How the Schocken Books collections changed Arendt scholarship

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Joshua Miller

TLDR; Hannah Arendt never wrote a "moral philosophy." It is not hidden away in the archives or any of the recent collections of her work, nor in her unpublished lectures, letters, or journals. She was a political theorist who thought that moral philosophy requires a set of social relations that are inaccessible in the modern world. Yet as she has become more popular and is taught more and more often by moral philosophers, she is developing an unearned reputation as a moralist that perverts both what we should mean by moral philosophy and what she hoped to show us about the world we now inhabit.

Starting in the mid-nineties and then accelerating in mid-2000s, the publishing house Schocken Books has been publishing impressive thematic collections of mostly unpublished or inaccessible papers by Hannah Arendt. Edited by Jerome Kohn, the collections take up themes like Arendt’s approach to her Jewish identity, or the themes of understanding, politics, or judgment. The first “Essays in Understanding” collection was originally published in 1994, but seemed not to find an audience, and so was not completed: after the successful publication of a new version of Origins of Totalitarianism in 2004, the series was rekindled in 2005 by the publication of The Promise of Politics. Promise was a hit, as were the followups, and a new volume of essays on understanding is due at the beginning of next year.

This has been a great service to Arendt scholars, but it has also had a peculiar impact on the uptake of Arendt in the contemporary era. As I will argue here, these four volumes have completely transformed the disciplinary identification of her work and, perhaps, undermined her own account of how she ought to be read and understood.

Some background: I wrote my dissertation on Arendt. Though I attended Bard College where Hannah Arendt is buried, I first encountered her work in graduate school under the tutelage of Holloway Sparks, a political theorist, when I took a seminar on her work. We read Arendt–as I think was then the fashion–in chronological order, after a brief introduction by way of this interview (transcribed in the Penguin Portable Arendt as this was pre-Youtube):

At the very beginning of the interview, Arendt claims that, “I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I’ve been accepted by the circle of philosophers as you so kindly suppose.”

The interviewer, Günter Gaus, protests: “I consider you to be a philosopher.”

Arendt responds: “I can’t help that, but in my opinion, I am not a philosopher. I’ve said good-bye to philosophy once and for all.”

Later, she explains: “I want to look at politics with an eye unclouded by philosophy.”

That was enough to situate Arendt as, in some sense, anti-philosophical, and to highlight the important distinction that motivated much of her work: an antagonism between politics and philosophy. Philosophers, Arendt argued, were too obsessed with objectivity in their assessment of nature and metaphysics to be able to take up the situated thinking of a political theory. Where political theory essays to understand what has happened, which is just what we expect from philosophy of science or metaphysics, when it tries to be political, philosophy retreats to a kind of impotent moralizing. Contrast Marx and Rawls and you’ll see the difference immediately.

It was, at the time, also quite au courant to cite Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt on the question of Arendt as an ethical thinker:

The myriad currents of political opinion represented by Arendt’s critics flowed over or around the larger issues Arendt had raised–and not answers. These issues loomed larger in American political life as the war in Vietnam escalated. Rosalie Colie, Arendt’s Wesleyan friend, ended a letter about the war with a plea: “Please write your morals. We need it, I do anyway.” For a “morals” there was–and still is–a great need, but Eichmann in Jerusalem would not satisfy it.

Thus, Young-Bruehl too assumed that Arendt had left philosophy and its effort to separate normative issues from political ones behind.

Now, of course, we have since that time received the Schocken Books collections with great pleasure. Much there is collected around themes, and perhaps because of this great interest in Arendt’s morals the papers I hear most often cited are the papers on personal and collective responsibility. In other words, the desire for Arendt’s “morals” is so great, produced so much secondary scholarship and archival research, that Jerome Kohn decided to publish the primary source material that might best represent this theme.

The impact of this decision has been, I think, far ranging. I wrote my dissertation just as these collections were being published, so I feel that my own experience of Arendt bridges the pre- and post-Schocken worlds. An ethical reading of Arendt that at the time felt fresh and only available to those who had spent time in the archives at the Library of Congress has begun to feel fairly well accepted. Yet I sometimes wonder whether we have lost the political theoretical version of Arendt in the shuffle.

Consider five ways to read Arendt for the first time: (1) the exhaustive chronological reading of a graduate seminar, (2) in order of impact and importance, (3) a thematic tour through works relevant to your interests, (4) an exhaustive reading focusing on lines of argument and thematic connections, and (5) brief dips into relevant essays, ignoring the larger project.

While I still think (1) is the proper way for upper-level students to imbibe Arendt’s oeuvre, I can acknowledge that completeness is not always a friendly initial goal. Most of my colleagues and readers are pursuing some version of (3) or (5), although a few may get seduced by the exhaustive thematic approach. When my friends James Stanescu and Joseph Trullinger asked me to rank Arendt’s works by importance, I discovered that as much as I hate to admit that some of her books and essays are more important than others, I do have strong feelings about how they ought to be read if (2) is at stake. The ideal read order by impact and quality would be:

The Human Condition
Between Past and Future
On Revolution
Origins of Totalitarianism
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Life of the Mind
Love and Saint Augustine
Crises of the Republic
Men in Dark Times

This is in many ways a conventional order: though many students will start with Eichmann, I believe one can’t appreciate it as an Arendtian text without having a grounding in her other work, both on politics in general and on totalitarianism in specific. I also happen to think that two works which are not as often read today deserve to be more carefully studied: her work On Revolution comparing the French revolution to the American one, and her collection of linked essays, Between Past and Future, which is both deeply philosophical and shows–as she protested in the interview–how political theory is truly a different method than political philosophy.

