More on "Theory" in the Humanities

This is a follow up to the previous post that cast a skeptical eye on the ability of the humanities to produce knowledge or meaningful understanding.  I want to comment here on the possibility of constructing a humanities based “theory” to elucidate the world, ourselves, or the relation between the two.

To see deeper into the problem with the assumption that something such as a theory emanating from a humanities discipline can reliably provide information about the world – including the mind of an author – I will consider the description of one such theory, Derrida’s deconstructionism, as provided in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).  What is deconstruction according to this article?  One of Derrida’s earliest answers is described as follows:

Simply, deconstruction is a criticism of Platonism, which is defined by the belief that existence is structured in terms of oppositions (separate substances or forms) and that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other. The first phase of deconstruction attacks this belief by reversing the Platonistic hierarchies.

Supposing that Plato’s alleged hierarchies are mistaken, it is unclear what value there is in reversing them.  The reversal of a false hierarchy isn’t necessarily a true one.  For example, if we reverse the false hierarchy, men are superior to women, we get the equally false, women are superior to men.  Moreover, if Plato himself is guilty of some form of complex fiction writing, i.e. failing to engage in anything other than his own abstractions that lack grounding in reality, then reversing them is to similarly play in the realm of fiction, much like analyzing Tolkien’s works for hierarchies among Orcs, and then reversing them; what could that possibly teach us?  Perhaps it could teach us something about the opinions of the author of the reversal, but without both more context and a relatively sophisticated psychological theory applicable to the author, it is not easy to say what would be learned here.

The SEP entry continues:

On the basis of the reversal… we can see that something like a decision (a perhaps impossible decision) must have been made at the beginning of the metaphysical tradition, a decision that instituted the hierarchy…

This is plausible.  Decisions – assumptions, presuppositions, etc. – as to the rules and axioms of investigation must be made prior to any inquiry.  It does not follow, however, that such decisions are arbitrary, unfounded, unjustified, or not conducive to discovering the truth.  They may be just the right decisions required to uncover the structure of reality, and the reasoning they initiate may be logically sound.  What this means is that there is no reason to believe that the mere act of reversing the result of such decisions will lead to a better account of reality. 

Now let us turn to the second phase of deconstruction:

The previously inferior term must be re-inscribed as the “origin” or “resource” of the opposition and hierarchy itself.

There are a couple of problems here.  First, as just noted, because the need to rely on “decisions” – axioms, rules, etc. – in order to get inquiry off the ground does not entail that the decisions are bad or conducive to falsehood, it follows that we cannot assume that any hierarchy that results is necessarily wrong.  Hence, to elevate what Plato saw as the less valuable of two parts of a hierarchy – say matter over form – is not necessarily to do anything important or revealing.  Nor does it follow that the inferior term must have some fundamental or central role in the creation of the hierarchy.  Perhaps Plato elevated form over matter because he was in fact obsessed with the material – maybe he feared the physical body – and felt some paradoxical need to overwhelm it – put it in its place – in his theory; but perhaps not.  The mere fact that there is a decision here tells us nothing, because similar decisions are required for any inquiry, including Derrida’s. 

In general, from the fact that a hierarchy is incorrect, it doesn’t follow that the previously inferior term is the origin of the hierarchy itself.  Consider:

            Non-human animals are more intelligent than humans.

This is, apparently at least, the wrong way around, so we must reverse the hierarchy:

            Humans are more intelligent than non-human animals.

It does not follow that re-inscribing “non-human animal” as the “origin” of this opposition and hierarchy is correct, or even makes any sense.  On the contrary, it appears that if anything it is a preference for, or bias toward, the human that is the origin here.  At any rate, it is the relation between the two that is the cause of the hierarchy, not any one on its own, so to propose a theory of reversal and inversion on a priori grounds is simply suspect.

Secondly, unless we assume that Plato himself discovered something deep and true about the essence of reality in his hierarchical oppositions, he just messed up the order, any act of inversion will tell us nothing.  So… how do we know that Plato was right here?  Suppose someone divides the world into red things and geometric objects, making the latter more important than the former.  This clearly seems to be a hierarchy that tells us nothing about reality, so inverting it so that the red things are more important will similarly tell us nothing. 

Well, perhaps I am not properly considering the nature of this re-inscription, so: 

How would this re-inscription or redefinition of appearance work? Here we would have to return to the idea that every appearance or every experience is temporal. In the experience of the present, there is always a small difference between the moment of now-ness and the past and the future… this infinitesimal difference is not only a difference that is non-dualistic, but also it is a difference that is, as Derrida would say, “undecidable.” Although the minuscule difference is virtually unnoticeable in everyday common experience, when we in fact notice it, we cannot decide if we are experiencing a memory or a present perception, if we are experiencing a present perception or an anticipation… Insofar as the difference is undecidable…[it] destabilizes the original decision that instituted the hierarchy.

