Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Some Final Words (For a While) on Philosophy and the History of Philosophy

Some recent fairly productive polemics and exchanges over at New APPS have led Mark Lance to issue the following query: "[W]hat I'd like to know," he writes, "is how the historians on this blog think we should draw the line [between what counts as history of philosophy and what is simply historical scholarship that should be housed elsewhere than in a philosophy department]. Is the measure still in terms of some notion of engagement with contemporary philosophy?  Or is there some other consideration that would suggest that there should be a field of history of philosophy, housed in philosophy rather than history, where engagement with contemporary philosophizing is in no way an essential desideratum."

Here is my reply:

I have a straightforward answer, one that will not come as a surprise to some of our readers: I do not believe that any direct engagement with contemporary philosophy should be a requirement of employment as a historian of philosophy within a philosophy department. This is not to say, however, that I do not think that historians of philosophy play a vital role in, let us say, the ecosystem of academic philosophy. I believe historians of philosophy can help current philosophers to gain perspective on their projects by showing them the scope and range of what has been able to pass as an important philosophical question in different times and places, and thereby providing a picture of the flexibility and contingency of what ought to count as a philosophical question.

This sort of contribution might have the effect of changing contemporary debates by showing that some resolution to them was already proposed long ago in an unfamiliar idiom (which often happens, for example, in the study of ancient Indian epistemology: we find the answers to contemporary questions, but we often don't even realize it because the style of argumentation is so different). Or this sort of contribution might simply help current philosophers to bear in mind the extent to which what we call 'philosophy' today really is a mixed bag of leftover questions from various historical legacies. In this connection, I believe it is absolutely crucial as a historian of philosophy to respect actors' categories, and that means to accept that if some Libavius or van Helmont claims to be doing 'philosophy' when he is in fact doing something that looks a world away from what we think of as philosophy, we have to respect his own understanding of the endeavor. This is in part why I was aghast when Leiter, perhaps semi-facetiously, announced recently with surprise that there is such a thing as the philosophy of chemistry: heavens, I can show you countless texts, published over several centuries, in which the words 'philosopher' and 'chemist' were used interchangeably! What does this show? Among other things it shows that philosophy and chemistry go way back together. It also serves as a fine illustration of the flexibility of the discipline.

This flexibility inevitably leads the thorough historian of philosophy down paths that cannot easily be connected up with current philosophical concerns. But it is up to the current philosophers themselves, if they wish to go through the intellectual exercise and thereby to be edified, to take an interest in the findings of the historians of philosophy --the findings that are often so far from current concerns--, and to allow these findings to serve as fuel for reflection on what this project we call 'philosophy' is all about anyway.

If current philosophers don't want to hear it, then I guess I would be willing to work in an HPS program rather than in a philosophy department. The problem with switching to a history department however is that they aren't interested either: whereas historians of philosophy tend to practice a fairly Whiggish march-of-great-ideas sort of intellectual history, professional historians tend by and large to be suspicious of intellectual history, to see ideas as epiphenomenal, and thus tend only to skim philosophical texts enough to get an idea of what is being said, before going back to talk about networks of patronage, the distribution of printing presses, etc. So my natural home, I insist, is in a philosophy department. But I would like to see some changes in the way non-historian philosophers understand the contribution of their historian colleagues. I would also like to see some changes in the way historians of philosophy conceive their intellectual project. I would like to see more of them explicitly reject the demand made by many of their non-historian colleagues that they demonstrate the relevance of their research to current philosophical debates.

I often hear colleagues relating how they first came to philosophy by reading the Tractatus, or the Republic, or some other common gateway text. I had a less usual introduction: as an undergraduate I came across the Philosophical Transactions, and read the first 30 years or so of them, starting in 1666, from cover to cover. This gave me a highly distorted perception of what the field of philosophy includes. But somehow I've always remained loyal to that first impression I had of what philosophy is about (e.g., the possibility of spontaneous generation, the function of the chimpanzee's larynx, vortex theory, the problem of infinitesimals, the refraction of light at the earth's poles..., hell, pretty much everything), and I continue to believe that exposure to unfamiliar conceptions of philosophy, such as the one that gives the Transactions their title, is a good thing for current philosophers, whether they do history or not.

And this is why I think historians of philosophy belong in philosophy departments, even, or perhaps especially, if they don't contribute directly to current philosophical debates.

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Update: I am finding it harder to extricate myself than I had hoped. David Wallace replied to the above comments with I think a very sensible question: Isn't there a semantic issue here? The discipline we call "philosophy" now doesn't automatically map onto any given discipline with the same, or an etymologically related, name in the past. What "Philosophy" meant when the Philosophical Transactions were being published in the 17th century is not obviously closer to modern philosophy than to modern science. After all, Philosophical Transactions is still being published, and these days it's unambiguously a science journal.

Again, here is my reply:

I had somewhat anticipated the semantic question, and probably should have said something about it in the initial post.

Certainly, if there had been some sudden and total shift at some point in the past, after which what they called 'philosophy' no longer overlapped at all with what we call 'philosophy' (say, like the shift from Thomas Aquinas's use of 'metaphysics' to Shirley MacLaine's use), then there really would be no value to current philosophy in studying everything that has ever been called 'philosophy'. But what we see instead is a gradual and continuous transformation (with one fairly abrupt and large transformation occurring over the course of the 18th century, when the particular natural sciences come to be parted out from what was until then known as 'natural philosophy').

But there are at least a few ways in which studying these transformations as a historian of philosophy may be fruitful, rather than simply zeroing in on those elements of past philosophy that remain of clear relevance to us. First of all, we might find that when someone in the past was doing something that he thought of as philosophy but that we do not think of as philosophy, he might nonetheless have been making observations that we can recognize as philosophical; e.g., Galen on the function of the pancreas can tell us something about teleology; Daniel Sennert's alchemy/chemistry can tell us something about the range of possible theories of compound bodies, which should be of interest not only to, say, those who might also be working on Democritean atomism or Descartes' corpuscularianism, but also to readers of, e.g., van Inwagen's Material Beings.

But again, I insist, this sort of pay-off is nice, but must not be a condition of considering some research on some past work research in the history of philosophy. For one thing, at the outset the historian of philosophy is not going to know where these still-philosophically-relevant nuggets might be hidden within some vast treatise on calendrical astrology or some such no-longer-legitimate thing. Second, in taking, say, Libavius's claim seriously that in trying to transmute base metal into gold he is doing 'philosophy', or Joachim Becher's claim that he has invented a perpetuum mobile, sometimes described as the ultimate 'machina philosophica', we might be forced to reflect on forgotten (but still perhaps latent) elements of the philosophical project: in fact these two examples are not so different from at least one of the two accusations, made justly or not, against Socrates at his trial.

So our philosophy does have something to do with their philosophy. This something would have been perfectly obvious to anyone writing before or during the great splitting off of the disciplines (Kant remains perfectly aware of and respectful of this older conception of philosophy as late as the turn of the 19th century). So again it's not a matter of a sudden shift of meaning, but rather a gradual transformation, of which I believe it is one of the responsibilities of the historian of philosophy to provide an account.

One final note: as you point out the Philosophical Transactions is today just another science journal, but that certainly doesn't make it irrelevant to philosophy, any more than the first issues of the journal are irrelevant to the historian of philosophy: it's very relevant, as a source of material for philosophers of science.

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A postscript (not in the original comment):

Come to think of it, I would not necessarily exclude, from the list of legitimate questions a historian of philosophy might ask, the question as to how it came to be that if you go to the 'metaphysics' section of a bookstore today (or, say, ten years ago, when such bookstores still existed) you will find books by Shirley MacLaine, but not Thomas Aquinas. That is an interesting question, and the full answer to it would probably tell you a great deal about the history of metaphysics. Surely it has much to do with the transformation of 'metaphysical' into a term of derision in early-20th-century positivism, and it might have something to do with the inherent unclarity of what the topic ought to be covering, an unclarity that goes back to the very naming of the work by Aristotle that brought the discipline into existence.

So by all means, fellow historians of philosophy, ask yourselves about Shirley MacLaine's metaphysics, too. Draw on all possible sources of insight that might help you to understand what the project of philosophy is about. It is not that MacLaine herself will actually say insightful things --for the most part, the minor figures I study from the 17th century don't either--, but rather that she serves as a bit of evidence in piecing together the history of a difficult concept.

Mutatis mutandis, just this sort of work has been done by William Newman, who reconstructed the emergence of occult-tinged 'symbolic alchemy' over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, in order to distinguish it from the practical and scientific alchemy/chemistry --Newman calls it 'chymistry', highlighting the fact that the two words were for a long time interchangeable, and thus it is an anachronistic error to suppose that one of them could have been a legitimate endeavor, and the other a fraudulent one-- of the early modern period. With C. G. Jung's reveries cleared out of the way by solid scholarship, we are in a better position to appreciate the contribution chemists/alchemists made to the history of matter theory, which is to say to a part of the history of philosophy. But Newman is, professionally, a historian of science, and so he is free to contribute to the history of philosophy in a way that historians of philosophy themselves are not.

A Response to Robert Pasnau on Studying the History of Philosophy

Robert Pasnau has recently written an open letter encouraging graduate students in philosophy to specialize in the history of philosophy. (Please do click and read it before reading on here.) Now I understand that Pasnau meant this letter to serve as a recruitment tool, and to this extent he was required to tailor it to what he rightly supposes are the preconceptions of most students going into graduate programs in philosophy and who are not yet convinced of the worthwhileness of specializing in the history of philosophy. However, while this approach might indeed raise the number of dissertations with a historical orientation in the short term, it does nothing in the long term to help us overcome, and in fact does much to reinforce, a number of misguided views about the relationship of philosophy to its history, about how the history of philosophy is best studied, about the proper role of history-of-philosophy scholarship within today's philosophy deparments, and so on.

I am currently co-editing a volume with Mogens Laerke and Eric Schliesser on precisely these matters, and when it comes out (OUP, 2012) I am hoping that it will help significantly to transform the relationship between non-historians and historians within philosophy, and that at least some of the contributions will make a compelling case, one that will be understood by non-historians, for the philosophical worthwhileness of plunging into the past, of coming to feel at home there, and of taking the time to really, deeply, get to know the period one studies: all of which are things that students currently specializing in the history of philosophy are not expected to do.

I am going to withhold most of my thoughts on this matter for now, saving them for my own contribution to the OUP volume. But here I would just like to point out the three elements of Pasnau's letter that I found most problematic.

First, by encouraging graduate students to specialize in the history of philosophy on the grounds that (i) it is easier to get a job with such a specialization; and (ii) once employed, they can drop history and move into what are implicitly portrayed as the big leagues, Pasnau's case for specializing in the history of philosophy perpetuates this specialization's status as a second-class, handmaiden, propaedeutic, back-up plan, etc., to real philosophy. It involves, in other words, the implicit presupposition that there is only one way to spend a valuable career in philosophy, and that is by contributing to and helping to resolve current debates.

