note taking. two comments posted elsewhere. responding to Corey Robin and Gordon Lafer (continuing from below)

The problem with unions, especially the skilled trades, is that they reduce everything to economic terms. The legal triumphs of liberalism from the New Deal to the civil rights movement did no more than transform what had one been seen as private life to public economic life. If your actions have an effect on economic life the logic goes, then fundamentally they are economic. Liberalism is instrumentalism.

With very specific exceptions, union tradesmen in the US aren’t the best you can get. The exceptions are in jobs where the technical knowledge is such that they those who have it command respect. Union steamfitters with high school diplomas can tell engineers with graduate degrees that their numbers are wrong and the engineers will listen. Mistakes can kill. The important relation is not monetary but proprietary: of a skilled tradesman to his knowledge and experience. Outside of Ironworkers and steamfitters the best tradesmen in NY are non-union, but of course so are the worst.

German roofers are famous and the rules used to state that you couldn’t open your own shop until you’d apprenticed for 7 years. Under EU regulations this was attacked as unfair.

I don’t defend the physical trades I defend tradecraft, not for spooks but in the general sense that the contemporary academic model of intellectualism does not accept. Philosophy teaches the primacy of theory; democracy is founded on the primacy of practice. Lawyers are craftsmen. Writers are craftsmen. Musicians are craftsmen. Politicians are crafty. Life is Shakespearean before it’s Platonic and your “ideas” about trade are not a trade. As I pointed out before, European intellectuals haven’t lost this necessary sense of irony; they never imagined it was possible to separate ideas from desire and art. If you told Foucault that you thought liberalism was instrumentalism he’d credit you with reinventing the wheel. But liberals love their assumptions. They call them “objective” and say they’re based on “reason” and “science”.
Forget Foucault, read Derrick Bell on Brown v. Board of Education.
---

Unions will never be strong enough if all they do is negotiate better terms for slaves, or mandate factories designed by Temple Grandin. And the contemporary vogue for what philosophers call “embodied cognition” is not enough, since disembodied cognition is impossible.
The riots in London are the rebellion of those raised to be managed. Is the answer better management? I mentioned Derrick Bell because his arguments are founded not in disembodied liberalism but his experience as a black man. Where else would be get such skepticism?

Academic discussion of the lives of working people is like Jewish discussion of Palestinians, art critics talking about art, and the feminism of men. All may or may not be well intentioned but either way they're not enough.

Gordon Lafer responds: "whatever."

Power corrupts, and people believe their own lies. The only answer: more lies told by more people. Call it "Democracy."
When I hear the word theory I reach for my drink.

And again. I hate this shit.

Construction trade unions should become contractors, beginning on small jobs that union shops would be priced out of, eliminating the middleman. Contractors are overpaid secretaries. Whatever profit should be returned to the union. Unions should work with architecture schools, offering summer apprenticeships at union training facilities. At time point certificates from such facilities should become mandatory for graduation from any architecture school, but start with one. As it is most architects don’t know how to build shit.

I’ve seen a 22 year old Mexican homeboy give a gentle swirl to a glass with a thimble-full of wine with more understanding of why than I’ve come to expect from yuppie slacker assholes with something to prove. It was two in the morning and the kid had just left work. Do I have to telegraph that he worked in a restaurant? And probably a very good one. Someone had made the effort to teach him and he had made the effort to learn.

You’re concerned that people employed in soul-killing work get better pay. I’m concerned with the nature of soul-killing work.

More on law, the mutual antipathy of science and skill, and why lawyers are craftsmen.
The argument is not between science and religion, or about whether or not art represents spirituality or spiritual values—whatever the fuck those word mean. What defines the opposition to science is not religion or illogic but craft (that, and introspection). Lawyers are the only craftsmen Anglo-American philosophers take seriously. [I was wrong about that] But even then the idiot philosophists don't get the fucking point. If cops are not "the law" then what are scientists?
I'm only repeating myself here because when I get a spike in hits like this it's usually because I've made a ruckus on some academic blog, and the theme is always the same. In other words: see above.

Interestingly the second link on the google search is to the archive of Jan 04, which begins on the 31st with this post:

Humanism and good writing both are in limited supply on the web. It's a thing made by and for conceptualists: ideas matter, not the forms they take. It may be important to eat and have a roof over one's head, but it doesn't matter if the roof is made of tin, the walls are made of sheetrock, and the food comes as a pill. So I wander through discussions of technology, linguistic analysis, and economic theory, references to Star Trek and Tolkien, and 'best of' lists that are predicated on such ignorance I can have no response.
People who are interested in, who take pleasure in, the strength and flexibility of language have other things to do and other ways to keep themselves engaged. The only exceptions I've found, the only others more interested in means than ends, for whom the idea of 'content' is implicitly, and in one case explicitly, vulgar are women:
two observant Muslims and a Jewish whore.

What disgusts me even more these days is that the worst, the most purblind of the lot, spend half their time declaiming the depth of their epicureanism. I wouldn't give a shit if Bainbridge were simply an Ultra but he can't make up his mind.

35 years shouting into the void. I'm so tired of predicting the future, or describing the present before everyone else begins to figure it out.

Princeton University Press: Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy

In today’s new economy—in which “good” jobs are typically knowledge or technology based—many well-educated and culturally savvy young men are instead choosing to pursue traditionally low-status manual labor occupations as careers. Masters of Craft looks at the renaissance of four such trades: bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering.

so bored

It’s called post-humanism, or pre-humanism redux....the boy at Starbucks with a coffee bean tattooed on his forearm, a member of the "Barista tribe." 

It’s the public proclamation of loyalty to a subculture; documenting the need to belong; atomization and the rise of pathologically over-determined imagined communities etc.
 etc. etc. It’s the sociality of baroque individualism.

We now have food geeks as well as science geeks, all with the moral philosophy of Asperger’s patients: so fixated on their mania for [tube amps/Pouilly-Fuissé/Ducati two-stroke engines] that you’d be a fool not to hire them for your [high-end audio store/restaurant/Soho motorcycle salon]. Why be a well rounded adult when you can be an eternal [pre]adolescent and expert, and a happy cog and servant?

 Lawyers are craftsmen

I'm probably going to have to spend some time with The Craftsman, if only at the bookstore, but I get the sense that Sennett doesn't quite get the point.

Craft isn't a value. It's simply how we communicate with each other. You can either accept that, as practicing lawyers, screenwriters for HBO, and the girl you didn't go home with last night do, or like Brian Leiter, John Rawls, Brad DeLong, and the vast majority of the Anglo-American academic intellectual apparat, you can pretend. From the blurb:

Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Making physical things is not the point. Understanding that we are physical beings is the point.