There is certainly work in the experience of time that suggests that any particular experience is a structured mix that combines perception of what is occurring at that time with memory and anticipation (see, e.g., Horwich 1987) – experience has content that is temporally structured to include a past, present, and future component.  What is not clear, is whether there is no way to distinguish these at all; even fuzzy boundaries can be boundaries, and who knows what cognitive science might discover.  Moreover, it is unclear why this undecidability would invalidate Platonic arguments about, say, the form of the good, or the nature of mathematical knowledge.  There may be an argument for this, but since Platonic metaphysics is the result of a long period of contemplation and analysis, there is no obvious move from a feature of momentary perceptions to the results of long, thorough contemplation. 

When reflecting upon the nature of number or goodness, one may be doing little more than staring out of a window, pen and notebook in hand, mulling over arguments of Frege and Russell, or Kant and Aristotle.  The perception of the trees and birds beyond the pane of glass may – though may not – be an essentially entangled mix of what is seen then with memory and anticipation.  It is not at all clear, however, what impact this has on one’s reflection of Frege’s attempts to translate the Peano axioms into axioms of the predicate calculus.  Suppose, as one read The Foundations of Arithmetic, one’s perceptions were consistently temporally mixed in just this way: what is the significance of this fact for reflecting on whether the logical reduction of arithmetic is sound?  It would seem that the inability to separate the temporal components of experience would have no bearing on this.  Further, even if one cannot separate out the components of experience at the time they are happening, it doesn’t follow that one can’t look back on one’s experience with the benefit of additional information and then disentangle the strands, which might lead to a principled way to do so in general.  In short, it is not at all clear how the alleged features of temporal experience would undermine the choice of axioms and rules of inquiry that are required to get any investigation off the ground.  Conversely, if such features do destabilize all such choices, then they would undermine the principles that undergird the deconstructionist inversion.

So this is an example of a theory applied to a text that is supposed to result in something interesting and informative about reality.  However, if the text itself is simply off base, then the move proposed by this theory will not likely tell us anything interesting or informative; at least it gives us no reason to suppose so because it offers no means of correcting the text other than rearranging its parts, which is of not help if the text is fundamentally incomplete.  Moreover, we have to have some reason to believe that the inversion proposed by the theory is a good move: likely to be informative, corrective, truth-conducive, or what have you.  For this, more than a priori reflection on texts is required, because what we want to know is when texts are better or worse at getting things right.  Inverted Plato vs. Regular Plato leaves us in no position to judge.  It is like being told that A believes that P and B believes that not-P.  Without evidence from outside their belief states, we have no way of adjudicating between them.

So, until we can demonstrate that humanistic writing, that isn’t grounded in math and science, can reveal something about reality, then any attempt to reverse, pervert, subvert, or otherwise undermine previous such writing cannot be said to amount to knowledge of anything.  What, then, can it tell us?  I am not sure.  Perhaps something about the mind of Derrida, but I am not sure what that would be without more empirical evidence about him and how human minds work in general; i.e. not without some science. 

Obviously more has to be said to make the case.  In particular, I am, here, relying on a single source about a single aspect of a single author’s work, so it would be illegitimate to generalize from this single case.  It is, however, illustrative of the point I made in the previous post: that a non-scientific theory of texts applied to texts to create other texts does not seem to be the kind of thing that will generate knowledge of the world; at best it would generate knowledge of the applier of the theory, but even that would be suspect without detailed empirical investigation.  So, the question is what the theory – in this case a principled inversion – could possibly teach us about the world.

Let me end with a limited defence of Plato.  It seems to me that his “elevation” of forms had to do primarily with an observation, that Euclidean geometry, which is an a priori and formal axiomatic system, manages to correctly describe space.  He proposed, along Pythagorean lines, that the explanation of this is that reality itself is ultimately mathematical in nature, so that it shares its form with the Euclidean axioms.  If this is correct, then the basic structure of reality is timeless and unchanging, in which case the idea that the world is a place of change and flux must be some kind of mistake or illusion.  This may be wrong, but it is reflection on the basis of a mathematical-physical knowledge and observation.  So, to return to the original point, it is far from obvious why a general “inversion” of the resulting system would be true, interesting, or valuable.

Can the Humanities Survive?

As a philosopher, my professional home is in the humanities faculty.  Lately I have come to think that philosophy, at least the kind that interests me, belongs in the faculty of science.  I am not fully convinced, but this post outlines some of my doubts about the humanities.  In a later post, I hope to look at the other side: what is valuable and necessary about the humanities.  For now, here are my tentative thoughts.

In the 1999 film The Ninth Gate, there is a scene in which the character named Boris Balkan delivers a lecture with the title ‘Demons in Medieval Literature’.  The movie does not present any significant lecture content, but it is certainly a plausible title that one can imagine delivered by a scholar of literature or classics or philosophy in numerous academic settings.  Further, I think that the role of demons as characters in medieval literature sounds like an interesting topic.  But the title moved me to consider a question: what could a talk on demons in medieval literature actually tell us?

