This is a response to Ogged's post in response to my Bad Writing post. So I'm just going to launch right into it. But let me first say: Ogged is a jolly fellow and I like him a lot. Just thought I should get that out there in front.
Two issues raised are quite distinct. Issue one: can a case be made out for the goodness of necessarily 'difficult' or 'unclear' writing? Such writing is not automatically to be consigned to the outer darkness of sheer 'badness'? I think the answer is yes; but I find an adequate argument so obvious that I guess I still mostly don't see what the fuss is about. I don't think we need to go exhuming Heidegger to settle this, for example. You don't need to be a Heideggerian to see that sometimes difficulty is unavoidable and unclarity a sort of necessity.
Brian Weatherson says he doesn't see why difficulty and unclarity should ever be necessary, but I think that, concerning a lot of cases, he would just say 'oh, right, right, didn't see what you had in mind.' Cases like Kant saying, at the beginning of whichever big book it was: 'I'm sorry I'm not a better writer.' Or words to that effect. We still read him, even if we believe that the writing is unavoidably bad, given his native lack of talent for clearing it up. (See my Philosophical Abecedarium.) Another sort of case: often somebody starts a debate, and if you look back at whatever piece or idea gets the ball rolling - that piece itself really is not clear, in light of developments. Only later contributors really appreciate the shape of what was to come. We accept that this is going to happen. There is a sense in which the people who come up with new stuff are almost never going to be in a position to really see what it is they are doing. Quite pardonable when, say, Frege turns out not to be the best guide to the long-term significance of some aspect of Fregeanism. Ergo, necessarily difficult and unclear, but it's OK. (Nobody is clearer than Frege, so if he falls down, it must be OK.) I'm sure Weatherson will just say: 'is that all they were talking about? Who would deny it?' Exactly. McCumber does a bit of pretending someone might deny it, seems to me.
It gets a bit tougher when we turn to Nietzsche - or Plato - and ask: is all this irony, indirection, poetry, stagy presentation, vatic brevity, so forth, possibly up to and including self-contradiction, quite in order? Well, maybe here it does get dicey. Maybe Weatherson will get off the bus here and say he thinks it may be pleasant, or fun, or attractive, if you like that sort of thing; but it isn't strictly necessary. I sort of go back and forth on this one. But I guess I think six days out of seven that the results of stripping off this stuff would be philosophically - not just poetically - less worthy. My own favorite philosophers are, after all: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Plato. Probably in that order. I obviously have a thing for making things difficult.
These are, to be specific, cases in which people set out to be difficult and unclear, for some rather difficult to specify and no doubt individually varied reasons. (I like Russell's response to some rather compressed things Wittgenstein had to say in this line. "Well, then you'd better get yourselve a slave to state the arguments." Good come-back, Bertie. But I'm still more inclined to indenture myself to Ludwig.)
Perhaps the first thing to be said is that, in a sense, this is just Plato's old argument with the poets all over again. One way or another, the argument for difficult philosophy will be the argument for irreducibly poetic philosophy. Plato himself is careful to write out the anti-Platonic heresy in advance by being poetic himself. (Never forgets to hedge his bets, that man.) It is tempting to suggest that philosophers who say you should not write intentionally difficult, unclear stuff are taking Plato's hard-line. Ergo, they are enemies of poetry. Nasty philistines, they must be. But this is not really right. If you say to an Anglo-American philosopher, 'I think that Shakespeare is a lot more deep and meaningful than any philosophy I've read - Kant or Plato', I think it is a rare philosopher who will fire back: 'that's because you're not as smart and good as I am.' Most philosophers will regard this as an eminently sensible attitude, and many will strongly share it, but they just personally don't know of any good, honest ways to meld or hybridize philosophy and poetry. I feel this myself. I personally like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard - and Wittgenstein and Plato - because I feel that they managed, in extraordinary ways, to combine literary art with philosophical argument effectively. Mostly the literary arts these four deploy are close to the skills that I suppose novelists (and dramatists) mostly display. These four philosophers are shrewd psychologists, and they understand how being a shrewd observer of various human - especially philosophical - personality types can feed back into philosophical argument in potent ways. I think the 'poetic' philosophers who appeal to me least - maybe Hegel and Heidegger - do so because I feel that they are trying to hybridize standard arguments with some other literary model in unsuccessful fashion. Two things are mixing, and the results are less than the sum of the parts. (I realize that I just opened a giant can of worms by calling Hegel and Heidegger 'poetic' without explanation. Well, sorry. This is just a blog post, man.)
Too much for me today. But I have just finished a draft of a long manuscript in which I worry about rather related things at some length. Charges of bad writing, for example. The MS is a 3 chapter extension of my philosophical dialogue, "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory for Life". I've blogged it before, but won't link because the online version is now quite out of date. The new version is about 150 pages, and I'm not going to post it just right now (because I've submitted it for publication, sort of, and I don't know what will become of it. I also hope it will be a big part of a book some day. I do think I owe editors and book publishers a little bit of pre-publication discretion, though I'm not sure about that. If it goes through yet more major iterations, I'll post the penultimate version, whatever it proves to be.) But interested persons - I don't need to know you, you just need to be interested enough to bother to ask - can email me and get a link to the thing to download it. Circulating stuff like that is definitely OK. I do welcome intelligent commentary/criticism.
Right. That's my plug, then. Now, on to the second issue raised by Ogged's post. He concludes:
Given that Heidegger is so little studied, most graduate students in philosophy don’t even have the opportunity to encounter him and decide for themselves whether the neglect of his work is justified (and those that do encounter his work often receive cursory and unsympathetic instruction). Given the lack of meaningful engagement, the reasons for neglect aren’t re-affirmed by each generation, they’re simply passed down; you don’t have to believe in logical positivism to inherit its legacy.
I am sure Ogged has in mind Carnap's notorious anti-Heidegger slap: 'nothing nothing's itself' is nonsense that needs diagnosis as pathology. It isn't philosophy. (Was it Carnap? I think it was.) Ogged's thesis seems to be that Heidegger got written off back when Carnap ruled the roost, and no one has gone back to check whether a mistake was made. A part of Ogged's thesis may be that philosophers, like myself, who do not consider ourselves logical positivists, are actually fellow-travellers of an unconscious sort. We have picked up habits of mind that are a tad narrow, due to our heritage. And, since we don't read Heidegger and other such philosophers to broaden our horizons, we don't even notice they are narrow.
Maybe that's not what Ogged is saying. I'm not completely sure how far he wants to push the point. His post title is 'John Holbo is Positive(ist)', which could just be a joke, or could actually hint at an alleged grain of truth.
Let me just say what I think is the case, regardless of what Ogged is saying.
Logical positivism is an intellectual movement that was tremendously dominant for a relatively brief period of time and then, to a degree that is rather astonishing, melted away. By which I mean: it did not even leave all that much behind. It's like the Spartans. Hugely powerful, conquered the center of philosophy - Athens - but now we don't have any lasting monuments.
