Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830-1850, 

Saint-Simon’s emphasis on overt didacticism underlines the transitional status of his ideas. While the disciples who took up the banner of industry following the philosopher’s death in 1825 were to cultivate a mystical religiosity where sentiment was given pride of place, Saint-Simon’s own attitude toward imagination and the arts remained qualified by an underlying commitment to reason. Positivist leanings provide a continual bedrock to his thought, surviving, and indeed justifying, the modifications in his practical outlook. In this respect, Saint-Simon displays epiStemological convictions that grow out of the rationalist tradition of Enlightenment philosophy. His promotion of a utilitarian aesthetic, too, has eighteenth-century antecedents, not only in the Revolution but also in ancien regime interest in the morally inspiring impact of art. Yet, in certain respects, Saint-Simon makes a break with the Enlightenment. His perception of contemporary medical theory, with its repudiation of the egalitarian connotations of sensationalism, prompted an acknowledgment of the inherent limitations of reason as a faculty found in developed form only among a small minority. It is in this context that sentiment, whose organic origins apparently guaranteed more universal appeal, acquires a pivotal role in the political equation and leads to the artist’s promotion in Saint-Simon’s later work. Such an appreciation of sentiment, while sharing some of the characteristics advanced in eighteenth-century texts, fundamentally deviates from this earlier tradition in its overall place within an explanation of aesthetic response and differs markedly from the essentially elitist conception of sensiibilité.

Saint-Simon’s attitude toward art is, moreover, unambiguously functional in tone. Beauty is a concept entirely foreign to his concerns; art achieves significance in his eyes only insofar as it can be justified on strictly utilitarian lines. Symptomatically, his aesthetic speculations remain on exclusively abstract plane, eschewing any reference to specific works of literature, painting, or sculpture. Nor did Saint-Simon make conspicuous attempts to acquaint himself with contemporary practice. While he had gone to elaborate lengths to cultivate leading scientists, even contracting a short-lived marriage in 1801 as a means of establishing a fashionable salon in his home near the Ecole de médecine, his familiarity with artists of the period remained slight—though the painter Ary Schefier briefly entered Saint-Simon’s circle in 1816, through friendship with his young collaborator Augustin Thierrlv. This isolation confirms the general indifference with which the artistic community responded to Saint-Simon’s promise of unprecedented social eminence, a promise all too apparently qualified by a highly instrumental understanding of culture as subservient to priorities determined through the superior insights of reason.

The rationalist ballast that holds Saint-Simon’s aesthetic in place was largely jettisoned by his disciples. As the following chapter will demonstrate, their cultivation of pronounced religious overtones had far-reaching implications not only for their interpretation of Saint-Simon’s philosophy of social organization but also for their understanding of art and of the artist’s status, which far surpassed anything their mentor had been willing to allow. In this respect, the movement cast aside much of the Enlightenment inheritance in Saint-Simon’s philosophy and forged an understanding of art social that moved beyond his utilitarian commitment to exert a far more potent appeal on the artistic community in the years after 1830. 

It didn't leave rationalism behind for long.

a new tag for Saint-Simon

And reposting the below from a year ago, because I've been writing about Athens and the Renaissance. Double-consciousness is the foundation of humanism and democracy. It's the foundation for art. Art is always the manifestation of double-consciousness, the acceptable form of release: the illusory world of play where self and other are joined. Du Bois was always a positivist of one sort of another, defending enlightenment model of the "rational, single self". Romantics and irrationalists respond by wanting the make the illusion a reality.

But positivism was always a form of romanticism.

17 … But now we have another problem.What is that?
What if we find out what makes each of us internally consistent? What if I find your proper name, that thing which describes exactly what you are?
Than I will always be honest, or predictable at least. And you will be able to interpret everything I say and never be wrong. And of course I’ll know your name as well.
No dishonesty, no subterfuge, no Freud, no art… Then we can all be logical positivists.
But it doesn’t matter. That dream’s irrelevant.
I want unification.
It’s an illusion.
I want the illusion.
Do you want the illusion or do you want the illusion to be real?
What’s the difference?
One means that you have an appreciation of the arts. The other means that you’re a fascist.

...and a new tag for Simon Blackburn. He deserves one at this point.
---

From Sept 2018:

"Divided consciousness"

"Irony is the glory of slaves."  Milosz

Du Bois.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Arendt

But bragging is a common vice, and a more specific, and also more decisive, flaw in Eichmann's character was his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow's point of view. Nowhere was this flaw more conspicuous than in his account of the Vienna episode. He and his men and the Jews' were all "pulling together," and whenever there were any difficulties the Jewish functionaries would come running to him "to unburden their hearts," to tell him "all their grief and sorrow," and to ask for his help.

A repeat

File under Trolley Problems. A soldier explains what Oxbridge philosophers can't. It's a sign of how far we've fallen that it has to be explained at all.

A thousand years ago when I was about to begin my military career, a wise old retired Marine colonel, a veteran of the carnage at Tarawa, gave me some advice. Paraphrased here, he said

So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect. Democracy is the antithesis of the military life; it’s chaotic, dishonest, disorganized, and at the same time glorious, exhilarating and free — which you are not.

After a while, if you stay in, you’ll be tempted to say, “Look, you civilians, we’ve got a better way. We’re better organized. We’re patriotic, and we know what it is to sacrifice. Be like us.” And you’ll be dead wrong, son. If you’re a career soldier, you may defend democracy, but you won’t understand it or be part of it. What’s more, you’ll always be a stranger to your own society. That’s the sacrifice you’ll be making.

"A military in service to a democracy is an authoritarian order in service to a free one: every soldier is simultaneously both a soldier and a citizen." A living breathing contradiction in terms. Before we negotiate with others we negotiate with ourselves.
---

Another recent repeat, an obvious one I missed. Baudelaire

To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The litterateurs of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society.

Simon Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, comparisons, changes and additions made at some point between the first edition in 1994 and 2005

Humanism

Most generally, any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and either optimistic about the powers of human reason, or at least insistent that we have no alternative but to use it as best we can. More particularly, the movement distinctive of the Renaissance and allied to the renewed study of Greek and Roman literature: a rediscovery of the unity of human beings and nature, and a renewed celebration of the pleasures of life, all supposed lost in the medieval world. Humanism in this Renaissance sense was quite consistent with religious belief, it being supposed that God had put us here precisely in order to further those things the humanists found important. Later the term tended to become appropriated for antireligious social and political movements. Finally, in the late 20th century, humanism is sometimes used as a pejorative term by postmodernist and especially feminist writers. applied to philosophies such as that of Sartre, that rely upon the possibility of the autonomous, selfconscious, rational, single self, and that are supposedly insensitive to the inevitable fragmentary, splintered, historically and socially conditioned nature of personality and motivation. 

The underlined was added.

"...renewed celebration of the pleasures of life, all supposed lost in the medieval world." 

"supposedly insensitive to the inevitable fragmentary, splintered, historically and socially conditioned nature of personality and motivation."

Snide, and wrong.

The entry, unchanged, for Montaigne. No mention of humanism.

Montaigne had no very high opinion of the faculties and achievements of mankind. His attitude found ample confirmation in the work of Sextus Empiricus whose motto "Que sais-je" ("What do I know?") Montaigne adopted to himself.

