The spirit of the staircase

A short email exchange about computational literary studies, since Leiter realized who I was and blocked my response—I didn't try very hard to hide—and I still blew the chance to make what's now the best one. 

I dealt with Moretti years ago (use google for Moretti and Cosma Shalizi) but things have changed. Now it's enough to say that if Moretti thinks that we should "stop reading books", then maybe the "counting, graphing, and mapping" he prefers should be directed towards the works of Moretti, Pogge, Ludlow and McGinn, to help us to understand the correlation of pedantry and sexual harassment. 

I've said it all before but not about Moretti's technophilia. He makes it easy, but I'd missed it.

“The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures.”

Moretti and his brother need to sort this one out.

And this ties to Leiter again. 

"Should one not teach philosophers guilty (or possibly guilty) of sexual harassment?" 

Is it still teaching philosophy if it includes subtext?

I should add my side of the email exchange. I will, later.

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Dean C. Rowan responding to me at Leiter's

Collini does not mention one avenue of literary research that is inviting increasing traffic: computational literary studies (CLS). I wonder whether Guillory treats it. CLS does at least purport to say what one species of "research" should look like, and its proponents argue that it is necessary as a corrective to traditional literary criticism, which ultimately relies on subjective judgment. For a good starting point, see Nan Z. Da, "The Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies" in Critical Inquiry, v.45, no.3, spring 2019. Da's article is useful, because it surveys a number of computational techniques deployed by CLS researchers, and also because it spawned an interesting debate about the accuracy of Da's criticisms. CLS springs from increases in computing power and efficiencies, but also from reaction to New Critical prescriptions of "close reading." Franco Moretti's Distant Reading is perhaps the leading text in this respect. So here we have a fork off of the tradition of Anglo-American literary studies whose object is no longer "the" literary text and whose purpose is no longer the achievement of a balance of interpretive factors--intention, history, biography, form, and so forth--to render a meaningful reading of the text. Rather, the object of CLS is expansive bodies of literary texts unreadable as such by any individual scholar. The outcome of a successful CLS study should be to tell us about formerly unacknowledged objective literary characteristics of the aggregate texts. Da has plenty to say about how reliably this model is executed. The relevance of all of this to the OP is that CLS, having the trappings of "objective" study, imports to literary studies a quality of professional discipline evidently wanting in traditional literary criticism.

I can't imagine philosophy deploying anything like a CLS. To do so would turn the study of philosophy into the study of the literature (or aggregate texts) of philosophy. But I've been blabbing here for a couple days. Thanks to Hello Again for chiming in. Anybody else?

From my email, with small changes, repeating old arguments

The end to subjectivity is a fantasy of fundamentalists—Scalia, "the constitution as I interpret it is a dead constitution"—leaving only the elite the luxury to indulge. "My subjectivity is truth"

Gombrich, Art and Illusion, [a longer quote here]

For the Egyptian, the newly  discovered eternity of art may well have held out a promise that its power to arrest and to preserve in lucid images might be used to conquer this evanescence. Perhaps it was not only as the maker of “substitute heads” and other dwellings for the “ka” that the Egyptian sculptor could lay claim to the famous appellation of “one who keeps alive.” His images weave a spell to enforce eternity. Not our idea of eternity, to be sure, which stretches backward and forward in an infinite extension, but rather the ancient conception of recurrent time that a later tradition embodied in the famous “hieroglyph” of the serpent biting its own tail. Clearly an “impressionist” art could never have served this outlook. Only the complete embodiment of the typical in its most lasting and changeless form could assure the magic Validity of these pictographs for the “watcher” who could here see both his past and his eternal future removed from the flux of time. 

There could be no more poignant contrast to this confidence in the spells of art than a passage from Plato's older contemporary Euripides that also deals with tomb sculpture. When Alcestis is going to die, her grieving husband Admetus speaks of the work he will commission for his solace:

And represented by the skillfull hands

Of craftsmen, on the bed thy body shall

Be laid; whereon I shall fall in embrace

And clasp my hands around it, call thy name,

And fancy in my arms my darling wife

To hold, holding her not; perhaps, I grant,

Illusory delight, yet my soul's burden

Thus shall I lighten...

What Admetus seeks is not a spell, not even assurance, only a dream for those who are awake; in other words, precisely that state of mind to which Plato, the stern seeker after truth, objected.

Plato, we know, looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art."

I posted that on Leiter's page over a decade ago, when he rejected only most of my comments. He rejected it.

CLS would undermine philosophy as much as literary studies, and the humanist academy itself. If sentences are to be examined like "so much rock and foliage"—repeating things I wrote in 2006—then that applies to all writing, and all that's left is science. But taking that to its logical conclusion undermines science itself as a practice. Alex Rosenberg can't see that the neuroscience he champions undermines cognition, rendering his "ideas" epiphenomenal.

Determinism is a ubiquitous trope these days but popular culture faces it more directly than academia. DEVS and Westworld are just two examples. I included two youtube links in the reply Leiter rejected, once he realized who I was. [I didn't put them in the email]

But if we're left to accept on faith that consciousness is causal, then we need to accept subjectivity, and politics with all the mess. The humanist academy is democratic in form [It isn't. I was sloppy]; science—as mechanism—is authoritative and as authoritarian. It's a lousy model for politics, or at least an "inhuman" one.

Literature is the discussion of values as manifest in actions. That the actions are fictional is irrelevant. It's observational, which is why fantasy is deprecated by readers of "literary" fiction. Speculative and fantasy fiction is read by philosophers and engineers—defenders of truth—who deprecate literary fiction as pretentious untruth. The only pulp fiction accepted by readers of literary fiction are crime novels, which by definition are observational and descriptive. My father is remembered for one essay on Hammett.