But what if one spends one's entire career elucidating some period of the past? This changes the present state of things too, though in a different way: it shows us that we could have been wrong in attributing a certain view to a certain figure, and that if that is so we need to revise our understanding of the transmission-history of the ideas and questions we continue to take seriously. This in turn might lead us to take some of these ideas more seriously, and some less.

What if it were to be shown, for example, the Locke was not nearly so much of a nominalist as he has been taken to be? Wouldn't this cause at least a bit of a realignment in contemporary debates that descend from the nominalism-realism controversy? Now how one might show such a thing about Locke brings me to my second major concern about Pasnau's letter. (In this example, some close to the matter will note, I am drawing on the very enlightening work of Peter Anstey.) One could just read the usual, highly abridged editions of the Essay, and follow that up with the usual recent Anglophone secondary literature; in which case, I probably don't need to add, it is unlikely that major new insights will be had in the interpretation of Locke. Or, by contrast, one could study manuscripts, marginalia, even Locke's personal seed collection (!); one could map his relations with botanists, and so on.

This is the sort of work that I think Pasnau has in mind when he says that if you walk into a typical meeting of historians of philosophy at, say, the APA, you are likely to find it dull: the obsessing over watermarks, the piecing together of fragments, and so on. But this is also just the sort of work you have to do if you want to get it right, and the only philosophers, as far as I know, who would deny that that is the goal of philosophy are the ones who think that it's all just 'discourses', 'narratives', etc. There is a current of history-of-philosophy scholarship, of which most non-historian philosophers seem completely unaware, that rejects that view as adamantly as it rejects the anti-historical prejudice of much current Anglophone philosophy.

It is plain to me from years of talking to people (and as many years of overhearing conversations not intended for my ears) that non-historians who walk into a room full of historians obsessing over watermarks conclude that they must be doing this in order to compensate for a lack of philosophical ability. But this is simply a false inference. If you are going to permit historians of philosophy the freedom to try to get things right about whatever it is they are studying, you will have to cease with the demand that they produce a short-term, immediately recognizable philosophical pay-off from their historical work. It might take years of immersion and grappling in order to really understand some local, context-laden debate of long-ago. And with manuscript work in particular one has to allow to the historian of philosophy the freedom to develop a sort of expertise that is not limited to that of extracting arguments. There is in addition something akin to the expertise of the art historian: such a specialist has to stare for a long, long time, and then has to go and read a lot about networks of patronage, and so on; and then, finally, she might arrive at some kind of account of the beauty of a painting. Similarly, you have to stare and stare at manuscripts, and you have to learn about the context of their production, in order eventually to understand whether the points being made in them are good or not.

Now it might in fact be the case that some people who do this sort of work are not the best epistemologists, philosophers of mind, metaphysicians. But even then, so what? Where is the justification for the presumption that they must in fact be working towards an eventual, direct contribution to contemporary philosophical debates in order for their study of old texts to be a legitimate endeavor? Maybe there is simply a division of labor within philosophy, wherein some people excel in elucidating and resolving problems in texts produced by others, and some people excel in contributing to current debates. I want to hear an argument that will convince me of the greater nobility or urgency of the latter endeavor.

In any case, it is simply not true that watermark-obsessers are compensating for their philosophical mediocrity. I have never met a single contextualist historian of philosophy of whom such a judgment would be fair. They just happen to like what they do, and they recognize, for reasons I've already sketched, why doing this is an important contribution to the discipline of philosophy as a whole.

Finally, and relatedly, in his somewhat jocular account of his own approach to working with Latin texts --mastering Latin is in fact a lot harder than remembering that intellectus means 'intellect' and actus means 'act'; in fact, it is by no means clear that even these translations of these two words are adequate in all contexts--, Pasnau seems to reject the notion that a specialist in the history of philosophy might also benefit from liking history itself, as well as philology, the study of languages, and so on. He presents these rather as obstacles to getting at what really counts --the timeless arguments inconveniently shrouded in Latin-- rather than being portals of access to rich and unfamiliar worlds.

What history, philology, foreign-language study, and so on, can often reveal is that in fact what we took to be timeless philosophical problems were in their inception conceptualized very differently, and have transformed over the course of their histories in ways that can cause us to doubt whether we and our predecessors are talking abut the same thing at all. This sort of discovery is one that can generally only be made if one opens oneself up to the world of the past philosopher, to his idiom, his social values and status, his culture and religion, and so on. Those who open themselves up in this way are usually classicists, historical anthropologists, historians of religion, for example, but seldom historians of philosophy. Sometimes however the work of such non-philosophers (Walter Burkert on Pythagoreanism comes to mind) has been so compelling as to force philosophers to reconceptualize the nature of the texts they study (though for the most part it is specialists in ancient philosophy who allow themselves to be influenced in this way). 

Since Pasnau's letter took the form of advice to students, part of me wants to reply in kind with very different advice: to warn prospective graduate students who are interested in the sort of approach I've described to go instead into a history-of-science program, or a history-and-philosophy-of-science program that takes the 'H' in its acronym very seriously (and there are many such programs; to name a few: Cambridge, Indiana, Toronto, Johns Hopkins, Sydney, Pittsburgh, Nijmegen...). If it is the philology part that interests you most, then I am also tempted to recommend going into classics instead, or into some variety of area studies (e.g., South Asian Studies), where one might learn about Indian philosophy in a way that comprehends and respects Indian history, and in a way that values and promotes, rather than taking as an obstacle, the mastery of the relevant languages. Or follow the model of Erwin Panofsky and go into art history: indulge your love of things besides arguments, while still producing arguments and dealing with concepts in a way that could not but impress any philosopher.

Yet it's only part of me that is tempted to offer that sort of advice. (It's the part of me that feels intellectually at home for the first time ever during the present term, which I am spending in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, surrounded by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians of ancient China, historians of medieval Islamic art, and so on). This advice may be the most useful for some people, and it may have been useful to me 15 years ago. But I've grown committed to philosophy, and really would rather reform than secede: so I hope that a generation from now there will be historians of philosophy within philosophy departments who are both rigorous historians from a methodological point of view, and are also recognized as first-tier, full-status philosophers by their colleagues.

So yes, do work on a historical topic in graduate school, not because this is easier and you can drop it later on, but because you love history, and because you know it's good for philosophy.

Animal Intelligence: An Exchange with Abraham Stone and Frans de Waal

I recently had a long-distance exchange with two very interesting thinkers --the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal, and the philosopher Abraham Stone, himself approaching eminence-- concerning the scientific study of animal intelligence; the epistemological problem of the interpretation of data on animal intelligence; the inadequacy of most 'science writers' to the task of communicating what is at stake in the study of animal intelligence; and other no less interesting matters.

The exchange initially began from what I took to be a typically disappointing science writer's article at Discovery, by Jennifer Viegas, concerning some purportedly new signs of elephant intelligence. Have a look at that article before reading on, so that you might better understand how this exchange got rolling.

I took issue with the author's observation that "[o]ther animals clearly engage in teamwork," while by contrast one of the scientists involved in the study, Joshua Plotnik, "thinks they are 'pre-programmed for it', unlike elephants that seem to understand the full process." I wanted to know, in response, what kind of empirical evidence could ever ground such a distinction. Moreover, I wanted to know whether understanding is really incompatible with pre-programming. Those were my deep concerns about animal-intelligence research. I also expressed a concern about Viegas's style of science writing, namely that the condescension and cutesiness of it (using words like 'yummy' and easy alliterations) did not inevitably transform any intelligence animals might display into the same old familiar circus performance, if now in print or on screen, rather than in the three rings of old.

At this point Cameron Brown (who left the exchange early on), set us on the right path philosophically by suggesting that the usual criterion by which scientists attribute understanding of processes is "based on improvisational ability, which must be supposed incompatible with pre-programming." Cameron went on to wonder whether "understanding could be on a gradient rather than binary, similar to how psychologists have sometimes distinguished between goal-directed and rule-based or formal rationality." Another contributor to the discussion also suggested that it is improvisational ability, or the capacity to do something new and unexpected, that signals animal intelligence. He noted that humans quickly and constantly form new meanings through language and custom, whereas ape social behavior, such as hunting, always involves "just a few signals that do not vary or combine."

In response to these two points I took a historical turn, as I often do, and noted that using the apparent absence of spontaneity in animals as an argument for denying them understanding, will, or moral status, is very old. Descartes uses it, for example. But at the same time there is a parallel line of reasoning, that goes back at least to Girolamo Rorario in the 16th century, according to which animals act predictably because they've already figured out exactly what motions of their bodies are most in agreement with nature, whereas we humans are uncertain and floundering. And thus, as Rorario puts it, animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine [brute animals make better use of reason than men].

Enter, at this point, Abe, with an observation about the proper division of labor between the natural scientists and the philosophers with respect to the question of animal intelligence: "The reasoning and terminology of natural scientists, Abe writes, "typically appear sloppy and insufficiently reflective to philosophers and even to mathematicians. And yet in the end they often discover things that philosophers and mathematicians couldn't. Descartes is a far better philosopher than Newton, but Cartesian physics is crap. So it's not easy to know when we should criticize them. Linguistics and animal intelligence may have been colonized by bad philosophy to some extent, which just makes this more difficult rather than less." At this point I came back with my initial compaint about mediocre science writing, and argued for a role for philosophers in the work of interpreting the data on animal intelligence (and implicitly for a role in disseminating these interpretations to the broader public).

I repeated here my concern that in typical science writing on animal intelligence, such as Viegas's article, anything the animals might accomplish is degraded "in the very framing of the story into the clever trick of a beast already assumed on a priori grounds to be lesser." I also said that philosophers ought to jump into the interpretation of the data on animal intelligence even if the scientists do not want us there; and I said --which I know very much goes against Frans's long-standing practice, as we'll soon see-- that there's something inherently troubling about the use of diminutive names ('circus names', I called them) for animals that are at the same time the subjects of scientific study. It is not necessarily bad, I add here (which I did not say before) that scientists form affective connections to the animals they study, but the problem comes at the stage of dissemination by science writers, when the public is told of all the clever things some Dumbo or Bongo has managed to do.

Abe replied that "[t]here's probably not that much risk of getting in the scientists' way, if only because they'll probably pay no attention to us." He then went on to dismiss my concern about naming practices: "I think we can agree that a lot of science writing is bad. I'm not sure I agree with your criticisms of this particular piece. Should we be worrying about the dignity of elephants in this sense (e.g. their right not to be given diminutive circus names)? It might be kind of like worrying that they aren't decently dressed. Not that I can quite explain what would be wrong about the latter."

