Quote of the Day: Surprised by the Simple

From the book that my class is reading for today:

This is a surprising discovery, though the facts are entirely obvious to us. It is important to learn to be surprised by simple things -- for example, by the fact that bodies fall down, not up, and that they fall at a certain rate; that if pushed, they move on a flat surface in a straight line, not a circle; and so on. The beginning of science is the recognition that the simplest phenomena of ordinary life raise quite serious problems: Why are they as they are, instead of some different way?

-- Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge, p. 43

Poem of the Day: Continuing to Live

We are discussing (selected chapters from) Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity today in my class. At the beginning of the second chapter, "The Contingency of Selfhood", Rorty quotes "the last part" of "a poem by Philip Larkin". The last time I read the book, I didn't bother to look up the full poem (why I can't recall). But this time I did, and so I thought I'd share it with all of you.

Continuing To Live

Continuing to live - that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries -
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise -
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

-- Philip Larkin

Quote of the Day

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., posses so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

-- John Adams, writing to Thomas Jefferson
Quoted in Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, Chapter 2

Theodorides's Epigram (and Diverse Tangentially Related Matters)

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.

-- Theodorides, trans. H. Wellesley (from the Greek Anthology)

I saw this in William James's Pragmatism, chapter 8, where it is quoted and ascribed simply to The Greek Anthology. (An 1895 volume called Selections from the Greek Anthology is online here; this epigram is on p. 275). The Greek Anthology ascribes it to Theodorides, and credits the translator.

In the notes to the Penguin edition of James, Giles Gunn refers to the author as "Theodorides of Syracuse", adding that he "wrote towards the end of the third century B.C.", although Gunn downgrades him from the author to the reported one, saying that the epigram is "ascribed to" him. Poor Theodorides does not come up in the first page of Google results for a search on Theodorides, and does not even seem to have a Wikipedia page in English. (Here's one in French.)

Here's an alternate translation:

Shipwrecked I; but be none scared by my ill-starred lot;
Other ships sailed the sea with mine, and suffered not.

-- from this web site, and a few others, although none that I found credit a translator.

I must say that poor Theodorides of Syracuse seems sadly underrepresented on the web.

The translator, interestingly, does somewhat better. H. Wellesley seems to be Rev. Henry Wellesley, D.D. (1794 - 1866), principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, editor & translator of a volume called Anthologia Polyglotta: A Selection of Versions in Various Languages Chiefly From the Greek Anthology (London, 1849), available in full at the link. The link before that is to a genealogy site from which I got his dates; it, in turn, seems to be citing this W. H. Auden-focused genealogy site on which Rev. Wellesley turns up.* From those two sites, both just lists of facts, you get a sketchy but none-the-less real picture of his life: he was ordained at Oxford at age 28, married at 40; and was the father of four children (one of whom died at birth). He became a Doctor of Divinity at age 51, the same year he was made principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford (the latter, at least, because of his uncle, the Duke of Wellington, who was the chancellor of the university). He died at age 71.

Wellesley's translation of Theodorides is in his Anthologyia Polyglotta, at page 300, along with two Latin translations (one by Samuel Johnson (!)), a German translation, and the Greek original. Interestingly, Wellesley seems to have organized his book by subject and theme, so that on the very next page he reproduces a nearly identical epigram by Leonidas of Tarentum, also from the 3rd century B.C.E., who is also well represented in The Greek Anthology (with over a hundred poems, according to Wikipedia). Here's Wellesley's translation of the Leonidas:

Fearless set sail from this wreck'd seaman's grave.
We perish'd: others safely rode the wave.

And here's a second English translation, which Wellesley attributes to one W. Sheperd:

Loose from my tomb thy hawser: though I died
Shipwreck'd, my comrades 'scaped the raging tide.

Those two English epigrams read simply as alternate translations of Theodorides -- indeed, at first that's what I thought they were. But the Greek Wellesley gives is (even to this non-Greek reader's eye) different. So I suppose that either two versions of a common poem have come down to us, or it was a common sentiment in 3rd century B.C.E. Greece. (Click through for French, Latin and Italian translations, plus the original.)

Take heart, Henry Wellesley! Your work lives on: though you died, it has, so far, weathered the gale.

Update: An anonymous source, who agreed to be described as "one familiar with the President's thinking on the issue", sent in the following literal translation of the Theodorides:

I am a shipwrecked man's tomb; but you, sail! For even as we
Perished, the surviving ships traversed the sea.

--------------------------------
* Wellesley is on an Auden-focused genealogical site for the single most distant relationship I have ever had reason to contemplate: Wellesley's sister's great-grandaughter's husband's second wife was the granddaughter of Auden's aunt (by marriage's) brother's son's wife's great-aunt's husband's brother. I swear to God I didn't just make that up (although I might well have gotten something wrong there -- it isn't the easiest chart to put into words!); in fact, it took some effort to extract that from the site, so I hope you appreciate it.

Kay Ryan Rides on Neurath's Raft (Kay Ryan Week™, Day 3)

Remember, today is Special Class Cross-Over Day as Attempts' Epically Earth-shattering Kay Ryan Week™ continues...

