Month: February 2017

One problem with the ethics of Cold War philosophy concerns what I will call “disidentification” (Hegel called it Entäußerung, or “externalization”). Whatever I choose has at least one alternative, for otherwise there would be no choice. And if I identify myself with any member of my plurality of alternatives, I cannot choose any alternative to it (or them). Since alternatives are incompatible with one another (otherwise there would also be no choice), doing that would end my identity and so be suicidal, physically or morally. Therefore, any alternative in a rational decision must be something I can walk away from and still be me.

This is not an issue for rational choice theory, which was originally developed to cover cases of consumer choice and related contexts. In such cases, my identity is not at stake; no matter which brand of toothpaste I choose to buy in the drugstore, I will still be me. But when rational choice theory becomes Cold War philosophy, it applies to everything I do that can claim to be “rational,” and so to more important matters.

One inevitable result is that commitment comes to look like choice, in spite of the fact that commitments are, precisely, what you cannot walk away from. Instead of seeing myself as committed to my religion, for example, I may find myself trying to choose it in a Cold War way. But choosing a religion implies, as commitment does not, that there are other religions which I might choose—alternative religions.

But then, before I make the choice, I can have no religion at all.

Suppose, for example, I am “choosing” Catholicism. There must then be an alternative religion on the table which I might choose—say, Hinduism. If I already identify as a Catholic, however, this choice is fake: I cannot choose to become a Hindu without changing my identity. So for my choice to be real, I must put aside the religion I already have—Catholicism.  I must “disidentify” with it.

Cold War philosophy, claiming as it does to apply to everything rational, bids us to take this stance on all things. Everything about me then becomes an object of my choice, and at the limit I can have no identity other than that of being a rational chooser, i.e. an algorithmic machine who first ranks her preferences in accordance with transitivity and completeness and then opts for the highest utility. (As Rawls might say, everything concrete about me is behind the “veil of ignorance.”)

When Hegel unpacks disidentfication as “externalization” in the central sections of his Phenomenology of Spirit, it is an emancipatory process: it frees me from all kinds of identities imposed on me by my upbringing and social conditions. The difference is that Hegel does not present externalization as a process involving choice among alternatives. It is rather a “negation,” or rejection, of various predominantly natural features as constituting my identity. In doing that, I come to see them, not as features of my identity, but as mere circumstances which I can  change or abandon. (I discuss this at length in my Poetic Interaction.)

The resulting identity, however “emancipated” it may be, is a pretty thin one, and in any case the emancipation is a bit of a sham. No matte how many of my own properties I have negated, denied or ejected from my identity, others will treat me differently: they will continue to see me as having, or performing in accordance with, specific traits of gender, race, class, nationality and so forth—and it is not I who write the scripts for the various scenes I am forced to perform.

Who does?Who makes this a sham emancipation? The question is a pretty big one, but the answer is pretty commonsensical. I’ll get to it soon.

 

My encounters with Leiter’s Nietzsche had led, not to Nietzsche, but to a set of rules for turning Nietzsche into someone analytically acceptable. But what, according to Leiter, did analytical philosophers find acceptable? What sort of people are they, if we  judge by Leiter’s rules for pleasing them?

First of all, they are deeply concerned with their enemies (Rule # 1): Nietzsche had to be rescued from Foucault and his evil “postmodern” henchmen. Your enemies, O analytical philosophers, are Nietzsche’s enemies, and mine as well—so we are all friends!

Second, they know little about those enemies. Though some of the henchmen Leiter tilts against are real enough, Leiter’s Foucault is largely a fabrication, and anyone who has read a bit of what Foucault says about his own project should know it.

Third, they are incurious: what would it take not to notice that Leiter’s “continuity with science” thesis Chapter One is buttressed by a convoluted discussion of “continuity” but none of “science” until the next chapter, which quietly contradicts what is presupposed in this one? Leiter doesn’t bother to cover his tracks.

Not only are these people incurious, but they are dismissive of any project not their own (Rule # 3); like to ape scientists (# 4); and adhere to philosophical strictures established to fight a war that ended thirty years ago (# 2).