The publication of the four Schocken volumes (with a fifth coming in January) have radically changed this ordering, however. First, it made available her unpublished piece, “Introduction into Politics” which she intended as a followup to Between Past and Future. (Recall my lengthy treatment of one of its themes here.) Second, it made easily available a triptych of pieces: “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” and “Thinking and Moral Considerations” which together are often read as supplying the necessary “morals” from Arendt.

Let me say a few things about this triptych: written as lectures and addresses, they are clear and easy to read and teach. They also address some of the questions that most bedeviled critics of her account of Jewish leaders’ collaboration with Nazi authorities, and her strange half-indictment of Adolf Eichmann less for what he did out of hate than for what he did out of stupidity. These essays are certainly in conversation with the startling results coming out of social psychology (Asch, Milgram, Zimbardo) regarding the terrible things people will do out of compliant respect for authority or subsumption into a role or job. How can seemingly ordinary men and women–who love their families, attend church regularly, and might never scruple to steal or cheat–engage in horribly violent acts?

Yet is this, this moral psychology, really all we want from moral philosophy? In some sense, the horrors of the Shoah are plain to all who care to look, and “speechless horror” is a perfectly adequate response. After that, Arendt’s moral philosophy constantly returns to a conception of self-consistency, regular reflection, and seems to conclude that most evil-doing is a kind of superficial self-deception. The totality of her moral philosophy might be boiled down to: a) “No one has the right to obey,” and b) “Morality is being able to live with yourself and what you’ve done.”

Arendt says as much in “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” which largely summarizes the argument of Between Past and Future and is primarily about confronting the collapse of morality into manners, the loss of abstract principles or autonomy in the pursuit of social conformity, and the ease with which mores and customs can be turned towards wickedness.

As such, I’ve begun to worry that these new collections may cause us to ignore Arendt’s political theory. It’s as if a new edition of Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer became all the rage and we began to ignore the Critiques. Reading Arendt through the lens of her disgust with moral philosophy–which, like religion and theology was utterly unable to prevent or even explain the Nazis–means that we ignore what, to my mind, she was able to help us see about the world. It also means that we too readily accept that moral philosophy can never be anything other than a kind of degraded political theory. I think there are many more interesting lines of inquiry to be had from moral philosophers than how to avoid committing genocide!

But I won’t defend moral philosophy from Arendt here. Too many of her critics read her looking for flaws or weaknesses to attack. Instead, here’s an act of appreciative theory:

Joshua Miller’s Top Ten Things that Arendt Got Right About Political Theory

Race-thinking precedes racism. Arendt’s analysis of the rise of totalitarianism is a mammoth book, but the basic argument is simple: you can’t hate Jews for their race until you think of the fundamental flaw with Judaism in racial terms. Thus, race-thinking comes before racism. Before race-thinking, Europeans hated Jews for completely different reasons: religion! You don’t exterminate other religions, you convert them. But once you have race-thinking, you can create justifications not just for anti-Semitism but for colonialism, imperialism, and chattel slavery of Africans.
The Holocaust happened because Europeans started treating each other the way they treated indigenous peoples in the rest of the world. Europeans learned to think racially in the colonization of Africa, and the European model for dealing with resistance involved murderous concentration camps. Thus, when race-thinking eventually returned as a form of governance in the European continent, so too did the concentration camps.
Totalitarianism is largely caused by the growth of a class of “superfluous” people who no longer have a role in their economy. In an industrializing society, much traditional work can now be done with fewer workers. One possible solution to this oversupply of workers is to put some of that surplus labor force to work monitoring, policing, and murdering the rest.
Ideologues ignore counter-evidence. A very good way to understand ideology is as a logical system for avoiding falsification. There are alternatives theories of ideology that aren’t immune to counter-evidence but instead merely exert constant pressure: for instance, there’s a difference between what Fox News does and what Vox does, and Arendt’s account is more useful for criticizing Fox’s constant spinning than Vox’s technocratic neoliberalism. But Arendt supplied us a useful account of ideology that is closest to our standard use and our current need.
The language of human rights is noble and aspirationally powerful. However, statelessness renders most rights claims worthless in practical terms and in most judicial institutions. Someone who must depend on her rights as a “man” or a human is usually worse off in legal terms than an ordinary criminal.
You don’t discover yourself through introspection. You discover yourself through action. The main set of claims she made in The Human Condition about the role of public and political life strikes me as pretty important, especially insofar as it denigrates economic and racial identity politics. Think of the cocktail party version of this: on meeting a new person, some people will ask, “Where do you work?” in order to get to know them, identifying them through their profession, their economic role. Others will ask: “What are you into?” as if to say that our recreation and consumption is what defines us. But for Arendt, the appropriate question is: “What have you done? What do you stand for?”
If you take that seriously, “identity” politics is frustratingly restrictive. A person is not defined merely by the class or race they come from: they are defined by the principles upon which they act. While it is often necessary to step into the political sphere as a representative of Jews or women–and Arendt acknowledged that this becomes unavoidable when one is attacked as a woman or a Jew–the best kind of politics allows us to enter the political sphere as ourselves, not knowing what we will discover about those selves until we have acted. So the need for identity politics is an indication of larger injustices: we respond as members of our groups when systematic and institutional forces oppress us as members of these groups.
Revolutions that aim for political goals are more likely to succeed than revolutions that aim for economic goals. Misery is infinite and thus insatiable; political equality is comparatively easy to achieve. Thus it’s important to connect economic complaints to a deprivation of political equality: the important problem with white supremacy, for instance, is not that whites “have” more than Blacks, but that we count for more, that it is uncontroversial that “White Lives Matter.” (Though an important indication of that “counting for more” is that white people have more than Blacks because we continually plunder Black people and are able to get away with it systematically.)
Philosophy as a discipline is fundamentally at odds with politics. This is a problem for political philosophy, and it helps to explain why so much of political philosophy is hostile to politics and tries to subsume the agonistic nitty-gritty of the public sphere under rules of coherence and expert knowledge. This is because thinking as an activity is a withdrawal from active life, and especially politics: the fundamental conflict between the eternal and the ephemeral is not one that can be usefully bridged, and most often those encounters are pernicious for both thinkers and doers.
Work and labor are different. Some activities are repetitive and exhausting, and only biological necessity forces us to continue them. Some activities make the world and our lives within it meaningful and fruitful. Many people have economic roles that mix the two activities, but still and all they are distinct. What’s more, there’s not shame in wishing and working for a world without labor, perhaps a world of automation. But a world without work would be fundamentally meaningless.
Evil is not complicated, so don’t overthink it.

