My Best Pieces (most recent first)

Les Érudits Maudits: Education and Class

So only the few and the proud will be interested in my érudit maudit concept. In fact, however, our society is opulent enough that it is possible to live decently at quite a low relative economic level. And while certain pleasures and comforts will need to be sacrificed, the most painful sacrifice will be success itself. People often talk about “true success”, but nobody really believes that success is anything but money. Those  making the bohemian sacrifice will have to choose between taking a lot of ribbing and nagging about their personal failure, and just cutting unsympathetic people out their lives. Neither option is an appealing one.

Ethics and Surgery

Ethics is a practical discipline like surgery, and while second-order textbook knowledge of surgery has great value for first-order practitioners, an autonomous second-order textbook-only science of surgery, uninformed by experience, would be a monstrosity. Second-order ethics should be a handmaid of first-order ethics, and since ethical behavior is not a difficult kind of performance (as in music or sports -- or surgery) of which some people are incapable, second-order ethicists should be expected to have "expertise" at first-order ethics too. And just as surgery is usually taught by the case-study method, ethics should probably also be taught through the detailed examination of a range of actual cases, starting with the routine and moving toward the difficult.

Becker on the Family

When the child-commodity turns eighteen, it becomes independent. At that point the little child-commodity (which had been producing "psychic income" -- p. 194) turns into human capital -- i.e., an independent adult selling its labor on the market. At this point the parental unit of human capital has nothing to show for his efforts. The child-commodity upon which he had lavished so much money and time is gone forever, to be replaced by an independent, competing unit of human capital.

Agamben, Schmitt, Strauss, and Benjamin

This may also what Agamben thinks, but to me it's all wrong. If the lawless state of exception has become the basis of modern state power, it would seem that the corrective would be a return to lawfulness. Butler is apparently talking about something like Benjamin’s “pure violence”, outside the law, to counter the lawlessness of the state of exception, but for a variety of reasons I think that that proposal is ludicrous. As I’ve said elsewhere, the German Left between the two World Wars has to be regarded as the most unsuccessful political movement of all time, and seems unlikely to provide us with a usable model for our own practice. Furthermore, the violent potentials in the world of today seem almost all to be from the right, and it seems ill-advised to dream of “pure violence”.

What was Wittgenstein?

Why was Wittgenstein blocked? My own feeling is that he was still stuck in the universality trap and was not able to move to the indexical perspective. Second, he attached himself to the mystical notion of silence, without having involved himself in actual mystical practice. (If he had done so, he would have found that the mysticism of silence are supported by extensive bodies of writing; “silence” is a teaching device, not a dogma or absolute rule). And finally, the peculiar form of existential ethics he was born to, a rigorist sort of Germanic Christianity, was not, in my opinion, well-suited to philosophical development.

Schmitt and Strauss: An Unfair Appraisal

Nonetheless, I find the Leo Strauss of the Schmitt/Strauss dialogue completely repellent. It does not seem to me that Germany in 1932 was the right time or place to engage in a deep and thoroughgoing critique of liberalism. (Liberalism here is broadly defined in the European style, according to which Milton Friedman is more liberal than a  liberal Democrat is).

The Unreality of Time

From a physicist's point of view we ourselves are unreal -- along with Time and everything we know. Nothing confined to the world of entropy can be real, and even entropy itself is a superficial epiphenomenon from the early Big Bang. All of us are illusory transients and will ultimately disappear in the Gotterdämmerung of heat death. And when we are gone, Reality will not even miss us.

Why Relativism?

I think that a real philosophical discussion of ethics would understand ethics in its political and historical context, with particular attention to the limitations of the scope of ethics that have been seen over the last several centuries, and as a result would find relativism as an unsurprising historical reality rather than as a starting point for sophisticated philosophical argumentation. A more meaningful ethical discourse would use real cases instead of fictional ones as heuristic examples, which would require taking the ethical issues seriously and actually trying to resolve them. It would also recognize that ethics, rather than simply being a body of truth-functional ethical statements to agree to, has to be integrated into the ethical agent’s identity by a self-transformation in order to be real.

