Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 24

On Professor Melamed, Rabbi Serfaty, and entry into the Snoge

My colleague, and friend, Yitzhak Melamed got denied entry to the Snoge (or Esnoga) to do some filming for a documentary on Spinoza by an eloquent Rabbi. (See below for the letter.) Looking at the wording of the letter, I suspect the Rabbi (who despite Amsterdam being a small village, I have never met) kind of calculated it would go viral. For his letter is needlessly insulting.

It is not insulting, to be sure, in calling Spinoza an 'Epicouros.' While the word is undoubtedly derived from 'epicurean' in so far as Epicurus believed that the Gods took no interest in people's affairs.** Now, it is generally applied to all heretics and so Spinoza fits the bill (regardless of what exactly the learned Rabbi has in mind--it would have been nice to know if he has Maimonides' meaning in mind or a more generic use.)

It is needlessly insulting not just because there is no reason to believe Spinoza ever set foot in the Snoge (which was built long after he left Amsterdam.) It is insulting because he declares Melamed "persona non grata" in the Snoge. This is peculiar given that the Snoge welcomes tourists without distinction from all walks of life, even keeping that in mind when setting its times for prayer; and has let an Epicouros like myself attend bar mitzwahs there. This is why I suspect some ambition and opportunism in the Rabbi's stance. He is now a very public defender of the faith. But only some opportunism. Let me explain.

Most of our friends have joined in the ridicule of the actions of the Rabbi, when they don't denounce it more strongly.* And here, much to my own annoyance, I wish to defend the Rabbi's stance. In these matters I tend toward the Lockean-Marxian (Groucho not Karl) in my sensibilities: as I suggested in a different context (recall the Tuvel/Hypatia-affaire): I am all for minority groups to have the right to decide on their often illiberal and sometimes immoral entry-requirements, not just membership, but also including their houses of worship (as long as Exit is relatively straightforward). The Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam is very small, decimated by the Holocaust and emigration. It doesn't just have every right to avoid facilitating a movie that however intelligent and sober still will aid in the glorification of its greatest Heretic, but in many ways it has a duty to do so.

As an aside, in an article that deserves careful scrutiny, "Freedom of Speech and Philosophical Citizenship in Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise," Julie Cooper has argued persuasively that Spinoza was a critic of philosophical/intellectual celebrity. That is, in fact, one of Spinoza's lines of criticism of Descartes. And it is pretty clear that the celebration of Spinoza -- which is, in fact, a big politicized deal in Amsterdam -- goes very much against the spirit of his political philosophy. So, somewhat ironically Rabbi Serfaty is in some respects defending Spinoza from his admirers here.

Melamed himself is often a critic of Spinoza, and in my presence has criticized Spinoza's (what we may call) moral philosophy in no uncertain terms. So, it is a bit odd the Rabbi thinks that the study of Spinoza is problematic. We are, in fact, far removed from, say, the spirit of Rabbi Soloveitchik, who was a learned reader of Spinoza. 

UPDATE: It turns out that the Rabbi has no legal right to refuse Melamed entry to library Ets Chaim. (I basing myself here on a report in Dutch (here). HT: Mum.)  This library is open to researchers from all over the world. And since there is government money sponsoring the foundation that runs it, the Rabbi can't treat Melamed as "persona non grata" there. But in re-reading the letter by the Rabbi, I think it's pretty clear he intends to keep Melamed only out of the Snoge.+ [End OF UPDATE.]

I would never personally argue that Rabbi Serfaty is obliged to keep the film crew out of the Snoge. (Plenty of politicians have been filmed there for events.) But there are grounds to suspect such a film would be a mechanism to help later day critics of the community (to which I never belonged) litigate against it, and certainly to treat the Cherem as a colossal mistake and a sign of backwardness. In fact, Rabbi Serfaty is acting here in the spirit of Rabbi Toledano who, in rejecting a revocation of the ban, argued that it would mean that "we in our synagogue should spread the denial of God's existence to the extent that it destroys our heritage and the pillars on which Judaism rests."  If you take that line of thought seriously, and he gets paid to do so, Rabbi Serfaty's position is common sense even though it lacks warmth and what my people call, menschlichkeit.

 

*A few years ago the community -- with, I believe, a different Rabbi -- welcomed public discussion of the ban which got reported all over the world.

**Yes I am familiar with this bit in Maimonides.

+PART OF THE UPDATE: Presumably, he may lack standing to do so if the Parnassim (the directors of the community) refuse to to support him.

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

���The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn���t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.���

���But that������ Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

���They defeated us from beginning to end,��� he said. ���Partly because my government didn���t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.���

���Because they were fighting for their freedom!���

���Maybe so,��� he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle. "Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs. 

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him. So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to his public service. 

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and the characters are sketched are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."). 

Having said that ,the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows, for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend. And in her story Le Guin, who is not na��ve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction) [recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the "courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition. Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer dies at exactly the same time in your body. ���That, to me, is not a loss. That���s a draw.���

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry.  It is entirely compatible with his view than one can find one's enemies moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to, individual terms. 

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable. 

 

 

 

On Pynchon on 1984 (pt II): On Jews and Religiosity

Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the party. Big Brother's regime exhibits all the elements of fascism - the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective - except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in 1984 is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Much has been made recently of Orwell's own attitude towards Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little - Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented with the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.
As close as 1984 gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing the characters Julia and O'Brien. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalised into anything racial. "Nor is there any racial discrimination," as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book - "Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party . .." As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism "one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism", and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for 1984 , the European nationalisms he was used to would somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.--Thomas Pynchon  (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

The other day (recall) I used Pynchon's "Introduction" as a foil to reflect on the the nature of Newspeak in 1984. And since I will be critical of it today, again, I will note, first, that I find his, "The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily," a sublime observation. The claim is not just true of Orwell, but of much of the intelligentsia since 1945. Pynchon does not pause to explain why Orwell, who is just about as astute a commentator on his own age as one can imagine, would fall victim to this mistake. A mistake, I hasten to add, that can be easily avoided if one reflects a bit on, say, Lucian and the admiration More, Hume,  and Adam Smith had for him. I suspect that even in magnanimous Orwell the costly mistake is due to an abiding, progressive view of history in which certain stages are overcome and beyond us.

Be that as it may, Pynchon's claims about the absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four is rather strange. He misses entirely, and, as I have noted before, he is not alone in this, that the first thing Winston Smith writes about in his diary is his experience of going to the movies and watching war films which, upon reflection, turn out to be occasions for the audience to cheer on war crimes against (recall) "a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean."* And, included in it, is a gruesome scene involving a "middle-aged woman [who] might have been a Jewess." And so while I agree with Pynchon that there is a reticence in Orwell about describing the camps -- vaporization occurs off-stage in 1984 --, the allusion to the Holocaust is right there in the opening pages of the book. The whole first diary entry supports, in fact, Pynchon's contention that 1984 is misread if one only sees in it anti-communist, cold-war propaganda, and overlooks the book's major focus, which is on the diagnosis of enduring fascism.