As I mentioned a few days ago, I am once again teaching The History of American Thought Since 1865 this semester. And starting last Wednesday, we began covering Pragmatism; I'll continue lecturing on it today (and we'll discuss William James Monday).

Pragmatism is a complex philosophy -- check out this post for several different definitions of it -- and not easily nutshellable, but one of its key characteristics is an anti-foundationalist epistemology. Anti-foundationalism is, again, complicated, but it's been well captured in a number of different metaphors -- the most famous of which is actually from a philosopher who was not, himself, a Pragmatist at all. Philosopher Otto Neurath (1882 - 1945) famously compared inquiry to a boat being rebuilt while underway:

Imagine sailors, who, far out at sea, transform the shape of their clumsy vessel from a more circular to a more fishlike one. They make use of some drifting timber, besides the timber of the old structure, to modify the skeleton and the hull of their vessel. But they cannot put the ship in dock in order to start from scratch. During their work they stay on the old structure and deal with heavy gales and thundering waves. In transforming their ship they take care that dangerous leakages do not occur. A new ship grows out of the old one, step by step—and while they are still building, the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure, and they will not always agree with one another. The whole business will go on in a way that we cannot even anticipate today. That is our fate.

Now, as I said, Neurath himself was no pragmatist -- he was in fact associated with the logical positivists -- but his analogy was adopted by W. V. Quine, who is often described as a pragmatist. (He's not one of the classical pragmatists, but he definitely has pragmatist tendencies in a way that the description is not unreasonable, in my opinion.) In fact, it was Quine, in his most famous book, Word and Object (1960), who popularized Neurath's notion, saying that "Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat." (p. 3) And certainly the idea captures well a concern that the Pragmatists too shared.

Note that Neurath himself used the words "vessel" and "ship"; Quine called it a "boat" -- but if Google is to be trusted (and Caveat Surftor is definitely the word of the day there), Neurath's raft is a more common a search than either "Neurath's boat" or "Neurath's ship". And that is the version that Kay Ryan (Remember Kay Ryan? This post's about Kay Ryan.) used when she took Neurath's vessel out for a little cruse of her own:

We're Building the Ship as We Sail It

The first fear
being drowning, the
ship's first shape
was a raft, which
was hard to unflatten
after that didn't
happen. It's awkward
to have to do one's
planning in extremis
in the early years --
so hard to hide later:
sleeking the hull,
making things
more gracious.

-- Kay Ryan

It's a cute use of the metaphor, although I'll admit that I don't think I agree with the philosophical point it's making. (In fact, I think I rather strenuously disagree with it (at least with what I take it to be.)) I also don't like it quite as much as I do either of the poems from the first two days of Kay Ryan Week -- and I'm frankly unsure if that's because of the philosophical disagreement, or is simply an aesthetic judgment, or some mixture of the two. But I do like it -- and I really, really like that she wrote it. Neurath's boat is a fine craft, and I love to see it get more attention.

Stay tuned tomorrow for another exciting day of Attempts' already-hyped-almost-to-metaphorical-bankruptcy Kay Ryan Week™!

Quote of the Day

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life, -- all this, even as you and I.

-- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece"

(I'm teaching this class again; it's week two, and this is the book we're discussing today.)

An Economical Example of Thomas Kuhn's Inconsistency About His Own Ideas

...[T]he proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. [...] Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other.

-- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 150

From "practicing in different worlds" to "both are looking at the world" in the space of two sentences! It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "the destroyer of worlds". Jean Grey, eat your heart out!

The Other Life of Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk is best known as one of the intellectual founders of modern American conservatism; his best known work is The Conservative Mind, and it was one of the thirteen books I chose to assign in my survey of U. S. Intellectual History Since 1865 (we just had our discussion of it yesterday). It was far from his only contribution to this tradition, however: he also wrote a column in the National Review in its early years, edited his own conservative journal called Modern Age, and wrote a lot of other books on conservative thought, and so forth. Like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, Kirk is one of the intellectual founders of contemporary American politics, of enormous influence.

But Russell Kirk was also a fantasy writer, specializing in ghost stories; reviewer Michael Dirda, who knows whereof he speaks, called Kirk "the greatest American author of ghostly tales in the classic style". And, as I found out when preparing my lectures for this week, his story "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" actually won the World Fantasy Award in 1977 for best short story (the same year Ray Bradbury got a lifetime achievement award). It's included in a collection of Kirk's short fiction called Ancestral Shadows, and also in David Hartwell's anthology The Dark Descent (which I've owned for years, and have read a lot, but not all, of -- and not this story, nor did the identity of its author ever penetrate my consciousness; this shouldn't have been a surprise to me -- but it was).

I'm fairly certain he's the only author we're reading this semester who won a major F/SF award. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the only person I'm so much as mentioning in the class who ever won a major F/SF award.

Strange world.

Quote of the Day: Walter Lippmann's Offhand Diss of Landscape Painters

It is like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the ploughed field outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a sojourn in the painter's portrayal of his own emotional response to his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen.

-- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, Chapter 5

...kinda love the last half of the second sentence there.