Well, maybe that's a bad analogy. Logical positivism is like behaviorism in psychology. Let's try this instead. If you go up to an average professional academic psychologist today and say, 'scratch you, and there's a behaviorist underneath' you DON'T hear back 'actually, I would not exhibit any behaviorist-type behaviors if subjected to that particular stimulus, so, no.' You would just get a rather puzzled look. Psychology has left behaviorism behind so decisively that it's really only studied as a curiosity. I'm sure every intro lecture has a segment on behaviorism, but only because it's so illustratively extreme: 'you can learn a lot about the subject of psychology by thinking about how and why behaviorism was attractive, but terribly wrong.' Psychology is not afflicted with a legacy of behaviorism that just won't go away. Of course, psychologists - being scientists, or at least wanting to be - want verifiable results. They will ask whether you can provide empirical data showing things you allege about the human mind are true. But if you said, 'Aha! You're slipping back into it! Behaviorism!', you would just be mistaken. Really what we have is a case of a determination to be empiricists. This determination was hideously distorted into behaviorism. And now (it is to be hoped) the discipline has returned to more sane expressions of this empiricist spirit. (If I'm wrong, and psychologists are all still closet behaviorists, I'm sure someone will write and tell me.)
I could provide similar examples from other disciplines. If you go up to an English graduate student and say, 'It's all about Northrop Frye, isn't it? You pretend to be interested in other things now, but you've not quite moved on, have you? You can't.' This would be a very grave misreading of the situation. Obviously, the thing to say about Frye is: it's amazing; as late as 1960 you simply couldn't ignore the man in good conscience. And now you are eccentric if you've read him. He's passed without trace.
Logical Positivism is almost in this category: gone away and not even ghosts left haunting us. And by 'no ghosts' I mean: it's not the case that the dream has died but everyone is still vaguely beguiled by it, and thereby incapacitated from moving on with scarcely a backwards glance. Ogged and his commenters note how few courses there are on Heidegger at top departments. It would shock me if there were a single course being taught on logical positivism at ANY top 50 department. (I could be wrong, but it would be a fluke. I don't mean a survey course with a paper by Carnap, or a history of 20th Century philosophy. I mean: a course devoted to serious study of logical positivism.) There is a sense in which logical positivism is perhaps a bit neglected. Carnap wrote some interesting stuff, after all. And it isn't exactly an accident that Wittgenstein's Tractatus was the logical positivist Bible. And the Tractatus is pretty great. Wrong, but great.
Yes, I know. Wittgenstein isn't exactly a positivist. I wrote my dissertation in part about how the Tractatus is really a purified version of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation. Believe me, I know. See previous post about post-its. But one thing you see when you finally go all the way down the tractarian-Schopenhauerian rabbit hole, in this writer's humble but highly-informed opinion, is that - in a weird sort of way - the positivists were not dummies when it came to a lot of this stuff. They just ignored it's spirit. And I would be lying if I told you Ludwig did not go out of his way to mislead them with difficult, unclear writing.
I have a distinct soft-spot for the positivists, all in all. But I regard the school as completely extinct and presently uninfluential.
Yes, Quine responded to positivism. And we are still responding to Quine. But Quine is sort of a behaviorist, too. The bits of Quine that still interest people today are the bits that can be unhinged from unhinged thoughts about behaviorism and positivism being true.
And don't confuse the fact that I just said the positivists are not dummies, exactly, with some admission that they are still exerting influence. I don't think they are.
Like psychologists returning to saner forms of empiricism, philosophers after logical positivism returned to saner forms of rationalism and conceptual analysis and logicism and empiricism. (It's not as though these philosophical streams don't go back to Plato, you know. They didn't burst out of Vienna in the 1920's.) So it may seem plausible to say: Heidegger isn't much studied because the positivists libeled him, and it stuck. But I think that's just wrong. The reason Heidegger isn't studied today is the same reason Kant and Hume would probably have found the man a bit baffling. Heidegger is, as it were, post-Enlightenment and post-counter-Enlightenment. And now I just dug myself a deeper hole full of open cans of worms, because I have to explain that claim I just made. Well, I'm not going to. It would take too long and I probably couldn't do it. And I may have just made the problem for Heidegger-haters worse, because it may seem I'm implying that the problem with contemporary philosophy is not that they trust Carnap implicitly about Heidegger. The trouble is that they are clueless about a whole pile of important intellectual and cultural upheavals after Kant. Well, some Anglo-American philosophers are unaccountably hostile to Nietzsche, I must confess. This has always seemed very unfortunate to me. But I just don't get the whole Heidegger thing myself. I wrote my dissertation under two men who both study Heidegger - Hubert Dreyfus and Hans Sluga. It's not like I haven't gotten dribs and drabs of the stuff along the way. I've read it. I just find it a very exhausting way of finding your way back to some things that Nietzsche said more clearly - by which I mean: with dancing feet. And the rest just doesn't impress me. I don't see what the big deal is. Probably I'm missing stuff. But I'm damn sure I'm not missing it because of something I have in common with the logical positivists. It's because of something I have in common with with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant. I'm sort of a rationalist.
And I'm not a pure rationalist. I have keen counter-Enlightenment sensitivities, if you know what I mean; I like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. Liking these guys does not suffice to help me understand the point of Heidegger.
Not to make Heidegger the odd man out. I'm not saying he's out of the philosophical loop. I don't hate Heidegger. I just don't think he's that great. So definitely I'm saying that indifference to Heidegger, such as would lead one to forego teaching classes on him, is perfectly consistent with perfect freedom from ghosts of logical positivism. And hostility to Heidegger is not strong evidence of crypto-positivist fellow-travelling, or anything of the sort - not without other evidence, like people with bumper-sticks that say 'Schlick is Slick!' Things like that.
In short, I really, really think reading contemporary Anglo-American philosophy as haunted by logical positivism is a grave psychological misjudgement. (I don't even mind being called a positivist. It's like being accused of being a devout follower of Maimonides. It's exotic. It has a certain off-the-wall charm. I sort of like logical positivism. They were different, I give them that.)
I'll add an afterthought, regarding dsquared's comment - which Ogged quotes - that McCumber is not so far off the mark regarding what logical positivism is. I suppose I got a bit worked up. I do that. I surely do. But I consider logical positivism such a target-rich zone that it does seem to me reasonable to demand clean hits. McCumber is coming in on a wing and a prayer. (Do you remember that scene on the original "Heavy Metal" movie? with the coked-out aliens trying to land their tiny craft in a space station the size of a planet, with a docking bay the size of the visor of a motorcycle helmet, relative to the station as a whole? And they ALLLMMOOOST don't make it. They graze the wall of the bay, coming in. It seems reasonable to criticize a landing like that, even though the little ship does land in one piece.) But maybe Ogged and dquared and McCumber are right and there is some version of positivism that is closer to this point about the definition of 'clarity'. I'm not really seeing it, but I'm not a truly knowledgeable scholar of positivism, if it comes to that. I tend to think of the better sorts of logical positivism as being close to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which contains a number of decisive arguments against trying to define 'clarity' as McCumber proposes positivsts will clamber to do. So I can't help but think the positivists would have seen the risks. So McCumber's account still doesn't sound like correct presentation to me. But I grant the point for the sake of argument. It doesn't matter, for purposes of my main point, whichis that no one is a logical positivist anymore. And no one is haunted by ghosts of logical positivism. I really think that's pretty much just true.
I am going to sign off this post by sending anyone who has survived it, with his/her desire to intact, to read this Bellona Times post, which is really great, and only the latest in a line of really great posts. Click on the 'popular series' link which takes you back to early exploits of Francis the Talking Mule. Just keep scrolling down. I happened on this whole string of posts the day after I finished my long manuscript (see above). And I was frankly amazed at how I am arguing in parallel at many points. These posts gave me some ideas for going back and making improvements. But I've promised myself I'll let it just sit and cool off, that long manuscript.