Not a very pleasant picture—and hardly, of course, an accurate one. The analytical philosophers that I have come to know in my career no more resemble this than they resemble pterodactyls.

But there was one final twist, and one final perfidy.

The twist had to do with Foucault—the real one—and naturalism. As Scare shows, “naturalism” has a heavy history in American philosophy. During during the McCarthy Era it came to be used as a euphemism for “atheism,” and in that sense, Nietzsche is obviously a naturalist: he denies the existence of God. But “naturalism” also meant turning to nature rather than to culture for your explanations of human affairs: it was consciously designed to bring philosophy under the umbrella of natural science. The survival value of  this during the early Cold War is evident.

Leiter, of course, knows nothing of that history. Having anti-postmodernist fish to fry, he wants “naturalism” to mean “belief in human nature.” But human nature plays a small role in his subsequent discussion, because what Nietzsche actually appeals to in his explanations, according to Leiter, is not human nature but various “type facts” about human nature: “It is type-facts, in turn, that figure in the explanation of human actions and beliefs (including beliefs about morality)”—p. 8.

There is one human nature, but there are many type-facts about it. Leiter, quoting himself, refers them to “a fixed psycho-physical constitution” (p. 8). But what is this “fixity?” Do type-facts about you  last your whole life? No quote from Nietzsche in this section says so. Do they change historically? Again, Nietzsche—Leiter’s Nietzsche, anyway—is silent.

Suppose that they do, and that the nature of a type-fact can be explored via the way people talk about themselves and other things. Then type-facts would act very much, for Foucault, as do the discourses in which a person has been “subjectivated” (Scare p. 8) explain the behavior of that person. Like type-facts, indeed, Foucaldian discourses are relatively stable forms which determine, and so explain, peoples’ behavior. The main difference would appear to be that for Foucault these determining forms are not natural, but cultural. That’s quite a difference—but also very far from the epistemological chasm that Leiter has dug between Nietzsche and Foucault.

At this point, I decided to stop reading. But the final perfidy awaited. Leiter’s Chapter Two recounts “the profound intellectual influences on the young Nietzsche, influence that shaped his naturalism” (p 35). Nietzsche’s philosophy, we learn, arose from his youthful, enthusiastic, and uncritical reading of the Presocratics; the Sophists; Schopenhauer; and the German Materialists. Nietzsche, it appears, loved them all—presumably because of the relevant type-facts about him.

But Nietzsche was clearly not a universally uncritical reader; he was pretty critical, and early on, of the Bible, and later of manifold philosophers and historians. So why take it that a spate of uncritical reading in Nietzsche’s early years explains his views?

It helps, here, to remember that Leiter’s book is intended for young people: it is to be “student-friendly” (p. xi). This absolves Leiter of numerous tedious things we would expect to find in a book intended to convince scholars—things like careful reading of Foucault, engagement with secondary literature not in English, historically informed discussions of naturalism, and linguistically informed discussions of terms like Wissenschaft.  But it raises another question: what sort of a friend to students is our friend Leiter?

One who gives the young readers of his book the impression that enthusiastic, uncritical reading was crucial to the development of a major philosopher. One who thus, tacitly, recommends that kind of reading to students. Including, of course, the very students who read Leiter’s book! He apparently wants students to read him uncritically and enthusiastically, abjure the evil “postmodernists,” and dedicate themselves to Leiter’s caricature of analytical philosophy. And in this way Leiter will endear himself to those analysts (or would if there were any like that) and develop an uncritical following among philosophy majors. He will have a much more influential, and so agreeable, career than if he had made his arguments rigorously and presented complete discussions of the evidence.

So now I really did stop reading. Though Leiter’s book has some merits as popularizing Maudemarie Clark’s account of Nietzsche’s “theory” of truth—views with which I am in some, though limited, sympathy—isn’t really about Nietzsche at all. Like so much of what Leiter does, it’s really about—the Life of Brian.

Sorry for the interlude—I was traveling and ill. The illness did not come from reading Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche book. I think.