There is one answer we can rule out, I believe, right from the start.  The talk can tell us nothing at all about demons for the simple reason that there are, so far as we know, none.  I will come back to this point shortly, for there are two ways this could be wrong: (1) demons in fact exist, contrary to what we may believe; and (2) non-existent entities can be the subject of truths (they can be the values of variables that render propositional functions true).  But for now let us assume that demons are non-existent and, accordingly, there is nothing to learn about them.

This leave the possibilities that the lecture could teach us something about either medieval literature, by conveying facts about a type of character that appears therein, or else something about medieval writers, by passing inferentially from information about the characters created by the writers to conclusions about them.

Starting with the latter, I will raise the following objection: it is not possible to learn anything about writers from what they write without a largely true psychological theory of (1) writers in general; (2) medieval writers; (3) medieval writers of demon stories; or (4) the individual writers under consideration.  In short, one must have a true psychological theory of the individuals involved, which would require a theory of psychology of sufficient generality that it covers the particular writers in question.  The reason for this is that the reasons people do things are complex, varied, and often opaque (to both themselves and others).  Accordingly, if we are going to draw any conclusions about a writer from what they write – really, any artist from what they create – then we need a theory that connects created work to the mind and character of the creator.

So, hoping to enlighten our understanding of past writers on the basis of what they write depends on some properly researched and correct cognitive science.  Now, the character in the movie is not a scientist but a humanist, so the question is whether training in a humanities discipline could equip one to form justified inferences from creation to the mind or character of the creator.  I don’t see any good reason to suppose that it could.  We wouldn’t suppose that humanities training equips one to be a medical doctor or chemist or police officer, so why does it allow one to function as a psychologist or other cognitive scientist?

Returning to the former suggestion, let us consider whether a humanist can tell us something about literature by analyzing the characters that lie within it.  This depends on what we think we can learn about a work by analyzing its characters, which will depend in part on what the analysis is and what it presupposes about the nature of literature.  Suppose, for example, that we think that a sudden in increase in stories about demons can be traced to a famous outbreak of plague, which caused people to search for some kind of understanding of the terror they were experiencing at the time.  This relates features internal to stories of a time to events external to those stories, in particular the emotions of the writers of the day, but once again we are drawing a conclusion about people’s minds on the basis of their writings, which would require a psychological theory, something humanists do not study as anything more than interested amateurs.

Perhaps, then, humanistic analysis can remain entirely internal to the world of the literature studied; humanists simply examine stories on their own terms, analyzing the nature of the fictions created.  The problem with this view is that there would seem to be nothing interesting to say about fictional creations themselves: they don’t exist, so presumably there is nothing to say about them except what the author intended to convey to us by creating them, which requires that we know something about the author, or the times in which s/he lived, which requires that we move outside the internal world of the fictional creation, to either a psychological theory about the author or a psycho-sociological theory about the relation between people and stories at the time the author wrote.  So the question remains, what does the humanist bring to this endeavour without scientific training?

Let me return now to the point I mentioned at the start.  Suppose, first, that there is something true to say about demons because they in fact exist.  If that is the case, then once again it is not people with training in humanistic disciplines but, rather, something like a demon biologist to whom we would want to turn for information about the creatures; if they are sufficiently sophisticated, we may need demon psychologists, sociologists, economists, etc. as well.  Assuming there are beings with the properties of demons, existing either in space-time or some other realm, then they would need to be observed and studied before we could draw any conclusions specifically about them, so empirical sutdy of some sort is required.

The other suggestion that though demons do not exist, there can nevertheless be true propositions about them.  This would require a move away from a classic objectual interpretation of the semantics of demon claims toward the less common substitutional interpretation.  Roughly, the former insists that ‘there are demons’ is true if and only if there is some object or entity that can serve as the value of the variable in an existentially quantified proposition, such as (Ex)x is a demon ((Ex)Dx).  If there are no demons, then there are no values for x, and the proposition is false.  The same applies for any other proposition about demons, such as demons are tall.  So, if there are truths about demons themselves, despite their non-existence, then we must interpret ‘there are demons’ as expressing a proposition that is made true so long as there is a term that, when substituted for a in ‘a is a demon’ yields a truth.  As many philosophers have pointed out, this seems to remain quite obscure: how can a term, a linguistic entity, a, make it true that a is a demon if there are no demons?  I think this question hist the mark, but the idea is, roughly, that fictional realms have sufficient richness to make it true that, say, unicorns have horns but not demons, even though both are non-existent, merely fictional entities.  How this could be is unclear, but proposals are out there: e.g. non-existent entities subsist even if they don’t exist – not sure what to make of that, but even assuming subsistence is something above and beyond mere make-believe, how do we learn about subsistent entities?  Perhaps intellectual intuition – some kind of intellectual contact with the abstract realm – would do the trick, but assuming, again, that this isn’t a form of make-believe, this seems relevantly like perception to stand in need of some kind of scientific investigation; at any rate, it is hard to know what a training just in humanities could reveal here.