Analysis and Synthesis / Part and Whole / Specialist and Generalist / Labor and Management / Deliberation and Decision

Philosophy’s principled decision to limit itself to specialized subjects and to refuse to try to understand the whole confines philosophy to the subordinate role and minimizes the possibility that philosophy might actually make a difference. If generalism is unphilosophical, then the boss will be unphilosophical. And in the world we live in, that boss will be someone like Pat Robertson or George W. Bush. If you leave a vacuum, someone will fill it.

Specialization and Generalism (Long Version)

The specialized-expert model of scholarship, at its best, can lead to impressive discoveries, but it has its blind spots. At worst, when institutionalized it can force scholars into narrow and unproductive areas of study, and beyond that, it often leads to the thoughtless dismissal of work which is generalist or eclectic or both. The received arguments justifying the sole dominance of specialized-expert work are flawed. In my rambling way I’m going to point out some of these flaws below.

Ressentiment and Schooling: A New Theory of Western Civilization

Sexual repression and hatred of the body are often alleged to be at the root of Western alienation. An examination of a number of key figures (Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and St. Augustine, with glances at Sartre, Pascal and Thoreau) shows that behind the sexual repression and ressentiment often lie years of intensive classical education forced upon these authors by ambitious parents -- often mothers, with the fathers absent or ineffectual). The supposed sexual repression is simply the result of the same social-climbing imperatives, which forbid both illicit relationships and marriages into inappropriate families.

While I do not really believe that my theory actually explains Western civilization, I think that it is better than the theories that it parodies, and in fact does describe an important dynamic in Western life.

A Naive Reading of Descartes

The basic "Cartesian" philosophical principles of mind-body dualism, idealism, and the ontological proof of the existence of God are all there in the Discourse on Method, but in such a sketchy form that they don't seem like philosophy at all. The metaphysical, philosophical part is limited to the six pages of Part Four, and to me seems by far the weakest and least interesting part of the book. What's really interesting is the description of a practical analytic, atomistic scientific method -- including a job description for research assistants, an early version of peer review, and a model for scientific training that looks a lot like "progressive education".  A naive reading of Descartes' text finds a pragmatist. 

Material Implication

However, my conclusion is, first, that people who use ordinary-language implication in their work will gain nothing whatever from its formalization as material implication, which is directed toward entirely different purposes. And second, that people inventing examples of implication for textbooks in formal logic should simply avoid real-world examples. After all, some crows are white. In truth, in the ordinary-language real world, there's very little outside the most basic physical science rigorous enough to profit from rigorous formulation as implication.

Cratylus

Contrary to Plato's wish, the fateful absoluteness of social actions and decisions is not grounded on reasons as absolute as the decisions, but on historical customs and conventions. As a result, we cannot know the answers to ("normative") social questions the way we know questions of ahistorical scientific fact. And Cratylus can be seen as an ancestor, not only of culture critics such as Nietzsche (who had his own history of the word "virtue") or more recently Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (writing about the history of word "representation" in all its contexts), but also of the legal scholars who rule our lives an the basis of conventional precedents tracing back to the Norman Conquest.

Parmenides in Szechuan

In Chungking, the temporary Nationalist Chinese capital during WWII, Hao Wang (eventually to become Kurt Godel's literary executor, studied mathematical logic  while Ch'en K'ang was  translating and commenting on Plato's Parmenides. Oddly enough, Ch'en does not mention two closely  parallel passages between Chuang Tzu (Watson tr., p. 141) and Plato (Parmenides #130c) on the Forms (or Tao) of hair, mud, dirt, piss, and shit.

I throw in quite a number of interesting Chinese / Western parallels and antitheses.

Other pieces (most recent first)

Why is there Economics Rather than Nothing?