Erasmus, unchanged

One of the earliest and greatest humanists of the Northern Renaissance,
...had little confidence that the unaided powers of men were capable of forging new utopias. 

Blackburn can't keep his definitions straight.

The entry for Thomas More doesn't refer to him as a humanist though he's referred to in other entries as a humanist. He and Erasmus are linked in both their entries.

He is remembered philosophically partly as a friend of Erasmus and a key figure in the renaissance in England but, also as the author of Utopia (1516) a description of the quest for a political ideal that is satisfied by a system of communism, national education, and free toleration of religion.

No mention of irony.

1994 - Entry for Liberalism but not for Republicanism, for Isaac Newton but not Blackstone. Both were added.  Locke is treated deferentially, Montesquieu snidely. No changes.

The first time I read discusions of "comparative advantage" I thought immediately of the importance of redundancy for stable systems: efficient systems are fragile; stable systems have high levels of redundancy.

I thought these things were truisms. That's why I've had so much trouble (and this is going back years) following arguments predicated on thinking they weren't. [Taleb etc. here]

Economists and philosophers who defend efficiency defend it as a value system, a type of morality that they associate with science and engineering. But they're not engineers.

Writers of financial contracts are called Financial Engineers. And Joseph Yellow Kid Weil was a confidence engineer.

continuing
Leiter, in his post on Dworkin, includes among others a link to a symposium on one of Dworkin's papers [the link to the original paper is dead, but it's available here: pdf], and to his own "review essay" of recent books by and about Dworkin. The Theory of Esoteric Law for me puts the final nails in the coffin of every argument Leiter or Hart could make on the philosophy of law.  Dworkin's evasiveness is part and parcel of the general inability on the part of philosophers to admit to defending an idea to the extent of it being a form of ideological commitment, but besides that Dworkin's arguments describe pretty much the way things actually work. We create and defend narratives and try to find the "right" way to continue them. We try to justify those narratives and those decisions to those around us. Courts may invent new doctrines but the justification of those doctrines is always predicated on them being seen as the continuation of a tradition. They must be recognized, and recognition is a process of situating the unknown among the known. The focus is on continuity not change. Those who pretend that they themselves are not the product of culture will also pretend that their decisions are removed from it. Others will defend their cultural assumptions without being able or willing to articulate them. Scalia won't be remembered as he'd want to be and his desire, and the record of his social interactions, needs to be considered a part of the cultural and linguistic process of law.

Dworkin begins his response to Simon Blackburn by saying "Blackburn doesn't like lawyers…"
Hart was a barrister for 8 years but unlike Dworkin seems not to learned much from it.

"The argument with Balkin is whether we need to sacralize questions in order to avoid sacralizing things."

plus c'est la même chose

Tedra Osell makes the arguments of David Brooks (and National Right to Life)

God... forbid anyone, anywhere should ever have to “involuntarily” do anything.

...In every single instance we are arguing over control. Children are a problem in a world that insists on autonomy and self-determination, because children compromise one’s autonomy and change one’s life path.

I submit that a society in which children are a problem is a society that is deeply inhumane.

update: I didn't read beyond the post. Osell in response to a question

The rhetoric for abortion rights in an American context (or probably in the context of most industrialized countries) depends on the language of autonomy and self-determination, yes—in part because autonomy and self-determination are so central to the culture.

I would assert, however, that the “right” to abortion stems from the simple fact that abortion is possible and that women with unwanted pregnancies will—and have, throughout history—abort those pregnancies. The argument is therefore not about the right to an abortion so much as it is about whether or not women will have access to safe, legal medical abortion or whether they will be left to their own devices.

Judging by the post itself I'd written that she'd described change "unknowingly". She just articulated it very well. And again, (less fortunately)

indian 09.14.12 at 2:58 am
Why do feminists feel the need to speak like steretypical prole men in discussing such topics? E.g., “pisses me off” from the OP or “fuck that shit” from the quoted material. It’s almost like they valorize traditional maleness? Anyway, I find it hopelessly middle-class in origin. Elite women or prole women do not act like prole men, sorry. I know this even better as a bit of an outsider to Western culture.

Tedra Osell 09.14.12 at 3:19 am
I am middle class. I don’t see why that’s “hopeless.”

As to whether I swear because I valorize traditional maleness: no, not that I’m aware of. I swear because I find doing so (1) an effective way of demonstrating emotion; I not only have an opinion on this topic, I also have strong feelings; (2) rhetorically desirable.

Also, I don’t know that it’s true that prole/working-class women don’t swear. Certainly working-class women who are concerned with being respectable don’t, but plenty of working class women do.

Am I to infer that you think swearing is something I ought not to do? And if so, why?

The Urban dictionary definitions for Prole. I like the first one.

From "proletarian" meaning wage-earner or worker. The shortened version being a derogatory term used by the middle and upper classes to deride the working class majority.
Oh Tarquin, look at those wretched proles. Set the hounds on them.

And Osell's vulgarity is mannerism not manner. It's a pose, as she admits.

One partial explanation might also be that I (again, can’t speak for Belle) do, in fact, cultivate a somewhat aggressive persona (although actually I have used this very little on this blog) as a compensatory mechanism for imposter syndrome, which is a pretty common problem for high-achieving, ambitious American women, I understand. I believe it is supposed to have something to do with anxiety engendered by the dual imperative to be “good” in the sense of “achieve, do well in school, be successful at work” and “good” in the sense of “be nice, don’t challenge authority, don’t stand out.”

A pose is a pretension, a sign of weakness, which is how it reads. The problem isn't that it's acting, but that it's bad acting.  Commenter etv13 posts a link to a discussion of Univocal Heteroglossia at Language Log.  She posts it as an aside, and Language Log isn't known for literary criticism, but Chris Kluwe does a better job of it than Ossell.

A.O. Scott reviews The Master.

More showman than shaman — he holds his followers in thrall with jokes, dinner-table toasts and bawdy songs — Dodd is so adept at the performance of sincerity that he may long ago have fooled himself into believing the bizarre doctrines he seems to pull out of thin air. “The Master,” meanwhile, is rigorously agnostic about his methods and intentions, refusing the temptations of satire and gazing fondly at Dodd’s follies even as it notes the brutal way he and his acolytes deal with doubters and heretics. This semi-sympathetic stance makes sense, since the film, a glorious and haunting symphony of color, emotion and sound, is very much its own Cause.

Our minds sometimes play tricks on us, substituting invention for memory. Movies turn this lapse into a principle, manufacturing collective fantasies that are often more vivid, more real, than what actually happened. “The Master,” unfolding in the anxious, movie-saturated years just after World War II, is not a work of history in the literal or even the conventionally literary sense. The strange and complicated story it has to tell exists beyond the reach of doubt or verification. The cumulative artifice on display is beautiful — camera movements that elicit an involuntary gasp, passages in Jonny Greenwood’s score that raise the hair on the back of your neck, feats of acting that defy comprehension — but all of it has been marshaled in the pursuit of a new kind of cinematic truth. This is a movie that defies understanding even as it compels reverent, astonished belief.

Duncan Black, September 2012

Dear PR People
Occasional, if futile, reminder that I'm actually not really interested in most popular nonfiction books. I'd be much more likely to read and comment on fiction. Also, too, TV and movie screeners.