I used 'war crimes' in the previous paragraph. Because one of the notable features of Oceania is that it is constantly hanging enemy soldiers for war crimes. And yet its own entertainment depicts war crimes of one's own as mere spectacle, and a further instance of building social cohesion within it. And put this abstractly, 1984 is as timely as ever. 

When I wrote that Pynchon's claims about absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four are rather strange, I had in mind the fact Pynchon ignores a crucial feature of the Appendix to 1984, despite the fact that Pynchon's own "introduction" is structured on the significance of this "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak" (and so devotes relatively outsized attention to it).  For in it the nameless implied author, who is (as Pynchon notes) writing a considerable time after the events described in 1984, claims the following:

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internation.*

So, rather than being absent, key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. Now, if I were in a polemical mood (which I am not) I would note there is a flirt with anti-Semitism here; a trope one could imagine existing among disillusioned intellectual Christian Socialists (a "near Communist" in Orwell's terms) who trace the origin of fascism to the fanatical particularism of the Hebrew Bible in the manner, say, in which (in my life-time) Jabotinsky's and Begin's Zionism were depicted as sharing roots with fascism. But I am not interested in polemics today.

That the Hebrew Bible is a source of political craft, even the elements of a political science, is a central feature of Machiavellian republicanism--this is hinted in The Prince, and fully developed in both the Theological-Political Treatise and, perhaps more important for the purposes of reflection on Orwell, Harrington's Oceana. And as it happens Orwell engaged seriously with the most able Machiavellian of his time, James Burnham, in his (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," which discusses critically Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians: defenders of Freedom. I am surely not the first to note that plenty of themes of the former -- especially the power-hungry technocrats and intelligentsia who would develop a new kind of oligarchy -- discussed by Orwell found their way into 1984. In fact, one of Pynchon's key themes, viz. that 1984 is concerned with the international division of the world into three gigantic spheres of influence, is central to Orwell's treatment of Burnham. But while in the latter he has some interest in exploring the roots of fanaticism, Burnham does not, I think, trace some of the roots of fascist technique to the Hebrews.

One peculiarity of the claim about the ancient Hebrew by the implied author of the Appendix is that while it is, indeed, central to the whole spirit of Oceania that "" in virtue of the fact that Oceania lacks written laws. The reader learns this in the opening scene when the thing that Winston "was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws)." But this is the exact opposite of the law-saturated life of the ancient Hebrew! And, while the Hebrew Bible is not an instruction manual into a life of service to the false gods, Baal and his priests are mentioned surprisingly frequently in it, and is (for example) central to the narrative about Jezebel in the Book of Kings.

In fact, in Orwell's posthumously published, autobiographical essay, "Such Were the Joys," he writes that "if I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera."** Whatever else they have in common, they are all idolaters in some sense (Cain being a tricky case). So, Orwell presumably knows there is something peculiar about what the implied author of the Appendix says about the "ancient Hebrew." Interestingly enough, Orwell is clear that he finds Christianity "strewn with psychological impossibilities."+  And in context it is clear that the Old Testament does not suffer from these.

Where does this leave us? Pynchon is right within the text of 1984, we are regularly invited to contemplate the religiosity (without religion) of members of the Party and the various forms of social psychological techniques and rituals that facilitate it. But he is wrong to suggest that this is somehow divorced from Judaism. On the contrary, yhe implied author of the Appendix explicitly connects this with the attitude of the "ancient Hebrew." But the text of the Appendix also suggests that its implied author has superficial acquaintance with the book, the Hebrew Bible, that characterizes the life of the ancient Hebrew (something one cannot say about Orwell). And at the risk of overreading, this suggests to me that the vantage point of the Appendix, which is projected much into the future from 1984, and whose implied author is a member of a future intelligentsia -- the official subject matter of the material is the rise and fall of Newspeak -- is one in which the Old Testament is not part of lived experience or knowledge by direct acquaintance, but merely hearsay. As it happens I think (but I would) that this supports my claim (against Pynchon) that the perspective of the Appendix does not hint at (now quoting Pynchon on 1948) "restoration and redemption." But it is, in fact, the state of affairs in much of contemporary life.++

 

 

 

 

*The passage might be taken as the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation, which I disputed last week, that the Appendix represents a certain kind of political restoration and defeat of Ingsoc. It would be surprising for a member of the Party to understand the Party in light of the practice of the old Hebrews. 

**Again, a polemicist in bad faith might explore how Orwell is rooting for the enemies of the Jews.

+In context, Orwell uses 'religion' not 'Christianity,' but what he describes is Christian not Jewish religion.

++I hope to do one more essay on the significance of the Old Testament to 1984.

On Throwing Out Philosophical Babies with the Bathwater

Newton's Corollary VI, however, is not in the Principia for mere ornament. Newton needs it to establish that to a first approximation, the system of a planet and its satellites can be treated as an isolated gravitating system if one ignores the shared orbital motion around the sun. Thus we have a case--treating the sun's gravitational field in the region of the system in question as essentially homogeneous--of what Einstein was to call the "principle of equivalence." Indeed, Newton's sixth Corollary (which deals with a homogeneous field of acceleration), and Huygens's discussion of centrifugal force (which deals with an inhomogeneous one), together adumbrate the principle, exploited so fruitfully by Einstein, that the dynamical states and behavior of bodies in no way distinguish between, on the one hand, a certain kinematical state, and on the other, a second kinematical state implying the same distances and rates of' change of distance, together with a suitable applied field of force. It is a little surprising that Mach, with his relativistic view of motion and his interest in seventeenth-century mechanics did not at all notice these things.--Howard Stein "Some Philosophical Prehistory of General Relativity." Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 8 (1977): 20.

Last week, after my digression on Harman's rediscovery of Adam Smith, I mentioned in a correspondence with Nathan Ballantyne, that Howard Stein also had documented a case in which a philosophical move/insight/distinction had been lost (and then recovered). And after stating this confidently, I thought it prudent to re-read the Stein piece I had in mind (and only belatedly realizing I had blogged about this material before--today's post is thus a retracing of steps). Before I get to the Stein piece a few words of introduction.

Let's stipulate that due to linguistic or geographic isolation or the (deliberate and accidental) destruction of sources sometimes philosophical moves or distinctions are not available at a later date. These may well be cases of linguistic injustice (recall), but do no present further philosophical challenges.