The internal criticisms of economics fall roughly into two categories: bad mathematics (notably the laws of general equilibrium, which are claimed to be stable but are not), and empirical falsehood. Besides general equilibrium, the economic concepts which Keen says are erroneous include “the representative agent”, the downward-sloping demand curve, the upward-sloping supply curve, diminishing marginal productivity, the use of risk (as in gambling) as a proxy for uncertainty (what Rumsfeld calls the “unknown unknowns”), Say’s Law and its various revisions (which only work in a static economy with no accumulators of wealth, no growth, and no capitalists), and the neoclassical adaptations of Keynes.

McCumber's Critique of Analytic Philosophy

“Philosophy, as a second-order discipline, was to reflect the nature and
conditions of that enterprise, whose validity…. was simply assumed. The
confinement of philosophy to such second-order inquiry was also carried through
in ethics. Philosophers of the day were not to take ethical stands or give moral
advice but simply to reflect on the meaning of ethical terms….”

Could Friedrich Nietzsche have married Jane Austen?

But the big question is this: if Nietzsche had been an Austen character, could he have married one of Austen's Dashwood sisters? I think that the answer is “maybe -- but probably not.” In his favor is Jane Austen’s own bias toward reserved, dignified suitors. When she concocted improbably happy endings for her books, Austen made sure that the “nice guy” got the girl -- whereas she forced the dashing, impulsive seducer to slink offstage in disgrace. Now, according to the testimony in Gilman’s book, Nietzsche was tolerably like the characters Austen favored, and during his younger days he probably even had the ardent sincerity Marianne (the “sensibility” sister) demanded. At the same time, however, both sisters expected what we would call an upper class income (1000 to 2000 pounds), and Nietzsche probably would have been out of luck for that reason.

Adorno Redux

My friend Paul Dunne of the Shamrockshire Review of Books , responding to my piece here, does as much as anyone could to persuade me that Adorno was OK.

Dunne primarily defends Adorno's cultural elitism, pessimism, disdain for popular culture, and disengagement from active politics. I am no longer in a position to criticize Adorno on these specific counts, or even to disagree with him about most of them. However, I am still uneasy with all forms of Marxo-Freudian theoreticism, and I still think  that too much of Adorno's work amounted to an effort to maintain the prewar folkways of the German leftist high bourgeoisie.

As I've said many times, whatever you think about the pre-WWII German left, you have to wonder whether it wasn't the most unsuccessful political movement of all time, and for this reason I am not really receptive to wisdom coming from that quarter. And while it's true that Adorno was an innovative thinker and did not merely try to continue on as before, I think that his response to the disaster was a bit lacking in self-criticism.

I suppose that I should give Adorno a second shot, perhaps reading one of the less-theoretical collections. (As for the question of contingency in history, that's a big question to deal with later. It's not my belief, however, that history is completely random, but only that it includes some space for deliberate agency -- a question about which most Marxists seem terribly incoherent.)

Baggini on Pirsig

What Pirsig seems to have produced is a philosophy of qualities without substances. This seems tolerably close to the Buddhist or the Taoist view, though I’m not in a position to speak with any confidence.

Brian Leiter and David Brooks

Supposing that the judges, lawyers, and jurors I mentioned above were to go to contemporary philosophy for help in doing their jobs, they would almost certainly end up more confused than they had been when they started, and they might well end up incapable of doing their jobs at all. In the present state of the game, philosophical ethics may well do more harm than good.

Theory and Me, Part I

“Liberating potential” is supposedly crucial to theory, but in fact theory, like any other methodology in the methodologized university, has been imposed on a generation of scholars from above by standard bureaucratic processes -- chiefly the establishment of objective standards and procedures for the control of hiring, firing, and promotion.  It would be interesting to see Connery apply the tools he has used to analyze text formation within the Chinese bureaucratized elite to the rules for text formation in the bureaucratized academic world of today.