I think it is significant that 'logical positivist' gets used at one point in one of these posts, more or less as a synonym for 'too rationalist'. I have no real problem with this usage, given that the philosophical school has died. The term might as well find a new, loose use, based on its association with some folks who were, indeed, excessively rationalistic. But, of course, then just calling someone a 'positivist' begs the question by building in the assumption of excess. I do sort of suspect that McCumber and Ogged are sliding a little between 'logical positivism' as a name for a school of philosophy, and 'logical positivism', as a name for anyone who is too much like Spock or Data for his or her own long-term good. But maybe not. Just a thought.
Oh, and don't miss the UC Berkeley Art History Department fight song. That's my whole manuscript in eight short lines. Which saves time over reading 150 pages, if you think about it.
The Hotsy-Totsy Club, eh? Bay Area folk, then, if I make no mistake. My kind of people.
bbwaring-at-yahoo-dot-com
If you want evidence that Heidegger is poetic there's the fact that he wrote poems, he wrote about the importance of poetry, and he wrote stuff like this in his philosophical work:
"The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year's seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. When we say sky, we are already thinking of the other three [i.e. earth, divinities, and mortals] along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four."
As to why he's not studied more I think it's partly prejudice against Continental philosophy generally, partly because he's so hard to understand (while there are other interesting things to work on that don't require the same initial effort for possibly little-to-no gain), and partly because so many of those who do know his work say that it's basically the same as Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein, or whoever. It's nicer to read Stephen Mulhall and much nicer to read Julian Young. And if you read them it's tempting to think that Heidegger himself is not worth struggling too much with (either because you now know what he says or because you've decided that he's wrong or banal). But of course someone who hadn't done the hard work on the man himself would not teach his work to graduate students. And the likes of Mulhall and Young are themselves too close to those Continentals for many philosophers' tastes. I think Wittgenstein's hardness counts against him too. There's a suspicion of the obscure, and why read Ludwig when Kripke is so much easier? It's a shame, but you can't really blame people for exploring relatively obvious problems rather than going down what at least looks to many people like a blind alley.
Posted by: duncan | December 12, 2003 at 10:33 PM
Thanks, John. Insofar as it would make sense now for you and me (and any other hearty soul) to read some Heidegger together, I'd have to call this exchange a smashing success. So I'll just make a few brief points.
On what McCumber means by logical positivism, and in what sense he thinks it still has currency, I would commend people to his book on the topic (ignore the reader reviews).
Personally, I intended the title of the post in a (mostly)-jokey way; serious only insofar as your apparent disdain for "difficult" writing reminded me of Carnap (yes, it was Carnap). Where we have a substantive disagreement, and the reason it would be great fun to read something together, is where you ask,
This is the kind of question that makes me wonder what you think the texts are up to. I'll caricature what I presume to be extreme versions of our respective views. You: saying true things. Me: Engaging the reader in such a way as to make him engage the issues being discussed. I don't even know what one would have if the dramatic form of the dialogues were stripped away. It wouldn't be Plato, and it wouldn't be very interesting philosophically. This--"what is the text doing?"--seems to me the essential difference between you and me and analytic and continental reading more broadly, so I'd love to hear what people have to say about it.
Posted by: ogged | December 12, 2003 at 11:17 PM
I think that part of this discussion centers on what the goal of philosophy should be. If the primary benefit of philosophy is to produce persuasive answers, then I think there's really no excuse for unclarity. If, however, the point of philosophy is to pose interesting questions -- questions worth grappling with even if the person who poses them does not provide very convincing answers -- then I think that a "poetic" method of strategic unclarity is the way to go.
I think that there is a case to be made for poeticism that still ends up with Heidegger sucking, simply because he's not very good at the poetic things. I personally think that the questions he raises about the history of philosophy and what we might have lost since the pre-Socratics are interesting questions, and I find that his exposition of Greek thought in general has a lot of bearing on theology (my personal field), since early Christianity developed in dialog with Greek thought.
There's also a case to be made that his questions are ultimately so big as to be unanswerable and thus uninteresting and that his successors, such as Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, all help to bring phenomenology back to a more manageable level -- still raising big questions, but not formally empty questions such as the "question of Being."
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | December 13, 2003 at 01:51 PM
"Can a case be made out for the goodness of necessarily 'difficult' or 'unclear' writing?"
Maimonides makes one in his "Guide for the Perplexed." He plants contradictions in his text, and states five reasons why he may contradict himself. The Perplexed were to study the text and excavate these contradictions, clarifying the writing. This establishes the basis for an argument that certain texts contain esoteric and exoteric meanings or messages.
Is this so different from encryption? Encoding a message so that it is only decipherable by certain people, or even, no people?
The Oracle is also well known for its equivocity, and many philosphers trade in riddles.
Posted by: anon | December 13, 2003 at 05:58 PM
Ogged, you'll just have to take my word for it. When I mused about 'stripping the poetry away', I wasn't daydreaming about trying to translate Thus Spake Zarathustra into Carnapian Protokolsätze, to see what it REALLY comes to. Nope. Nothing of the sort. It was just a vivid way of asking: what do I think is the point of writing 'poetic' philosophy? I think you are worried some positivist is going to storm in: no point! Ha-HA! Let's talk about TRUTH! But I am more worried about flabby answers from the other side, frankly. It's easy to praise the marvellous, edifying, primordial metaphysicalosity of poetry without really knowing what the hell you are talking about. (I don't mean you, personally. I mean everyone who thinks this stuff is wonderful.) I think the only way to make sure one is not gassing vaguely about something one just happens to like is to keep a skeptical eyebrow cocked. Really. Why should poetry make things deeper, as opposed to merely more pleasant to read? I'm really not sure. I've always thought Herr Heidegger was a bit fast and loose on this one.
As to the McCumber stuff: our library doesn't have his book. (It has others by the man, but not this one.) I read the few pages that Amazon has got and - well, I won't say my worst fears were confirmed, because I haven't read the book, have I? But he's gone and said the very thing I feared he would. He even uses the very verb I feared: 'beguile'. (They always use that verb. What is it with that verb? It's like some people are totally beguiled by ... aw, hell with it.)
"The main claim of the positivists, of which we will hear more, was that if a statement could not be verified, it had no meaning. Though most philosophers would now disagree with this, it remains beguiling in its simplicity and self-assurance, so influential that much subsequent American philosophy since has been informally characterized as suffering from postpositivist depression."
I am sorely tempted to use the words 'simplicity' and 'self-assurance' in describing McCumber's point of view. But seriously. I haven't read the book, but on the basis of just a few pages, I'm willing to wager heavy money: this is just a dreadfully, dreadfully wrong way to think about it. Really. Please do not regard all this as some defensive reflex. The problem is that McCumber misreads contemporary American philosophy so wildly - and so confidently - that I don't see how he is going to recover and make himself useful.
He seems to be pushing the line that American philosophy has been avoiding the big questions. He actually says that American philosophy becomes by and large 'unreflective'. (What the hell is that supposed to mean?) He gives some examples of allegedly reflective addresses to the APA. Then (later) unreflective ones. And what seems to damn the latter in his eyes is that the authors had the shallow temerity to talk about 'truth and objectivity' for an hour. "But none of them even broached the relation of objectivity and truth, if any, to philosophy itself." Is he serious? Anyone who talks about the nature of objectivity and truth for an hour and then forgets to add before the question period: 'pretty clearly, this relates to questions about the nature of philosophy'. Oh come, sir: surely we can take a thing like this for granted. Is McCumber going to defend the view that truth and objectivity have nothing whatsoever to do with the nature of philosophy?
