Graham has a nice post up on how to respond to uncivil comments and the wisdom (or lack thereof) of doing so. I confess that I have a real problem here. Not only do I feel compelled to respond to every comment that’s posted on my blog, but I often allow my frustration to get the best of me and behave in a less than civil way. I have the greatest admiration for blogs like K-punks‘ or Spurious‘ where comments have been closed all together, or Shaviro’s tendency to very seldom respond to comments. I wish I was more like this, yet I seem to have a compulsive need to respond that often leaves me feeling regretful later. Often discussions are simply not worth getting into, not because the person isn’t making an interesting point but because either positions are so far apart that it’s very difficult for the discussion to proceed at all (Plato’s old point about first defining terms), or because there’s so much investment in the respective positions that things very quickly become ugly and acrimonious, making all involved look bad. Here there’s wisdom to be gained from Latour and his account of trials of strength where ideas and entities are concerned. According to Latour an entity establishes its reality through a trial of strength, through which it is able to enlist other entities for its ends. In the world of theory this would be manifest, in part, in enlisting others behind one’s thought as either advocates or sympathizers.
Debate is one way in which such trials take place, but is certainly not the only way. If we look at the history of philosophy and science we will see that in many instances the triumph of a philosophy (broadly construed) occurs not so much through the refutation of a position so much as through the enlistment of others that gradually leads the prior philosophical positions to all but pass out of existence. Thus, for example, the Enlightenment thinkers did not so much refute the Scholastics, but rather through a lot of [often unfair] rhetoric, enlistment, institutional maneuvering, etc., enlisted the Scholastics out of existence. Any reader of Medieval philosophy knows that there are all sorts of precious gems to be found in these forms of thought and that characterizations of Scholastic thought by figures like Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, etc., are often on the order of Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Beginning from the position that the persistence of an entity in time requires the ongoing enlistment of other entities as a means of sustaining or perpetuating itself (e.g., my body needs food, atoms constantly exchange electrons, etc), the success of the Enlightenment thinkers (and it was not a complete success), consisted in setting up roadblocks in the ability of Scholasticism to re-produce itself across time through acts of communication. This occurred in part through acts of seduction (creating new philosophies that were politically and intellectually attractive to new generations), strategic use of the printing press, the formation of networks outside of the Scholastic dominated universities, and rhetorical mockery of Scholastic thought that attached it to a number of the more egregious aspects of recent European history. Hume, for example, mocks Scholastic thought suggesting that it is simply an elaborate defense of superstition (i.e., witch burnings, religious wars, brutal oppression of uneducated classes, etc) garbed in sophisticated language. Scholasticism, taking itself to be establish, institutionally protected by the universities, the aristocracies, and the Church, did not see as necessary to defend itself against these attacks (yes I’m exaggerating) and was content to continue its debates within the walls of the academy. As a result, it sealed its own fate by failing to recognize that it is not simply the content of ideas that count, but also their transmission and proliferation. In this regard it’s worthwhile to think of alternative history’s of philosophy so as to underline the inherent contingency of ideas and positions. How, for example, would philosophy be different today had Hume died before writing the Treatise and the Enquiry. There would be no Kant and therefore no subsequent German Idealism. Yet this would entail a fundamental difference in the issues dominating thought today and surrounding social constructivism and linguistic idealism. The absence of Hume would mean that the critiques of induction from an epistemic standpoint would not have arisen and therefore would have headed off subsequent idealist trajectories of thought. Such experiments can open thought to envisioning other possibilities and ways of talking about the world.
read on!
All of this sheds a different light on the dominance of teaching from the standpoint of the history of philosophy in Continental philosophy departments. When viewed through this lens, asserting the primacy of the history of philosophy becomes not so much a practical issue of the impossibility of doing philosophy unless one is well acquainted with the history of philosophy, so much as it is a matter of a certain strategy in trials of strength, intent on preserving philosophy in a particular form and defending against the emergence of new forms. I am definitely not making the claim that the history of philosophy shouldn’t be taught or that our graduate students shouldn’t have a strong grounding in the history of philosophy. Nor am I making the absurd claim that every thinker does not first find him or herself thrown into a world populated by the history of prior thought that functions as a material cause for their own philosophical work. Rather, what I take umbrage with is the tendency of Continental programs to require dissertation work on another thinker. What I would like to see is something as cool as Continental thought with the authorial voice and commitment that you find in problem-oriented Anglo-American philosophy.
I suspect that some of the reason we don’t find this in Continental thought has to do with the linguistic turn. Insofar as the linguistic turn led to the conclusion that we can’t talk directly about the world but are rather always haunted by language and history, the recourse becomes one of writing about what another philosopher said about the nature of the world so as to simultaneously 1) be able to talk about the nature of the world, while 2) claiming that one is merely talking about texts. Since texts, like Humean impressions or the Cartesian cogito are treated as what we are directly related to, it follows that any talk of the world must be mediated by texts. We thus get a strange triangulation where the philosopher wishes to say something about the world, recognizes that the linguistic turn prevents this, so we must talk through a naive philosopher’s text to speak about the world. The philosopher using this strategy simultaneously believes, perhaps, what he is saying about the world through, say, Leibniz, while being able to plead a critical stance by virtue of merely talking about texts and not, therefore, naively thinking that one can directly speak about the world. All of this reminds me of Zizek’s joke about Judith Butler. Judith Butler, according to Zizek, says we can’t directly reference a coffee cup, but must rather say that “within the framework of Western thought, from a white male phallocratic perspective, within this particular structure of power dominated by the panopticon, under this particular language game, ‘this’ is a coffee cup.” For Zizek the joke here is that all of this is intended when we say ‘this is a coffee cup’. In other words, what is added to our discussion of the world when we qualify it with the citation “Leibniz argued…”?