Philosophers and Nuclear War (around 1950)

While looking for other things entirely, during the last few days I've run across some citations from the years 1947-1952 which put philosophy in a rather odd light. The topic is nuclear warfare, and the authors are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and the process philosopher and theologian Charles Hartshorne.

Bertrand Russell's "Power: A New Social Analysis"

When I started reading Power, I expected to whip through it, make some comments on the two Russells, and be done with it. A quick scan shows it to be the work of a philosophe, comparable to the writings of Macauley or Gibbon. Ungrounded generalizations, snap judgements, and moralisms stud the pages. The book apparently was constructed entirely with the use of Reason, Common Sense, common knowledge, and secondary sources, with no experimentation, research, or data collection to speak of. So I had a snappy, snarky dismissal all ready to go.

However, I've found that Russell's theories mesh with things that I've recently concluded for myself.

"Le Real" is a kind of Sturgeon

So we could paraphrase Kant, “A hundred real reals do not contain a centavo more than a hundred possible reals.” Seemingly, the Real is the cash value -- the kingly, the important, the inherited realm, landed property, and the gold and silver coins. Philosophical realism is the philosophy for which Ideas or Forms are important because they are royal and real because they are thinglike – which seems to destroy the purpose of the Ideas, which supposedly gain their power via their distinction from mere physical objects. And in Spain and Portugal, royalty remains "real" to this day, whereas in France since 1789, even the word real itself has been banished from the language. (What does Lacan have to say about all this? “The Real is impossible.” Thanks a lot, Jacques!)

Specialization and Generalism (Easy Version)

It seems reasonable that generalist thinking should be fostered in the university, and the departments where generalism would seem most appropriate are history, literature, and philosophy. But nowadays these departments, too, have been methodologized, so an eclectic generalist like me really has nowhere to go. The university has apparently abandoned generalist thought. This amounts to the abandonment of public philosophy to street preachers, demagogues, and hack journalists. Every department nowadays wants to be an expert discipline with specialist methodologies and paradigms, and the ones that think of themselves as more successful in this regard sneer at the others (“butterfly collecting and social work”.) 

Michel Meyer II: From Logic to Rhetoric

To Meyer, meaning is not a relationship between words and things, but emerges in dialogue. Any statement or proposition is an answer to a question, and is dependent on what is in question, which is often implicit. ("Argumentation is the study of the relation between the explicit and the implicit", p. 91). If a proposition adequately answers  the question, as the hearer understands the question, then it is an answer. Otherwise, new questions are raised, often by making explicit  something which had been implicit. ("The meaning of an answer is its link to a specific question" -- p. 127.  "An answer is only so in respect to another person" -- p. 103. "Meaning is precisely the medium through which an answer is taken over by someone other than the one who proposed it". (p. 129).....

Tao is not a different thing than everything else we know, or another thing besides all the things we already know, or even the collection of everything that there ever is, was, or will be, but simply everything that is or is not, or has been or will be, or not,  before we have asked any questions about it.

Michel Meyer and Practical Philosophy

Meyer’s key principle is this: every statement is the answer to a question. The meaning of a statement can be known only by knowing what question it answers. A proposition standing alone is “apodictic” if the question it answers is repressed, and “problemetological” if the answer is understood as pointing to the question. Logic and ontology are apodictic; propositions are understood without regard to their context or their problematology, and science, for example, is understood as a body of truths rather than as a process of investigation, discovery, and questioning. Analytic philosophy is fanatically apodictic, and defines itself as much as anything by the way that it regards most past philosophical problems as“out of question”.

Liberal-Hatred

"One who calls himself a liberal is nowadays diversely called by others a traitor, coward, parlor-pink, eclectic, jelly-fish, a selfish or muddy thinker who wants both to have his cake and eat it, rationalist, skeptic, conservative, radical…. But there is unanimity of opinion on one thing, namely, that liberalism is essentially negative, paralytic, and disintegrative. It’s boasted open-mindedness is nothing more than axiological anemia.” Leslie Page, “Liberalism, Dogmatism and Negativism”, Journal of Social Philosophy, 5 (1940), p. 346.