So, what kind of analysis could one do on texts under the assumption that fictional worlds somehow manage to support true claims about demons, unicorns, centaurs, or what have you?  Since, by hypothesis, there are no such creatures, the analysis will not involve empirical investigation other than a psychological or sociological investigation into the states of the creators of fictional worlds, which brings us back to the need for trained scientists.  So, the analysis must be a priori, perhaps a conceptual investigation of the relationship between various parts of the fictional worlds.  The question is what ‘conceptual analysis’ is in this case.  One can easily imagine investigating a work of fiction for logical relations between propositions: finding inconsistencies, for example, or looking for formal entailments of key propositions in the literature.  The latter would involve something like translating the language of the literature into first order predicate calculus and then using well defined derivation rules to see what is entailed by the logical form of the relevant sentences.  This may be of some interest, though it still depends on bringing a discipline external to the fictional world – mathematical logic – to bear on the analysis of the world of fiction, and most humanists do not receive such training and, indeed, many philosophers do not either.  Further, formal logic is, arguably, a mathematical discipline, so it is not clear that this is a way into texts that is open to specifically humanistic training.

Of course there are certain to be all kinds of theories that some will wish to bring to the analysis of literature.  Economic, psychological, sociological, mathematical, etc. ones will fall under the purview of scientists, but there are others that purport to be non-scientific but still informative: Marxist, postmodernist, deconstructionist, etc.  One could imagine an argument to the effect that such theoretical stances allow for an analysis that is both internal to the texts but also informative.  I am not sure how this is supposed to work.  Take the case of Marx, for example; he took himself to be uncovering laws that governed human history, in part via a detailed examination of factory records.  If Marxist analysis of history and economics turns out to be false, it can hardly tell us anything interesting about the internal world of a text: false laws of material reality can have little bearing on a fictional world that subsists independently of its creator.  Even if they turn out to be true, it is hard to see their relevance: the laws of physics may be true, but what can they tell us about a fictional world of unicorns or demons?

So the question is what a theory that is not a purely logical one – so, one that can be learned in a typical humanities department – can tell us about the internal relations of the parts of pieces of literature without at some point relating the parts of the literary work to alleged facts about human psychology, society, economics, biology, etc.  What can something like deconstruction or postmodernism tell us about a piece of text that isn’t either a logical analysis or a scientific one?  This is, I should reiterate, all premised on the already flimsy assumption that realms of non-existent beings are sufficiently robust to allow for true propositions in the first place, which is by no means obvious.

This is starting to sound a bit like the classic positivist argument against metaphysics, but there is a difference, perhaps slight.  I am raising no objection to the Russellian-Quinean-Davidsonian-Putnamian program of tying metaphysics to science.  Whether through indispensability arguments, ontological commitments, or what have you, there is plenty of room on my view for metaphysics in philosophy.  It is just that metaphysics is grounded in, broadly speaking, two realms: mathematics/logic and science; it is, in fact, part of those realms, as Quine believed.  Russell argued, famously, that a logical analysis of the logical form of denoting phrases shows us that they are, in fact, not referential terms but propositional functions: existentially quantified formulas.  This allowed him to eliminate the need for reference to subsistent but non-existent entities, but it is possible for the analysis to go the other way: to demonstrate the need to posit a kind of entity that we did not previously realize we needed; e.g. sets or universals.  So, again, this is not a general argument against metaphysics.

The worry is that when one constructs a theory to take care of interpreting texts but that is neither scientific nor mathematical/logical in nature, i.e. a theory that is purely internal to the text, then one is more likely to be imposing or projecting than revealing or detecting.  That is, one could be smuggling into the theory at the ground floor what are just one’s a priori presuppositions about human nature, society, economics, physics, medicine, what have you, and then contorting the interpretation of the text to fit the theory.  Since texts fail to push back against us in the way that chemicals or living human beings do, it is far easier to hold onto one’s literary theory in the face of any possible textual evidence than it is to hold onto a chemical or psychological theory in the face of any possible chemical or behavioural evidence.  And, again, all of this is on the presupposition that a substitutional interpretation of propositions about non-existent entities works.

So, does the worry about demons in medieval literature generalize?  Are the humanities either science in disguise or speculative fiction?

Philosophy and Boxing

There is something about testing oneself.  I try my best to seek out challenges against which I can measure my abilities.  The tougher the challenge the better, so long as I can take the time to work my way up the skill ladder toward high level competence.  Once my training is done, however, I want to push myself against the very best available to see what kind of obstacle I can overcome.  It is only upon contact with the highest level of challenge that one truly knows who and what one is.  Without that external check, one’s internal processing can veer unimpeded toward fantasy and romance, leading one to believe all kinds of distortions about oneself and the world.  It is in facing a serious challenge that reckoning takes place, bringing with it clarity, knowledge, and insight.  Since understanding oneself is the goal of philosophy, and one cannot understand oneself without understanding one’s environment, facing up to serious challenge is the essence of philosophy.  That is why philosophers debate: we offer counter-examples, raise objections, propose thought-experiments, and construct arguments in order to challenge our own views as well as those of others whose views we are considering as, possibly, our own.