Poem of the Day: Waste Land Limericks

In honor of my students discussing the original for today, I present the classic parody...

Waste Land Limericks

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II

She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!

III

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV

A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.

V

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

-- Wendy Cope

Snarky Academic Comment of the Day

In later years Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical style, in the belief that readers should be persuaded by the cogency of the thought rather than the felicities of the prose. He was uncommonly successful in getting rid of the felicities.

-- Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 304

The Fifth Beatle of Pragmatism

Who is the "fifth Beatle" of pragmatism?

What does that question even mean?

Ok, it goes like this. Everyone decided (for some inexplicable reason) that the four-person musical group "The Beatles" actually had a fifth member; that person was the "fifth Beatle". But no one seems to agree who that is.* Wikipedia has (at least until some bozo decides to delete it) a fairly good list of candidates -- ten serious candidates, plus some minor candidates, and a large number of additional joke and fictional candidates.

So I decided (for some inexplicable reason) that "fifth Beatle" was a good generalized term for the following situation: pretty much everyone agrees that a particular group has X members, and pretty much everyone agrees on the identities of X-1 of them, whereas the remaining position has many plausible candidates. In these cases, the final person can be referred to as "the fifth Beatle of _____", where the blank is the name of the group.**

So: who is the fifth Beatle of the pragmatists?

The major classical pragmatists were, by broad consensus, a four-man band. And three of them everyone agrees on: the three central, core, canonical pragmatists are Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Everyone who makes such a list agrees on that. Even people like Rorty, who wants to read Peirce out, wouldn't deny his historical place on the list.

But who else?

I'm not going to answer that question; I'm just going to list some plausible candidates. In most cases, I've actually seen someone actually use that person as the fifth Beatle of the pragmatists.

1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Holmes's big promoter as pragmatism's fifth Beatle is Louis Menand, who, in his Pulitzer-prize winning history of pragmatism, made Holmes his fourth main subject along with Peirce, James and Dewey. And there are some good arguments for him: above all, he was a member of the Metaphysical Club, the discussion group at which pragmatism was born.*** And his ideas are arguably pragmatist in spirit. On the other hand, many people have denied that Holmes was a pragmatist at all (let alone a key one), most notably Oliver Wendell Holmes himself. ("I think pragmatism an amusing humbug" Holmes wrote in a letter.)

2. George Herbert Mead

A very popular choice: I think I've seen more four-person lists with Mead as #4 than any other single candidate. Thus Israel Scheffler's introduction to the pragmatists is called Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead and Dewey. And a fair number of people slip him onto lists of the 'great pragmatists' without any hint that he's not a unanimous pick. One argument for him is that he helps beef up the "Chicago" school of pragmatism (Dewey, more socially oriented) and keeps pragmatism less focused on the "Cambridge" school (of Peirce and James, and for that matter Holmes).

3. F. C. S. Schiller

The Englishman: good to stick on if you want to emphasize that pragmatism wasn't just an American movement; easy to leave off nonjudgmentally if you simply declare you're only talking about American pragmatists. Another good argument for him is that James cites him a lot in Pragmatism, along with Dewey (and more than Peirce). An argument against him is that he isn't read as much these days as Perice, James or Dewey -- or Holmes or Mead, for that matter. An early favorite, he's in decline these days.

4. Richard Rorty

Not really a good candidate -- he's simply a much later figure. (He is credited for pragmatism's recent revival, but that's another story.) Calling him the fourth pragmatist is like calling Julian Lennon the fifth Beatle of the Beatles. But I've seen him used on such lists.

5. A few other possibilities

Not as convincing as the above possibilities, but you might argue for: Chauncey Wright (a key influence, but not really a pragmatist per se); Josiah Royce (arguably pragmatist, but hardly on the classic track); Jane Addams (influenced Dewey), Ralph Waldo Emerson (not a pragmatist, but some argue for him as a precursor).

***

Strangely, while there seems to be no consensus on who the fifth Beatle of the pragmatists (that is, the fourth major pragmatist) is, there is a surprising level of consensus on who the fifth person (the sixth Beatle?) is, on lists which happen to include five. Even more surprisingly, he isn't one of the main candidates for the position of fifth Beatle! In lists of three, people stick to Peirce, James and Dewey; in lists of four, they add one of the candidates listed above. But in lists of five, people tend to include Peirce, James, Dewey, their choice of fifth Beatle, and C. I. Lewis, who was a later figure than Peirce, James, Dewey or any of the various fifth Beatle candidates. Lewis, in fact, was considered for a while the last pragmatist; now that there has been a major pragmatism revival in the last thirty-odd years, he's the last of the old school, or perhaps a transitional figure between the old school and the new school. (He taught some of the analytic philosophers who, while not pragmatists, were arguably pragmatic in spirit -- Quine and Wilfred Sellars -- who in turn were influences on the major promoter of the pragmatist revival, Richard Rorty.) So all the world can know: C. I. Lewis is the fifth member of the four-man band, the pragmatists.