So we've got these philosophers who dip their toes in the shallows of truth and objectivity, mere babes beside the likes of Hegel and Heidegger. And it just so happens that one of those thus slighted is Robert Nozick. A man who has written an astounding, surely inadvisable brick of a book, "Philosophical Explanations", which centers on such questions as 'why is there something, rather than nothing?'
(Let me just explain that point: maybe Nozick's book is not as good as Heidegger's, but it isn't because Nozick is afraid of the big questions that sort of interest Heidegger.)
McCumber is a Hegel/Heidegger partisan who is upset that Hegel and Heidegger are not studied as much as he thinks they should be. I sympathize, in an abstract sort of way. But he is really not getting it if he thinks the problem is that American philosophers are just unreflective. They are adherents to a very different philosophical point of view. I'm sure that's very annoying, because it's hard to budge people when you get to disputes that run this deep. But we all know that it's a tad risky to brand those who think differently than you do as deluded. McCumber actually compares American philosophy to a family in which everyone knows about the incest and/or alcoholism but refuses to acknowledge it. I really think that's over the line. It's making yourself dumb by way of pretending the other guy is dumb and evil. It's unbelievable. What's the point of that? (Not that I haven't been there myself. But that was a blog post, man. Well, actually four or five of them, if I recall. Bit embarrassing, now that I think back. OK.)
I'm sorry, but think about how much it annoys you when someone says - and actually believes - 'Oh, Hegel, he just gave the world's longest invalid proof for the ethical supremacy of Prussian bureaucracy. That's all he ever did.' McCumber is getting all set to tee-off against American philosophy at about that level of sophistication and charity, it seems to me. I really don't see the point - I mean, unless you are just playing it for laughs. I always see the point of that. But that doesn't seem to be it here.
Ogged, you are cyber-salt of the earth, man. And may I say: your posts this last week or so have been great. But, after five pages, I am really not with you on this one.
I'm willing to read Heidegger, if everyone assures me I must for my health; and I quite enjoy reading Hegel - what a joker he was! Trying to make us take this stuff seriously. But McCumber is really rubbing me the wrong way.
Posted by: jholbo | December 13, 2003 at 09:04 PM
Thank you for the kind words, John. It's flattering to think that parallels might be made between your work and my amateurism. Luckily for both our sets of readers, parallelism doesn't reduce to equivalence -- which, as you indicate, is one way philosophical surveys become entangled with questions of poetics. (Or, maybe better, aesthetics. Heidegger's sky is "poetic", all right, but it's boiled stuffed owl. Kant's fumbling is better art, being funnier.)
It hardly matters, but my caricature of "logical positivism" comes from (light) experience with the thing itself in a few 1970s philosophy departments where it held sway. At that time and in those backwaters, it was still a real temptation to be consciously turned away from -- one of the only temptations I ever managed that with, and so I tend to overstate its importance.
To return to your starting point, the problem with most of the stuff that gets called "bad writing" isn't its difficulty, necessary or not, but its dullness, careerism, parochialism, and insipidity. Since the attackers of "bad writing" typically share those traits, I'm not inclined to cheer them on.
Good difficult writing provides as much pleasure as good simple writing or good incoherent writing. Most commonly, I think, we get all three at once.
Posted by: Ray | December 14, 2003 at 04:37 AM
"He actually says that American philosophy becomes by and large 'unreflective'. (What the hell is that supposed to mean?)
Since I have the book, and you don't, I'll help you out with that. Here are a few paragraphs from the book (pg. 9-10). Even these will be merely inflammatory without the arguments and evidence presented in the book, but I hope they're better than nothing. (Errors in the text are my typing mistakes. Footnotes omitted.)
That’s just “for the record,” so to speak. We’ve gotten away from the more interesting discussions of bad/difficult writing, and the question of what we think texts are (or should be) doing. If you want to come back to McCumber's book after you've, well, read it, I'd be happy to. What I'd most like to discuss, if you're up for it, is his paper in the March Continental Philosophy Review on the philosophical basis of the analytic/continental divide.
You know, maybe what the world needs is a joint or group blog dedicated to bridging that divide.
Posted by: ogged | December 14, 2003 at 10:36 AM
A little OT, but John, I think you're a little too kind to current analytical philosophy. It is extremely specialized and technical, and it does place such a premium on these qualities that it shies away from the big questions. Of course it's not all like this, and counter-examples can be cited, but I think it's more than fair as a general characterization.
I've taught introductory philosophy classes, and the overwhelming reaction of questing young minds in search of big ideas to current analytical philosophy is bemusement. Where, they wonder, is the vital, visceral curiosity about life? Where is "philosophy" in this?
Anyway, I'm usually a staunch defender of analytic philosophy, but it seems to me that you're a little too hasty to dismiss the real criticism. Yes, "positivist" is often used as shorthand for "Spock-like," but in that sense, it's a pretty accurate accusation.
Posted by: Realish | December 15, 2003 at 06:39 AM
Let me second Realish's depiction of analytic philsophy. And by way of valdating via biography (argument ad Kerriam?), I am a product of analytic undergrad and graudate departments, and I am a defender. But it's quite common practice to throw kids into "on denoting" without any real background on why you might ever care. Sure, intelligent, thoughtful analytic scholarship of Hegel, Husserl, et. al., exists. But the spirit of "The Refutation of Idealism" (namely philistine incomprehension) hovers over Anglo-American philosophy to this day.
Also, John, your description of logical positivism as a "target-rich environment": zing!
Posted by: baa | December 15, 2003 at 11:39 PM
My argument is that American philosophy is strangely unreflective, both in comparison with other academic fields and in comparison to what philosophy has traditionally been. I see nothing posted here that impeaches that.
The next question is--why?
Of course, in asking that I rub myself the wrong way too. It hurts. But at least I only do it after I have read what I wrote.
Posted by: John McCumber | December 17, 2003 at 11:45 AM
I am enough of a logical positivist to admit that John McCumber has me dead to rights, requesting that I actually read his book before trashing it. That is a fair application of some or other quite sane version of a very modest verification principle. (Verify that what you say is true, before telling google. Something like that.)
I can only say in my defense that I have asked the library to order the text in question. And I did try to be forthcoming about the slender, purely Amazonian evidential basis for my comments.
I'm jetlagged, so I'll try to make my expression of genuine bafflement clear. What is the evidence supposed to be that contemporary American philosophers are unusually 'unreflective'? The answer cannot be that they do not ask questions about the nature of philosophy itself, and give answers. Because obviously they do. It is plausibly the case that most American philosophers have a more - shall we say? - deflated conception of the nature of philosophical inquiry than McCumber has. By way of illustration, let me focus on the non-contemporary case of logical positivism (may it RIP.) The logical positivists cannot plausibly be accused of having failed to ask all the big questions. They can be accused of having said all the big questions are all nonsense and should not be asked. Which is, as their critics have rightly pointed out, a sort of self-refutation. And even if one wants to let that point slide, the positivists might be faulted for insufficient tolerance to certain avenues of approach. But that would be to say they are wrong, not that they are unreflective. (There is a venerable heritage in the West of doubting that philosophical questions are fully meaningful and useful to ask. The positivists are among the latest deflationists in this noble line.)