I responded with a bold claim, that "[r]eal study of animal intelligence would not have any prior implicit supposition that to be intelligent just is to be like us (that's a strong philosophical claim, I know), and the diminutive circus names are one of the ways in which the animals studied are framed in advance as lesser versions of us (that's a fairly modest sociolinguistic claim, I think, with well-known parallels in the study of class and gender relations)." I add here (again, which I did not say before) that a good example of the study of elephant intelligence is the discovery of the significance to them of the vibrations caused by their stomping. Something we took before to be just brute bodily motion turns out to be an important part of the maintenance of an intricate social network. This sort of discovery is fundamentally different, and I think more important, than the elephants' performance in tests set up by human beings.

At this point Frans joined us with a succinct and optimistic summary of the state of scientific research on animal intelligence: "Joint attention has been found in all sorts of animals, not just apes, it's no cognitive marker anymore. Recently it was reported for wolves (thus negating that dogs have it because of domestication). Theory of mind is hardly a unitary phenomenon, and for all we know some of it can be found in apes, monkeys, dogs, jays. The literature is moving fast." To this, another participant suggested that all of this data gathered on all of these species could simply be the result of scientists 'seeing what they want to see'.

I replied that this latter suggestion in response to Frans's account of the state of the discipline "underlines the difficulty that has plagued the animal-intelligence debate since at least Rorarius: for those who suppose on a priori grounds that any apparent sign of intelligence in animals is only an anthropomorphizing projection, no amount of the sort of evidence that Frans adduces is going to make a difference." I added that "the only reason why we don't have any problem attributing intelligence to other human minds is that we need to suppose their existence on practical grounds, and so when called upon come up with good-enough philosophical arguments to do away with the other-minds problem.

"Frans is optimistic, I went on, "that the empirical evidence is coming in so fast and is so overwhelming that soon everyone will be convinced. I'm more inclined to think that the withholding of intelligence (and other traits associated with human-likeness) has much more to do with the way human societies define the boundaries of community, and if they've already determined that these boundaries don't extend to baboons, then there's no ability a baboon can demonstrate that will change their minds in this matter. So we very much need the sort of empirical data that Frans is spending his life finding, but in order for the prejudice of human uniqueness to be pushed toward decline these data need to be accompanied by arguments, issuing sooner from moral and political philosophy, that are not themselves based on the data."

Here there was a sort of juncture in the conversation, where Frans, it seems to me, laid his cards out (though in a way that is certainly not surprising to anyone who has read his published works): "For any Darwinist the assumption is simple: continuity between closely related species. Even often between distantly related ones. The human brain contains no parts and no transmitters that until now have not also been found in other primates. There are differences, but they have more to do with brain power than with a qualitatively different brain. The reason humans assume they are different are essentially religious, handed down from traditions that arose in the desert where people had never met nh primates. When the first live apes arrived at London Zoo, early 19th century, the queen herself declared them 'disgusting'. And ever since Western intellectuals have been busy trying to determine what sets us apart."

And at this point I could not hold back from the temptation to cite Cicero (himself citing the poet Ennius): Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis ['How similar to us that most ugly beast, the simian!'].

On Orgasm and Irritability

I recently came across a website ridiculing undergraduates for turning in written work in which they had conflated the words 'organism' and 'orgasm'. But this might not have been so much the usual sign of subliteracy, nor even a Freudian slip (if ever such a thing existed); it might, just might, instead have been a sign of incredible erudition.

In Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's La Philosophie zoologique of 1809, the latter term appears to be taken as more or less synonymous with the former. Chapter 4 of the treatise, entitled 'Of Orgasm and Irritability', defines orgasm as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive." Further on he describes it as sensibilité latente, and thus as a notion that is complementary to irritabilité, which is the capacity of the body to sense and react to external stimuli.

'Orgasm' in today's sense is something like a reduction of what Lamarck meant to only its most extreme instance. Somewhere also I remember Leibniz saying earlier, in the 1670s, that the reproductive act in animals is the summum or culmination of its existence as a sensitive being, and a sensitive being is just what an animal is in its very essence. So the idea is that the sensation involved in reproduction is the ultimate expression of what it is that an animal does qua animal. So it is not at all hard to see how we slide from Lamarck's orgasme to our orgasm(s).

Interestingly, as I and others have argued in more scholarly spaces, a similar shift happens in the history of the term 'organism', which starts out describing an abstract state, like Leninism or Judaism, and ends up being a count noun that can easily be rendered in the plural. One might of course speak of 'multiple Leninisms', but one has to strain to do so, whereas multiple organisms or orgasms are easily tallied.

Anyhow, I don't know when the semantic shift occurs precisely, and would be pleased to learn some more details. I expect the occurrence of Lamarck's technical term in the title of this post will, given the way search engines work, garner more readers for it than I am used to having. But alas these will probably not be readers interested in helping me to fill in gaps in my knowledge of the history of science. 

T. S. Eliot: Philosophy and Genre

There was in the early 20th century a now largely forgotten American-English philosopher named T. S. Eliot. He published some scholarly articles, notably one in The Monist of 1916 on "The Development of Leibniz's Monadism." In general however he preferred to return to an older form of philosophical writing, also preferred of Parmenides, Lucretius, and Henry More: namely poetry. 

I would like to cite at length the final segment of Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" of 1940. It sums up perfectly my own views of religious belief, of the limits of human knowledge, and of our prospects for salvation, but that's not why I am citing it. I am citing it because I would like to then go on to make a point about the relationship between disciplines or domains of inquiry on the one hand, and the genres in which they are written on the other. So read it now. But really read it.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

In the 14th-century Kerala School of mathematics in Southern India, mathematical proofs were, like "The Dry Salvages," written in verse. This delayed for some time the West's ability to discern within these lines of verse many discoveries that the West would take several centuries more to happen upon on their own using a more or less Euclidean style (dare I say 'style' instead of 'method'?).

Here, in Eliot, we are dealing not with mathematics, but with speculative metaphysics of the sort that also interested Leibniz (alongside mathematics): the relationship between the eternal and the temporal, the nature of corporeality, the prospects of surviving the corruption of the body, and so on. As I often say, if this is not philosophy, I don't know what is, and one hopes that the future's historians of philosophy will, in their surveys of the early 20th century, not consider only Carnap, Heidegger, and the rest of the usual canon of authors writing in the prevailing genre of that (but by no means of every) historical period, but instead will enrich their picture of the era by reading at least a few select poets.  The ones who contributed in parallel to philosophy's prevailing genre might yield particular insight, like Henry More in his day, who described the promise and limitations of 17th-century corpuscularianism both in poems such as the Democritus Platonissans as well as in straightforward treatises such as The Immortality of the Soul. 

Read, philosopher, I mean to say, T. S. Eliot, not as a curious reader who has finished his or her work for the day, but as a philosopher.

For Salt, a Cricket: Notes on Folk-Taxonomy and the Hindu System of Reincarnation

Here, from the 2nd-cenury BCE Laws of Manu, is the most explicit elaboration I'm aware of of the system of Hindu reincarnation: that is, the specification of which sort of soul ends up in which species of womb:

A priest-killer gets the womb of a dog, a pig, a donkey, a camel, a cow, a goat, a sheep, a wild animal, a bird... A priest who drinks liquor enters the womb of a worm, bug, or moth, of birds who eat excrement, and of violent creatures. A priest who is a thief is reborn thousands of times in spiders, snakes, and lizards, aquatic animals, and violent ghouls. A man who violates his guru's marriage-bed is reborn hundreds of times in grasses, shrubs, and vines, in beasts that are carnivorous or that have fangs, and in people who engage in cruel actions. Violent men become carnivorous beasts; people who eat impure things become worms; thieves become animals that devour one another; and men who have sex with women in the lowest castes become ghosts...

The rhythm of the list grows more rapid and staccato as it moves on to the crime of theft:

For stealing grain, a man becomes a rat; for brass, a goose; for water, an aquatic bird; for honey, a stinging insect; for milk, a crow; for spices, a dog; for ghee, a mongoose; for meat, a vulture; for marrow, a cormorant, for seseme oil, an 'oil-drinker';  for salt, a cricket; and for yogurt, a crane; for stealing silk, a partridge; for linen, a frog; for cotton, a curlew; for a cow, an iguana; for molasses, a bat; for perfumes, a muskrat; for lettuce, a peacock; for cooked foods, a porcupine; for uncooked food, a hedgehog.

There appears to be a system of correspondences here, as clearly in the pairing perfume/muskrat. Each theft seems, though often in a very cryptic way, to be followed by a transformation into the sort of animal associated with the object stolen, an association either in virtue of a property of the animal itself, or in virtue of the animal's characteristic activity (what Leibniz would call its officium). But then the system grows more straightforwardly just, in a poetic sense, when the sort of theft in question involves the taking of another living being:

[For stealing] a deer or an elephant, [he becomes] a wolf; for a horse, a tiger; for fruits and roots, a monkey; for a woman, a bear.

Presumably, stealing these sorts of animals (or plants) is akin to preying on them, even if one does not in fact eat them as a real predator would; and presumably there is something bearish in the ravaging of a woman.

Far worse than theft or even murder is to fail in the carrying out of the innate activity (the officium?) of one's social class. For this one becomes not an animal but some variety or other of ghost. Thus:

A priest who has slipped from his own duty becomes a comet-mouth ghost who eats vomit; a ruler who slips from his duty becomes a false-stinking ghost who eats impure things and corpses. A commoner who has slipped from his own duty becomes a ghost who sees by an eye in his anus, eating pus; a servant becomes a moth-eater ghost.

This is all very vivid material for the imagination, but what interests me most are the correspondences between animals on the one hand and the theft of various objects on the other. Following a lead from Zimmermann (1982), it seems that in this system we have a basis for claiming that Indian folk-taxonomy is embedded not just in therapeutics and pharmacy (Zimmermann's focus), but also within its system of justice. This would provide grounds for claiming that a text such as the Laws of Manu leaves a rich trace of a science of nature, in much the same way that Leviticus does with its dietary prohibitions: which have to do with morality, hygiene, and taxonomy all at once.

The difference is that the Hindu system of justice is an explicitly cosmic system, where the consequences of moral transgression are projected into a future life that begins through a radical species transformation. Because it is such a bedrock principle of Western natural philosophy that species transformation must involve the eradication of one individual and the generation of another (even lycanthropy in Europe is almost universally explained as a taking on of the outward appearance of a wolf, while maintaining the human species essence), it might be harder to see that what the Hindu system of reincarnation is doing is not only trading in metaphysical impossibilities, but also saying a great deal about the nature of various kinds of social action and about certain salient features of the natural environment. And again, like Leviticus, it is doing this by a single motion. 

I'll be writing on this more in the future, towards an eventual article. But for now I have to keep working on my Sanskrit, and keep reading...

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See Francis Zimmermann, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1982.

See also my earlier post on Zimmermann here.