Then there are cases -- now known as Kuhn-losses -- in the sciences, where insights in a discarded paradigm are not ready-at-hand in a new ruling, scientific paradigm. I use 'ready-at-hand' in order to make clear that not all such cases of Kuhn-loss have to involve strict incommensurability.  The insight from the discarded paradigm may just be thought unintuitive or unlikely-to-work in a new paradigm. (This is especially likely to occur in complex policy contexts.) In so far as paradigms structure the availability of intellectual choices (we might call them theoretical affordances), Kuhn-losses are just a natural effect of the disciplining of an intellectual community by text-books and a shared sense of salient experiences (statistical regularities, decisive experiments, etc.). I say 'natural' because time and cognitive attention are scarce goods, and so at the margin there will be a trade-off between the cost of memory and the costs of advancing the paradigm (etc.). The previous sentence may seem abstract, but some such reasoning was (and is) often used to remove the history of the discipline from the graduate curriculum in a field of expertise/science. There is more to be said about such matters, but hopefully that's sufficient for present purposes.

Now, since philosophy does not have paradigms in the scientific sense, and since graduate education in philosophy is not standardized in the way the sciences and the discipline's history is preserved within the graduate curriculum, the existence of the philosophical analogue to Kuhn-loss in philosophy is prima facie a puzzle. Because Kuhn-loss is a term within the philosophy of science about science, and I both deny that philosophy is a science and -- more polemically -- think it a bad idea to think about philosophy in terms familiar from the philosophy of (Kuhnian) science (because unhealthy to the flourishing of philosophy), I use (after nudging from Ballantyne) 'throwing out the baby in the bathwater' when discussing prima facie puzzling cases of the loss of philosophical insight/moves, and distinctions.

And as I noted last week, Harman felt the force of the puzzle. As it turns out, in my reconstruction of the case, it was Sidgwick's strategy, to turn philosophy into a text-book-driven field with the aim of both (i) demarcating normative philosophy from empirical psychology and (ii) to treat ethics as aiming at (and now I use the felicitous phrase of Aaron Garrett) "comprehensive and coherent normative moral theories" that basically caused Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be dropped from quasi-standard reading lists in philosophy. And this entailed that some relatively cutting edge responses to objections to impartial spectator theories were not ready at hand when the topic was revived. This opened the door to what we may (in honor of Liam Kofi Bright) call historical arbitrage. 

I think such arbitrage is needed when whole eras of philosophy are treated with disdain in subsequent ages. It's pretty clear that the early moderns actively promoted disdain toward and a lack of acquaintance with scholastic philosophy. And this meant that lots of distinctions and concepts developed by the scholastics were removed from philosophical vocabulary or emptied from a lot of previous significance. And without wishing to raise a prejudice against the practice, we can see that post-Kantian university philosophy in Germany and later in Anglophone world re-introduces a lot of these distinctions and terms back into mainstream philosophy. (To what degree these are really the same concepts given shifting background metaphysics I leave aside.) 

Now, re-reading Stein (one of my doctoral supervisors) was instructive.  First, I was reminded that my own rejection of the ban on using anachronistic terms -- a ban common among certain historians of philosophy (inspired by a species of contextualism)--, is anticipated by Stein (whose paper I read in graduate school).  His version of the argument is instructive:

For the avoidance of anachronism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to restrict conceptual vocabulary to that of the period under discussion. To impose such a restriction is to inhibit flexibility of thought without any important compensating guarantee against error. It is an intellectual stratagem analogous to that of the shallow empiricism in science that seeks security in rules for the construction of concepts, and achieves only a hobbling of theory. (p. 14)

Stein is explicit that Mach is an example of such shallow empiricism. (p. 14; recall also.) But perhaps forms of operationalism  may also be classified as such. Be that as it may, Stein is right that one can still be anachronistic in interpreting the past even if one only uses actor's categories. For, one may well add apply these categories in a way that is a-historical and at odds with the historical sources. I once claimed (rather too polemically in a NDPR review) that this had happened among scholars who polemically rejected looking at the past through the prism of contemporary issues, but who had tacitly projected a version of the fact-value distinction (in fact, I now understand it was Sidwick's) onto the past that was anachronistic. Moreover, as Daniel Schneider taught me, by using actor's categories, which may well be contested concepts, one is likely to take sides (without always realizing it) in past debates. So, Stein seems to me right that the deployment of anachronism can be illuminating of the historical actors' actual positions (etc.). Stein himself does this throughout the article.  

Okay, now let's turn to the baby with the bath-water. First, in the major key (as it were), Stein himself is an anti-Kuhnian. He concludes his essay with the the claim that "I see, from the seventeenth century up to today a profound community of concerns and a progressive development that has involved both cumulative growth and deepening structural understanding." (27) Stein does not deny a 'conceptual revolution' by Einstein (building on Riemann).

Second, in the minor key (as it were), but my present interest, Stein recognizes that within this profound community of concerns, historical cul-de-sacs and forgetting are possible. Mach really misses something that was available to Newton and Huygens. And while Stein does not  harp on this, plenty of folk influenced by Mach (even after the Einsteinian revolution) missed the point when describing seventeenth century relativity and its development. That the later folk do not see as clearly is especially striking because not only is the seventeenth century mathematical vocabulary is relatively impoverished relative to the later ones, but also there is intellectual continuity from late seventeenth century thinking through the nineteenth century. No major texts are lost and the philosophical vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth century about physics and astronomy does not pose major difficulties to the nineteenth century mind. 

Now, while Mach's case happens within science (broadly conceived), it also involves what we may call the metaphysical principles of science and so, also part of (natural) philosophy proper. (Mach's own institutional position reflects this in his own shifts from mathematics and physics to becoming one of the first professors in the history and philosophy of science.) I put it like that because full awareness of the implications of the "principle of equivalence" seems to have been missed. Now I don't think of myself as an expert on 19th century physics, so take this with a grain of salt. But it's pretty difficult to test empirically the principle of equivalence and so was, perhaps, not of active concern to practicing physicists and natural philosophers. In addition, and this seems to me crucial to Stein's argument, later reflection on relativity was shaped primarily by Leibniz's views (who was treated as the standard bearer for relativistic thinking).

I think this happened in part because of the effect of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence on philosophical thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This displaced interest in Huygens' views (some of which were hardly accessible) and let people to miss that Newton himself had important stuff to say on the topic. While I am pretty convinced that Leibniz-Clarke shaped people's views of Newton's natural philosophy (to this day, alas), I also say this with some nervousness because I don't know if anyone has checked in a systematic way what folk did with or commented on Newton's sixth Corollary. Of course, and this I feel confident in saying, in many places people studied physics through text-books that while Newtonian in some expanded sense did not follow Newton slavishly at all. Even so, because Newton's achievements were culturally so central to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is really striking that some of his most profound insights were only appreciated in the development of a physical theory that surpassed his. 