To repeat (since I'm too wuzzy to do anything else): why call philosophers 'unreflective' merely because they have a deflationary attitude towards, or take a piecemeal approach towards, philosophical problems - or, as the case may be, because you think they are terribly wrong-headed about nearly everything? Why should this be evidence of unreflectiveness? Stepping back some centuries: is Hume 'unreflective'? He certainly thought most metaphysical speculations were unfruitful nonsense. Were the ancient skeptics 'unreflective' when they argued that there could always be arguments on both sides, so perhaps it isn't worth the bother? I would not use 'unreflective' in these connections. Another example: I think Hegel is mistaken about almost everything. I would not accuse the man of being unreflective. That's not the right word for what I think is going wrong here. Likewise,I fail to see how 'unreflective' could be the right word for the failings of American philosophy. There is just too much strenuous mental energy going into the whole endeavor. Of course, American philosophers tend to assume that Heidegger is less worthy of study than Quine. But Heideggerians tend to assume that Quine is less worthy of study than Heidegger. I don't say that Heideggerianism is inherently 'unreflective', due to it's tendency to breezily pass over serious consideration of Quineanism. Why then accuse students of Quine of being 'unreflective' due to their lack of Heideggerianism?
I am suspicious that when McCumber uses 'unreflective', he is groping for something sufficiently caustic to express his profound conviction to the general effect: 'wrong, yet infuriatingly dominant'. I think he should just say that he thinks American philosophy is barking up the wrong tree. We should all read more Heidegger because Heidegger is a great philosopher. I don't agree, but I'm at least willing to hear about it.
Like I said, I'll read the book. And, like I said: McCumber is well within his rights to complain about me spouting off without having done my homework. Still: what I have just written stands on its own as a request for clarification as to what the hell the word 'unreflective' is doing, popping up in these discussions where - it seems to me - it has no very central place. Everybody on all sides is, we trust, thinking as hard as they can. Why assume otherwise?
Posted by: jholbo | December 19, 2003 at 02:28 AM
I guess I'm wondering the same. As a flatly made comparative statement, it doesn't make much sense to me. What are the benchmark "other fields" that McCumber deems adequately reflective in comparison to American philosophy? Does he mean other disciplines? Other nationally-constituted bodies of philosophy? Other fields of philosophy? The statement as such doesn't mean anything to me, save as a somewhat shopworn opening rhetorical gambit. For example, it's become something of a convention in papers by grad students in anthropology to declare that they are pursuing a reflexive understanding of their discipline in contrast to some past anthropology--a gesture which makes no sense at all, really, given that anthropology has a long history of obsessive self-reflection.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | December 19, 2003 at 04:16 AM
You want specifics about "other fields?" I am a member of the MLA and the APSA. Both groups publish annual volumes dedicated to questions about where the discipline has gotten to, where it should go, etc. Both goups regularly and prominently schedule sessions at their conferences that deal with these matters. When did you see the like in philsophy? Not since the days of the positivists.
Look in the decennial indices for the Journal of Philosophy, Phil Review, American Journal of Philosophy, etc. See if they even have a notice for "philosophy." Compare, as I do in my book, the Presidential addresses from the 40's with what they are like since the 60's. In the old days they were places to reflect (that word again!) on the discipline. Now they are places to "do philosophy."
For crissake, I don't just think American philosophers shold read Heidegger because he is a "great philosopher." Read my article in Continental Philosophy Review:" I argue that it's because they will do their work better if they know a bit more about him. This is about arguments, not feelings.
Posted by: John McCumber | December 19, 2003 at 08:16 AM
I have to say I think Mr. McCumber[1] has a point. What's the difference between a member of the Vienna Circle or David Hume abandoning metaphysics, and a newly-minted analytical philosophy PhD doing the same? Well, in one case they gave it a huge degree of thought, and in the other case they did so in order to fit in with the crowd and get tenure. And I think that the word "unreflective" captures that distinction rather well.
Posted by: dsquared | December 19, 2003 at 03:52 PM
I gotta say I'm dumbfounded by this debate. I got my Ph.D. at Michigan (a mainstream analytic department) in 2000 and work primarily at the intersection of moral psychology and epistemology. My principal mentors at Michigan were Steve Darwall and David Velleman. The main influences on my work (besides Darwall and Velleman) are Harry Frankfurt, Michael Bratman, Christine Korsgaard, Richard Moran, and (most recently) Gary Watson, David Owens, Candace Volger, and Michael Thompson. This is mainstream analytic philosophy nowadays.
Unreflective? Frankfurt? Korsgaard? McCumber is at UCLA -- does he think Tyler Burge, for example, is unreflective or metaphilosophically naive? This makes no sense to me at all.
I'm sorry, I haven't read McCumber's book or article. (Does he discuss, e.g., Burge?) I gotta say, thought, that reflection -- including, crucially, self-reflection -- is the whole reason I got into this racket. Nor do I find an absence of reflection on the predicament of the philosopher in pursuing such reflection.
P.S. I know this is not yet an argument against McCumber -- since, again, I haven't read him. It's merely a testimonial from someone in the trenches who was analytically trained and is trying to get tenure in an analytic department. Maybe my reflections on self-trust, advice, testimony, regret, evil, and other 'hot topics' within current analytic philosophy don't count as 'reflective' in McCumber's sense.
Posted by: ESH | December 20, 2003 at 12:25 AM
'Unreflective' in this context means unconcerned with the question, 'What is philosophy?' I think it's fair to say that current analytic philosophy is mostly unreflective in this sense.
I did hear Michael Dickson recently give a good talk recently on the question of what metaphysics is, which probably counts as reflective by McCumber's lights.
Early Modern History of Philosophy tends to be a bit more reflective in this sense. Introductions often talk about what philosophy is, what the history of philosophy is, and why history of philosophy is worth doing. These introductions usually aren't very good, and the value of history of philosophy is really something that ought to be shown and not said. When historiography of philosophy degenerates into the question of whether Jonathan Bennett's work is any good, it can get a little poisonous.
Meta-philosophy is another branch of philosophy and it can be done well or badly. It's possible that an excellent paper on the question of what philosophy is would be useful to all philosophers, but it's possible that it wouldn't.
Posted by: Mike | December 20, 2003 at 01:10 AM
If 'unreflective' means uninterested in pursuing questions about the nature of philosophy directly, then I concede that current analytic philosophy is unreflective. But I insist that most of the philosophers I mentioned, among many others, are pursuing the question indirectly. A lot of current work in ethics and epistemology starts from worries about naive (and historically influential) assumptions about the form that a philosophical theory of agency should take. You don't have to be asking 'So what is philosophy?' to be reflecting on the nature of philosophy.
Posted by: ESH | December 20, 2003 at 02:01 AM
A quick response to dsquared: the problem with making American philosophers 'unreflective' due to their membership in a somewhat hidebound academic culture - i.e. they are raised to think and question and proceed in certain ways, not others, and most don't do a lot to break out of these ruts - is that it is then trivially true that all academic fields are unreflective. (For example, how do Heideggerian philosophers end up Heideggerian? Mostly because some other Heideggerian gets 'em when they're still young, I expect.) Which drains the question of its interest, or at least of its relevance to the question of whether American philosophy has some special problem.
