Beyond Belief

I never know what to make of philosophical historiography. Charles Taylor new Templeton book, A Secular Age, is such a work. In a recent post at Immanent Frame, Taylor picks up on a distinction made in his new book between 'porours' and 'buffered' selves. A buffered self is like you and me, selves for whom there is a discrete frontier between itself and the world, between the mental and all else. A porous self is one for whom this discrete border does not exist. (I wonder what Taylor would make of the extended mind thesis)?

Does it make sense to ask, Is this accurate? I don't think so, for a reason I'll provide in a moment. But even if I do not think that this sort of work is something that can be accurate or inaccurate, it is still possible to disagree with certain claims made in it. I have one claim in particular in mind that I'll address below, which is this: that the difference between ourselves and our ancestors has less to do with different beliefs, and more to do with different 'experiences.'

First let me register my qualifications on philosophical historiography. Taylor tells a story about how, roughly five-hundred years ago, a porous experience of self was supplanted by a buffered experience of self. As Taylor acknowledges, this account has similarities to Weber's theory of Entzauberung. For us, purposes, meanings, intentions, and values are intrinsically mental predicates, whereas for those who experienced a porous self, such things were parts of the environment as much as parts of the soul, and a world that itself embodies meaning, purpose and value is a an enchanted, zauberische world. Of course, while I detect a hint of nostalgia in Taylor's piece (he is a practicing Catholic after all), Taylor's work succeeds as admirably as any at being a fair-minded, work of descriptive philosophical historiography.

Taylor’s story is consistent with itself. We might even be able to say that it is consistent with the facts, were it not the case that in history, more often than not, the facts are decided by story we are trying to tell. Danto made this point classically: we can say, in a rather uninteresting but unassailable way, that at 7pm, just after sunset, January, in the year 49b, Julius Ceaser rode his horse across the river Rubicon--but this hardly makes for a historical fact. There is no history here at all. History requires tying earlier events to later events within a narrative framework, and that narrative framework requires ascribing psychological predicates like desires and intentions. Thus, to make the above fact interesting, we could say that Ceaser crossed the Rubicon and thereby ended the Roman republic--but this fact is unaccessible, or even meaningless, outside of the narrative about the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire. If that's the case, then I'm not sure what it would mean to call a work of philosophical historiography 'accurate.'

Nonetheless, there is one claim made in Taylor's post that is questionable regardless of whether it is accurate. He asserts that the difference between ourselves and the selves of our forebearers is not a matter of belief, but of 'experience.' He doesn't define experience, but I suspect he means something like existential mood, horizon, attunment, or what-not.

So, Taylor claims that beliefs are not at stake here. I wonder. Here is an example common both to our forebearers and many today: Heaven is a place beyond time and in heaven we will meet and enjoy company with our relatives and loved ones. 'Meet' and 'enjoy' are temporally extended predicates. It is not clear at all what it would mean to meet, or to enjoy oneself, divested of extension in time. This conjunctive belief cannot be maintained. It would not be right, in the end, to say that the belief is false; it would be better to say that it is confused. Nonetheless, it is a belief, at least in the sense that it is a proposition that, when uttered or written, a large number of people throughout history have and would assent to.

So, I want to say that while the difference between us and our ancestors is not a question of truth or falsity (ignorance vs. knowledge), it is a still question of belief; a question of whether a belief embodies a coherent concept. While it would be wrong to call our forebearers ignorant, it would be okay, I’d argue, to call them confused. Following this argument, while it is not fair to assert that our ancestors were wrong and we are right, it does make sense—I might claim—to say that we are less confused than they were, that we do not have here a mere difference in worldviews, but a normatively constrained difference wherein confusion and consistency are criterial.

As I said, I do not say that Taylor is wrong, only that his claim is questionable. I suspect that there really is something to the notion of 'experience' as Taylor uses it, but it is something that has to thought-through, not just asserted.

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Is Zizek Really a Communist?

Zizek—I think—claims to be a communist. Not a party communist, of course, nor even a political communist, but a revolutionary communist. He would like us to place communism within the enlightenment tradition—not the namby-pamby enlightenment tradition of Mandeville, Mill or Rorty, but the bare-knuckled, paroxysmal enlightenment of the French Revolution. Enlightenment as revoution, sure, but revolution in the name of Objective Reason.

