Category Archives: philosophy

Emerson’s mistake

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Emerson’s Self-Reliance makes a provocative case for cultivating the self and shunning morality in the form of obligations to others. One famous paragraph begins, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” The same paragraph ends with an argument against charity as an entanglement that damages integrity: “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”

Emerson strongly favors interacting with other minds, especially the geniuses who figure in the books that he devours in his private hours. Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Milton, Copernicus, and Newton are just some of the names he invokes in Self-Reliance. He thinks these people (all men) had distinct and invariant characters. “For I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being.” Thus, to understand an author is to grasp something unitary and unique about him that inspires you to enrich your own equally coherent character, not by sharing his truth but by creating your own. In Experience, Emerson writes:

Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire. Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos.

But this is false. To experience another person’s mind (whether through a brilliant book or an everyday interaction) is not just to pick out one idea that you think defines the other. It is to begin exploring his or her web of thinking while sharing your own. You both have unique webs, but each element of your thought is shared with many other people. You gain the most by exploring many of the other person’s moral nodes and their connections. This does not threaten your “unity” or risk chaos, because your own character was already a heterogeneous, evolving, and loosely connected web that you largely adopted from other people. Touching at just one point is a failure of communication and interpretation.

To be sure, you can strive to disentangle from everyday life and politics and prefer books to “dining out occasionally” (which, Thoreau found, interfered with his “domestic arrangements”), but you should not persuade yourself that you have thereby disconnected your network map from everyone else’s. Your self is still a social creation, and you are still mentally involved with others, even if you detach politically and economically.

References: Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (New York: Random House, 2009) pp. 134-5, 138. Emerson, “Experience,” in ibid, p. 322. Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (New York: T.Y Crowell & Co., 1899)p. 62

the public purposes of the humanities (a brief history)

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Shrinking enrollments and subsidies lend the humanities an air of crisis. Several states are considering cutting public support for majors that do not lead directly to jobs. North Carolina governor Pat McCrory discussed that idea on the radio with former NEH director Bill Bennett, who himself holds a philosophy PhD. During the conversation, Bennett “made a joke about gender studies courses at UNC-Chapel Hill. ‘If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it … But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.’” Although gender studies includes a lot of social science, the other departments that would suffer the most from cuts would likely be in the humanities.

This moment is particularly difficult, but the debate about the public value of the humanities is a perennial one. The word “humanist” derives from the informal name for a new kind of tutor who emerged during the Renaissance. Medieval universities had offered a curriculum that strongly emphasized abstract, theoretical, and technical subjects—above all, philosophy and theology. The main purpose was to prepare senior churchmen. Young men interested in secular, public roles—as courtiers (in monarchies) or office-holders (in republics)—sought a different kind of education that was more practical, concrete, and likely to make them persuasive in public. They attended universities and paid private “humanists” to tutor them on the side, or else they simply studied with humanists, whose curricula began to influence the grammar schools and then the universities of Europe.

The original purpose of the humanities, in short, was to prepare young men to be effective public speakers and to have secular public virtues. The mainstay of humanistic education was the study of narrative, both historical and fictional. Humanists also taught philosophy, but they shifted the focus from abstract arguments to characters like Socrates and the literary form of works by authors like Plato, Seneca, Erasmus, and Montaigne.

Shakespeare received a humanistic education in his grammar school, and he nicely summarizes its goals at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew. Young Lucentio hopes to “deck his fortune with his virtuous deeds”—and to accomplish that, he needs an education. He sets off for the great medieval university of Padua–the first university in all of Europe–where he plans to “plunge … in the deep” by studying philosophy. The form of philosophy that he would encounter at Padua would be scholasticism, the impressively developed and refined offshoot of Aristotle’s thought. He is rather like a young person today who wants to study economics: a difficult, highly technical discipline that promises professional career opportunities and that pretends to explain important general questions. Lucentio’s servant (and perhaps his tutor) Tranio politely suggests that he should mix that diet with some literature and rhetoric:

Mi perdonato, gentle master mine,
I am in all affected as yourself;
Glad that you thus continue your resolve
To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy.
Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray;
Or so devote to Aristotle’s cheques
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured:
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk … (I.i)

Although the humanities originated as preparation for public life and “common talk,” in the century after Shakespeare, humanistic scholars became increasingly sophisticated about the texts they taught and the historical contexts in which those texts originated. The original idea was to inspire young men with the examples of heroes from the classical past. But the more that humanistic scholars understood classical civilization, the more remote, complex, and varied it appeared. They pursued the truth with the most sophisticated available research tools, treating their impact on students as secondary. The Battle of the Books that broke out in England around 1700 appeared to be a humorous debate between the “wits” and the “pedants,” but in part it was a conflict between amateur enthusiasts of classical texts and professional classicists. Insofar as the amateur enthusiasts—the “wits”—made a serious case for their side, they argued that the humanities should support public life. The pedants retorted that the amateurs did not really understand the texts they appreciated. (I draw this example and much of my argument from the work of my father, Joseph M. Levine.)