Descriptive literature is a form of second-order curiosity, the sort of curiosity opposed by people for whom first order enthusiasm is paramount. It describes subjectivity. 

Library science is a technics. Second order curiosity is asking yourself why you chose to be a librarian. Someone could write a biography of a librarian, or a novel about a man who became one. Maybe the author has known librarians and observed their behavior, their relation to people and books, and the world, and has tried to imagine what goes on in their heads. It's speculative but grounded in empiricism and the interpretation of actions and events. My grandfather died when my father was an infant. My father had no memories of him. His father was a PI with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He was a killer for factory owners, in the US and Canada. When my parents were in grad school at Berkeley they marched with Harry Bridges' longshoremen. The contents of my father's mind were available to others only through the facts of his behavior. Facts are open to interpretation.

s.e.

What's the point of being curious about other people without recognizing it as being curious about ourselves? There's no way to pretend we're not the object of our own study. The collecting of facts is a value worthy of study. The link's to Macdonald and Kazin.

"For the aesthetic in general as an expression of the supreme ultimate value of a system 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."
Hermann Broch

William Heckscher on Panofsky. From his memorial essay at the end of Panofsky's Three Essays on Style.

Everything in humanistic scholarship, even the (to him somewhat comical) New Criticism, which he characterized with Pierrot's words, "Je sais bien écrire, mais je ne sais pas lire," he considered acceptable, so long as it was not "institutionalized."

"I know how to write but I don't know how to read" 

 Panofsky

The Middle Ages accepted and developed rather than studied and restored the heritage of the past. They copied classical works of art and used Aristotle and Ovid much as they copied and used the works of contemporaries. They made no attempt to interpret them from an archaeological, philological or "critical" in short, from an historical, point of view. For, if human existence could be thought of as a means rather than an end, how much less could the records of human activity be considered as values in themselves. 

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.
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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.’
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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.

I was banned at Crooked Timber bit by bit. First by Bertram in late 2007 and then Farrell in early 2008. At some point after that  they had an email exchange (according to Daniel Davies) and voted to ban me entirely.  Some comments were deleted, others "disemvoweled".  My older comments were left up. I kept commenting for few years under various pseudonyms. When they caught me some comments were removed, others made illegible.

Bertram didn't remove my comments from the post above. He just said that was the end. Farrell disemvoweled them. At some point in the last few years they changed their minds, and all of those are now back. I The bracketed "aeiou" is is a remnant of the code that restored them.

I'm not happy with my tone in a lot of them. I try too hard and enjoy myself too much. The anger was justified and my opinions haven't changed. Theirs have been shifting for as long as I've followed them.

But they've restored a lot of comments so I can't say any of it is about me.

Updating. Documenting drift.

When Thomas Pogge travels around the world, he finds eager young fans waiting for him in every lecture hall. The 62-year-old German-born professor, a protégé of the philosopher John Rawls, is bespectacled and slight of stature. But he’s a giant in the field of global ethics, and one of only a small handful of philosophers who have managed to translate prominence within the academy to an influential place in debates about policy.

Leiter

“It breaks my heart to have to say it,” said Christia Mercer, a former colleague from the Columbia philosophy department, “but it’s clear that Thomas uses his reputation as a supporter of justice to prey unjustly on those who trust and admire him, who then — once victimized — are too intimidated by his reputation and power to tell their stories.”

This is also my reaction.

Ludlow, McGinn "It's no secret". Rationalists rationalize.

Leiter links to IHE, on the threat to the liberal arts.

For Talbot Brewer, professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Virginia, the liberal arts need saving in part from the “black mirrors” so many of us are glued to each day. Cellular phones, computers and, especially for children, television, facilitate a kind of “reverse-Weberian,” late capitalistic assault...

Calling attention a “vital resource,” Brewer described it as “the medium of passion, of friendship, of love. 

Not “reverse-Weberian", simply Weberian. And again, for Leiter the whole point of philosophy is that it is not art or fiction, but close to science.  He reads for text without subtext. As I repeat again and again, Leiter, like his friend Posner, is a technocratic anti-humanist.

Maria Farrell (start here or here) discovers "Post-Democracy"

I’ve been reading and re-reading Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy on and off for about eighteen months, and just spotted a nice precis of it on OpenDemocracy in a piece by Kit de Waal about celebrity activism:

“The term ‘post-democracy’ was coined by Colin Crouch to refer to the fusion of corporate power with government, generating an elite politics based on a political-financial cycle in which money buys power and power rewards money. Post-democracy is a plausible imitation of democracy. It has a popular, consultative appearance, while the real politics of power and money consists of a continuing round of inter-personal transactions among elites.”

What makes Post-Democracy hard for me to digest more than a dozen pages at a time is not, I think, its relentless rightness, which I personally find more or less inarguable, but how little there appears we can do about it. My experience of reading it is basically ‘yes, this is better researched and thought through than I’d ever manage, and I agree; we’re basically fucked.’

I get that I’m experiencing nothing more than the cognitive dissonance of a social democrat who knows capitalism is awful and probably tending towards disaster – but more the chronic debilitating disease kind of disaster of, say, a slow-boiled lobster, than the explosive, revolutionary and strangely psycho-sexual climax of sudden foment and change – but who has neither the temperament nor the constitution for either ripping it up or walking away. (Hello Rosa Luxembourg. Like my hero Virginia Woolf, you would despise me, too.) But simply knowing this doesn’t help.

About a decade ago I was at a weekend conference in New York on what was then called ‘the new philanthropy’. The impeccably well-educated and well-spoken man who’d been Angelina Jolie’s fixer in the world of Davos and the UN system was there to say how great it was that celebrities were now getting down into development issues and doing things that governments didn’t have the will for. At the Q&A, I made myself a bit awkward by asking how democratic it was that those people could re-order policy priorities on a whim, and wouldn’t it be better if they just voted and paid their taxes like the little people....