Now back to McCumber. My original imprudent commentary on the basis of all I could read on Amazon was inspired by the fact that McCumber seems to citing, as evidence his thesis is correct, things that seem to me like fairly strong counter-examples to his thesis. Let me just return to the specific example I cite: someone talking about truth and objectivity for an hour, without adding 'and this sheds light on the very nature of philosophy' is presumptively 'unreflective'. I just don't see why this is a correct presumption.
I do admit that it is a good thing to have some something like what the MLA produces, i.e. overviews of where the discipline is perceived to be, and be heading. I happen to have read quite a few of these over the last few years, in the course of my literary critism and theory investigations. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the genre, but there is nothing especially deep or impressive about it either. Asking 'so, what did we all do this year?' is not obviously a more profound question than 'what is the nature of truth and objectivity?' Also, it does not seem to me that the MLA's offerings, in this regard, do very much to spur even the sorts of modest self-critical reflections one would hope for. These publications are often occasions for reinforcement of dubious received notions. I suppose this brings me back to dsquared's point. It is predictable that this would be the case, because most academics get locked into rather narrow ways of thinking. As a species, we just aren't smart or strong enough not to get stuck in ruts. I don't see that American philosophy is any more infirm in this regard than any other discipline.
I guess my specific question for McCumber is: why should I take hour-long talks about truth and objectivity as evidence of the speaker's unreflectiveness? Again: I do appreciate that I am supposed to read the book. But when I find I am having such profound difficulties agreeing with the first few pages, I don't have much confidence that reading the rest will give me more than a whole catalogue of specific points to be baffled by. I didn't mean to imply, in my previous comment, that McCumber is just ranting - expressing his feelings, not making arguments. I do think that 'unreflective' is not getting us very far. I think it is not putting our finger on whatever the genuine point of dispute is.
I do think there are legitimate disputes between very different philosophical traditions and perspectives. These deserve to be aired, not swept under carpets. I don't think that being 'unreflective' - in anything like the ordinary sense of the term - is plausibly what separates Anglo-American philosophy from continental philosophy (yes, these are vague designations, we all know.) The term is being used polemically, not diagnostically. (And far be it from me to forbid polemic. It would be most hypocritical. But polemic has its limitations, and it seems to me 'unreflective' is running us smack against them.)
Posted by: jholbo | December 20, 2003 at 03:11 AM
I just gave McCumber's paper a quick on-screen read (all I have time for today), and I must say that if by 'analytic philosophy' he means analytic philosophy prior to 1980 (McCumber mentions no work more recent than Davidson and 1970s Kripke (no mention of Kripkenstein, even)), then I agree with his thesis that analytic philosophy does not even try to come to terms with time. That is, it did not. But this ignores lots of work post 1980: Bratman vs. Davidson on agency, reams upon reams of work on rule-following, Korsgaard and Velleman on the diachronic dimension of the categorical imperative, Wollheim and Lear on the role of a life in our practical thinking, Brandom on deontic score-keeping, and lots and lots of other work by analytic philosophers that tries very hard to come to terms with time. Maybe this stuff doesn't approach time in the right way. But that's not the claim McCumber is arguing for.
In sum, McCumber's claim that "Analytical philosophy... has not abandoned the view that philosophy studies things as if they were independent of time" is straighforwardly false -- unless of course you assume a specific conception of what it is to study things in time. True, recent analytic philosophy does not approach the temporality of agency or concept-possession in the way of those influenced by Heidegger or Derrida. In particular, an appreciation of temporality does not directly inform their style of writing or their conception of philosophical argument. There are surely some interesting possible points of engagement here. But it would take a different paper, indeed a different sort of paper, to get at them.
(Apologies if I read too quickly and missed something relevant to what I've just said. I simply didn't want my other two comments to stand without at least making a pass at the paper today.
By the way, citing Davidson and McDowell as representative "conceptual virtuosos" -- as if they were paradigmatic analytic philosophers or did conceptual analysis -- is quite odd, given the current state of their reputations.)
Posted by: ESH | December 20, 2003 at 03:36 AM
It seems to me that the lack of MLA-style "wither philosophy?" discussions might be taken as a sign of the relative health of the discipline compared to the other humanities. There's something a bit neurotic about an excessive of introspection and navel-gazing.
Posted by: Matthew Yglesias | December 20, 2003 at 06:17 AM
I'm inclined to agree somewhat with Matthew in this respect. If the MLA is regarded as a properly reflective body, then I don't think being reflective is an entirely healthy thing to seek after. It's all well and good to wish that the question, "What is philosophy?" be a part of the agenda of American analytic philosophy--and I don't know that I'm convinced that it is not--but to emulate the MLA would be in some sense to make that the only question with which philosophy could be concerned, with its own self-constitution and conditions of possibility, and never with actually doing the work of philosophy beyond that.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | December 20, 2003 at 06:50 AM
As a follow-up on another point I made on a different one of these new-fangled electronic message boards, it amuses and saddens me that because people can read genre fiction and pass multiple choice tests on Shakespeare (I know that Professors Holbo and Burke have much more knowledgeable and nuanced positions) that they feel comfortable in passing judgement on the professional discourse of literary scholars. Witness this Yglesias's comment above: on what grounds does he, besides meretricious Chronicle and NY Times Magazine accounts, suppose that the MLA is a neurotically self-reflexive organization? My guess is that the MLA is just used as a metonymy for anything one wishes to condemn in academia.
I'm not one of these people who goes around bemoaning the lack of "continental" philosophy in American universities because I don't know enough about the subject to make such evaluative comments. Why does this rarely stop journalists, philosophers, and assorted hangers-on from doing the same w/r/t literary studies?
Posted by: Chun the Unavoidable | December 20, 2003 at 07:46 AM
I think a distinction might help keep us from getting sidetracked on the MLA. There's the sort of "wither X" handwringing that has to do with the state of a discipline in terms of its place and status in the academy, and then there's the reflection on the terms and goals of a discipline that make it what it is. Handwringing shades easily into navel-gazing, but the latter sort of reflection is (not exclusively, of course) "the work of philosophy."
Posted by: ogged | December 20, 2003 at 10:51 AM
Sorry, this is probably the wrong place to put these musings, but I have one more thought on McCumber's paper. It elaborates Mike's final remark about the value of metaphilosophical reflection.
The thing that I find most frustrating about McCumber's paper is its presumption to step back and comment on the essential properties (he does use the word 'essential') of the two styles of philosophy. One retort would note that this act itself seems to presuppose the very 'reductionism to invariant structures' that's supposed to be essential to the analytic tradition. Another would note that the analytic side's suspicion of (or boredom with) explicit metaphilosophy registers a rejection of precisely that reductionism.
Most analytic philosophers would argue metaphilosophically as follows. A philosophical tradition is something in which, qua philosopher, you can only participate. Sure, historians of philosophy can step back and pose the sorts of questions that McCumber poses, and that's a valuable enterprise. But it manifests a species of philosophical bad faith to argue for a contribution to philosophy itself from such metaphilosophical premises. It's a way of refusing to acknowledge your own deliberative-argumentative freedom.
They have no problem with the following sort of argument: "Hey Austinians, Derrida's critique of your guy contains more than meets your eye!" "Hey Levinasians, some analytic neo-Kantians have lately developed some arguments that pose an interesting challenge to your guy!"
If I like Austin a lot, I ought to read Derrida. If I like Levinas a lot, I ought to read the current analytic neo-Kantians. I mean, it's all philosophy.