The debate about the public role of the humanities has never been resolved, and perhaps never will be, because there is enduring merit in both sides. But as long as we expect the public to fund the humanities with their taxes, it will be essential to make a persuasive case to voters. That case must somehow honor both rigor and relevance, both scholarly excellence and some kind of “common talk.”

[References: Kevin Kiley, Another Liberal Arts Critic, Inside Hiigher Ed, Jan 30, 2013; Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also “Joseph M. Levine,” “the future of classics,” “humanistic versus technical philosophy,” and “the place of social impact in a university.”]

character understood in network terms

In a random network, like (a) below, each node has an equal chance of being linked to any other, and the number of links per node will show a normal distribution. However, in most real networks (see “b”), a few nodes hog most of the links; the distribution is skewed. A rule of thumb–not a law of nature–is that 20% of the nodes draw 80% of the links in a naturally occurring network.

Two phenomena, among others, explain the tendency for links to cluster. First, some nodes are simply more important than others for reasons independent of the network’s structure. For instance, if an asteroid hit South Dakota, web pages devoted to asteroids would get more incoming links because the topic would be timely.

Second, the rich get richer. A node that already has a lot of links is easy to find and provides short pathways to other nodes, so there are reasons to link to it. In the case of websites, that phenomenon may be artificially exaggerated by Google, which uses the number of links to rank search results. But in a naturally occurring human network, it is smart to connect to people who are already well-connected. Regardless of their intrinsic merits, they draw more attention because they have more attention.

Now, consider one’s worldview as a set of ideas connected in various ways to each other. This network changes constantly. It tends to grow as you learn new things. You also forget or reject things that you once knew, but growth is the main tendency, at least for the first 25 years of life. Every time you are confronted with a new idea (from other people or direct observation), you will be inclined to connect it to existing ideas.

The two phenomena introduced earlier will encourage you to link the new idea to nodes that are already well-linked.

First, you will believe (rightly or wrongly) that some of your existing ideas are important, and you will link your new ideas to those. For instance, if you believe in God, that’s pretty important, and you will be inclined to ask of any new idea whether it connects to God. Perhaps it is evidence of His will or a sign of His glory.

Also, you will prefer ideas that you have already used to support other ideas. In network terms, you will look first to your high-traffic nodes as potential links to the new nodes that you are bringing into your map. They are more salient, and they allow you to connect the new idea to many old ideas.

This tendency to cluster has its dangers. It can be a cognitive bias, limitation, or “heuristic” in the bad sense of that word. It locks people into their current views. A fancy term for one relevant form of bias is asymmetric Bayesianism. Whenever a new idea or observation seems relevant to one of your favorite beliefs, you connect them and make the original belief even more central to your network. Whenever a new idea conflicts with an existing belief, you find reasons to shunt it off to the edge of the network. All your experiences reinforce your original idea.

But although clustering has dangers, I would defend it to a degree. For one thing, some ideas deserve more links than others. Whether a given moral belief deserves a lot of links is an important question. For example, it is true and bad that millions of children are hungry. But it is a different question whether that idea is linked to enough of our other beliefs. Their hunger should be relevant to many other questions, such as what I do with my own surplus income. To take a different example: the Holocaust was unthinkably bad. And it is relevant to the existence of the state of Israel. But I believe that the Holocaust is connected too often to other issues involving the contemporary Middle East, such as Israel’s relationship with Palestinians. It is not that each link is false or illegitimate, but the network is centered in the wrong place.

So your moral network should skew in favor of the right things. That is not question-begging: it rather poses an important question. Which beliefs should be central nodes?

Your moral network will also skew because of the rich-get-richer principle: ideas that you have already linked to many other ideas will attract new connections because of their prominence. I would like to challenge the premise that this is pure bias, a mere limitation.

If morality could be truly rational, then one of its hallmarks would be a lack of bias toward existing beliefs. All your ideas would also be mutually consistent. And there would be a reason for everything. You would not just believe P, you would always be able to give a reason for P.

