John Protevi's Blog

Jesús Navarro, "How to do philosophy with words: Reflections on the Searle/Derrida debate."

Blurb for the English translation of Jesús Navarro's book on the missed encounter of Derrida and Searle (Spanish original is here; the translation will appear with John Benjamins). 

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Jesús Navarro’s fine book stages the non-encounter of Searle and Derrida. With impartiality, care, and precision he explains the misunderstandings and ill will that made this a missed opportunity and reinforced the “analytic / continental divide” that has plagued the professional philosophical scene for decades.

The book proceeds on two levels, a first order recapitulation of theses, and then a second order reflection on the speech acts of the encounter itself, showing that it’s not simply theoretical misunderstanding – of which there is plenty – but also conflicting political visions that beset the encounter.

First, Navarro sketches the traditions of each thinker (Wittgenstein and Austin – but of course he is shared – on the one hand, Saussure, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas on the other), and establishes the different understandings of key terms such as “intentionality,” “iterability,” and so on. He also pinpoints the difference between the “either / or” logic of Searle and the logic of impurity or contamination of Derrida (in which the condition of possibility of a term or concept is the condition of impossibility of its pure application).

Secondly, the book then, wonderfully, applies speech act theory to see how and why the encounter failed, as each side failed – or refused – to see the philosophical aims for which each side marshaled their theses and arguments: not just the theoretical aims of systematization for Searle and deconstruction for Derrida, but also the political aims of Searle’s denunciation of threats to rationality and Derrida’s denunciation of non-reflective instantiations of the “metaphysics of presence.”

The conclusion then asks what might have been, had the encounter gone otherwise; in so doing it asks whether an encounter on the terrain of “philosophy” in the singular (i.e., without regard to “analytic” and “continental” varieties) would be possible. That is, is there “philosophy” or only “philosophies”? A difficult question which we can thank Navarro for posing.

Notes on Ideology, loosely tied to Eric Swanson's "Slurs and Ideologies"

I recently met Eric Swanson at the conference on Jason Stanley's work in Valladolid (where I presented this paper). We had some very nice discussions about the paper he presented there entitled "Slurs and Ideologies" (latest version here [in PDF]).

I've spent some time since then thinking about the paper and realized that, despite some desultory reading of the classics, I had never really written down my thoughts on ideology. So I thought I'd compose these notes, without doing any re-reading, just trying to let my thoughts crystallize. While these notes were prompted by reading Eric's paper (and Jason's propaganda book), they are largley independent of those works and shouldn't necessarily be seen as a commentary on them.

Comments welcome, of course, here or by email.

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Here's how I think of ideology: it's a set of affective-cognitive dispositions, instilled in people by their participation in practices.* Its implantation starts with kids growing up in an environment in which certain verbal and physical practices are common and once that implantation takes hold actions coming from those dispositions reinforce the ideology. An ideology doesn’t act, but it makes it easier for those who consent to the ideology to act in ways that are consonant with the content of the ideology.

I don’t think practices are part of ideologies; practices are sets of actions that interact with ideologies, implanting and being reinforced by actions that are the components of practices. For instance, mortgage redlining is a practice that is part of, and reinforces, the general practice of racial segregation which is itself part of and reinforces the way of life of white supremacy ("way of life" would be an interacting set of practices and ideologies).

I don't think a practice is like a belief, norm, value, or way of interpreting the world, which all seem cognitive / subjective. Practices are instead ways of acting in the world (but I wouldn't call it a way of interacting *with* the world, since that installs a subject / world split I think). They find their unity in a "script" which brings together affective-cognitive dispositions that guide actions, beliefs, and so on, so that by following a script different iterations of an action become a practice.

"Interests" is another difficult term here. They aren’t parts of ideologies, but they are a principle of explanation of ideology-guided actions and practices. They are more objective than a norm or value. Hence the occasional problem of a mismatch between the "true" interests of someone and their norms, values, and actions.

For example, the practice of mortgage redlining upholds the interests of certain actors who benefit from the way of life of white supremacy (e.g., white homeowners in segregated neighborhoods in which blacks can't get mortgages), and hurts the interests of those denied mortgages by that practice, but I'm not sure it’s in the same ontological class as belief, norm, value, and way of interpreting the world.

Verbal practices: some actions and the supposed motives that produce them, and the characters of people who repeatedly produce those actions, are repeatedly praised or blamed. Exposure to those verbal practices produces affective-cognitive dispositions to believe / feel in certain ways, thus leading to repetition of the actions, thus providing scripts by means of which the actions might congeal into a practice.