At this point one may be impatient and suggest that in fact the case at hand while no Kuhn-loss is the effect of paradigmatic thinking in science, which can, in fact, obstruct the insights of (what we may call in homage to Kuhn) the scientific-legislator of the paradigm. And that by creating a division of labor in science (among different fields, but also among theory and experiment), it was left to relatively few to study relativistic theories while Newtonianism ruled. And, in fact, once Maxwell's equations and concerns about the ether opened the door, relativistic principles were explored by (say) Poincare in the late nineteenth century. So the critic may refuse to accept the example as a case about lost philosophical babies.

Fair enough. But, of course, one of the effects of the split between philosophy and science, and the relatively high status of physical science, is the tendency toward paradigmatic thinking in science and philosophy. And one may well conclude, as I do, that in so far as paradigmatic thinking and the prestige of science within philosophy as such shape philosophy we should expect the bathwater, even one nourished with the fruits of science, to carry away important insights.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least ��40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power. (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

*Shortly after being tortured, Smith realizes he is supposed to accept that GOD IS POWER. If I were more Deleuzian this would be the starting point of my Spinozistic reading of the 1984.

**To be sure this is not the whole population. As the Appendix emphasises its primary.

+In a future post I intend to explain that the Appendix gives a further hint of this in its understanding of the Party as similar in character to the ancient Hebrews. I also want to return to Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 for other reasons.

On the Social Workers of Um-Helat (pt II)

So the social workers of Um-Helat stand, talking now, over the body of a man. He is dead���early, unwilling, with a beautifully crafted pike jammed through his spine and heart. (The spine to make it painless. The heart to make it quick.) This is only one of the weapons carried by the social workers, and they prefer it because the pike is silent. Because there was no shot or ricochet, no crackle or sizzle, no scream, no one else will come to investigate. The disease has taken one poor victim, but it need not claim more. In this manner is the contagion contained . . . in a moment. In a moment.

Beside the man���s body crouches a little girl. She���s curly-haired, plump, blind, brown, tall for her age. Normally a boisterous child, she weeps now over her father���s death, and her tears run hot with the injustice of it all. She heard him say, ���I���m sorry.��� She saw the social workers show the only mercy possible. But she isn���t old enough to have been warned of the consequences of breaking the law, or to understand that her father knew those consequences and accepted them���so to her, what has happened has no purpose or reason. It is a senseless, monstrous, and impossible thing, called murder.

���I���ll get back at you,��� she says between sobs. ���I���ll make you die the way you made him die.��� This is an unthinkable thing to say. Something is very wrong here. She snarls, ���How dare you. How dare you.���

The social workers exchange looks of concern. They are contaminated themselves, of course; it���s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work. Impossible to dam a flood without getting wet. (There are measures in place. The studs on their scalps���well. In our own world, those who volunteered to work in leper colonies were once venerated, and imprisoned with them.) The social workers know, therefore, that for incomprehensible reasons, this girl���s father has shared the poison knowledge of our world with her. An uncontaminated citizen of Um-Helat would have asked ���Why?��� after the initial shock and horror, because they would expect a reason. There would be a reason. But this girl has already decided that the social workers are less important than her father, and therefore the reason doesn���t matter. She believes that the entire city is less important than one man���s selfishness. Poor child. She is nearly septic with the taint of our world.

Nearly. But then our social worker, the tall brown one who got a hundred strangers to smile at a handmade ladybug, crouches and offers a hand to the child.

What? What surprises you? Did you think this would end with the cold-eyed slaughter of a child? There are other options���and this is Um-Helat, friend, where even a pitiful, diseased child matters. They will keep her in quarantine, and reach out to her for several days. If the girl accepts the hand, listens to them, they will try to explain why her father had to die. She���s early for the knowledge, but something must be done, do you see? Then together they will bury him, with their own hands if they must, in the beautiful garden that they tend between caseloads. This garden holds all the Um-Helatians who broke the law. Just because they have to die as deterrence doesn���t mean they can���t be honored for the sacrifice.

But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate. The child must grow, and learn, and become another social worker fighting an endless war against an idea . . . but she will live, and help others, and find meaning in that. If she takes the woman���s hand.--N.K. Jemisin (2018) "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" in How Long the Black Future Month?, pp. 10-11.

Last week (recall), I focused on the pecularities of the coming of age ritual in Um-Helat (a "postcolonial utopia" (p. 12)). The ritual alluded to, again, near the end of the story (quoted above). Because the daughter of the man executed by the social workers of Um-Helat has not undergone the ritual yet. She is, hence, unaware of her father's crime and the reasons for his sudden death. 

Presumably, this lack of awareness has also spared her life: there is in her no mens rea. Because she did not undergo the coming of ritual, she had no knowledge of the taboo on Earthly (social) media consumption, and the effects that may follow from the violation of it. This despite the fact that she is also infected with the Earthly ideas her father pursued and shared secretly. These ideas involve the denial of equal respect, the advocacy of social hierarchy. But also directed, or exclusive love like the intense love the child feels for her late dad. To be sure, it's okay to love one's children and parents in Um-Helat, but not at the expense of others--so in the ideals of Um-Helat, one should be aunties to many children (p. 1).

Um-Helat is governed by the ideal of mutual, egalitarian respect. But also by a kind of principle of sufficient reason (PSR) because, as the passage quoted above implies, all actions in Um-Helat can be explained (and so justified) to each other. This suggests that Um-Helat does not lack philosophy. The mutual respect ideal and the PSR are defended violently against those that seek out and circulate ideals of social subordination associated with our world. If capital punishment were not shocking enough, Um-Helat's 'social workers' act as secret prosecutors, juries/judges, and executioners at once in defense of certain kind of social taboos. 

The lack of separation in the juridical functions of social workers is presumably rationalized by their commitment to keep the fact of contagion as quiet as possible, and to weed it out as quick as possible. The law and its severe consequences are known to adults, and there is even a kind of consent to it in Um-Helat.* And so, one may think this meets minimal ideals of public reasons. But the execution of the law is not. There is a clear denial of publicity in Kant's sense (e.g., "all actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity"). In addition, the law of Um-Helat does not build into its execution any safeguards against false accusation or mistakes. So, the social workers of Um-Helat are more akin to the guardians of a Government House utilitarian society (than a Kantian one).

The language of 'contagion' reminds us that the social taboo on forbidden knowledge is medicalized. Violation of the taboo on consumption of Earthly (social) media is treated as a disease. And the 'social workers' are Um-Helat's immune system. Strikingly enough, the 'social workers' of Um-Helat are themselves partially infected or "contaminated themselves" (..."it���s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work") with the very thing they are tasked to fight.

That the angry child is a potential recruit to what we may call the 'guild of social workers' makes a lot of sense upon reflection. She is spirited and loves too-partially, which are, in fact, two key qualifications for the guardians of Plato's Republic (375). So, part of the implied (invisible to us) education of such contaminated young kids into would be 'social workers' of Um-Helat is the redirection, the turning of this angry, powerful directed love into a love capable of serving the common good ferociously. 