Finally, let me close with a question about this whole notion of "fifth Beatles" as a general category. Can anyone think of any other groups which seem to have a "fifth Beatle" role? Remember, to count there have to be a (largely) agreed upon number, with all but one slot (largely) agreed upon, and that one spot fairly wide open. I think it's a fun little category, and I'd love to get more examples of it; but I don't know if there are any.**** To put the question in a pragmatist spirit: how useful an analytical category is this notion of the "fifth Beatle"?

______________________
* Personally I think the best answer is clearly George Martin: the most important thing about the Beatles was their music, and Martin clearly had an influence on the music comparable to that of the four (other) members of the group, which can be said of none of the other candidates. But lots of people -- including people like George Harrison and Paul McCartney, who one might plausibly think are in a better position to judge than I¶ -- disagree.

** If this ever catches on, of course, it will lead to the traditional question of "who is the fifth Beatle?" being rephrased as "who is the fifth Beatle of the Beatles?" This is a feature, not a bug.

*** The Cavern Club of pragmatism, perhaps? Or should that be the Liverpool College of Art of pragmatism?

**** The closest thing I can think of is the fact that, in a lot of college catalogs, there are courses on three modernist writers, and that they always seem to be courses in "Joyce, Proust and _____", with a variety of candidates for the third slot. I believe I've heard of classes on "Joyce, Proust and Faulkner", "Joyce, Proust and Mann" and "Joyce, Proust and Kafka", and of course there are other very plausible candidates too (Virginia Woolf and Robert Musil come to mind). But I'm not quite sure that that counts, or should count -- if nothing else because there isn't a name for this category, which the fifth Beatle could be the fifth Beatle of.

¶ Although you might, at least plausibly, think they are in a worse position to judge: too biased, no historical distance, etc.

Quote of the Day: The Problem with Simple Philosophies

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

-- William James, Pragmatism, Lecture 1

Characterizing Pragmatism

Pragmatism is an incredibly important philosophical and intellectual movement -- "widely described as America's distinctive philosophy", or "America's one original contribution to the world of philosophy".* 

 Great. So what is it?

In order to clarify this for my students -- or, at least, in order to leave them confused in a much richer, more educated way -- I passed out (on the day I first began talking about pragmatism) four characterizations of pragmatism, three of which attempt to summarize its core contribution in a few words. Here they are, with a few stray comments interlaced:

Pragmatism... could be characterized as the doctrine that all problems are at bottom problems of conduct, that all judgments are, implicitly, judgments of value, and that, as there can be ultimately no valid distinction of theoretical from practical, so there can be no final separation of questions of truth of any kind from questions of the justifiable ends of action. -- C. I. Lewis, "Logical Positivsm and Pragmatism" (1941)

That one is a twofer as far as characterizations go, since not only is Lewis a prominent pragmatist in his own right** (yet a later one, and thus writing after Peirce and James and after most of the work of Dewey), but it's also been endorsed by one of the more prominent figures in the pragmatist revival, Cornel West, who has cited it as "the best characterization of pragmatism ever formulated".

If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability. -- Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (2001)

I like that one in part because, right after saying that "what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea", Menand goes on to list four different ideas. Now, it's clearly fair to say that those ideas are connected (probably logically, and certainly historically insofar as they were held by the key pragmatists***). But that's just to say that they're "a group of ideas". To avoid inconsistency here, Menand is committed to the claim that they are a single idea as opposed to a group of ideas -- which is, I think, hard to maintain. So if the Lewis is a twofer in one sense, this is a twofer -- or, more accurately, a fourfer -- in a different sense: four characterizations of the key pragmatist idea(s) for the price of one.

Indeed, from the earliest of Peirce's Pragmatist writings, Pragmatism has been characterized by antiscepticism: Pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief (Peirce drew a famous distinction between "real" and "philosophical" doubt); and by fallibilism: Pragmatists hold that there are not metaphysical guarantees to be had that even our most firmly-held beliefs will never need revision. That one can be both fallibilisitc and antisceptical is perhaps the basic insight of American Pragmatism. -- Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (1995)

So between the characterizations of Lewis and Putnam, and the four from Menand, we have a list of six ideas where are said by quite distinguished authorities to be central to pragmatism. Now, I don't think that all six of these (or even all four of Menand's) are "a single idea" -- I think they are quite clearly a group of ideas. In fact, I think that they are (at least on their face) "separate not merely in the sense of being discriminable, but in the sense of being logically independent, so that you may without inconsistency accept any one and reject all the others, or refute one and leave the philosophical standing of the others unimpugned." (You could make an argument against that, but I don't think it's obviously false.) Nor do I think that they are all variations on a theme; I don't think that (say) they all bear a "family resemblance" to each other. But they are clearly linked -- historically, obviously, in their adaptation by the pragmatists, but also in making up the core of a worldview -- the philosophy of pragmatism. And I think that, put altogether, they make a decent beginning at characterizing what this thing called "pragmatism" is.

