James Hilton's 'Goodbye Mr. Chips' was about an old fashioned Classics Master at a minor Public School. He loses his wife in childbirth & teaching Virgil- Vidui magistri maxima vigilia maturescunt animi- keeping widowed vigil over scholastic soul ripening- becomes the one solace of his lonely life.
In return, he comes to be greatly loved by the boys & the fathers of those boys who had once been his students. Hilton's point was that 'Humanities' (i.e. teaching Latin & Greek) had become sub-human and as dry as dust, but could humanise- or even heal the heart- if teaching and studying the subject corresponded to some closer emotional bond- that between man & wife or a boy & his Mum & Dad- which, alas!, had to held in abeyance for a period.
When the boys say goodbye to Mr. Chips, they are preserving his memory within the shrine of an alma mater they will look back upon as a foretaste of Paradise.
Daedalus, which is published by MIT press, has a shockingly stupid essay- one unleavened by any trace of a liberal education- by Prof. Appiah- who was educated at Bryanston- the fashionably, Dalton Plan, Touchy-Feely, verging on Vegan, if not outright Heathen, Eton- & is the grandson of, 'the carrot Chancellor'- Sir Stafford Cripps.
Apparently, he used to stay with his grandmother (Sir Stafford died before Appiah was born) who was an overseas aid organiser by profession. She was the daughter of the eponymous inventor of Eno's fruit salts- which, I believe, are an essential component of the Gujarati diet. Them fuckers be smart, rich, slim, yet- for such is my ipse dixit credo- as constipated as fuck.
It must be said, the chief value of the Humanities is that they are the mental equivalent of a does of salts- purgative & cathartic & only psychologically necessary for those not potty-trained id est the victims of progressive education stupid enough to be further victimised by higher education in that type of coprophagous self-sodomy.
Both sides of Appiah's family were very distinguished, highly educated, and he himself became something of an academic super-star.
This sterling background of his suggests that teaching shite to Ivy League cretins causes brain-rot.
August 22 2022
Philosophy, the Humanities & the Life of Freedom
Three things between which there is no necessary, or useful, connection.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Abstract
Humanistic disciplines
descend from 'Studia Humanitatis' as opposed to Theological studies and drew upon 'secular' Greek & Latin works. History, Philosophy & Literature are Humanities. Economics, I believe, split off as it became more mathematical & empirical. The Law has always been separate but Jurisprudence could be considered part of Philosophy. Philology of a technical sort or Linguistics with a mathematical description too may be regarded as having separated from the Humanities.
The question now is whether the Humanities have become a paranoid or hysterical branch of 'Grievance Studies'. It deals with the sub-human & represents a mischief against the common-weal.
have family resemblances rather than a simple shared common aim or method
They have such resemblances with STEM subjects, Econ, Political Science, etc.
, and, like literal family resemblances, these have an explanation that comes from their historical relationships to one another.
No. There has been 'convergent evolution'. In other words, the same sort of thing appears in widely separated places with similar technology & socio-economic arrangements
Philosophy, in particular, is closely connected to the sciences it has spun off over the centuries, but remains distinct from them, because
it deals only with 'open problems' which it doesn't have the means to 'close'.
normative inquiry uses methods different from those of any contemporary science.
Not if deontic systems have a representation in mathematical logic. There is little difference between an 'expert system' & a deontic system. A group of lawyers interpreting a 'morals clause' in a contract may arrive at the same conclusion as a moral theorist even though they reason in different ways.
But much philosophical inquiry, like much humanistic work, is also idiographic rather than nomothetic; it focuses our attention on particular things, rather than seeking generalizations.
I can think of no example of any 'particular thing' a philosophical inquiry has focused on. It may seek to answer the question 'when is war just?' even if it then goes onto argue that a particular war is just.
The rewards of humanistic study are, therefore, as diverse as what we can gain from paying attention to its diverse objects of study.
Why bother studying- unless the only job you can get is teaching- when just paying attention is as rewarding?
In ethics and political philosophy, in particular, we learn from studying particular episodes in which we discover the significance of certain values by recognizing what is wrong in societies in which they are not respected.
No. We might say 'such and such Society- which everybody knows fucked up big time, did not respect such and such value. This suggests that we need to do more to promote that value lest the same fate befall us.' Thus we might say 'America now tolerates homosexuality. Guess which other society did so? Sodom! Let us ban sodomy- which violates Kant's 'categorical imperative coz I don't want no dicks up my bum- lest a big earthquake causes us all to perish'.
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
To be fair, Witless lived at a time when biological Racism was considered scientific.
No one who is wise will aim to define the humanities in a sentence or two.
The Humanities are what descend from Studia Humanitatis. That's good enough. Kripkean rigid-designators are very effective in reducing ambiguity.
We use the term to refer to a remarkable variety of scholarly activities and, surveying them, it is not obvious that they have some shared something-an essence, some conditions necessary and sufficient for membership-that explains why we should lump them all together. One common use of the term in practice is to organize the administration of the university, where we have deans of humanities, alongside deans of social sciences, deans of natural sciences, and, often, people with various other decanal titles. But many departments fit uneasily into these structures. Are anthropologists and historians, say, humanists or social scientists?
Social scientists. The ancients didn't greatly care about the customs of savage tribes though a Pro-Consul might describe them.
Some seem surely to be one or the other; many look a little like both.
We may say, 'this Physicist or Soccer player writes in a humanistic way. I suppose this is because he comes from a cultured family or received a classical education.'
Where does cognitive science-with its computer scientists, its philosophers and neuroscientists and psychologists and linguists- belong?