A smart commenter replies quoting a post by her I'd decided not to read.

Oh I remember you. 

“The question isn’t whether the Easter Rising accelerated Ireland’s independence or made it happen at all; it’s whether it was worth the death of one bow-legged tenement child. Of course it wasn’t."

If you don’t have faith in the people to create democracy why do you mourn its passing?

From the older post

In 1916, my great-grand father, Eoin MacNeill, was the head of a dissident army, the Irish Volunteers. At its height, before many left and volunteered to fight in World War I, the Irish Volunteers numbered about eighty thousand men.

The befuddled sister of a Weberian "liberal" and wife of a career military officer, she prays daily for the health of the Pope, and mourns our fallen state.

The Farrells are from the gentry. They are not "the little people", but for Maria celebrities are vulgar. Her brother's clan, the technocrats, are the new aristocrats, but like her he's never understood the switch. And both in different ways pretend to be defending democracy. I'm with Norman Mailer

Weber's technocratic elite, the masters of "value-free science" could never exist separately from the capitalist elite. They're siblings. Again, see Leiter's friendship with Posner, and Henry Farrell's interest -liberal academia's interest- in libertarianism, which outside of the academy is no more or less than a cult. Technocracy is not democracy. The link's a google site search. Search the web; it's still mostly me. And still obvious.
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But we can take hope from our own history. Amid unrelenting upheaval and popular anger, the Renaissance left a legacy that we still celebrate as one of humanity’s brightest. It also left wisdom, in both its triumphs and disasters, to help us steer through similar storms. Looking through a Renaissance lens, what to do now becomes startlingly clear. We need to welcome genius. To understand that disruptive change and technological revolutions can spread both immense good and harm. To celebrate diversity and overcome prejudice. To raise public and private patronage. To embrace change, and strengthen public safety nets in ways that embolden us all. To build new crossroads and welcome migrants. To tear up the (mental) maps that unhelpfully divide people. To stoke virtues – especially honesty, audacity and dignity. To champion collective endeavours as well as individual freedoms.

The Renaissance offers lessons on how to magnify the flourishing under way. It also offers warnings about what happens when we fail, in a time of great change, to renew our social bargain with one another.

This is our age of discovery. We can succumb to its pressures, close our borders and our minds to new people, ideas and technologies, and thereby surrender the possibilities inherent in humanity’s present circumstances. Or we can seize this moment, navigate the crises of our own time and co-create a blossoming that the world will still talk about in 2500.

Flounder or flourish? The choice is ours. 

Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna’s Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance is published by Bloomsbury/St Martin’s Press 

Ian Goldin is director of the Oxford Martin School and professor of globalisation and development at Oxford University (@ian_goldin). Chris Kutarna is a two-time Governor General’s medallist, Commonwealth scholar and fellow at the Oxford Martin School (@ChrisKutarna).

According to his Oxford student profile Kutarna was the lead China research on this tome:

Globalization is about Americans outsourcing product development and services to other countries. Globality is the next step.

Globalization has never been about American outsourcing. Globality is packaging and book sales.

"This is our age of discovery." The Industrial Revolution which hasn't ended is being rebranded in the language of Madison Avenue and B. school to refer to the Renaissance as opposed to the Enlightenment. That's the only relevant data point, except for the fact that Kutarna seems to have published a novel in Mandarin.
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More of the same at The Boston Review

What Is Education For?

Opening the Debate, Danielle Allen: Preparation for democratic citizenship demands humanities education, not just STEM.

Samuel Moyn:  Rights vs. Duties, Reclaiming Civic Balance
The second piece isn't part of the symposium.  It should be.

repeats, repeats, repeats.
Rules can't be contradictory; obligations will conflict. The formalism of truth vs the formalism of process. Liberalism, technocracy and science (and pseudoscience), vs republicanism, democracy, and law (and art).  More of the same.

One (via Leiter)

The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other. Mill developed utilitarianism with great humanity and insight. Perhaps that is why many utilitarians (those with less humanity, insight and judgment) say he is not a true utilitarian. I have said to two of my friends: David Lyons and John Skorupski — both excellent philosophers, who have made a deep study of utilitarianism — that they are my favorite utilitarians. The reaction of both was the same: “But I am not a utilitarian!” To this my reply was: “Ah, so that explains it.”

Consequentialist theories begin with a very simple and undoubtedly valid point: Every action aims at a future end, and is seen as a means to it. (This is precisely Kant’s conception of action.) So one rational standard of action is how well it promotes the end it seeks. Another standard is whether it aims at ends which are good. Both of these, but especially the former, depend on judgments of fact. Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.  ["Thinking" means "thinking with great humanity and insight"?] Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. ["Humanity and judgement" and "rightly": the contradiction between humility and moralism] Philosophy is more about the latter than the former. That’s why empiricist philosophy always tends to be anti-philosophy (and is often proud of it) [in favor of "science"or opposed to it? (see Hume, below)]. People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed. (The rightward side of American politics illustrates this very well.) [And academic pedantry is leftist?]

The big problem for consequentialism is that facts of this last form are hard to obtain except for a few determinate ends in the fairly short run. Consequentialist theories pretend that we can set some great big ends (the general happiness, human flourishing), provide ourselves with definite enough conceptions of them to make them the objects of instrumental reasoning, [was Hume an intrumentalist?] and then obtain enough reliable information about what actions will best promote them that we could regulate our conduct by these considerations alone. In fact people do not know enough about themselves and what is good for them to form a sufficiently definite conception of the general happiness (or whatever the end is) to establish definite rules for its pursuit. [Well there goes a truckload of academic literature out the window]

Further, we cannot predict the effects of our actions, [click the fucking links] especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do. As a result, it is possible to use the simple point that it is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don’t pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest. [Lazy rationalism. Hume was an empiricist, right?]