Incidentally, the quote in the above paragraph is from the fourth of the quotes I handed out to my students -- a quote from a 1908 essay, meant to show, basically, that this confusion is (at least) not new. Here it is in its full glory:

In the present year of grace 1908 the term "pragmatism"--if not the doctrine--celebrates its tenth birthday. Before the controversy over the mode of philosophy designated by it enters upon a second decade, it is perhaps not too much to ask that contemporary philosophers should agree to attach some single and stable meaning to the term. ...[E]ven after we leave out of the count certain casual expressions of pragmatist writers which they probably would not wish taken too seriously, and also certain mere commonplaces from which scarcely any contemporary philosopher would dissent, there remain at least thirteen pragmatisms: a baker's dozen of contentions which are separate not merely in the sense of being discriminable, but in the sense of being logically independent, so that you may without inconsistency accept any one and reject all the others, or refute one and leave the philosophical standing of the others unimpugned. All of these have generally or frequently been labeled with the one name, and defended or attacked as if they constituted a single system of thought-sometimes even as if they were severally interchangeable. -- A. O. Lovejoy, "The Thirteen Pragmatisms" (1908)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

 ______________________ 

 * The latter quote is from John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (U Chicago, 1994), p2; the former is from a book called Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead and Dewey (Routledge, 1974), p. 1, written by a man named Israel Scheffler, who also happened to teach a seminar I took way back in the fall of 1990 called "Philosophy 136: The Pragmatists", which was my introduction to this particular school of thought, and which has (clearly) stood me in very good stead for lo these many years. Thanks, Professor Scheffler! 

** According to most people; there isn't (in an appropriate irony) consensus on this issue. I don't think there's anyone who everyone would agree is a pragmatist, except maybe William James.

 *** Who the "key pragmatists" are is, as mentioned in the previous note, a contested question. Menand's list of four thinkers are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey.

Stray Thoughts on William Graham Sumner's What Social Classes Owe Each Other

A week or two ago, preparing for class, I reread William Graham Sumner's What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883). After doing so, I jotted down some of the stray thoughts that occurred to me while rereading it -- nothing fully thought through, just my first impressions -- a set of reader reactions of the sort that I asked my students to do and hand in. But I thought it might make for a nice blog post. Then I forgot to post it.

Coming across the saved post, I had the sad thought that its time had passed, and that it was now too late to post it. I then further reflected that every human being on earth, save a paltry 21 of them, is not in my class; and by no measure aside from the fact that my syllabus has passed it by is this post on a 128-year-old book any more or less relevant now than it was a week and a half ago. So here it is.

In case you've never read Sumner -- and I wouldn't particularly recommend it to anyone who isn't studying intellectual history; unlike many of the books I'm assigning, I don't think it's a Valuable Book That Ought To Be Widely Read (even if it was an influential one, a usefully representative one, and one that made for a good assignment) -- his basic answer to the question of "well, what do social classes owe each other?" is "nothing". (In fact, when I asked my class that very question early on, one student piped up with that entirely apt one-word answer (much to my relief: it showed they got the basic point.))

As a book, I'd have to say that it was both rhetorically masterful and intellectually shoddy.

Rhetorically masterful: even if you don't agree with his viewpoint (and while a lot of contemporary right-wingers say things which are along the same lines, I imagine that fairly few of them would actually support the repeal of, say, child-labor laws), he sweeps you along, until you are filled with emotion over the visceral injustice of taxing one person to help another. How dare you! It is an argument that has a lot of easy, intuitive persuasiveness (as Sumner made it but also -- importantly -- even divorced from his particular articulation of it (hence its insidiousness.)) It sounds right at first blush as long as you don't think about it too hard.

To be sure, Sumner rhetoric isn't particularly subtle. (But then, to be effective, it doesn't have to be.) One aspect that struck me was the language he chose to describe what it is that those pushing social programs (which Sumner mostly defines as not only any economic assistance but even most economic regulation, as well as such things as public schools (I say "mostly" because, as I'll get to in a moment, he isn't always consistent about it)) seek to do for others. Sumner says that the desire was to make the worse off "as comfortable" as others, to fulfill their "desires", give them "everything of which they feel the need", grant them "satisfaction": terms that make you think of an evening out of luxuries. Only once does he let slip and admit that one of the realities that the programs he decries seek to prevent is that of people literally starving to death. (To say nothing of children neglected by their parents, children being denied schooling, people being forced by market conditions to work twelve hour days, working under unsafe conditions, and so forth.) His talk of comfort, desire and satisfaction are, at the least, shockingly misleading, if not downright dishonest.

And considered just as a rational argument the book is a mess. This is true in far too many ways for me to enumerate, so I'll just touch on a few.

Sumner is woefully inconsistent in how he uses terms and in his reasoning. For example: one of Sumner's key ideas is that of the "Forgotten Man". But he doesn't use this notion at all consistently. Here's how he defines it early on:

In all these schemes and projects the organized intervention of society through the State is either planned or hoped for, and the State is thus made to become the protector and guardian of certain classes. The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists. Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type--that A and B decide what C shall do for D. It will be interesting to inquire, at a later period of our discussion, who C is, and what the effect is upon him of all these arrangements. In all the discussions attention is concentrated on A and B, the noble social reformers, and on D, the "poor man." I call C the Forgotten Man, because I have never seen that any notice was taken of him in any of the discussions.

Under this definition -- and it's not a throwaway, it's one he returns to multiple times -- the "Forgotten Man" is anyone who pays taxes for a social program while not benefiting from it.