The Gendered Conference Campaign Goes to Russia

I'm back to making trouble in the comments sections again. There appears to be a controversy between the Russian organizers of an upcoming Hume conference in Moscow and some of the prospective Western participants, concerning the under-representation of women among the speakers in the conference. The Russian organising committee, headed up by Elena Vostrikova, sent a letter to the complainants, in which she maintained, among other things, that "we consider your proposal to influence our conference by pressing the invited speakers to cancel their participation in it a manifestation an anachronistic colonial behavior which we also deem inappropriate." To see the entire letter, go here. My comment at the same site is reproduced below.

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I agree with Mme. Vostrikova that this is, in a certain respect, colonial behaviour. You cannot operate as philosophers at the international level, organising events that involve cultural exchange, without taking into consideration the differences between the cultures. In this instance, I believe that Western Europeans and Americans tend to see their cultural difference from Russia as less significant than the Russians themselves see their cultural difference from the West. (This is perhaps the only case in the world in which a group others itself even as those from whom it is self-othering in turn refuse to other it.)

Now, for better or worse, an entirely different history of gender politics in Russia has had as a consequence that, today, different cultural attitudes prevail concerning the 'natures' of men and women, and concerning the social roles to which these natures make them suited. Are these attitudes correct? I don't believe so, and I don't believe any of the readers here do either. But having spent a year and a half in Russia, I will confess that I have indeed sat silently through many conversations that reproduced essentializing commonplaces about gender difference: conversations which, had they taken place in the West, would have caused me to intervene in opposition. Why did I not intervene? Because unless something truly criminal is going on I believe in the edifying effect of quiet participant-observation, and because under the circumstances it would have been arrogant to do so, and in any case ineffectual. It would have been a small-scale instance of the sort of geopolitical manoeuvre to which Vostrikova and the others allude (it would say, like Jeffrey Sachs in another sphere of public life, 'We know better').

Now Russia also has an entirely different history of gender in public institutions, including the academy. There are indeed very high percentages of women in most scientific fields, as Vostrikova et al. point out, and this has in large part to do with the legacy of the Soviet commitment to advancing the representation of women in high-status fields (a top-down commitment that never succeeded in transforming popular attitudes about men and women).

Today, however, I fear that the high representation of women in the humanities has to do with the fact that financially the institutions where these are housed have been completely gutted, while simultaneously, in the post-Soviet era, ideas about what constitutes status have been completely reversed: leaving a peculiar situation in which women entered into high-status jobs because of a certain sort of Soviet progressivism, but now hold those same jobs in such large numbers only because Russian society as a whole has lost this progressive momentum: popular attitudes have proved much more enduring than when the Bolsheviks came up with that hapless phrase "The woman is also a person", and now the status of the jobs into which women were promoted has gone from one extreme to the other. They remain there largely because of the low status of these positions.

I'm not necessarily sure cultural exchange is always worth it (I declined an invitation to a conference in Iran a few years ago), but if you're going to go ahead with it then you would do better to not blunder in there with a Besserwisser attitude and start telling your local hosts how to do things, especially if you have no knowledge of or interest in the history that led them to do things this way in the first place. Russia is part of a different cultural-historical sphere than the one familiar to most Hume Society members (it has had, to be sure, a prominent Westernizing elite since Peter the Great, and a proper Enlightenment for the elite under Catherine, which tend to obscure from view this deeper cultural difference at the popular level: during the Enlightenment, the 'people' were serfs). Yes, I know there is feminism in Russia, but I would argue that as in Catherine's era it is salon feminism, and that in everyday use the word has a fundamentally 'importny' (imported) ring to it, like, for that matter, 'jeans' or 'Coke'. Perhaps someday things will be different, but the change is not going to be quickened by a group of Western philosophers chastening their Russian hosts for not adhering to the norms that prevail at APA-sanctioned events. Moscow is out of that jurisdiction.

How It Actually Was

I seldom descend into the comments basements of the blogosphere: I figure if I have something to say, I might as well just say it here. But this morning I read a comment at another site (with which I am loosely affiliated) taking Richard Sorabji to task for his lampooning of Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam for their, let us say, creative uses of Aristotle. At issue was Sorabji's observation that Aristotle never read Descartes; the commenter suggested that this is no reason for a current philosopher to refrain from putting Aristotle and Descartes into conversation. Here is what I added to the discussion:

I'm with Sorabji. If this separates the history of philosophy from philosophy, so much the worse for philosophy. What historians of philosophy can do, like archaeologists or big-bang cosmologists, is to provide an ever more fine-grained and vivid picture of wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.

As in archeology and cosmology with their unique objectives, what this slow, massive project will eventually yield is a convergence on the truth about the range and bounds of human philosophical reflection. Picking and choosing, and putting dead philosophers into conversation with one another in an anachronistic way, is just a totally different game (and I'm tempted to emphasize game, in contrast with the earnest truth-seeking of let us say 'pure' history of philosophy). Sorabji knows about and values the once much-better-known science of Altertumswissenschaft, which saw the history of ancient philosophy anyway as part of a larger project that included palaeography, archaeology, philology, linguistics, etc. It yielded vastly more light on what Aristotle was up to than Nussbaum (save for her early work, such as the fine study of the De motu animalium) ever will.

Why care what Aristotle was actually up to? Because otherwise we might as well just invent a fictional mascot, Oristatle, say, and attribute whatever views we want to him. It is in this respect that 'pure' history of philosophy is realist, and all appropriationist forms of history of philosophy, whether 'analytic' or 'continental' (a trivial distinction with respect to this issue) are anti-realist.

On Seeing a Deer: A Postscript

I failed to mention in my recent reflections on the possibility of a cervidocentric theology that there is in fact a very important precedent for this approach in the history of philosophy. I am referring of course to Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a 12th-century Andalusian Arabic treatise describing the ascent of a human orphan raised on a deserted island by a motherly doe. The primal experience of her solicitude, the observation of the wisdom inscribed in her parts and in her actions, leads the boy gradually to certain knowledge of the truths of Divine creation.

Now as I've already said I'm wary of the need for such an ascent: I am perfectly content to simply stop and admire the doe. Yet I do think it highly significant that the author chose to start with precisely this animal. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the very word 'deer', cognate to the German 'Tier', may be understood to mean simply animal as such. There are animals that don't quite qualify for this generic status, in view of exceptional, often negative traits on top of their animality: they are loud, they eat meat, they eat garbage, they copulate in human view. But the deer is the silent plant-eater of the forest: elusive but without a trace of evil. God's perfect creature.

If Ibn Tufayl's orphan had been raised by an elephant, say, or a mongoose or a tapir, the God he ended up coming to know in the end might have looked very different indeed.

Divine Machines: An Interview at New APPS

Today is the first in a series of New APPS Interviews, which will run every Wednesday through the end of May, picking up again in September. 

Today's interview is with Justin E. H. Smith, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ from January through June 2011. His new book, Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life has just appeared with Princeton University Press (2011). 

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John Protevi: Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Justin.  Your book is subtitled “Leibniz and the Sciences and Life,” yet in the Introduction you also write that you will look at Leibniz in relation to "what we would now call 'biology'." Why the scare quotes on "biology"?

Justin Smith: I don't take those as scare quotes so much as marks signaling a use-mention distinction. One of my guiding principles in the book was, to the extent possible, to respect actors' categories, to avoid using names for concepts, practices, or entities that would not have been familiar to the people I was writing about; and 'biology', for example, makes its first appearance only in the late 18th century.

JP: fair enough. What is at stake in this use-mention distinction for you in writing in the genre of history of philosophy? (If that is indeed the genre in which you would place your work.)

JS: This is not just terminological quibbling: it is rather a necessary part of working one's way back into the problems that early modern philosophers faced, rather than allowing ourselves to update their problems so that they come out as more familiar to our own world of concerns than they in fact are. I certainly take this task to be a necessary and incontrovertible part of history-of-philosophy scholarship. The branch of philosophy that interests me is what was called at the time 'natural philosophy', which would later be sliced off and partitioned into biology, chemistry and other concrete 'sciences'. If we take actors' categories seriously, then, when we do the history of biology or chemistry we are willy-nilly doing the history of philosophy.

To continue reading, go here.

Philosophy of Religion Is a Fraud, But...

Right after typing out some of my recent reflexions on atheism, I came across this post at Religion Dispatches magazine, telling of a prominent philosopher of religion who has come to the conclusion that he has devoted his career to a subdiscipline that is in essence a fraud. Keith Parsons of the University of Houston is now abandoning this area of teaching and research (presumably to work on something else).

Is the philosophy of religion a fraud? As it is currently taught, yes, it most certainly is. It is, again, a huge waste of time to argue about the existence of God, not because both sides will stick stubbornly to their guns, but because this is not a universally meaningful question. We might as well be arguing about whether the Australian Aboriginal ritual object called a tjurunga is in fact responsible for impregnating Aboriginal women.

But as we might have predicted, one thing that Parsons does not consider is that, short of simply declaring a research program bankrupt, one might first consider whether there are not more fruitful approaches or more fitting methodologies for getting at the core of the thing that has long interested you. And here I just have to shake my head in amazement that my fellow philosophers seldom even notice the possibility of an ethnographic turn. Such a turn would make philosophy of religion into a data-driven, interpretive program, and thus it would parallel the turn currently being defended with some reason by advocates of the new, so-called 'experimental philosophy'. It would not ask, "Does God exist?" or "Is the soul immortal?", but rather "How does culture x's belief in such-and-such transcendent entity fit, logically and structurally, within that culture's universe of meanings?" When this task is accomplished, one can move on to cultures, y, z, and so on, and eventually come up with a schema for the universal parameters for the range of possible beliefs about some entity, say God or the soul, that is of interest to philosophers of religion.

Parsons is still beholden to that prime directive of philosophy (to which many x-phi advocates, at the cost of coherence, also remain committed), that "if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it." But this would mean that no one should devote serious attention to Australian Aboriginal theories of reproduction, and to my mind that would be to let something interesting and important fall off the academic agenda. Of course, when Parsons says 'serious academic attention' what he means is 'serious attention from academic philosophy', and one might reasonably ask whether the comparative and data-driven turn is not a turn away from philosophy (a similar question is being asked of x-phi advocates who are interested in psychology experiments).

My own inclination is to respond: who cares? As long as it gives better results, then why should we be afraid to cross disciplinary boundaries? But upon further reflection I also have to add that Durkheim and Mauss, for example, are also better philosophers than, say, John Hick or Louis Pojman. They are asking vastly more sophisticated questions, and using vastly more rigorous methodologies, to find answers to problems that they themselves recognize as emerging from the Western philosophical tradition.