This is, however, also why we fight.  I am not talking about warfare or street fights, nor about heated anger, backstabbing, undermining, or political takedowns, though those may have some features in common with what I am discussing.  No, I primarily mean combat sports: boxing, MMA, Muay Thai, etc.  To enter into the boxing ring, for example, is to face a serious challenge head-on.  To test oneself against another person in controlled combat is to check one’s inner beliefs against the outside world.  Am I a good fighter?  Am I really in shape?  Might I make the Olympic Team?  Could I handle myself if my life were threatened?  Etc.  These are the sorts of questions that only others can answer for you, by standing across from you and attempting to knock you out, or at least down.  Of course, nobody should step into the ring without adequate training.  You must get fit and skilled by putting in the hours of working out, practicing, and managing one’s diet and sleep.  Nonetheless, after all that is done, there is only one way to know how good one is, and that is to face the challenge of another fighter.

One of the many interesting things about my personal favourite, boxing, is that it demonstrates a fine balance between rules and control, on the one hand, and creativity and unpredictability, on the other.  The basic principle of boxing is simplicity: four basic punches, simple footwork, efficient defence.  The goal is to combine these elements unpredictably to sow confusion in your opponent, which opens up defence and allows one to strike.  Ultimately, one aims to defeat one’s opponent, but the true goal is to know oneself: if one is good enough here, then one can push for even better fight partners; if not, one must step back and retrain.  

Now, the fight must be fair for the simple reason that if not, then the result tells us nothing about how good we are as combatants, and this holds especially for the victor. That is why enlightening combat must have rules and while, in general, the limits of boxing are agreed upon in advance, referees exist to, in part, enforce the limits.  For these reasons, street fights and backstabbing attacks in the workplace have limited philosophical value for the attacker: victory will occur without any gain in self-knowledge. There may be something to learn about how one reacts to an unfair, unprovoked attack, but the assailant will certainly learn nothing of value about himself/herself.  These are not, therefore, good fights.  One must fight fairly for oneself as much as for one’s opponent, for otherwise the opportunity for philosophical insight is destroyed.

So I remain unsurprised by the fact that I am drawn to both boxing and philosophy.  I understand why the ancient philosophers saw combat training as part of a philosophical life, and I am drawn to the interpretation of a philosopher such as Epictetus as a kind of wrestling coach (see here for an interesting take).  Put simply, there is no philosophy without understanding, and there is no understanding without challenge.

Philosophy is often portrayed nowadays as excessively combative (see, for example, the opening paragraphs of this interesting essay) and while, much as in boxing, one can certainly step out of bounds in philosophical debate – and unfortunately, there are no referees to bring things back in bounds – in general, I am suspicious of this complaint.  Intellectual combat, within the rules and conducted fairly of course, is necessary to test one’s beliefs for philosophical value.  It is far too easy for anyone to get lost in flights of fancy dressed up in philosophical language, but ultimately leading nowhere. Much as one can be the greatest boxer in the world in one’s mind, one can be the purveyor of the greatest philosophical knowledge in one’s mind.  Training in the gym is some indication of one’s skill in combat, but only a good opponent can tell us the truth.  Similarly, a coherent philosophical system is some indication of insight, but only philosophical combatants can reveal the truth.  Too much sympathy with a philosopher’s views can in fact be counter-productive for him/her if it interferes with the level of critical engagement required to see just how far the views can be pushed.  

Certainly philosophical exchange should be fair and reasonable, without personal, gratuitous, or otherwise inappropriate attacks because victory by such means tells us nothing about ourselves as philosophers. However, I think philosophical debate, like all intellectual pursuits, is inevitably combative and rightly so. This can lead to painful experiences, to be sure, but pain is a large part of learning, as any boxer will tell you after he/she drops his hands in front of a good coach!  Philosophers should not shy away from the combative elements of the discipline, though we should do what we can to abide by fair standards and rules that apply to all.  I wonder what the philosophical equivalent of a weight-class would be…

Oh, and if you are in Kingston and want to learn how to box, here is the place to go.

On Freedom of Expression

I think it is worth reminding ourselves why freedom of expression matters.  There were times when any of the following suggestions might have provoked stunned outrage: that Jews be allowed to own land or hold political office; that women be allowed to vote; that African Americans be granted full citizenship.  The free expression of dissenting views was of the utmost importance in those days.  It remains so today, even if the particular suggestions just noted are no longer taken seriously.  Unfortunately, there are debates in academic philosophy today that are conducting themselves without proper regard for the importance of allowing dissenting views to see the light of day.