But that's now the mainstream analytic metaphilosophy: Philosophy is something you have to do. And philosophy is not something that you can do well by stepping back and posing explicitly metaphilosophical questions.
If those who identify with the continental tradition insist on pursuing such questions, we'll get the following stalemate: Continentals will strike the analytics as doing straightforwardly bad work. And analytics will strike the continentals as hopelessly naive.
But that's a prediction about the actions of individual human beings, not a claim about the essential properties of these traditions. It follows from my analytic metaphilosophy that drawing a conclusion from either side about the essential properties of the other would amount to an outrageously unphilosophical dismissiveness.
Posted by: ESH | December 21, 2003 at 01:29 AM
ESH,
What you are calling "metaphilosophy" has traditionally been called "philosophy." The addition of "meta-" to the word is something of an academic conceit meant to insulate a certain type of discussion from intrusive questions. You are absolutely correct about the activity which we call philosophy but it seems very difficult to claim that we can simply begin to think and ignore historical precedent. If we are "doing" philosophy we are necessarily interacting with our intellectual ancestors through the very way we are framing and answering questions we pose. I don't see how we can fence a certain area off and say that it is philosophy but the discussion of philosophical problems and their historical solutions is "metaphilosophy." It seems like a professional convenience rather than a substantive distinction.
Posted by: David | December 21, 2003 at 12:51 PM
Note to ESH: a "quick on-screen read" doesn't do it, especially for a text which has been rewritten 7-10 times, as all of my publications are (that still doesn't save me from typos, though!). What I said, in context, was not that contemporary analytical philosophy is atemporal (in the way I don't like--see below), but that analytical philosophers are often trying to do by instinct what they would be able to do in a more knowledgeable and successful way had they been trained in the sophisticated techniques of Hegel and Heidegger.
(I am glad you captured the irony in my use of the term "essence." It is explained in my essay "Essence and Subversion.")
Second note to ESH: I do have a specific view of what it would be for philosophy to study things as if they were in time--it is not to argue for the truth of sentences about those things, or even for the truth of sentences about processes involving those things. It is to see sentences themselves as processes or events, and to make use of non-argumentative, specifically Hegelian techniques of dialectical reconstruction and of smilarly non-argumentative Heideggeran procedures for opening futures. Some of the people you cite as counter examples to me are doing that; my argument is that they would do it more easily,if not better, if they worked more through Hegel and Heidegger (as Brandom, to name one, does).
Third note to ESH: I agree with David about the distinction betwen metaphilosophy and philosophy. The idea that anyone should just relax and "participate" in a tradition has problems so great I can't even name them. Slavery was a tradition in the South; should Southerners simply have "participated" in it? (Should they have left critical reflection on that tradition over to "meta-Southerners?") This is even less accceptable for philosophy, which since Socrates has been associated with self-knowledge, and so was always "metaphilosophy."
Note to several: The MLA may be neurotic, but at least they are trying to understand where they are and how they got there. Moreover, they do not just write about themselves (philosophers are much more self-referential--not because they only write about themselves, but because they only write about each other). And how come no one even mentions the other group I cited--the APSA?
Posted by: John McCumber | December 21, 2003 at 02:41 PM
Prof. McCumber,
I did read the paper more carefully before writing the previous comment yesterday; I gave it a quick read the day before because I wanted to post some thoughts on this thread but (unlike other posters) I didn't want to let them stand without at least looking at the paper.
I suspect that you're being ironic in congratulating me for noting the irony in your use of 'essential.' I figured that you must have some thoughts elsewhere about the oddness of the term in that context.
I won't touch the analogy with slavery, which is not in itself a tradition of thought.
I think everything between us rests on your second note. I'd have had a completely different reaction to the paper had it contained an account of how people like Brandom or McDowell (or Burge?) could do better what they're already doing if they worked more self-consciously "though" Hegel and Heidegger. I'm all ears on that question.
But that would have to involve engagement with those philosophers, not (primarily) commentary on traditions. Brandom and McDowell already in fact think of themselves as doing what you advise, but it seems clear that you don't think they're doing it in quite the right way. It would be an instance of precisely what I'm calling participation to try to show them how to do it better. That was really was my only point.
(By the way, I'm not a fan of the term 'metaphilosophy' either. My question is entirely how -- not whether -- to reflect on philosophy. I'm giving an interpretation of analytic impatience with such reflection when it is too explicit and too generalized, since I share that impatience. But I'm also claiming that it's important to pursue this self-reflection in other forms.)
Posted by: ESH | December 21, 2003 at 10:17 PM
ESH,
I can't speak for JMc but the example which comes to mind for me is the difference between the opening of the Tractatus and Heidegger's "The Essence of Truth." The Tractatus's first statements are rather dogmatic and remind me of the opening of Book 2 of Aristotle's Physics. In Aristotle's case, however, we have the Metaphysics as a help in our attempt to understand "ton onton". We get no such thing in Wittgenstein. Therefore--ignoring the obvious quirks of his personality and the temporal gap between the two works--if Wittgenstein was able to engage with the substance of Heidegger's essay, he would have come away with, perhaps, a deeper understanding of how problematic his first assertions were. This is all speculation of course thought I can't help but wonder if a serious engagement with someone like Heidegger (or Hegel) would have given Wittgenstein's (or Quine's, Dummett's, etc) a depth which they presently lack...in my inferior opinion, anyway.
Posted by: David | December 22, 2003 at 09:04 AM
Actually, for what it's worth I agree with McCumber's conclusion in the paper and therefore with your point, David. That is, I agree with the claim that people who work in each tradition (with their distinct institutional loyalties, styles of writing, etc.) have some important things to learn from people who work in the other tradition -- and indeed more or less the things that McCumber has in mind. My quarrel is only with his argument for this conclusion (which in philosophy of course means I'm quarreling with everything of interest in the paper).
What got me interested in this thread, once I saw what was at stake (after my first comment above, which isn't really to the point), was my hunch that much analytic philosophy nowadays manfests what amounts to a rather subtle and compelling species of metaphilosophical self-reflection, and that this reflection is overlooked sytematically in McCumber's paper, since (a) he discusses only pre-1980 analytic philosophy, (b) he poses the issue as if it turns on one's theory of truth (which seems, by his own lights, to cram his issue into the very analytic straightjacket that he's trying to get us to remove), and (c) he works (however 'subversively') with a conception of intellectual tradition (or argumentative practice) that prevents the full force of this analytic self-reflection from being felt.
This last problem emerges clearly in his gloss of my recommendation as "relax and participate." On the contrary, on my (I think mainstream analytic) view you can't participate in an intellectual tradition by 'relaxing' but only by seeking out the smartest critical interlocutors that you can find -- even when, especially when, they were trained in other intellectual traditions. McCumber seems to think I've got Kuhnian 'normal' science in mind, but in fact I think philosophy is always (well, cautiously) revolutionary.
(Apologies to Holbo for having hijacked his comments board!)
Posted by: ESH | December 22, 2003 at 12:43 PM
No apologies necessary, ESH. I have been spectating with much interest. (I am glad my generally rather, er, energetic postings have been the occasion for temperate dialogue. Doesn't always work that way.) Let me add for the record that I finally got around to giving McCumber's paper a read and a half. I doubt he is exactly waiting on my benediction, but it made a better impression on me than his paper in the Culler volume and those few Amazonian pages of his book.