The one great difference between the French comparative-religionists and the later philosophers of religion is that the former are perfectly willing to take seriously beliefs that they aren't considering adopting themselves. This is what philosophers simply can't do, as Parsons nicely demonstrates for us, and this limitation is the root cause of my estrangement from my own discipline (though the emergence of boundary-defying tendencies in academic philosophy in recent years, including experimental philosophy, does give me some hope that in the long run it will be worthwhile to stick around).

Ars longa, vita brevis

"Wide ass, white briefs." Years ago I might have offered up just such a translation of the Hippocratic motto that serves as our title and as our lesson. It would have been a wild guess, based on faint homophony. It would have been me bullshitting, as was my principal occupation for most of my early life.

Against all real evidence, I spent my adolescence so convinced of my own genius that I figured all I had to do was just ride along and watch a great life --my own-- unfold. From the third-person perspective, this would have appeared as laziness, and I suppose it was that, among other things. But it was also rooted in a peculiar perception of time, in particular of the relationship of the present to the future. The present, namely, seemed eternal, and therefore the future seemed wholly fictional. Art was long, but I had an eternal present in which to dally in anticipation of someday getting around to mastering it.

The first time I succesfully derived the conclusion to the syllogism that says all men are mortal, and moreover that I am a man --the first time it hit me, that is, what the real implication of putting that major and that minor premise together is--, my relationship to the future changed fundamentally. I can't isolate the moment, but at some point it all shifted, from dalliance to urgency, to getting it all into my head before the syllogism was carried through once and for all.

Yet astoundingly, even after I figured out I was mortal, the bullshitting continued. I continued to make great claims for myself, to assert expertise on whatever the subject at hand happened to be. I tried to keep a stock of two or three things to roll out for any topic whatsoever that might come up (two or three sufficed for the appearance of infinitude). If my limitations were ever found out, I could point beyond the topic at hand and insist that my expertise was somewhat elsewhere.

In some ways I can't help but feel that blogging is a continuation of this bad habit: I'm entirely in charge; I hit 'post' when I'm good and ready; before that I can consult Google to fill in any gaps. Like a mosquito that grows bright red and swollen by sucking the blood from a beast it could never fathom, I can now get my omniscience parasitically by sucking a drop here and there from that truly omniscient beast, the Internet.

I'm a mortal whose time is running out, who always imagined he'd be omniscient, and only belatedly realized he did not have an eternity in which to get there. I am a being torn between an impulse to real mastery born of fear of death (I have, after all, managed to learn a few things fairly well), and a tendency, born of early illusion, to rest content with vagary, approximation, and bullshit. Blogging came along at just the wrong time, and attempted to throw the fight in favor of that old bullshitting hooligan, whom it sees as its kind of fighter.

(Let me add at this point that the Internet, it has been commented, like Shiva, is both destroyer and giver at once. I don't doubt that great works of art will be, and may even now be in the process of being, launched from Typepad, and critics of the future will praise the brave young visionaries on whom tradition did not weigh, who felt no loyalty to the centuries of book-learning that for far too long defined what it is to be learned, eloquent, and profound. But I was built on the old model. There's nothing to be done about that now.)

As some readers will know I've recently begun a semester-long membership at a research institute in the United States, with a perfect library and seemingly boundless resources for the facilitation of intellectual advancement. This transplantation --the first extended period of time I will have spent in my native country since I moved to Canada in 2003-- has brought about in me an intense reflection on what I ought to be doing with myself, how I ought to be filling up my limited time, to what ends, and why. If life has been at various moments and in various combinations devoted to pleasure, posturing, and projects, it is as if of late it has streamlined itself into only the last of these: life as pure project.

Having projects suited to a finite creature means, in part, giving up omniscience as an end. That can be left to the omniscience-prosthesis, without resentment, and without a jealous desire to masquerade as it, to pull off a pointless imitation of the mechanical repository of all knowledge. But there still are bodies of knowledge to master: Sanskrit, something of the history of astronomy, more of the cognitive-science literature, the theoretical treatment of abductive inference, for example. (I've got what experts in the art of back-handed compliments like to call an 'ambitious' book that I'm writing; and I will write it.) This is what I am proposing to myself to do, in a very earnest way, for the next little while.

This will involve something of a separation from the electronic media that have so taken over my experience of daily life (just today I was invited to participate, apparently as an expert, in a psychiatrists' conference on addiction and the Internet! More details on this soon). I will not promise to abandon jehsmith.com altogether, but you can at least expect to see fewer posts here from now until midsummer, and the posts you do see here will be more clearly anchored, I hope, as fragments of a long-term project, in the subjects --besides that old fallback subject, the self-- in which I like to claim expertise.

I remember years ago --perhaps right around the time I learned that fatal syllogism-- meeting older scholars who spoke earnestly of just wanting to finish this or that study of this or that obscure philosopher before the inevitable recrudescence of the tumor for which they'd just been treated. I thought: My God. So this is what a life comes to. And it is, and the most famous among mortals adjust themselves to that fate while there's still time.

Towards a Real Archaeology of Knowledge

The insistence we often hear in recent years that there is no longer any divide between analytic and continental philosophers always sounds to me like a paradigm case of protesting-too-much. There is at the very least something the existence of which it makes sense to deny, call it what you will, even though we agree that the positive research program of analytic philosophy has been dead for at least 40 years, and that 'continental' philosophy is in fact overwhelmingly états-unienne.

Brian Leiter thinks that this something is really just a difference of quality, with 'analytic' standing in for 'high quality' and 'continental' for 'low'. [Note: The irony of writing sous rature at such a moment is not lost on me, but Brian has been in touch to express disagreement with my characterization of his view, so I would like to try again to give a more adequate account of it. What he does believe, I hope I can say, is that the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the principal organization committed to promoting what is generally called 'continental philosophy' in North America, is an organization committed to the promotion of bad philosophy (a relevant quotation from Brian: "There's an entire professional organization, SPEP, which champions bad work on and inspired by the Continental traditions in philosophy." However, Brian also holds to the view I mentioned in the first paragraph, that the distinction between the two schools is a meaningless one, and that much good work is done on Continental traditions in philosophy, just not, generally, by those working under the umbrella of SPEP. These views taken together do not seem all that different from the view I initially attributed to Brian: that the people who --rightly or wrongly-- organize themselves under the banner of 'Continental' philosophy tend to be doing bad philosophy, quite apart from any consideration of whether they ought to be organizing themselves in this way or claiming this label for themselves. Whatever they are called, Brian thinks they are doing bad philosophy. Moreover, most people call them 'continental' philosophers. Brian evidently thinks it's regrettable that this is how they are called, and on this we are in agreement.]

Now back to the scheduled programming. At times I've maintained that the distinction is entirely institutional and sociological, and that it is getting things backwards to focus on internal doctrinal differences as the cause of the rift. But on further reflection it now seems to me most just to return to Thomas Nagel's old characterization (and I do not recall precisely where this occurs) of the difference as resulting from the typical orientation of the pre-philosophical educations of analytic and continental philosophers-in-the-making, with analytic philosophers frequently coming from a background in the natural sciences (or at least from a background that inculcated appreciation of the natural sciences), and continental philosophers coming from a background in the more poetic or expressive corners of the humanities.

If this account is correct, it follows that the rift needs to be understood as a symptom of a much more general problem, that it is just one instance of the famous two-cultures problem, rather than an internal affair of philosophy departments alone. If the local rift is to be closed, then, perhaps this might best be brought about not by the definitive triumph of the science-oriented philosophers over the literature-oriented ones (which is to say of the good over the bad, or, which amounts the same, of the high-status over the low-status), but rather by a vastly more significant reconciliation of the natural and the human sciences, one that takes seriously the old conception of the humanities as sciences (or Wissenschaften in the broad sense), and thus that accepts that the humanities and the natural sciences are two different but often overlapping branches of the same general project.

The scientific character of the humanities is something, it seems to me, that remained clear until the middle of the 20th century, at which point numerous factors --from the math-and-physics elitism of scientifically oriented analytic philosophers to the suspicion of 'grand narratives' characteristic of poststructuralism and deconstruction-- began to hasten a split. As a lucid transdepartmental thinker such as Immanuel Wallerstein is able to recognize, this is a split that would not have made any sense not only to Aristotle, but even to Kant, as late as the end of the 18th century. In Wallerstein's view, the split is an artefact of the triumph of classical liberalism, which artificially divides the natural from the human, as well as subdividing the human into the political, the economic, and the socio-cultural. Given that the era of the dominance of liberal thought appears to be drawing to a close, Wallerstein thinks --and I very much concur--, perhaps it is time to hasten a new Streit der Facultäten that will issue in a new way of organizing the study of humanity and its place in nature.

I believe that in setting about this task, we would do well to pay close attention to the way the artificial split between the natural and the human impacts the organization of the various branches of the study of the past. This is not just because I myself am professionally interested in the past, but also because I believe that it is in large part a remnant of skeptical worries about the non-scientific character of the study of any non-repeatable past events or even of any uniformitarian processes, the same skepticism that led Popper to call evolutionary theory a 'metaphysical research programme', that has led to the bracketing as hopelessly non-scientific of the humanities in general, lean heavily on the past, as they do, to the extent that the study of human culture is inescapably the study of human tradition. 

It has been a long time since Popper put forth such a hard line for philosophers of science, and discriminators of non-science, to toe. Since then (and even at that time, to be fair), much work has been done to secure for the study of past, non-repeatable events the status, more than honorary, of science. Mutatis mutandis, much of what has been argued in the case of evolutionary biology applies equally well to the study of deep human history: prehistoric migration patterns and so on. There is a rich consilience of inductions, as well as rigorous models tested both by computer and in real-world case studies, of how, say, the New World was first populated. Yet in matters pertaining to the development of aspects of culture we often find members of the academy taking up the very same position creationists take relative to evolution: dismissing it as 'just a theory' or, to use their slightly more elevated language, dismissing the attempts of people in centers of power to explain this or that aspect of an indigenous culture, even a culture that has been extinct for millennia, as just more of the 'hegemonic discourse'. This is the humanities effectively declining to be taken seriously, the humanities refusing to be the human sciences.

Foucault spoke metaphorically of an 'archaeology of knowledge', but it seems to me that what this misses is that archaeology already was itself the archaeology of knowledge, which consisted in the digging up, analyzing, and interpreting of fragments of material cultures past, some of which had writing on them (e.g., Greek columns) and some of which did not (e.g., Neanderthal burial mounds). Through sophisticated modelling and induction I do not see why from fragments of material culture one should not be able to construct hypotheses about the beliefs, the 'epistemologies', of people far removed in time. Writing makes this task a great deal easier, but even there it is often very hard, and much of what might controversially be described as proto-writing (Babylonian clay tablets, Mayan pictographs, etc.) stands at least as much in need of interpretation as, say, the layout of a village ruin.