The same with physical practices: all the way from facial expressions: smiles, squints, frowns; bodily expressions: shrugs, recoils; social interactions: shaking hands, patting on the back, hugging, kissing, or pushing, shoving, fighting, killing....

Relating slurs to ideology is a socializing move. The power and danger of slurs is not just that they produce a series of internal representations linking words and classes of people; instead they do that *and*, by cueing ideologies, they trigger affective-cognitive dispositions and scripts resulting in thoughts and feelings and actions that conform to practices that reinforce a way of life.

Slurs are on-the-spot psychologically violent, and by cueing / reinforcing ideologies, they increase the chances of further psychological violence (by further slurs, and by internalization), and they increase the chance of physical violence by (on the outside reading) triggering scripts for practices, or (on the inside reading) by triggering the practices directly.

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* In my own work I talk about "bodies politics" in order to mark social and somatic interaction which result in replication of "affective-cognitive structures", as I think including affective dispositions in "ideology" produces a lot of tension in the expanded concept with the traditional (cognitive) components of beliefs, norms, and values. But if we want to use an expanded notion of ideology I think the affective components should be made explicit.

Revised paper, "Jason Stanley and the Recovery of Artisanal Knowledge in Plato"

JASON STANLEY AND THE RECOVERY OF ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO

Download PDF version

SIUCC 2015
University of Valladolid
October 2015

John Protevi
Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies
Professor of Philosophy 
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803 USA
[email protected]
http://www.protevi.com/john

 

FORECAST

The talk has two parts, epistemological and political. I will proceed in the “sympathetic hypothetical” mode. Rather than delve into the linguistics-oriented critical literature on Stanley’s intellectualist thesis on know-how (e.g., Poston 2015), I will instead strive for a charitable exposition of the neuroscientific elements of latest version of that thesis (as presented in his 2013 Frontiers in Human Neuroscience piece with John Krakauer) in order to elucidate the stakes of his work: if we assume his position withstands criticism, what then follows for both our epistemology and our politics?

First I show how Stanley critiques the mental knowledge / manual skill distinction by means of his deflationary sense of (not necessarily verbally articulable) propositional knowledge. Stanley and Krakauer claim non-conceptual “motor acuity” (reduction of variance in movement) is only one part of “motor skill.” Not necessarily verbally articulable propositional knowledge provides a scaffold for the exercise of such acuity, and it’s the combination of knowledge and non-conceptual acuity that constitutes motor skill. Conversely, non-conceptual forms of perceptual ability inhabit manifestations of perceptual knowledge, and it is even the case that prototypical intellectual work such as mathematics involves “neural computations equivalent to those underlying both perceptual and motor acuity.” There is thus a sort of “non-conceptual intellectual acuity” just as there is “factual knowledge in motor skill.” This criss-cross allows us rethink the distinction of mental knowledge and (merely) physical skill or knack. With Stanley’s help we can now see the distinction presupposes an underlying form with elements of both sides; we can call this “artisanal knowledge.”  

Now the mental / manual distinction is not just an epistemological point, but also a political one: “Our society is divided into castes based upon a supposed division between theoretical knowledge and practical skill” (Stanley 2012). The philosophical justification of this political structure can be seen in Plato, to whose foundational status Stanley often refers: “Plato’s Republic is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception” (Stanley and Weaver 2014).

So in the second part of the talk I show how the concept of “artisanal knowledge” illuminates a seemingly minor, though in fact key, passage in Plato’s Laws about how the childcare provided by slave nurses provides the emotional basis of moral and political education. Plato denigrates the choice by the slave nurses of the proper lullaby (and by extension other forms of morality-influencing childcare) as mere “guesswork.” So, there are political stakes to Stanley’s epistemological work: although denigrated by philosophers as mere knack, the entire moral / political system of Plato’s Laws rests upon the “artisanal knowledge” of these slave nurses, just as, we could argue, using developmental psychology, the emotional bases of our moral-political system rests upon contemporary childcare.

I will conclude the talk with some reflections on the role of political emotion in Stanley’s recent book, How Propaganda Works.

Jason Stanley and the Recovery of Artisanal Knowledge in Plato

JASON STANLEY AND THE RECOVERY OF ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO

ABSTRACT: In this paper I first lay out the way Jason Stanley deconstructs the mental / manual labor distinction by way of insisting on his deflationary (because not requiring verbal articulability) notion of propositional knowledge occurring as a scaffolding for motor skill. I then show how this allows us to recover a sense of “artisanal knowledge” in what Plato had denigrated as mere “knack” or “guesswork,” even as the supposedly purely manual labor of slave nurses caring for the children of citizens occupies a crucial role in the Laws.