When consequentialist theories are developed in terms of an equally shallow psychology of the good — such as a crude form of hedonism — the results can sometimes strike sensible people as revolting and inhuman. People can be reduced to simple repositories of positive or negative sensory states, and their humanity is lost sight of entirely. When people think that moral problems can be solved by some simple strategy of calculation, that sets them up for ghastly overreaching. They think they can turn everything into a “science” the way mechanics was turned into a science in the seventeeth century. [rationalists rationalize] They want to turn everything over to technocrats and social engineers. They become shortsighted or simplistic about their ends, and they disastrously overestimate their ability to acquire the information they need to make the needed calculations. Utilitarians of the caliber of Mill and Sidgwick do not do these things, at least on particular moral issues about which they reflect as human beings. [yes another fucking link]

...Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history. It has taken me a long time to realize where I most disagree with Marx. His assessment of capitalism is far too favorable. He took its instability, inhumanity and irrationality to be signs that it was a merely transitional form, which had delivered into humanity’s hands the means to a much better way of life than any that have ever existed on earth. Marx could not bring himself to believe that our species is so benighted, irrational and slavish that it would put up with such a monstrous way of life. He thought that it was inevitable that people would find a better way. We now see that this was not so. Capitalism has not proven to be a transitional form, a gateway to a higher human future. Capitalism now seems more likely a swamp, a bog, a quicksand in which humanity is presently flailing about, unable to extricate itself, perhaps doomed to perish within a few generations from the long term effects of the technology which seemed to Marx its greatest gift to humanity. Capitalism has proven to be a far more terrible system than Marx could ever bring himself to imagine. Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims. [moralizing fatalism]

Two

David Hume, who died in his native Edinburgh in 1776, has become something of a hero to academic philosophers. In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. The runners-up in this peculiar race were Aristotle and Kant. Hume beat them by a comfortable margin. Socrates only just made the top twenty.

This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive. Their goal was “to produce in the reader a complete distrust in his own faculties,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1815–1817. The best that could be said for Hume as a philosopher was that he provoked wiser thinkers to refute him in interesting ways. As a historian and essayist, though, Hume enjoyed almost immediate success. When James Boswell called him “the greatest Writer in Brittain”—this was in 1762, before Boswell transferred his allegiance to Dr. Johnson—he was thinking mainly of Hume’s History of England, which remained popular for much of the nineteenth century. “HUME (David), the Historian” is how the British Library rather conservatively still catalogued him in the 1980s. 

["History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it."]

...Still, it is probably the rise of so-called “naturalism” in philosophy that best explains Hume’s newfound appeal. [Contemporary naturalism is just the sort of pedantry Hume mocked. Is Santayana popular again?] Naturalism has several components, all of which were prominent in his work. Hume stressed the similarities between people and other animals: a century before Darwin’s Descent of Man, he argued that there is no great difference between the minds of humans and the minds of some creatures in zoos. (Hume also anticipated Darwin in implying that certain mental traits function to aid reproduction.) He treated religion as a natural phenomenon, to be explained in psychological and historical terms—which tended to annoy the pious—and he argued that the study of the mind and of morals should be pursued by the same empirical methods that were starting to cast new light on the rest of nature. Philosophy, for Hume, was thus not fundamentally different from science. This outlook is much more common in our time than it was in his.

Hume’s response to the allegation of universal skepticism was that the author of the Treatise—who, he pretended, was someone else—had meant only “to abate the Pride of mere human Reasoners.” He advocated “Modesty…and Humility, [back to Montaigne and Erasmus, and Humanism, not the anti-Humanism of pedants. Humanism is not optimism. Look it up] with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties.” As for the foundations of morality, Hume anonymously protested that the author of the Treatise had merely denied that “the Propositions of Morality were of the same Nature with the Truths of Mathematicks and the abstract Sciences.” The book did not dispute the fact that there was a difference between right and wrong; rather it maintained that this difference reflects humanity’s “internal Tastes and Sentiments”—which, according to Hume’s pamphlet, ought not to be received as a shocking idea.

"Still, it is probably the rise of so-called “naturalism” in philosophy that best explains Hume’s newfound appeal." The return of the descriptive naturalism of literature and history and the fading of prescriptive pseudoscience. Philosophers are coming to terms with the fact that Modernism is dead. The Enlightenment is dead. Hume's humanism was the humane pessimism of the Renaissance, not the optimism of pedants.

Allen Wood (first link): "I think it is already clear that Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century." Rawls was to philosophy what Tolkien was to literature. But Tolkien will last longer.

Another one that I'm not going to go on about.
"Holy Wars: Secularism and the invention of religion"

Relativism and Religion: Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes
Carlo Invernizzi Accetti
Columbia University Press, $65 (cloth) 65 fucking dollars.

The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions
Michael Walzer
Yale University Press, $18 (paper)

Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Princeton University Press, $29.95 (cloth)

Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
Saba Mahmood
Princeton University Press, $24.95 (paper)

"Accetti’s singular insight is that Catholic and secular theorists of democracy, for all their differences, agree on one fundamental assertion: ethical relativism is a problem for democracies."

blasts from the past
Idiot McGinn

I am struck by this passage from Tocqueville: "I have previously stated that the principle of the sovereignty of the people hovers over the whole political system of the Anglo-Americans. Every page of this book will reflect certain fresh instances of this doctrine. In nations were it exists, every individual takes an equal share in sovereign power and participates equally in the government of the state. Thus he is considered as enlightened, virtuous, strong as any of his fellow men." Toqueville's point is that democracy presupposes that each person is as competent and virtuous as any other. But of course this is false: people differ widely in intelligence and virtue. Note that he says "considered" not "really". So democracy rests on a lie. How, then, to defend democracy? Well, if truth, reason, virtue, etc are not objective qualities that people exemplify to varying degrees, but are rather relative to each person, we have a way out: everyone is as smart and good as anyone else to himself. Then democracy rests on no lie, since everyone really is cognitively and morally equal. Relativism steps in to save democracy from its noble lie. Thus relativism finds a foothold. But relativism is rubbish; so where does that leave democracy?