One last thing: the Schocken collections are admirable and beautiful texts, but Jerome Kohn sometimes turns to salesmanship in his introductions. Perhaps one reason they play such an outsized role in recent readings of Arendt is that he argues in the introduction (and many readers seem to accept) that “her unwritten volume on Judging… may have crossed some of the t’s and dotted some of the i’s of ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.'” In short, Kohn bills these lectures as filling in the unwritten volume. (While he disavows this interpretation in the next line, he also writes assertively if schematically about what Judging must be given these essays.)

Lectures given in 1965 and 1966–which only set up questions and ostentatiously end in uncertainty rather than answer them!–are supposed prefigural accounts of Arendt’s thoughts a decade later. It’s really a shame: a Heideggerian anxiety over mortality and the unfinished projects it portends that is deeply un-Arendtian. As with Beiner’s transcription and interpolation of the Kant lectures and indeed as with my own dissertation on her work, we are so focused on what we lost with her death that we ignore what she gave us.

Lifeworld and System: a primer

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Peter

The great social theorist Jürgen Habermas has drawn attention–for more than half a century–to the problem that he calls the “colonization of the Lifeworld by System.” Here is my explanation, based mainly on a rare concrete example from his Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2.

The Lifeworld, for Habermas, is the background of ordinary life: mainly private, somewhat naive and biased, but also authentic and essential to our satisfaction as human beings. It is a “reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretation.” In the Lifeworld, we mostly communicate with people we know and who share our daily experience, so our communications tend to be opaque to outsiders and certainly not persuasive to people unlike us. But Habermas argues that we are incapable of thinking about everything at once. In order to reason and communicate, we must take most points as givens. Only then can “single elements, specific taken-for-granteds” be brought up for conversation and critical analysis.

Meanwhile, the “System” is composed of formal organizations, such as governments, corporations, parties, unions, and courts. People in a System have official roles and must pursue pre-defined goals (albeit sometimes with ethical constraints). For example, defense lawyers are required to defend their clients, corporate CEOs are supposed to maximize profit, and comptrollers are supposed to reduce waste in their own organizations. In the current period, there are fundamentally two Systems: markets (in which instrumental action leads to profit) and governments (in which instrumental action demonstrates power). Although the people who work in markets and governments are complex individuals with other commitments, their official work responsibilities are to maximize money or to administer power.

To illustrate the Lifeworld, Habermas invites us to envision an “older construction worker who sends a younger and newly arrived co-worker to fetch some beer, telling him to hurry up and be back in a few minutes.” The senior worker assumes that a whole set of beliefs and values are shared on the team: German construction workers enjoy and expect to drink beer at breaks during the workday, beer is for sale in the vicinity, the younger and/or most recently hired person is the one who does unpaid chores for the group, and so on. Each of these assumptions could be brought into doubt and subjected to debate. For instance, as Habermas suggests, the younger worker might say, “But I don’t have a car,” or “I’m not thirsty.” Other “elements of the situation” might generally pass unnoticed yet become relevant as circumstances change. If the younger worker is an immigrant without health coverage and he falls off the ladder as he goes to buy the beer, several relevant laws and controversies may suddenly occur to the workers, moving from their background knowledge to topics of explicit discussion. But at any given moment, simply by virtue of being human, the workers must assume most features of the situation as a shared and implicit background, a “vast and incalculable web of presuppositions.” This is their Lifeworld.

In order for the workers (or any other group of people) to be free and self-governing, they must be able to render any aspect of the Lifeworld problematic. It is a definitive feature of modernity that no assumptions are considered immune to critique; and it is a condition of democracy that no critique is blocked by law or other force. When the younger construction worker notes that no beer is available within walking distance and he doesn’t have a car, he is giving a reason for someone else to go. This turns his work group into a small Public Sphere. To the extent it is democratic and deliberative, his reasons will require responses.

Imagine (to go beyond Habermas’ presentation of this example) that the radio is playing as these men work. A news program includes an interview with a feminist activist who criticizes the construction industry for hiring very few women, followed by an immigrant leader who notes that alcohol is forbidden to Muslims (thus the assumption that everyone wants to drink beer is exclusionary), followed by a health expert who attributes disease to excessive daytime beer consumption. These people are making arguments that compel critical attention to specific aspects of the workers’ Lifeworld. They represent the larger Public Sphere of the Federal Republic or the European Union. It doesn’t matter whether the interviewees have self-interested motivations, such as selling copies of their books, or whether the radio station is a for-profit company trying to attract listeners. The format of any reasonably well-run news program will compel the speakers to give reasons that can be checked and assessed by reporters and listeners. This is a case of a democratic Public Sphere challenging citizens to reflect about aspects of their Lifeworld.