If the intellectual model of fine art remains intellectual design (and the logic of original intent) the popular model is now theatrical design. There’s a relation: the children of conceptualists have returned to an art-making process the only way they could, as furniture makers. There’s a similar culture of “crafting” in academia, of grad school knitting circles, economist coffee connoisseurs, philosopher illustrators and wood carvers. None of this amounts to much, or won’t until the preoccupations outpace the ideas. The best example, going back to the beginnings of conceptual art, is Adrian Piper, who's had careers both as an artist and an academic philosopher. But her best, most tortured, work documents the sleep of reason, undermining all of her ideological pretensions. Her work is the poetry of confused rage. The new culture of crafting by comparison is another form of naïve decadence. For crafters, knitting circles are the closest they’ll come to hammering out scenarios for The Wire.

Recently, again, experts have become critical of expertise, philosophers critical of philosophy, but they miss the point. They’re unwilling to see themselves as part of a process that preceded their “discovery’ of the flaws in past assumptions. 

Philosophers who recognize themselves as orators become no more than sad ex-priests. The “postmodern” defense of bad writing and of theory as art doesn’t work as a defense of poetry or of lawyers, whose role hasn’t changed that much over the last 2000 years. Social scientists refuse to see themselves as tradespeople even as historians have never quibbled over whether their field can be called an art. The members of the Frankfurt School were exemplars of bureaucratic reason, the most famous of them so horrified of the implications that he called desperately and pathetically for unreason as the only possible response. Adorno was either unwilling or incapable of the empiricism, directed inwardly and outwardly, that might have allowed him see just how much both he and his “old institute” were products of the same forces that made the things he claimed to oppose. The rise of a self-conscious geek culture, the proud celebration of the preadolescent imagination in adulthood, came in earnest ten years after the publication of One Dimensional Man and the release of Dr. Strangelove, the title character an amalgam of Werner von Braun and the ur-geek von Neumann. “If you say why not bomb tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?

The discovery of experience
The difference between Law and lawyers, philosophers and comedians

Change is slow but inevitable. Academics are the last to know.

A little fun with a high school science geek. It's rough but WTF (update: three comments for my records)

I wish Wieseltier had done a better job but Dennett's a purblind fucking idiot. With that in mind:
Why do you insist on arguing logic with priests? Priests begin from their definition of all meaning being social. They argue not only from tradition but from the moral imperatives of tradition: you arguing that blood cannot become wine is irrelevant. And yet you and Dennett wonder why you can't convince the faithful? That's simply illogical.

You're more interested in the world than in perception, but then perception is how we experience the world. Computers don't perceive, animals do, and you're an animal. Those of us who are observant animals- who do not therefore pretend to be machines- pay close attention to and question ourselves, our motives and intentions. We try to remind ourselves to doubt, lest we begin to respond only out of reflex or habit. Scientists are not science any more than policemen are the law. Dennett doesn't understand that simple fact and Wieseltier doesn't respond to that arrogant stupidity clearly enough. But he's right.

Science does not explain Brian Leiter's fixation on academic social status or his unwillingness to respond to the blatant contradictions between his semi-leftist politics and his dedication to the academic priesthood. He's a Nietzschean snob. His tastes and manner define him more than his 'philosophical ideas.'
Why is Brad DeLong so god damn phobic of anything that has to do with Noam Chomsky, when the have so much in common? Delong's responses are frankly irrational. He goes off like a loon. Science can't explain that. Or perhaps it can, but it's not a science that we have access to.

Try to explain out loud to yourself why we defend the rule of law and not of men. Laws are nothing but traditions written on parchment. Why not just have people like you or Dennett make decisions for us? Why go through all this absurd ritual? Since lawyers are nothing but amoral craftsmen (and con men) why not have scientists debate among themselves to resolve court cases?
Think about what the rule "of law" means and why we have it.
Then go back and take a high school literature class.
Philosophy is for adults son. Grow the fuck up,
and we can talk.

two

John C. Halasz "[Religion is] a socio-cultural phenomenon and it's not obvious that it requires or is amenible to natural-scientific explanation."

All functions of society are socio-cultural phenomena and one cannot simply use one such function to analyze another. Or rather one can argue for a scientific explanation of religious belief but that will never eliminate its roots in our animal tendency to pattern thought based on previous experience. My point about Leiter is that the tastes and manners that precondition his contradictory arguments are the equivalent of faith.

The laws of science are not socio-cultural phenomena, but the uses to which science is put are. What atheist humanists and religionists both are offended by in Dennett's form of secular anti-humanism is the putting forth of the tools od science as themselves answers to questions of morality. But his claims to observational clrity are belied by the fact that he can't realize that religion only concerns itself marginally with the study of the world: it's primary interest is in law and social order. To hear him lecturing the faithful is akin to listening to a mathematician lecture fans of literature for reading lies.
"What's with you people. Don't you know, stories aren't real!!?"

The defense of religion is the defense of social order. Dennett argues that science can displace that order- displacing an order of language with one of number- and be both moral and just. But the activity of scientists- as opposed to the "laws" of science- is a social activity and as much an order of language as is religion or a court of law. Human beings experience life as a function of a social reality. We do no experience the world as number and computers do not 'experience' the world at all.

Religion is not the problem, it is those who claim unmediated access to the 'real' world whether the world of numbers or of gods. Dennett makes Nino Scalia's arguments for clarity and order but bases them on science rather than Catholic doctrine.

three

The myth of a unipolar consciousness "I say what I mean and I mean what I say" is as American as Henry Ford and 'can-do' anti-intellectualism. And of course, the parallel to Dennett is not Scalia but Posner's Law and Economics. And Posner and Leiter are buddies of course.
But the rule of law is not the rule of reason; we choose the former because the latter is impossible. Dennett attacks not only religion but language itself; language which can not escape ambiguity.
Under the rule of reason, if it were possible, no one would ever get off on a technicality.

I looked up the Dr. Seuss reference just to make sure I was right, and look what I found: "A plea for the Humanities." by another Seth too!
I guess god must be smiling on me today.

---
update: DeLong eliminates comments on this item.

From 2008 and still good.  I'd written that change is too slow. But it won't change.
There are no adults. I'm tired.
---

Rule#1. Make it idiot-proof.
I hate explaining this shit, but it's all I do.

geek |gēk|
noun informal
1 an unfashionable or socially inept person.
• [with adj. ] a person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest : a computer geek.
2 a carnival performer who does wild or disgusting acts.
DERIVATIVES
geeky adjective
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the related English dialect geck ‘fool,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch gek ‘mad, silly.’
---
The bottom two drawings are obviously models of human interaction: either in the present (mediated by language) or in the study of the past (mediated by language and time). The top two are diagrams of common utopian/dystopian fantasies [hopes] of far too many people.
I should have made this clear long ago, but I take people too much for granted.