Zizek has made a highly entertaining career ridiculing lefty wimps, which could be defined as those who refuse—or better, verdrängen—the violent Kern constitutive both of human society writ large and the human psyche writ small.

In the end, Zizek’s standing as a revolutionary communist rests upon what is perhaps the one commitment that he is clear and consistent about: that history is driven by class struggle, and that class struggle is the only true opposition that is not a displacement or symptom of something else. He embraces the Althusserian paradox: everything is symbolic, but in the end, economics in terms of the class struggle is everything.

I could find many more passages like the following to support this claim:

“Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.”(full article here)

Zizek’s communism therefore ultimately rests upon his conviction that class struggle is the only ‘essential antagonism.’ But class struggle figures in Zizek’s thought like trauma in Freud, and the ‘real’ in Lacan.

In keeping with this, his only really clear and consistent commitment, Zizek’s one constant and never-ironic target of attack is the myth and concept of organicism: the idea that somewhere, somehow, at some time and in some way, human individuals and human socieities can be whole. This is, in the langauge of psychoanalysis, the fundamental fantasy, the myth of egoic wholeness as opposed to subjective fracture—and at base, the source of human aggression (hence the struggle). Zizek’s Ideologiekritik could be interpreted, finally, as the attempt to work the acceptance of castration into the political domain, for however disparate and scatter-shot his many polemics seem to be, they all aim to undermine any stable ideological position through sarcastic and irreverent dialectics of parody, mockery and satire.

Perhaps, in my opinion, Zizek’s most interesting thesis—never really stated in any systematic manner, but iterated often throughout his works—is that what binds people together into communities, and equally what binds together an individual person's (fantasy of) identity, is enjoyment. People and peoples differ from one another, form cliques, likes and dislikes, committ violence and atrocity, not from any shared beliefs, or shared values, or shared culture/ethnicity/background—peoples are formed according to what they enjoy. Beliefs and values are in the end--if they are anything relevant to social grouping--just symbols of personal and social economies of enjoyment. You are different than me—why? Not because you believe that The Mummy was an entertaining film, but because you actually enjoyed it. I am not one of you—why? Not because you value suburbia over city, but because you actually enjoy your large house and your long drive-way and your Wendy’s. I'm not a republican--why? Not because of any particular beliefs I have about health-care policy or geo-political strategy, but because I can't begin to imagine what it would feel like to take sincere pleasure in patriotism and a large, waving flag. Jouissance as the ultimate social concept, the primitive that makes sense of all the rest. I am not being insincere when I say that this is possibly be a real scientific insight for the social sciences—even though it needs to be theoretically systematized in a way Zizek has never even begun to try.

But if Zizek’s hails the class struggle, it is within the Lacanian framework of castration and the real. And if he promotes himself as a Marxist, it is against the one notion that animates Marx from his early humanism to the days of Das Kapital: that the class struggle, and therefore social struggle, can be overcome. Nonsense, according to Zizek. The closure, the suture, can never be accomplished, the fantasy must be destroyed, alienation and violence are the consitutive core of human kind, the letter has killed the body—the cause is lost, essentially. And yet, says Zizek, we must fight, struggle, resist, pursue this desire tenaciously to the death—what does this make of Zizek? Obviously—he is no communist, he’s an anarchist.

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Are We Post-Moral?

For a while now I've been claiming to anyone who cares to listen that we live in a more or less post-moral age. I don't really have a developed argument, and in fact, I'm not even exactly sure what a 'post-moral age' means, but here's a brief attempt to explain.

I don't mean anything too profound by 'post moral.' For instance, I don't think that moral obligations have floated away, or that they have ceased to matter. For all I know, that may indeed be the case, but it's irrelevant to the notion I'm getting at. I also don't mean to suggest that the moral world has been supplanted by something newer, fresher or more 'authentic.' Again, this might be case, but it doesn't matter for my purposes. Finally, I am also not denying that many of us (although a decreasing number, I suspect) ask ourselves moral questions from time to time, perhaps even daily. Should I cheat on my taxes? Is it okay to distort my colleagues record in order to gain an advantage over her? Is it wrong for me to skip my friend's wedding for a vacation in Vegas? As I intend the term, it is perfectly consistent to recognize that people ask themselves questions like these but maintain that our world is post-moral.