No one has done a more thorough job of spelling out the scientific epistemology of archaeology than Alison Wylie (see in particular her Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, University of California Press, 2002). She reveals an endeavor that is  thoroughly scientific, even if it does not conform to all the standards of paradigmatic scientificity set by physics and revered by early analytic philosophers. It studies something non-repeatable (so do evolutionary biology and big-bang cosmology), though it is nonetheless falsifiable in just the same way the other sciences of the past are (as a fossil rabbit from the Pre-Cambrian would have caused J. B. S. Haldane, so he said, to abandon his commitment to evolution), and also built upon countless domains of inquiry whose status as science are perfectly secure (e.g., the chemical analysis of soil).

In its indifference to the distinction between textuality and non-textuality --it digs things up and 'reads' them, whether they have letters written on them or not-- archaeology provides a model of the sort of approach to the human sciences that I believe could greatly help to overcome their estrangement from the natural sciences. Archaeology as traditionally conceived --before post-processualism came in and destroyed its scientific aspirations in exactly the same way that post-structuralism destroyed the aspirations of anthropology, and deconstruction the aspirations of textual studies-- cannot fail to see human culture as a particular kind of natural excrescence, one that eventually sinks back into the earth and intermingles again with the stuff of nature against which it set itself up in opposition for a short while. In this sense, unlike the academic discipline of history as currently conceived, archaeology cannot set up a buffer zone out of the non-textual human past ('prehistory') that preserves a distance between the proper domain of the humanists, on the one hand, and on the other hand the natural world studied by 'scientists'. If we abandon the prejudice that textual traces are a uniquely special sort of vestige of the human past, then palaeography may be conceived in turn as as a particular branch of archaeology: the kind that deals with inscriptions on paper and in similar media.

This sort of palaeography --the study, through weighing, comparing, analyzing, and interpreting of a certain kind of cultural trace, one that requires a special sort of expertise, even if it is not fundamentally different in character from the study of burial mounds or architectural ruins-- should, I think, be the basis of what we call broadly 'textual studies'. In this connection I applaud Franco Moretti, and I see at least glimmers of real reason for optimism in the more popular attempts at bringing natural science to bear on the study of art and literature (e.g., Denis Dutton), as well as in some of the current enthusiasm about a digital revolution in the humanities. Literature should be anchored in quantitative analysis and in palaeography, which should in turn be seen as a branch of archaeology, which should, finally, be seen as a scientific discipline that seeks at bottom to place human culture in the natural world. Scholars in this field should be ever on the look-out for their equivalent of a Pre-Cambrian rabbit fossil: a shred of physical evidence from the past that would disconfirm our received understanding of how some idea or style developed and was transmitted.

The history of philosophy, on this approach, would be the archaeology of one small subset of one particular kind of material traces left from the past. This branch of study would require special training in order to develop the ability to recognize a certain kind of subtle thoughts from a certain sort of traces, but it would not be fundamentally different from the study of other such traces, and would be no less neglectful of the holistic and environmental forces that went into shaping them. That would be a real archaeology of knowledge, and it would take us a long way towards solving the two-cultures problem (of which the analytic-continental rift is a local symptom).

The History of Philosophy as the History of Bean-Counting

I've argued before that in their floundering around the question as to whether there is such a thing as non-Western philosophy, academic philosophers in the English-speaking world appear unable to decide whether their activity should be understood more on the model of a tradition of, say, dance (e.g., ballet) or, instead, on the model of a technology (e.g., the military use of gunpowder).

It would be nonsensical to ask why the Papuans do not have ballet: they do not have it because it is a regional tradition (incidentally, this seems to be roughly the way Saul Bellow was thinking of the tradition of the novel in literature when he noted that there is no Tolstoy among the Zulus). Correlatively, it would be no less nonsensical to ask why the Somalians ended up incorporating firearms into their society with such zeal. They did so because guns are useful for killing people, or for getting what you want from them by threat of force. To put it bluntly, guns have a place in every culture, in view of their immense usefulness in the advancement of what appears to be a universal human end. This is a usefulness, moreover, that it does not take gun-less cultures all that long to figure out (it's said that when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1534, Huron men ran out to greet the ship, signalling from shore that they would like to trade furs for guns: this on what official history tells us was the first European expedition in this region).  It doesn't matter what eventual ceremonies a given culture will build up around its guns (sergeants-at-arms, twenty-one-gun salutes, Constitutional mythology, stuff like that), the primary application of firepower will remain everywhere the same.

If philosophy were like gunpowder, there would be no question as to its reach: everyone would share in it equally. If philosophy were like ballet, there would also be no question as to why everyone does not share in it equally. My own strong suspicion is that philosophy is rather more like ballet, but perhaps a better comparison, one that keeps the example of military technology in view, would be to say that philosophy is not like the technology itself of war, but more like a particular military tradition that grows up around the use of weapons and the preparation for war, and involves the pinning of medals, the reference to great battles and strategies of the past, and so on.

In the case of martial pageantry, it is clear what the more basic thing is around which the tradition springs up (in the case of ballet, there is also clearly a more basic thing, dance, which in turn appears to be something humans qua humans do, about which see Ezra Zubow and Elizabeth C. Blake, "The Origin of Music and Rhythm" in Archaeoacoustics, ed. Chris Scarre and Graeme Lawson, Cambridge, 2006, 117-126). But what would that more basic thing be, in the case of philosophy? I suspect it is what is often called bean-counting: the tallying of exchanges (of cattle, grain, etc.) by use of pebbles in bowls, of marks on clay tablets, and so on. Wherever we have traces of this sort of activity, we have concrete evidence of a sort of representational thinking (one pebble stands for one cow, etc.) that we can rightly suppose to be just the small report of a more elaborate system of classifications, of setting up correspondences, and of seeking adequate definitions.

Wherever you have people keeping track of things in this way, I mean, you probably have people trying to come to terms with the nature of the things they are keeping track of. A charitable assessment of what the ancients were up to would have us suppose that wherever there is a trace of a culture trying to keep track of the world for practical purposes (navigation, calendry, etc.), there is something like a 'science', however different from our own: a theoretical elaboration of the grounds of the practice. And I really don't know what philosophy could be other than the very most theoretical reach of this elaboration.

You can insist that it must, in addition and at a minimum, involve reflection on the grounds of knowledge of the science, rather than just on the grounds of the science itself, that it must, that is, centrally involve epistemology. But this is a very recent expectation, one that goes against the primary meaning of the term in question until at least the middle of the 18th century. On some issues, I'm a conservative, and I simply think it's wrong to neglect the meaning of a term that has accrued over millennia for the sake of accommodating recent trends. What's more, the possibility should not be excluded that even epistemology is rooted in the sort of processes I am describing. Recent work by Michael Friedman --who represents par excellence the sort of orientation with which I am sympathizing here-- has made a convincing case, in more steps than I am able to mention, for tracing the Kantian theory of space and time as pure forms of intuition back to certain exigencies of medieval astronomy, which in the final analysis existed for the sake of calendry, which in turn had as its principal purpose the determination of the proper date of Easter and similar exigencies of culture.

Much as scientists studying prehistoric human migration patterns have taken an interest in the biogeographical consequences of the European conquest of the New World, it might be useful to think about more recent developments in bean-counting, and of their relationship to modern epistemology and (perhaps) metaphysics, as providing an example of a more general process. I have in mind in particular the well-studied relationship between innovations in early modern accountancy on the one hand and modern ideas about certainty, probability and doubt on the other (see Hacking's Emergence of Probability for the grand theory, and the sundry studies by Daston et al. for the more narrow investigation of the theory's ramifications). This recent history could perhaps serve as a more accessible model in reference to which one might speculate about, say, the basically trace-less epistemology behind Babylonian clay tablets.

Of course, many in the discipline would see such 'genealogical' work as a threat to the integrity of the discipline, since it seeks to ground philosophical reflection in something that is both more foundational but also much more mundane. But one seldom noticed benefit of such an approach is that it entirely resolves the problem of the global distribution of philosophy: philosophy tends to appear where there is science, and science appears where there are urban settlements with complex and wide-scoped administrative projects. India and China, but not the Kalahari Desert or Greenland.

An adequate approach to the history of philosophy, then, would take India and China into account, not because we are interested in 'the Eastern mind' or some such racist drivel as that, but because these civilizations were sufficiently like the one that has until now been the principal focus of our attention to expose as groundless any claims of Western uniqueness. An adequate scholarly approach would defend global history of philosophy against comparative history of philosophy: an approach that sees philosophy as an outgrowth of a certain kind of sociocultural arrangement, rather than as a divine spark sent down to Greece long ago (with various dimmer sparks cast, perhaps by mistake, to negatively characterized 'non-European peoples'), and passed on from there, through a few intermediaries, to Rutgers and NYU.

Thoughts Occasioned (in Part) by the Closure of the French Department at SUNY-Albany

I never know what I'm supposed to be paying attention to when I go to the symphony. In general, wherever I go, I lapse all too easily into sociology, and I start thinking about the posture and the haircuts and the accents of people around me when what I'm supposed to be doing is listening to what they're saying. But at the symphony, where I know so little about what is really at stake, where I am so unskilled in making that judgment learned audiences so love to make as to whether or not the evening's interpretation is a successful one, my reversion to sundry reflexions on anything and everything but the music is almost automatic.

Most recently, I found myself watching Anne-Sophie Mutter playing a violin piece composed specially for her by Sophia Gubaidulina. It was good. I liked it. If anyone was 'off' that evening, I certainly didn't notice, but this may be because I was preoccupied with all sorts of ridiculous and improbable thought experiments, one of which is still with me days later. I tried to imagine, namely, what it would be like if, somehow, I was sent out on stage with a violin in my hands. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. The internal wiring of my body --the neurons and the nerves and the muscles-- simply has not been configured so as to enable me to even pretend for a second that I can play a violin. But look at Anne-Sophie Mutter's body. Is it so different? It is a woman's body, but it is not in respect of that difference that she is a violinist and I am not. Where is the difference, then? The difference, obviously, is in the way we were shaped and tenderized over the years. Her violinist-body and my slouching, contemplative, wholly non-musical body were shaped throughout the course of many years of handling, of dressage.

Now we're getting close to what I actually wanted to talk about: not music, but the humanities, and the state of higher education in general. There is, at this point, nothing we in the humanities can ask students to do that is analogous to what must be asked of anyone who hopes to follow in the footsteps of Anne-Sophie Mutter. We cannot say to students: "Welcome. We are here to rewire your neurons. We are here to completely transform you from the inside so that everything you do with your body (and mind, but that's an afterthought), every sensation and minute experience you have of your own capacities, will be entirely foreign from what you now know." Increasingly, in fact, universities are clamoring to assure students that no such transformation will take place. They promise that they will complement the students' already-existing strong points, fit themselves into the students' busy schedules, speak to what the students already know, and so on. Many universities have by now practically adopted as their slogan: Come join us! No transformation required.