We study the past not by studying the preoccupations of those who were there but by studying the record of those preoccupations. We live alongside one another through another version of the same process. We cannot claim to share their interests -in terms of the present we can't claim identity- though in some cases we can claim an affinity with them, but there remains a gulf between us and our subjects and each other. This gulf can be wider or narrower depending on their interests and ours. The  applications of Mathematics can appear to collapse historical time and the distance between individuals, numbers live in an eternal present and in unity with one another, but we don't.
Our society is a society built upon isolation and simultaneously upon a fixation on a desire/fear of simple absolute unity. Raves and The Borg are products of the same fear, desire, sadness.
A geek is someone who is so wed to his own fixations that he is unable to imagine the world through the mind of another. Americans are the prototypical geeks, unable to imagine non-Americans. But geeks now rule academia, even the humanities. Literature is now studied in academia by literature geeks. Our soldiers are military geeks. That specifically is dangerous, but so is the rest.
The above is, objectively, how the world works. It's the diagram for water-cooler chitchat, presidential elections, academic advancement, and how to pick up girls. It's the model of life as theater, assuming of course that actors know they're being observed. It's the model for intellectual "progress" in that progress is only possible if the model is seen to apply to human behavior. It is also therefore a defense of the arts, of craft, as a mode of reflexive activity and social engagement. [lawyers are craftsmen]. It's the model of artists' relation to one another and of artist to critic, if the critic sees himself in a reciprocal relation rather than as voyeur vampire, what academics become when they imagine themselves as observers and others as animate objects. The sciences and the pseudo-sciences have become not only asocial but anti-social. I've linked to Colin McGinn enough, but I've been pointing out examples of this for years. "Truth" is the metaphysical glow that attaches itself to unknown facts. It fades with familiarity and those facts return to their previous status as mundane.

If you don't understand that what you are and represent is being recontextualized constantly, and if you're remembered at all it will be as others see you, then you have no right to call yourself an "intellectual." Even then it's a term best left for others to use to describe you, if they choose.

Reading any text, examining any man-made thing, you ask yourself what to respond to: text or subtext, the intention of the maker or what the thing seems now to represent. Ideally you learn from both, but perhaps you have no way of knowing the maker's intent. Either way you may learn to respect the maker of a resilient, dynamic, order -a structure- and begin to reconstruct the categories they worked with, that were their preoccupation. You ask: “Is there more to learn from this person as thinker or as symptom?" Just as meeting someone on the street you ask: "Is this someone to laugh at, or with?" The stuff that lasts never becomes dated; the memorable minds are never merely symptomatic. Philip Roth is a practitioner of philosophical naturalism. Brian Leiter is a professor of a branch of a school of late scholastic philosophy. Post-war rationalism, late modernism, baroque idealism: these are the categories that will be used to describe it. They're categories of history, not reason.
At some point this will become so obvious that even PhD's will understand it.

Sometimes I forget how much I repeat myself. "I hate explaining this shit, but it's all I do."
And it's sloppier than I remember. From 2008:

Rule#1. Make it idiot-proof.
I hate explaining this shit, but it's all I do.



geek |gēk|
noun informal
1 an unfashionable or socially inept person.
• [with adj. ] a person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest : a computer geek.
2 a carnival performer who does wild or disgusting acts.
DERIVATIVES
geeky adjective
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the related English dialect geck ‘fool,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch gek ‘mad, silly.’
---
The bottom two drawings are obviously models of human interaction: either in the present (mediated by language) or in the study of the past (mediated by language and time). The top two are diagrams of common utopian/dystopian fantasies [hopes] of far too many people.
I should have made this clear long ago, but I take people too much for granted.

We study the past not by studying the preoccupations of those who were there but by studying the record of those preoccupations. We live alongside one another through another version of the same process. We cannot claim to share their interests -in terms of the present we can't claim identity- though in some cases we can claim an affinity with them, but there remains a gulf between us and our subjects and each other. This gulf can be wider or narrower depending on their interests and ours. The  applications of Mathematics can appear to collapse historical time and the distance between individuals, numbers live in an eternal present and in unity with one another, but we don't.
Our society is a society built upon isolation and simultaneously upon a fixation on a desire/fear of simple absolute unity. Raves and The Borg are products of the same fear, desire, sadness.
A geek is someone who is so wed to his own fixations that he is unable to imagine the world through the mind of another. Americans are the prototypical geeks, unable to imagine non-Americans. But geeks now rule academia, even the humanities. Literature is now studied in academia by literature geeks. Our soldiers are military geeks. That specifically is dangerous, but so is the rest.
The above is, objectively, how the world works. It's the diagram for water-cooler chitchat, presidential elections, academic advancement, and how to pick up girls. It's the model of life as theater, assuming of course that actors know they're being observed. It's the model for intellectual "progress" in that progress is only possible if the model is seen to apply to human behavior. It is also, therefore, a defense of the arts, of craft, as a mode of reflexive activity and social engagement [lawyers are craftsmen]. It's the model of artists' relation to one another and of artist to critic, if the critic sees himself as in a reciprocal relation rather than that of a voyeur vampire. That's what the social sciences become when they're seen not as acting within models of interpersonal activity but of relations of observer to inanimate object. The sciences and the pseudo-sciences have become not only asocial but antisocial. I've linked to Colin McGinn enough, but I've been pointing out examples of this for years. "Truth" is the metaphysical glow that attaches itself to unknown facts. It fades with familiarity and those facts return to their previous status as mundane.

If you don't understand that the most of what you are and represent is constantly being recontextuaized and that if you are remembered at all it will be as that, then you have no right to call yourself an "intellectual." You're merely a technician.

Reading any text, examining any man-made thing, you ask yourself what to respond to: text or subtext, the intention of the maker or what the thing seems on its own to represent. Ideally you learn from both, but perhaps you have no way of knowing the maker's intent. Still you may learn to respect the maker of a resilient, dynamic, order -a structure- and begin to reconstruct the categories they worked with, that were their preoccupation. You always ask, “Is there more to learn from this author as thinker or as symptom?",  just as meeting someone on the street you ask, "Is this someone to laugh at, or with?" The stuff that lasts never becomes dated; the memorable minds are never merely symptomatic. Philip Roth is a practitioner of philosophical naturalism. Brian Leiter is an academic and a professor of a minor branch of the minor school of late scholastic philosophy. Post-war rationalism, late modernism, baroque idealism, these are the categories that will be seen to define that school of thought. They're categories of history, not reason.
At some point this will become so obvious that even Ph.D's will understand it.

Leiter on Religion:
A mixture of the obvious and the odd. His radicalism is so bourgeois in it's assumptions; and to be radical is never to assume, yes?

[still a bit rough]
I've always had a visceral sort of distaste for the moral philosophy of contracts and self-interest. Rawlsian logic reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Somewhere in Hull: Apropos the neighboring family of 20 odd children -filthy and unkillable infants of the Catholic poor- an Anglican old dry stick turns to his wife and asks why "they can't they just use birth control like we do when we have sex." To which the wife [Terry Jones?] sheepishly replies: "But darling, we don't have sex."