I think I can best describe what I mean by 'post moral' by pointing out that few of us (post-moral persons) take our moral character or standing as something important and overriding in our lives. Becoming a moral person is not a task that, when suggested, most people recognize for themselves. Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe I'm projecting my own shoddy self-understanding on the world around me--but I don't think so. It seems to me rather that morality, to the extent that it is effective in the average person's life at all, operates as a constraint (however constructive) in the pursuit of goals. For example, Jones hopes to become a successful researcher, but believes that, morally, it is wrong to achieve this end by plagiarizing another colleagues work. It's not that Jones is just afraid that he might not get away with it; get away with it or not, he does not believe that it is right to plagiarize for the sake of self-advancement and to the injury of another person. But the point is that it never occurs to Jones that it is important to act this way because it is important to be a good person. Jones really has no interest in being a good person. He wants to be a successful researcher, but he recognizes that there are certain things one ought not do in the pursuit of that goal.

Now, I also realize that there are ends or projects that many of us work towards achieving, and to which some of us even dedicate our lives. Ending world hunger, helping displaced refugees, working to promote human and civil rights--these are all, in some sense, moral ends that lend purpose to many people's lives, and that many of us, to some extent at least, identify with. But again, it is completely compatible to work for such ends, even strenuously and with dedication, without concern for whether or not, in so doing, one is or is becoming a good person.

Alastair MacIntyre we know was all the rage for a while because he argued that some important moral knowledge--the importance of character and virtue, and habit--had been forgotten sometime on or about May, 1641. I'm not making this argument. I don't think that the desire to be a good person commits one to a virtue-theory of ethics. Kant is no virtue theorist, yet Kant certainly recognized that we ought, morally, try to be good persons. I'm just saying that while many of us worry about doing the right thing, few of us worry about being the right sort of person, and that this makes us 'post-moral.'

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The Philosophical Conservatism of Post-Modernism

I may be wrong, but I sense that philosophical post-modernism--the sort of philosophy that twenty years ago, perhaps, seemed like it might have rooted itself as a viable, vibrant alternative to the Anglo-Austrian engine (and that certainly had ambitions to do so)—is dead. As someone who likes and appreciates this tradition, and who feels even that it has been unfairly demeaned, I am upset at this. But it is hard, for instance, not to notice that there is no one right now working who can credibly be said to have picked up the baton left after the death of the generation of Derrida, Foucault, Levinas and Deleuze. I struggle to name a single work produced in the last decade that matches these thinkers at their best, and come up with none. The movement, so far as I can tell, is spent.

As I reflect on how or why this has occurred, I am struck by the suspicion that, despite its pretensions, philosophical post-modernism remained in a very fundamental and profound way conservative. This is not a novel thesis. It has been suggested already by Habermas. But Habermas had in mind a quasi- if not overtly political conservatism. I am referring instead to a philosophical conservatism.

This is evident in two ways. The first, a fixation on the subject, and the second, a mis-understanding about what was truly radical in the linguistic turn.

Despite it’s being displaced and de-centered, despite renouncing its sovereignty, and despite its subordination to the body and to affect, the subject never truly ceased being the focus of post-modern philosophical attention—or even obsession. Like the suppressed primal fantasy, the subject always returns.

By taking the subject seriously, the Heideggerian critique of presence seemed to have something intensely important, and epochal, to say. Similarly, the Derridean prognosis of the always already impossible achievement of this critique seemed equally profound and disturbing. This leant definition, and momentousness, to the ‘overcoming of metaphysics.’ But ignore the subject, and suddenly these projects seem pointless, if not silly.

And ignoring the subject is precisely what their counterparts across the Atlantic were doing. In this respect, Quine is far more radical than any of his continental peers. For Quine, rather than undermine, critique or work-through the subject, just breezily passed it by.