Having attempted to digest the eightfold (or so) intellectual diverticulum presented by Leiter’s discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalism, I found I was still only on p. 11 and tried to move on. But there was much more in this section for those who want to learn how to make  someone who died in Germany in 1900 look like a contemporary American analytical philosopher. And for me there were three more Leiter Rules

First, it turns out that Nietzsche’s own basic project has nothing to do with his naturalism. That project, Leiter said, is Nietzsche’s philosophical attempt at “value-creation,” i.e. at the “revaluation of all values.” Value creation’s profound concern for human greatness (not a notable feature of naturalism) “animates all [Nietzsche’s] writings” (p. 27); and the much-belabored naturalism is merely an instrument in its service (pp. 11, 26, 283). But value-creation, Leiter avers, has no “continuity” at all with Nietzsche’s naturalism (p. 11). So Leiter dismisses it: “most of Nietzsche’s writings are devoted, in fact, to the M-naturalistic project” (p. 11).

We now have one philosophical project (value-creation) that “animates all” of Nietzsche’s’s writings; and another (naturalism) which, though extensively treated in those writings, is explicitly said to be merely an instrument in its service. On which do we focus? The instrument! It’s as if a book on Quine’s philosophy focused on his many technical writings in logic, dismissing the philosophical overview in whose service they stand. So we get Leiter Rule #3: Dismiss any aims and concerns of your guy that do not align with those of analytical philosophers—even as you openly admit how important they were to Nietzsche himself.

Dismissing value creation is in the service of yet another Leiter Rule, # 4: Make your guy as close to a scientist as you can. We saw in an earlier post that Nietzsche’s “emulation” of scientific method (which is not really an emulation, and not of a method), is phrased by Leiter in terms of Nietzsche’s “continuity” with science. Leiter supports this continuity-with-science thesis with four quotes in which Nietzsche praises scientific method. The first and most important of these is not from the main text Leiter’s book deals with—On the Genealogy of Morality—but from the preceding book in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, Beyond Good and Evil. But in addition to the fact that Leiter had to get it from another book—not fatal of course, but grounds for worry—there are, he notes, some “striking” things about this passage.

Yes, and one striking omission from Leiter’s discussion of it. The quotation is long and I won’t reproduce it here; it’s on p. 6 (having already been as far as p. 11, I was clearly losing ground). Suffice it that the quote discusses the “discipline” of science, and Leiter claims it shows Nietzsche’s allegiance to scientific method. But what does Nietzsche mean by “science?”

Leiter then, on p. 7, supports his view of this passage with three more quotes, of which the first and most problematic is from The Antichrist § 59. (I note in passing that The Antichrist, like Beyond Good and Evil, is not On the Genealogy of Morality.) As Leiter has it, the quote says that “[S]cientific methods… one must say it ten times, are what is essential…” But alas (for Leiter!) the Colli-Montanari German text, which is the only German text referenced in his bibliography (p. 306) does not contain the word “scientific;” it refers only to “methods.” Same for the Kaufmann translation, which Leiter claims to have used. Uh-oh.

Perhaps some reference to the context of science is established elsewhere in the passage, unquoted by Leiter but enough to justify (though not to excuse) the mutilation of the actual quote? No: the whole passage is about the ancient Greeks, who as far as I know had not discovered the modern scientific method (they didn’t do many experiments and didn’t have a clear conception of empirical “method”). Later in the passage, Nietzsche in fact lists the ancient “methods” that, in the twilight of Christianity, have been reconquered by moderns—and what are they? “The free gaze on reality, the cautious hand, patience, and the entire probity (Rechtschaffenheit) of knowledge.” Cognitive virtues, all of them—but why call them “scientific”? They could have come from Heidegger—and the later one at that.

The other two quotes on p. 7 do valorize “scientific method—” but again, what does Nietzsche mean by that? It is, ahem, surprising that in his discussion of Nietzsche’s continuity with science, and in contrast to his elaborate discussion of the meaning of “continuity” in this context, Leiter doesn’t ask what Nietzsche means by “science.”