Now already we're in a conceptual muddle, since Sumner never even notices the possibility that A, B, C and D might be different people in the case of different programs -- that looking at an entire government everyone might variously play the roles of C and D. Perhaps he means that, overall, the sheer dollar-value one gets from or contributes to the programs can be added up. But he doesn't say that; that's me trying to clear up a mess he leaves.

And of course it gets worse if you consider that, over time, the roles of C and D might switch. A child who goes to public school and gains benefit thereby (playing D) then grows up to be a productive taxpayer (playing C).* This complexity -- hardly a particularly obscure possibility -- is never mentioned, and makes utter hash out of a great many of Sumner's arguments.

Instead of following his own rigorous definition (while not abandoning it either, but always returning to it whenever convenient for his purposes) Sumner clearly has an image of who he takes the "forgotten man" to be, just as he has an image of those he takes to be the beneficiaries of government largess too. Here's how he describes the "forgotten man" latter on:

He is the Forgotten Man. If we go to find him, we shall find him hard at work tilling the soil to get out of it the fund for all the jobbery, the object of all the plunder, the cost of all the economic quackery, and the pay of all the politicians and statesmen who have sacrificed his interests to his enemies. We shall find him an honest, sober, industrious citizen, unknown outside his little circle, paying his debts and his taxes, supporting the church and the school, reading his party newspaper, and cheering for his pet politician.

Needless to say, this is wildly more specific than his actual definition -- unless you assume (as Sumner at times, but not always, seems to) that everyone who does not benefit from Government help will be honest, sober, industrious, unknown, and so forth -- a fairly far-fetched notion.

What's going on, clearly, is that Sumner is working with an imaged representative example of what he takes the "forgotten man" to be. (The same is true with those who get help, who propose that the government do it, and other roles in his little medieval morality play.) And either through deliberate distortion or through simply sloppiness he varies between his strict, "scientific" definition and his fictional, platonic character. It's an understandable slippage -- people typically think about concepts by comparing cases to core examples, even if we try to formally define them -- but it doesn't make it any less sloppy.

And of course that's just one example. Vague claims, poorly defined terms, inconsistent arguments, key points asserted with neither argument nor evidence to back them up, unnoticed assumptions -- and on and on, ad nauseum -- all abound.

Another example that struck me, for instance, was that Sumner was inconsistent about why a strict laissez-faire system was desirable. Often he seemed to be making a moral claim, saying that it is simply unjust to tax any one person to benefit another; at other times, however, he seemed to be making a practical argument, that such schemes always leave people worse off (everyone? or on average? in how long a term? -- he's not clear.) Again, which one he's saying matters -- some of his claims fail one test, some fail another, but he conveniently slips back and forth depending on what he needs to establish at the time.

He's inconsistent about what he thinks the state should do -- in some places he seems to be a minarchist, supporting only police, soldiers and the enforcement of contracts; in other cases he implies that there are genuine things the state should do for the public interest besides that, "public interests and common necessities" -- transportation infrastructure, I suppose. Maybe parks. But he not only fails to establish what divides those things which are genuinely good state interests from those that are immoral/unwise attempts to coerce charity (why do bridges and police pass the test while public schools and food safety inspectors do not?), he doesn't even seem to notice that this is an issue he needs to address. But a strict minarchist could apply lightly edited arguments from Sumner against the idea (which, again, he inconsistently supports) of any public works; and an anarchist could apply them against the minarchist. (If D needs police or contract enforcement and C doesn't, isn't it robbery to tax C to hire police to protect D? Let D hire private security and private-sector contract enforcers; if they don't, then they deserve whatever they get.) I'm not saying that such lines can't be drawn, but they clearly need to be drawn, not taken as obvious.

And so forth. Anyone looking for evidence that conservative ideas are nothing more than "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" will find plenty to go on here. Dressed up as science, it's all an emotional screed based on some romanticized image of the hardworking forgotten man.

The book is a mess. A philosophy class in basic argumentative errors could profitably use this as a text -- but, then again, so could a class in rhetoric. Because it's persuasive. Which is the really horrifying thing.

A few odds and ends. I think that Robert Bannister is clearly right (in his book Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (1989)) that "social Darwinism" isn't playing much of a role here. (Contradicting the earlier, influential argument by Richard Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944, 2nd ed. 1955) which made Sumner the poster boy for Social Darwinism.) Sumner is arguing a classic laissez-faire position based on economics and some poorly thought-through political philosophy.

In his final chapter, Sumner compares the sociologist (which is what he called himself -- and, indeed, he is one of the founders of American sociology) to a physicist, and says that he has simply described the workings of the world without moral judgments, and that anyone who complains that he is ignoring moral judgments doesn't understand how science works. If you take it as humor, it's kind of funny.

Sumner said that, given government assistance, it's better to be poor than to be rich, since the latter have to support the former. It's an argument that was made again.