Relativism is foundational to democracies. Democracy is strictly formal as to process and relativist as to absolutes. That's the fucking point.

I shut down an absurd debate about the roots of secularization once with the simple comment that secularization is the simple result of coexistence: once a Catholic girl fucks a Jewish boy it's the beginning of the end for religion qua religion.
To put it in terms of law: modern democratic justice is a Muslim judge hearing the case of a Christian accused by a Buddhist of robbery, defended by a Jew, with the state represented by a Hindu, before a jury of Animists and Jains. In order to function in such an environment you need to engage it in its entirely; you must answer not to one interest or another but to all. 

"The Tunisian “success story,” then, is not that all sides wanted democracy, but rather that all sides had no choice but to settle for democracy."

Necessity is the mother of secularism. Philosophy does not invent; it codifies. Practice precedes theory.

And Michael Walzer is a Zionist. The data is not on his side.

"History is bunk". I do all this on autopilot. That's my only excuse.

Leslie Green: Germaine Greer is right about trans-women
Feminist Philosophers Social Construction And Gender Identity

I wrote a comment; Green posted half of it. I wrote a second pointing out that although rejecting comments is his prerogative, editing without the right of refusal is a particularly sleazy form of censorship. Obviously that one didn't show up at all. I posted a two comments at Feminist Philosophers, but they were rejected as well. Credit to Green for at least leaving in the question about Dolezal, which still no one has answered.

On both sites, my comments restated points I've made before, see below, on intentional communities and hypertrophied individualism. Liberals, Oxbridge philosophers, Israelis, and transgender feminists: "I am what I say at I am. Take me at my word!" "I'm an artist!" "I'm a poet!" "I'm a scientist!" Bruno Latour and David Chalmers.

"No baby... please... I understand you... you're a part of me! I have an extended mind!"

We are judged by others. Understanding that, fosters self-awareness; ignoring it is dangerous.

Peter Ludlow, a Northwestern University professor of philosophy, resigned his position effective Monday, Nov. 2, 2015, and is no longer employed by the University.

Richard Prince retweeted a link, deadpan: it's been 25 years since the Mapplethorpe fiasco in Cincinnati. The working class Catholics who were horrified by the photographs were horrified because they understood them as Mapplethorpe did.  I remember howling with laughter at the time reading descriptions of the expert testimony for the defense: "the arc of the urine being directed into a man's mouth...  a classical study of symmetry".  "Art is good for you".

The peasants got schooled by their betters.

The defense brought in art experts from across the country to testify about Mapplethorpe’s technique.

“He was a classical photographer most of the time, all about lighting and position of the model. He wasn’t radical in that sense,” Barrie said. “The flowers were a lot more sexy than the X Portfolio,” which contained the S&M photos.

The prosecution said the pictures would speak for themselves, but “there were no experts in the art world saying this was pornography,” said Richard Meyer, an art history professor at Stanford University and the author of “Outlaw Representation.” The jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting Barrie and the CAC.

The trial was “a PR disaster,” said Vice Mayor David Mann, who was a City Council member at the time. “It kind of made us the laughing stock of sophisticated communities.”

Things got worse before they got better. A 1993 city charter amendment made Cincinnati the only U.S. city to ban enactment or enforcement of gay rights laws until 2004.

“We didn’t know it then, but” the Mapplethorpe case “was the last stand of the organized West Side Catholics, led by Marine veteran and Sheriff Simon Leis, against the inevitable transition from a city with a Roman Catholic ascendancy to a city where power was up for grabs. Still is,” said Albert Pyle, who was a staff writer for Cincinnati Magazine at the time of the Mapplethorpe case. “The West Siders were shocked that the city wasn’t ashamed of itself. The non-Catholic whites were embarrassed for the city to take a hit in the national press. Black Cincinnati, who had no stake in the CAC but who were social conservatives, thought it was a lot of white nonsense.”

And critics who don't try to reclaim Mapplethorpe for some sort of banal liberalism try to recast him as radical.

His self-portrait with a bullwhip up the bum, like the master-slave couple in a bourgeois apartment, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979), shows self-evident irony that inevitably complicates the issue of what a portrait portrays. However, in her lurid accounts of the sex that is supposedly expressed, documented, or otherwise depicted, Morrisroe opts for a horrified literalism that comes to defend a barely disguised sense of disgusted fascination. 

At this point, Mapplethorpe takes over as the dinge-queen from hell. In her descriptions of rather hopeless affairs with black boyfriends, Jack Walls and Milton Moore (who, it turns out, was Mr Polyester), Morrisroe confirms every worst fear and fantasy. ‘It has to be racist,’ Mapplethorpe says knowingly at the height of racist chic. When he fails to find a black Adonis in Kellers bar he goes to a yacht party only to be disappointed. ‘You’re looking for an intelligent, successful black millionaire who wants you ­ a white man ­ to call him “nigger”?’, a black female friend asked. ‘I wouldn’t call him “nigger” all the time,’ he replied, ‘Only during sex’.

I'm living in a silent film
Portraying
Himmler's sacred realm
Of dream reality
I'm frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain't got the power anymore
No I ain't got the power anymore

In American intellectual life it's impossible to treat people with any respect at all without also being obliged to celebrate them. So prostitution can be only a mortal sin, a rebuke to bourgeois hypocrisy, or something everyone's daughter should try. Academia follows the same logic, minus the option for sin. Technocracy is Aristotelian. American culture on the other hand is conservative and pessimistic, or the optimism is so bright that the perversity is plain to see.