To be sure, Leiter notes—many pages later—that the English-language obsession with natural science is not conveyed by Wissenschaft, the German term (p. 36), and at one point (p. 41) he notes that Nietzsche characterizes science as “knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” which is part of the German meaning, but is hardly the whole of it. Wissenschaft, in German, etymologically means “an organization of knowledge;” the Oxford Living Dictionaries define it as “The systematic pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship (especially as contrasted with its application).” So in German, things like jurisprudence, (Rechtswissenchaft) and the study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) count as sciences. Neither of them, of course, makes a presupposition of determinism: they are all about people who are responsible for their actions. So continuity with Wissenschaft does not guarantee naturalism in Leiter’s sense.

A discussion of Wissenschaft as part of the discussion of naturalism would thus weaken Leiter’s claim of Nietzsche’s continuity with science, even as that claim was advanced. So Leiter discusses it later and obliquely, when he comes to Nietzsche’s concern with classical philology in Chapter Two (pp. 35-38). This discussion trades upon the general view of Wissenschaft mentioned above, as it must—philology is hardly an empirical science as Anglophones understand the term (it make virtually no use of mathematics, for example). But it does not relate Nietzsche’s views on the “science” of classical philology to his views on Wissenschaft in general.

What is at stake in this is Leiter’s “continuity with science” thesis. Since his discussion of that in Chapter One makes no reference ot the German term, it sounds by default as if Nietzsche were continuous with science as Anglophones understand it–with natural science. In fact, wissenschaftliche method turns out for Nietzsche to mean nothing more than building up an organized body of knowledge from empirical evidence, doing so carefully and with “free gaze,” i.e. with a willingness to see reality as it really is. All the quotes that Leiter adduces for Nietzsche’s praise of scientific methodology are thus to be read in the context of Nietzsche’s home language—and Nietzsche’s continuity with science is not as contemporary as it sounds in Leiter’s discussion. Indeed, it is downright vapid. And we get a fifth Leiter Rule: When the meanings of your guy’s words in the original language to not coincide with the meanings of the terms by which they are conventionally translated into English, ignore them—or discuss them somewhere else.

 

Rule #1 for Leiter transformations—for turning some wild and crazy figure from the history of philosophy into someone logical and mild-mannered enough to be acceptable in today’s well-purged philosophy departments—was: claim that your guy and contemporary philosophers have a common enemy, even if you have to invent that enemy.

Now we turn to rule # 2: dress your guy up in the formal structures of Cold War philosophy. Most philosophers, when you say “formal structure,” think of logic. But, as Scare argues, logic merely structures philosophy’s surface; it has no ontological bite and is more of an intellectual veneer than a structure. The underlying formal structure really used by Cold War philosophers—the one that applies across the board, whatever else they are doing, and which unlike modus ponens and its empty ilk actually gets certain things done—is rational choice. As many scholars have noted, Cold War “rationality” just means choosing for the highest utility among alternatives ranked according to transitivity and completeness (see Scare for bibliographical details). It’s pretty hard to apply logic to Nietzsche and make him look good. But what about Cold War rationality? Leiter’s effort, though doomed, is noble.

Understanding what is meant by the claim that Nietzsche was a naturalist requires, Leiter claims, telling us what sort of naturalist Nietzsche was. One way to do this, the simplest and most direct, would be to find the places where Nietzsche talks about naturalism and expound them. But Leiter doesn’t do this; instead, he offers us a whole taxonomy of naturalisms—I counted eight. Nietzsche, I think, counted none; as far as I know, he never discusses the typology of naturalism.  I won’t go into all of Leiter’s types and subtypes; the main distinction is between M-naturalism, which holds that philosophy should be “continuous” either with the methodology of the sciences (which means emulating scientific method) or with their results (which should be “supported” by “the best science”: p. 3), and “S-naturalism,” which is “substantive, i.e. holds either that “the only things that exist are natural (or perhaps simply physical) things,” or  “semantic,” holding  that “suitable philosophical analysis of any concept must show it to be amenable to empirical inquiry” (p. 5). So we are up to four varieties of “naturalism.”