I have about 20 nits to pick with it, which I will not pick just right now. I don't really agree with the conclusion(s), but my disagreements are not of the sort that make my fingers itch to cast more stones. They might be lessened by further discussion, which is always what one hopes for. To be just a bit more specific: I don't really buy the 'it all comes down to different attitudes towards time' line, but I do think it is very important to start with Hegel. In a sense this is just obvious, but I think there are ways of starting from here that might induce each side to acknowledge that the other side has more 'strategic depth', as it were. It is easy for 'analytic' philosophers to write off a lot of 20th century 'continental' philosophy as pseudo-intellectual flim-flammery, which (of course) much of it is. (Just as a lot of analytic philosophy is trivial noodling with pseudo-problems that have been invested with a pleasing formality.) Likewise, I think it is too easy for sympathizers with continental philosophy to regard analytic philosophers as a bunch of shallow-rooted, post-positivist weeds. I think one advantage of going back to Hegel is that you can better articulate ways in which analytic hostility to Hegelian and post-Hegelian thinkers is very deep-rooted indeed.
I realize what I just said is not an explanation or answer or anything. And it's not as thought this is exactly what McCumber himself is saying. But it strikes me that what I just said is consistent with what McCumber says in this paper, and more or less in the same region of logical space. Whereas it seems to me that in the other stuff I have read McCumber takes the 'analytic philosophy is a shallow-rooted post-positivist weed' line. (I'm not going to go round again trying to attribute this line to that other stuff. I'll just say I'm glad he isn't taking this line in this new paper, because it isn't the right line to take.)
Posted by: jholbo | December 22, 2003 at 08:50 PM
Tom Rockmore recently published an article on the reappropriation of Hegel by certain analytic thinkers e.g. McDowell & Sellars. The only difficulty I can see with this is the nagging thought that I'm better off reading Hegel than Prof. X's hegelian excursions. This is not meant to be snide but we all agree that our time is limited and our reading lists are huge so, to pick up ESH's thread, why not engage with the most compelling philosophers in the tradition rather than with the guy who is popular at the moment? Obviously, we are trying to work our way towards that position with our present discussion--and we are only disputing about who is worth the time and effort--but we seem to be involved in a bit of presentism by trying to dragoon the current crop of writers into the "venerable list of philosophical greats." I have to confess that this statement isn't terribly helpful viz. the defense or the prosecution of analytic philosophy and, thus, may sound a false note in the discussion. Let me put this in a much cruder fashion: why should I study Sellars or Putnam, rather than Hegel or Heidegger? What insights do the former duo provide which the latter two lack?
Posted by: David | December 22, 2003 at 09:33 PM
Well, Sellers has interesting things to say about transitivity and the qualitative comparisons of sense data, and Putnam helped prove that Hilbert's 10th problem is insoluble. I don't think either of those things are in Hegel or Heidegger.
Seriously, David, read what you like. If you don't have professional obligations (orals to pass, a survey course to teach, a bibliography to fill out), there's no reason not to be the captain of your own reading list.
If you don't enjoy reading Putnam and Sellers, then don't do it. But don't imagine that every argument they offer is a popularization of something in Heidegger or Hegel. If you just open up one of their articles at random, you'll almost certainly find something with no counterpart in Hegel or Heidegger. Whether it's an insight or not is a further question, the answer to which depends on the page.
Posted by: Mike | December 23, 2003 at 12:04 AM
I suppose I might be taken more seriously if I spelled Sellars's name right.
Posted by: Mike | December 23, 2003 at 03:26 AM
Mike,
It is certainly is true that we make some decisions on the basis of aesthetics eg. should I force myself to read George Eliot's corpus or attempt to gain a serious understanding of serialism? To my mind, the question here is not of that genre. Ultimately, if philosophy is an attempt to know, to gain some measure of wisdom, then it cannot be a matter of indifference to us whether we read Vico or Sellars. In the end we are forced to ask whether or not the philosophers we read are truly worth the time it takes to read them (my concession to the original topic of this blog entry: bad writing). We can get at that question by asking which philosophers appear too have a profound understanding of human life and which don't seem to plumb the depths with any regularity. I take part of your point to heart insofar as some of what is being written is really just academics talking to one another. That's fine and it's a necessary endeavor for members of that guild. I don't begrudge the task because its a different variation on what I do in my job. Beyond this, however, is where the problems lie.
I've recently read Sellar's "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" and I have to confess that--it appeared to me--much of what he's saying had already been said in a similar fashion by Hegel. Furthermore, with Hegel it was accompanied by a deeper penetration of the phenomenon in question and a far more profound explication of the consequences of the matter. So I have to wonder about the necessity of reading Sellars if key parts of his philosophy are based upon a type of quasi-hegelianism. I use Sellars as my stalking horse but I would like to offer it up as my larger impression of significant swaths of the analytic tradition. Not wanting to fall into the trap of assuming that all of the tradition is mistaken, I pose the question " where do the 'analytics' probe deeper into the philosophical firmament?" Do Quine, Goodman, Dummett, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Russell accurately represent the mainstream of analytic philosophy? Do theories of truth ultimately prove their own truth? Ooops...I slipped that one in... ;-)
Posted by: David | December 23, 2003 at 03:57 AM
In the end we are forced to ask whether or not the philosophers we read are truly worth the time it takes to read them (my concession to the original topic of this blog entry: bad writing).
Sure, but this isn't really the sort of thing that you can trust strangers about. Either you have to poke around for yourself, or find a philosopher that you respect and admire and find out who he or she likes to read. I think various professionals are coming up with lists of their favorite books of the last 20 years over at Leiter's blog. Still, ultimately, you need to form your own judgment about it.
I take part of your point to heart insofar as some of what is being written is really just academics talking to one another.
That wasn't actually any part of my point. I was just thinking that Putnam's and Sellars's work is radically different than Hegel's and Heidegger's. If you think that Sellars is just a watered down version of Hegel, well, good, and so much the worse for Sellars. Trust your own eyes before you trust mine.
Not wanting to fall into the trap of assuming that all of the tradition is mistaken, I pose the question " where do the 'analytics' probe deeper into the philosophical firmament?"
Do you mean deeper than Sellars? or Hegel? or Heidegger? Anyway, I don't know. It depends what you're interested in. If you want a recommendation about a specific topic, there's a chance that I (or somebody else reading this thread) can help you. A nice collection of analytic essays on various deep topics is Nagel's Mortal Questions.
Do Quine, Goodman, Dummett, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Russell accurately represent the mainstream of analytic philosophy?
Well, they certainly are canonical figures. They're mostly dead (collectively mostly dead, not severally) and none of them are especially active. If you want a survey of the mainstream of analytic philosophy now, you might try getting an issue of the Philosopher's Annual
Do theories of truth ultimately prove their own truth?
No.
Posted by: Mike | December 23, 2003 at 04:26 AM
I was away over holidays but would like to thank everybody for this exchange. I learned a lot.
I also think it ends very well: whether Quine, Goodman Sellars etc. represent the maoinstream of analytical philosophy is exactly the kind of question analysts should be asking. If the enduring contributions are not distinguished from the momentary fads, all will be lost in the night of history. Is that how you want to be treated?
I stoutly maintain that analytical philosophers will need Hegel and Heidegger to ask that question right, though!
Cheers!
Posted by: John McCumber | January 18, 2004 at 04:14 AM