A Thing of This World

I just got an advance copy of A Thing of This World, a new book at Northwestern University Press by Lee Braver of Hiram College. Here's the publisher's description:

At a time when the analytic/continental split dominates contemporary philosophy, this ambitious work offers a careful and clear-minded way to bridge that divide. Combining conceptual rigor and clarity of prose with historical erudition, A Thing of This World shows how one of the standard issues of analytic philosophy--realism and anti-realism--has also been at the heart of continental philosophy. Using a framework derived from prominent analytic thinkers, Lee Braver traces the roots of anti-realism to Kant's idea that the mind actively organizes experience. He then shows in depth and in detail how this idea evolves through the works of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. This narrative presents an illuminating account of the history of continental philosophy by explaining how these thinkers build on each other's attempts to develop new concepts of reality and truth in the wake of the rejection of realism. Braver demonstrates that the analytic and continental traditions have been discussing the same issues, albeit with different vocabularies, interests, and approaches. By developing a commensurate vocabulary, his book promotes a dialogue between the two branches of philosophy in which each can begin to learn from the other.

I was asked to blurb the book. Here's what I wrote, portions of which show up on the back cover:

Analytic and Continental Philosophy II: Resources

[UPDATED with additions and revised categories on Wednesday May 16.]

Here's the start of (what I hope will be) a collaborative bibliography on the relation of Analytic and Continental Philosophy. So far I have three categories:

1. Discussions of the AP / CP divide
2. Beyond the divide
3. Discussions of Individual CP figures and Analytic Philosophy

I decided to expand the original version of the third category from just "Derrida and AP" to other figures, e.g., Foucault and Deleuze. You should also check out Shaun King's list of Rorty articles to consider in this comment.

Please email me or comment here with additions or annotations. Thanks!

Analytic and Continental Philosophy III: Continental Philosophy is impossible to define

I've always maintained that while you can't define "continental philosophy," you can treat the extension of the term both synchronically and diachronically, or as I say in the Preface to A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Yale UP, 2006; available outside North America as The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy [Edinburgh UP, 2005]):

‘Continental philosophy’ has always been an exceedingly difficult term to define. In fact, it may even be impossible to define. After all, Nietzsche tells us in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘only that which is without history can be defined’, and not only does continental philosophy have a history, but most – although perhaps not all – of its practitioners would agree with Nietzsche that a historical treatment (or what he would call a ‘genealogy’) of philosophical texts is vitally important. Thus, in lieu of a definition, this Preface offers a (synchronic) operational treatment and a (diachronic) genealogy of continental philosophy.

Nominalism!

Aaron Preston has a very interesting comment in response to this post by Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports.

In his post, Leiter excoriates Nancy Holland -- and by extension the editors at Notre Dame Philosophical Review for letting it pass -- for saying this in her review of Jason Powell's Jacques Derrida: A Biography:

One wonders, for instance, about the statement that philosophy in America "has the role of legitimating the US government and the scientific enterprise" leading to the suggestions that analytic philosophy "has as its telos the establishment of a universal culture for a static, totalitarian universal civilization" (pp. 124-125).  Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified, but surely in need of much more argument.

Here's my two cents, on what Preston says, not on Leiter, Holland, Powell, or Derrida:

New Book Series: "New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science"

I've recently become series editor for a new series with Palgrave Macmillan entitled New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. The topic of the series is a great occasion for dialogue between analytic and continental philosophers, if you ask me, and since you're visiting my blog, I guess you are asking me.

I've added a link to the left column, but if you don't want to click on it, here's what you'll read there:

Naturalist vs Non-Naturalist instead of Analytic vs Continental

Jon Cogburn writes in a comment to this post as well as here on his own blog that other ways of cutting up the philosophical scene than "analytic" and "continental" are needed. I completely agree. Here's what I write in the Preface to my current book project (about which I hope to hear very soon from the press where it's awaiting final approval).