In fact, the un-deviant, and unquestioning healthy citizens of Um-Helat are not suitable to the task of social worker. They are basically too happy and too dutiful for the task of defending the psychic health of Um-Helat with extreme measures.+ So, it makes sense that 'social workers' who are central to the survival of the ideology/ideals of Um-Helat are recruited from those like the child, spirited and with intense love. We learn that these social workers can otherwise be anyone (including (recall) a gethen).

The reason I have adopted the language of the Republic, is that the social workers themselves are both an elite of Um-Helat and, simultaneously, may also be controlled by somehow. That they are a kind of elite becomes clear early in the story, when one of them is seen to promote common mutual acknowledgment publicly (see p. 3). And, in fact, the official task of these 'social workers' is "to ensure the happiness and prosperity of their fellow citizens." (p. 7) Those that are entrusted with this noble task are those that have experienced a secret grief and kind of loss of a sort unknown (and unknowable) to the rest of Um-Helat.  

We get a hint about the function of "the studs on their scalps;" at an earlier point in the (very brief) text we were told that these are "implanted." (p. 3.) And it is also implied that all social workers have them (p. 7). Presumably to allow control from afar, a safe-guard. This is a city known for its great technological innovations, so such distant control is not beyond the possible for them. What's left unclear is who controls, who can be entrusted with power over those studs in a city in which every question is supposed to have an answer. 

*There is ambiguity in the "father knew those consequences and accepted them." Did he accept and approve the justification for them, or is the passage merely conveying that he acted in light of knowledge of the consequences?

+The citizens of Um-Helat also lack curiosity of the forbidden. Admittedly, the children of information gleaners need not be inquisitive themselves, but presumably they have more a propensity for it than those that lack such parentage. Such curiosity will be needed to find those that are information-gleaners. 

On Herland, Utopian Racism, and the Analysis of Patriarchy

The women of Herland have no fear of men. Why should they have? They are not timid in any sense. They are not weak; and they all have strong trained athletic bodies. Othello could not have extinguished Alima with a pillow, as if she were a mouse.

Terry put in practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman.

It did not work. I got a pretty clear account of it later from Ellador, but what we heard at the time was the noise of a tremendous struggle, and Alima calling to Moadine. Moadine was close by and came at once; one or two more strong grave women followed.

Terry dashed about like a madman; he would cheerfully have killed them���he told me that, himself���but he couldn���t. When he swung a chair over his head one sprang in the air and caught it, two threw themselves bodily upon him and forced him to the floor; it was only the work of a few moments to have him tied hand and foot, and then, in sheer pity for his futile rage, to anesthetize him.

Alima was in a cold fury. She wanted him killed���actually.--From: Charlotte Perkins  Gillman (1915) Herland, chapter 11 (p. 142 in the penguin edition).

That the women of Herland lack fear is key to the overall argument of Herland. The point is not that the absence of men in Herland creates a society incapable of generating fear. For, these women are quite capable, like the Amazonian of old, to inspire justified fear in others. They are introduced as a rumor by locals, who keep their distance from the "strange and terrible Woman Land in the high distance." (ch. 1; p. 4) And they keep their distance for a good reason because all the local men who tried to visit do not return and disappear without a trace. Because these locals are understood as 'savage' and 'uncivilized' by the women of Herland and the three male American visitors to Herland, they are dispensable. The three American men -- we're in the age of explicitly racialized, imperialism -- openly speculate about "about penetrating those vast forests and civilizing���or exterminating���the dangerous savages." (ch. 12; p. 154).

The women of Herland are more discrete than these Americans, but the observant reader learns not just that no savage men returns, but also that the explicit reason why the Americans are spared is that their advanced technology (a bi-plane) indicates their civilization, and that in virtue of this they may be suitable candidates for re-creating a dual sexed state. (ch. 8; p. 96)* In addition, the women of Herland have culled most animals from their society (see the passage about dogs and horses (ch. 4; p. 53)), and we learn they are not averse to breeding the remaining ones (and plants). Finally, note that in the passage quoted above, one of the women of Herland, the one subject to intended marital rape, wishes to kill her assailant. 

That the women of Herland lack fear is noteworthy to the American visitors. (It's commented on in their initial encounters with the women of Herland.) And so we obliquely learn that American women are expected to be afraid of men. We also learn that, in part through the scene above, that this does not end at marriage because violent marital rape is treated as something inherent in true American masculinity.+ (Wikipedia has useful references to wider discussion among nineteenth century feminists.) In fact, the pervasiveness of violence in American life is a theme that surfaces throughout, obliquely, and it is discussed (somewhat comically) in terms of how Americans treat the dogs as pets (especially ch. 5).

Recall that I label a certain kind of comparative institutional analysis -- within the Utopian genre -- Socratic political theory (recall; but see, especially, this post on Ursula Le Guin and this one on Thomas More.; and this one on Spinoza). In addition, I have noted before that utopian fiction can have multiple uses. Many assume that utopias are primarily about imagining a possible future, even provide a blue-print for them. But one of my best past students, Hannah Lingier, taught me (recall) that utopian narratives often have another function function (by way of idealization) in isolating and revealing (in image and speech) how non-trivial existing social mechanisms work or might work.

What makes Herland facinating is that it reveals obliquely how a system of patriarchy functions by way of subtraction (men are absent) and through the interactions of the American visitors and the women of Herland, and the mutual reactions among them. And so, while one is shown the institutions, norms, and practices of Herland in which patriarchy is absent (except in historical and carefully curated memory), one thereby learns to discern the really existing patriarchy in civilized countries. And so it practices Socratic political theory in a distinctive way.

I do not mean to suggest that pervasive fear and laws and norms that permit toxic masculinity and violent marital rape are the only features of patriarchy revealed in Herland. There are set-pieces on how American Christianity promotes violent patriarchy, how the way property is conceptualized promotes patriarchal norms, how sexual jealousy among women is an effect of a society in which man you marry is the main ticket to social and economic advancement, and quite a number of observations on how gender or 'femininity' is structured and used as a way to control women.++

I mention the latter because while it seems to be true that the distinction between sex and gender derives from the middle of the twentieth twentieth century, Perkins Gilman deploys an analogous distinction in sophisticated fashion. (Mandeville had already noted that socialization gendered girls feminine (see here also for an extensive quote).) And she applies the distinction in the context of analyzing patriarchy and the neo-Darwinian evolution of social norms. But about that before long soon.

*���From another country. Probably men. Evidently highly civilized. Doubtless possessed of much valuable knowledge. May be dangerous. Catch them if possible; tame and train them if necessary. This may be a chance to re-establish a bi-sexual state for our people.��� (ch. 8. p. 96) It is unclear how the women infer that there are men in the plane. The racism of the three American men is undisguised, they assume that in virtue of being clearly civilized, the women of Herland must be of "Aryan stock." (ch. 5.; p. 60) This is taken for granted by the narrator-sociologist of the three.