I don't eat pussy because I want my cock sucked, I eat pussy because there's nothing else I'd rather do. And given a choice between a woman who sucks cock because she feels obliged as payment for a social debt and one who swallows for the love of it, which would you choose? Mix the genders any way you like, the question is the same.

Rather than false neutrality, why not accept the inevitability of bias? Rather than gross generalizations and the intellectual vulgarity of Rawls and John Cleese, why not choose to look down on self-interest itself: why not treat it with the disrespect it deserves?
That's not to say one should ignore it -one cannot disdain what does not understand- but accepting the existence of a lowest common denominator is not the same as celebrating it as such.
Science may teach us that greed is common. It does not preclude the judgement that it is also banal. Nor in fact does it preclude the argument that it's glorious, but such an argument at least is a discussion of value.

I'd have more respect for DeLong and more interest in Leiter's ideas (Leiter has a sense of humor) if they both understood the degree to which they each conform to a type. Their logics are built on sensibilities and values. As I've said before, the argument is not between religion and science but between the values of craft -of skill and artifice- and science. The rule of law is the rule of oratory and interpretation, and the goal is an imperfect justice. Science is the search for facts, described hyperbolically as a search for truth.

Craftsmen are more flexible than bureaucrats. Poets, priests, con-men, and lawyers are craftsmen, and academics are bureaucrats of the imagination, or that's what they become when they start referring to scientific processes as 'values.'

I prefer con-men to bureaucrats (on principle).
---

On a related, and more recent, note Jason Stanley asks what he thinks is a rhetorical question, Why Hire a Philosophy Major?:

"Perhaps because those trained in philosophy are likely to possess a better combination of verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing skills than those trained in any other major?"

At the bottom of the PDF he links to, the lowest numbers, alongside Business-Accounting[!] are for Social Work and Early Education.
It seems logical the next test should be for empathy.

This is all a repeat, but it's necessary.

John Protevi is a philosopher.

...Because we all know that one could craft criteria so that it does, or doesn't, depending on one's desires. That strikes me as not the sort of thing we'd like on our blog.

John Mortimer was a lawyer.

I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.

We reason always in service to desire. There is no arguing otherwise. Lawyers are paid craftsmen, and Protevi sounds like Antonin Scalia.

...Because we all know that one could craft criteria so that it does, or doesn't, depending on one's desires. That strikes me as not the sort of thing we'd like on our society.

The model of a "living" Constitution which is the liberal model of legal interpretation, is that it applies to all texts: a Constitution, a Beethoven Sonata, or The Genealogy of Morals. The living Constitution describes a living language. And it's the only model that describes the history of changes that have already occurred. Meanings change through argument, but we always argue from the present and from contemporary sensibilities. The Constitution is what we desire it to be, within the constraints of language. In the future people will desire something else.

Democracy is due process: results are secondary. The process of democracy is argument, and there are a lot of arguments breaking out, so there's real politics. even among academics: 1, 2, 3

The Palestinians are still objects of debate, or at best concern, rather than subjects to be listened to. For liberals the main theme in the end is self-regard. John Quiggin wonders why he's seeing a resurgence of "Reality-based journalism?"

The fact that, with no observable exceptions, the Republican Party relies on delusional beliefs for most of its claims about economics, science and history has been obvious for some years. But, until recently it’s been outside the Overton Window. That seems to have changed,

He's seeing change, but are the Palestinians?
The only change is in normative language and reference. The Palestinians, unlike homosexuals (now), are still outside, beyond the boundary. Anthropogenic global warming is somewhere in-between. What's grotesque in liberalism, seen in Quiggin's use of the terminology of the "Overton Window" is that the term can never be used to refer to the user's own limitations.
I've been reading Bruno Latour and bits and pieces on the Extended Mind (mentioned earlier) Thinking of reading Harman. I'm beginning to see the themes: the world as collective as seen through an expanded diversified networked self.

The Israeli philosopher says to the Palestinian farmer: "I see myself in you and you in myself."

The Palestinian farmer responds: "You can't speak for me, so why pretend?"

The other is other. The expanded, networked, self will act according to it's own bias. The philosopher as a type is comparable (as I've said) to the Continental European legal role of Investigating Magistrate. Both originate in the Church.  However much the philosopher magistrate wants to claim an expanded, networked consciousness, he is still only a self: the sexist who calls himself a feminist; the asshole who claims to be "a nice guy".

The other is other. The defense attorney's other is the prosecutor. By law s/he can be nothing else. A class on feminist theory taught by a man to male students is not enough. It will not do the job. There can be no discussion of feminism without the presence of women. There can be no discussion of the Palestinians without Palestinians. Various claims to "see the other in myself" are pure rhetoric and wishful thinking. Embodied consciousness is not an idea it's what we are. And what we are are individuals defined by individual perceptions. That we can not live or thrive alone is something else entirely. You can not understand the need for community without understanding the borders of the self.

Philosophers want judges to be at the intellectual and moral center of our justice system, but they aren't. Ambulance chasers are at the center of our justice system. I had a short email exchange with Protevi, but it wasn't helpful.

Rule#1. Make it idiot-proof.
I hate explaining this shit, but it's all I do.

geek |gēk|
noun informal
1 an unfashionable or socially inept person.
• [with adj. ] a person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest : a computer geek.
2 a carnival performer who does wild or disgusting acts.
DERIVATIVES
geeky adjective
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the related English dialect geck ‘fool,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch gek ‘mad, silly.’
---
The bottom two drawings are obviously models of human interaction: either in the present (mediated by language) or in the study of the past (mediated by language and time). The top two are diagrams of common utopian/dystopian fantasies [hopes] of far too many people.
I should have made this clear long ago, but I take people too much for granted.

We study the past not by studying the preoccupations of those who were there but by studying the record of those preoccupations. We live alongside one another through another version of the same process. We cannot claim to share their interests -in terms of the present we can't claim identity- though in some cases we can claim an affinity with them, but there remains a gulf between us and our subjects and each other. This gulf can be wider or narrower depending on their interests and ours. The applications of Mathematics can appear to collapse historical time and the distance between individuals, numbers live in an eternal present and in unity with one another, but we don't.
Our society is a society built upon isolation and simultaneously upon a fixation on a desire/fear of simple absolute unity. Raves and The Borg are products of the same fear, desire, sadness.
A geek is someone who is so wed to his own fixations that he is unable to imagine the world through the mind of another. Americans are the prototypical geeks, unable to imagine non-Americans. But geeks now rule academia, even the humanities. Literature is now studied in academia by literature geeks. Our soldiers are military geeks. That specifically is dangerous, but so is the rest.
The above is, objectively, how the world works. It's the diagram for water-cooler chitchat, presidential elections, academic advancement, and how to pick up girls. It's the model of life as theater, assuming of course that actors know they're being observed. It's the model for intellectual "progress" in that progress is only possible if the model is seen to apply to human behavior. It is also therefore a defense of the arts, of craft, as a mode of reflexive activity and social engagement. [lawyers are craftsmen]. It's the model of artists' relation to one another and of artist to critic, if the critic sees himself in a reciprocal relation rather than as voyeur vampire, what academics become when they imagine themselves as observers and others as animate objects. The sciences and the pseudo-sciences have become not only asocial but anti-social. I've linked to Colin McGinn enough, but I've been pointing out examples of this for years. "Truth" is the metaphysical glow that attaches itself to unknown facts. It fades with familiarity and those facts return to their previous status as mundane.