Foreign-language instruction is the one area of the humanities where the promise of non-transformation is difficult to keep, and I believe it is in this connection that we need to understand the rapid disappearance of departments of foreign languages and literatures throughout the English-speaking world (the case of French --not to mention Russian!-- at SUNY being just the most recent of many examples). If there is an argument in defense of eliminating these programs, it is that they were at this point only vestigial anyway: it's been a long time since anyone came out of a BA degree in French who was able, as a result of the course of studies for which the degree was the reward, to actually speak French. To expect students to master a foreign language would be precisely to have a design upon the wiring of their brains, but such a design would entirely go against the trend, now fully dominant across the humanities, of creating, for every course, a parallel universe of so-called 'learning objectives', where the singular and obvious objective of a course cannot be mentioned, and instead one must speak vaguely of enhancing critical thinking skills, nurturing confidence in public speaking, learning to collaborate with others through small-group work, etc. But obviously the only legitimate learning objective of, say, a Greek course is to learn Greek. Once that basic commitment is abandoned, real education in letters is doomed.

Foreign-language programs were, I mean to say, the anchor of the humanities, but it is not only since the recent economic crisis and the massive closure of these programs that we have been adrift. The institutional changes that made these programs irrelevant and ineffective occurred during boom times, and in particular during a time when universities came to realize they could get in on the boom by catering to students as if they were customers, adapting themselves to the 'learning styles' and degrees of motivation of potential tuition-payers. Soon enough, classics departments were spinning out parallel degree programs in 'classical studies', where --following the general rule in academia according to which 'studies' implies dilution, corner-cutting, and compromise-- students could now get degrees by taking courses about daily life in ancient Rome, say, without having to learn any Latin at all.

I will not run through the argument here that it was not the humanization of the university, but rather the corporatization, that brought these changes about. What I want to suggest is just that it is not only cost-cutting in difficult times that has brought about such a dire situation for the humanities. Humanities programs are dying off in this desert into which we've all strolled because they were already weakened by the junk-food diet they adopted while still in their old and bountiful habitat. Faculty members, who did not share the financial incentives of the people whose interests were served by scams such as 'classical studies', nonetheless were complicit, since they held onto the inherited belief that the replacement of learning by 'learning objectives' was a part of the democratic opening up of higher education to all members of society.

I want to suggest also that it is not just language and literature programs that have been seriously damaged by the changes I've described, but indeed all of the humanities. When I say that foreign-language training is the anchor of the humanities, I mean it anchors, or ought to anchor, disciplines apparenty as independent of it as philosophy and history. There is a wonderful model of education that will be familiar to anyone who has read about the Little Russian monasteries in Gogol's stories, and that also existed in classical India and in the Islamic world. In the Byzantine version of it depicted by Gogol, schoolboys pass through four stages: first they are 'grammarians', then 'rhetoricians', then 'philosophers', and, finally, 'theologians'. This seems to me pretty much the proper order of things (leaving off, perhaps, the ultimate stage). In the Indian tradition, claiming to be a master of any of the darshanas or doctrines without first demonstrating a deep, thorough, intimate mastery of the elements of phonetics, grammar, and prosody (and I mean a real mastery, comparable to what enables Anne-Sophie Mutter to do what she does with her violin), would be simply absurd. Without mastery of language, a student trying to spin out ideas is like me trying desperately to scrape a few notes from a stringed instrument. Potentially, that mastery could simply be of English, just as the pandits gave their exclusive attention to Sanskrit. But students today are permitted to remain nearly as estranged from the inner workings of their own native tongue as they are from the foreign languages they were expected until recently to at least sample.

Again, if there is any argument in favor of the decision recently made at SUNY, it is only that foreign-language instruction is already so much decayed, and so out of step with the institutional culture of 'learning objectives', that pulling the plug was a natural conclusion to a process that began long ago. But how much more hopeful it would have been (and may still be, if not in Albany) to see the humanities re-anchor themselves, and to return, against the tide of academic corporatization that first made foreign-language instruction irrelevant, to the old expectation of real transformation. 

--

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A Conversation

DHS Agent Baca: “What is the purpose of your trip?”

Me: “I’m going to Indiana University in Bloomington. You know, Hoosiers?”

Baca: “What will you be doing there?”

Me: “I’ll be delivering a paper.”

Baca: “What is the value of the paper?”

Me: “Oh, it’s incalculable.”

Baca: “Sir, if you’re delivering paper in the United States, I’ll need to know the value of it.”

Me: “Well, I suppose the paper itself is worth next to nothing.”

Baca: “Sir, what kind of paper salesman are you?”

A Comment on the 3QD Philosophy Prize

Damn it! Why did I have to win the philosophy prize?! If I had won the Top Quark for political blogging, I would have made straightaway to the hot-tub store and put a down payment on a DreamJet Deluxe. As it is, I have to admit I'm a bit embarrassed. I am not an amateur of philosophy, but rather someone who earns his living at it; I am not a student, and not, except in a very conflicted way, a philosophy blogger.

Allow me to reflect for a moment on these distinctions. When I started ‘blogging’ (and I only admitted that this is what I was doing about a year ago), I did so precisely to be able to indulge a side of my personality apart from my career as an academic philosopher: a side that is free to say things without arguing for them, to be satirical rather than sincere, to appeal to rhetoric, emotion, phantasy, eros, and all the other subterfuges my tradition seeks to keep in check.

In 2005, when www.jehsmith.com first went up, all this was rather easier to do. But increasingly blogging is coming to be an important part of the academic profiles of a certain species of young professors. Group blogs are, more and more, important vehicles for conferring prestige, and I see no reason why in the near future they should not be the makers or breakers of careers. Relatedly, many younger academics are sculpting for themselves an online profile that really does nothing more than supplement their research profiles. For better or for worse, it is too late for me to follow that model: I have let off five years worth of irrelevant, unprofessional, sometimes compromising steam into the intertubes, and sometimes I fear that the principal result has been a general fogging up of my professional identity.

But like pretty much everything one chooses to do, it closes off some possibilities, even as it opens up other ones. Winning this prize, in the ‘philosophy’ category, brings me, willy-nilly, a bit closer to the respectable, career-complementing variety of blogging I initially eschewed. It’s always gratifying to win a prize, and as long as I'm going to win one, the silver hairs now sprouting on my back are tickled that it is the ‘top’ one. It’s especially gratifying to win this prize, this year, given that a previous interaction in this space had led me to believe that the contest’s judge was likely to be unsympathetic to my opinions. I supposed this all the more in this instance, since the post that was nominated (against my wishes) happened to be written in my usual brusque manner on a topic I knew to be close to the judge’s heart. I am grateful that he gave my modest little essay a clear-eyed read, and found what I had to say compelling.

Still, I cannot, under the circumstances, accept the prize money (again, damn!). What I propose to do instead is to turn it into a fellowship for a deserving graduate student at my institution. I will be investigating the formalities of doing this once I have returned to Montreal next week from my Middle American conference junket. 

--Covington, Kentucky

No Sexual Intercourse?

I really like the Cognition and Culture people. If there is anywhere out there a school of thought with which I would want to claim agreement, this is almost certainly it. As I see it, they represent a tradition that develops out of certain key points defended by Chomsky, and disputed by Foucault, in their famous debate of 1971. They defend the view that cultural difference amounts to a set of relatively superficial variations on universal features of human social and biological reality. A key corollary of this is that for them there is nothing terribly peculiar or aberrant or fallen about the past few hundred years of Western modernity. Mental illness is not new, 'man' is not new, the perception of human 'racial' variation is not new, even if there are interesting ways in which people began talking about these things at the onset of the modern era. What the Cognition and Culture people want to study are the features of the socially situated human mind that underlie and precede these new ways of talking. I'm with them, so far.

But I'm rather put off by the intellectual jockeying, so familiar from the narrower intradepartmental squabbles of the philosophers, by which they attempt to cordon off the legitimate intellectual pursuits from the illegitimate ones. I was vividly struck by this in a post  some months ago from Pascal Boyer. Here he describes much French philosophy and psychology of the 20th century as relying on crude and disingenuous 'bait-and-switch' tactics. They tell you something radical, as that before the modern period there was no such thing as 'man', but then when you push them on it they hedge and backtrack, concede that their initial point is true only if properly understood, etc. This is indeed a familiar and wearying tactic. But I wonder whether it gives us sufficient reason to simply shut out what the baiters-and-switchers are saying.

Boyer takes as his central example Jacques Lacan's famous enigma: il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, translating it as 'there is no sexual intercourse'. This sounds absurd indeed, but an important first step towards demystifying it might be to give a translation of it that is not willfully misleading. It seems to me a vastly preferable rendering would have been 'there is no sexual relation'.

Now I have no idea what Lacan actually meant, but I do think that, when accurately translated and assessed quite apart from its dubious source, this claim is an interesting one: it does not mean that there is no genital contact between human beings, but rather that the experience of this contact is not fundamentally relational: the presence of the other could be simulated, with exactly the same brain states and subjective experience on the part of the one real human being involved. This seems to me not unrelated to the very interesting experiments with android-like dolls in Japanese rest homes (to cite just one example): solitary elderly people are made happier when they are talked to by dolls programmed to say the sort of things their deceased partners used to say. Do the elderly people take the dolls for genuine others, with whom they can have a rapport? No, and that's what's interesting: we have evidence that our emotional contact with people can be simulated, can be induced in the mind/brain without any real contact. We turn out to be fairly monadic, as many philosophers in the past have had compelling reason to hold. In fact, il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel may be understood as following from a more general metaphysical claim to which Leibniz himself did not object: il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, car il n'y a pas de rapports du tout (the fact that in his case it was true in a more literal sense might have contributed to his eventual monadism, but that will have to be a subject for another occasion).

Is this what Lacan meant? Again, I don't know, but I suspect it's not entirely unrelated, and I insist it's interesting. This makes me think that Boyer has missed an important tertium quid in his approach to the advancement of learning, between discipleship and hostility. Yes, we should call bullshitters by their real name, but we should also read bullshitters, as time permits, because they might inadvertently say something interesting, or at least cause us to think something interesting ourselves. This is obviously the proper methodology when approaching, say, 17th-century natural philosophy, where the work of goldmakers, physiognomists, and astrologers is just as likely to reveal what was at stake in the central debates of the period as is the work of the thinkers (and there weren't very many of them) who managed to steer clear of these confusions. Why should we treat our own era any differently? Time constraints, you might say, and that is fair enough, but then there's something very odd about the categorical (and time-consuming) denunciations of all the stuff the defenders of proper science don't have time to read.

The Taylor Affair, Continued

However glorious it is to bask in a rare moment of Leiter-conferred legitimacy, noblesse oblige that I finish the job I began in an earlier post by confessing that my distaste for American Derrideanism in no way implies sympathy for the Derrideans' usual enemies.