Interestingly enough, while it's pretty clear that Herland is a critique of patriarchy, and it also reveals the tight link between patriarchy and militarist/violent imperialism -- the Herland women are isolationist and, when they discover the existence of other civilizations eager to join in pacific communality with these --, but it is by no means obvious it's criticizing the racialist imperialism of the Americans or women of Herland. If one reads Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics, it's pretty clear that the racism is a feature not a bug. (This makes me suspect that Othello is not an innocent example either.)

+Herland makes clear that the entitlement may not be common to all men, but it is common to wealthy, high status American men.

**This partial list was developed by my students in my Utopia & Dystopia seminar.

On Jemisin, On the Curated Stories we Tell the Young, and Omelas (part I)

But some knowledge is dangerous.
Um-Helat has been a worse place, after all, in its past. Not all of its peoples, so disparate in origin and custom and language, came together entirely by choice. The city had a different civilization once-one which might not have upset you so! (Poor thing. There, there.) Remnants of that time dot the land all around the city, ruined and enormous and half-broken. Here a bridge. There a great truck, on its back a rusting, curve-sided thing that ancient peoples referred to by the exotic term missile. In the distance: the skeletal remains of another city, once just as vast as Um-Helat, but never so lovely. Works such as these encumber all the land, no more and no less venerabe to the Um-Helatians than the rest of the landscape. Indeed, every young citizen must be reminded of these things upon coming of age, and told carefully curated stories of their nature and purpose. When the young citizens learn this, it is a shock almost incomprehensible, in that they literally lack the words to comprehend such things. The languages spoken in Um-Helat were once our languages, yes--for this world was once our world; it was not so much parallel as the same, back then.--N.K. Jemisin (2018) "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" in How Long the Black Future Month?, pp. 7-8. [HT  David Duffy] 

A few years ago, several readers recommended Jemisin to me after I had posted (yet again) on Le Guin. I am late to the party because her Broken Earth series (a trilogy) was, rightfully, a sensation when the individual volumes appeared wining every prize possible despite opposition from sexist, white supremacists.* The Ones Who Stay and Fight is a short story and a response, in complex ways, to Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. (It's possible that "Um-Helat" just is "Omelas" with a vowel shift and a few centuries drift.) There are many echoes of Le Guin's short story in in Jemisin's short shory.

There is, in fact, one kind of direct reference to Le Guin in Jemisin's story: among the population of Um-Helat, we are told, there are/is a "gethen" (7). Gethen is a planet in one of Le Guin's most famous novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (set in her Hainish universe). Gethen is populated by ambisexual people with no fixed sex. The implied narrator of "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" leaves it ambiguous whether this gethen is meant to be a descendant of the people of Gethen. If so, Jemisin's story is also part of the Hainish iniverse. I say 'also' because Le Guin had retrospecively inserted "The Ones who Walk Away" into the Hainish cycle with a dedication attached to another story (which I recently discussed), "The Day Before the Revolution." Or, the narrator is using 'gethen' as a means to refer to any kind of ambisexual (in the way that 'fridgerator' and 'xerox' function), and the implication is that Le Guin's writings are at least familiar to the narrator.

The previous paragraph is a kind of aside, but that there ambisexual people in Um-Helat is meant to be another illustration that in this city -- which (see also the quoted passage atop this post) is multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-religious -- practically all human possibility is welcomed. As the narrator tells us on p. 1, "This is a city where numberless aspirations can be fulfilled." In reading about Um-Helat, I am often reminded of Plato's and, especially Al-Farabi's description of the democratic city. Recall Al-Farabi's take, "The democratic city is the city in which every one of its inhabitants is unrestrained and left to himself to do what he likes. Its inhabitants are equal to one another, and their traditional law is that no human being is superior to another in anything at all." Al-Farabi describes democracies as naturally, welcoming, cosmopolitan, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies ("the nations repair to it and dwell in it, so it becomes great beyond measure. People of every tribe are procreated in it by every sort of pairing off and sexual intercourse.") Democracy is presented in dazzling colors: it is "the marvelous and happy [polity]. On the surface, it is like an embroidered garment replete with colored figures and dyes. Everyone loves it and loves to dwell in it...." This dazzling feature is very present in Um-Helat, too, from the first page.

The first inkling we get of this in the story, is that in Um-Helat "anyone can earn auntiehood." (1) This suggest that it has an inclusive notion of family-hood. To be an 'auntie' in Um-helat, just means to care for a youngster. In fact, we later learn (and this is non-trivial point to the story, even a SPOILER--don't keep reading if you are not into that) that exclusive love to off-spring and parents at the expense of serving the common interest is highly problematic in Um-Helat. So, being a true 'auntie' in Um-Helat involves not favoring your own nephews and nieces.  

However, unlike the democratic city, Um-Helat has social mechanisms and customs that are clearly designed to prevent any instability and the degeneration of democracy into tyranny. In particular, these mechanism are designed to prevent ideologies that promote human inequality from taking root. The 'gethen' mentioned above (again SPOILER alert), is one of the so-called 'social workers' whose job it is to root out those who secretly consume and circulate our inequality promoting (social) media. These social workers -- with a nod to 'paradox of freedom' [in the story something analogous is called the 'paradox of tolerance' (p.5)] -- literally police the spread of dangerous memes and their (human) carriers. (The viral/contagious metaphors run through the story.) Some other time, I'll return to the nature of these social workers, but in the remainder I focus on peculiar such mechanism designed to create resistance to dangerous ideas (that promote unequal respect/dignity). 

For, not unlike Omelas (recall), Um-Helat has a peculiar and structurally not dissimilar coming of age ritual quoted above this post. What I am interested in here, is the content of the 'carefully curated stories.' For, not unlike the children in Omelas, they learn something about their city/polity that both is carefully kept from them (which implies an important social taboo), and simultaneously crucial to the political identity of the city and its citizens. In the case of Um-Helat it is connected to historical memory of a post-apocalyptic re-founding, and in which the archeological remnants of a bombed out civilization figures greatly.

In fact, there are plenty of hints throughout the story that Um-Helat understands itself as progressing, a work in progress, from a terrible nadir. Since the remains of the war are omnipresent and left highly visible, I was reflecting on what might be the content of the curated stories that so shock the kids.** I believe they are told that treating others as unequal, as worth dominating, inevitably leads to war, even civil war. Let's call this the bedrock principle of Um-Helat. And the reason they are shocked by the bedrock principle is that the very idea and the conceptualizations of treating others as unequal is banished from Um-Helat (remember the 'social workers' police this violently--they are like Platonic guardian-auxiliaries who guard city from internal and external enemies). It may well be very difficult to phrase in their language. (We are told they have plenty of vocabulary to mark difference, but not to express superiority in difference.) 