With natural science. If you don't make that cut because your theory is stupid & useless, you may be considered a philosopher instead- e.g. Chomsky.
It seems pointless to insist on settling the question, save as a matter of administrative convenience.
Humanities are cheaper to teach. Scientists need expensive labs. There may have to be cross-subsidisation from the Humanities & Law & Business faculties.
The humanities dean will hope for fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, but will be delighted, too, when philosophers working on consciousness get grants from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Some may. Some may not. The balance of power within the Department may have shifted. If there are commercial applications, the best students may reject the humanistic Professor's courses & opt for those by the Sciencey guy. But that fellow may himself depart to Google or OpenAI.
You might think that the difficulty here derives from the fact that the various fields of the humanities display the sort of similarities to one another that Wittgenstein, thinking about games, called family resemblances. It is easy to see what he had in mind. I have the same nose as one of my sisters,
so do, by convergent evolution, some people living far away from you. The two of you may not have a common ancestor with that trait.
like my mother and her father, but our eyes are much darker than theirs were. My father and I had gestures in common, as well as genes. But, as you know, the y-chromosome I got from my father is in none of my sisters or their children and grandchildren. Nevertheless, any two of us-any two of the more than a dozen descendants of my parents-have things in common (family resemblances, then) even if there are no traits distinctive of the family that we all share. Even in the scattered world of my third cousins, who number in the thousands, I will see, from time to time, that nose, which my grandfather got from his grandfather, whose seven daughters spawned one part of that network of my kin.
There is a species resemblance. Particular lineages may have sexual-selection rules or practices which lead to heterogeneity within the same basal population.
But focusing on these various resemblances alone misses something important.
It really doesn't.
Namely, that they have a historical explanation. I have that nose because I got the genes for it from my mother.
This is a type of history everybody is aware of by the age of 5. Families have histories.
Her father got it from his grandfather, by way of his mother. Those gestures I share with my father, I learned from him. I take a lesson from this: sometimes the explanation of why things belong together, the explanation of their family resemblances, is genealogical.
Which is why it is enough to say 'the Humanities descend from Studia Humanitates' - i.e 'a classical academic curriculum designed to foster moral and intellectual virtue. Initiated by Italian humanists, it focused on grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy based on Greek and Latin classics, designed to create well-rounded citizens.'
There is a historical story, which may or may not be genetic, as to why they are there. And because history is messy and multifarious, there may be many such stories, some not much connected with others.
Do these stories matter? No.
I want to discuss some of the ways in which one part of the contemporary philosophical landscape- the part that has to do with ethics and politics- fits into, and does not fit into, the humanities.
Economics relies on Structural Causal Models of a mathematical type whose fundamental concepts- e.g. 'equilibrium' are taken from Physics. That is where the humanistic approach falls down.
Given our focus, I will be paying attention to the family resemblances at work in the literary and artistic humanities and to the humanistic aspects of the social sciences.
Why bother? The thing is self-evident.
But let me say at the start that I think the links to the social and biological sciences are important, too.
D'uh!
I argued this before, in a book called Experiments in Ethics, in which I tried to show how ethics profits from a dialogue with what used to be called the “moral sciences”: anthropology, economics, evolutionary psychology, and sociology.
But does anybody else profit? No.
A little genealogical sketch may help illuminate why, nevertheless, there is reason to place us in a different family history as well. And the analogy to family histories here is crucial: all of us belong to many families, traceable by a variety of ancestries.
In his preface to the 1787 edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant said he wanted philosophy to take “the secure path of a science.”
Later still, he wanted to reduce metaphysics to physics. He was quite mad by then.
That move is one crucial starting point for modern professional philosophy in Europe and the cultures that have taken philosophy from her.
Kant was reacting, in a stupid manner, to what he considered a 'dogmatic' error of Leibniz.
But what most of us in philosophy departments in the North Atlantic world now do does not belong, in a variety of ways, with either the natural or the social sciences, and it is worth asking why.
The answer is 'bundling'. Oligopolistic Colleges can force students to take some useless courses which are cheap to teach. Also, affirmative action is more easily implemented by choosing cretins to teach crap.
One reason, to start us off, is that what we often call nowadays the “Western” philosophical canon-which runs from
Pythagoras & before him some Egyptian or Sumerian dudes who made mathematical discoveries of a useful type.
Socrates, Plato,
who wanted rich kids to study a bit of Math. There were some very good mathematicians who were Platonists.
and Aristotle, via Ibn Rushd and Aquinas, and on through Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Leibnitz to Kant himself- has spun off a great many sciences,
They appeared by themselves because they were useful. Progress accelerated greatly once applications became more & more lucrative or else competition grew more intense. There was a national security aspect to this.
which have then set out on their own. Without Descartes, no Cartesian coordinates;
Independently discovered by Fermat. A Math professor, whose father had also been a Math professor, Franciscus van Schooten gave us our modern two axis system.
without Leibnitz and calculus,
Newton
no modern physics;
Galileo, Kepler etc.
without Pascal, no probability theory;
Nonsense! Cardano was earlier & more important.
without Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, no economics;
Rubbish! Every country had its own tradition of 'political arithmetic'. My impression is that the School of Salamanca influenced Hutcheson who influenced Smith & Bentham. Ricardo & Malthus were important. But Mill missed the Marginalist boat.
without Turing, no computer science;
Fuck off! There was Weiner & Church & so forth. Anyway, Turing wasn't a philosopher.
no Rudolf Carnap, no Chomskyan linguistics.
Zelig Harris was on the right track. Chomsky wasn't. Don't blame Carnap for this.