Secondly, post-modern philosophy simply misunderstood the linguistic turn by failing to notice that the important emphasis was on speech-acts, rather than symbols per se. Thus, in Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and their followers, we have what is, in effect, simply an updated Humeanism that takes symbols or the ‘text,’, rather than impressions, as the origin of the world, the mind and the self. Vastly over-estimating the importance of Saussure, while ignoring Austin, Wittgenstein, Quine and others, it seemed as if structuralism fronted a formidable thesis, and that the critique of structuralism was an essential endeavor. And this allowed it to seem plausible that the aforesaid ‘world,’ ‘mind’ and ‘self’ ( or subject, ego, author, etc.) were just a play of symbols and signifiers, much like for Hume they were just a play of impressions.

But again, for their trans-Atlantic peers, emphasizing the speech act placed the sentence, or statement, at the foundation of meaning. This move allowed the Anglophone philosophers to bypass what had been a major troubling theme throughout all of post-Kantian and post-modern philosophy, viz., how to make sense of a transcendental, world-constituting ego that at the same time is a part of that same world. Derrida thought it was crucial to point out that, in light of this problem, the possibility of pure presence was undermined by its own conditions of possibility. Deleuze and Foucault made similar points. But by turning to speech-acts, to pragmatics and so on, the importance of presence as relevant to truth, knowledge or being loses its sense. Thus Quine can say, without much trouble or contradiction, that a certain indeterminacy is endemic to all world-referring semantic items, and while interesting and important, this is hardly in some deep, metaphysical or epochal sense profound. In other words, the critique of presence can only appear to be an important project if, conservatively, you take Cartesian certainty as still somehow philosophically relevant. The move to speech-acts simply doesn’t.

In both of these respects, post-modern philosophy is still working within the modern tradition of Descartes and Hume in a way that simply does not apply to the major figures and trends of the Anglophone world.

A final note: while the movement is dead, I do not think that this means that the parts are dead. Like all great works, they are monadic. Heidegger, Foucault, even Deleuze, may all individually re-emerg in new contexts with new life. But the movement connecting these, so I surmise, is spent. The history of philosophy is full of such resurrections. Descartes, Spinoza, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, are in constant cycles of reincarnation, and I see no reason why the same fate might not follow Heidegger, Foucault and company.

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Was Baudrillard a Charlatan?

When the Guardian ran a recent article on the death of Jean Baudrillard, a mass of comments followed in its wake. Some were full of absurd adoration, others were equally absurd in their dismissals. I would like to respond to my favorite comment; it is my favorite not because I think a single word of it is right, but because I am impressed by how wrong someone can be. Here are some highlights:

He was an intellectual charlatan. The basic idea that everything is a simulacrum was robustly refuted by the Anglo Saxon tradition in philosophy. It is either dishonest, or if seriously meant, false.
Baudrillard, along with Barthes, Derrida, Foucault etc, illustrates the key weakness of the French intellectual left: their refusal to acknowledge human reality…
All this has its roots in a view that we cannot know what we plainly do know - and could not get through ordinary life without knowing. In the view that what is real is in fact illusory, that what is valuable is of no importance. It is a short step from the view that nothing can be said that is not about the person saying it, to the view that nothing that is done to people or populations has any meaning other than as an expression of feeling by those doing it, and about which nothing meaningful can be said since it too will just be an expression of an equally valid but different feeling…
Any focus on human life as it is lived and felt in the real world that for Baudrillard was a simulacrum would get you out of this immoral and dishonest approach to life on the planet.
The antidote to this idiotic nonsense is GE Moore. You say you believe time is unreal. Are you really saying I cannot say whether I shaved before I ate breakfast? You say you believe the external world is unreal. Do you really mean I am not looking at a chair right now? You say you believe there is no such thing as right and wrong. Do you really mean....?

