bound for failure. But since arguments defined the academic discipline, arguments are all academic philosophers have got, and they will seem to presume the primacy of arguments as a unique and privileged mode of access to “truth”, lest one falls victim to the fatal sin of “confusion”. So philosophers will be argumentative, while, as per the above premises, ignoring the fatal ambiguity of the word, and the slide into aggression and anger that always shadows “arguments”. And, since the discipline has no other prescribed content than techniques of argument, it is fundamentally parasitic upon other sources of knowledge, content or activity, and thus will seem to indulge its quondam pretensions and seem “imperialistic”. Hence, to outsiders in other disciplines, such argumentativeness might seem a misapprehension of what motivates their own forms of inquiry and how they generate their own specific forms of content. And, since, under the above premises, arguments are assumed to aim, “disinterestedly”, at unconditional “truth”, and thus seem de-motivated, the motive ascribed to such argumentativeness is liable to drift into the malicious or pejorative.

Analytic philosophers frequently speak in terms of “commitments”, meaning the implications that must be adhered to by someone arguing from some specific belief or premise, (which seems always to be cognitive in nature or, at least, to be “cashed out” in terms of some sort of cognitive content). But can one inquire into commitments in an entirely detached manner, without adhering to some commitments oneself, ones which are equally and reciprocally questionable, (though not in a pejorative sense)?

Part of the reason Heidegger appealed to “authenticity” so centrally in his work is because he recognized that there is no metaphysical, ontological, or epistemological ground that could unify and guarantee all knowledge. Henceforth, all knowledge is grounded on an abyss, ein Abgrund, and based solely on the projects of its inquirers/knowers. Hence part of the evaluation and justification of the “truth” of the claims of knowers is referred back to the “authenticity” or truthfulness of the inquirers, their mode of comportment, and the projects that they venture. And he etymologized the Greek “methodos” as originally meaning “way” or “path”, as in “I am the truth, the way, the life” or the Chinese “tao”. I, for one, don’t understand how one can conduct any inquiry in complete abstraction from the underlying concerns that motivate it. And that always involves the comportment, the “ethos”, of the inquirer, which is always one amongst a plurality of such projects and comportments. And that involves an evaluation of the questionableness of questions, not just argumentativeness for its own sake.

As for literary studies and similar disciplines, which Paul Valery once dubbed the “delirious professions”, in which one’s stock-in-trade is one’s reputation and one’s primary means is one’s own opinion of oneself, there can be no question of aiming at “truth” there, since the works under investigation are sheerly fictive or imaginative. IMHO, their aim is or should be at veracity, in the sense of sheer accuracy. Provided one understands that the “play” of imagination is not in earnest, is as much an evasion as a coming-to-terms-with reality. Literature is a counter-myth aimed against the fatal myths of reality. But then there is no encounter with reality which does not occur in terms of a counter-factual horizon of possibilities, in which imagination is already implicated. That is where the motivation of “ethos” comes in, in examining the multiply unrealized possibilities of our prospective fates and the possible worlds we (don’t) inhabit. In other words, philosophy and literature are much different ways of reflectively examining our needs and desires as they are implicated in the course of the world. And there are different kinds of precision and rigor, which is something that shouldn’t be obscured by repressive demands for complete “clarity”.

Trevor: I don’t think Stephenson is responsible for inventing that. Banning the man’s novels isn’t going to change people’s beliefs. I mean, why not just draw up a list of all the features of “anarchocapitalism” and blackball everyone who displays any of them. Or you could just ban teenagers, or make them identify themselves, or something.

Steven A.: I don’t see computer science in his bio. A scientist and programmer: not quite the same thing. There are circles, I understand, where a computer science degree is looked at askance, though there are plenty of former physicists and mathematicians working in the “harder” reaches of software.

Steven: I’m not totally sure when most US universities got computer science departments, and according to Wikipedia Stephenson studied math and geology in the 1970s. In the 1980s it was quite common, in every area, to find people with backgrounds in the sciences or in math, and it’s still fairly common in some kinds of programming to find a very diverse range of backgrounds, even graphic artists. And certainly a computer science or software engineering education is supposed to equip you to learn new technologies from books and other printed materials–as Randy does in the novel.