If you assume your own rationality then you're free to trust the opinions of those you see as kindred and dismiss the opinions of outsiders. It's up to you to define what's offensive and what's not, according to your own objective reason.

"The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny"

Kaurismaki, Kiarostami, Spielberg, and Samuel L Jackson on violence in American culture.





My second attempt at Feminist Philosophers. I've used the Ludlow quote often enough, but without going back to the source. The reference to Kristeva slipped by. That was a mistake. The full paragraph is even more damning because even more absurd.

I'll try again. Why no defense of Dolezal? If she hadn't tried to hide her background but still made the same claims, would anyone take her seriously? Eminem doesn't claim to be black. Why should a man be accepted as "being" a woman?

In related news, Peter Ludlow just resigned. Here's Ludlow interviewed in 2013

Well, I think that 'philosopher' is an honorific term that we hand out to people whose thinking about foundational issues we admire and approve of. It's like putting a gold star next to someone's name. I guess your question then is this: When did I decide to try and get the gold star? I started college as a business major, but existential trauma propelled me into courses on Kierkegaard and so forth. Those courses didn't help with the existential trauma but they did help my GPA. After rny junior year I took a summer school graduate course at the University of Minnesota. It was taught by Herbert Hochberg and it was all about Quine and then Kripke. That's when the existential trauma lifted. That's also when I gave myself the gold star. But you know, many years later I was at a dinner with Julia Kristeva and I told her the story of how Quine and Kripke cured my existential trauma. She didn’t talk to me the rest of the meal, so, you know, I don’t think everyone has the same ideas about who should get the gold star. And I’m o.k. with that!

Three passages, three points
1- 'philosopher' is an honorific term
2- I decide to try and get the gold star
3- I gave myself the gold star.

Ludlow gave himself an honorific. He calls himself a philosopher and therefore is a philosopher. Germaine Greer says men should not be able to say that they're women. Perhaps in both cases the designation is best left for others to bestow. Ludlow and McGinn rationalize their absurd behavior. Zionists do the same thing. "Liberal Zionist" is a logical contradiction, but the Palestinian experience has been ignored. Maybe we leave our political designations to others as well. Am I a liberal?

"It's no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other"

Leiter treats that statement as a joke. Obviously it's not. Things get messy when people who identify themselves as "others" have an "other" of their own. But that's how the world works. We are each other's "others". That's a problem philosophers don't face very well, because they want to come to terms with otherness, if they do at all, only to escape it.

Again I'll repeat what I said before: gender reassignment surgery is the most extreme of extreme rnakeovers. Are there other forms of such behavior feminists accept with so little question? What sort of body horror drives people to work so hard to go against their own biology? And this has nothing to do with those born intersex. 

The blindness to Zionist ideology and behavior is based on affiliation. "I'm a liberal and rny friends are liberal" Therefore they can not be illiberal. There can be so self-hating Jews, who identify with white Europeans as they torture and kill their own closest relations. Jews are now white. Transgender self-hated? Impossible. That's for desperate housewives not drag queens.

Radically intentional communities are artificial: over-designed, over-theorized, overdetermined. The politics of phobia is reactionary. But reactionary desire isn't the problem. The desire for utopia is the problem.

Six posts now on Greer, Jenner, Dolezal, Caster Semeya, Candy Darling.
A tag I've wanted to make for a while: Utopia and Intentional Communities.
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added a few months later: Transhumanism and Transgender

It's still no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other

updated: Peter Ludlow, Colin McGinn, Richard Posner and the People's Republic of China.
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I haven't added anything to the Colin McGinn tag in awhile.

I have a rather modest unassuming leg--nothing flashy, but quite agreeable. Not like your spectacular look-at-me legs! We should have a foot race one day--I expect to be left in the dust. Also, what about wearing shorts or a skirt one day so I can actually see them--so far I've only strictly seen their shape. Not that I'm obsessed or anything. Your mind should model itself on your legs--powerful, muscular, beautiful, agile. Oh reader!

"She did not respond."

A specific variety of asshole. Rationalists rationalize.

Found by accident, from years ago:

The rule of "reason" leads to the rule of truthiness. That's why we choose the rule of law. Richard Posner:

the duty of judges is "always [to] try to do the best they can do for the present and the future, unchecked by any felt duty to secure consistency in principle with what other officials have done in the past"

The point of using precedent or intention or any other interpretive device is to test one's arguments against others. Posner's argument is that of the man who tests his ideas only against himself: of the chess player who plays alone, spinning the board between moves, or the man who thinks he's good in bed because he always comes when he masturbates.
That's a good way to weaken your game.

It's more than that. According to Posner's logic the exclusionary rule and the doctrine of the "fruit of the poisonous tree" just gets in the way of utilitarian justice, as per the mind of the beholding judge.

Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, Princeton Univ. Press.

Blurb

Westerners tend to divide the political world into "good" democracies and "bad" authoritarian regimes. But the Chinese political model does not fit neatly in either category. Over the past three decades, China has evolved a political system that can best be described as "political meritocracy." The China Model seeks to understand the ideals and the reality of this unique political system. How do the ideals of political meritocracy set the standard for evaluating political progress (and regress) in China? How can China avoid the disadvantages of political meritocracy? And how can political meritocracy best be combined with democracy? Daniel Bell answers these questions and more.

The PRC is only a meritocracy following Posner's logic, and Leiter's, and Jason Brennan's (Princeton again). It bequeaths us mandarin bureaucrats who think like Posner, and apparatchiks who behave like Ludlow and McGinn, and the general corruption of the academy.