There are so many ironic turns here, that it is hard to decide where to begin. The commentator mistakenly seems to place Baudrillard in the category of philosophical skepticism of the Cartesian variety, and thinks that this has been “robustly refuted” by Anglo-Saxon philosophy (at least, I think he is suggesting that skepticism has been refuted, since that was a concern of Moore, and as far as I know no analytic philosopher has dealt with the notion of reality as a simulacrum). But what could it mean to say that skepticism has been refuted? Skepticism is not the view that there is nothing real or that there is no external world; skepticism merely doubts the existence of an external world. The only way to refute doubt is to prove that the object of that doubt really exists; but since any such proof is likely to be furnished by the real world, there is no reason not to doubt the proof. Moore’s argument, in fact, was to hold up his hands, point out that they exist, and use this as proof that the external world exists. I have always been impressed by Moore’s argument, though largely just because I’m generally impressed by arguments that completely miss the point, and Moore’s is the best illustration I’ve seen of this in the history. What skepticism requires is not a counter-proof, but a response to the doubt itself, a way of showing the origin of the doubt and drawing the consequence that the doubt is unwarranted. To the best of my knowledge, the best approach along these lines is taken by Heidegger in Being and Time.

Next, the commentator accuses Baudrillard, along with much of the Continental tradition, of taking a view of morality that grounds it exclusively on feeling. But I am not aware of any continental philosopher holding that view. The idea that morality is nothing but the expression of a speaker’s emotions was, in fact, never taken seriously as a philosophical doctrine until A. J. Ayer. The special irony, of course, is that for logical positivists the view that morality is just an expression of emotion arises directly out of the view that only the physical world is real; that it is, in fact, the only reality. But Baudrillard never rejects morality; rather, he gives us an analysis of a world in which such things don’t matter, or in which “nothing that is done to people or populations has any meaning” other than as a media spectacle. Perhaps that is too extreme a characterization of our world, and Baudrillard is unquestionably guilty of hyperbole. But if our world is dangerously close to being a world in which all moral considerations, all the horrors of war, are concealed by Hollywood-esque montages on the news, then the best way of affirming the importance of morality may well be to diagnose the social malady that threatens to conceal this importance. This is what Baudrillard tried to do. Perhaps he was not always right, perhaps he was too provocative for his own good, and perhaps he lacked the philosophical depth needed to tackle these problems. But how many Anglo-Saxon philosophers have really made that effort?

But it is also a mistake to see Baudrillard as a philosopher. He is by training a sociologist. And he is something else: a philosophically informed public intellectual, that is, a species so rare in the Anglo-American world that we have trouble recognizing them when we see them. This isn’t to say that nobody tries: plenty of philosophers have political blogs (such as this one), but these tend to vacillate between academic philosophy and political commentary on a level not far removed from that of many other political blogs. Baudrillard tried to do something else: he tried to diagnose the social framework that we inhabit, within which our political and moral decisions take place.

But let us briefly turn to Baurdillard’s most provocative thesis: that reality has been replaced by the simulacrum. First off, again, this is clearly not a version of skepticism: Baudrillard it not doubting reality; rather, he is pointing out that we now experience reality through a media veil; for us, reality is simulated. This idea is both catchy and seemingly insane; when I first read Simulations as an undergrad, I would go outside and stand in the snow, feeling the snowflakes melt on my cheeks, feeling cold wind blowing through me—this, I told myself, was no simulation, it was reality at its strongest. But take something like love. Love, we might think, is the epitome of real human feeling. But in what sense is the obsession with love, my obsession, our cultural obsession, genuine? Where do we pick up the idea that love is the most important human feeling, that without it no life can be complete? From movies, maybe, and from the lyrics to every other song that’s come out in the past 50 years. Benjamin worried that mechanical reproduction would destroy the aura of the work of art; instead, it has perhaps made the works more precious, given them a greater aura. It seems to have done so for emotions. It is not only art works that can be mechanically reproduced; human emotions are just as easy to put on a screen and transmit. In other words, the argument that reality is “real,” and not a simulacrum is a tricky one—which of our feelings, of our perceptions, of our habitual ways of thinking are really “real”? In a way, the point is almost meaningless—of course human feelings, perceptions and thoughts are shaped by their environment; that has always been true, and it has not made these things “less real.” But what if the forces that shape us now are concerned only with more excitement, with sensationalism, with providing an entertaining spectacle? Does that make a difference? Does that somehow corrupt reality, turn it into something else? That was the question that concerned Baudrillard.

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