I was thinking about this recently upon learning that the very excellent interviewer, Richard Marshall, resigned from 3AM Magazine after the decision was made to remove an interview he conducted from the magazine (see here or here).  I don't fault the magazine for this, as it was under immense pressure and acted reluctantly.  That, however, is what makes this situation so worrisome.  Reasoned dissent is not a threat to moral progress, but essential to it.

Noam Chomsky is right: either you believe in freedom of speech for those you disagree with or you don't believe in it at all; even Goebbels believed in freedom of speech for those he agreed with.  We need to remember this.  Everybody, on every side of a serious dispute, believes that he or she is on the side of the good and the true.  The value of freedom of expression comes from the knowledge that anybody can be wrong, and we won't know who is if we do not allow all considered views into the arena of debate.  Without such freedom, we have no check against persistent ignorance.  This is why such freedom is a foundational value of any civilized society, and its dismissal cannot be tolerated on the basis of offence.  Just because one is offended, it does not follow that one is right.  Those who found the very idea of a woman voting shocking did not gain any epistemic standing from the strength of their outrage.  The same holds today for anybody, even those on the right side of a dispute: one's outrage carries no probative value, except, perhaps, in demonstrating something about one's personality.

I think that the value of free inquiry goes even further than this, however, to the individual level.  Without the freedom to personally consider all viewpoints, no individual can fully self-develop.  The ability to openly explore all possibilities in creating a life path is central to the formation of the self.  Freedom of speech and thought lies, therefore, at the basis of human flourishing.

Of course there are risks associated with erring on the side of freedom of expression, but the best defence against bad views is counter-argument, not censorship, dogmatic resistance, or loud sloganeering.  If we stand by while the views we disagree with are silenced, it is only a matter of time before the views we agree with are silenced.

It is deeply worrisome to me that philosophy - of all disciplines! - should be losing sight of this in even the slightest of ways.  We are not doing justice to our worthy inheritance.  I fear that many philosophers today would be on the side of the Athenian government supporting Socrates' conviction rather than standing up for his right to offend.

Some Reflections on the Chomsky-Foucault Debate

After ten years on my shelf, I finally picked up and read The Chomsky-Foucault Debate.  I knew a fair bit about Chomsky’s philosophy and much less about Foucault’s, but came away with increased admiration for both.  I found Foucault’s responses to indicate a very subtle and thoughtful approach to historical and conceptual questions and I was impressed by how much agreement there was between him and Chomsky.

            Where they mostly disagree is on the nature of political justice as well as the idea of human nature.  Chomsky has famously argued that there must be something like a human nature, by which he means an inborn set of cognitive capacities inherited from our genetic ancestors.  These would allow human beings to solve the practical induction problem of there being no way to determine the difference between a linguistic noise and a non-linguistic one by simple sensory exposure. They would also explain the similarity in structure between all languages, the ability of children from any part of the world to learn the language of any other part, and so on.

            Foucault is sceptical of the idea of human nature because of the observed plasticity of concepts in general through history.  Something that is seen as an eternal necessity in one era is rejected as trivially false in another.  More notably, the ways in which concepts, such as ‘human nature’, are understood often seems to be the result of the wish of the powerful to marginalize, exclude, or punish certain groups in society.  So, for example, one human trait might be deemed natural, or part of human nature, so that those who lack it can be confined to institutions, subjected to degrading treatments, or teased.  Terms referring to torturous acts can be medicalized in order to seem like neutral, benign practices.   All of this has the effect of rendering a substantial sub-group of the population oppressed and without a voice, so changes in our understanding of the human being, biology, medicine, and social institutions are not necessarily indicative of progress toward truth or enlightenment.  Indeed, Foucault expresses a very deep scepticism of the very concept of such progress simply because every concept will be subject to such arbitrary mangling: this includes such concepts as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘objectivity’, ‘rationality’, ‘evidence’, ‘science’, and so on.  No idea can be assumed to be free of the ad hoc manipulations of the powerful.

            In essence, Chomsky agrees with this on the social and political level.  He accepts that powerful groups – state governments, multi-national corporations, and so on – purposely, if not always explicitly, exert tremendous control on the generation and distribution of ideas in society: what gets heard, as opposed to silenced; taken seriously, as opposed ridiculed; presented as settled instead of controversial; dismissed as absurd as opposed to respected; and so on, is in various ways a product of what powerful groups and individuals want the general public to think.  He believes there is effectively greater ideological control in the United States than in fascist Spain (the control is exerted subtly rather than by government force).