Instead of assigning thinkers to the camps of "continental" and "analytic" philosophy as our sorting procedure, why not use "realist" vs. "anti-realist" or "naturalist" vs. "anti-naturalist"? Now at first glance, these seem  be simply new terms for the same division, as many analytic philosophers are naturalizers and many continental philosophers insist on a non-naturalizable "difference" which they claim appears through our relation to language. For these continental thinkers, language is a network of signs or signifiers that constructs a network of concepts or signifieds. The meaning of signs or concepts does not come from their isolated presence, but from their difference from all the other nodes of the network. Furthermore, it's commonly held by these philosophers that these differential networks construct a reality for a culture. Such social constructivism implies that naturalization of the social / subjective is hopelessly circular, as any concept of nature is already socially constructed. In the same way, such strong social constructivist thinkers are anti-realists.

But it is not true that this categorization is complete: a good number of analytic philosophers resist naturalism, while some continental philosophers are naturalizers. (I should note here that the important aspect of naturalism for my project is not the narrow technical sense of trying to account for the objects and processes of abstract thought by natural causes. [This is in fact a false problem, an artifact of residual Cartesianism.] Rather, I use a more relaxed notion of naturalism as the attempt to understand natural and social / subjective phenomena with the same basic concepts. As Spinoza would say, humans do not constitute a separate "kingdom within the kingdom" of nature.) Now I wanted to write a book that would naturalistically treat the intersection of politics and affect. This puts me at odds with those within "continental" philosophy who are anti-naturalist "difference" thinkers, and it comes as a surprise to all those, "continental" and "analytic" alike, who identify contemporary French thought with anti-naturalism. But as I argued in a previous work, Deleuze and Geophilosophy, which I co-wrote with Mark Bonta, Deleuze and Guattari offer us a thoroughly differential philosophy (being thus recognizably "continental" thinkers) which is at the same time thoroughly naturalistic (thus confounding the received notion of "continental" philosophy as anti-naturalist).

Analytic and Continental Philosophy I: Becoming the Philosopher You Are

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to have my own venue in which to participate in the discussion on the relation of “analytic” and “continental” philosophy that pops up now and again on the web. For example, this post by  Keith DeRose at Certain Doubts, in which, although joining late (#81), I ask people not to conflate “postmodernism” (defined as a concern with “floating signifiers,” the “free play of meaning” or some such) with “continental philosophy” or even with “contemporary French philosophy.” Or this post by  Brian Leiter on “Styles of Philosophy,” in which I agree with Leiter that one cannot conceptually define “continental philosophy”(= “CP”) or (“analytic philosophy” [ = “AP”] for that matter), but in which I suggest we might be able to talk about the sociological reality of the two camps in terms of different hiring and citation networks.

There’s a nuance here that needs to be treated in further detail, and on which I plan to post in the near future, but I think we can distinguish – NB: using citation networks rather than a conceptual distinction – “analytic continental philosophy” [= “ACP”] as those works on continental figures which cite people belonging to the analytic network (e.g., Mike Wheeler's excellent book on Heidegger and cognitive science, Reconstructing the Cognitive World [MIT, 2005]) and “continental continental philosophy [= “CCP”] as those works on continental figures citing people belonging to the continental network (e.g., Reiner Schürmann’s superb book, Heidegger on Being and Acting [Indiana, 1987]). Both books are on Heidegger, but if we define “continental philosophy” solely by means of work on continental figures, then we’d have to say Mike Wheeler is a continental philosopher, and that seems to be something that neither Wheeler nor many others would accept.

I’m planning a series of posts on these topics, but thought I’d introduce them with some autobiography for the following reason. While I think we can establish the synchronic co-existence of two fairly distinct hiring and citation networks, I think it’s important to stress at the outset that, at least as far as the citation network goes, there is some opportunity for exchange, which I’ll detail below the fold. But you can also look diachronically at how people enter these networks, that is, how they become either analytic or continental philosophers by incorporating a set of beliefs / desires / tastes / emotional triggers, and so on, about what constitutes “good” or “bad” philosophy, or at least, “the sort of thing our people do.” We needn’t get too far into anthropology / sociology here (I do though really like the statement attributed to Bourdieu: “we should do an anthropology of ourselves and a sociology of others”), but I think this process is better described in terms of initiation or acculturation than it is in terms of rational deliberation. I don’t know about you, but I certainly never had equal exposure to both analytic and continental philosophy in my undergraduate training, and my decision to pursue continental philosophy training at the graduate level can’t really be said to be the result of rational deliberation as to the relative merits of the two fields. One – CP – just felt right to me – I knew enough about it to know that it was a challenge I wanted to take up; the other – AP – was largely terra incognita. I suspect it’s the other way around for those who ended up in AP, but I’d be happy to hear from others with different experiences.