But . . . to learn “everything there is to know about the Internet slash Information Superhighway” from a TCP/IP book purchased for learning how to program it? Was this a book about TCP/IP internals, which I can imagine a very brilliant person with Randy’s background maybe being able to understand, but which he isn’t evidently using in the kind of thing he’s working on? Or, maybe, was this a high-level book intended to convey the kind of system the Internet more or less is for people whose job it is to manage technology on society’s behalf? It’s a puzzlement. An interesting scene, though.

Oh, I get it. All philosophers are Israelis. Or are all Israelis philosophers?

John Halasz’s post is quite good, by the way.

I am saying that in seeking to explain the “fraught,” your premise requires the existence of significant numbers of “humanists”* to whom the concept of non-personal questioning of premises would be sufficiently novel that they’d need it explained to them, by you. Inasmuch as it’s not plausible that enough such people exist to explain the phenomenon you purport to be explaining, I’m saying your premise is just wrong.

(* No, seriously. “Humanists”? Why is that the new term of art? It’s an honest question and I promise not to think your answer makes you a bad person.)

John Halasz wrote:

IMHO, their aim is or should be at veracity, in the sense of sheer accuracy. Provided one understands that the “play” of imagination is not in earnest, is as much an evasion as a coming-to-terms-with reality. Literature is a counter-myth aimed against the fatal myths of reality

or, to adapt a line of Pater Ackroyds about biographers and novelists, the difference is that a logician can make shit up, but a literary theorist has to tell the truth.

Dr. Slack: Having survived the Political Correctness years on an Ivy League campus when I was a middle-class upward-striver who liked science, I don’t knee-jerk at “Liberal Dinner Party!” in perhaps exactly the way you intended.

I don’t knee-jerk at “Liberal Dinner Party!” in perhaps exactly the way you intended.

If you’re saying you literally attended parties that fit the description of the Encyclopedia of Decency, then… wow. It’s not like that out here in the rest of the world, trust me. Pinning a swastika on a Jew must have been particularly stressful.

To be charitable about the “liberal dinner party” trope, I think characterizations of the event depend in part on the spirit in which the observer is engaged with his surroundings. It’s like the contrasting photo-essays one always sees about protests: “look at the Eeeeevil anti-Israel protest, comprised of nothing but orcs orcs orcs! now look our wonderful peaceful pro-Israel protest, which is full of prancing ponies and shining unicorns!” People with a pre-existing agenda will tend to fixate on certain things and interpret (and in some cases misinterpret) them based on that agenda when viewing a protest, or going to a dinner party.

Now, I can look around at such an event and see much of the same raw material for outrage that so preoccupies the non-liberal or the Muscular Liberal — or at least see how they can see it that way — but that doesn’t mean that some random dude at table saying he’s “against the Iraq War” because “it’s just logic” is going to indict the whole event, everyone involved in it, their intellects and their upbringing and their probably questionable parentage in the way it evidently does for the Muscular Liberal. Or Neal Stephenson.

@134: WTF?

136: If the first paragraph of that post is confusing you, click the “liberal dinner party” link in the post you were originally responding to.

If there rest of that post is confusing you, I’m using politics as an analogue to how Stephenson is treating science versus the un-sciencey in his scene in Cryptonomicon, because I don’t think there’s really that much difference.

The clue that you are missing is that I see the two sets as substantially overlapping. Those who cultivate a sort of ‘armor of authenticity’ and those who, maybe, have read – oh, some Heidegger on authenticity (just for example). Does that help?

It would if they did in fact “substantially” overlap, to enough of a degree that the overlap would explain the “fraught” confrontations you are trying to explain.

The problem is that while there are of course people who are threatened by apparent attempts to undermine their personal authenticity and integrity and hence the very structure of Civilization itself, a) that concern is far more likely to characterize anti-Theorists within the humanities, who are not the sort of people who tend also to wind up in turf battles with the philosophy department and rarely not the sort of people who tend to be into Heidegger by and large (seen widely as the precursor to Derrida’s supposed assault on all that is good and just and meaningful), and b) even most of those people take themselves to be arguing rationally from well-established premises (though they may not have done much work in examining those premises). To the extent that they’re pissy and personal in defense of those premises, I don’t find their defensiveness all that different from that of many defenders of presumed Anglo-American “rigor” against the Continentals. They will at any rate simply not do as an explanation of philosophy’s various shitty run-ins with Theory.