But although every particular point should be subject to discussion, the whole Lifeworld must be protected. One reason is that we need the Lifeworld to think at all, for we are capable of testing a specific assumption only while holding our other assumptions for granted. A second reason is that our Lifeworld is ours, a condition of living authentically. Any political program that tries to strip a group of people of their accumulated assumptions all at once would be totalitarian. A radio program that brings separate issues to the workers’ attention expands their thinking; but if a revolutionary government seizes all the radio stations and begins broadcasting propaganda against contemporary German working-class culture as a whole, that is a threat to their Lifeworld.

Meanwhile, the Lifeworld is vulnerable to manipulation by interested parties who act instrumentally. For example, suppose that on the radio, the workers hear men with similar accents to their own praising a particular brand of beer. Maybe women are also heard, enjoying these men’s company and appreciating their good taste. It sounds as if friends have entered the real Lifeworld of the construction site, but these supposed friends are really actors who are are paid to sell beer. Of course, the workers will understand the purpose of an advertisement, yet by skillfully imitating their authentic Lifeworld, the ad can affect their behavior. No reasons need be given; no rebuttal is invited. In this case, Habermas would say that the Lifeworld of the workers has been colonized by the System of markets. The System of government might similarly colonize their Lifeworld if a candidate for public office started talking on the radio as if he were their friend who shared their values and experiences.

In discussions of Systems colonizing Lifeworlds, common examples include commercial advertisements that masquerade as authentic communications. These are cases of “commodification”: firms mining the Lifeworld for economic advantage. Habermas also emphasizes the tendency of welfare state bureaucracies to “juridify” or “judicialize” the Lifeworld. For instance, when well-intentioned states seek to protect pupils and parents against unfairness in testing and discipline, fairness “is gained at the cost of a judicialization and bureaucratization that penetrates deep into the teaching and learning process,” depersonalizing the school, inhibiting innovation, and undermining relationships.

A neo-Marxist line of criticism faults Habermas for equating juridification with commodification and the state with the market. This critique hold that the underlying process is capitalist exploitation, and the welfare-state is only a threat to the Lifeworld because it is a tool of capital. Habermas disagrees. For him the underlying process is growing specialization, a feature of modernity. He insists that in socialist societies, the state colonizes the Lifeworld in a parallel way to the market’s colonization in capitalist societies; and in welfare states, both threats operate at once.

[It turns out that I have posted 58 times before on Habermas, collected here. My broadest posts are probably Habermas and critical theory (a primer); saving Habermas from the deliberative democrats; and Ostrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need.]

libertarianism and democracy

Posted on July 27, 2017 by Peter

In the Washington Post, Michael Chwe argues that the “beliefs and values” of James M. Buchanan “conflict with basic democratic norms.” Buchanan (1919-2013) was a hugely influential public choice economist. Chwe is intervening in the debate about him that has been provoked by Nancy MacLean’s recent book Democracy in Chains. Although I haven’t read MacLean, I want to offer a theoretical point.

If freedom means non-interference, and if democracy means equitable decision-making in groups, then freedom and democracy are in tension.

“Non-interference” means not being told what to do or what not to do. “Equitable decision-making” means a process that yields a result binding on the whole group, based on everyone’s input. It need not mean majority-rule; democratic processes can be more complex and demanding than that. But democracy does yield binding outcomes, which may interfere with what individuals want to do. Therefore, democracy as equitable decision-making conflicts with freedom as non-interference.

This means that libertarians and classical liberals should own up to the fact that they are critics of democracy. Yes, they favor certain forms of liberty and equity, but those don’t equal democracy. Libertarians are leery of binding decisions by non-voluntary groups.

For their part, strong democrats–people who want to defend and expand the scope of democratic decision-making–should admit that they are critics of freedom as non-interference.

But one can compromise. I happen to think that non-interference is a real good. People rightly don’t like to be told what they may and may not do, except when it is strictly necessary. I also happen to think that democratic decision-making is a real good: people should deliberate and shape their common world. If the two goods trade off, then we can design institutions that offer elements of democracy along with strong constraints to protect individuals from unjust interference by the group. For those who favor a compromise, Buchanan’s work is full of important insights and cautions, but is not a satisfactory political theory all by itself.

Two important complications:

Non-interference is a problematic concept. We tend to think of a person as free from interference insofar as she goes about her everyday life without anyone else making explicit commands or threats. But that person lives in a world shaped by institutions, norms, and powerful decisions by other people, starting with her parents and including her employer, competing companies in the marketplace, celebrities who shape the culture, etc. It’s not clear that she is more free if she faces fewer explicit, immediate rules.
There are other kinds of freedom, besides non-interference. In a post that still draws daily traffic, I summarized six types. I actually omitted an important seventh type on which Philip Pettit is an expert: freedom as non-domination. This means freedom from any other person’s arbitrary will or discretionary choice. One can be highly limited by rules that are non-arbitrary, or one can be subject to arbitrary decisions that happen not to be very consequential. If you think that arbitrariness (rather than constraint) is the main threat to liberty, then you can favor strong democratic institutions. But they can’t be simply majoritarian. Instead, they must be aimed at producing non-arbitrary decisions: decisions that are justified by reasons, influenced by all opinions, and consistent with rules. I find this very promising, but I also believe that we must attend to the insights of Buchanan and others about how real institutions fail to honor such abstract principles.