Duncan Black, March 2010

What The Hell's A Research Paper
I think a major consequence of the lack of reading non-fiction other than textbooks is that when in late high school or college teachers want research paper type things, the students have a lot of trouble largely because they've never read any. They aren't familiar with the basic model. This gets interpreted as "they don't know how to write," which I guess is somewhat true, but they don't know how to write in a particular style because they have spent so little time reading that particular style.

Obviously this is good enough for a blog post, and not "I am an education expert," but I do, at least, have experience teaching at the college level….

Ossell's stumbling charts the move away from individualist idealism just as it charts the return of the open acceptance of class, but her response isn't enough to resolve the problems of abortion.  Abortion is not downloading, another activity that's to often defended as moral rather than simply acknowledged as ubiquitous.  Questions of the viability of human life are not as simple as questions relating to the quantity or definition of data, even if they have to be treated the same way as  questions of law.
The strongest non-idealist defense of abortion rights follows another logic

We need a new generation of technocrats who understand that democracy is procedural not ideational. We don't need better, smarter, masters of the universe, we need a more educated populace and scholars with a sense of irony. We need fewer philosophers and more historians. We need a return to the understanding that greed is inevitable, but that's its a weakness, and that democracies have freedom of speech not because governments grant it but because the government is not granted the power to take it away. Technocrats as fantasists of their own power have everything backwards.

It's less a question of whether women should have a right to abortion than under what circumstance we should allow the government to interfere. Osell makes the argument for social ubiquity but not society.

The world as we experience it is messy; law is not. Once you accept the distinction hard questions become easier. All governments that would claim to be based on the world beyond experience will be based on bigger fictions than those that are the basis of democracy.

Technocrats recognize governments and individuals, but not society, since it can't be quantified. Like Donald Davidson's rejection of the conceptual scheme [always, for simplicity, quoting Simon Blackburn],"arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate”, society like the subtleties of Proust in french, or Jabberwocky in english, "n'existe pas!" Thatcher is claimed to have made that argument, but didn't. She paid lip service to "a living tapestry" while doing her best to shred it.

For technocrats, rules are primary, people are secondary. Rules are something we have in common, but only as the lowest common denominator. Focusing on the mean puts downward pressure on the mean. Studying only the ubiquity of mediocrity, it spreads.

A society of laws can produce the image below, but laws cannot define the implications. Laws in a republic cannot be used to oppose fascism in its infancy, as sensibility and idea; it is an aggregate and can only be opposed by an aggregate. Democracy is the rule of amateurs governed by laws, not the rule of experts governed by their own sense of reason. We need an educated populace; the former "Bitch PhD" should give up on home schooling her own child and get a job teaching high school, preferably the children of proles. I think maybe Adrienne Pine would agree.

Another repeat, rediscovered by accident.
Simon Blackburn, Quasi-realism, and real politics.

...I'm not arguing with Blackburn, but he's doing no more than scoring academic points. He'll never get to politics, even the social politics of daily life. Every lawyer argues cases from the position of quasi realism: his obligation is to his client. But every lawyer has an opponent in argument. "Research", the terminology of science applied to social life (and debate is social life) remains perspectival even at its best. For my purposes it doesn't matter if the authors are being disingenuous or if their myopia is the result of ideological formalism. It doesn't matter if they're cynics or fiddlers. Blackburn is a fiddler, that's what interests me here.
The politics of mathematics and formal logic, of the functionalism of tools, is anti-politics. The politics of Truth is anti-politics.

Interesting that Zizek and Badiou, [see yesterday] an Eastern European former dissident and a Western European ex-Maoist, are arguing the importance of aspiration, of hope, the desire to be better than mostly we are, while Western left-liberals, now "left-neoliberals" (including those calling themselves socialists) are arguing for the creation of systems of control that limit our capacity for self-harm. It seemed clear to me that Badiou has returned to the Church, or maybe he never left. The choice is between the rationalism of engaged hope and the rationalism of individualism and cold moral reason (and moral seriousness is not moral responsibility). The secularist empiricism of language and experience is the third option that's ignored.

Panofsky, quoted below (and all of this is a repeat from years ago):
"The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition."

Simon Blackburn in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy:

Humanism—Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.

To be fair that's from the 1994 edition and Blackburn has updated it and made it at least a bit more historically accurate; nonetheless another demonstration that Enlightenment Humanism, as it's come down to us, is an oxymoron.
---

Philology. The narrative of Modernism is of synchrony and formalism supplanting narrative. The only place philological argument is central is in constitutional scholarship. The word's been sitting there, unused, and I never caught it.

"Former friends have recounted that Loughner had a fixation for grammar and words, saying that he challenged Giffords at a previous public meeting with the impenetrable question: 'What is government if words have no meaning?' "
---
"A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned."
W.V.O. Quine.
---
"Einstein tells the story of how Gödel called the game theorist Morgenstern on the evening of his citizenship interview in the United States, to explain how he had discovered a logical problem in the Constitution: a non-standard model that would enable a dictatorship to be created consistently with it. After a period of ill health, he effectively starved himself to death for fear that he was being poisoned."
Entry for Gödel in Simon Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
---
"[T]he Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead — or, as I prefer to put it, enduring. It means today not what current society (much less the Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted."
Antonin Scalia

No word has meaning, each has meanings. Logicians don't understand language, they replace the Platonism of religious authority with the Platonism of numbers, and Quine's holism has the same effect. Scientists are not science; if science is a tool, philosophy must be concerned with the nature of the tool user. Holism, absent the social function of language and thus still "reductionist", is a metaphysical article of faith. His naturalism is anti-political and his politics were predictably lousy.

The only way to eliminate meanings, or freeze them, is to eliminate interpretation as subjective and therefore illogical. The only way to eliminate subjectivity from our experience of social and therefore political life is to lie. Taruskin and Balkin again. And as long as we're on the subject of music, it makes sense that Willard Quine's nephew was a musical puritan and junky.
---

It's not that Quine's holism is an act of faith as much as that he uses it to defend his faith in philosophy as an independent subject. His arguments are fundamentally perverse: a moralizing defense ex cathedra of the idea of pragmatism, which encouraged the continuing practice of its opposite.
--

This ended up the beginning of a new tag: Kurt Gödel meet David Addington, though I brought in the Addington reference later. It made me smile that the only other reference I've found to the two of them is in a paper by Balkin and Levinson. Linked here

[see also earlier post]

Simon Blackburn defends quasi-realism (preprint)

...The crucial passage in Egan’s paper reads as follows:

For me to be fundamentally in error, I need to have some moral view that’s (a) stable, and (b) mistaken. But given Blackburn’s account of moral error, this can’t happen. For my moral belief that P to be stable is for it to be such that it would survive any improving change (or course of improving changes). For my moral belief that P to be mistaken is for there to be some improving change (or course of improving changes) that would lead me to abandon P. So on Blackburn’s account of moral error, a moral belief is mistaken only if it’s not stable. So for me to be fundamentally in error, I’d need to have some moral view that was (a) stable, and (b) not stable, which I pretty clearly can’t have.