If you don't understand that what you are and represent is being recontextualized constantly, and if you're remembered at all it will be as others see you, then you have no right to call yourself an "intellectual." Even then it's a term best left for others to use to describe you, if they choose.

Reading any text, examining any man-made thing, you ask yourself what to respond to: text or subtext, the intention of the maker or what the thing seems now to represent. Ideally you learn from both, but perhaps you have no way of knowing the maker's intent. Either way you may learn to respect the maker of a resilient, dynamic, order -a structure- and begin to reconstruct the categories they worked with, that were their preoccupation. You ask: “Is there more to learn from this person as thinker or as symptom?" Just as meeting someone on the street you ask: "Is this someone to laugh at, or with?" The stuff that lasts never becomes dated; the memorable minds are never merely symptomatic. Philip Roth is a practitioner of philosophical naturalism. Brian Leiter is a professor of a branch of a school of late scholastic philosophy. Post-war rationalism, late modernism, baroque idealism: these are the categories that will be used to describe it. They're categories of history, not reason.
At some point this will become so obvious that even PhD's will understand it.

On Emil Jannings:

My primary intellectual interest is the defense of skill, of an idea of mastery over a medium, trade, or craft. Most intellectuals, now, even those who make their living searching for meaning in others' workmanship, are bothered by such arguments.  They associate skill with beauty, but beauty no longer with truth.  I'm not going to explain why this is so any more than I'm going to say they're wrong. They're not.  But lawyers are not legal philosophers for the simple reason that legal philosophers are not craftsmen. They do not see themselves as acting within the theater of communication of which law is an aspect. What Kerim and others are criticizing in Diamond's work strikes me as no more, or less,  than the social ineptitude more common to engineers or philosophers than to practicing lawyers.

Anthropologists study the skills of their subjects. They learn to appreciate the terminology and the terms of distinction peculiar to a given society. They become both intellectuals and connoisseurs.
A con man is a connoisseur; it's part of his job. A mathematician does not need these skills. But mathematicians are as fallible as the rest of us and I prefer the company of those who understand not only their capacity for error but for delusion. All wise men are connoisseurs
---
(as if to prove my point)
DeLong the philosopher:

General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was an utter bastard: he shot five times as many of his own men for desertion during the Battle of Stalingrad as allied soldiers died on D-Day.

General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was a very good general: we all should be very grateful for what his 62nd Army did during the Battle of Stalingrad.

The moral intelligence of a precocious ten year old, who supplements his allowance writng Cliffs Notes.

serendipity, I guess.
In reference to the last post. The update is funny. But the debate is interesting.
As always the point is not that there's no such thing as reason but that the question remains: "Who watches the [self-appointed] watchmen?"
[2/24:Read the comments by and in response to "Megan." There is no communication in language without politics.]

In his previous post Leiter links to Raymond Geuss. Reading the piece you have to think Leiter links to him out of some vague deference, if not to superiority at least as another member of the priesthood; even if that man politely mocks everything Leiter professes. I can't think of Leiter without thinking of his fondness for Timothy Williamson:

"Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth.”

Geuss is trying to come to terms with what Leiter ignores, but his language is vague and poeticizing: He write as a fan, someone more interested in the poetic than -to use my term- the "poemic." I'll repeat a passage I quoted 6 months ago, by Hermann Broch:

Although art is no longer a part of the religious system, having become autonomous like all other value-systems since the breakup of that all-encompassing system of religion, reinforcing this autonomy with the principle of l'art pour l'art, nonetheless, art even today has set down its own private theology in a series of aesthetic theories, and continues to hold to its highest value-goal, and this, too, continues to hover in the realm of the infinite, be it called "beauty," "harmony" or whatever else. And the ethical demand made of the artist is, as always, to produce "good" works, and only the dilettante and the producer of kitsch (whom we meet here for the first time) focus their work on beauty.

For the esthetic in general as an expression of the supreme ultimate value of a sustem can influence the result of ethical action only secondarily, just as "wealth" is not the main goal but the side effect of individual commercial activity. And "wealth" itself is an irrational concept. It is an almost mystical process, the setting of ethical values: Arising from the irrational, transforming the irrational to the rational, yet nonetheless it is the irrational that radiates from within the resulting form.

Philosophers are interested in "Truth" and "Beauty." Artists like lawyers are craftsmen and tradesmen first. Philosophical art as Baudelaire saw, avant la lettre, is Kitsch. This is something Geuss the late modern philosopher doesn't quite get. Leiter and Williamson however as late modernists of another sort, as intellectual bureaucrats, are simply vulgarians and pedants. And pedantry as I've said, is a form of irrationalism.

Geuss: "Since neither a picture nor a poem is an argument, neither is a suitable object for counterargument."

That's wrong. Pictures and poems are a kind of argument. A lawyer in a courtroom is said to make "arguments" even though he's speaking on behalf a paying client. His defense of that client is predicated on falseness: his loyalty is to the court. The court itself represents "truth" but only in its process, not in any given result. Within the rules of the court the only goal is victory.
A lawyer makes a kind of argument, and so does a poet. Poets at work, again as I've said (I'm repeating myself a lot these days) are not unlike Ronald Dworkin's Hercules. Philosophers who don't understand art, or law, don't understand democracy.

But I want to read P.M.S. Hacker.
---
There was a time when I thought Dworkin's Hercules was meant to describe an ideal judge's earnest attempt to call 'em as he sees 'em: to 'find' a logical, formal, consistency across the questions of the case and his perceptions as a member of a political/linguistic/cultural community. Now I can't tell if Dworkin was shrouding his moral realism in a fog of language, or shrouding the argument described above in a fog of truthiness. There was no reason for him not to be clear. There may have been a personal need on his part not to be.

Ken Johnson review of the Lee Ufan exibition at the Guggenheim: A Fine Line: Style or Philosophy?

...A much published philosopher as well as an artist who divides his time between Japan and Paris, Mr. Lee has enjoyed considerable recognition in Europe and in the Far East. Last year the Lee Ufan Museum, a building designed by Tadao Ando, opened on the island of Naoshima, Japan.