There is, of course, lots of pissy personalism in those run-ins. I’d contend it has little to do with the contrasting intellectual cultures that are supposed by you to be involved — aside from being more heterogenous, sometimes messily so, I’m not at all convinced there’s some really distinct intellectual culture going on inside your neighbourhood philosophy department — and much to do with pissiness over substantive issues like mischaracterization of arguments, premises, literature and thinkers’ bodies of work. The complaints that the other side is trying to make one’s reasonable arguments look stupid — that what’s going on is basically evasion, obscurantism and a personal attempt to make the other guy look like a fool — do come up when the frustration in those debates reaches a peak and don’t seem to me to be confined either to the philosophers or the non-philosophers.

He certainly says in several places that it is quite important that deconstruction is not a position, or a claim. As such, it is conveniently immune from refutation

Claiming that something is a verb and not a noun makes it “conveniently immune from refutation”? What?

he is bemusedly contemptuous of attempts to treat it as if it were possible to critique it by means of conventional arguments.

It sort of stands to reason that it’s difficult to critique unconventional logic by means of conventional logic. (Not impossible, mind you, but I could relate to Searle’s frustration with him for all that I thought Searle came out the worst in their dispute.) But it sort of sounds as if you’re finding his questioning of the latter premise to be almost an expression of… contempt? Maybe even “deep contempt”?

He did seem to take criticism rather personally, and gave almost as personally as he got in that regard.

I know he took personal criticism personally, particularly when it was substituted for argument (for example, Searle tossing Foucault’s less-than-perspicacious “terrorism of obscurantism” quote at him in the news media). But that’s not the kind of “taking personally” that you seem to be talking about.

And cripes: inside your neighbourhood philosophy department

s/b/ “inside your neighbourhood lit. department”

I need a coffee, obviously.

(DS: she can speak for herself, of course, but I suspect Bianca’s “wtf?” might have referred to your interpretation, not your explication. I mention this only because I am a “humanist,” I suppose – I’m apparently a political theorist – but who uses a fair bit of stuff from analytic philosophy, and who has a modest background in math and science; perhaps it’s my background, but I read Bianca’s “kneejerk” comment exactly the opposite way than you. Relatedly, and since Davidson has been invoked aways up-thread: I’m always struck by how quickly a principle of interpretive charity is discarded in online discussions. I’m not taking sides here: this affliction strikes us all).

I want very briefly to intervene between JH and DS, with an example that isn’t exactly on point, but which may nonetheless illuminate some constructive middle ground here.

Some of my recent work has been trying to build a (short and narrow) bridge between analytic political philosophy and critical urban theory. I sell this as a division-of-labour sort of exercise: “go right on interrogating assumptions and exposing biases in the conventional wisdom about cities! the moral and political philosophers can worry about the normative principles you assume, and that motivate your critiques.” That way of framing the division of labour fits in this setting, where much of the theory is critical but not expressly normative, but it easily raises hackles, inspiring the sort of reaction that JH suggests—if, that is, the theorists in question really do take their normative commitments personally.

Now, a small sample, certainly, and involving very particular areas of theory and philosophy; but with these caveats in mind, my tentative findings so far:

– I don’t generally find the non-philosopher theorists treating their normative premises as part of their identity; no one has yet taken my efforts as a personal attack.

– sloppy arguments are less common than a certain sort of philosopher might suspect, but there is certainly some generic annoyance with a philosophical obsession over very narrow, precise arguments and incessant distinction-drawing.

– I haven’t seen the sort of extreme positions that some fear are lurking outside of philosophy departments, i.e. that purportedly rational argument is merely rhetorical manipulation, etc.

-relatedly, when Foucault is seriously invoked, my sense so far is that it is usually for fairly constrained methodological purposes, and that the theorist isn’t accepting some blanket case about the ubiquity of power or the impossibility of breaking out of the knowledge-power nexus (of course it isn’t at all clear that Foucault said any of that, which brings me to the next observation …)

– “surveillance” and “governmentality” get bandied about a fair bit, and probably without sufficient attention to deeper questions about Foucault’s methods, and implications thereof.

– I have encountered plenty of scepticism with the idea that normative principles can be supported in the way philosophers might hope. Some theorists I’ve talked with do suspect that, at the end of the day, Rorty’s pragmatism is the best we can hope for, and that our critical-theoretic efforts cannot do better than that by way of moral foundations.

– along these lines, I have certainly encountered theorists who suspect the philosopher of being a closet imperialist, seeking to impose a hegemonic conception of “reasonableness” one abstract, narrow, and precise argument at a time. But they certainly weren’t blinded by this suspicion.