So if I’m a reflective quasi-realist, I can know in advance, just by thinking about what moral error is, that I can’t be fundamentally morally mistaken. (Egan 2007: 214)

Now unfortunately this is not quite right, and the extent to which it misses being an accurate formulation of anything the quasi-realist ought to accept is critical. It is not quite right that for a belief that p to be stable is ‘for it to be such that it would survive any improving change (or course of improving changes)’. This gives a criterion of stability in terms of whatever is an improving change. Whereas as we have seen, officially stability is a matter of surviving anything that the subject would regard as an improving change, either antecedently, or post hoc. Without this conflation, the result that a moral belief is mistaken only if it is not stable does not follow, and the contradiction does not follow either. To see this, let us distinguish the two ideas more carefully. It is the difference between:

(M) If something is entrenched in my outlook, in such a way that nothing I could recognize as an improvement would undermine it, then it is true.
(I) If something is entrenched in my outlook, in such a way that nothing that is an improvement would undermine it, then it is true.

The first of these is the gun Egan would point at the quasi-realist: the a prioricity of (M) would deliver a kind of first-person smugness that I was concerned to avoid. The second is very different. It talks of immunity to actual improvement: something at least close to Crispin Wright’s notion of superassertibility. And it may be a priori that if something is immune to all actual and possible improvement, then it is true—given a natural connection between improving and getting towards the truth. But (I) is not a problem, for it introduces no asymmetry between myself and others. If I hold (I) to be a priori true, I should equally hold its impersonal version to be so:

(I´) If something is entrenched in anyone’s outlook, in such a way that nothing that is an improvement would undermine it, then it is true.

For that matter, neither version of (I) introduces anything specific to ethics: it may be a priori that if someone’s belief that the film starts at eight o’clock is immune to improvement, then it is true. For if it were false, then an improvement is clearly on the cards, namely replacing it with the truth. Deflationism about truth is quite compatible with (I´). A deflationist will interpret it as a generalization corresponding to the schema ‘if p then an outlook which includes ¬p is capable of improvement’ and under any acceptable interpretation of improvement, this will be something to be asserted.

So a swift rebuttal on my part would be simply to reject the conflation between (M) and (I).

Blackburn's analogy: "if someone’s belief that the film starts at eight o’clock is immune to improvement, then it is true. For if it were false, then an improvement is clearly on the cards, namely replacing it with the truth."

And mine:


Venus de Milo front and side views
Outlook/Viewpoint/Point of view. My analogy takes outlook literally to mean a view from a place, in this case in front of the statue. The side view is off limits.


Analogy is a literary device. Blackburn's "swift rebuttal" is lawyer's rhetoric and mine is no better. But we can respond to him in other ways and with arguments that should be obvious to any educated non-philosopher:

How forceful would arguments for the equality of women have been without arguments by women? Is there a substantive [non-political] reason for women and minorities to be represented in government? Why do we separate the executive and legislative, the prosecution and defense?

I've said all this before and none of the points are original. Blackburn is struggling to hold on to an ideal of moral individualism, and quasi-realism only makes sense if you let go of it. Lawyers are under no requirement to believe in the truth of their clients' arguments. Their only obligation is to represent them.

Simon Blackburn on Moral Quasi-Realism

Single case probabilities are those of particular events, such as Eclipse winning the 2.30 p.m. race this afternoon, an asteroid hitting the earth in the next century, or Parfit changing his mind about expressivism before Christmas. The background to Ramsey’s view can be sketched quite quickly, and is not really important to what follows. It is the pessimistic but plausible view that no satisfactory theory of such probabilities is forthcoming. Frequencies require sets of events, and putting events into sets does not help unless we have a principle for selecting the right sets. Any such principle is in danger of leaving all single case probabilities at either 0 or 1, although we will usually not know which, or, if the world is indeterministic, leaving them equally unknowable. Hence, probabilists such as Richard von Mises had banned them altogether, and scepticism about the notion—what is now called an error theory— seemed to be the only scientific course.

And yet outside the philosophy classroom the notion refused to die. Horse races still took place, and bookmakers thrived as before. Discussions about a particular horse’s chances filled sporting columns and bars. Insurance companies and actuaries still worked. People made up their minds, or changed them, oblivious to the pained cries of philosophers. So Ramsey, more charitable than von Mises, offered an explanation and vindication of the practices connected with voicing and discussing single-case probabilities. The manifestation, he said, of a sincere judgment of this kind is a distribution of confidence, and that in turn can most easily be regarded as a disposition to buy or sell bets at appropriate prices, under certain idealized conditions.[1] Such dispositions, of course, are not true or false in themselves. But they have what I called a propositional reflection, in the single case judgment. Thus, if I find I am disposed to risk $1 on Eclipse winning the 2.30, in the hope of getting $2 back if he does, I can voice this disposition by saying that Eclipse’s chances are at least 50 – 50. The disposition is discussable, for it may be that this is a very foolish bet. If you know that Eclipse is off-form, entirely outclassed by the field, has shown symptoms of equine flu, or recently lost a leg, you may helpfully seek to dissuade me. It is these discussions that fill racecourse bars and the sporting columns and the single-case probability proposition is the focus for them.

...We now turn to ethics, where, over many years, I have tried to articulate and defend a precisely parallel position, standing, for instance, to error theorists exactly as Ramsey stood to von Mises. The parallelism has not been hidden: I have explicitly drawn attention to it in many writings. Moral and evaluative propositions are foci for the arguments and thoughts with which men and women discuss, reject, accept, ways of conducting their lives. We urge them on each other in order to change peoples’ practical dispositions: their motivations and concerns, their sense of honour, guilt and shame, or of what will do and what will not. So now I turn to some of the things Parfit says, and see how they might sound if we applied them to Ramsey’s theory. Since I do not want to put words into Ramsey’s mouth, I shall invent a persona, Bramsey, to act as my spokesman.

Blackburn suggests that such attitudes (moral and conative attitudes) might be mistaken in the sense that we would not have these attitudes if our standpoint were improved in certain ways. But to explain the sense in which this standpoint would be improved, Blackburn would have to claim that, if we had this standpoint, our attitudes would be less likely to be mistaken. This explanation would fail because it would have to use the word ‘mistaken’ in the sense that Blackburn is trying to explain.
P. 359

The parallel will be:

Bramsey suggests that betting dispositions might be mistaken in the sense that we would not have these dispositions if our standpoint were improved in certain ways. But to explain the sense in which this standpoint would be improved, Bramsey would have to claim that, if we had this standpoint, our betting dispositions would be less likely to be mistaken. This explanation would fail because it would have to use the word ‘mistaken’ in the sense that Bramsey is trying to explain.

Zionism as Quasi-Realism. This sort of snapshot "research", without reference to recent Israeli actions is like a history of Israel with no reference to events before 1948. "Finally, our data showed..." that if you ignore data you get "X". But the amount of data is limitless. And where you start is your choice. [I have to say it's worse than that: "...while others claimed that his government is constitutionally illegitimate." Following the text of the constitution it is illegitimate.]

I'm not arguing with Blackburn, but he's doing no more than scoring academic points. He'll never get to politics, even the social politics of daily life. Every lawyer argues cases from the position of quasi realism: his obligation is to his client. But every lawyer has an opponent in argument. "Research", the terminology of science applied to social life (and debate is social life) remains perspectival even at its best. For my purposes it doesn't matter if the authors are being disingenuous or if their myopia is the result of ideological formalism. It doesn't matter if they're cynics or fiddlers. Blackburn is a fiddler, that's what interests me here.
The politics of mathematics and formal logic, of the functionalism of tools, is anti-politics. The politics of Truth is anti-politics.