I don’t know that I can go all the way with Latour’s notion of trials of strength (Graham has a terrific post on it here), but I do think he reveals something important in how philosophical movements develop. Moreover, I think Latour makes a good case for why engagements should be entered strategically and why addressing all criticisms might not necessarily be productive or valuable.
In the context of all this debate, somehow my appearance has become a topic of discussion. Basically I look like I’m twelve years old. Those interested can see me here.
February 6, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Interesting post, and glad to have a face to put with a name finally.
As for Dejan, no worries. I’ve since been given the complete rundown on his psychological problems, ongoing career failures, and tendency to stalk female bloggers on the internet. If I had known these things I would have opted for strategy #1.
February 6, 2009 at 11:31 pm
This is great stuff. I think once again you’ve nailed the institutional / agonistic ‘externalities’ of pure thought; the scholastics vs. Enlightenment example is … enlightening!
I’m not sure which is the chicken and which the egg, but I do see intellectual histories boiling down this way, and in my own conversations I tend to see value in extending my ability to code-shift / play various language games. It’s hard to get a particular thing said this way, you’re quite right, but you’re talking about recruitment and that takes a certain rhetorical flexibility.
I also see your point about Continental philosophy. I’m wondering how we would know it was Continental philosophy if not by reference to particular Continental philosophers. Back to institutional externalities, it’s also worth remembering that in the Continental system of higher education the first dissertation is a work of apprenticeship; only the second is a masterwork.
February 7, 2009 at 12:15 am
Thanks Carl,
I think you’re right about the function of dissertations vis a vis apprenticeship. However, at least as I reflect on my graduate education, I can’t say I was taught much in the way of how to make an argument, pose a problem, develop concepts, etc. Rather, the focus of my education was squarely on the interpretation of texts and drawing relationships between texts. Now, to be sure, interpreting a text is a form of making an argument, requires posing problems of a particular sort, and requires the evaluation of other interpretations (other arguments). However, it seems to me that one thing deeply lacking was any sort of emphasis on posing a question that wasn’t a question about texts but about something in the world. I do think there’s something of an illusion here, though. In Anglo-American thought graduate students are not so much taught to pose questions or formulate questions as they are introduced to a body of pre-existent problems and questions akin to the sort of apprenticeship undergone by scientists as practitioners of “normal science”. They then work away at these problems. Nonetheless, the focus is on the resolution of problems rather than providing a new spin on a text.
For me the issue is not with whether or not work references other works and is in dialogue with particular philosophers so much as it is a matter with whether or not work is about those thinkers. I would hardly know how to think in a way that wasn’t in dialogue with Plato, the Stoics and atomists, the rationalists, the empiricists, German idealism, Marx, Deleuze, Husserl, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, etc. These other thinkers are always in the back of my mind and I constantly draw materials from them. However, what I’m trying to think is not about these thinkers or an exposition of those thinkers. I suspect that Continental philosophy would be recognizable as Continental philosophy by virtue of having a certain pedigree of references and dealing with a certain set of themes common to that tradition and informed by that tradition. The difference would be that it wouldn’t be commentary on these other thinkers.
February 7, 2009 at 12:44 am
I think these externalities also situate Heidegger’s call for a deconstruction of the history of all prior philosophy in a very different light. Far from refuting or answering the problems of the rationalists, the German idealists, etc., Heidegger instead sidesteps these discussions altogether through a return to the origins of philosophy and the archeology of missed alternatives. The hermeneutic approach then becomes a sort of rhetorical strategy that allows an entire range of problems and questions to simply be dismissed on the grounds that we need to return to the primordial origins of western thought and think beyond them.
February 7, 2009 at 11:36 am
Judith Butrler’s talk on her new book ‘The Frames of War’ on 4 Feb 2009 at Birkbeck College London can be listened to at:
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/archive/2009/02/harc-special-event-judith-butler-frames-of-war-the-politics-of-ungrievable-life/
February 7, 2009 at 10:23 pm
that characterizations of Scholastic thought by figures like Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, etc., are often on the order of Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
Perhaps. The contrary impulse– the continentalist’s “ecumenicalism,” if you will–nauseates to a higher degree. Descartes and Hobbes do not sit at the same table, whether in terms of metaphysics or politics (Nor do, say, Hegel and Lacanistas).
One problem may be that college-boys have for a few centuries now been indoctrinated with the Cartesian starting-point. Mugwumps could do worse than re-peruse Hobbes’ neglected points contra-Cogito (Hume doesn’t defeat Hobbesian naturalism, really [“no ideas with antecedent impressions”]–develops it, and points out a few uh problematics).
February 8, 2009 at 7:58 am
Another thought to add to the debate… Whatever replaces the continental tradition will always have more of a “great books” feel than whatever replaces the analytic tradition.
That is to say, when I call for people to do original speculation rather than merely commenting on texts, I am not calling for piecemeal “arguments” over professional micro-problems.
One of the virtues of the continental approach is its recognition that the value of a philosophy runs much deeper than any particular successes or failures of its surface argumentation. Sure one can find unsound arguments in Plato, Leibniz, or Hegel, but there’s a reason that they will be read centuries after Davidson and Quine are forgotten, and analytic philosophers generally show little sense for that reason. You can make all the “knockdown arguments” you want and still be a dry, narrow-minded technician devoid of vision.
But this does not absolve present-day continental philosophy of its own cardinal sin: the belief that commenting on the views of Heidegger is an inherently philosophical act. It’s not. Also, there is a tendency among continentals to avoid any knowledge of contemporary science, which is a very bad move. They don’t read much general history or geography, either, and even their tastes in literature tend to be restricted to whatever Heidegger or Derrida happened to like.