I am afraid that I see morality differently from that. I think it is a tissue of beliefs and commitments that is relatively hard to construct and sustain. Each piece is easy to reject if we ask “Why?” But if we tear away at the tissue, we have nothing keeping us from just doing what we want. Morality is “faith-based,” whether the faith is in God or in the equality of human beings (a moral assumption not at all suggested by science).

Morality is also a means of building up a common worldview with other people. It is “socially constructed,” and constructing it allows us to live together, not merely in parallel. Again, if we ask “Why?” about each component of morality, we will just weaken the common tissue that we have spun together.

This does not mean that any moral beliefs will do, or that we needn’t be concerned about justification, consistency, logic, and other hallmarks of rationality. An inconsistency should be a source of concern and reflection. Automatically returning to a few well-traveled ideas is not satisfactory; we should strive to broaden our minds. On the other hand, we know that strongly clustered networks are robust. They work better and last longer than random-looking networks. Thus, even if two people endorse the same list of moral beliefs, I would wager that the one whose beliefs cluster will act better. I hope that my moral worldview does not center on false or bad nodes, but I do seek beliefs to which I can frequently turn. Those centers of my network map define my character or moral identity.

the new civic education article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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(Washington, DC) I am proud to announce that a new article on “Civic Education” is online on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a peer-reviewed, free resource that I use regularly for a wide range of topics. Jack Crittenden originally wrote the article and did a very good job with it. At his request, I have thoroughly revised it, so that it now has two authors. Here are the philosophical questions that the article poses at the outset:

  • Who has the full rights and obligations of a citizen? This question is especially contested with regard to children, immigrant aliens, and individuals who have been convicted of felonies.
  • In what communities ought we see ourselves as citizens? The nation-state is not the only candidate; some people see themselves as citizens of local geographical communities, organizations, movements, loosely-defined groups, or even the world as a whole.
  • What responsibilities does a citizen of each kind of community have? Do all members of each community have the same responsibilities, or ought there be significant differences, for example, between elders and children, or between leaders and other members?
  • What is the relationship between a good regime and good citizenship? Aristotle held that there were several acceptable types of regimes, and each needed different kinds of citizens. That makes the question of good citizenship relative to the regime-type. But other theorists have argued for particular combinations of regime and citizen competence. For example, classical liberals endorsed regimes that would make relatively modest demands on citizens, both because they were skeptical that people could rise to higher demands and because they wanted to safeguard individual liberty against the state. Civic republicans have seen a certain kind of citizenship–highly active and deliberative–as constitutive of a good life, and therefore recommend a republican regime because it permits good citizenship.
  • Who may decide what constitutes good citizenship? If we consider, for example, students enrolled in public schools in the United States, should the decision about what values, habits, and capabilities they should learn belong to their parents, their teachers, the children themselves, the local community, the local or state government, or the nation-state? We may reach different conclusions when thinking about 5-year-olds and adult college students. As Sheldon Wolin warned: “…[T]he inherent danger…is that the identity given to the collectivity by those who exercise power will reflect the needs of power rather than the political possibilities of a complex collectivity” (1989, 13). For some regimes—fascist or communist, for example—this is not perceived as a danger at all but, instead, the very purpose of their forms of civic education. In democracies, the question is more complex because public institutions may have to teach people to be good democratic citizens, but they can decide to do so in ways that reinforce the power of the state and reduce freedom.
  • What means of civic education are ethically appropriate? It might, for example, be effective to punish students who fail to memorize patriotic statements, or to pay students for community service, but the ethics of those approaches would be controversial. An educator might engage students in open discussions of current events because of a commitment to treating them as autonomous agents, regardless of the consequences. As with other topics, the proper relationship between means and ends is contested.

Stanley Cavell: morality as one way of living well

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I have been dipping into the works of Stanley Cavell for 20 years, but my recent reading of Tony Laden’s Reasoning: A Social Picture and my re-reading of Cavell’s The Claim of Reason have given me, I think, an inkling of Cavell’s whole view. He is a dense and difficult author, and I found it rewarding to type the quotes embedded in this post because each word, emphasis, and parenthesis rewards consideration–and you miss a lot if you read too fast.

A standard view of morality might treat it as (ideally) a comprehensive guide to good judgment and good action. It should cover everything that is good or bad, from minor questions to the relations among governments. In fact, everything that we do should be subject to moral evaluation. Morality should be internally coherent, or correspond to some kind of moral truth, or both. If there is actually no moral truth, then morality is not what it purports to be and is really just a set of conventions, biological urges, or subjective opinions.

Cavell instead views morality– “mere morality”–as a particular way of engaging other people at a human scale:

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