Interesting that Zizek and Badiou [see yesterday], an Eastern European former dissident and a Western European ex-Maoist, [not so ex-, actually] are arguing the importance of aspiration, of hope, the desire to be better than mostly we are, while Western left-liberals, now "left-neoliberals" (including those calling themselves socialists) are arguing for the creation of systems of control that limit our capacity for self-harm. It seemed clear to me that Badiou has returned to the Church, or maybe he never left. The choice is between the rationalism of engaged hope and the rationalism of individualism and cold moral reason (and moral seriousness is not moral responsibility). The secularist empiricism of language and experience is the third option that's ignored. Too bad about that dinner, it would've been fun.

note taking
Posted at Practical Ethics Blog

Religion is formal law as public record. If you want to know what a Christian believes you can look in a book. The text, or law, is a ground. Reason has no single ground. It's fundamentally private. That fact more than anything is why democracy is founded in the rule of written public law and not the rule of reason. The primary function of law is that a people come to some form of agreement. What they agree upon is secondary. Absolute truth is not a goal.
Courtrooms are chambers for decision-making not truth production.

I asked my dentist why he crossed himself before he began work on my root canal."To remind me that there's something out there bigger than I am." I said my family were atheists but that for us history served the same function. He paused for a minute before smiling and nodding.

The logic of law is conservative, even pessimistic. The logic of science is optimistic.
Simon Blackburn, in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Humanism as "most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.” The best that can be said is that his may be the contemporary definition. As a matter of history it's simply incorrect The link is to a passage by the art historian Erwin Panofsky [this page se/dg] 

The most famous image in the popular imagination of the power of reason alone is in the character of the Mad Scientist. And it's not uncommon in philosophical circles to read arguments claiming that unaided reason shows that history is bunk [Alex Rosenberg] There's no similar myth of the mad historian, what there are are horror stories in fiction and life of people who claimed that history no longer applied to them.

What drives me up the wall reading through Anglo American academic writing is that there are so many arguments based so much on what the authors know or assume, that actually adding something from outside is impossible. Someone can say "All language is English" and if someone responds in another language they're ignored as spouting gibberish.

Interesting parallel to the mad scientist in American culture is the lone hero. Sadly such discussions have no place in discussion of philosophy.
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"I'm intrigued by Seth's view of religion as public and reason as private. Can't both be either? There's no way I can find out what a Christian believes by looking in a book. Christians have all sorts of idiosyncratic beliefs, some more Bible-based and some less.

As for whether absolute truth is a goal - well, that depends on your values. It can be if you want it to be. Nor, I think, does democracy have to be founded on the rule of written law. It's a mechanism by which the people (as opposed to an élite) take decisions, usually by voting (either directly on issues or by electing officials). It's usually enshrined in written law but I don't see this as a logical necessity.

With regard to English-speaking academic writing, I wonder if the real problem is that native English speakers tend not to read extensively in other languages because of the dominance of our own."

Posted by: Peter Wicks

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Colin McGinn: Relativism and Democracy

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?

I think in a very basic way, McGinn is right and in a more important way he's very wrong, to the degree that I find his argument almost obscene. McGinn to me is an arch-Catholic who calls himself an atheist. His idealism is anti-democratic and I'm a defender of democracy. He's also an arch individualist which is another conflict.

My point above was that a faith understood in a common language (Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Hindu) as opposed to a personal experience, is a public record and that it's most important function to society is in that. Not that it isn't also private. And the texts don't have to be written they just has to be collective. The myths of a group bind the group together. And the availability of others myths makes them less foreign. "Oh, you believe in a book too" For some people that book is the Constitution. In a sense I told my dentist I believed in books, and that worked for him, at least to the point of respecting my choice. For someone like McGinn and many others that's not enough. They want "truth."

The structure of law courts are strictly formal. "Due process" even what's now called "substantive due process" is not a guarantee of more. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is vague. Adherence to precedent, "Stare decisis" got Galileo in trouble, but we still refer to it in courts. Justice is called "imperfect justice" and it's all we'll ever have. And trying to perfect it is less important than raising people who can argue and re-argue articulately, that understand all sides of an argument. So my questions about religion and religious people are not just about what they believe but how those things functions to them: structure and subtext. And my comments above were based on observations of that. It's that kind of reading that interests me, of texts, paintings, and people. Philosophy prefers to decontextualize and read for intention.
I grew up around literature professors and lawyers so that's where I get my "relativism." But it's also where I learned to read the way that brought me to my response to the post about atheists and trust.
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"I also agree that philosophers (as opposed to "philosophy") makes an error if it reads this type of intention into writing that was not intended to be precise in this way."

Even the most precise language needs to be read that way. Your argument reads like the conservative legal argument for "original intent" in readings of the Constitution. But the Constitution is a text just like this post, which used words, "favouring logic and abstraction" which I read. against the grain, to criticize.

This is referred to I think as anti-naturalism and it makes no sense to me. Open-ended empiricism can't be formalized and that's the conflict. The formalism of numbers works as more than form because numbers generally manifest relations in the world. Words "represent" relations and those relations change. Mapping the change in those relations (in time and by geography) is not anti-naturalist. To me it sounds like Santayana (and it wasn't his idea) but Santayana is linked with Quine, which really throws me for a loop. Quine was a scientific anti-cosmopolitan, so I don't get the connection. I don't think Santayana would have a problem with my analysis. And it seems to me to have supplied a better description of the relations of believers and atheists than that supplied by an analysis based on philosophical intent. It gives a better model of the world (of experience).
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" 'Your argument reads like the conservative legal argument for 'original intent' in readings of the Constitution.' Why? How?

I don't think "favouring logic and abstraction" should be read as a criticism (if this is what you meant). Whether it is useful in describing the relationship between believers and atheists is another matter.

With regard to history (and pessimism) versus science (and optimism). History cannot be pessimistic or optimistic because it's about the past, not the future. Science is (in itself) neither pessimistic nor optimistic because it is an attempt to uncover the "laws" of nature. I would be a naturalist more than an anti-naturalist, in the sense that I consider social systems to be legitimate objects of scientific enquiry. But only to the extent that our objective is to understand, rather than (directly) to change. If we want to change something, then we need not only history (for lessons) and science (to suggest new approaches) but also clarity of purpose. What are we trying to achieve? How cautious do we want to be? What kind of risk are we willing to accept and how should we deal with uncertainty? If we want to bring something to that debate, and not only say "we should agree on something", then relativism can only take us so far."

Posted by: Peter Wicks
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I think we're arguing at cross purposes. History is never about the past, but about our understanding of the past, in the present. There will always be another history or biography of "X" for each new period of any civilization; history is interpretation. History pessimistic in the sense that the knowledge of history leads us towards pessimism, or conservatism. The rule of law is founded on conservatism. Again I'll go with Santayana: we rarely make new mistakes, mostly we just repeat old ones.