An Ethical Argument for Philosophy Co-Authorship; on Friendship and Disagreement

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Joshua Miller

This piece was co-written and co-published with Eric Schliesser.

The most dazzling example of co-authorship is Paul Erdős, who co-wrote more than 1400 papers in mathematics with 485 collaborators. (What is your Erdős number?) To do this, he became functionally homeless: “His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare, “My brain is open,” work with his host for a day or two, until he was bored or his host was run down, and then move on to another home.”

In the sciences, co-authorship is normal. In the humanities, it is uncommon. In philosophy, it is almost non-existent. (See chart.)[1] Yet philosophy is not without famous co-authors (e.g., Marx and Engels). What’s more, some monographs ought properly be considered co-authored, like John Stuart Mill’s collaborations with Harriet Taylor Mill: “when two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common it is of little consequence, in respect of the question of originality, which of them holds the pen.”

There is little scholarship on co-authorship in philosophy, but a steady trickle of blog posts suggests that there is interest and anxiety on this point. (Helen de Cruz, Mark Zelcer, Robert Paul Wolff)

1. What is co-authorship generally?

Co-authorship in the sciences is ideally ruled by two rules rooted in a particular sociology of labs and research groups. First, co-authors contribute to the scholarly endeavor for a piece of publishable scholarship by planning, executing, or analyzing the results of some sort of research. Second, co-authors compose the written portion of the research, either collectively or through some division of labor.

Both of these ideals are violated, of course—there are plenty of massive multi-authored articles where scholars receive token authorship (gift authorship) or someone who made substantial contributions is not credited as an author (ghost authorship.) In that way, these are “endorsed” norms, not the “enforced” ones: violations abound and are even legitimated as common practice in some “big science” research areas. But this remains the practical ideal.

2. Why is co-authorship deprecated in philosophy?

Professional philosophers collaborate, usually through disputatious conversation, but usually not in a way that counts multiple thinkers as the author of a single paper. We are also much less likely to cite our peers than the agenda-setting papers in our sub-fields, especially as a part of a generic literature review. (See Kieran Healey’s data.) It is more common for close collaborators to co-edit than to co-author: for instance, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum famously created the “capabilities approach” together without co-authoring any of their foundational papers. They did, however, co-edit the seminal volume, The Quality of Life in 1993.

So while we do not imagine ourselves to be lone geniuses communing with the ancient canon, it is the case that many philosophical papers are projected as manifestos of a single principled thinker. Indeed, philosophers are particularly prone to a kind of “subauthorial collaboration” that is formalized in lavish acknowledgements in the text or an early footnote. (Cronin, Shaw, La Barre, 2003)

David Lewis, who understood philosophical politics as well as anybody (recall), comments on this kind of “ghost” authorship in his paper, “Causation as Influence:”:

“This paper mostly presents the latest lessons I’ve learned from my students. Under the customs of the natural sciences, it should have been a joint paper, the coauthors being (in alphabetical order) John Collins, Ned Hall, myself [David Lewis], L.A. Paul, and Jonathan Schaffer. But under the customs of philosophy, a paper is expected to be not only a report of discoveries but a manifesto; and, happily, the five of us have by no means agreed upon a common party line.”[2]

Yet analytic philosophers often imagine themselves by analogy to the natural and social sciences, and American and continental philosophers increasingly emphasize the collaborative nature of our enterprise. Why, then, do we not use co-authorship more?

One obvious reason is the relative paucity of grants and research support compared to the natural and social sciences. Without an incentive to adopt the lab or research group model, most working philosophers are not members of a funded research unit with reporting requirements. Rigorous research is understood to support ‘research-led teaching,’ and so the single-author model is based primarily on the single-teacher model. We should thus expect the introduction of larger private grant-making institutions, like the Templeton Foundation and the Berggruen Institute, and public European grant agencies, to usher in an era of increasing research group size in philosophy, and the more frequent co-authorship.

We expect that new collaborative technologies will decrease the costs and difficulties of collaboration to the extent that philosophers will more often overcome them, even without any increased funding or benefits. Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, and simple Microsoft Office sharing, versioning, and commenting will all tend to ease the speed with which scholars of all varieties—including philosophers—create collaborative documents. Social media, chat programs, and email ease collaboration over distance to replicate the proximity by which labs and research groups co-compose.

Lastly, we might think of philosophical research as long-shot bets (Langhe and Schliesser, 2017) that explore concepts, methods, or techniques that may be generally applicable. As such, it will be difficult to trace any particular result in the world back to a paper or monograph, and it is preferable to have many such long-shot bets rather than focus the efforts and attention of a highly skilled research team on sequential elaboration of just one of these gambles. It will generally be better to encourage idiosyncratic work done by individuals and small teams in hopes that one of those bets pays off. In the age of increasingly easy collaboration some enduring, virtual small research teams will emerge without, hopefully, fully displacing lone wolfs and disputatious research groups.

3. What norms of co-authorship might philosophers embrace?

If philosophers do adopt co-authorship norms, which ones should we adopt?

We should start with the ideal of recognition of actual contribution to the research and knowing participation in the composition. Co-authorship should never be merely “honorary” inclusion for a member of a team or department who contributed to neither the research work nor the writing endeavor. However, the division of labor in some disciplines has the result of producing co-authored pieces where some credited contributors don’t even understand the paper they have helped to produce. Should we extend co-authorship to a student assistant who writes the literature review for a piece of research without understanding the rest of the paper? Should we accept co-authorship for a paper whose conclusions we do not endorse, if we supplied the formal modeling or computer code that underwrites it?