Finally, I kept thinking while reading the book that you could probably run for office as a Republican in this country using only quotes from Sumner for your speeches and soundbites. It feels quite contemporary -- or, perhaps, late 90's: the Republican party since 2001 has had such a large strain of fear-mongering about terrorism (and, after that, about undocumented immigrants and then Obama) that that part seems wildly missing. But as far as the attitude towards social policy goes, it's quite current. I kept thinking of Phil Gramm (my least favorite politician until the advent of W.) Oddly enough, though -- here and there, in the corners -- Sumner comes across as quite Victorian in some of his moral assumptions, beliefs in progress, and so forth. Not much -- you could edit them out pretty easily and still have plenty left for a Congressional campaign. But they integrate far more naturally than I might have guessed beforehand.

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*This particular example is complicated by the fact that, here and there, Sumner seems to argue that the person who would be playing C in this example are the parents, who are getting someone else to pay for their kids' education, and not the children themselves. But he seems perfectly content to let the children suffer for the sins of their parents, which means they are either going to be "D" (i.e. helped by the state) or the victims of Sumner's hoped-for neglect.

Did You Know That Henry James Participated In a Round-Robin Novel?

I didn't. But it seems he did: The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors (1908) includes a chapter by Henry James -- Chapter 7, "The Married Son". I wouldn't have guessed it.

(A round-robin story is a story written by multiple authors -- essentially a stunt, although there have been a fair number of them.)

Aside from James, the other author involved who's still read today is William Dean Howells, who wrote the first chapter, "The Father" (and seems to have conceived of the whole project). I haven't read it, but if you want to, you can find the book on Gutenberg. (Aside from Howells and James, the authors are, today, mostly forgotten.)

In other Jamesiana, Alice James, the diarist and sister of novelist Henry and philosopher & psychologist William, was born on August 7, 1848. This wouldn't be worth mentioning save that a surprising number of web sites -- PBS, and the "about" page for the publisher Alice James Books are two -- list her as born in 1850. I'm not sure how this alternative date got started. I'm pretty sure it's wrong, although both are quite prominently listed. (One telling fact is that the specific day is always associated with the year 1848.) Does anyone have any information on this? (To confuse things further, Alice was also the name of William James's wife; she was born 1849.)

Update: While I'm sharing stray oddities about the James siblings, I'll mention one more, which isn't widely known (although Louis Menand talks about it in his fabulous book The Metaphysical Club), which is that the third child of Henry James Sr. (after philosopher William and novelist Henry (Jr), but before diarist Alice) was Garth Wilkinson James -- called Wilky James -- who was one of the (white) officers in the (all-black infantry) 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War -- the regiment whose formation and attack on Fort Wagner is depicted in the movie Glory. Wilky James was wounded in the attack on Fort Wagner, and never fully recovered, suffering from various pains and ailments until his death at age 38.

Quote of the Day: Peirce Contra Descartes

American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914) goes at the central move in the philosophy of the robot-lover Descartes, in this fabulous passage from his 1868 essay "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities":

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up.... A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

I have removed what I took to be a rather unhelpful metaphor. If you, understandably, would rather take Peirce's words over mine in this case -- or if you're interested in the other three principles of Descartes's (besides universal doubt) that Peirce takes on in his essay -- I recommend you read the whole thing.

I Wish I Wasn't Too Cynical To Believe This

Nothing new, no time-saving devices, -- simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal, -- not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

-- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 5

William James Contra the Ph.D. Degree

...is not our growing tendency to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors [i.e. holders of a Ph.D.] an instance of pure sham? Will any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? Notoriously his moral, social, and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever. Certain bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them, just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own procedure..... The truth is that the Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.

-- William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus" (1903)

...not really against the Ph.D. entirely, but against their monopoly in teaching and the general importance placed on them.

Syllabus for The History of American Thought Since 1865, Spring 2011

Starting a week and a half from now, I'm teaching (for the first time) an upper-level course on U.S. intellectual history, entitled The History of American Thought Since 1865. (That is, it's the first time I've taught it; it has been offered for many years by a senior member of the HWS history department who also teaches -- most recently this past fall -- the companion course, The History of American Thought To 1865. (I should say that it's his course title; I'd prefer one with "intellectual history" rather than "American thought" as the key term -- perhaps since the latter can be read to imply a unity that I don't think exists, but possibly just because it sounds old fashioned.) I thought I'd tell you about it.

First I should say that this is not, in fact, the complete syllabus for the course -- I don't see any particular reason that anyone save my students would be interested in my grading policies or my office hours. But since I've been interested when other academic bloggers have posted their syllabi, and since, in putting together this course, I benefited from looking at the online syllabi of instructors at other institutions who were generous enough to share them with the world, I thought I would pay it forward and give the interesting parts of the syllabus, namely, the required readings and some indications of the nature of the assignments.

One thing I'd note is that there is (I believe) a wider range in what is taught as the basic material for U. S. Intellectual History than for any other sub-field of history -- not only in books taught, but in subjects covered. Its comparable, I think, to courses like "Introduction to Philosophy" or "The U.S. Novel Since 1945", where you wouldn't be surprised to see entirely nonintersecting topic lists appear on multiple syllabi: there's simply too many different ways to approach the material. Thus, despite my filling the shoes of a senior (and, IMHO, quite fabulous) scholar, I am teaching the course quite differently than he does -- and, indeed, quite differently than did any of those whose syllabi I've seen, online or elsewhere. Perhaps doing so is cheeky, but I think that even those of us who are but Sub-Sub Academics (as Melville might have put it) have to approach a topic as we ourselves see it -- something which is shaped by, but not copied from, our elders & betters. At any rate, you should know that this is my particular take on this material; if you look at any other online syllabi, you'll see very different ones.