So when a subject matter and a set of techniques develop to the point where they can be carried on by a new kind of specialist, they can bud, so to speak, off the philosophical branch.
No. All we can say is that philosophers should stop talking about a thing once some other discipline 'closes' the question. Don't talk about why synthetic a priori truths or 'incongruent counterparts' exist when Science has shown that the examples given of them are false.
Nevertheless, philosophy maintains connections with all of those sciences: first, because philosophers think about the philosophy of each particular discipline, of mathematics, physics, biology, economics, and so on.
If the question is 'open', that's fine. The problem is that philosophers no longer know what has been closed.
And second, because there are philosophical questions that need to take account of the best science of our day.
Sadly, philosophers are too stupid to know what that is.
There are many reasons why this, too, is so.
Here is one. Ontology is about what there is. How can we answer that question adequately while ignoring physics, biology, economics, and psychology?
Fartology is about farts. How can we fart an answer to the question posed by a fart while ignoring the smell? Easily enough. The thing doesn't matter in the slightest.
But another important reason is this, and it is crucial to my present purpose. Morality, which is part of the subject matter of ethics, is about what to do and what to feel;
It may be. It may not. Suppose I can do nothing- because I am paralysed. Suppose further that I can't have feelings for some neurological reason. There may still be some matters I consider moral or immoral. The nurse left the TV on and I am watching a child being tortured. I may feel no emotion but I may say to myself- 'hurting a child' is immoral.' This may be something I have learned or something I have decided for myself.
about how we should respond to our own, each other's, and the world's demands. And to apply norms sensibly we must understand the empirical contexts in which we apply them.
No. The point about a norm is that it is action-guiding even when there is little knowledge of the situation. This is actually both helpful & necessary. The soldier obeys orders even if he suspects that the situation might not be what his commander envisaged. The commander benefits by knowing that soldiers aren't going to second-guess commands.
No one, of course, denies that in applying norms, you need to know what, as an empirical matter, the effects of what you do will be on others.
That may be desirable. It may not. There is a theory that an omniscient human would do nothing whatsoever because he would know all the consequences of any possible action he could take. But it may be that the best path for Humanity would be one where they discovered everything on their own.
An opponent who denied that would be a straw man.
No. He would be sensible.
There are real opponents, though, who deny that psychology can be relevant to the question of what values we ought to be guided by and what sorts of people we should aim to be.
Values are psychological constructs. A guy who doesn't get this is not an opponent. He is a fucking cretin.
To such opponents, one can reasonably put questions such as these.
What would be the point of norms that human beings could not, given our psychologies, obey?
Their point would be to cause us to follow some other norm which we can obey. Suppose I am a paedophile. I can't stop myself from harming children. I can surrender myself to the police & get locked up or chemically castrated or whatever. Alternatively, I could just kill myself.
After all, reflection suggests, in a philosopher's formula, that “ought” usually implies “can.” (Which means that if you say somebody ought to do something, you must ordinarily be supposing that it is something they can do.)
Not necessarily. You ought not to molest kids. I you can't stop yourself from doing so, kill yourself. If you can't even do that, chop your dick off. If that too is beyond you, get some sort of psychiatric help. It may not work, but at least you tried.
And even if unfollowable norms had some sort of ideal force, how should we actual humans respond to them?
To the best of our ability.
If moral philosophy is to connect with moral life, if it is not to be, in the justly pejorative sense, “merely theoretical,” it must attend, in articulating and defending norms, to how they can come to bear in actual lives.
This should already be fucking obvious.
During the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume began his 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by distinguishing two sorts of moral philosopher. One sort, he said, makes “us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments.” And, he goes on, as long as “they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honour, they think, that they have fully attained the end of all their labours.”
If they can do that, they 'pay their way'.
The others “regard human nature as a subject of speculation; and with a narrow scrutiny examine it, in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object, action, or behaviour.”
This can't be done. It is a waste of time.
But it is hard to see how we can pursue the first project of moral exhortation and reform if what we learn in the second, speculative, project suggests that our recommendations are hopelessly unrealistic.
We can pursue any project to the best of our ability. We can't fly. But we can jump. By becoming very good at jumping we could win a Gold medal at the Olympics.
At the very least, then, we would owe the psychologists a hearing in our moral lives,
We only owe people something if they gained some benefit for us or we have received some reward, or otherwise acquired an obligation towards them.
even if there were a kind of speculative philosophy that could ignore them.
This is also true of fartology which ignores speculative farts if thinks sub par.
You can go too far in the other direction, of course. Neuroscientist Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, aimed to meet head-on a claim he says he has often encountered: that the scientific worldview he favors must be silent on moral questions.
It is likely that morality evolved alongside 'big brains'. The problem is, some animals appear moral to us while others are naughty and fly around shitting on our heads.
Religion and philosophy deal with questions about “meaning, morality, and life's larger purpose,” people say, questions that have no scientific answers.
If they relate to the super-natural or the after-life, that probably is the case.
Harris's view is exactly the opposite. Only science can help us answer these questions, he says. That is because truths about morality and meaning “must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures,” and science alone-especially neuroscience, his own field of expertise-can uncover those facts.
If others of his profession agree, who are we to cavil?
So rather than consulting Aristotle or Kant (let alone the Bible or the Koran) about what it is for human beings to flourish, why not turn to the sciences that study conscious mental life?
Plenty of people do so. I must admit that my view on the 'un-naturality' of homosexuality changed after reading popular science books by ethologists or evolutionary game theorists.
Harris means to be denying a thought often ascribed to the same David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values, the former being susceptible of rational investigation, the latter, supposedly, not.
All cultures distinguish between what is imperative & what is alethic. Claims of both types can be subjected to rational scrutiny.
According to Harris, the values, too, can be uncovered by science, the right values, whose pursuit promotes our well-being.
Nothing wrong with that. We might say that Harris proposes a neurological 'meta-ethics'. Would this differ from an economic 'meta-ethics'? Perhaps. What is more likely is that different 'meta-ethics' have the same 'ethics' or, can easily be changed till they do.
Wait, though. How do we know that the morally right act is,
we have no way to measure or objectively verify moral righteousness
as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind?
we don't know how to measure 'well-being'.
We may affirm that the one is equal to the other but affirmation is not knowledge.
Has science revealed that? No. And I do not see how it could. That does not seem like a question to be settled through experiment, even guided by theory. And if science cannot do that, then the starting premise of Harris's arguments must have nonscientific origins.
Not necessarily. A thing which we can't currently measure or verify may become measurable or verifiable at some future point. What is important is whether there is an 'objective function' to be minimized or maximised. If so, you have 'naturality' & a non-arbitrary metric. Sadly, if Life evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape, there will be an arbitrary element in the objective function.
In fact, what Harris ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism,
Bentham could be translated into neurological terms. But, we suspect, neurological states are 'multiply realisable'. This is like saying you can get the same utility level by changing what you want rather than getting more of it.
a philosophical position that is now some two centuries old
One could say Moh Tzu was the first utilitarian 2400 years ago.
and that faces, as all familiar philosophical positions do, a battery of familiar challenges. The idea is that we should aim to maximize human (or perhaps animal) welfare and that that is all that matters. But even if you accept that basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different creatures?
Antidosis. Would they be willing to exchange states?
Should we aim to increase average well-being (in which case a world consisting of one blissed-out hippie may be better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)?
If one person has a 'bliss-point' many others are likely to do so. Alternatively, they could be altered in some way till such is the case.
Or should we go for total well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are barely worth living)?
What we go for depends on what we can achieve. Talking bollocks doesn't actually change the world.
If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what is wrong with killing someone in his sleep?
It creates a precedent for your own being killed.
How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?
Apply a discount rate. We actually do this when we save money or run up credit card debt.
Does no one have rights that we need to take account of?
Rights are linked to remedies under a vinculum juris. Sadly, they may not enforceable in an economical manner.
But the deepest challenge to the only-science answer though, I think, is this.
The soul is a supernatural substance. Only Canadians lack it.
Psychology and neuroscience can tell you what it takes for a normal person to feel satisfaction; economics and political science help you think about what the effects of various public policies will be; physics, chemistry, and biology tell us how the world works, so that we can take what we want from it. These things are all true. Still, given these facts about what produces satisfaction, who will help you decide whether John Stuart Mill was right to say, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”?
Dissatisfaction doesn't greatly matter. Bing repeatedly kicked in the balls does matter.
Indeed, which experiment will confirm that this question is even worth asking?
The experiment of asking to get paid for asking a puerile question. True, if what you are employed to do is a type of glorified chid-minding, babbling baby talk is how you while away the working week.
And where will you learn that one reason for studying the sciences is that understanding how the universe works, understanding where we fit into it, would be worthwhile in itself, even if we never put the knowledge to use in doing anything?
This is also the reason why fartology is worthwhile.
Faced with people who do not understand this, and who insist that their lives are entirely satisfactory without that knowledge, it is hard to see why they should respond to the fact that many other people do get satisfaction from it. They will, no doubt, have other satisfactions.
Some people gain satisfaction by eating their own boogers. So what?
So though there is much for ethics to learn from the sciences, natural and social, ethics cannot be reduced to questions those sciences are equipped to answer.
Sadly, the answers Science gives can 'pay for themselves'. That is why there is more and more money for Science while Philosophy only attracts cretins.
And the methods of reflection that philosophers use in answering questions about, to stick with our example, the nature of well-being-the question of what it is for a human life to go well-may draw on the results of experiments but are not themselves experimental; theoretical argument in philosophy is also mostly very unlike theoretical argument in biology or physics. That is a first important reason, then, why ethics does not belong among the sciences, even though it needs to be in continuous conversation with them.
A cretin gains nothing by being in continuous conversation with smart people.
Our methods are often very different.
IQ levels are tragically different.
My main focus in this essay is going to be on another kind of reason, though: the fact that ethics, unlike the sciences, needs to maintain its contacts with the arts and humanities.
True. If you haven't been watching 'South Park' you haven't been doing Ethical Philosophy.
Poetry, fiction, biography, art, and music, as well as literary criticism, cultural theory, and the other humanistic disciplines, are not just materials for moral reflection. They are also sources of moral understanding, inspirations for moral action, and teachers of the sentiments that moral life requires.
Not just 'South Park', Team America too is important. 'The world is divided up between dicks, pussies & assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!'
Philosophy, for this reason, really needs to be able to engage in different moments with each of the disciplines. We need not the sure path of one science, but a difficult conversation among all the different kinds of systematic knowledge. We need it because people need it, and all the disciplines of the humanities have something to contribute.
'The Good Place' did it well enough. Little can be added after Kristen Bell has spoken.
One characteristic of much writing in the humanities- one family resemblance across much of that broad field- is a concern to continue millennial conversations.
as opposed to conversations with millennials.
In philosophy departments we still really do read Plato (429?–347 bce) and Aristotle (384–322 bce) and Confucius (551?–479 bce) and, of course, many others who have also read them between their time and ours. Literary scholars discuss novels going back at least to Satyricon (first century ce) and The Golden Ass (second century ce), and plays, like Aeschylus's Oresteia (fifth century bce), that Plato and Aristotle would have seen, and poems, like those ascribed to Homer (eighth century bce?), that they would have known. We think these texts still reward rereading in our radically different contexts. But the rewards are extremely variegated.
The problem with low IQ people is that they don't understand what they read.
Sometimes, as when I read some of the Nicomachean Ethics with my students each year in an introduction to ethics, I do so because I think he got something right: friendship really is one of the great human goods.
As is farting. When I was young, my witty and apposite fats won me many friends.
Sometimes, because he got something interestingly wrong: he says that the enslaved are not capable of action “in accordance with excellence.”
This was the traditional Asante view. That's why they were the biggest supplier of slaves to the Europeans.
Enslavement, I want to reply, reflects the nature of the enslaver
Asante?
not of the enslaved.
Frafras? Dagombas? Oddly, Europeans weren't enslaving each other.
Sometimes, though, we read him because someone later-bperhaps someone much later like Elizabeth Anscombe- took something from her reading of him to remake modern moral philosophy.
She was a good Catholic who used to protest outside abortion clinics.
On other occasions, as when I read the Iliad with students in a class about honor, it is because the poem explores a powerful ideal that has left its traces in our thought, even though it is utterly unlivable now; as Achilles's rage-
Menis- like Sanskrit Manyu- is a dark, cosmic, rage which heralds a change in the cosmic order.
the rage that Homer urges the Goddess to sing at the poem's start, a rage that persists despite the costs to his fellow Achaeans- is difficult for us now to make sense of, much less to respect.
Because Homer was like Ved Vyas- viz a bard recalling the transition to the Iron Age by piecing together legends regarding the leading dynasties and deities of a territory which was becoming culturally and politically unified. There is little point reading books if you have no interest in or understanding of the aims & methods of the author.
In the same class, we read about nineteenth-century Asante generals, who sat playing board games surrounded by barrels of gunpowder, ready to blow themselves up if their troops retreated.
In which case there would be no slaves to sell to the Europeans.
Victory or death, they said, and they meant it.
Victory for us means enslavement for you.
There is something crazy in this, even if it made them formidable enemies. But we learn something important about the power of honor in one kind of human life here, something that deepens our understanding of how honor works today: when a young man in a gang in Watts
a historically African-American neighbourhood. I guess he might have an ancestor sold to the Europeans by Asantes.
risks his life because he has been dissed, he is not Achilles or an Asante general, but there is a family resemblance worth noticing.
No. The descendants of Achilles were more productively employed.
This is crazy and, at the same time, intelligible, too.
It is low IQ.
But the humanistic concern with past artifacts- the drawing on a fifth-century-bce Grecian urn, or a nineteenth-century romantic ode about one- is not to be explained simply by the fact that we can draw a lesson from it,
you need at least average IQ to do so.
so that it provides another general truth that might guide our choices, our thoughts, our feelings. Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” does offer such a generalization, since it ends with that famous couplet:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.11
But whatever the interest of this thought, it is not that it is true. It is obviously not true. Truth clearly is not beauty. And, if it were, you obviously could not live a decent human life if that was all you knew. What we have here is at best figuratively true, and one of the figures involved is hyperbole. Still, reflection on Keats's ode is something that many thousands of members of the Modern Language Association know how to practice, believe valuable, and can demonstrate the worth-whileness of by teaching new generations of readers to attend to that poem and its companions.
Why bother? You don't need to be taught to appreciate poems or paintings. You are taught literature in school as part of your study of its language. But the market for most poetry is grown-ups- not kids or their teachers.
The importance to some disciplines of attention to particulars, and not just to generalities, from the full panoply of the human past and present is something that Wilhelm Windelband drew attention to more than a century ago.
Talk about the bleeding obvious! Still, being a Professor of useless shite, what else could the stupid Kraut do?
This insistence is, I think, a feature of much work in the humanities. In a once wellknown essay on “History and Natural Science,” Windelband wrote about all the disciplines that enrich our knowledge of the world, from history to physics, that they were seeking through their experience of reality either the universal, in the form of a natural law, or the particular in a historically specific form.
He was wrong. What they both sought were better data-sets. Some such could fit Structural Causal Models with a mathematical representation.
They consider, on the one side, the always-unchanging form,
We know of no such thing.
on the other, the unique, specific content,
which is all we have access to.
of what happens in reality. The first are law-based forms of knowledge,
Hypotheses. Nothing more.
the others involve knowledge of particular events;
which isn't particularly fine-grained though it may get better as tech improves.
the former teach what is eternally the case, the latter what once existed. Systematic knowledge is — if one may construct new terms of art-in the one case nomothetic, in the other idiographic.
We use these words a little differently now.
It is not that humanistic knowledge is never nomothetic
I suppose, if statistical methods are used, it is nomothetic- e.g. establishing that Shakespeare wrote 'Two Gentlemen' on the basis of some particular mathematical pattern in the appearance of particular consonants.
philologists generalize about language change, philosophers pronounce principles. (And scientists can be idiographers: E. O. Wilson seemed entranced by a particular ant species as well as by general truths about the evolution of the ant.) But humanist inquiry is often idiographic.
surely idiotic is meant? What we expect from the humanities is 'tone'. The point about Plato was that he was a gentleman. Aristotle was Alexander's tutor.
That is one reason why one characteristic form of humanistic exploration, alongside the article or the treatise, is the essay, a form that Montaigne invented,
he gave a new name to what had long existed.
and that inspired Bacon to do something somewhat different in English under the same name. An essay is not about proving a general point; it is about stringing together particular insights.
Like the 8-legged Chinese Examination essay.
It is more like a conversation with oneself, overheard by the reader, than a lecture to the world. All of which makes it even more pressing to ask what the point is of attention to these particulars?
Taking a shit is pressing. Asking stupid questions is not.
Let me point out first that asking that question risks simply denying the claim and following the natural impulse of the nomothete. It is to seek a law, a general answer. We are tempted, that is, to say with Hume, in the Enquiry I have already cited, that the study of these things from the past is important because it allows us “to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour.”
Hume may have thought his readers were buying this guff. We know better. Essays are shite you write to pass exams or, later on, to earn a bit of money from a literary magazine.
I want to insist, per contra, in defense of the idiographic, that while humanists are generally interested in past particulars, there is no general answer to the question why. The answers are specific to the objects of attention. I do not say we cannot draw general conclusions from past objects and events. Of course-quite obviously-we can. Hume himself does that in his five-volume History of England.
It had a political purpose though it sold well because it was written well.
But that is not the only thing we can do. The story about why it is worth attending to Keats's ode is an incompletable story,
If Appiah tells it, it is a complete waste of time as a story.
replete with the many kinds of rewards of that attention.
What is our reward for wading through Appiah? He has said nothing whatsoever.
In fact, the value of attending to the ode, I want to say, is as various as its readers and the uses to which they put it.
They know that already. Ask a bloke why he is reading something. He'll tell you he is getting something out of it.
The stories about why it is of continuing importance to read Homer or Sappho or Kant or Achebe are specific to their particular works, then. There is, I say again, no general answer.
This is like saying 'there is no general answer to 'what is your name'. ' because people have different names. Appiah is too stupid to realise he is stupid. I suppose that is the special skill he imparts to his very special little snowflakes.
Still, one central argument for paying attention to the specifics of the past can begin with a point made by Thucydides when he said, in The Peloponnesian War, that “an exact knowledge of the past”
which is unavailable just as is an exact knowledge of the present
is “an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”
But such interpretation might be better done by those with no knowledge or interest in history.
If we knew all the problems that were going to arise for us,
we would be omniscient
we would know what general knowledge we would need to draw from the past to face them.
Fuck that. If you know the future, you don't need lessons from the past.
But we do not. And so we need a great stock of past cases on which we can draw,
The opposite is the case. We needn't bother with the past at all. Still, some people like it just as some people like eating their own boogers. The difference is, a guy who can talk about the Thucydides trap & our Iran policy in a posh accent is an acceptable dinner guest. Not so, a guy who eats his own boogers & wishes to discuss the finer points of such gastronomy.
so we can figure out, as the world presents its challenges to us, which past cases they resemble or reflect.
It would be fair to say, in politics, perception can become reality & that if everybody is saying 'history is repeating itself', history does actually repeat itself.
This is often a kind of analogical reasoning
viz. wondering whether what applies in one case might apply in a somewhat different case
which it would be misleading to characterize as a matter of finding a general law that governs both that past case and this new one.
one could do so analogically.
An example can guide us by directing our attention, through resemblances that are inexact, to a feature of the new situation that is parallel to something in the old. This is how legal reasoning in the common law tradition often works: We have rules for thinking about straying domestic animals. Faced with straying ostriches, we ask if we can apply similar rules.
If it is a domestic animal- e.g. it is being reared for its meat or feathers etc- then, it is obvious, that the rule re. domestic animals applies.
To do this, we do not have to identify the common properties of the domestic animals and oversized birds and articulate a general principle: ostriches are identical with cattle and sheep for particular legal purposes.
domesticated cattle and sheep
Settling the single case will do.
No. Understanding that an ostrich raised for meat is a domestic animal resolves the case.
Perhaps an analogy will help here. It is worth having a toolbox around the house, one with a wide range of tools, whose properties you know something about. But there is no general answer to the question, “Why?”
The general answer is 'having tools could come in handy.'
Each tool can be used for lots of things. There is no one thing a screwdriver is useful for.
There is one and only one task for which it is optimized for.
(Resist the temptation to say, driving screws. If you claim that is all screwdrivers are good for, you are just revealing you do not know much about the lives of screwdrivers.)
Why claim that? You say 'this screwdriver is for driving screws of such and such type'.
And the range of things you can do with each tool is different from the range of what you can do with the others.
Few tools are multipurpose. Each is optimized for a particular function save if, like the Swiss Army knife, it intended to serve many purposes.
Claw hammers, like screwdrivers, can be used to remove nails from planks,
Screwdrivers aren't used to remove nails from planks. Appiah is a fucking cretin.
but screwdrivers, unlike claw hammers, are not generally much use in nailing them in. But you cannot now think of all the things that any particular tool might turn out to be usable for.
Yes if you can, if you aren't as stupid as Appiah.
People are finding new uses for them all the time. Like many philosophers, for example, one use I have for tools is to make a philosophical point.
He uses a screwdriver to remove rusty nails from his cranium. The philosophical point he is making is that he is as stupid as shit.
With any tool, you do not know what it is good for until you see what problems arise.
No. If you find a tool whose use isn't obvious, you ask a handyman.
When humanists focus our attention on, say, a text or a work of visual art, one reason is that they think that the experience of attending to it will be a worthwhile experience.
A bore, like Appiah, will be wrong.
They do not think that the value of that attention is exhausted by what it teaches us, where “what it teaches” is some general truth.
Like paying attention to shitheads is a waste of time.
But they also think that we cannot tell in advance what that poem or painting could teach.
Sure we can. From a religious poem we gain something which promotes faith. From a naturalistic painting of an object we learn what it looks like.
It is worth having in your repertory, which is one reason people have learned poetry by heart, one reason we revisit paintings. Because who knows when something from them will deepen our response to a new situation?
Fuck that. We memorize poems we like & we go look again at pictures we like. True if you have to teach cretins, you might say 'what we learn from Keats is that if you see a nice vase don't smash it over your mother's head'.
A poem or a painting is not for anything.
It is there to provide aesthetic satisfaction of some sort.
Not because it has no uses. It has, in fact, many uses, and new ones may occur to new readers each time their situations change.
Appiah uses poems to extract nails from planks. True, he hasn't had any success so far but he keeps trying.
But the value of the poem does not depend on any one of these uses.
Why is this fucker so obsessed with valuing things? The fact is poems or pictures have an emotional valency which is subjective & state dependent.
It lies, rather, in two sorts of facts: that the experience of reading it can be one worth having,
i.e. doing something meant to be pleasurable can be pleasurablee
and that sometimes we will return to it in new situations and find that it helps us think and feel and act in response to them.
No. That is an instruction manual. We may return to a poem or a picture because we want a particular sort of solace. This is about emotions. It isn't a guide to action- unless you do actually top yourself.
And, as a philosopher humanist, I insist that this is true of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Analects.
Analects, yes. The thing is aesthetic & concerned with eusebia. Aristotle- not so much. He was a pedagogue & if it is your misfortune to teach shite, maybe he shows you how the thing can be done with little mental effort.
You may wonder why I have such confidence in this. Well, first, let me remind you, that the claim is not that these texts reward attention because they yield something that all humanistic attention delivers. I have denied that there is any such thing.
Appiah is just saying 'a liberal education is of no practical use'. But that was only said when the definition of a gentleman was a guy who didn't have to work for a living.
The claim I am making, at the moment, is about those two works in particular. Part of the evidence, in each case, is inductive. People have done the experiment of returning to these texts over millennia and come back with a sense of enlightenment.
Pedants may have pretended such was the case in the case of Aristotle. The Analects are alive in the way that the Gita is alive because the eusebia they encode is still very much with us.
(Also, but this is a different argument, with pleasure. As Arnold insisted in the first section of Culture and Anarchy, we need both “sweetness and light.”)
But not 'gentlemen' who don't have to work for a living.
Watching an interesting mind struggle with an important question turns out to be rewarding.
Reading Appiah isn't.
But I am also claiming that we cannot say in advance what reading these texts can be good for.
Why? The claim is clearly false. Reading Aristotle is good for understanding, or teaching, Aristotle.
And I concede that it is possible that new readers in new situations may come to feel that they are not good for anything old or new, that their use has been exhausted. Though, frankly, I am not sure I would want to live in a society in which no one had any use for Aristotle and Confucius.
Sadly, we have to live in a society which has a use for Appiah.
Someone's life is well-lived-Aristotle's word for this is εύδαίμων, “blessed with a good genius,” as my Greek dictionary puts it-
i.e. the dude is under the protection of a nice God
because of what they do, or have, or experience.
this does not follow. It was a claim a pedant made because he was being paid to get the sons of rich men to make an effort too raise themselves in public estimation rather than to simply idle away their days while squandering their inheritance.
So, for any life to be worthwhile, there must be things worth doing or having or experiencing.
No. That's why we don't automatically stop life-support for those for whom such appears not to be the case.
One thing you learn from the humanist's idiographic concern with objects and events from the past is what some of those worthwhile things are.
You learn the opposite. Stuff that seemed important in the past really wan't.
Aristotle, having paid attention, like a good humanist, to some of the particulars, pointed some of them out: friendship, for example, as I mentioned earlier, but also, as he says, developing habits of emotional response that lead to excellence.
Pedants don't get paid for saying 'be nice!'. They have to tart things up a bit.
When it comes to thinking about political philosophy, and in particular about freedom and equality, it seems to me that one element of the case for the humanistic method of careful idiographic attention to particular past texts and events depends on recognizing something important about moral discovery.
Why is this cunt so obsessed with the importance of discovering what is fucking obvious to everybody? How fucking students are the grad students he supervises? Can they tie their shoe-laces? If so, they already know more than you can teach them.
Think, for these purposes, about the ideal of liberty that circulated through the American Revolution,
it was the ideal of not paying taxes to Mad King George.
and the ideals of equality and fraternity that traveled with it in the great slogan of the French Revolution.
The English had ended feudal obligations centuries ago. France was playing catch up.
Each of those three powerful ideas, so it seems to me, was grasped in part by thinking about what was wrong with the existing shape of things: it was an ancient regime, an established order, that they aimed to overthrow.
D'uh!
The idea of liberty, for example, develops through thinking about what is awful about not being in charge of your own society or your own life.
No. It develops from having your money taken away by the tax-man.
What inspires the new ideal of equality is the pain and humiliation associated with belonging to the “lower orders,” of being treated as an inferior, required to perform deference, denied access not just to resources - money, education, choices - but to equal standing. Equality becomes the name for the impulse to escape all that.
No. Equality meant Nobles would have to pay the same rate of tax as commoners. Also, no more fucking lettres de cachet. Everything should be justiciable. If the English have had habeas corpus for centuries, why not us?
When the revolutionaries pronounce “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, and when, thirteen years later, the French National Assembly recognizes and declares, “les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits” (men are born and remain free and equal in rights) in the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, there is a sense in which they do not yet know what they are talking about.
Appiah doesn't know what he is talking about. American or French politicians did. Revolutions are about taxes & who gets to own what & how matters will be decided.