Our current professional ideal is consensus. On this ideal all authors must give credence to every jot and tittle of the work, even if their confidence varies slightly. Co-authorship in philosophy is stricter because philosophers can and should endorse all the claims, arguments, and conclusions of the paper. Papers can be thus be co-authored in philosophy when two or more researchers find a common interest, discuss it at great length, and truly co-compose the entire paper, contesting each argumentative move and turn of phrase until agreement is reached. As such, it should be very unlikely to see large groups of co-authors writing together, given the difficulty of producing such an exacting meeting of the minds, and we even look askance at philosophy papers co-authored by three or four scholars.

Another possibility is that philosophers working on closely-related research might try to divvy up the tasks in a field of research around some question such that only one or a few of the authors of a work understand the whole thing, while others are credited for their contributions without being “first” or “lead” author status. This requires trust in each other to handle sections of the paper that address relevant issues from their sub-fields; perhaps a paper that is 12,000 words long is written in two halves, with only the introduction and conclusion truly a joint project. On this ideal, co-authors retain to right to veto truly abhorrent claims made outside of their assigned sections, but only by threatening to dissolve the partnership. Otherwise, they can only register objections and hope to be heard.

A third possibility would be to follow the norm in law courts, where empaneled and en banc judges issue both dissenting opinions or in some cases join the majority in parts of their decision but not others, perhaps affirming the result but not all of the methods used to arrive at it. In such cases, a minority might dissent vehemently, while the court is understood to have rendered the opposite verdict: that minority dissent is clearly a separate research project in philosophical terms. They are not understood as co-authors of the majority opinion but as co-authors of a distinct opinion which did not win a majority of support. The more instructive question is what to do when judges affirm parts of the main decision but not all of it, and by analogy, situations where co-authors affirm parts of a research project but not all of it. Can it be possible for one of the co-authors to “sign on” to parts 1, 2, and 4 of a paper, while dissenting from arguments found in part 3 and in the conclusion? For example, in the past one of us has used a footnote to signal an alternative position from the one arrived at in the body of the paper.

A fourth possibility is majority voting. Bright, Dang, and Heesen (2017) argue that scientific work should aggregate researchers’ judgments. Claims and propositions should be made in a paper that receive the assent of the majority of the authors. One might well find oneself outvoted in some cases, and this would be fine so long as there was agreement that voting had not produced a contradictory or logically incoherent set of claims.

A fifth possibility would be a kind of deliberative dictatorship: a lead author could write a paper, assign sections for others to compose, and bounce ideas off of possible co-authors. At the conclusion, all participants who agreed with the final product could sign on as co-authors, while dissenters could produce their own dissenting papers to be published alongside. This is related to proposals that might allow peer reviewers to receive more recognition for their work as initial gatekeepers.

Could all of these modes of co-authorship flourish in philosophy? Are some of them inimical to the discipline?

4. Philosophers should co-author more of our work

Given the fact that some forms of collaborative recognition do exist, why suggest co-authorship as an alternative model for philosophy? Let’s start by dividing the reasons for co-authorship into roughly epistemic and roughly ethical categories, even if this is a division that is easily collapsed. Co-authored papers may simply be better for having multiple composers, readers, and researchers attached to them. The division of epistemic labor will often lead to better-written, more carefully crafted, or simply more copious publications: many minds make light work.

At the same time, co-authorship is partly about recognizing the contributions of our peers. In that sense, it is ethical. This is a weaker defense of co-authorship, since there are alternative methods for providing recognition. If a paper issues from a conversation with a colleague or a good objection raised at a conference or blog post, we philosophers would normally expect to mention that in a footnote, not to grant the colleague or objector co-authorship status. Philosophy papers are sometimes imagined to be the record of the thoughts or analysis of a single agent, and group agency seems much more difficult in these cases because we are so rarely in anything resembling agreement. We are rarely of a single mind, ourselves, so this is no big impediment, but this also ignores the fact that one can commit to a written product while having varying confidence in its disparate elements.

But there’s a significant ethical claim that might recommend co-authorship: the ideal of scholarly friendship. Co-authorship can be a way to channel professional philosophical relationships in productive ways, a norm for guiding conversations and arguments towards shared, potentially overlapping projects. There is independent reason to believe that shared projects are an intrinsic good tied closely to well-being. (Korsgaard, 1992) Thus we should, if possible, prefer to share the tasks associated with philosophical research with others, not just after publication but throughout the scholarly endeavor. Philosophical co-authorship is desirable just because philosophical friendship is desirable.

Shared projects are possible both between equals and between mentors and students. As such, co-authorship is a way to encourage productive collaboration within departments and with undergraduate and graduate students. In the pedagogy-first model of much philosophical research, departmental colleagues at most small schools should not co-author their research because this leads to overlapping areas of interest and knowledge. A department with only a handful of philosophers should instead hope that its faculty have as little in common as possible, even if they must share governance of their department and spend their careers working side-by-side. But if co-authorship underwrites philosophical friendship, then even a maximally pluralistic department should seek opportunities to co-create research, actively seeking agreement and shared methods, research areas, and conceptual terrain.

Like friends, co-authors need not agree on everything.[3] Finding some method for adjudicating those disagreements is important, but philosophical writing can encompass these minor dissents or majoritarian procedures, just as our departments do. The key is that the commitment to co-author—like the commitments of friendship—is a commitment to resolve disagreements using whatever methods are available. Friends do not obsess over decision-procedures, though we adopt them to ease tensions for the sake of shared projects. The same should go for co-authors.