But Mr. Lee’s reputation has not extended to the United States. This exhibition, his first in a North American museum, gives a sense of why. His art is impeccably elegant, but in its always near-perfect composure, it teeters between art and décor.

Soren Melikian in the IHT: When Catalog Descriptions Dictate Value

LONDON— An entirely new approach is determining buyers’ decisions at auction. Abstract considerations such as the artist’s name or the previous owners’ celebrity are now the prevalent criteria, while visual achievement becomes almost irrelevant. At this week’s sales of Impressionist and modern art, this had a dramatic impact on prices.

Christie’s experts, vividly aware of the changing attitudes in the constituency they cater to, cleverly pressed all the right buttons in their catalog presentation.

The estate of Ernst Beyeler, one of the most influential 20th-century art dealers, had consigned 41 works of art ranging from Impressionism to post-World War II avant-garde movements. The proceeds of the sale were to benefit the Beyeler Foundation set up by Mr. Beyeler in his hometown, Basel. The museum, erected in Riehen, needed the cash to finance its exhibitions program and its acquisitions fund.

Christie’s made sure that the Beyeler theme, spun in reverential tones, was widely dealt with in the media. Potential buyers were made to feel that acquiring a Beyeler picture amounted to securing a badge of cultural honor.

It worked brilliantly right from lot one, a 17th-century Spanish trestle table that Mr. Beyeler used as a desk in his office until his death in 2010. The printed estimate for the table was £8,000 to £12,000, or $12,000 to $18,000 plus the sale charge. It ended up at £289,500 — setting a world auction record for banal Spanish provincial furniture.

This kind of fetishism sent many of the 41 pieces of Beyeler memorabilia to levels that bore little relationship to the art.

...Picasso’s “Couple, Le Baiser” dated Nov. 28, 1969, so sloppily dashed off that it seemed hopeless, realized £6.53 million, courtesy of a lone telephone bidder.

...The corollary of the almost exclusive attention now accorded to abstract considerations is that the most beautiful pictures often fetch comparatively modest prices. Cézanne's “La rivière,” a pure masterpiece of 1881, made only £2.5 million.

Not "an entirely "new approach" but it's gotten worse. Monets are worth more than Cezannes because they're prettier, not more important. Markets are based on greed and desire for what others desire. Scarcity means "insufficient for the demand": outside of necessities the application becomes fluid. That a Bernini modello sells for a fifth of the auction price of a Giacometti is both predictable and absurd (so therefore not).

I was talking to video editing tech yesterday about the new Final Cut X and he said what Apple has been dumbing down their product line because they make more money in the mass market than the market for professionals. Towers now have slower processors than IMacs and with the new changes in Final Cut professionals are talking about going back to Avid.


Craft is a social activity. Craftsmen take pride in their abilities, defined as something other than acquiring wealth, because their audience respects them for their skills and at their best for their refusal to pander. The integrity of craftsmen relates to the integrity of those who respond to them. Structural integrity is "the state of being whole, the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction." But this isn't absolute, since absolute integrity would mean indifference, so the result is a divided consciousness, integral but looking outward. And the relation of craftsmen to their craft and to their audience becomes the model for lawyers' relation to their clients and the bar, and by extension again of individuals to one another: loyal to themselves but responsive to others. Laws are formal in the sense that democracy is formal, and structural integrity becomes a form of moral integrity. The rule of law is the acceptance by individuals of their being bound by social process and through that to each other.

John Quiggin: You say you want a revolution

As promised in my previous post, I’m setting up a separate thread for discussion of my premise that a socialist revolution is neither feasible nor desirable. ...

Update: I’ve updated to link to the earlier post remove an unjustifiably snarky reference to aristocratic sentiment and to include a para from the previous post, on situations where revolutions are likely to turn out well.

the offending paragraph:

At a deeper level, the appeal of revolution has a substantial residue of aristocratic sentiment. In the course of the last 200 years, and even allowing for the defeats of the past 20 years or so, the achievements of the Left have been impressive, starting with universal suffrage and secret ballots, going on the creation of the welfare state, continuing with progress towards equality without regard to race, gender and sexuality, preserving the environment from the disastrous impact of industrialism and so on. Yet most of this progress has been achieved in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, through long agitation, boring committee reports and so on. Gains that are ground out in this way, with two steps forward and one step back, are not noble enough for an aristocratic sensibility: far better to fail gloriously.

The logic of bourgeois liberalism, and liberal intellectualism specifically, results in the monetizing of all social relations. Desire is simplified in the interest of clarity and the interest of self-interest: Apple, no matter how successful, is doing what it "needs to" or "should" do. Methodological and ideological individualism are born twins, one of the reasons that modern art, as modern craft, even in its most radical (leftist) moments, is shaded by the sentiments of equally anti-bourgeois aristocratic conservatives. But as technocrats have become the new aristocrats aristocratic art has divided into the decadence of luxury and the decadence of technocratic scholasticism. It's left for the majority as bourgeois, as even the working class define themselves now, to argue for craft, for sociability and for "the social" against technocrats, philosophers, and the defenders of the false aristocracy of economic oligarchy.

Note taking

I would spend all I had to save the life of someone I loved, while I would spend less on someone I was merely fond of, and maybe I’d toss some money to Oxfam for a kid somewhere.
Viewed objectively all three are equally deserving, but that’s not the way the world works.

Also: is Tony Judt a leftist in the US but merely a liberal in London?

Is liberalism rationalism and systems-building, or is it cosmopolitan empiricism and the cultivation of the flexibility required to negotiate their inevitable failure?

The comments above were rendered illegible, "disemvowed," by Chris Bertram: "I thought I’d made it clear that you aren’t welcome to comment on my posts. Any more, and you’ll get a comprehensive ban from CT as a whole."
I sent him an email and told him just to do it. I'd posted an additional comment, writing that the post itself was probably the most honest thing he'd ever written at the site, if not ever. Snide but true. Rather than disemvowel it he simply made it vanish.

I want to write more about the post itself. maybe when I'm sober. I'm still reading essays by and about Michael Fried which by chance also have a connection [see wednesday] And there's an obvious relation to this:


from this post

If you take the above model as describing how we respond to each other, how we learn about each other and ourselves, then the the failures of liberalism, and of the human imagination, are less traumatic. In fact they're only traumatic to idealists who think those failures can be avoided or righted. They can't.

The advantage of the arts over the sciences as a basis for philosophy is that in the arts it's better to be good than right. That this is a subject for philosophy as a whole rather than aesthetics is shown by the fact that the same rule holds for lawyers. Lawyers are craftsmen not scientists.