So. The term has fourteen weeks of classes (not counting the week of spring break that interrupts it). It starts and ends mid-week, so there are thirteen full weeks, plus two partial bookends. I will be assigning a book (or significant chunk of one) every week -- an unusually heavy load in this time, I'll admit. We'll have one discussion a week, on the readings; the other two weekly classes will be devoted to lecture, when I will attempt to put into context what we do read, and to talk a little about the thousands of equally important books that didn't make my list of 13.

Here are the thirteen reading assignments:

1. William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883)
2. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
3. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) and "The Will to Believe" (1896)
4. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916) (select chapters only)
5. Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Women and Economics (1898)
6. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)
7. T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" (1922), plus a few critical articles on it
8. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)
9. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, (1953) (select chapters only)
10. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
11. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
12. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, (1989) (select chapters only)
13. Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures (1987)
    

Where available (#1-8), I have linked to complete online texts; otherwise the links go to Google Books (if they offer a preview) or elsewhere (if not).

Precisely which chapters of the Dewey, the Kirk and the Rorty will be assigned is something I'm still mulling over. (I might even assign all of the Rorty -- it's hard, but it's not that long.) From the Kirk I'll assign the American chapters (he does the U.S. and Britain) -- but I might cut down on those further. Dewey I just need to cut down for length -- but I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet. (That's one of the things I need to do between now and the first day of class.)

As for why I'm assigning a few articles to accompany "The Waste Land", although I don't for the others: it's just a very different sort of text. The other twelve writers, however complex they may be, are each trying to make an argument; Eliot writes a poem. Thus its connection to the course material will be more obscure. Also, it's a difficult poem to read for the first time. So I'm going to assign a few articles to (hopefully) help the students through these stumbling blocks.

To anyone who wants to say: "this is insanely ambitious": I know, and I agree. Let's move on.

The assignments will be threefold. The students will write a one-page reaction paper every week, making an observation and asking a question about the book; I'll have a few students read these aloud each week to serve as a jumping off point for our discussion. (These papers are largely intended to make sure students both do and think about the reading.)

There will be a final paper of 10-12 pages, due on the last day of class. As a concession to the "this is already insanely ambitious" point, I've decided not to make this a research paper; it will be a paper on some selection of the books for the course, tracing some intellectual issue (race, gender, democracy, class, the nature of scientific knowledge, the role of the state in society, etc, etc) through a number of the works. (Thus, if an ordinary upper-level course requires a lot of reading, plus a fair amount of reading for a final paper, this will hopefully balance out by just making the students write about the course material.)

And, finally, there will be a final exam, based largely (but not entirely) on the lectures, to make sure that portion of the instruction is tested and evaluated in some way (i.e. to make sure they come, listen and try to remember what I say). I'm going to pass out sheets each lecture with key terms (people, books, names of ideas, etc.) to help with this, since there isn't otherwise a textbook.

I'll have one student enrolled in the course for graduate credit. In addition to the books listed above, she'll read an additional three books -- secondary rather than primary sources -- and write two-page response papers on them; we'll also meet to discuss those books separately. The first of those books is Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which is one of the most engaging and accessible of the secondary sources on this material; the other two I'll pick in consultation with her, to match her interests. Her final paper will be 15-20 pages, rather than 10-12, and will have to work at least one of the additional readings in in a significant way.

And that's my course. Putting this together -- and preparing the lectures -- has taken an insane amount of my time over the past few months, in particular in the weeks since last semester ended. Various other projects that I care deeply -- in certain cases, much more deeply -- about have been put on the back burner, if not all the way in the fridge. But it's been a fun course to prepare. If the students have half as much fun taking it as I have had putting it together, they'll love it. And if they do a tenth as much work, they'll ace it. Let's hope they all do. (Nothing would make me happier than to give everyone an A.)

Comments are welcome, bearing in mind that it's too late to make more than minor modifications for this spring (e.g. the bookstore has already ordered all the books). So even if you argue, convincingly, that I should throw this out and start again, I won't be able to.

Update, Spring 2012: I am teaching the class again with just about the same syllabus. I added a fourteenth book (as you can see I was already thinking of last year if you read the comments) -- Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (between Baldwin and Rorty, for week 12, knocking Rorty and Chomsky to 13 and 14 respectively). And in a few cases I'm shorting the readings somewhat -- not out of a concern for length particularly, and certainly not to balance adding the Gilligan (it doesn't), but because a slight shortening of some particularly difficult readings seemed in order; so I'm omitting a chapter from James's Pragmatism (chapter 4), one from Chomsky's lectures (chapter 4) and saying that students needn't read the (second-edition) postscript to Kuhn, only the text as originally published in 1962. Otherwise the syllabus is essentially unchanged.