If we want to understand experience we need to understand that we experience the world through perspectives, which change over time. The difficulty is in recognizing and marking those changes. The history of the Catholic church isn't written by theologians, who will strive to see continuity, but by historians. Philosophers descend from theologians, and historians are still here doing the same job they always have, examining everything made by man, with and against the intended logic of the makers.

I'll end where I came in: religious people in the US distrust atheists because of an association of atheism with the atheism of pure reason (and arrogant technocracy) which gets a lot of press; professional atheists include people like McGinn, who hasn't convinced me he's an atheist at all. This is an American or Anglo-American phenomenon with a long history. The secularism of books is much less threatening because less arrogant, and frankly less dangerous. Spencer Coxe, the director of the Philadelphia ACLU from 1952-79, called the ACLU "a conservative institution." If we lived in a stronger democracy it would be more clear to more people what he meant.

Continuing from the last post.
This is sort of funny. You want to think Cory Doctorow understands his own words but he doesn't. And I found the link through Henry Farrell. who similarly wants to understand, but can't. They both manifest the geek's pathological externalism. I wrote that last phrase then decided to google it to see if it'd been used before. Only once apparently.

Observation, study, and marking to the mean exerts downward pressure on the mean. Farrell and Doctorow are struggling against the natural outcome of their own preoccupations.
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Facebook's Zuckerberg (from the third link above)

You have one identity,… “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

The point -value- of multiple identities, is in how they allow us to operate through contradiction, and contradictions specifically are something that conceptualists/geeks try to ignore. Role-playing and other forms of fiction are denuded of their moral authority and relegated to forms of simple gaming, ancillary to thought and reasoning rather than central to behavior. Objectivity is thought of as public, impersonal and absolute, while subjectivity is secondary and private. In fact the reverse is true: subjectivity is both public and central; objectivity or "truth", like justice, is public but approximate. A courtroom is a theater and lawyers are role-playing. The absolute is always private.

An anti-humanist will say we know each other by our ideas, which we learn simply by exchange. A humanist will say we know each other through our contradictions: not through understanding, but interpretation.

Conceptualists imagine communication as being founded in the articulation and reception -questions of truth and falsity- of statements such as "One plus one equals two." Humanists see it in the articulation and reception, and questioning, of statements such as "I love you" or "Trust me". On humanism again contemporary philosophers who call themselves humanists are as ignorant of history as they are unobservant of their own behavior, and argue from assumptions that run counter to what humanism was once seen to represent.

Thus the Renaissance conception of humanitas had a two-fold aspect from the outset. The new interest in the human being was based both on a revival of the classical antithesis between humanitas and barbartias, or feritas, and on a survival of the mediaeval antithesis between humanitas and divinitas. When Marsilio Ficino defines man as a “rational soul participating in the intellect of God, but operating in a body,” he defines him as the one being that is both autonomous and finite. And Pico’s famous ‘speech’ ‘On the Dignity of Man’ is anything but a document of paganism. Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ He does not say that man is the center of the universe, not even in the sense commonly attributed to the classical phrase, “man the measure of all things.”

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

…The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition.

Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" in Meaning in the Visual Arts

“Humanism- Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.”
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

The two passages originally posted here. I'm repeating myself a lot, but each day brings another example that demonstrates one or more of my few basic points: Consciousness to the degree that it exists is multiform; assuming otherwise moves the personal and subjective to the periphery making it easier for others to dismiss their relevance altogether.

Writers and filmmakers are referred to by the name of their craft. The words "painter" and "sculptor" are treated as synonyms for "artist."

Throughout, the exhibition reveals to us an artist who, much like Leon Golub and Philip Guston in his last decade, has insisted on giving equal emphasis to narrative and form, that is, to literary meaning and what I would call sub-verbal experience. That he is sometimes more entertaining than profound indicates that this balance is no easy thing to achieve....

Mr. Kentridge is a skilled draftsman who almost entirely lacks an original touch: his images tend to be inert if they’re not in motion. His primary subject, the irrationality of evil, may need the irrational magic of film to be truly effective.

Roberta Smith should read a little more art history. Narrative is form, and the imaginative response to film is no more (or less) irrational than the response to other forms of art. Would she oppose painting to the "irrational magic" of the novel? Being a proponent of painterly abstraction she just might (while criticizing the irrational magic of a Holbein portrait).

The question, and here's she's right to bring in Golub and Guston, is how well narrative form has been used by practitioners of the plastic arts in the recent past up to the present. And the answer is "not very well" for the reason that artists and critics shared the same biases, seeing the same opposition of narrative to form, choosing narrative therefore as anti-form, as the first move against materialist formalism, returning simultaneously to subject matter only as vulgarized "content". The Pop imagination attempted to make materialist form out of content, and in its struggle and failure left us poetry. But Smith does not understand even this, and is left fighting a rearguard action in defense of the no-longer avant. She's in good company (cf. Simon Blackburn et al.). The institutional avant-garde and the academy are united in reaction.

The best work in Kentridge's show is filmic narrative, as is the best work in the Biennial, and that's because the vast majority of works of contemporary visual art that engage the world from the standpoint of moral seriousness -as opposed to simple morality or indifference- are movies, as novels outstrip philosophy. And the best works in the Biennial that aren't in film or video are explicitly narrative, most as trapped in limbo as Kentridge's drawings (or Tim Burton's, also now on display at MoMA). Anything at the Whitney with a physical presence is either a stage set or a prop, or in one case a miniature diorama.

Maybe the Times should send it's theater and film critics to the Biennial next time. Either would be in a better position to judge the success or failure than its writers on "fine" art.

"philosophers"

As I've said before, in so many words, post-war modernism is the reactionary recapitulation -as mannered and brittle- of the much more ambiguous modernism of earlier in the century. There's something offensively un-self-aware in the knee-jerk proclamations of ordered progress: as something that was or is happening, or that should happen. I could be talking about "Ozzie and Harriet" or Clement Greenberg but just as easily about the so called "cognitive revolution", not the culture at large which is always messy but the respectable quasi-official culture that modernism became. Has anyone commented that C. Wright Mills writes like The Organization Man, Apostate, a carrier of the same traits he condemns, without of course being aware of it? How is it possible after the first 50 years of the bloodiest century in history that so many people could so casually make assumptions about the stable subject: The experts' "I" even in rebellion.

Thinking of this after stumbling into a review by Jerry Fodor The arrogance, based on lazy assumption and self-regard, is just odd to me.

I'm not a fan of Chalmers and the limits of the Extended Mind Thesis are pretty clear: If my arm is an extension of my mind, is my hand like a fork? But Fodor says less in 10 printed pages than I did in 15 words and in the process manages to sound like someone who knows little about the world outside the pretensions of his field. I'm told some of his colleagues might agree with that judgement- and even that he might himself. Every few paragraphs I come across a statement to which my only response is: "How do you know?" And the only answer I can imagine from him is "Because!" What is "content" other than the perception of something? And what's perception? Whatever it is it's not to be questioned, because to question it is to question optimism. I can't think if another excuse. But it allows him to call himself "a philosopher" as someone else might call himself "a chemist." The analogy of philosophy as demi-science: pure bullshit. Sometimes the conflict between fact and assumption - empiricism and rationalization- becomes so clear it's painful to watch.