The University of Chicago has suspended negotiations to renew its agreement to host a Confucius Institute after objecting to an unflattering article that appeared in the Chinese press. The decision follows a petition, signed by more than 100 faculty members this spring, calling for the closure of the institute. The petition raised concerns that in hosting the Chinese government-funded center for research and language teaching, Chicago was ceding control over faculty hiring, course content, and programming to Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing, which is also known as Hanban.

See also, Sahlins. I said in a note to him that the Confucius Institute made perfect sense in the context of an academy based on Posner's principles.

see also, Apple University.

Filed under determinism, etc.

Analytic philosophers write novels:
Colin McGinn has written two, the most recent self-published. (Amazon)
I remember reading an enjoyably cruel review of the first one.
Timothy Williamson has  a "Tetralogue"
Alex Rosenberg's now written The Girl from Krakow (also Amazon)

Not so long ago fictions were no more than lies.

correction: Rosenberg from an exchange with Williamson in 2011

That doesn’t mean anyone should stop doing literary criticism any more than forgoing fiction. Naturalism treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge. 

extra: a line I should have quoted years when I was comparing him to Lady Gaga.

I dismiss no phenomenon, I dismiss attempts to reconcile naturalism with intentionality, human agency, free will and finally the enduring self.

"I... I dismiss the... self"
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Filed under determinism, etc.

"I claim no expertise on Iran..." 

"With an actual deal, with definitive text and conditions, now in place, I wanted to share a few initial reactions..." 

Critics in Washington, Israel and the Gulf nations that neighbor Iran say the deal will merely delay the country's path... 

First take: Obama's winning streak continues with Iran deal... 

Sanctions, inspections, and decision-makers: The number of things that could still trip up an Iranian nuclear agreement is small, but they're ...

What a stupid fucking country.

Filed under determinism, etc.

BBC, Celebrations in Tehran

There are people who lived in Tehran in the 90s who look back with nostalgia, even if they laugh at themselves doing it.

Conservatism fails, whether or not those who call themselves conservatives are trying to do what they think is the right thing.

A banker's job, viewed from the ideal of efficiency, is making money. I'm not sure I'd want to be operated on by a brain surgeon who didn't see his job as brain surgery.
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New descriptions for old arguments.

The paradox of efficiency. [not the Javons paradox]
Sartre's waiter as a descriptive model of geekdom, (the best I've ever read) but not of waiters.
How do you reason yourself out of pedantry?

1. The purpose of a business is making widgets that can be sold for a profit.
2. The purpose of a business is making widgets that can be sold for a profit.
3. The purpose of a business is profit.

1. A carpenter's job is making things that can be sold for a profit.
2. A carpenter's job is making things that can be sold for a profit.
3. A carpenter's job is profit

1. An economist's job is...
2. A philosopher's job...
3. A scientist's job...
4. A writer's job is...
5. A musician's job is...
6. A chef's job is...

What's left to be done "for it's own sake"? What class of people are permitted an explicit combination of social and economic exchange? And what class of people are permitted to reverse the priority?

Social life is seen as intellectually inefficient.  It's assumed to be economically inefficient.

Working lawyers (not law professors) describe themselves as tradespeople. Their skill is social as well as technical. They're not rule-followers they're players at rule following; the playing is constitutive of their success and of their knowledge. The contemporary culture of crafting by comparison is aestheticized rule-following, fitting the model of the "hospitality industry", of techs and ad agency "creatives".

Crafting as geekdom finds its apotheosis in Sartre's waiter, but Sartre follows the model of efficiency celebrated by philosophers, and as such by Modernists, that sees craft as nothing but illustration, and fantasizing individualism and "authenticity" he misses the point.

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he return, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton whale carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realize it. This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a direct regard which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight "fixed at ten paces"). There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he to as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition. 

"A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer." 

Even if the buyer is a tailor? Sartre is a member of the class permitted to join art and leisure and he pretends to be artless. He sees others living through their social roles and pretends -the French bourgeois leftist intellectual- that he's not doing the same. "The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it." So does a dancer, why not a waiter.  Lawyers play with their minds, and so do philosophers. But lawyers play in pairs. Philosophers' model of sport devolves to onanism, or similar. The link's to McGinn [!]

This is all for the paper, which already has this.

If communication is a circuit, reflex is a short. The fantasy of the premature ejaculator is a state of eternal orgasm. The mania for progress becomes no more than simply the desire to go faster. If knowledge is measured in conclusions not in processes then the shortest distance between two points, the short circuit, is the obvious choice.

Kant on rule-following, Critique of Pure Reason

If understanding as such is explicated as our power of rules, then the power of judgment is the ability to subsume under rules, i.e., to distinguish whether something does or does not fall under a given rule (is or is not a casus datae legis). General logic contains no prescriptions whatever for the power of judgment; nor can it. For since general logic abstracts from all content of cognition, there remains for it nothing but the task of spelling out analytically the mere form of cognition as found in concepts, judgments, and inferences, and of thus bringing about formal rules for any use of understanding. Now if general logic wanted to show universally whether something does or does not fall under them, then this could not be done except again by a rule. But for this rule, precisely because it is thus we find that, whereas understanding is capable of being taught and equipped by rules, the power of judgment is a particular talent that cannot be taught at all but can only be practiced

"...the power of judgment is a particular talent that cannot be taught at all but can only be practiced..."

Like playing the violin or making one, like surgery or slicing lox, like seducing a woman or a man, a jury or an electorate.

A banker's job, viewed from the ideal of efficiency, is making money. I'm not sure I'd want to be operated on by a brain surgeon who didn't see his job as brain surgery. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.

I found the passage looking for sources on Kant and Wittgenstein, through Cogburn, who's still an idiot. [as I said: "'The return to metaphysics' is a return to theology as science, to 13th century scholasticism, to fantasies of truth." (more)] The point is to tie both Kant and Wittgenstein back into pre-Enlightenment Humanism, (previous post) and the fading (again) of scholastic pedantry.