Like friends, co-authors need not be equals. We see in the sciences that co-authorship allows a kind of scholarly mentorship, and in philosophy graduate students experience intense collaboration for the first time while writing their dissertation with a senior scholar. We even acknowledge that this is akin to co-authorship by treating dissertation advising as something close to co-authorship for some professional purposes.

More of this sort of mentorship should be encouraged. The practice of learning from another scholar does not end when a philosopher receives a PhD, and probably we shouldn’t pretend that it does. Perhaps newly-minted PhDs aren’t yet ready for the full burdens of a research program, or perhaps they would benefit from mentorship when they move on to a new research program. Or perhaps not: perhaps this would end with more domination by senior scholars, as the division of labor creates permanent hierarchies. But it’s not as if our current, academic political economy is hierarchy-free.

A final reason is merely accuracy: our authorial norms give a false idea of our practices to the rest of the academy. We should consider revising them to align ourselves with our fellow academics. Let’s not pretend that scholarly productivity metrics are irrelevant or that Deans do not look askance at our publication records compared to other disciplines.

[1] Despite the best efforts of some of the authors of this post!

[2] The quote and suggestion comes from Christopher Hitchcock, who offered it as a comment to an older post on philosophy coauthorship at New APPS.

[3] We are indebted to Andrew Corsa’s and Eric Schliesser’s unpublished research on Margaret Fuller’s ideas on friendship and magnanimity.

What’s New?

Posted on July 13, 2017 by etweber@gmail.com

Diving into Public Philosophy, or maybe Belly-Flopping Into It

This spring has been BUSY. In Moving to Lexington, KY, I decided that among my key aims would be to dive deeper into the waters of public philosophy, public intellectual engagement. So far, a number of related activities have kept me busier than I could have imagined. They’ve also been hugely rewarding.

Organizationally, I’ve been working a great deal on projects for and leadership of The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA, on Twitter & Facebook). Last fall, we held an online video symposium on “Trigger Warnings,” which was a lot of fun, and we need to hold more of them. We haven’t gotten back to that yet, but we need to, I think. We should probably think of that kind of work as a program, one with a name, and that should happen with some frequency, as well as an officer leading the charge for how and when we’ll hold the next one. We’ve certainly learned a great deal about the need for and steps for better audio quality in recording such events. The next one will be better and we’ll keep on growing our archive of material and gatherings.

In work for SOPHIA, we’ve also returned to a project I started in 2015, which was my Philosophy Bakes Bread podcast. Instead of it being solo and only a podcast, we’ve welcomed Dr. Anthony Cashio of the University of Virginia’s College at Wise as a co-host on the show, which is now centered on interviews about how and why philosophy matters in real life and leadership. We’ve been very fortunate to get a spot on WRFL Lexington, 88.1 FM. The program is now a weekly radio talk show and then a podcast after that, the Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show and podcast (on Twitter and Facebook too). We started in January of 2017 and have been very busy ever since. The podcast, when I worked on it alone, only came to 4 episodes in 18 months. Since committing to the weekly radio show, we’ve aired 32 episodes, 27 hour-long programs and 5 short “breadcrumb” episodes. It has been considerably more work than I could have imagined, but it’s also been a great deal of fun. More importantly, it’s been some of the most engaging public philosophical work I’ve done to date. We’ve got listeners in 67 countries and the show has been downloaded over 9,000 times to date. We’re excited about approaching the early milestone of 10K downloads, which we hope to see happen in the next 10-14 days, or less, as far as our present trends appear to be going. That’s super exciting.

We also have a logo for the show now, that isn’t just my lame effort to put a text over an image in Photoshop… We’re finally getting around to putting the word out in efforts beyond social media posts. We’re WAY overdue on a few requests for interviews. To give you a sense of why, for each episode, we need to: 1) think about who’ll be on, 2) invite the person(s) on the show, giving info about what we do, how, etc., 3) schedule the interview, 4) meet to prep to give the interview, 5) meet and record the interview, 6) edit the interview for airing as an episode, 7) go to the station and air the episode, 8) announce the show on social media before and as it’s airing, 9) get the files after airing from the station and perform final mastering on them, 10) prepare language, images, and social media posts to accompany the podcast episode release, 11) post the show and announcements on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus, then 12) secure and make final tweaks to transcripts of the show that the great Drake Boling, UKY Philosophy undegraduate student, has been doing for us, and finally, 13) post the transcript on our site, as a PDF, and on Academia.edu. Ok, now do that 31 more times… to date (no, we’re not up to date yet with all the transcripts). To say it’s been a lot of work is an understatement.

This means that I’ve not had a chance to do as much of my own (single-author) writing, but the good news is that I’ve been doing considerably more coauthoring. In the academic world of Philosophy, people tend to think of meaningful writing as single-authored work, at least much of the time. That’s a mistake. There have been excellent philosophical works that are coauthored. Among them, I’m thinking of a number of projects by Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse. But they’re uncommon in the field. I’m glad to have had the chance to do some coauthoring, and one of these opportunities was a very special one. Again related to SOPHIA, I and three scholars put together a project that we pitched for the Public Philosophy Journal. The idea is that some theorizing has been needed for SOPHIA to pursue its mission: to build communities of philosophical conversation. To that end, Andrea Christelle, Sergia Hay, James William Lincoln, and I ventured to Michigan with grant support from the journal and the Mellon Foundation, ultimately, to write together a “Groundwork for Building Communities of Philosophical Conversation.” I’ve experienced coauthoring only a few times, and it’s not always been easy. This case went very smoothly. We’re not done with our project, and getting together remotely to finish the project is taking time, but the pay off has been great. We’re researching needs and methods for building communities of philosophical conversation, because we believe there’s a great need for a more philosophical culture in the United States and elsewhere.