But it does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid. There is, for example, a slippery slope from being poor to being rich; it doesn’t follow that whoever is the one is therefore the other, or that to insist on the distinction is mere prejudice. Similarly, there is a slippery slope between being just a foetus and being a person; it doesn’t follow that foetuses are persons, or that to abort a foetus is to commit a homicide.

There is no objective "true" divide between a foetus and a person. To argue otherwise is not "rational" but only self-serving. The fact is that the most powerful arguments for the legalization of abortion begin in the knowledge that there is no absolute answer and that given this, along with other issues of enforcement, the state should not have the right to intervene. Fodor invents an absolute out of whole cloth. As I said he does it a few times but this one just pissed me off. Like Simon Blackburn on Humanism, or Chomsky, or Searle, what he knows is what he wants to believe, no more.

The rationalism of ideologues leads to irrationalism and barbarism. Is Weinberg any more deluded than Rumsfeld?
The will to ignorance. Amazing

note taking:

"Hmm. Does the law of non-contradiction admit of degrees of adherence?"
Can the law of non-contradiction be applied to human society, and
can it be applied to any human society that we could consider just?

A modernist would say yes/ a post-modernist would say no.
An 18th century Philosoph would say yes/ a 16th century Humanist would say no.

And there's a difference between relativism in an absolute sense and relativism as an acceptance of what we can know of the world. Relativism of some sort is a necessity for a democracy, otherwise if you want to follow Plato fully take the politics too.
The dream of a perfect grammar in politics becomes a defense of authoritarianism. That's the post-modern and the pre-enlightenment (still secular humanist) critique of modernism and of the enlightenment and the age of revolution.

And Engels in a different context your words could have been written by a someone at Volokh arguing with Jack Balkin, or Brian Leiter mocking Bruce Ackerman. Your argument is fundamentally conservative in that to follow it results in conservative [read: anti-democratic] policy.

References follow:

Thus the Renaissance conception of humanitas had a two-fold aspect from the outset. The new interest in the human being was based both on a revival of the classical antithesis between humanitas and barbartias, or feritas, and on a survival of the mediaeval antithesis between humanitas and divinitas. When Marsilio Ficino defines man as a “rational soul participating in the intellect of God, but operating in a body,” he defines him as the one being that is both autonomous and finite. And Pico’s famous ‘speech’ ‘On the Dignity of Man’ is anything but a document of paganism. Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ He does not say that man is the center of the universe, not even in the sense commonly attributed to the classical phrase, “man the measure of all things.”
It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.
…The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition.

Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" in Meaning in the Visual Arts

“Humanism- Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.”

Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

Two definitions of Humanism. I prefer the first. Not hard to do considering I'm not a Modernist.
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In for a penny:
"It sounds as if you are denigrating modernity"
I'm not denigrating modernity. Or maybe I am but we're stuck with it. We're modern. Modern-ism is something else: enthusiasm and optimism regarding the technological advancements of modernity. Modernism involves a conflation of technological and moral progress. It gets more complex when you're dealing with someone like Eliot who is called a modernist when he's more a regretful modern. It's the same when thinking about humanism. Do you mean the humanism of humane irony or the later humanism of clarity and optimism? I think of the latter as a variant of post or anti-humanism. But I'm not any bigger on the optimistic enlightenment than I am on modernism. And for the record Surrealism and Duchamp weren't dealt with seriously in this country until the 60's and 70's, with the moves against Greenbergian modernist idealism. Surrealism is more a touchstone of post-modernism than modernism itself. See Rosalind Krauss.

Quine's naturalism begins with the arch rationalist's assumption that the self is a stable thing: acting and not reacting. And if that's not his argument then that doubt should be applied back to any speaker. This ties in in the 50's I guess to a distaste for behaviorism. A distaste that's more moral than logical.
But what happens when you apply formal systems or assumpions to the complexities of the social world? If you want to treat language as formal system go ahead, but don't delude yourself that it will still function as a representational one, representative that is of our experience. Numbers may or may not function as models but words are used in mimesis and mimesis is very personal. Don't even begin to talk about politics. It seems more like an escape from politics or with social engagement outside the academy.

If you want to talk about philosophy in the world look at the relation of ideas and behavior. You may want to see your ideas as representing yourself in the world, but actions do a better job of that. Arguing that we should all live by rules when we live (at our best) by principles and prudence is arguing for abstract reason from wishful thinking. Successful politics is always founded in empiricism, both the politics that civilized people despise and that they praise. But it's a functional streetwise empiricism, a different form of "realism" than that discussed here. What sort of a naturalized epistemology can we have when the agent of naturalization is so prone to going off?
And this means specifically that no one should confuse my argument with anti-realism. The relevant question to me is not the existence of the outside world but the problem of access and of moral responsibility. Someone should respond to my question about SCOTUS. And in general: if you don't have the capacity to describe your existing relations to the world: of social life; and politics, then you have little business discussing philosophy. And I say that assuming that for anything to be of broader philosophical interest it has to be seen to model something other than itself.

As to post-modernism. There is another division. There's the librarian model of de Man and Borges which is a sort of literary epicurianism (of language divorced from the world) which is connected to decadence and even anti-humanism but which helped lead towards a return to humanism. I think Garcia Marquez called Borges something like 'necessary', which wasn't meant simply as a compliment. And again: Duchamp and Surrealism and Krauss. Don't rely on Danto for Duchamp. Duchamp goes back to Baudelaire. He didn't want to be called a dumb painter because as he said: no one ever got called a stupid poet. And Eliot used readymades too, as collage: "Hurry up please, it's time." Duchamp is a literary trickster and if anything as conservative in his way as Eliot.
Playing off of outmoded forms of narrative that he couldn't quite let go of. He was a perv of the old bourgeois, but the pervy bits got him street cred with the punks.

Between modernity and modernism it's a mish-mash but they aren't identical. And the same with what follows, but if you want to imagine the American equivalent of European pomo-theorists you won't find them in the American academy. The unreliable subject is the subject of literature, and from there it became one of continental philosophy. The American academicized version of continental theory is like the perfect replica of the Parisian bistro in NY: a simulacrum without the context. And the unreliable author, whether Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek , Philip Roth or Norman Mailer, becomes in the academy the very very reliable expert in Unreliability Studies. The American academy is predicated on the reliability of American academics, when they are no more reliably aware of the external world than the rest of us. Humanism on the other hand, I am being snarky here is founded on the hope of a worldly academy, even occasionally a vulgar one.

And in relation of ideas to literature, complaining that the Europeans are just ripping off Montaigne is like saying Proust is ripping off Lady Murasaki. The point is the communication of ideas in the language of the present. It's the present that's being observed and described in literature. The world is the subject being represented through mimesis in language. People have been making chairs for thousands of years. If you and a friend are looking at a room full of chairs at the Metropolitan Museum you're not going to talk about the one thing they all have in common. If you're talking about novels you're not going to pretend the stories are "true." But there's probably more truth in the collected lies of Philip Roth than there is in the collected truths of Donald Davidson. The difference is that all Roth is trying to give an objective description of his subjective experience.
And maybe the Continentals are all lousy poets but in a very real sense what they were trying to describe was post-war Europe, while their American contemporaries were trying to describe absolutes. But maybe all the Americans succeeded in describing was post-war America. And that is what makes the Europeans smile.