Kenneth Burke made up quotations too!

Five of my favorite quotations, three of which are unattested and probably apocryphal, and one of which isn't a quotation at all, but just a rough paraphrase. But that's OK! Because the highly-esteemed Kenneth Burke used fake quotes too, and by my great good luck his fake quotes talk about approximately the same thing that mine do!

What Happened to Philosophy?: Rorty's "Consequences of Pragmatism"

A couple decades ago Richard Rorty, along with several others, proposed a new direction for American philosophy. Nothing came of this, and the analytic philosophy of the Anglosphere now plays exactly the same role as the scholastic philosophy pilloried by Rabelais, Montaigne, More, erasmus, and every other writer of that period whom anyone reads any more. Post-modernism is almost as bad, and the problem is the same in both cases: professionalization, methodologizations, and paradigm-enforcement. It could have been nice.

"How History Made the Mind": David Martel Johnson

I'd like to like Johnson's book, but his history is thin and his theory of the mind is tendentious and idealized, based mostly on what he and other psychologists and philosophers of mind try to make themselves into. Johnson is, relatively speaking, one of the good guys, but the possibility that the approach he describes will ever be able to describe fully-functional human beings seems very slight.

Freud and Me

Did incontinent early man have the habit of putting out forest fires by pissing on them? Did early woman invent weaving in the process of trying to make herself little penises out of her pubic hair? My conclusion is that Sigmund Freud needed either a reality sense or an editor.
 

Pre-Idiocentrism:

The Heap

However, it's absolutism which (paradoxically) leads to the slippery slope. With relative concepts you have known ends, and argue about the middle. With absolute concepts you have one end which is perfect and basically imaginary; everything else is equally imperfect, and first trimester abortion is the same as murder. With two ends given, you can argue about the middle without making either end disappear entirely (i.e., without either making everyone tall, or everyone short). To my mind, Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu in Chinese philosophy had solutions to this problem superior to Plato's.

Simples (unfinished draft)

The pure formal experience described by the three philosophers resembles the dimensionless points of geometry (or Newton's real infinitesimal) in that it is imaginary. It doesn't seem, though, that anything as powerful as geometry rose from the fiction of an atom of consciousness; my understanding is that Artificial Intelligence developed from quite different, more pragmatic origins (mostly attempts to model animal behavior).

Why I Never Studied Critical Theory

The irony and darkness of history comes only in small part from the abstruse self-misunderstandings uncovered by critical theorists.  They come mostly from the fact that individuals and groups are always working toward different ends and thus often impede and sabotage one another, as well as from the fact that, by definition, most ventures fail.  

Relativism as an Institution

"Truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on the other" (Pascal).

Relativism is to a large degree institutional and legal in origin. The international system, federalism, limited government, secular government, and individual rights (as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights) all have a relativizing effect. What's legal in one place is illegal in another -- not just from nation to nation, but from state to state, city to city, and even from county to county. (In some states of the US each county has its own liquor laws.) Likewise, in a secular state guaranteeing individual rights, you are able to do whatever you want to, within the law, even if everyone in your community hates what you're doing. The tendency in the West over the last several centuries has been to relax the bonds of absolute values, especially religious and traditional values, and to replace them with more limited and more explicit legal codes, thus creating large zones of individual freedom which are differently defined from one political unit to another. (Mostly superseded by "Why Relativism?").

Readings from others:

Miscellaneous readings

Readings on History and Time

Readings from Prigogine

Readings from Perelman ("Argumentation and Time"

Readings on the Self

Readings on Method

Bibliography of Philosophy, Social Science, General Science, Etc.

Bibliography of Practical Philosophy

All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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