            Where Chomsky disagrees is at the individual level. No matter how concepts may be contorted and disfigured, it is absurd to suppose that individual human beings are formless, perfectly plastic blobs, simply waiting for the imprint of their ideological environment.  After all, a perfectly formless entity – it surely couldn’t rightly be an object in any interesting sense – would be unable to absorb any imprinting: to draw an imperfect analogy, you could press your hand into the vacuum of space all you want and never leave a print; but if you press your hand into clay, then a mark will be formed.  So, human beings must have some kind of structure of receptivity in order to be subject to conceptual manipulation and, therefore, to be able to take up concepts in the first place.  Chomsky thinks this is compatible with the kind of historical abuses aptly pointed out by Foucault.

            To put it another way, without a background of relatively fixed form, the concepts of manipulation, change, or distortion would have no application.  If literally everything goes, then nothing does: clay can only be deformed because if it has an internal structure to begin with.  On this, I am firmly on Chomsky’s side: if there is change, of either a benign or malicious kind, then there must be some structure to be altered.

            So one question I have is what the impact is of Foucault’s observation – which I also think is true – that many medical, scientific, philosophical, political, economic, social, etc., terms and concepts have gone through significant historical changes.  What are we to make of the fact that what is considered a benign, even beneficent ‘medical’ intervention in 1880 is considered an unthinkable attempt at social control or even torture today?  What is the implication of this sort of historical variability?

            Well, it seems to me that the answer is at a certain level pretty straightforward, though things get complicated pretty quickly. First, as noted above, such alternation couldn’t have any impact on human beings if we weren’t the kinds of creature who are, innately, subject to conceptual impact.  You can shout obscenities at a rock or twig all you want, or you can offer the most soothing words you know, and you won’t change its response to the forces of gravity.  You can calmly and soothingly insult your dog and not impact its self-esteem in any way.  Yet, with human beings, even the most subtle form of insult can trigger large responses, and certainly institutional settings can change our sense of what is possible for us to achieve because of our observation of what is acceptable/rewarded and what is unacceptable/punished.  So, the kind of historical, conceptual plasticity rightly noted by Foucault in fact depends on the kind of human nature that Chomsky defends, i.e. one that is subject to conceptual impact.  The fact that the concept ‘human nature’ itself has undergone historical transformations doesn’t contradict this.

            But there is something more intriguing to me that comes out of the discussion between Chomsky and Foucault on political justice. Chomsky believes that it is part of our inherited human nature that we strive for creativity and meaningful engagement with our surroundings.  Indeed, it is his argument that the learning or usage of language, even in its most basic forms, is an ongoing act of creativity that is outside the scope of explanation by current principles of natural science.  So, he thinks it is of our essence to be creative and free, and that this has implications for the proper arrangement of society: it should be one in which individuals are, insofar as possible, enabled to pursue creative, meaningful interactions with their surroundings.  Moreover, systems can be judged as relatively just or unjust along such a dimension, i.e. how amenable they are to such freedom and creativity.

            What surprised me most of all in reading the debate was how strongly Foucault rejected this, in large part, so far as I can tell, because it all rests on notions of both ‘human nature’ and ‘justice’ that, he believes, can have no fixed, ahistorical content.  What is ‘just’ for one context is the height of malevolence in another. Hence there is simply no hope of measuring justice, even in theory because there is no measure outside of a given context.  Now, in one sense I think this is what one would expect if one were to hold that human beings and human ideas are all inherently formless: there could hardly be a fact as to what promotes or degrades human well-being if there are no facts about well-being.  Foucault says:

“When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power.  I can’t see what objection one could make to this” (p. 52).

He says later:

“it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power” (p. 54).

So this really suggests that it is the idea that human concepts have no essence – they are inherently without form – that supports a rather nihilistic conclusion: that there is nothing we can say by way of criticism when the powerful abuse the powerless.  It is just what is done, and words will be twisted to mean whatever the relevant group – powerful or powerless – want them to mean.  If this is true, however, then there is no difference between good and bad uses of a concept, so there can be no such thing as improperly or unjustly pathologizing any given kind of human behaviour.  So calling all the X's in human society "great" and "in need of medical treatment to eliminate X-behaviour" are equally good or bad.

            One thing that is going on is that Foucault thinks that the concepts we have can’t be used to fight and overthrow the system in which the concepts are born:

“you can’t prevent me from believing that these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realization of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilization, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can’t, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should – and shall in principle – overthrow the very fundaments of our society.  This is an extrapolation for which I can’t find the historical justification” (pp. 57-58).

Now there is a sense of what we might call “taint creep” here: since all concepts are born in a system that is tainted to a certain degree, they are all thoroughly and irredeemably tainted themselves.  I’m not sure why we should believe this.  But this can’t be quite right, because outside of a conceptual system, the notion of “taint” lacks application.

            Of course, this might be simply a prediction or empirical claim: as a matter of fact, using concepts such as “justice”, which are born in a classist system, simply will fail to have any impact in overthrowing or substantially changing that system.  I gather that the evidence for this comes in the final sentence of the above quotation, namely that Foucault hasn’t found any historical example of concepts within a system being employed to overthrow that system.  An analogy might be as follows: as long as one limits oneself to the vocabulary of capitalism, one will be unable to overthrow capitalism, or even properly conceive of this overthrow, because the terms one uses will carry, implicitly perhaps, the justification for capitalism. 