I’ll stop there. Leiter’s question is: where does Nietzsche fit? On p. 5, he is both an “historical S-naturalist,” in that he rejects any explanatory role for God in an account of the world, and a “speculative M-naturalist” in that he “takes over from science the idea that natural phenomena have deterministic causes.” The adjectives here are cryptic, but meanings can be worked out. “Historical” just appears to mean that Nietzsche, like Hume, is now an historical figure—like Lincoln, he belongs to the ages. “Speculative” appears to mean that Nietzsche, also like Hume, develops a theory of human nature that is “modeled” on science in that it takes over from science the view that “natural phenomena have deterministic causes;” beyond that (and there is an awful lot beyond that) Nietzsche’s views appear to be produced by some sort of “speculation.” The determinism means that the general theory of human nature provides a basis for explaining (in words quoted, still on p 5, from Barry Stroud) “everything in human affairs.”

So much for cryptic; let us move on to problematic. Just why Nietzsche’s M-naturalism should be called “speculative” is not explained. If “speculative” means “goes beyond sensory experience,” as it used to, then the empiricism Leiter attributes to Nietzsche (e.g. on p. 71) poses problems. A more puzzling problem is the identification of determinism as a method. “Natural phenomena have deterministic causes” is not the description of a method, but a single statement which can (and does) serve science as a principle by which scientific methods get elaborated. Misidentifying it as a method is no idle tomfoolery; it makes Nietzsche look more “scientific” than he is. If I say I have adopted the “Brady method” for playing football, it sounds like I have a lot more in common with the great Patriot than if I admit that I have adopted only the principle that the aim of the offense is to get the ball across the goal line. (I will come back to Nietzsche and science.)

On p. 8, Nietzsche also turns out to be a results M-naturalist in that he draws on actual scientific results, “particularly in physiology.” Of course, lots of non-naturalists, from Aristotle to Aquinas to Alasdair MacIntyre to Charles Taylor, do the same. So why “drawing on” scientific results should make you a naturalist is unclear, as is how you can draw on them and still remain “speculative.” We certainly have here a remarkably relaxed criterion for naturalism.

That Nietzsche is a naturalist is hardly news. Leiter’s contribution, in his own eyes apparently, is to determine exactly what type of naturalist Nietzsche was.  The discussion has slightly misfired in that out of eight (or so) categories of naturalism Leiter identifies, Nietzsche lands in three. It’s a bit like ordering half the menu in a restaurant. But people do do that, if the menu is cryptic enough.

More to the point: why this involved and confusing discussion of types of naturalism in the first place? Nietzsche himself never talks that way as far as I know (and as far as Leiter documents); it is an external matrix applied to his thought.  Why? Why not just say that Nietzsche’s naturalism has three components: his denial of an explanatory role for supernatural entities, his recurrent use of physiological results, and his emulation of the main presupposition of science? What is the point this complex and confusing discussion in a supposedly “student friendly” (p. xi) book?

This is where Rule # 2 comes in. Leiter’s discussion of naturalism makes wild-and-crazy Nietzsche look, not only canny, but (sort of) rational in a Cold War way. First, if you have eight (or so) classes of naturalism, and Nietzsche exhibits three of them, he is nicely (if a bit widely) boxed in: pinned, we may say, in a lepidopteral sort of way, like Max Otto during the Otto Affair (see Scare, Chapters One and Two). Second, who put Nietzsche in there? Was it Nietzsche himself, who after all is responsible for his own views? Then it might look, at first blush, as if Nietzsche arrived at his version of naturalism via a choice among eight (or so) different versions of it. It might, if you are used to Cold War philosophers operating that way.

There are of course enormous problems with claiming that Nietzsche arrived at his naturalism via a rational choice among alternative forms of it—problems we will see later—and Leiter doesn’t openly claim that he did. What he has done with this strange discussion is set things up to make that an easy inference for the student. But who knows? It may not be Nietzsche that Leiter is trying to adapt to Cold War philosophy. Maybe it is Leiter himself: maybe he wants us to think that it was he, not Nietzsche, who has laid out the alternatives and then placed Nietzsche in among them—that it is he, not Nietzsche, who is “rational” by the standards of Cold War philosophy. Or maybe Leiter just assumes, unconsciously even, that this is just the way to do good philosophy. There are by now so many articles and books that operate like this—they lay out some alternatives, consider their pros and cons, and then choose among them—that Leiter just assumes that’s the way to proceed. In any case, we readers of Leiter, young and old, are beginning to understand Nietzsche, because we know where he is on our Cold War grid.