– urban theorists tend to be well-grounded in some area of empirical research, and there is a bit of a knee-jerk tendency I’ve noticed, to assume that the philosophers don’t get the complexity and messiness of the world. They might be on to something as a rough heuristic, but it can be annoying when the philosophers have actually taken some time to get up to speed on historical and institutional specifics, and then to be lectured by a theorist – of all people! – about the complexities of the real world.

– perhaps in some measure because of this, some theorists are far more interested in conceptual work that directly addresses substantive and urgent themes (deep diversity, secession, nationalism, poverty, etc), and less interseted in applying some interesting philosophical idea and debate to some small part of those pressing issues.

Again, a small sample, in a particular area of theory (some of which is more closely aligned with empirical social studies than other, more humanistic disciplines), and involving a pretty narrow set of philosophical concerns, but take from these findings what you will.

Bianca/Steven– I’m not saying we should burn or censor Stephenson’s books, I’m just saying people should not read them.

It would be acceptable to burn and censor Rand’s books however.

As to the rest of the conversation: forget about Derrida or Wittgenstein, the ‘Zizek’ cult seems in full force right now, yet the attacks launched at him (or his work…?) are pretty laughable (Adam Kirsch coughcough).

Why does everything boil down to the ‘science wars’ again and again?

“The other cultural sign that recognizes the conflict of the two modernities is the movement, primarily in the humanities and the social sciences, of “post-modernity”. Post-modernity, I hope I have made clear, is not POST-modern at all. It is a mode of rejecting the modernity of technology on behalf of the modernity of liberation. If it has been stated in this bizarre form, it is because the post-modernists have been seeking a way to break out of the linguistic hold liberal ideology has had on our discourse. Post-modernity as an explanatory concept is confusing. Post-modernity as an annunciatory doctrine is no doubt prescient. For we are moving in the direction of another historical system. The modern world-system is coming to a end. It will however require at least another 50 years of terminal crisis, that is of “chaos”, before we can hope to emerge into a new social order.
Our task of today, and for the next 50 years, is the task of utopistics. It is the task of imagingin and struggling to create this new social order. For it is by no means assured that the end of one inegalitarian historical system will result in a better one. The struggle is quite open. We need today to define the concrete institutions through which human liberation can finally be expressed. We have lived through its pretended expression in our existing world-system, in which liberal ideology tried to persuade us of a reality that the liberals were in fact struggling against, the reality of increasing equality and democracy. And we have lived through the disillusionment of failed anti-systemic movements, movements that were themselves as much part of the problem as of the solution.
We must engage in an enormous worldwide multilogue, for the solutions are by no means evident. And those who wish to continue the present under other guises are very powerful. The end of what mdoernity? Let it be the end of false modernity, and the onset, for the first time, of a true modernity of liberation.”

— I. Wallerstein

A bit superficially OT, but yet pertinent here I think.

No problem, Dr Slack. Someday maybe you can explain the conditions that make your comments make sense.
Loren, thanks. Interesting comment.

As for Stephenson, I don’t know exactly where he stands (I’ve only read half of one book), who his friends are, what he likes or dislikes–which is as it should be. Though I would prefer there to be more better written books like his than more worse written ones.

We have lived through its pretended expression in our existing world-system, in which liberal ideology tried to persuade us of a reality that the liberals were in fact struggling against, the reality of increasing equality and democracy.

I suspect the writer of this sentence of having a highly nonstandard definition of “liberal”. Or at least one unfamiliar to me. Most of the rest of the passage strikes me as fairly standard garden-variety grandiose prophecy, but that sentence stands out for its weirdness. Increasing equality and increasing democracy are not always compatible goals, but the people *I* would describe as liberals try to advance and reconcile them.

Why don’t you guys make a deal: JH reads “Wittgenstein as Conservative Deconstructor” in the Wheeler collection, and JCH reads Martin Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction” in Crary and Read, The New Wittgenstein. I think the differences are mostly terminological — what Stone calls “deconstruction” is what Wheeler calls the non-conservative kind of deconstruction (I forget his term). In each case JD and LW are sort of doing the same thing, but LW comes out better.

I’m taking it that you are not unaware of the long-standing criticism of liberalism as formal equality “under the law” that suppresses and evades the issue of “substantive” equality.