We are told, that what "shocks the young citizens of Um-Helat is the realization that, once, those differences of opinion involved differences in respect. That once, value was ascribed to some people,
and not others. That once, humanity was acknowledged for some, and not others." (p. 9) It is pretty clearly part of the logic of the story that the carefully curated coming of age ritual is designed as a kind of social inoculation against of the spreading of inequality in respect.

Now, the passage just quoted (from p. 9) does not support my claim that what they are taught in the coming of age ritual is that treating others as unequal, as worth dominating, inevitably leads to war, even civil war. It's possible they are merely that treating others as unequal did lead to war/civil war.

But I think bedrock can explain another oddity. The social workers don't just police the spread of ideas of unequal treatment/respect, but they are especially on the lookout for people who consume our (social) media. Um-Helat is a branch that split of from us at some point in (a possible) past. (The metaphysics and epistemology of the branching worlds is worth its own post.) And the oddity of the coming of age ritual of Um-Helat is that they explicitly teach in (carefully curated fashion) the very knowledge that is considered dangerous even explicitly forbidden in Um-Helat!

Now, one might that what's central (and again there are shades of Plato) is that the reason our (social) media is forbidden in Um-Helat is that it packages especially dangerous ideas in ways that makes its spread more likely that facilitate uptake for evil. This is certainly part of the story. But as the narrator recognizes (and the folk of Um-Helat, too), by making it "forbidden" fruit, it becomes "so seductive." (p. 9) And since in order to become adult in Um-Helat is to be explicitly exposed to these dangerous ideas anyway, why make it more attractive -- to inquisitive and rebellious natures -- by forbidding becoming acquainted with the versions circulating on our (social) media? 

I suspect that, in fact, the really dangerous idea -- and this is also what's so unsettling about the nature of Omelas -- is that it is not true that societies that are built on mutual disrespect, or on harming some and not others, fundamentally must lead to civil war.+ In fact, Omelas is explicitly a polity "without soldiers." To put this in the language of game theory, a fundamentally inegalitarian polity may be a suboptimal equilibrium, but an equilibrium nevertheless. And it is idea, which is key to bedrock, that is kind of the noble lie of Um-Helat. And if you don't believe that Um-Helat, which is lovely in many ways, can have any noble lies, you are in for a shock when you read the story for the first time and learn of the manner in which the social workers prevent the virus of inequality spreading. But I return to that before long....stay tuned.

*I am not a groupie, because I am not fond of her The City we Became.

**What follows is partially indebted to comments by one of my students, Oscar Hammarstedt.

+How this is possible is for another time.

Caliban and the Witch, Beauvoir, and The Great Transformations

My interest in this research was originally motivated by the debates that accompanied the development of the Feminist Movement in the United States concerning the roots of women's ���oppression,��� and the political strategies which the movement should adopt in the struggle for women's liberation. At the time, the leading theoretical and political perspectives from which the reality o f sexual discrimination was analyzed were those proposed by the two main branches of the women's movement: the Radical Feminists and the Socialist Feminists. In my view, however, neither provided a satisfactory explanation of the roots of the social and economic exploitation of women. I objected to the Radical Feminists because of their tendency to account for sexual discrimination and patriarchal rule on the basis of transhistorical cultural structures, presumably operating independently of relations of production and class. Socialist Feminists, by contrast, recognized that the history of women cannot be separated from the history of specific systems of exploitation and, in their analyses, gave priority to women as workers in capitalist society. But the limit of their position, in my understanding of it at the time, was that it hat it failed to acknowledge the sphere of reproduction as a source of value-creation and exploitation, and thus traced the roots of the power differential between women and men to women's exclusion from capitalist development ��� a stand which again compelled us to rely on cultural schemes to account for the survival of sexism within the universe of capitalist relations.--Silvia Federici (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation, preface, pp. vii-viii (all my references are to the UK edition).

A few weeks ago, I noted (here; echoing diagnosis of MacKinnon) that De Beauvoir treatment of the origin of patriarchy suffers from circularity. She projects backwards the idea of man as inventive Homo Faber, especially of values, who is admired by the more rooted women who then become complicit in their own subordination because they enjoy and admire the activities of the more daring men. And while violence is not contingent here -- the military and hunting exploits of men are especially admired --, and violence toward women is not absent, women's subordination is, in part, sustained by their sharing in the fruits of Man's inventions and, as Marion Garcia has noted in her recent book, the non-trivial pleasures consequent subordination. But as an origin account, this whole approach presupposes, as MacKinnon notes, that patriarchy is already fully functioning (and so circular). 

One related problem with De Beauvoir's treatment is that the origin of patriarchy itself gets pushed back into mythic times and so ends up being omnipresent. A consequence of this is that real historical differences matter less than the omnipresence of patriarchy and that because there is no spatially and temporally bounded origin to their subordination, women also do not see themselves as distinct political group (a point noted by Garcia). It also means that the history of feminism itself is either a history of permanent failure, or something very new.

Last week (recall) I was rather critical of Federici's Caliban and the Witch. But it is important to recognize that Federici offers a much more compelling account of the origin of patriarchy than De Beauvoir does. While not denying that women's subordination to men is a historical reality in many times and places, Federici shows that modern feminism is reacting to a form of patriarchy that grew out of the late middle ages and that "peaked in the 19th century with the creation of the full-time housewife." (p. 78) By 'grew' I do not mean she thinks this was an organic or pacific development. She argues that it involved half a millennium of state (sanctioned) violence against women (and heretic), which was inaugurated by several centuries of persecution of purported witches (mostly female).

While, the account presents itself as Marxist (about which below more) and feminist in character, the underlying template for the overall argument is derived Nietzsche. In particular, Nietzsche's account of the use of torture and force for the development of a so-called slave morality (structured around good and evil) and especially of breeding an animal "with the right to make promises" familiar from The Genealogy of Morals. She actually cites and partially quotes the passage, but presents Nietzsche as claiming that "blood and torture were necessary to 'breed an animal' capable of regular, homogeneous, and uniform behavior, indelibly marked with the memory of the new rules."* On Federici's account torture then is a site where "knowledge about the body was gained" and obstacles to the transformation of the modern worker eliminated. (p. 155)* 

That is to say, Federici explicitly invites the reader to see several large scale social transformations as essentially linked: the violent imposition of patriarchal norms on women's bodies and lives that are still with 'us in so-called 'developed' nations; the violent rise of capitalism out of primitive accumulation; and the violent rise of a transatlantic, racialized slave economy. One crucial feature these three transformations have in common is the rise of a national state that manages an economy, class relations, and (due to its interest in population) laws and norms of reproduction  These three transformation all occur in the centuries after the Black Death in the fourteenth century through the (so-called) age of Enlightenment. I used 'developed' because Federici believes that the linked historical transformations are being repeated today in 'lesser-developed' countries subject to forced capitalist development under the tutelage of international (financial) institutions.  