I've written those two sentences in various forms dozens of times by now. One of these days it's gonna stick

Note taking: It's the motherfucking Zietgeist [what's old is new again]

Outside of actual mathematical calculation, as distinct from the values that accrue to it, everything you do from the way you dress to the intellectual categories you inherit and adapt, describes the present. Post-war American academic philosophy contextualizes within post-war American culture no more or less than post-war American painting, the New Critics, or the Edsel. MIT’s capitalist culture vultures are the product of their age. And I’m still waiting for someone to describe for me the relation of the techno-formalist optimism of video design geeks with the dystopian narrative of Grand Theft Auto. This reminds me of fights in my youth when I insisted on pointing out the violence underlying Robbe-Grillet and Borges. “But it’s about language!” No it’s not. This has no more to do with pretentious comp-lit grad students than it does spiritualizing hippies. Just ask a trial lawyer, and not one who has the luxury of only taking cases he believes in but who goes for whatever pays the rent. Most lawyers are hack actors and they’re at the center of our culture. They’re storytellers for hire. They’re craftsmen, and the only ones left who are considered intellectually respectable, though in truth it’s only law professors who are taken seriously because they’re engaged in the reasoned conversation of the ivory tower. A lawyer loses patience with law professors. [same as previous post] And there’s no such thing as pure description. You sound just like Orin Kerr. Who sounds like Borges. “One suspects that at least those who spend their time in role-playing games or the business school are acutely aware of spending their lives in performance.” Again this refers to games you have the choice to play. The prime mover of MIT’s games is functionalism: marketing is a priori. It may be for them but what is it doing as part of the academy? Have business schools taken over everything? The imperative of free inquiry is just that. It may include inquiry regarding the church, the state, the market, or the military[!]* but it is not bounded by any of them. Nor should it ever be.

*The context is the discussion of the military's HTS The larger context: The google site search link I removed was to monthly archives. These are to individual posts: 2006 and 2 [a good explanation] 2008 and 2 "Grant McCracken makes DeLong seem like Tiresias." And Henry Farrell is Jacob Burckhardt.

(2) Religious beliefs do not answer ultimately (or at the limit) to evidence and reasons, as evidence and reasons are understood in other domains concerned with knowledge of the world. Religious beliefs, in virtue of being based on "faith", are insulated from ordinary standards of evidence and rational justification, the ones we employ in both common-sense and in science.

The above by Brian Leiter from "Why Tolerate Religion?" Quoted by Andrew Koppelman in "No Respect: Brian Leiter on Religion" [SSRN]

They both should spend more time around criminal law, and lawyers who argue the causes fate hands them rather than those they choose. The mandate against the establishment of religion can and should mean simply that there is no special place for it, and the express right to freedom of religion can be seen logically, in its historical context, as the equivalent of statements of the right to be free from racial discrimination.

No two people can ever know between them what truth is; the best they will do is agree, and agreement is a function of social life not of the absolute. The law is designed first and foremost for conflict resolution; truth itself is always private. As I always remind people, the rule of law protects us from the [mis]rule of reason. Steven Weinberg's belief that we "need to know" certain facts about the universe is as irrational as his racism, if less divisive. I wouldn't interfere with his right to have his curiosity follow his tastes any more than I would want the state to mandate against his phobias, though I might argue against funding his research, as opposed to funding work on AIDS and Malaria. I might or might not, and either why it's an opinion and a matter of values, not truth. Leiter's response to Brian Tamanaha in their arguments over formalism and realism seem to me to be as based on faith, as opposed to empiricism, as his defense of a naturalized epistemology that sounds (again to me, in my opinion) like desperate science envy. His philosophy tracks with science in his fantasies, and he's unwilling to defend the humanities as such as having value, so his defense of philosophy falls flat. Read the Guardian link he posts. Did they really need a "philosopher" or would anyone with an imagination have been good enough? Maybe a parish priest who's a good judge of people.

Leiter pretends that philosophy is technical and cumulative but the facts and history seem to show only that tastes change. Remember that according to Leiter and his friends "history is bunk". [see the first post yesterday or begin here] I remember Leiter smiling fondly at Jerry Fodor saying with mild contempt that he -Fodor- didn't even know anyone in Comp Lit, though I know from another source that Fodor thought it was odd that one of his colleagues had friends outside the academy itself.

Academics' work represents their preoccupations to themselves. Some academics like to look out the window but it's not enough. Scholasticism is academic formalism; when outside information undermines that formalism it's ignored. The formalism of practicing lawyers is the formalism of craftsmen, of rhetoric, not a model of the objective world but of communication. The formal tropes of oratory are not the formalisms of mathematics, but claims for their their unity are ubiquitous in the academy: the model of a science of rhetoric. The goal of mastery of a skill has become the goal of the mastery of truth. A formal structure used for clarity is now imagined as a self-supporting manifestation of ideal order. That is a very dangerous logic. Leiter doesn't understand language, he doesn't understand law. He doesn't understand his relation to the world beyond his fantasies of it and he doesn't understand democracy. Neither do most academics.

It's too purple, earnest and overdone, very American in its innocence, but it's a defense of art as craft and honesty, as intimate description, intimate empiricism. And it makes all my arguments about the changes in our culture over the past decades. It's the reason for my comedians tag, the tag for lawyers as opposed to law, for performance and participation in democracy, for Joe Jamail and John Mortimer and Rumpole, for honest, champagne or not, bourgeois decency.

In light of all that is going on in the world today, it is difficult to celebrate the already-celebrated Stranger Things. But this award from you, who take your craft seriously and earnestly believe — like me — that great acting can change the world, is a call to arms from our fellow craftsmen and -women to go deeper and through our art, to battle against fear, self-centeredness, and the exclusivity of a predominantly narcissistic culture and through our craft to cultivate a more empathetic and understanding society by revealing intimate truths that serve as a forceful reminder to folks that when they feel broken and afraid and tired, they are not alone. We are united in that we are all human beings and we are all together on this horrible, painful, joyous, exciting, and mysterious ride that is being alive.

Technocratic reason is the truth of generalities, or the aggregate, of the fungible. Mimetic art is the description of one moment in time, one event, one day in one life, the death of one person. Non-mimetic art is gesture of such specificity that it forces us to focus, and we become powerfully aware that each of us is present for that moment in time, that event, that day.

More personal, so less abstract, less about ideas than -and because- about experience, a black man, not a white man in America.


See the previous post, and this one, and this one.

the usual
I made the usual comments:

The absurdity of analytic philosophy as philosophical act is that it operates under the illusion that one can analyze language and experience seemingly from outside of both. It may be possible for computers to describe computation, but consciousness can not describe consciousness apart from acting it. We are creatures of sense before logic, and we must try each day, without ever succeeding, to pick one apart from the other. Analytic philosophy does not teach self-awareness, claiming it is unnecessary. It is the philosophy of autism.