Thus the Renaissance conception of humanitas had a two-fold aspect from the outset. The new interest in the human being was based both on a revival of the classical antithesis between humanitas and barbartias, or feritas, and on a survival of the mediaeval antithesis between humanitas and divinitas. When Marsilio Ficino defines man as a “rational soul participating in the intellect of God, but operating in a body,” he defines him as the one being that is both autonomous and finite. And Pico’s famous ‘speech’ ‘On the Dignity of Man’ is anything but a document of paganism. Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ He does not say that man is the center of the universe, not even in the sense commonly attributed to the classical phrase, “man the measure of all things.”

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

…The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition.

Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" in Meaning in the Visual Arts

“Humanism- Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.”
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

Blackburn goes on to discuss the Renaissance, but not well. He’s wrong on the history, but then history isn’t really his concern. Panofsky was a historian and a secularist. And he was a cosmopolitan. Blackburn is not.

note taking

Brian Leiter, Simon Blackburn, Richard Posner, Colin McGinn, the “New Atheists, ” all share Chomsky’s rationalism and his idealism. All more and more express contempt for democracy and the “illiterate” “irrational” majority. Chomsky is on record for his contempt for empiricism as a methodology, but empiricism, as a journalist, is what’s made him as famous as he is. Put that list of names above alongside the link to Kos above [Kos the hack political operative]. Perhaps Chomsky’s a good reporter because he thinks it’s just banality, so he shrugs and does his Joe Friday act. It’s a better model for the press then we have now: he doesn’t take himself seriously.
But Chomsky is a defender of democracy because of what he assumes about people and their behavior Those assumptions are ridiculously simple-minded, in fact self-serving, but he sticks with them, while those who share his modernist rationalism have replaced that naive hope with arch cynicism. But he seems oblivious.

Intellectually Chomsky is in a time warp; his idealism concerning humanity as such is as dated as his linguistics, but he’s still a hero to the young. Yet when he’s caught being sloppy or indulgent he never admits it. He tries to argue his way out of anything, even if it would he easier to just own up and move on. It’s the same with his philosophical arguments. His brilliant imagination is also thin and brittle. You can contextualize him as a post-war rationalist and still value his insights, but you’ll always have to pick and choose what to keep and what to throw away. True with anybody actually. But context, history and ambiguity, empiricism, are not things he takes seriously. However good a reporter he is, his intellectual model as a thinker and a philosopher, and his model of the world, are deeply flawed.
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Perrin’s an angry clown, and a moralist. I’ve read him enough to understand his points, and I’ve made clear why it makes sense that DD would be the one to bring him up. And yes, serious earnest liberals are godawful, and Kos is on the tank for the democrats. But the best comment here still comes from Kos, though posted by someone else. And no one has mentioned that.

And while we’re discussing angry moralists, the fact remains that while up in heaven or The Aether or the land of The Forms, where truth is Truth and nothing else exists, John Brown is wrapped in silk and drinking tea with Moses while Abe Lincoln is washing their feet, in the real world Lincoln, the politician, the negotiator, the half-in/half-out guy, is the more important figure. Moralists have their place, they serve a purpose too in our Nada’s Nonexistent Plan, but what interests me is why I trust Markos Moulitsas, political player, intellectual middleweight and vulgar empiricist a hell of a lot more more than I trust John Quiggin and theories of "Creative Capitalism". [see previous link]

The thing about moralists is they’re not really vulgar, they only use vulgarity to mock vulgarity. Deep down the hate it. The thing about rationalists is that they found their logics on their own imagined a priori orders. And those orders are never vulgar. But politics is vulgar. Life is vulgar. The ideal world doesn’t exist and never will. I prefer angry idealism to idealistic optimism, Anti-Pangloss to Pangloss, but still with the Devil’s eye.
And Quiggin does not understand that in trying to reform the market as the market, all he’s doing is expanding it, and the role of instrumentalism in communiation and social life. The end of his logic is to say “Art is Commerce” and he’s too unobservant to realize it. Art and commerce need each other as antagonists. Duty to oneself and duty to others are conflicting obligations. The conflict is what gives resilience. Quiggin et al offer reasoned reasonable mush: Posner for pussies.
I propose a moratorium on the use of the term “creative.” Try replacing it with “observant” and see where it takes you. People these days are far too creative, and not nearly observant enough.
That’s what’s disappointing.

What's old is new again, and again, and again.

Blackburn is a philosopher. I'd have thought this was his area of expertise.

Follow the bouncing ball:
Science is the study of facts and philosophy the study of values. Conflating the two in favor of facts, values become assumed. Values assumed, all questions are seen as those of expertise. Terms of measurement are of course assumed. Curiosity is defined by the frame, values by the frame, moral worth by the frame.
Democracy, the multiplicity of values and goals, is undermined.
Blackburn's is the linguistic and philosophical (formalist) corollary to Law and Economics. I'll remind you of the fun I had with Colin McGinn

I had in mind experts of many different types, not all specialists in a particular field. Following Plato, I envisage people trained in all subjects relevant to politics--history, geography, philosophy, psychology, etc. These would be the "philosopher kings" (though not our narrow sense of "philosophy"). They could have advisors in a specific field, if necessary, but they would be broadly educated. These experts would work with some democraticlly elected leaders to make policy--but not merely in an advisory capacity.

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a response to a response

" 'Science is the study of facts and philosophy the study of values.’ This is a highly eccentric view of philosophy. One way of thinking of philosophy is as the critical examination of common prejudices…”

Critical examination of common prejudices without examining your own can seem logical only if you choose to see such things as external to yourself, as apart and other. The foundational analogy here, and analogy is all it is, is to science. The values behind the deployment of that analogy are not the values claimed by those who deploy it. If they paid more attention to their own prejudices, looking at the historical parallels, that would be clear even to them. Maybe I should have said ‘Science is the study of facts and philosophy the argument over values.’
That would have been clearer.

The formal analysis of language is seen as equivalent to the formal analysis of numbers. The moral values, the moral argument behind mathematical formalism is the moral argument of Platonism. I won’t argue one way or the other about numbers, but the moral logic of Platonism in language is authoritarian.

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Update- Oh Jezuz. I read the piece, hilarious. Right, wrong, and everything in between. It works best as intellectual and emotional autobiography but autobiography is autohistory and you know how much I love history. He contradicts his own arguments, with style. He's writing from sensibility, not ideology. My last comment at CT:
"He’s not hiding behind anything: his subjectivism, if not outright irrationalism, is front and center. There’s honesty in that... I’ll happily defend him, just like I defend TS Eliot and Philip Larkin."

Next up: Technocracy and Democracy: Contradiction and the Philosophy of Art. Kraftwerk

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.
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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.
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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.

When arguing with a believer, at what point does the continued attempt to convince him of his error begin to say more about the interrogator than his irrational opponent?

If we are going to defend the Hermeneutics of suspicion wouldn't it make sense to begin with ourselves?

Looking through Simon Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy I found a quote from Coleridge:

He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and in the end loving himself better than all.

One can design arguments that make black, white, and the reverse; scientists can become deluded, and policemen, contrary to what are often are their own assumptions, are not Law. I've always thought that Dworkin attempts to describe the process by which self-reflexive doubt is institutionalized in legal decision making, and doubt is not a quantitative understanding of the world. Rescue Marx and Freud from science and you rescue them from faith.