Time is change; Wittgenstein and Robert Wilson.

Dogmatic slumber: Cogburn goes to church once a week at least.
I don't make affirmative defenses of atheism as belief. I make affirmative defenses of secularism as practice, but that doesn't mean I have patience with affirmative defenses of religion as such.
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Earlier mention of Kant, as pedant.  

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.’
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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.

Zionists: transforming "antisemitism" from something horrible into something honorable since 1948. #Gaza #FreePalestine
— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 20, 2014

"academic freedom" and "hate speech", my page, and the latter at Leiter's.

Leiter writes a review in the NDPR, "The Harm of Hate Speech"

Jeremy Waldron makes a spirited, if somewhat meandering, case for the legal regulation of "hate speech," one that American scholars in particular would do well to consider. Such regulation is unconstitutional content-based regulation of speech in the U.S., but is common in most other Western democracies. Is there a good reason for the U.S. to be the outlier here? As Waldron notes in passing, in the U.S. "the philosophical arguments about hate speech are knee-jerk, impulsive, and thoughtless", which is at least partly due to confusion about what is at stake. Waldron observes that "hatred is relevant not as the motivation of certain actions, but as a possible effect of certain forms of speech", and thus the real issue is "the predicament of vulnerable people who are subject to hatred directed at their race, ethnicity, or religion"

...Of course, most people are just regurgitators of pablum, vectors of ideological and commercial forces at work in the broader culture, so what they "disclose" is only, in their eyes, a mark of their individuality.

Also my page, on Tushnet

It says something about the decline of this country that a specialist in Middle East Studies writing about Kuwait gives a better defense of free speech than a professor of American constitutional law does writing about The U.S. 

 And of course, Brighouse, against free speech

I would say, in fact, that the first amendment tradition has a terribly distorting effect on American public discussions of free speech.  

...I think there is a very strong case that hateful epithets can be distinguished and treated differently from propositional content, and do not merit protection under “the right to speak what one sees as the truth”.

and Bertram the same

The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves.

For more by both the above go here (and follow the instructions for sources)

On Salaita, Leiter links approvingly, to this

Wise argues, “What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” Of course, this standard is ridiculous: individuals should be free to say personal and “disrespectful” things about others (for example, everyone should be free to say that Wise’s argument here is both stupid and evil, without facing punishment from the respect police). Respect is not a fundamental value of any university, and being “disrespectful” is not an academic crime. But it’s notable that Salaita really didn’t say anything personal about anyone. So here Wise greatly expands the concept, declaring that not only persons but “viewpoints themselves” must be protected from any disrespectful words. I am puzzled as to exactly how a free university could possibly operate when no one is allowed to be disrespectful toward any viewpoint. Presumably, Wise will quickly act to fire anyone who has ever disrespected or demeaned Nazism, terrorism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Since all “viewpoints” are protected, then biology professors must be fired for disrespecting creationism as false, along with any other professor who is found to believe or know anything.

My comments

“Respect is not a fundamental value of any university, and being “disrespectful” is not an academic crime.” 

Salaita: “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.” 

The post has been linked by a respected academic who agrees with it while also (unmentioned in his link) being a supporter of “hate speech” laws. I won’t offer an opinion on whether or not the quote from Salaita can be classified as hate speech, but I don’t have to because I oppose the laws made to regulate whatever it is. 

The author of this post tries to separate the formal and structural (the integrity of academia etc) from the normative. Not gonna happen. 

The pale of the academic normative is broader than the pale of the common normative, but they shift in tandem. You should leave discussion of academic “freedom” to libertarians and focus on tenure as due process and academic independence—best defined as “once past the post, you’re in”—as better for society than its opposite. Salaita was let in and he followed the rules. Wise hasn’t.

The academy isn't removed from politics; tenure and academic freedom grant those allowed to teach a distance from its consequences. Larry Summers is allowed to say whatever he wants about the intelligence of women. J. Phillip Rushton and Arthur Jensen never lost a job as a result of their opinions on race and IQ. Even John Yoo has a job. Colin McGinn and Peter Ludlow got in trouble for the opposite of yelling "fire" in a crowded building—whispering "pussy" in a private room—but as exceptions to the rule they're of a kind.

Salaita's tweet in context, here.  It takes away somewhat from my use of it as illustration, but since we've gone down the slippery slope from "hate speech" to "trigger words", it still works. As with hate, the trigger is in the mind of the beholder, and if the beholder is prejudged as "victim" and as needing protection, then who or what is the protector? This is where liberal concern becomes a defense of Holly Golightly and Hollies go lightly, the opposite of liberalism.

Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered"

Not less dangerous and quite in accord with this general trend was the sole new piece of historical philosophy which the Zionists contributed out of their own new experiences; "A nation is a group of people ... held together by a common enemy" (Herzl)-an absurd doctrine containing only this bit of truth: that many Zionists had, indeed, been convinced they were Jews by the enemies of the Jewish people. Thereupon these Zionists concluded that without antisemitism the Jewish people would not have survived in the countries of the Diaspora; and hence they were opposed to any attempt to liquidate antisemitism on a large scale. On the contrary, they declared that our foes, the antisemites, "will be our most reliable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies" (Herzl). The result could only be, of course, an utter confusion in which nobody could distinguish between friend and foe, in which the foe became the friend and the friend the hidden, and therefore all the more dangerous, enemy.

The paradox of needing hate and hate speech to define yourself; the paradox of fascism. The photograph below is a fascist image, and a partial model of the Zionist self-image.

flickr

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"The pale of the academic normative is broader than the pale of the common normative, but they shift in tandem." Maybe I need to add another circle.