Derrida wanted to argue the primacy of craft and of description- as a novelist would- while maintaining the authorial certainty of the man of ideas. His works fail as philosphy because they fail as literature (and “do as I say not as I do” is no longer accepted as a valid argument) Judith Butler is a student of the moral success of his intellectual failure, but she doesn’t get the point. Still, to say [quoting Jason Stanley] that a university “should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige” either now or in the future sounds so ridiculously anti-modern that I don’t know what anyone has to complain about with either of them.

We separate science and law. We defend the rule of law over the rule of ideas [without thinking!] and then turn around and defend the rule of “truth” and science over the absurdity of “fiction”.
Derrida’s mistake was clumsiness, but what he represented in his clumsy way was a return [in the academy, and years behind the culture at large] to premodern now post-modern acceptance of the primacy of description.

The rule of law is the rule of language not of truth; and narrative is the order of the day, and will be for the forseable future.
---

I was first introduced to modern analytical philosophy in the mid 1980’s when a friend who worked at the Journal of Philosophy gave me a subscription. I remember an article on “morality and self-other asymmetry” that relied entirely, and seemingly as a point of ideology, on absract logic unaided by empiricism.
Why is it permissible to sacrifice one’s own life to save others but not to sacrifice another person’s to obtain the same result? The next question might have been: “why is the militry an exception?” but it was never asked. Questions as to anthropology or history were deemed irrelevent. More recently, on this site, I’ve run into discussions of Donald Davidson and references to his ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn writes this about Donald Davidson:
“Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate.”

So if it is impossible to translate the finer points in Mallarmé, then no finer points exist.

There is a form of intellectual life that is indebted to people and to forms that are not strictly speaking intellectual, even more than it is those that are. Mozart was not a philosopher, and he is more important than most of those who were.
I prefer craftsmen to philosophs as I prefer lawyers to philosophers of law (and defense attorneys to prosecutors). But if the main question of philosophy remains the relation of action to reflection, I’ll still think it my right to demand of those who call themselves intellectuals that they have an understanding of the importance of craft, action and performance to their ‘intellectual’ preoccupations.
---

Just to wind this up on my end…
john halasz,
My argument is not with analytic or continental philosophy but philosophy itself. The continentals, unlike the analytics, refer to literature as a model but they undermine it by rationalizing it, dealing in a conceptualization of thought that in this country has been used to academicize the arts in ways that I think are absurd.
The question is still: how does one act ‘within’ or through a philosphy? What is the relation of action to reflection?
Academic philosphy is defined by the culture of academe, and exists inside it; but what is the relation of a lawyer in a courtroom, to law, and to society? That relation is not the same as that of a speaker to a language, but a lawyer acts within law in a similar way. A lawyer acts, must act, within a system only as a part; he/she is required not to be fully conscious. But the system itself is considered philosophically valid. Again: the rule of law is not the rule of science. but I’ve gone through this before.

I defend the arts (my chosen field) as a function of culture that similarly is philosphically valid, in that each form is simultaneously a questioning and a documentation of itself and its surroundings, both formal and reflective. Continental philosophy values the arts for this even as it undermines them [artists and critics etc.] Analytic philosophy in it’s latent or not so latent positivism, thinks this is all bunk or otherwise hides from it, and therefore from the most important questions of philosophy.

I hate academic rationalists. I only defend theory to the acolytes of analytic philosphy because at the core of either is the same scholastic formalism. Like I said: the usual. Intellectual ghetto motherfuckers.

The post below is wrong. I didn't read more than a few sentences of Lance's post; I judged it mostly from its title, which is a misnomer. His argument isn't against the fetishizing of procedures but the fetishizing of design. cf. the absurdity of Rawsliana, and Sandy Levinson's obsessions (and here).

Lance

There is, of course, an enormous literature - in philosophy, economics, political science, decision theory, etc. - on the rationality of voting procedures. And while focus on procedural matters is not universal in any of these disciplines, it is surely fair to say that such considerations dominate the intellectual discourse. But such a focus requires ignoring one very simple, uncontroversial, and devastating fact: No voting procedure, nor any other definable procedure for arriving at a group decision is guaranteed to be rational.

No shit.

The fundamental point here is that these things are not to be fixed by obsessing on procedures. Procedures are merely tools, and in the hands of vicious craftsmen - to steal a phrase from Ani Difranco - every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. If philosophers and others want to contribute to more rational deliberative bodies, they need to stop obsessing with problems that can be formalized, and turn to messier issues of moral education, the socialization of habits of rationality, even, dare I say it, the cultivation of care and perhaps a beloved community (to steal from another social visionary.) Again, I am aware that there is literature in this area, but I don't think anyone will claim that the cultivation of Aristotelian civic virtue is a dominant thread in the academic discussion of collective rationality.

Rather than spending our time designing 9 string guitars and new varieties of sousaphone, we should learn to play the instruments we have. If all the world's a stage, maybe we should become better, more aware, more intelligent actors. But the focus on rationality is still there, and that undermines his argument. We need structures to manage irrationality, which is in itself inevitable. But Lance is too in love with himself to imagine his own irrationality as something that would ever need management.

Virtue ethics means the end to "technical" philosophy, a move away from the "creation of concepts", and outgrowing dungeons and dragons.  Better craftsmen and better critics, better citizens thus better politicians, better lawyers, fewer philosophers and fewer "visionaries".

The original post:

Leiter and Mark Lance: Against Democracy.

There's no other way to describe it. Justice in a democracy is procedural: if the cops bust down your door on a whim and find evidence of a crime, the evidence is inadmissible in court. It doesn't matter if the evidence is a dime bag or a dead body. That's procedure. "Truth", as it pertains to any single case, is irrelevant.
The "nuclear option" is a term of art referring to a tradition; no more, no less. And the change in rules also followed rules of procedure.

Craft is a social activity. Craftsmen take pride in their abilities, defined as something other than acquiring wealth, because their audience respects them for their skills and at their best for their refusal to pander. The integrity of craftsmen relates to the integrity of those who respond to them. Structural integrity is "the state of being whole, the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction." But this isn't absolute, since absolute integrity would mean indifference, so the result is a divided consciousness, integral but looking outward. And the relation of craftsmen to their craft and to their audience becomes the model for lawyers' relation to their clients and the bar, and by extension again of individuals to one another: loyal to themselves but responsive to others. Laws are formal in the sense that democracy is formal, and structural integrity becomes a form of moral integrity. The rule of law is the acceptance by individuals of their being bound by social process and through that to each other.

This is funny.
[found here]

I'm probably going to have to spend some time with The Craftsman, if only at the bookstore, but I get the sense that Sennett doesn't quite get the point.

Craft isn't a value. It's simply how we communicate with each other. You can either accept that, as practicing lawyers, screenwriters for HBO, and the girl you didn't go home with last night do, or like Brian Leiter, John Rawls, Brad DeLong, and the vast majority of the Anglo-American academic intellectual apparat, you can pretend. From the blurb:

Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Making physical things is not the point. Understanding that we are physical beings is the point.