            Okay, but can one not, even within the framework of capitalism, say, recognize certain limitations, such as great inequality, for example? Upon seeing this, can one not conceive of the need to modify or even overthrow the system, in order to eliminate this problem?  Notice that in the quotation above, Foucault points out the inadequacy of concepts such as “justice” to carry out a fight that should overthrow the fundamentals of society.  How can he suggest that this should be done, unless he conceives of a flaw in the current system that implies some action is normatively required?  Or, is “should” here merely an expression of personal taste, in which case why take it seriously?

            More importantly, if any social change is to occur, human beings are going to have to organize, communicate, and act in some sort of concerted effort.  This will require the employment of language and appeal to concepts: cohesive social effort of the type required is impossible otherwise.  Let us grant that Foucault is right and that all concepts are born of some social context.  If that means all concepts and ideas are tainted, then all attempts at change will require tools tainted by the vested interests of those who create and control concepts.  

Does it follow, however, that the result of such changes will be similarly tainted?  I don’t think so.  There is some kind of projection fallacy going on here: even if all the hammers used to build a house are made of wood, it doesn’t follow that the house is made of wood.  If a house is built out of sand, water, and a binding agent such as cement, one is left with a house that is neither sand, nor water, nor cement but, rather, concrete.  Properties of those things that construct something new are not necessarily transferred to that something new: some may be, but it is far from necessary. I imagine that Foucault’s point may be that whatever revolution we construct, the result will be at least in part a new conceptual system, and all concepts do necessarily carry the biases, distortions and power grab of some group or another.  Perhaps, but this doesn’t show that improvement is impossible: maybe there is no ideal landing spot available to us, no matter how revolutionary our actions, but perhaps some conceptual biases will be better for human beings than others. 

Of course, this is where I imagine Foucault insisting that “better for” is simply the invention of a few, used to placate themselves that they are doing the “right” thing and so feel better about whatever the results of their actions may end up being.  I don’t see any reason to believe this, unless one thinks that all properties of concepts, including their genetic ones, transfer to whatever those concepts are used to build, and this seems fallacious to me.

But I detect something else in the passages quoted above.  If all concepts, being born somewhere in some social context, are thereby unfit to serve the purposes of critiquing their social, political, or economic, system, then this would suggest that we need to transcend concepts/ideas altogether in order to achieve genuine political insight.  If the concepts that exist necessarily recapitulate the systems in which they are born, then escaping a system means escaping conceptual thought. This ties up with the denial of human nature, with the insistence that we, and perhaps all beings, are formless: the constraints implicit in conceptual systems are ill-suited to represent that which is without form.  This is interesting, but I think it is fatally flawed: that which is utterly formless, can sustain no imperatives, no creativity, neither advance nor retreat, nothing at all really.  A formless realm of thought, as Chomsky points out, is one in which nothing goes because anything does.  A truly limitless system of concepts would be one in which anything can mean anything in any way, which means it is impossible to interpret, at least by creatures such as ourselves; but then it is not clear how it could lead to anything at all, never mind social change.

In the end, I think the choice boils down to a Chomskean notion that progress, however small, can be made within a corrupt system so long as we open our minds and seek justice and fairness, or else a kind of fatalistic surrender in which no cohesive action is conceivable.  As Chomsky argues, creativity requires the friction provided by conceptual limits, and this includes thinking creatively about how to improve the lives of human beings.  I think Foucault’s arguments that this is impossible either because concepts such as justice can never escape the power systems in which they are born, or else because concepts are simply not suited to the job of revolutionary thinking, seems to be either fallacious because it makes a kind of genetic fallacy, or else hopeless, because it amounts to the idea that, in order to truly change things, we must access a purely limitless conceptual realm, which seems like a contradiction in terms: ‘limitless’ and ‘conceptual’ are at odds.

Perhaps that is our lot: there is simply nothing to say about the world, really; all is projection and there simply can be no objective facts at all, not even ones about small, incremental improvements.  This view is, however, self-undermining because in order for there to be projections at all, there must be some things that can be impressed upon and some effects of such impressions, as argued above.  If the world were truly without inherent form, this would include human minds as well, and there would be no way for concepts to have any impact whatsoever, and even historical plasticity would be an illusion, though even illusion would be impossible, for they have a certain form. That fact that there is illusion, entails that there is form to the human mind because the formless cannot be subject to illusion.

So, I think it is safe to side with Chomsky: there are facts about human nature, and there could very well be facts about what is better or worse for that nature.   This does not entail that human nature, or natural nature, is fixed and timeless; either could be subject to change with time. But at any given time in which there is so much as the acceptance of a concept, or the illusion of natural structure, is one in which there is some form of structure in the world, no matter how obscure it may seem to us.