In Federici's argument the persecution of purported witches, a veritable reign of terror over several centuries, is a key mechanism in subduing, primarily rural resistance to the rise of capitalism, and in shaping patriarchal norms on all women, including a major narrowing of women's participation in the waged economy. Some of the most interesting passages are about the ways in which men conspired to remove women as competitors from the workforce as physicians, brewers, and midwives, and the steady erosion of women's rights to enter into contracts or live alone, etc. Unlike De Beauvoir, who treats 'la querelle des femme' as a secondary phenomena primarily a debate among men about the relative merits of marriage to life in the clergy (The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, pp. 118-120), while Federici sees it in as a highly salient debate over and a source of knowledge about "a new sexual division of labor" (p. 114).

To be sure, Federici never mentions De Beauvoir in the whole of Caliban and The Witch. And as the extended quote from the preface suggests, Federici is engaging with the question about the origin of patriarchy in light of an American debate. I assume that by radical feminists she has in mind people like Firestone and Millet and by socialist feminists people like Eisenstein. While De Beauvoir has a tendency to efface past feminists, Federici has a tendency to efface her intellectual targets (not, of course, her political target which is clearly transnational Capital). However, that debate was prompted in no small part by De Beauvoir, so I hope that the compare and contrast element of this post is not seen as a non-sequitur.

Compared to De Beauvoir's account of the origin of patriarchy, Federici's approach has a lot of advantages. It can point to a where and how of the development of modern patriarchy, and explain many of its characteristic features. That is to say, it can explain what we may call the patriarchal template of modern gender relations. ("Gender" is not a word Federici uses a lot, except when explaining her large scale goals.) And it is not implausible that there are many interactions between tools of oppression in the inquisition into witches and the vicious exploitation developed in the context of transatlantic racialized slavery and plantations.

It is, I think, eminently plausible that a few centuries of state mediated terror against particular women left a mark on all women, especially because this terror went alongside great legal and political changes. Federici's account is not circular. It explains how the cause of (what we may call) women's equality was tied up in the historical and sometimes intersectional defeats of rural populations and pre-reformation heretical groups. And it is, incidentally, notable that in her account the broadly protestant heresies that succeed politically were also, simultaneously, defeats for the cause of women. 

Let me close with noting three limitations of Federici's approach. First, one problem with Federici's account -- and this is remarkably similar to a problematic feature in Karl Polanyi's account (he is curiously absent from her bibliography) -- is a kind of romanticism about the pre-capitalist village economy. To be sure, to note this is not to deny the violence that destroys the rural way of life. Liberals like myself (although I am more skeptical than most) agree with Marxists that the mercantile development of capitalism is a bloody and violent affair. Mercantilism is evil, and I agree with Federici (and against some Marxists and Liberals) that the rise of Capitalism and liberal society itself cannot justify these evils. There is no secular theodicy. 

However, Federici treats the rural or village economy as a "subsistence economy" in which "the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to end, as these activities became the carriers of different social relations and were sexually differentiated. In the new monetary regime, only production-for-market was defined as a value-creating activity, whereas the reproduction of the worker began to be considered as valueless from an economic viewpoint and even ceased to be considered work." (78) Of course, Federici's focus on how this unity permits more equal gender relations and permits an enlarged space for women's agency goes well beyond Polanyi. 

So, while Federici explicitly recognizes that the rural economy is structured by feudal relations and conflict, she ignores (as I have noted before) that it is also -- not in the least due to the absence of circulating coin -- suffused with credit and debt relations. And so this very idea of an organic unity has to pretend away the many social mechanism, which promote their own hierarchies and are often infused with violence, of debt accounting and settlement.** To put this in more ironic terms: while Marxists tend to make fun of those liberals who mistakenly posit a peaceful or natural primitive accumulation (Federici follows the tradition in associating this view -- see p. 61, p. 136, and note 6 on pp. 278-9 -- with Adam Smith's account), Polanti and Federici have a tendency to treat European pre-capitalist relations as thinly disguised gardens of Eden (e.g, Federici's pre-capitalist communities have abundant community wide feasts (etc.).)

Second, throughout the post I have described Federici's position in terms of 'modern patriarchy.' Perhaps, it would be better to call it 'capitalist' or 'Mercantile patriarchy' I do this in the spirit of charity because she is not trying to explain all patriarchy. And she has useful things to say about societies that do not exhibit the modern control over women's bodies. But as MacKinnon noted about De Beauvoir, Federici's argument often presupposes the institution of patriarchy. For, the gendered pattern of defeats she describes presupposes patriarchy's ability to organize militarily, politically, and economically to common ends. 

Federici recognizes the point by admitting that in "pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons." Even on her account Capitalist patriarchy grew out of a (pre-Capitalist) tempered patriarchy. (It would have been strange for her to deny this since both Feudalism and the Church were patriarchal in character.) So, while Federici's account advances beyond De Beauvoir, it, too, presupposes the patriarchy in order to explain the victory of patriarchy. 

And, third, and finally, it is notable that the developments she describes coincide with the growing influence of representative and elective institutions first in important towns and guilds, and, eventually in the nation-states and within (protestant) Churches. These representative institutions are almost uniformly gendered (propertied) male. Federici misses this point because she is only interested in what she calls 'workers democracies' (pp. 46-49) that resisted these representative organs. And this point can explain a peculiarity that her account notes but cannot explain (although predicted by Olympes de Gouges in 1791): that modern patriarchy was further developed and ultimately perfected under conditions of mass male democracy.+

 

*My previous post on Caliban and the Witch was devoted to Federici's tendency toward creative interpretation and misrepresentation, so I ignore such issues in the body of the post. I checked the old Doubleday Nietzsche edition (a translation by Golffing) which she explicitly cites and mentions in her bibliography and used it for my citations in the body of the text. Federici's reading is not silly because Nietzsche closes the paragraph with the claim that "he must have become not only calculating but himself calculable, regular even to his own perception, if he is to stand pledge for his own future as a guarantor does." And while this is not the modern worker, we're are clearly in the vicinity of the protestant work ethic and especially the capitalist planner who is credit worthy. 

** It also has to ignore the existence of a very dense medieval, continental wide network of long-distance trade, but let's leave that aside. The point is Walter Eucken's and undoubtedly it is directed by him, in part, against the Marxist tendency to see the development of long distance markets as an effect of the rise capitalism as opposed to its source (in context the target is Sombart).

+The point was anticipated by Eileen O'Neill (recall).

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gil Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gil Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door, that said, ���History of Philosophy: Just Say No!��� And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one���s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ���exegetical thinking���: reading one���s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ���tends���.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ���History of Philosophy: Just Say No!��� was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith���s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy). But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found C.D. Broad's (195) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's kuhn-loss question is relative simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is more a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible.