ANTI-ISLAMOPHOBIA

In a previous post and discussion about Islam on the Integral Global Facebook group a video by Bill Warner was recommended as an excellent source for the history of Islam. After reading about Warner he seemed like a typical politically motivated and narrowly informed Islamophobe like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I criticized him as an Islamophobic ideologue, without having watched the video. I was taken to task for not watching Warner’s video on the history of Islam and promised I would watch it and give an evaluation of Warner’s work. Bill Warner has many books and videos on Islam and is a political activist who says he’s educating the public about the history of “Political Islam” because of the threat it poses to the US and Europe.

So I’ve seen Bill Warner’s video and I have looked at the scholarly sources to check what he says. Lo and behold, it’s exactly as I said it would be. Warner has a skewed view of Islam that selects and arranges favored facts to promote his fears of an Islamic takeover. Now it could be the case that I just did what Warner does, select and arrange facts to agree with my preconceived ideas. Because that is possible, we need a test of what we assert. That is the point of having a community of scholars who devote their lives to studying specific topics AND who discuss assertions critically with other well-schooled scholars. Their assertions, unlike Warner’s, must past peer-review. 

 SUMMARY OF WARNER’S VIDEO

Warner’s history of “Islam” is shockingly tendentious. We see a map of the Middle East and Mediterranean that will visually chart the course of Islam’s spread from its beginnings. His biased title of this chart is “The Destruction of Classical Civilization”. He calls it a “battle map” and shows the 548 battles that Islam, represented as an everenlarging green blob, caused as it unrelentingly spread over more and more lands.  He absurdly personifies a thing called “Islam” and says “it” is taking over. His basic story is that Islam, because of the warlike parts of the founding documents, inevitably attacks and dominates other lands in order to impose Sharia law on the dominated. He says he’s only stating facts, and he does know some facts, yet chooses the facts he tells for maximal Western revulsion. So we learn about Islam enslaving but little about its culture. We learn nothing of the economic, social and political aspects of this history, nor is mentioned that this imperial struggle is only one dimension of the story of many world powers throughout history. Towards the end of the video his political agenda is exposed as he accuses universities and corporations of wanting Sharia law because they practice political correctness. But a rightest political ideologue like Warner could be right, so we need to check the scholarly debate. What we find is that some elements of Warner’s skewed view are accurate, but he has chosen to tell a narrow story focusing on the war-making aspects of Islam to scare and sow revulsion in Westerners ignorant of how history-writing is done. 

THE ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP 

Note: I will be noting the credentials of the scholars I cite, not to use their status as a substitute for determining whether what they say is true, but to emphasize that their work has been critically reviewed by similarly knowledgeable scholars. In academic scholarship there is a rigorous checking mechanism Bill Warner’s work doesn’t withstand.

First, it’s important to understand that it’s difficult to know what happened in undeveloped Arabia 1,400 years ago. One of the most esteemed scholars of Islam, Montgomery Watt, in “What is Islam?”, warns that “The greatest challenge to a coherent conceptualization of Islam has been posed by the sheer diversity of—that is, range of differences between—those societies, persons, ideas and practices that identify themselves with “Islam.”” 

So unlike Warner’s unhistorical green growing blob called “Islam”, one of the greatest scholars of Islam emphasizes its diversity, even using scare quotes around the term Warner tosses around so cavalierly: “Islam”. 

Prof. Chase Robinson in “The Rise of Islam 600-705”, part of “The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries” from Cambridge U. Press, elaborates on Watt’s comment, “As we shall see all too frequently throughout this chapter, the historiographic ground cannot bear interpretations that carry the freight of much real detail. For reasons made clear in chapter 15, the study of early Islam is plagued by a wide range of historiographic problems: the sources internal to the tradition purport to preserve a great deal of detailed history, but with very few exceptions they are late and polemically inclined; meanwhile, the sources external to the tradition are in many instances much earlier, but they know so little of what was happening in Arabia and Iraq that they are inadequate for detailed reconstruction. What is abundant is in general unreliable; what is relatively reliable is invariably too little;” Robinson concludes “Given the state of the evidence, the most one can do is to set out some historical answers very schematically.”

 Agreeing with Watt, Prof. Khaleel Mohammed states that “Islam contains so many juristic and interpretational differences that scholars generally acknowledge that there are several Islams. I choose not to detail such differences in this Element [book] and embark on a sort of essentialism.”

 I also found that Warner’s brand of polemical history is itself a subject of study by real scholars. In the chapter, “Modern approaches to early Islamic history,” Fred M. Donner, recounts the struggle against Warner-like polemics and in the process eerily nails Warner’s methods:

 “In another vein, there has emerged in recent years a secularized contemporary avatar of the medieval religious polemics against Islam that essentializes ‘Islamic civilization’ as antagonist to the ‘West’ and which sometimes reaches back to the founding events of early Islamic history in an effort to find ammunition for its arguments. In considering how scholars in the modern West have studied early Islamic history, then, it is important to be mindful of the many forms of the polemical tradition against Islam, even though that tradition cannot be considered scholarship in the proper sense of that word.”

 While Warner blithely recites his skewed conquest narrative of early Islam, Donner describes the differences among the scholars he names and the difficulty posed by the meager reliable sources: 

 “Regarding the conquest narratives, Noth emphasized their salvation-historical character and questioned whether the conquests had any centralized impetus or direction, Sharon and others suggested they never occurred at all, and Conrad has shown that some conquest accounts appear to have no secure factual basis; on the other hand, Donner stressed the cogency of understanding the conquests as a unitary phenomenon and Robinson demonstrated that some early, independent non-Muslim sources confirm certain Muslim conquest reports.”

 Donner concludes, “Beyond the thorny problems posed by the heritage of the polemical tradition and by the deficiencies of the sources for early Islamic history, there exist other problems of perception and conceptualization, as well as practical obstacles, that have affected Western approaches to early Islamic history.”

 And from  Chase F. Robinson, editor of “Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries”:

 “This – the realization that what we know about early Islam is less certain than what we thought we knew, and that writing history in this period and region requires altogether more sophisticated and resourceful approaches – is one of a handful of notable advances made in Islamic studies since the original Cambridge history of Islam was published in 1970.”

 Robinson’s summation: “What, in broad strokes, is the quality of our evidence for the period covered by this volume? It is mixed.”

 This appreciation of the diversity of views about historical Islam is also reflected in serious study of the contemporary Islamic world. In contrast, Warner presents Islam as a scary monolith that is driven by adherence to central ancient texts.

We learn from Prof. Emeritus Mohammed Ayoob in his “Political Islam: image and reality” that:

“In practice, no two Islamisms are alike because they are determined by the contexts within which they operate. What works in Egypt will not work in Indonesia. What works in Saudi Arabia will not work in Turkey. Anyone familiar with the diversity of the Muslim world--its socioeconomic characteristics, cultures, political systems, and trajectories of intellectual development--is bound to realize that the political manifestations of Islam, like the practice of Islam itself, are to a great extent context specific, the result of the interpenetration of religious precepts and local culture, including political culture.”

“It becomes clear that the Islamist political imagination is largely determined by context when one looks at the political discourse and, more importantly, the activities of the various Islamist movements.”

 And contrary to Warner’s ahistorical concoction “Political Islam”, we learn that “Political Islam is a modern phenomenon, with roots in the sociopolitical conditions of Muslim countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a product of the Muslim peoples' interaction--military, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual--with the West during the past two hundred years, a period when Western power has been in the ascendant and Muslims have become the objects, rather than the subjects, of history.”

“As these examples make clear, it is the local context that has largely determined the development and transformation of Islamist movements within particular national milieus. Moreover, it is not true that Islamist political formations have been primarily violent in nature. The most long-standing and credible Islamist parties have normally worked within the legal frameworks in which they have found themselves.”

And Ayoob, a political scientist, concludes “This Western perception does not, however, negate the fact that political Islam is a multifaceted phenomenon and is in almost all instances context specific, circumscribed by the borders of individual states. The overwhelming majority of Islamist political activity is conducted through peaceful means within constitutional limits, even where governments are unsympathetic to the Islamists' cause. Transnational extremist activities, including acts of terrorism, are the exception, not the rule, when it comes to political action undertaken in the name of Islam.”

Amazing how different is the conclusion of Prof Ayoob, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Michigan State University, writing in the peer-review World Policy Journal and subject to the criticism of his colleagues, from Bill Warner, the former physicist, who has no peer-reviewed Islamic publications or scholarship to his name. 

 ISLAM AND NON-MUSLIMS

An understandably popular topic in the West is how the dominant Islamic authorities, in the lands they conquered, treated their subordinate populations of Christians and Jews. As we might expect from such a diverse array of societies and locations the conditions for the underclass varied greatly.

Chase Robinson, in his chapter “Rise of Islam 600-705” confirms the warlike aspect of Islamic history that is Warner’s narrow focus. We learn of:

 “Muhammad putting his nascent community into shape for war-making against his polytheist opponents. In this, the Constitution conforms to the great stress laid in the

Quran upon fighting on behalf of God in general, and upon the connection between emigration or ‘going out’ (khuruj, as opposed to ‘sitting’, ququd) and this fighting, as Q 2:218 (‘those who emigrate and fight on the path of God’), and other verses put it. The Muslim is ‘one who believes in God and the last Day and fights on the path of God’ (Q 9:19)” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705).

While describing war making in the name of Islam, Robinson also provides the facts Warner excludes. In contrast to Warner’s hard linkage of Islamic violence to Islamic teaching we learn that:

 “Only gradually – and incompletely, as subsequent Islamic history would show – was taking up arms disengaged from belief, as armies were professionalized and the state claimed the exclusive right to carry out legitimate violence.” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705).

 And in the following quotes it sounds as if Robinson is criticizing Warner’s approach when he writes that “Modern descriptions of systematic conquest-era violence targeted at non-Muslims, in addition to those of post-conquest persecution before the Marwanids, are usually nothing more than poorly disguised polemics.” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705). He notes that “Unlike the barbarian invasions of the fourth- and fifth-century western Mediterranean, the effects of the Islamic conquests were in many respects modest.” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705). 

 And he concludes that:

 “For the most part, conquest destruction was restrained and, at least in some respects, discretionary: low- and mid-level bureaucratic functionaries were preserved so as to ensure fiscal continuity, and the material evidence shows continuities at other levels too.” Robinson, (“Conclusion” of “From formative Islam to classical Islam”)

 Regarding non-Muslims “the umma of the Constitution appears to accommodate the Jews of Medina, although they occupy a subordinate status. This inclusive sense of community reflects the relatively catholic nature of early Islamic belief: we have already seen that Muhammad had followed in the footsteps of earlier prophets (Moses and Abraham are especially prominent in the Quran), and his call for monotheism was initially compatible with those made by his predecessors.”  (Robinson, The Rise of Islam 600-705).

 Other sources confirm Robinson’s account:

Regarding Islam’s relation to Christians and Jews we learn in Courbage and Fargues, “Christians and Jews Under Islam”, that “the political, sociological and demographic factors that have shaped the position of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islam in the past and today. Focusing on the Arab world and on Turkey, the authors show how Christianity and Judaism survived and, at times, even prospered in the region, thus modifying the view of Islam as an inevitably unbending and radical religion.”

Najib Saliba, professor of Middle East history at Worcester State College, MA, writes: “This article will show that, for centuries, perhaps a millennium, during which Islam dominated the area, conflict between Jews, Christians and Muslims was the exception, not the norm. The norm was peace, harmony, coexistence and cooperation among those of the three religions. ”http://www.alhewar.com/Saliba_Christians_and_Jews_Under_Islam.htm

While Gordon Newby, chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University, emphasizes the stronger effect of historical factors, rather than the sacred texts Warner focuses on so exclusively. In “Muslim, Jews and Christians - Relations and Interactions” he writes:

“Relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians have been shaped not only by the theologies and beliefs of the three religions, but also, and often more strongly, by the historical circumstances in which they are found.” “During the first Islamic century, the period of the most rapid ex­pansion of Islam, social and religious structures were so fluid that it is hard to make generalisations” https://www.iis.ac.uk/academic-article/muslim-jews-and-christians-relations-and-interactions

SHARIA LAW

Warner is prone to hyperbole especially about Islamic Sharia law: “Each and every demand that Muslims make is based on the idea of implementing Sharia law in America.”  (Warner, “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims”) Part of his mission is to provide Americans with the information needed to combat the imposition of Sharia law in the US.

In Khaleed Mohammed’s monograph “Islam and Violence” for the Cambridge “Elements” series on “Religion and Violence” we get an informed and more varied picture of the current situation:

“The battle for Islam, as Khalid Abou El-Fadl notes, is between moderates and those he deems “puritans,” based on their vision of a pure Islam if certain laws and practices are enforced (Abou El-Fadl 2007: 162). Entities like ISIS and Boko Haram, in their effort to fight the Western forces, are imposing their own brand of Islamic law that has little to do with methodology or consideration of the goals of the Sharia, as understood by the classical jurists. Such “puritans” view most modern Muslims as having strayed from the path of righteousness and in need of coercion to return to what is proper. Many of the proponents for “Islamization of law” are not scholars in the field, and as such, bring about what Scott Appleby (2002: 85–92) and Khalid Abou El-Fadl (2014: 119) term the “vulgarization” of Islamic law. This means a return to an imagined, highly artificial Islam that draws a clear line of demarcation between an ungodly Western “them” and a righteous “us.” The actors in this scenario seek to gain their goals without any of the ethical or moral considerations elemental to the Islamic tradition, employing instead the cruelest methods to achieve their ends.”

 What Khaleed Mohammed is telling us, in contrast to Warner’s exaggerated vision of a Sharia monolith, is that the Islamic radicals impose “their own brand” of Islamic law that “has little to do with methodology or consideration of the goals of the Sharia, as understood by the classical jurists”. Those puritans “are not scholars in the field”. This “means a return to an imagined, highly artificial Islam that draws a clear line of demarcation between an ungodly Western “them” and a righteous “us.”” So Bill Warner, for his political purposes, has focused exclusively on the legal interpretation used by unschooled radicals, adopting uncritically their us vs. them dualism, that is an “an imagined, highly artificial Islam” while claiming that he is simply giving us the “facts” of Islamic law, about which he wrote a book.

People truly interested in Islam and violence might want to read a book about that topic, realizing that violence is only one dimension of the vast Islamic story, instead of listening to marginal figures who have no relationship to the actual scholarly community that interact and criticize each other’s works, and who uses his isolated studies to wage a counter holy war against a fabricated monolith called Islam.

At the very least Warner has not engaged the massive scholarship on Islam, instead reading the history for his paranoid political purposes so that the vast terrain of Islam becomes the radical interpretation of violent radical groups. Warner focuses on the oppressiveness and dangers of Sharia law, even going so far as to accuse US corporations and universities of practicing Sharia, by their alleged adherence to political correctness. But Prof. Khaleel Mohammed steers a middle course between rightwing Islam deionizers and left wing Islam apologists. 

 In “Islam and Violence” we learn, contrary to Warner’s reduction of Islam to three texts, that “Islamic law is found in an enormous corpus of volumes that document the rulings, opinions, and discourses over the span of many centuries” (Abou El-Fadl 2014: xxxii). It covers a vast array of topics, from rulings related to worship, criminal law, personal status, family law, commercial law, international law, constitutional law, and inheritance.”

 Khaleel Mohammed criticizes two other scholars, Tyan and Lewis, and asserts: “Contrary to what Tyan and Lewis would have us believe, there has never been any single Islamic creed or law about jihad, since there is no singular authoritative body in Islam. All we have from Muslim writers throughout the ages are numerous legal opinions that may all be equally “normative” (Mottahadeh and Sayyid 2001: 23–29; see also Abou El-Fadl 2007: 21–22; Afsaruddin 2015: 70–81).”

 And, in contrast to Warner’s scary contemporary Sharia monolith, we learn that: “The current state of Islamic law in every single Muslim-majority nation seems to be that of outright confusion…… In Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan, Iran, and Yemen, Islamic law seems to be enacted without any reference to the goals of the Sharia to promote what would seem to be ethical and moral practices to please the Divine.”

ON BILL WARNER

As we can see from a cursory glance of the massive literature form a novice working for only a week, there is a diverse, contentious, fact and interpretation-laden debate about what Warner confidently proclaims. For his anti-Islamic jihad Warner has selected a narrow portion of the historical story and then fixated on particular sacred texts to produce an Islam for his political purposes that has little relation to the realities of contemporary Islamic life and its history. 

 Warner says he’s only stating facts. That’s only half the story of writing history. ALL history writing is value-laden. We have to choose which facts to include, how to describe those facts, and what story those facts will tell. It’s true both that there are facts AND that every telling of those facts, even a chronology, is laden with values or moral choices. Warner, perhaps because he is not a historian, appears not to know this.

CONCLUSION

Bill Warner reads history to serve his present paranoid purposes. His given name is Bill French, but he chose the pen name “Warner” presumably because he sees his mission, post-9/11, as warning us of the coming Islamic theat. He fears the Islamic hordes coming to Europe and America and imposing Sharia law. To prove that fear is justified he reads Islamic history tendentiously selecting the facts to scare us about Islam’s true intentions. So his “history” is of a politicized religion that migrates outward to conquer and destroy its enemies and impose harsh Sharia law on its victims. His map shows one big mass of Islam, like a contagion or blob, that relentlessly subsumed and crushed other religions and cultures. And, of course, imperialism and domination is one part of Islam. We could also concoct a scary map of a blob-like European Christianity spreading over North and South America crushing the indigenous populations until European Christianity was supreme. And we could link that ruthless Christian genocide to recent attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. But history isn’t about religious creeds driving zealots to do its bidding, although that is one dimension of a complex picture true scholars try to discern.

 My survey of Islamic scholarship suggests there are two dangers: rightwing demonizers and liberal apologists. Bill Warner is one of many examples of the former and there are many examples of the latter. So we need to go to the scholarly sources. Of course, there too battle lines will be drawn, but the pressure to document sources and the peer-review process allows us to discern what we can and can’t say and believe about historical and contemporary Islam.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x549127?fbclid=IwAR3QL7JELbjTe9zA4KrInE3EsHNZgxdSQ1IIOeA4zL2phXlRINTKLLta02Y

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=4077262138984235&id=100009874782316&substory_index=9

I wrote a reply to this article by Jeffrey Dorfman:

Dorfman is generally right on the economics, but ideologically blinkered on the politics. He agrees with Karl Marx who appreciated the amazing productive power of capitalism.

It’s what happens to the working people of the society when that productive output is not redistributed that causes the problems. Who gets the fruits of all that productivity and who bears the costs of all that material abundance? Without people-power – democracy - the spoils will be distributed unequally. We’ve seen this with the great increase in inequality due to the great shift to the economic and political right in the US over the last forty years that has been initiated by the Republicans and aided by the spineless Democrats.

Dorfman’s right, Bernie and Alexandria aren’t socialists. Their stated policies are similar to, and an extension of, FDR’s New Deal. They want to correct the undemocratic and unequal effects of capitalism. They want to change the distribution side – who gets what – and not the production or supply side – who owns or decides what is made, how it is made and who gets what. The progressive New Dealers want to change the distribution side and socialists want to change the production side.

But it’s not Bernie and Alexandria’s fault that they are not socialists. It’s that these political-economic labels are ridiculously misapplied in the US mainstream media. Bernie et al. are adopting “socialist” because now, post-2016, it is not a complete liability. If that wasn’t the case, and “socialist” was still a dirty word as it was pre-2016, they’d probably work hard to get people to call them “progressives” A progressive being a somewhat-further-to-left liberal (Medicare for all rather than Medicare only for the over 65, for example).

In the same skewed way Republicans aren’t “free-market capitalists” as they’re misnamed in the US. They support corporate welfare - the government helping the capitalist class - in myriad ways: government bailouts for corporations, tax breaks predominantly for the wealthy, massive government subsidies for research and development, support for anti-free trade patents and copyrights, military spending, use of public lands and the public airwaves at rock bottom prices, etc.

Dorfman can only see two types of economies: welfare-state capitalism or authoritarian socialism. And, it’s true: a lot of the countries that have been called socialist – government owning the means of production – have been authoritarian. But, due to his ignorance of politics, Dorfman totally ignores the crucial insertion of the political concept “democracy” in the label “democratic socialist.” Democratic socialism is different from authoritarian socialism. Wouldn’t authoritarianism be antithetical to the democracy democratic socialists want? That’s why his linking of the US left to supposed authoritarian regimes is a kind of red-baiting. Call it “pink-baiting.” A typical move of the politically ignorant.

Democratic socialists should point to a different kind of socialism. One where working people have more control over how and what is produced. We might also call it “workplace democracy” or “economic democracy.” There are successful examples of it, the most famous being Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. An amazing story of a successful workers’ cooperative that’s been working for sixty years. (Successful doesn’t mean unproblematic, we’re talking about humans after all.)

Outside Dorfman’s purview there are capitalist economic systems that are not Nordic welfare-state capitalists or authoritarian “socialist” systems such as the old Soviet Union. There is the possibility of market socialism, as in Mondragon. In market socialism the people have more power on the production side, but there is still a free market. A nice book that explains how that would work is After Capitalism by David Schweickart. Bernie et al. could also find historical precedent in the “evolutionary socialism” of the much maligned early 20th century Marxian Eduard Bernstein, who advocated a gradual progress to socialism that passes through welfare-state capitalism to a democratic socialism.

Dorfman, like most mainstream economists, doesn’t understand that political citizens taking actions create economic outcomes. He seems to attribute the “wealth that allowed the luxury of …. generous [Nordic] government programs” to some abstract entity called “capitalism.” Yet in the next paragraph we learn that “reasonably powerful” unions exist in those countries. European countries in general have had much more powerful left-socialist movements and unions than the US. They fought and fight to create and keep those “generous government programs” that Dorfman seems to think capitalism magically distributes to them. The US has been much more productive than the Nordic countries over the last 40 years, but because of the declining political power of ordinary people we’ve had stingy government programs rather than generous ones.

Another example of Dorfman’s political blindness is his description of Venezuela as a dictatorship. While that fits with the US media’s mainstream misinformation about Chavez and Maduro, Chavez and Maduro were elected many times in elections as fair as US elections. And is it socialism that caused the problems in Venezuela or was it the two problems that have dogged oil-rich countries whether “capitalist” or “socialist” throughout the second and third worlds: overdependence on a valuable resource when the price is high – oil - and rampant corruption? It wasn’t Chavez’s socialism that caused him to rely on Venezuelan oil when the price was high to fund virtuous social programs, it was poor economic decisions. But he shared this defect with a long line of capitalist leaders before him. Venezuela has been prone to both of those common problems well before Chavez was born.

Nicaragua, after the overthrow of dictator and US ally Somoza, had a mixed economy. Perhaps if they hadn’t been terrorized by the US-funded contras, blockaded by the US and pushed into dependency on the Soviet Union, their early mixed economy could have succeeded.

Still, for all his unthinking parroting of the political confusion in the US mainstream over the labels “socialist” and “free market,” Dorfman is a libertarian, free-market capitalist who finds the Nordic countries correction of undemocratic capitalism acceptable. That’s great! Take him as an ally as long as he supports moving to an environmentally sustainable, capitalist, Nordic-like welfare-state economy. Just because Bernie et al. aren’t socialists doesn’t mean they aren’t proposing good and workable solutions to the US’s reverse Robinhood, corporate welfare state. The inequalilty of the present US economy would be greatly improved by a progressive step backward to FDR’s New Deal. Perhaps we can view the new progressive left’s ideals as democratic socialist, but like old Eduard Bernstein, they are trying to make it happen gradually through a revival of FDR-style welfare-state capitalism.

Chomsky Harris Debate

There was a recent exchange between Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris here

The issues aren't clear from the exchange. This may clarify:

Chomsky knows Harris's views, Harris doesn't know Chomsky's. Chomsky's been arguing against such views as Harris's and has developed a critique of such views for fifty years. Harris doesn't even know Chomsky's arguments or position. He could know Chomsky's positions and still disagree, but he needs to understand what a radical critique of the US role in the world says and the evidence for it.

Harris is taking a useful aspect of judging moral culpability - the intention of the perpetrator - and applying it to large social events. Chomsky - probably - is fine with the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter - where the intention of the person is taken into account - but that doesn't mean he thinks you can take powerful, large, social actors and apply the same individualistic criterion for assessing their moral actions.

I think Harris should not focus on intention when determining the morality of social actors' actions. Then he is vulnerable to Chomsky's argument that Hitler claimed good intentions. Harris, I think, should focus on his claim that the US is a more morally developed society and that the actions they are taking, not only are designed to make others morally more developed, but, more importantly, that the results of their actions create moral improvement for others. Harris's point should not be that Clinton or Bush didn't intend to hurt people, but that the effect of their actions over time is moral, social, or economic, improvement for others. If that's the case, then Harris can say the Japanese, the Nazis and Al Qaeda aren't doing that. They may say they are protecting the German people or making the world better by restoring Islam, but they are not. I don't think Harris would be right if he argued that, I agree with Chomsky's view, but I think that's what's crucial in Harris's view.

Harris lists the horrors of American actions over its history, but he doesn't take the next step. The next step is to ask: What social understanding explains all the results of US actions? Harris is saying: Yes the US has done bad, but we're basically creating good. Chomsky is saying: When you look at the results of US actions over time, Harris's explanation doesn't hold up. If the results of a system's foreign policy are consistently bad we start to say that attributing the bad results to unintentional mistakes - the US as well-intended but clumsy giant - doesn't work anymore. That could be a debate between them. But Harris would surely lose. Chomsky has a staggering wealth of knowledge about just those facts and Harris doesn't. But someone else politically knowledgeable might be able to challenge Chomsky's understanding.

What they should be arguing is: what have been the results of US actions in the world over an historical period and what does that tell us about how the social structure of the US functions to produce those outcomes? We shouldn't focus on intentions when we analyze social events, we should look primarily at the results of social actors' acting over time and find an explanation that explains the most data. I've found Chomsky's fact-based, moral and logical view the best.

On Bergson

Note: I'm trying to put some of my notebook observations on this blog without being so persnickety about the quality.

The thing I never got about the French philosopher Henri Bergson was why he was so popular for a time and why he lost popularity so completely. So often when he was mentioned the standard thing to say about him was that he was the most famous philosopher in the world in the pre-WWI period and then he was forgotten. I remember reading in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy a dismissive article about Bergson.

It would commonly be said of Bergson that he theorized duree which is our subjective experience of time in contrast to objective, clock time. Like the way boredom makes things slow down and interest makes time go by faster. Didn’t seem like much when described like that. But I knew that Gilles Deleuze wrote a book called Bergsonism and reinterpreted Bergson in the late sixties and saw great insight there. So what was the Bergson story?

Bergson, according to Suzanne Guerlac in her book Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, is saying that a background presupposition of our taken-for-granted conception of reality - not even to be noted - is space. Whatever happens has to happen within a container, a space, a field, an environment. The place in which things occur.

Bergson contrasts pure duration - duree -which she says he says can be distinguished from “time.” Because space is presupposed to be there holding whatever is, time is conceived along the lines of space, as a holder - past, present, future - of what happens. History happens “in” time (“in” being a spatial category used to described time). As if time is a thing that exists and contains the contents that occur in it.

Bergson is saying that what we experience subjectively are qualities, differences, but not just differences in quantity but difference in quality. So his example of the piece of paper illuminated by four candles and then progressively unilluminated as each candle is blown out. Is there a quantitative reduction in brightness, so that the white paper gradually looks black (after the fourth candle is blown out) or are there a succession of different hues going from white to greys to black? Is objective time and the space everything is happening within the real reality and the subjective experience of qualities the more ephemeral reality? Bergson reverses it so that the world is seen what it looks like when what arises in our experience and its qualities are taken to be fundamental.

Here is the French connection to phenomenology and Buddhist practice. Even Modernist literature and their focus on first-person subjective experience. Perhaps there is a French tradition getting at the lived subjective experience, life as lived, going back to Montaigne. And more recently Maupassant, Bergson, Joyce (in Paris), Beckett (in France), Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze. Even Foucault and how self and consciousness are formed. And Pierre Hadot and how the Greek philosophers were interested in "spiritual exercises" to train oneself to experience life rightly.

Areas of Interest

After studying for thirty years I recently realized how many themes of interest I have that keep getting picked up, satisfied for the time being, and then set aside. I thought I'd try to list some of these areas of interest. Some of them are relatively new. Some of them I left in graduate school in the eighties and always wanted to explore again:

Romanticism. The German variety from the late 18th and early 19th century. I never learned the difference between all those German “S-C-H’s”: Schiller, Schelling, Schleiemacher, the two Schlegels. I see though that there is a philosophical anti-foudationalism there and I’d like to understand it. Started reading Frederick Beiser's well-written intellectual histories, The Romantic Imperative and others.

Pragmatism. Looking at the Notre Dame Philosophical Book Review site there are some new books on Pragmatism. Since it is my basic philosophy I'd like to see what people who can explain it well are saying about it. So read Robert Schwartz's Rethinking Pragmatism and Michael Bacon's new introduction to Pragmatism.

The other day I saw on the new book shelf at my college library an introduction to The Kyoto School of philosophy. This is the school of philosophy that arose in Japan in the 20th century and used western philosophical language and techniques to philosophize an Eastern way of understanding existence and the world. I’ve always thought I’d like to understand better what philosophers using a analytic style would do with Buddhist concepts and that’s what these guys did.

I’ve always wanted to understand Spinoza better but haven’t found the right book for it.

Recently I read a compelling reinterpretation of ordinary language philosophy. It's always intrigued me but it always seemed dry and dusty. But Avner Baz’s book When Words are Called For interprets ordinary language philosophy as a radical critique of central parts of contemporary philosophy.

I’ve always wanted to understand how those who practice philosophical counseling understand it and distinguish it from psychotherapy. I got a couple books by Peter Raabe on it. Looks like they have trouble defining what philosophical counseling is.

While I assume – because of my assimilation of Chomsky’s political insight – that Iran is being set up as a useful enemy by the American political establishment and media, I didn’t really understand contemporary Iran well. I just figured it’s an authoritarian Islamic state and bad, but of course not to be threatened, sanctioned and attacked as the US is doing. But the recent book by longtime policy insiders Floyd and Hilary Mann Leverett, Going to Teheran, is quite an eye-opener. They say that the Islamic revolution of 1979 was an authentic revolution and that Ayatollah Khomeini was an authentic revolutionary. I always figured he was an evil guy (remember those eyebrows?) who established with others an authoritarian Islamic state. The Leverett’s always refer to “The Islamic Republic of Iran” instead of just “Iran” to emphasize that there was a genuine attempt at, and that there is a genuine kind of, democratic republic in Iran. That it is an Islamic-democratic hybrid and that the people do have some say. They even present solid evidence that the last elections that re-elected Ahmadinejad, which were presented in the American media as fraudulent, were actually as legitimate as elections generally are in democratic countries. More recently, the current elected president, Hassan Rouhani, is considered, by Iranian standards, more moderate than Ahmadinejad.

I want to understand more about what Charles Peirce, the pragmatist philosopher, said about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Did he really see ethics as more fundamental than epistemology and aesthetics as more fundamental than ethics?

What are the further implications of seeing knowledge as a kind of social status that some information has conferred upon it by a social consensus, rather than as a designation of the information’s validity according to some independent means of validation?

I still want to get back to Hegel. Maybe through Robert Pippin, maybe through Zizek, and maybe through Fredric Jameson. Not sure I want to read Hegel himself.
Some day I’d like to try reading Lacan himself. I spent a couple years in a reading group reading secondary sources on him: Bruce Fink and Slavoj Zizek.

The concept of the normative seems to be big these days. It still seems murky to me. This new book by Joshua Gert, Normative Bedrock, seems to take an approach I like, but I’m having trouble getting into it.

I still would like to read some Bakhtin after reading in a study group a selection from Tzvetan Todorov’s The Dialogical Imagination. I like Bakhtin’s attempt to see meaning as originating not just in contexts but in specific, unique contexts that, because they are the context that are occurring right now with these people who are talking, gain meaning from what has just been said and what we anticipate saying. It could link up with Baz’s interpretation of ordinary language philosophy since he criticizes both the semantic and the contextualizing approaches to determining truth and meaning by focusing on not trying to create a theory of meaning. That ordinary language philosophy is, Wittgenstein-like, a careful dismantling of the need for such theories. Maybe a kind of philosophical therapy.

In general, through pragmatism, ordinary language philosophy, Nietzsche, Buddhism, phenomenology, Bakhtin and others I seem to keep wanting to get away from abstraction and systems to a thinking that focuses on the texture of lived experience. Philosophy as being used to alter ourselves for the better and so having practical purposes.

I want to read more Zizek, but not commentary on Zizek, because he’s so enjoyable and delightful to read. And he gives lively and understandable descriptions of tough thinkers’ thoughts.

I’d like to finish Richard Bernstein’s Praxis and Action.

I’d like a nice book on Kierkegaard and to read again, in the Hong translation, the parts in Concluding Unscientific Postscript about subjectivity. As I recall the passages on subjectivity are so compelling that it seems while reading them that subjectivity is the true reality and the starting point for any thinking or living. That’s rhetorical skill!

Still want to read Adorno again and the Frankfurt School but not sure what. Maybe the nice looking history of the school by Rolf Wiggershaus.

More Hayden White. Still want to read all of his Metahistory.

I’d like to understand the dichotomy between the figural and the literal. Does literal correspond to the correspondence theory of truth? Literal meaning how things actually are? But isn’t that a philosophical assertion: how things actually are. We live a culture in which the surest knowledge is from the natural sciences and so what is "literally" true is what is physically true and not metaphysically true. Compare how those from medieval times may have thought that God and the soul were literally true and nature was a metaphor, messages from God, to be interpreted. This difficulty with the idea of the literal underlay Nietzsche’s metaphorization of language. That metaphor or the figural comes first and then comes literality.

I'd like to review Max Weber's sociology and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz. I could never get into Schutz because I was so politically minded and much more attracted to The Frankfurt School thinkers. Perhaps I could appreciate Schutz now.

I still want to understand theories of the placebo effect. If the placebo effect has to be ruled out as a cause of healing against every new medicine, and if it also is superior, sometimes, to doing nothing and letting the body heal itself, how does it work? What is the physiological mechanism by which we heal ourselves better than our natural process because we think we're getting medicine? Mind over matter doesn't explain much since almost everyone would see mind as a result of the matter of the brain and nervous system.

Chomsky and Zizek and the Journal

The recent “feud” between Chomsky and Zizek that the Wall Street Journal is promoting is only interesting for the use it is being put by the Journal. Reading Chomsky on politics in 1982 transformed me into a lifelong learner, reader of Chomsky and reader of Chomsky’s political critics. His empirical accuracy over a thirty year period has been astounding (check out the 500 pages of footnotes that accompanied the book Understanding Power). Contrary to many who are fans of Chomsky’s political critique, I’ve also loved the work of Salvoj Zizek. Chomsky’s statements implying that Zizek’s work has no value are wrong. I’ve found Zizek’s insights stimulating, helpful and fun. I don’t think I would understand what’s valuable in Lacan without Zizek and Bruce Fink. So I think Chomsky is wrong about Zizek and Lacan, and Zizek is wrong about Chomsky. They are both great in their domains. I do think that Zizek’s comments about contemporary political events – like the war in Afghanistan – are weak. That kind of stuff is Chomsky’s great strength.

It shows how skewed mainstream debate is that you can just state a crude version of Chomsky’s views and they seem foolish. But is the sense of foolishness in Chomsky’s views or in the mainstream assumptions that he is countering? What if it turns out that the mainstream assumptions are ludicrous – the US is pro-democracy, there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace process? If the radical argument against mainstream assumptions is seriously considered then the reader has to find out what’s right by exploring the issues. The Journal author doesn’t want the reader to do this and so the whole incident is presented as humorous and not to be taken seriously. Ironically, this is just the kind of journalistic behavior that Chomsky and Zizek help us understand. No wonder the author doesn't want to confront the issues they raise.

The whole point of the story of the “feud” is to marginalize these thinkers who offer a radical and rationally argued critique of western social and political structures and policies. Since the Wall Street Journal is a bastion of and, on its editorial page, a promoter of mainstream conservative policies they naturally oppose radical critique. Since the Journal is in the power position they can make fun of opponents. By not treating them seriously they can try to get their readers not to treat them seriously and instead use them for entertainment purposes.

Nietzsche and Klossowski

For the last few months I've been poring over Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. I had heard about it as one of the great Nietzsche interpretations, but I was unprepared for how great it is. What first intrigued me was the translator's quoting Michel Foucault's letter to Klossowski after the publication of the book in French in 1969. Foucault wrote: "It is the greatest book of philosophy I have read" and that in its quality it is "with Nietzsche himself." That's high praise! But it's true. I don't think I've ever read a book a second time right after finishing it the first time. I've told myself I would with some books, but never did. I'm just finishing it a second time and may start a third. I don't use it to derive arguments or know what Nietzsche really said. I experience it. It elaborates pretty precisely a proto-Freudian vision of existence and the world in which all that we take for granted as what makes things happen as they do are actually secondary or tertiary epi-phenomena or froth on the waves of reality. So consciousness, reason, the will, the self, distinct things, order all are plausibly, acutely and convincingly dismantled and seen as the result of an underground world of forces and impulses.

Recently a friend asked his standard question when I tell him about a thinker I'm reading: "What is the essence of the thinker's view in one sentence?" In one way it's absurd to try to summarize someone's thought in one sentence, but in another way it's an interesting challenge. He asked me to summarize Nietzsche and I thought my answer pretty good. I said: "Existence is a cacophonous melody."

The Preferential Moment

If the preference for an idea, the liking or disliking, strikes first, and the reasoning that justifies it follows, then learning more about the ingredients and mechanics of preference tells us about belief. And in learning about belief we learn about one of the determinants of what we confer the word “knowledge” upon. For knowledge, in part, is made up from the mix of beliefs that people have. Without a method for analyzing the moment of preference it passes by mostly unnoticed. Generally, when we are questioned about this moment of preference – called assumption, intuition, the given, self-evidence - we shrug because we have to accept its role in belief creation, but there’s not much more to say about it. Additionally, there’s often a discomfort with it because it runs counter to the primacy of reason as the reason we believe. Yet how do reasons which justify an opposite view also gain allegiance? How does a reasoning and conclusion the opposite of ours convince? Its convincingness has to have an alien quality to us because it cannot do to us what it does to our intellectual opponent. To know it in that way – the way the convinced know it – is to have “gone native” and become a convert. Conversion occurs when we transcend reason and have an experience of something as the truth.

This focus on the preferential moment, our liking or disliking, our desires, is unusual. It runs contrary to the main thrust of post-Enlightenment reason and science. But its role in believing the ideas we adopt as our own is, I’m arguing, necessary. If necessary we should know more about it.

Whose Truth?

Here's a reply I made here:

I think it's understandable even with a few inside references:

By what means or criterion do we determine the Truth? F. has his approach. I would guess that if you practiced his/Dan Brown’s/the Mahamudra approach then it would look that way. But if you practiced another approach you may find a different Truth or no Truth or some Non-Dual, ineffable, relative/absolute, Truth/Non-Truth. How are these differing Truths to be adjudicated? How do we sort out which is really the Truth? Whose practices, traditions, concepts, experiences are we to trust as providing The Truth?

Even with powerful practices to determine the Truth we still have to convince others through our words and through our persuasiveness to do the practices that we’ve found show the Truth. It’s the interaction with the community of those involved in determining what we know that we must engage regardless of how convinced we are by our Truth, which, of course, we know is The Truth. (This is Wilber’s three strands of any valid knowledge quest, the last strand is the opinion of the relevant community about the proposed piece of knowledge, that’s why his concept of orienting generalizations is important to him, because it determines what is knowledge.)

This view of the inevitable plurality of truths causes me to like, in contrast to Fede, Wilber’s move to a post-metaphysical integral theory in which the leading edge development is both discovering and creating the truth through its life practice on more developed levels. I don’t think that’s what’s really happening, but this incorporation of the role of the person and the human community in the creation of what we know is true captures something important about our postmodern present and so could argue that it is a transcendence and inclusion of a contemporary understanding.

But I also made the point that there is too much made of Truth in spiritual circles. I said that we should care more about ethics and actions. A person who has the Truth may still do bad things and a person without the truth may do good things. What we want is people acting better and talking about how we should act and altering their selves in order to act more ethically.

So a difference between us is how we believe you determine when you have knowledge. For you powerful mystical experiences are the means to Ultimate knowledge. Probably because you’ve had those experiences and were convinced by them. I have not had those experiences. For a different set of reasons than you I promote an emphasis on knowledge as more fundamentally dependent on ethics and the power structure of the institutions that determine knowledge. So when we are at the intellectual level in which we discuss philosophical topics like the character of knowledge, our views start diverging and we reach a point where you cannot give reasons for your choice of one criterion of knowledge over another. That’s when we would inquire into the extra-rational reasons any given person believes in something rather than something else. I advocate and demonstrate a “psychology of belief” in order to examine the nature of our attachment to the belief we find convincing for extra-rational reasons.

Preferential Treatment

An excerpt from what I am writing:

The hidden importance of the statement: “I like it.” Why like it rather than not like it? There is a lot packed into that experience. The quality of one’s experience of something varies widely for people. Beyond the level at which we give reasons for our beliefs, it is this preference which is determining for belief. Nietzsche writes about the importance of taste. Interestingly, this is the level at which most people contemplate the cultural products they experience: movies, books, TV shows, fashion. They say "I liked it" or "I didn’t like it." Very much in touch with their preferences and generally out of touch with their ability to say why they like or dislike. This is useful for maintaining aggregate demand in a consumer society, but bad for the dream of an informed, thinking, democratic public. One of the many ways capitalism and democracy contradict.

Intellectuals focus on their reasons for belief and neglect their affective preferences, yet, it’s contended here, these affective preferences, taste, play an important role in the development of a person’s worldview. So behind the ordinary persons preferences is their whole disposition toward life. One could do an interesting psychodynamic investigation of why a person likes x or y cultural product and similarly, I contend, we can do an interesting psychodynamic investigation of why an intellectual or anybody believes in x and not y when x and y are arationally assumed or felt or seem to be true.

Intellectual Contradictions

We intellectuals have some fun pointing out how the political candidates contradict themselves and are inconsistent in their views. A lot of the humor on The Daily Show uses this and it’s quite funny. But the joke could be on us. Being intellectuals we care about whether someone contradicts themselves. The law of non-contradiction is central to reason and science. But politicians, when they are being politicians, are not trying to be rationally consistent. They are trying to gain power. Contradiction or non-contradiction only matters to them if it affects their success in gaining power. They don’t have to care about contradiction in and of itself like intellectuals do. So we intellectuals think we’ve got them when we show how ridiculously inconsistent politicians are, but we are using an alien criterion – non-contradiction – which is much lower down on their list of important criteria. Now, if Jon Stewart and The Daily Show’s exposure of the blatant contradictions of the politicians becomes a force that affects political outcomes, then politicians would care; not because they’ve contradicted themselves and that’s bad but because it may be detrimental to their chances of gaining power. So we laugh at contradictory politicians and they laugh at us for missing what’s important to getting elected.

Hermeneutic and Preferential Circles

Is there a preferential circle as there is a hermeneutic circle? The hermeneutic circle describes how we interpret a text through the circular feedback of parts and wholes. We start with the first word (a part) and a sense of what this text we are about to read is about (and so the whole of the text), and then we interpret each succeeding part using our conception of the whole. In turn we alter our understanding of the whole by the understanding we make of each new part. So this is a continual, circular process by which interpretation occurs. At the end of the text our conception of the whole, the meaning of the text, has changed, and it has changed through the reading of the parts which got their interpretation through the then current understanding of the whole, which they, the parts, in turn, continually altered as we read.

So I had the idea that there is another circular process occurring which I call the preferential or, more awkwardly, tendentious circle. While the hermeneutic process is occurring another process is occurring which is the continual adjustment of our liking and disliking of the text. Each successive part rubs us one way or another – actually three ways: liking, disliking and neutral – and changes our feeling about the whole. And each feeling about the whole affects our experience of each successive part. At the end we have our disposition towards the piece: we liked it, didn’t like it or are mixed. This preferential reaction could then be examined more closely.

As I think about it, there is also the involvement of our previously accumulated likes and dislikes which inform the way we react to the piece. But this must also be true of the hermeneutic dimension. To interpret a piece we must use the whole of our understanding, placing it within the context of our larger understanding of things. (This is Gadamer's horizon of understanding.)

The preferential circle occurs with differing degrees of self-consciousness. Most people watch movies with very little consciousness of their reaction to it. And, at the lowest level, all they can say is “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” But we can increase our consciousness of our reaction to the film. Good film critics are reacting to the film and simultaneously or in retrospect recovering their reactions and the reasons for their reactions. (Pauline Kael was a master of this.) Generally this is described as an aesthetic reaction, but it has a personal/psychological dimension that usually goes unexplored. But it can be explored, as I do in the psychology of belief.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part XI

This is my response to the philosopher's post (Exchange Part X). My comments follow the **. His comments are un-starred.


** Ok let’s not fly off the handle here, it’s only reality that’s at stake. I'm sorry for the length of this, but I get anxious to defend my view.

** Two approaches at answering. The first is something new, an attempt to avoid the thrust and parry. The second is the blow-by-blow responses which I think continues the back and forth.

** First Approach:

** I wonder if there is a different way to approach this difference. After all, Rorty has engaged and parried the best philosophers on this, especially in Rorty and His Critics. So I doubt we will come to a resolution. The thrust, lunge and parry could go on and on. Now we would learn things about our beliefs and maybe modify them so I think that can be beneficial. But I wonder if there is another approach. Maybe to just clarify what the difference is and see if we can agree on the nature of that difference.

** We both think science is extraordinary and a wildly successful way to gain knowledge. We both think that talking about “discovering reality” and making a distinction between “all the evidence points to it and it seems wholly justified, but is it true?” are useful ways to think and talk. But there is a difference (and this is where we have to see if this characterizes the difference accurately) between how we regard the nature and importance of the concept/realness of “reality” or “the real.” You say we’ve got to have a robust understanding of “the real” and give reasons that argue for its robustness and, dare I say it, its reality. Otherwise we can’t understand why science and any other avenue to truth and the real works. We bang into a world out there, if you drop that notion then we lose touch with it and you (Rortians) are making believe that there is no world we bang into.

** I say, channeling Rorty, philosophers have made a valiant effort to know reality through metaphysics and ontology, debates about realism vs. anti-realism, but they’ve been unsuccessful. Let’s stop those debates about this entity that always seems to be on the other side of knowing and just continue with our inquiries and understand them as the result of social practices that produce useful or un-useful results. Scientists will still talk about discovering reality, but there isn’t much for philosophers to add to our knowledge of reality. Let's do a Wittgensteinian therapy on the need for an extra-pragmatic understanding of reality.

** Does that describe the difference?

** I’d go on to ask:

** Is there anything more to know about reality than that it stands as kind of absolute but ever unattainable goal which may or may not be correcting inquiry so that inquiry can approach it? Is there anything for philosophers to say about it – reality – beyond the various knowings of it in science, mysticism, religion, poetry, literature, history? Do the natural sciences tell us about physical reality as it is in itself and so help us with our metaphysical investigations or does science give us one extraordinarily powerful, elegant, useful, dangerous, predictively successful view of physical reality? Is there anything else for philosophers to do with reality? Can they tell us something more about It?

** You’re saying, “Hey Rorty, don’t be so fixated on the rigid, absolutistic, Platonic, Kantian-noumenal, reality. Rorty, you betray your beholdeness to absolutism in your fixation on rejecting it. Instead let’s set aside that Absolute Reality and the attempt to dismiss any discussion of Reality and talk about "reality." There is something for philosophers to contribute, that we don’t get from scientists, about that non-Absolutist reality.

** Second Approach: And here are your assertions and my response interspersed:

I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery.

** But we’re asking philosophical questions. Scientists are usually poor philosophers. Rorty has a reply to the Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg, (in “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics”) the only time I’ve sensed irritation in his tone, and, ironically, he defends philosophy from that scientist’s crude defense of a crude realism.

They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are?

** What’s the difference between the way things are and the way things really are? I think philosophers think there is a “really are” beyond “are.” Is that “really” the too severe Reality that Rorty is hooked on or the more moderate real that you are advocating as a more reasonable view? And what is that real like? We have no idea how things “really” are but we have been successful in wondering if our current understanding fits all the evidence and, as a shorthand, saying “but is it true?”.

Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows.

** But what is the criterion for determining greater correctness? If it’s explanatory power then demon spirits could be as good within its overall weltanschauung as the theory of infection, depending on the needs of the person to retain their culture. If it’s what cures better I’d say the theory of infection. But I don’t see the use of “gets reality better” or “more like the way things are” except for rhetorical and practical purposes. But astrology is preferable to astronomy if you are trying to understand yourself and guide your life. Does astronomy do that? But if you want to predict the next eclipse or know the extent of the cosmos, I say, do astronomy. If your criterion for knowing the origin of species originates in the absolute faith in the literal words of God in the Bible then creationism is superior. My God! what better authority is there than God? I think that’s wrong, but how do I convince the believer? Steven Hales argues that we have to accept a relativism when it comes to deciding between the rational worldview, the Christian worldview and the tribal hallucinogenic spirituality worldview in Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. Also Rorty is a Kuhnian and there is a different conception of science derived from Kuhn and the sociology of science which does not see science as a gradually more accurate representing of the real.

But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real.

** Is there any more to say about the real beyond the ways we have of identifying it? Is it matter, spirit, consciousness, God, some substance, the Tao? How do we know which it is? Is it fruitful to pursue it philosophically? It’s certainly fruitful to continue describing and explaining physical reality using science. Is there a difference between what science currently tells us physical reality is like and what reality is really like?

Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around.

** Rorty is fine with criteria such as “powerful” and “elegant.” Powerful meaning predictive, consistent with the evidence, cohering with what else we know. Those are fine criteria of science. The coming around can be explained by the adherence to certain criteria and the arising of the younger generations overturning of the older generations conceptions. The creative individual, on the margins, Einstein let's say, takes the anomalies and evidence and the applied standards of arguing and does something new. This causes a crisis for the established figures. They have to wrestle with it, to the degree that there is a democratic structure in their institution. A debate ensues, younger people (usually younger) are excited by this new approach and enter the fray. A struggle ensues. One side wins. We can say the winners have a better explanation, more of the evidence fits, old conundrums are solved (and new ones created) the old theory’s limitations are seen and it is incorporated into a better, more coherent whole. We can do more things – build atom bombs, yea! Is the world remade in the new conceptions image or do we know better what the world is really like?

Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.

** So you’re saying that Rorty is too hung up on a crudely dichotomous, black-and-white division between Reality with a capital “r” versus not talking about Reality except as is useful in given situations which is too pale and makes no sense of science’s successes. And he misses that there is another small “r” real that is neither of those. Is there a philosophical debate about the character of that moderate real? Maybe I’ve gotten too much of my understanding of philosophy from Rorty. Who are the thinkers talking about it and what do they say it’s like? Do they distinguish old-fashioned, Reality, the noumena, what’s seen from the God’s-eye-view from this other thing called “the real” which scientists are very good at knowing and telling us about? And is this real quarks or sub-quarks or something else according to these debates?

Whew!

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part X

The Philosopher writes:

I'm not "satisfied that working toward agreement with my fellows" is all that science is doing and I'd venture to guess that most scientists don't see their work that way either. Most scientists view their work (at least the biologists and physicists I've read) as a kind of exploration, an adventure of discovery. They almost expect to be surprised by the real. They wonder, ponder and nature often surprises them. It 's not just playing with human models that have no ultimate reference or can't "arrive" at any reference beyond itself. I mean, do you think it makes sense to say that germ theory, gravitational theory, cell theory and any other well verified theory in science has no reference to the way things really are? Of course, scientific theories don't disclose reality in any final, once and for all sense, but surely they are more correct than theories of infection that appeal to demon spirits. If Rorty were right there'd be no more sense in saying that astronomy is preferable to astrology or evolution to creationism so long as we can secure agreement that that's what reality is like from our fellows, or enough of our fellows. But the history of science is and has been a testing of models, falsification of models and re-testing against the benchmark of the real. Often, it has been the individual against the community in this regard. Scientists often don't want to see reality in a certain way, they have their own pet theories of the way things are, but if the theory unifies the disparate data in a powerful and elegant way, they can or often do come around. Scientific theories and their verification are not at all as arbitrary and socially constructed as Rorty makes out. Rorty wants a guarantee and behind his pragmatism there may be this rhetoric of regret, fueled by his Cartesian anxiety. Knowing is taking a look for him and if he can't be supplied with the super look that will bridge the gap between theory and reality, then we're supposed to give up on knowing reality and settle for playing with models and garnering votes from our peers. But knowing is not taking a look, at least not for Aristotle. It may be for Plato. I'm not sure.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part IX

The Philosopher responds.

My responses to him are inserted and always follow an asterisk *:


I like your spirited reply!

I guess I'm going to just have to read that damn book [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature] and hope to God I don't lose my "illusions."

* This, for me, raises the question of what makes us attach to the ideas, conceptions, beliefs that we are attached to that "seem right" even when (or if) the argumentation and evidence don't prove them or when the relevant community doesn't agree on an answer? We could say that some of us have an intuitive connection to the way things are, but that begs the question of whether there is a "way in which things are." And what's the nature of the "intuitive" connection? There is an interesting, bypassed world hidden in words like: assumption, intuition, conversion.

That having been said, sometimes it seems to me that Rorty is too absolute. (Ha!). Either the Real is self-present to us in some absolute way, a la Descartes, "clear and distinct" and all that or we must simply give up any hope of knowing the real and turn our attention to more "useful" topics. But isn't that attitude overdrawn? I mean, why can't we, in Aristotelian fashion, move toward the real, make models, test them, listen to what nature is telling us she's like, try to correct for bias, and "slouch toward verisimilitude" (with apologies to Yeats). We don't have to be the (Rortian) victims of his Cartesian anxiety. Rorty seems to couch things in this "all or I want no part of it" way. I believe science is one very good way, perhaps our best and only way, of getting out of our way, and letting nature tell us what she's like. How, for example, can we explain its pragmatic success if it doesn't bear some semblance to the real (note small r)? Anyway, I suspect Rorty's model of knowledge is too Platonic. He'd have done good for a good dose of the Stagirite. But, hell, I haven't done my homework.

* Rorty would be fine with making models, testing them, correcting for bias, even using colloquially the phrases "listening to nature" and "seems right but is it true?" as long as some ambitious philosopher doesn't say "Is nature really telling us things?, What is the 'real'?" Being a pragmatist he'd support all scientific inquiry. He just recommends not getting fooled by metaphors - here the aural metaphor of "listening" rather than the visual metaphor of a "mirror of nature" - like nature telling us what she's like. He suggests that we be satisfied with working towards agreement with our fellows and not taking the Peircian step of "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in".

* Now how does Rorty explain why science works so well if it's not telling us what nature is like? But does poetry work less well? Does it tell us what nature is like?

* Here's Rorty: "[The pragmatist] drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of 'correspondence' (either of thought to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that 'true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are' is no more illuminating than 'it is right because it fulfills the Moral Law.' Both remarks, in the pragmatist's eyes, are empty metaphysical compliments - harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and 'clarified' philosophically." Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xvii.

* So you and Rorty agree on the doing of science, he would just caution against letting the sometimes useful concept "real" slide into the historically unsuccessful investigation of the "Real."


Thank you for your interesting reply.

* And thank you.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VIII

The Philosopher was wondering:

I've been thinking about this question regarding Rorty: Is there
anything natural in Rorty's philosophy, anything, as he would put it, "found"? Or, is everything, "made?"


I thought:

Rorty's a big champion of the natural sciences and we certainly use the designation "natural" usefully. Humans are understood to be natural beings causally tied up in the whole causal unfolding of the physical world. And of course there are our everyday uses of "found" and "made".

But if you or someone else wants the distinction between "found" and "made" to do some epistemological work, like be a reliable distinction between ontologically distinct things one of which - the found - is simply there in the same way for all of us and so serves as a universal touchstone or referrent for reality and so creates an epistemological task of how we know when and who has the perspicuous representing of it beyond all "made" or human-createdness, then they will be disappointed as we see by a review of the history of philosophical attempts to find such a referrent and they should really talk about other, more useful, topics.

By telling a particular story of the history of philosophy Rorty wants to convince people that a distinction - the eternal and the contingent, the phenomena and the noumena, how things are in and of themselves and how they are because we see them that way - has led us astray and been ultimately unproductive, and so other topics are better to be discussed.

But maybe I'm not understanding your question. I assumed that you were saying that natural was connected to found as artificial or artificed would be connected to made.

This is one of the main themes of "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." I'm reading it again twenty years later and poring over it like its a sacred text. I want to be converted and inducted into the cult! Yet aren't I already a true believer? It seems some small part won't let go. Maybe that's the attachment to the absolute, the transcendent, the Truth. And is that a sane connection to what's real or is it the last vestige of the illusion?

Ah philosophy!

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part VII

I respond to the philosopher. My responses follow the ***


*** Good to hear your questions and criticisms.

I don't know. You do argue well and forcefully. I am not convinced and I can see you are not convinced by me.

*** Yes, that’s why there is the flourishing area of philosophy examining "rational disagreements."

Let me ask a few more questions about something Rorty says in this text book I have. He says: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just'). . . whatever view wins in a free and open encounter."

Some of my questions are these:

1) Who decides who wins in this "free and open encounter?"

*** The participants and the institutional structures that deem these things. If the participants agree – let’s say the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we agree there is a 90% chance of man-made climate change – then that’s a powerful, but not conclusive, “win”. That doesn’t mean others won’t disagree – Bjorn Lomborg – and continue to speak against it. Or, science journals decide what gets published. That’s an institutionalized way for someone to “win.” And the winners have to be contended with either as what you must cite in your article or as what you must criticize in order to change a prevailing view you think is wrong. Rorty used the word “content” in that quote to emphasize that that’s all we’ve got, we have to settle for that level of surety.

Who decides what the criteria of "winning" are?

*** The institutional norms in science are decided or maintained by those in power. The criteria that they use have a history dating back to the origins of modern science. But even those criteria have to be struggled over with different criterion gaining and losing power depending on trends in argumentation. The logician Graham Priest has written about the lack of argumentation for the law of non-contradiction and argued that there are true contradictions at the limits of thought. He calls this view "dialetheism." I'm not saying it's right (although I think it is), it just seems like an example of criteria being examined and modified.

2) Hasn't Rorty smuggled in an implicit notion of good into this definition by having the encounter be free and open? If he has, then he has begged the question regarding what is true, right and just. I think this may be true since the reason that he wants the encounter to be "free and open" is presumably, because he thinks that, in this way, it will be more fair, more just and well, right. But isn't this just to assume the truth of the position you should justify?

*** But doesn’t everyone argue as best they can for their view and then if pushed to the limit say: “Well, I just assume, that cruelty is the worst thing we do to each other.” Rorty isn’t saying he doesn’t have beliefs about what is just and right and best justified (true) he’s saying that we can have discussions about our differing moral and political views but let’s drop the Philosophical discussion about what is The Right Moral View, the absolutely right moral view. That conversation looked like it would be helpful centuries ago, but now its gotten so dry and specialized that philosophers no longer play a role in public intellectual life.

3) Following on 2), I want to ask, Why should the encounter be free and open? If the object is winning and if winning determines what is true and right and just, then why not win by any means necessary?

*** If we watch a sports race or political election and are focused on who won, it doesn’t mean we don’t care how they won. Why? Because in the sports race we’re interested in finding the currently best at that sport according to the current rules, or politically we’ve established a majority rule procedure to settle disputes and called it democracy. So winning by the rules is important because we think we get better outcomes and so solve our differences and problems better. Rorty could say that “free and open” allows more people to flourish, feel dignity, offer more varied views and so makes for a better discussion and that these are good things because they make for a better society, which is one that is more inkeeping with the image that he and his allies have for society.


4) If what is true and just and right is determined by who wins, then what happens to minority voices? If winning means simply whichever side gets the most votes (at least that's what I would assume he means) then does that mean that the minority position must be wrong? I assume that this is not what he means, but I wonder what his position on minority views would be since they are not on the "winning" side and so, at least by his definition, they can't be on the side of what is true, right and just.

I'm aware that he advocates cultivating a stance of "irony" toward our "final vocabulary" and so he probably wouldn't want even those who "win" to take themselves too seriously since they could "lose" next year, next month or next week!

*** I don’t think we have to press the use of “winning” in that sentence too far. Rorty can say that winning in intellectual forums is almost never a 100% win. The laws of physics are as close to 100% as you get perhaps, but, short of that, so much is revisable as new generations and other societal changes occur. I can see him elaborating a view in which there are current relative winners and losers and that each individual will, depending on their view, assign differing valuations to the differing sides: a current winner is considered by person A as a should-be-a-loser and person B as a rightful winner.

*** So Rorty writes several lines after the sentence you quote: ‘Habermas] still insists on seeing the process of undistorted communication as convergent, and seeing that convergence as a guarantee of the “rationality” of such communication. The residual difference I have with Habermas is that his universalism makes him substitute such convergence for ahistorical grounding, whereas my insistence on the contingency of language makes me suspicious of the very idea of the “universal validity” which such convergence is supposed to underwrite. Habermas wants to preserve the traditional story (common to Hegel and to Peirce) of asymptotic approach to foci imaginarii [certainties, I believe]. I want to replace this with a story of increasing willingness to live with plurality and to stop asking for universal validity. I want to see freely arrived at agreement as agreement on how to accomplish common purposes (e.g., prediction and control of the behavior of atoms or people, equalizing life-chances, decreasing cruelty)…” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p.67.

Something else I wrote a couple nights ago but didn't send is this:

Here's a pragmatic argument from Socrates against postmodern pragmatism. It's in Plato's Meno:

"I wouldn't swear to other things on behalf of the argument [immortality of the soul, knowledge as recollection] but for this, if I were able, I would fight in word and in deed: that we would be better and more courageous and less idle, if we thought that we ought to seek for what we don't know than if we thought that what we don't know it isn't possible to seek nor ought we to seek."

(My stilted translation of Meno 86b)

I'd say that if you think that truth and good are just human constructions, then there is no real reason to defend them since we're only fighting, in the end, for our right to use our "final vocabulary." But what is that? Is that worth fighting for? Dying for? I don't think there are many things that I would kill for, but I do think there ought to be some things worth dying for. Rorty's postmodern pragmatism gives us nothing to live for or die for and to that extent it is potentially corrupting in just the way that Socrates worries about in the passage above.

If Rorty is right, then we can't be wrong since there's only your perspective and my perspective and his and hers. But no perspective is really any better than any other since they're all perspectives that are made not found.

Socrates' position is just right--between relativism and dogmatism. He rejects both the position that there is no Truth (only truths) and the position that whatever that Truth is, he knows it. He believes that we can and must advance toward the truth. Progress entails vigorous self-examination and examination of others, but if there is nothing to advance toward, nothing to strive for, this can lead to the sort of intellectual and moral complacency he's talking about. So, in the end, I side with Socrates on the grounds of what effects Rorty's philosophy could have on our character. Take care, gentlemen.

*** When and how do we know that we know the Truth? If we can’t know then how does it guide inquiry? It’s true that Rorty does not give us something to live and die for. But who lives or dies for the concept of absolute truth?

*** And is our choice only between striving for Truth and nothing to strive for? This sounds like the either personal taste or an independent standard dichotomy from a previous exchange. We can be motivated to vigorous self-examination and examination of others so that we can learn more, interpret more creatively, create a better world, make our ideas cohere better, or solve problems together. None of those are the Truth but neither are they “nothing”.

*** Why the “just” in “just human constructions”, what’s wrong with human constructions? And what’s the difference between a “real reason” and a “reason”? If “final vocabulary” seems too thin or flip we could say we would fight for our “deeply held beliefs.” They are connected to and gain their meaning from many things like our attachment to family, land, society, way of life, future generations, etc. Those things and others are worth fighting for even if we can’t show that or don’t know if they correspond to the independent standard of truth and the good.

*** Whew! Now you must be convinced! It seems we don’t give up our deeply held beliefs so easily whether we think they have or could have the backing of absoluteness or not.