Literature and Philosophy and Sodomy and so forth played no fucking role. Had they mattered, then the way to avert Revolution would have involved the King getting out a better brand of Literature or Philosophy or Sodomy. Why did this not happen? Because it would be wasted money.
They do not yet know what a society of free and equal people will look like.
They never would.
What they know is that a society of people whose lives are stunted by domination and inequality will no longer do.
Let it be stunted by some other sort of domination- by a guy who is better at it.
They know it is bad to be enslaved.
French people weren't enslaved- unless they fell into Muslim hands.
And in learning how to live in a new way, they have to start with what they are seeking to end: the moments of condescension, the insults, large and petty, that demeaned people in the old way of doing things. Those cases come from the history books but also from fiction and from art and, of course, from everyday experience; and from nonfiction literature, as in the slave narratives of the nineteenth century that articulated the wrongness of enslavement and taught free men and women something about what it meant. Frederick Douglass's struggle with the slave-breaker Covey in chapter of My Bondage and My Freedom deepens our understanding of equality by showing us inequality in action.
That didn't change anything. The Civil War was fought between Whites who disagreed on political & economic issues of some importance.
Mary Wollstonecraft, three years after the French declaration, addressed Talleyrand, who helped to craft it, with her Vindication of the Rights of Women and, again, she did so, in part, by making visible the disabilities of the legal situation of women, not just by giving a conceptual account of women's equality (which she does) but also by exemplifying those disabilities, for example in marriage law. The point is that Talleyrand and his kind-a prince, a bishop, a wielder of power-could speak of equality while not realizing what it entailed for particular kinds of people. We can learn more about this topic from reading about the situation of gentlewomen in Emma or through careful attention to more recent works, such as A Room of One's Own or The Second Sex.
Or by watching Bridgerton. The fact is Wollstonecroft failed miserably. Also, it isn't really true that 'Pride & Prejudice' is about an inter-racial Lesbian couple who sodomize the King to protest against illegal settlements on the West Bank.
One of my favorite books to read with students is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. In it, we see what a life is like that is totally (and willingly) subordinated to the projects of somebody else.
No we don't. We see a guy who takes over his dad's old job. But he is in a line of work which is already in terminal decline and will soon disappear altogether.
Mr. Stevens, Lord Darlington's butler, articulates his professional project in a passage that is powerful because it is so disturbing.
Appiah doesn't understand the passage.
Let us establish this quite clearly: a butler's duty is to provide good service. It is not to meddle in the great affairs of the nation. The fact is, such great affairs will always be beyond the understanding of those such as you and I, and those of us who wish to make our mark must realize that we best do so by concentrating on what is within our realm.
Vote as you please but do what you are paid to do. Sadly, by the time the book was published, Paul Burrell had become King Charles's butler. The odd thing is, his stock is now higher than Andrew.
This political self-negation, we feel, is just the opposite of what democracy asks of us.
No. It was an accurate reflection of the inter-war years. The servants did their jobs efficiently and voted for whichever party took their fancy. In some cases, the butler had served with his master in the trenches. There was a closer bond, but a bigger political divide. Nothing wrong in that at all.
In recent years, philosophical egalitarianism has been deepened by reflection on what it is to treat one another-and to be treated-as equals.
It really hasn't.
Our grasp of what equality means and of why it matters is embodied in narratives like these.
No. Equality is about equal pay for equal work. Sadly, if you study or teach shit, your pay will be rubbish.
And part of why they do it so well is that they engage our sentiments as well as our reason.
This guy can't reason.
Cicero, in his defense of the poet Archias
his former tutor. The dude had legally acquired Roman citizenship. Cicero, to magnify himself as the student of a great Greek poet, says Archias would have deserved Roman citizenship in any case because of his literary accomplishments
- a defense long-studied by humanists seeking defences of poetry-
which already existed. Kids should memorize great poems. They will grow up to be eloquent & of higher character.
tells us how the poet was formed in those “arts by which young boys are gradually molded towards humanitas.” And he speaks, in the same rambling Ciceronian sentence, of Antioch, the poet's native city, as “liberalissimisque studiis adfluenti,” that is, abundant in the most liberal studies.
i.e. it had lots of Schools.
So he connects the idea of a preparation for a humane life with the studies most apt for free people.
Romans wouldn't remain free for very long.
And that, I think, is one way of understanding one root thought of multiple different strands of humanistic thought. The liberal in liberal studies means “befitting a free person.”
Though plenty of Roman patricians were taught by Greek slaves.
We are, or at least we should aim to be, free people, and one central ideal of liberalism is a conception of that freedom, which insists that individuals are all entitled to lives of their own, lives in which the central, shaping decisions are for them to take and not to be settled for them by a master.
Thanks to the Brits, even the Asante had to give up enslaving people.
And if you are to discharge the terrific responsibility of making your own life, then you surely need all the help you can get.
You need none from Appiah.
That is what a liberal education is for,
it makes you as stupid as Appiah
and the humanities, in their multifarious ways, provide instruments that allow us to exercise that responsibility.
No. Money is that instrument. If we can earn it, well and good. There are worse things a cretin can do than teach Humanities.
If we are to study the good life, in ethics, or the just society, in political philosophy, we need to draw on these wellsprings of understanding and of pleasure.
Fuck studying. The Humanities are for enjoyment. True, if you teach cretins, you may have to pretend that reading Arris-turtle will give you Ninja Turtle super-powers or else enable you to escape enslavement by the Asante or come out of the closet as a proud Lesbian man of colour- even if it is pink.