Much like Leibniz, who insisted that the fact that he was not a physician freed him up to call it like he saw it in debates about the source of vital heat, animal motion, etc., without having to worry about where this positioned him vis-à-vis the prevailing positions of the medical establishment, so too I see my total lack of any stake in toeing the analytic or the continental party line as freeing me up to say whatever I like about any and all dogmas of academic philosophy. My own opinion as to what is the right approach to philosophy is so completely marginal that I am quite certain virtually no one on either side of the divide has ever even thought of it. (Briefly, I think of philosophy as the history of philosophy, and I believe this should be approached as a branch of history itself, by employing the best scientific methods of paleography and philology, complemented by a thorough interest in social and economic history, demography, climatology, etc. I agree with experimental philosophers that philosophy should be approached scientifically, but it is different sciences, whose scientificity has largely been forgotten since the early 20th century, that interest me most.)

Given the marginality of my approach to philosophy, and the hyper-narrowness of my primary research domain (I believe that there are universes in grains of sand, as the saying goes, and it is for this reason that I believe that dissertations on citation techniques in Duns Scotus and whatever else Mark C. Taylor wants to get rid of are very much worth defending), I am perhaps more sensitive than some to the tendency of scholars in our field to inflate their own line of research into something much more important than it actually is. What irks me about expressions like 'attempting to think after Hegel' is that they take the contingent research path down which a scholar has gone --by, let us be honest, a combination of both interest and, as it were, thrownness-- to have much more of an epochal character than it could possibly have.

I've joked recently that I am 'attempting to think after Ralph Cudworth'. This is obviously a joke, whereas one can still say the same thing about Hegel in the loftiest of tones. But what is the difference? Perhaps it's that Hegel is just a more profound thinker than Cudworth. But perhaps also it's that the contingent absence of any community of neo-Cudworthians forces scholars working on the True Intellectual System to be much more modest about the project they are engaged in. But why are there neo-Hegelians, or people working in the wake of Hegel, coming to terms with his legacy, etc., while there are no such people coming to terms with Cudworth? I would submit that this has more to do with their respective reception histories than with the actual content of their work. History could have gone differently: Cudworthianism could have been a prominent current of thought, or even an official state ideology. History shows that eager disciples have managed to do more with less.

I am reminded here of one of Rorty's funnier lines. Commenting somewhere on the works cited by Heidegger in Being and Time, the obscure academic dissertations from late-19th and early-20th-century Germany,  he notes that it is surprising that Being should choose to hew so close to the syllabus. That is, anyone with even a bit of a sense of the contingency of the tradition in which they are working will recognize that they are not telling you about Being itself, or Spirit itself, or Truth itself, but only providing running commentary on the readings with which they are familiar. It is only familiarity with these readings that makes 'thinking after so-and-so' difficult, rather than any real epochal change that so-and-so brought about. Still worse when the epochal change is held to have occurred not just in the way people conceptualize reality, but in reality itself, in the unfolding of absolute Spirit.

Now the original post was criticized by some for being ad hominem. But it seems to me that this would only be a fair criticism if what I claimed to be doing in the post was assessing the internal rationale of claims made by Derrida or Taylor. But this is not what I was doing. I was talking about the social context of French academic philosophy in the late 20th century, and of its influence on the American intellectual scene. This is not so much ad hominem as it is de hominibus, and I really don't know what would be left to say about social history of any sort if one respected a ban on any mention of homines. I believe, with Steven Shapin, that philosophy, like science, can be studied "as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture and society, and struggling for credibility and authority." If it is possible to look at Robert Boyle in that light, why not Jacques Derrida? To suggest that such a thing is possible says nothing about the merit of the work of these authors, and the persistent tendency of philosophers to think that studying their leading figures in a Shapinesque way automatically amounts to a judgment about their ideas shows the great extent to which philosophy remains Whiggish in its historiography and Idealist about the sources of its ideas.

Now I did remark that these social factors influence the style of some French philosophy, and this might have seemed like a judgment as to its value. But again, I don't think there is anything sacrilegious about exposing the social factors influencing the production even of philosophical works I admire, so simply to say that such and such factors are visible in the production of a work such as Glas is not necessarily to dismiss it. It is simply to take it as something other than a production of pure genius.

To the extent that I am perfectly happy to see philosophy as a culture-bound activity, I don't think there is anything wrong with looking for the extra-academic sources of philosophical trends, and in the French case we will generally have to look to different domains of culture than in the American case. Quine has no secret debt to Jackson Pollock, while in France there is a long history of influence from the aesthetic avant-garde to establishment philosophy. A good example of such influence in the pre-post-structural era is Ferdinand Alquié's 1955 Philosophie du surréalisme, which evidently André Breton greeted lukewarmly, for the obvious reason that he did not want to see his embrace of absurdity translated into even a quasi-rational system of thought. Now such domestication is not necessarily a bad thing, but my personal preference is for the littérateurs who have no venerated social position to guard. I'll take the outlaw and the cut-throat, thanks (even in the knowledge that this reputation is in large part the result of self-mythologizing).

I confess that when I attempt to read Derrida, the experience is that of looking into the goings-on inside a very private club, yet at the same time there is a prior expectation that, because this is philosophy and not (just) literature, I am not supposed to be experiencing it in this way, but rather as universal. I recently picked up On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy, and found Derrida reflecting on the proximity to his own body, at some point in the past, of his colleague's various meatuses. I felt like I was interrupting something. As haughty and pompously authoritative as their work can be, this is an impression one never gets when reading analytic philosophers. Their work is meant to be universally relevant, and it is meant to be read by strangers. I can't look at a text like On Touching and not come away with the impression that its author was writing for a very intimate circle, one that shares the same values and manners and registers of speech, and that quite a bit will inevitably be lost in any attempt at cultural or linguistic translation.

I strongly suspect, again, that this difference has something to do with the cultural role of the philosophy professor in France. I certainly recognize that French philosophers have produced much of great interest, and I recognize that Derrida is just one special microbrew within French philosophy ('bottled for export', as has been suggested). Nowhere in my original post did I dismiss French philosophy wholesale. But I do think that there is an institutional tendency towards insularity and, relatedly, towards the preservation of the cohesion of the insular group through an exclusive way of talking. This is, again, not my own original observation, and it is one that is not made exclusively or even primarily by analytic Americans who prefer "straight shootin'." It is a point made at length by Pierre Bourdieu in his Homo academicus.

If anything, I had in fact thought I was being fairly sympathetic to French philosophy in my original post, even if the excerpts that were found fit for display on the Leiter blog did not communicate this. What I in fact think is that even if the cultural position occupied by the philosopher in France tends to lead towards insularity, it is preferable that a society protect and value its philosophers, than that they be reduced to behaving like free-market agents without any loyalties, which is closer to the truth about the American model of academia, and all the more so in the era of the downsizing of the humanities, the closure of unprofitable departments and programs, and the various threats to the institution of tenure.

Now we come, finally, again, to Mark C. Taylor, who in my opinion has combined the worst of both worlds: a career of obscurantism, capped off by the ultimate gesture of disloyalty to the institution that made it all possible. Again, I believe this provides a vivid illustration of the distance between French theory's American incarnation and the rarefied intellectual scene from which it derives. If French theory is primarily an American phenomenon, while French philosophy itself remains much richer, subtler, and diverse than this one thin thread of it reveals, this is perhaps because, as one commenter sharply noted, paraphrasing an article he recalls having read in the now defunct, aptly named Lingua Franca, "it was perhaps inevitable that the philosophy of the endless deferral of meaning should find its most receptive audience in the land of the junk bond, the leveraged buyout, and the pyramid scheme, where the bottom line reads 'Break this chain of signifiers and you die'." It seems to me that the transition from author of Altarity to advocate for the dismantling of tenure parallels the economic history of the past few decades in America all too well: a bubble burst by false promises, and those who were once so busy inflating it now making off with whatever they can get for themselves. At a moment like this, I would prefer to see a degree of guild loyalty, even if that required us all to converse in our own sort of insider cant.

Descartes' Cure for Constipation

What follows is a remedy that René Descartes apparently used and recorded in July, 1628, in order to relieve a trouble du transit intestinal. I have often said, only half-jokingly, that an alternative history of philosophy could be written by focusing upon the preoccupations of the canonical thinkers throughout history with the state of their own bowels, from the Pythagorean interdiction on beans to Nietzsche's claim (which I endorse) that "you will understand the origin of the German spirit—from distressed intestines." In such a history, Descartes' recipe would stand as a particularly important bit of evidence: the only reason we have it is because another philosopher, G. W. Leibniz, transcribed it nearly 50 years later, when Descartes' literary executor, Claude Clerselier, gave the German philosopher one day, February 24, 1676, to look through Descartes' manuscripts and to transcribe whatever interested him. Ponder that fact for a moment: Leibniz had a single day to copy out whatever he could find of interest in the Nachlass of the greatest philosopher of his era, and this remedy against constipation made the list. Clearly he was operating with a different understanding of the scope of the discipline than we are.

(Query to neo-Latinists: I'm not sure how to translate the phrase 'italicae nucis testae inditae'. Surely he's talking about some sort of nut-shaped clay vessels, rather than nuts themselves?)

A particularly difficult evacuation of the lower intestine after a number of meals was brought about in this way: Equal parts bull's gall, unsalted butter, black hellebore, extract of diacolocynthide, diagridion, and sapphron, reduced into a single mass and heated over a flame until they have attained the consistency of honey, inserted into Italian terracotta vessels and applied to the navel. And this cataplasm is then fastened so that it does not fall; and two cataplasms of clay, filled with these potions, are applied the one after the other, one per day. The first days nothing was felt by the patient, other than agitations and murmurs; the third day, the desired evacuation arrived with great pain, but the normal excretion did not follow the very hard excrements until the abdomen of a freshly slaughtered calf, covered in aged oil sifted after cooking and heated up, was applied to the patient's stomach, and until the anus was probed by fingers covered with bile and butter. 

[Alvi egrestio difficillima post menses aliquot sic provocata. Fellis taurini recentis, butyri insulsi, hellebori nigri, extracti diacolocynthidis, diagridii & croci partes aequales, in unam massam redactae, & igni ad mellis consistentiam decoctae, italicae nucis testae inditae, umbilico impositae sunt. Ligataque fuit mox ne caderet, & binae testae, diebus singulis, potionibus intus assumtis, sic repleta impositae sunt. Primis diebus, nihil praeter fluctuationes & murmura a patiente sentiebantur; tertia die, cum immensis doloribus supervenit egerendi desiderium; at induratis excrementis non successit excretio, donec vituli abdomen recens, cum oleo antiquo ad ignem cribratum & calens, ventriculo induceretur, digitis que felle & butyro inunctis anus sollicitaretur] (AT XI 644).