Let's not be thread-jackers all the time! Or, A Plea for Particularism

What I like in this piece by John McWhorter about the Yale president's decision to keep the name of Calhoun College is the author's insistence that we can make judgments, draw lines, and discuss particular cases. We can thereby resist the all-too-prevalent leaping from concrete demands ("we must remove Calhoun's name on this residential college") to grand principles ("should we remove the names of all slave-holders from all buildings?").

That move, something to which I would say philosophers are especially prone, lends itself (I would say non-coincidentally) to facile slippery slopes ("what's next, remove the name of people who didn't educate their daughters properly?") and reductios ("so you're saying we should change the name of the capital city of the nation because Washington was a slave-holder?").

So, fellow philosophers, let's not be inveterate thread-jackers. Let's cultivate the capacity to stick to the topic and discuss concrete demands. If a significant movement arises that demands the removal of Washington's name from the capital city, we can discuss the merits of that demand. In the meantime, let's discuss Calhoun. (And if you're at Princeton, let's discuss Wilson.) There's nothing wrong with a series of concrete discussions.

And speaking of liberal pieties about "discussion" as ways to avoid, well, real discussion, it would be good to call the bluff of the "discussion" proponents. (The Yale president's ostensible reason for keeping Calhoun's name on the building was that it would foster "discussion.") Make Yale a 24/7/365 discussion zone about past, present, and future links between racism, slavery, reparations, student debt, public space and memorialization.

Let's have every single department be required to give a public presentation on their website about their discipline's perspectives -- in all its range of opinion and controversy -- on the above topics. From Anthropology and Architecture to Economics to Philosophy to Psychology to hell, Botany and Zoology (I would love to know what the lasting effects of the industrial plantation system had on the flora and fauna of the South, what effects the mills had on the Northeast, and so on).

The President wants "discussion"? Let's have him marshall the awesome resources of the Yale faculty and students and have a real "discussion."

Comments

[Tim Lacy]

John,

Thanks so much for the pointer and your cautionary reflection above. I really appreciated the proper amount of historical relativism in the McWhorter's piece.

On your gloss, why *is it* so difficult for some philosophers, particularly those with an analytic bent, to think about cases and particulars? Why is there that quick leap to analogy and grand principle (often for grand-standing purposes)?

As a historian with a fondness for philosophy, I find it difficult to discuss situations that are embedded, or contextual, with many philosophers. Is this a never-the-twain-shall-meet meet situation? Is there a way, a format, where philosophers can be more contextual in the sense that historians are? Is this a "philosophy of history" problem among philosophers? Or is it that historians are too contextual, such that they make everything unique (i.e. unable to abstract from)? I'm willing to concede if historians are the problem. That said, I don't often encounter historians prone to downward slippery slope abstractions.

Best,
Tim

[John Protevi]

Hi Tim, I'm less certain about the reason why as I am about the existence of the tendency to principle-mongering. Maybe I'm exaggerating the extent of that tendency from a limited sample of the way it shows up as thread-jacking in online discussion, but I take it your experience includes face-to-face discussion as well.

Not sure it's limited to analytics, and in any case, there is theoretical pushback in the name of "moral particularism." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-particularism/

In any case, as I like to joke, I feel like Quentin Compson sometimes: "I don't hate principles, I don't!" But I think it's all about the granularity of our descriptions of our motivations / reasons. Or better, the finer-grained we get, the smaller the distance between a mere description of our motivations / reasons here and now, and the principle we say we're applying. But that's not to say we can't ever produce principles.

So, "we should remove the names of those who were the most egregious propagandists for slavery on the basis of racial inferiority even by the standards of the day and not by our own standards" (and mutatis mutandis for the calls to remove the names of Rhodes in Oxford and Wilson in Princeton) is a more fine-grained principle that would preclude many of the slippery slopes and reductios that cropped up in these discussions.

[Tim Lacy]

John,

Thanks so much for that link to the SEP article on "moral particularlism." I'll study it.

As a philosopher who cares about granularity and particulars, would you characterize yourself as in the minority in the profession? I like the idea you express of shortening the distance between our here-and-now motivations and whatever principles we say we believe in, or are "practicing."

Perhaps it's all about asking more particular questions and enforcing attention to those particulars in dialogue.

I would like to hear your thoughts on questions about the relations between historians and philosophers, from your point of view as in the discourse of the latter.

- Tim