No, but such sophistical arguments (e.g. “Heterosexual and homosexual men are both equally free to marry women, so there’s no discrimination here” – to translate France’s famous quip into the terms of a contemporary political controversy) are rarely associated with liberals, as the term is contemporarily used. So I think that to call that a critique of liberalism requires ignoring the modern meaning of “liberal” (unless, of course, it’s a historical quote predating the meaning shift, but I assumed from the discussion of postmodernism that it was relatively recent).

It’s difficult to engage with a view that liberals are engaged in a struggle *against* a “reality of increasing equality and democracy” unless you know what the author means by “liberals”.

But it now seems like a big irrelevant distraction from the thread that I probably shouldn’t have bothered with. (Unless it somehow illustrates the underlying point in a way too subtle for me to put into words right now… how would Wallerstein react to someone asking him to define his terms before proceeding?)

Chris:

Yes, the interpolation by another commenter of the Wallerstein citation was a bit off topic, (though Holbo’s response to Lamont’s concerns was also a bit of topic, and so it goes with internet posts and discussions, especially at the end of such threads, which is part of their “charm”). But then the semantic variability of terms, if not their instability and contradictoriness, is at least an off-shoot of the issues on this thread. It was John Austin who remarked that when someone speaks of “democracy” it is never quite clear what is meant. (Though that might have been just a piece of donnish liberalism). “Liberalism” has a variety of uses, and perhaps the economic kind, indicating an endorsement of “free” markets as the most desirable key to social organization should be distinguished from the political meanings, as concerned with the articulation of individual rights over against the potential or actual oppressive power of the state. But, historically, the two were conjoined in a common ideological node, emphasizing the freedom of individuals over against collective oppressions, in which the equality of freedoms was to be upheld against any requirements of collective existence or action, and a harmonization of all values and interests, on the basis of individuality, was to be the prevailing vision of extant reality. I.e. freedom took priority over equality and individual rights over the requirements of common existence, though it’s never been clear, to me at least, just how freedom is to be “measured” so as to be an “equal” quantity, and how individual right should be declared, directly and without conflict or contradictions, “universal”. On the other hand, if “individuals” only exist through their participation in communities, if “rights” are a collective legal institution, dependent on some power of their enforcement, and “equality” is referred to the pattern and stratification of social exchanges, then a simple “logical” identity between freedom and equality, tout court, as an unquestionable fundament of political reasonings and actions becomes problematic. But then “freedom”, i.e. human agency, is not just an immediately appealing facticity, but, upon reflection, a limited and finite “thing”, one bound up in relations with others, who are equally, indeterminately, and finitely “free”. And the counterpoint, the doppelgaenger, of human freedom is always power: how it is collectively generated, gathered together and concentrated , and distributed. Hence the political realm, (however underpinned by economic interests and structurings), concerns the public-political generation of power and its distributions: just “who” belongs to the political community (and who is excluded), how freedoms and rights are distributed, and who or what is to determine the collective ends of common projects or actions. The political realm, then, is pre-eminently one of alienation, of passing-over into otherness, of existing in community with others, who are utterly unlike oneself in values, interests or practical orientations, since political participation involves rising above one’s particular egoistic interests and values and presenting one’s viewpoint in terms of the “universal” common good or collective public interest. Which abstraction is always also hypocritical, so the political realm is liable to seem not just alienated, but corrupt, as well. So there should be little wonder over the instabilities or conflictual understandings of terms, which stipulative definition could not quite cure.

The A. France quip was less a sophistry than a sardonic observation, since who exactly gets to determine which pieces of rhetoric, an unavoidable condition of political speech- or any-, are sophistries, and which belong to unconditional truth? Though the example of “gay rights” is not a particularly good historical transposition, since, in my book at least, that is a matter of private or, at most, civic rights, and not a public-political issue. (I’m certainly not opposed to equal legal-contractual rights for gays, but I find tropes like “gay marriage” sentimental and reactionary). But the Wallerstein citation clearly was aimed at the politico-economic ideology of neo-liberalism, and concerned itself in an international perspective with the inequality and “democratic” deficit between as much as within nations, proposing a transnational generation of a countervailing “democratic” public sphere. But then what it was proposing was all too “vague”.

Yes, Lowith is very good on all the connections and analogies between John of Patmos’s and Karl of Trier’s descriptions of the cataclysm and then the descent from the skies of the New Jerusalem.

notsneaky: A hard truth that the Internet age has taught me is that a bad argument for a certain position does not count as a good argument for the opposite position.