SOPHIA’s group at the PPJ’s 2017 Collaborative Writing Workshop.

Beyond that, I committed to coauthoring a paper for the Summer Seminar on the Future of Philosophy at UNC Ashville this July, which I’ll be driving to this afternoon. I’m also giving my own individual paper there, but have been very happy to coauthor a paper with my Philosophy Bakes Bread co-host Dr. Anthony Cashio as well. We’re looking to finish a longer paper a little later this summer for the journal, Dewey Studies, and this is a step in that direction. The paper is called “Lessons Learned Baking Bread: Taking Philosophy to Radio and Podcast.” We had a blast writing it, and were inspired in relation to that to answer some of our interview questions that we’ve received (and have been way late in answering them) in the last few months. Anthony is not only great to talk to on the show, but also to write with. I’m hoping that my future includes more and more coauthoring, because it’s very rewarding and makes for a superior project, I believe, when we can draw from more minds and from encouraging and sympathetic thinking and dialogue.

Last but not least, I’m finishing work finally on my edited collection of John Dewey’s public writings. That’s been a long-time coming. I keep thinking it’ll be done soon, and it will be soon now… I’m also working to finish my next book, which I’ve been developing longer than any before, called A Culture of Justice. That’s the other topic I’ll be talking about tomorrow in Asheville. These projects would have been done far sooner if I hadn’t committed to an intensive radio show, but I don’t regret a thing. It’s all been super rewarding. I feel as though I’m constantly working and getting more and more behind, but I think it’s more likely that progress is just advancing slowly on the huge projects, bit by bit, and that I’ll be excited to see them at the end. That’s a lot like a big bed project, which I’ve completed in my new hobby of woodworking. I milled the lumber for it in late November and December of 2016. Big projects sometimes creep along, but eventually, if you keep making little bits of progress, they come together, like this:

I need a nap… Nah, coffee will help. I’m excited to be headed to Ashville, to meet up with some great philosophers. And, while there, to do a number of interviews for Philosophy Bakes Bread! When we can record in person, it’s awesome, like in these two cases from my trip to Michigan (photos below). Thanks to Chris Long for the great photo with typewriter in the foreground, and thanks to Naomi Hodgson and Amanda Fulford (I don’t recall who took the picture, of the two) for the pic of our setup in the less attractive computer room in Michigan. The rooms were quite different, but the conversations were both substantive and fun.

This is a photo of four people sitting around a table and a microphone to record an episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread in May of 2017, in a lovely room near South Gull Lake in Michigan.

Photo courtesy of Dr. Christopher P. Long, 2017.

This is a photo of me setting up to do an interview with Amanda Fulford and Naomi Hodgson in Michigan, 2017.

Photo courtesy of Naomi Hodgson and Amanda Fulford, 2017.

I don’t know how interesting this post is or has been for people, but it felt good to sit down and write it out. It may be of interest to a few people who’ve been kindly following and engaging with me on social media. In fact, I should mention a bit of a celebratory moment: I’ve hit 100,000 “likes” on my Facebook author page! That’s super cool and deeply gratifying. Thanks to everyone who’s been following my work. It’s really rewarding to write about and advocate for things that others care about too, making however small a contribution to dialogue about issues so many of us care about. It’s impossible to measure real impact, but we shouldn’t let difficulty in measuring something meaningful keep us from diving into it, or from belly-flopping into it as the case may be.

Image of a post from my Facebook page about a signed-copy giveaway for my latest books.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for your interest! If you’re not yet following me on Twitter or on Facebook, get to it!

The post What's New? first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.

science, law, and microagressions

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Peter

We live and work in settings that are diverse but unequal. Opportunities and outcomes can often be predicted on the basis of race/ethnicity, culture and religion, gender and sexual orientation, and class background. In these settings, we communicate constantly. Some of our communications are blatantly inappropriate, threatening the recipients or intentionally and obviously making them feel unwelcome and inferior. Some are acceptable or even helpful. And in between, some are arguably problematic. They are being called “microaggressions“–“aggressions,” because they are wrong; and “micro-” because they are not blatantly or clearly objectionable when taken one at a time.

One problem with them is that they may combine with many similar statements to create an overall environment that prevents people from flourishing and succeeding. Another problem is that they are simply unethical. Even if a given aggression contributes no harm at all, it is not what a person should say to another person.

Our culture is uncomfortable with ethical distinctions. Even children are taught that ethical claims are opinions in contrast to facts. We are quick to see explicitly ethical claims as subjective and biased. To criticize another person’s expression on ethical grounds seems arrogant, judgmental, and a possible threat to liberty.

In contrast, two major forms of reasoning are confident and widely viewed as legitimate: science and law. So there is a constant temptation to convert an ethical discussion about what is right into a science-like or law-like analysis.

For instance, in Aeon recently, the psychology professor Scott O Lilienfeld wrote that all policies and programs that target microagressions

hinge on one overarching assumption: that the microaggression research programme aimed at documenting the phenomenon is sound, and that the concept itself has withstood rigorous scientific scrutiny. This is not the case. Microaggressions have not been defined with nearly enough clarity and consensus to allow rigorous scientific investigation. No one has shown that they are interpreted negatively by all or even most minority groups. No one has demonstrated that they reflect implicit prejudice or aggression. And no one has shown that microaggressions exert an adverse impact on mental health.

Lilienfeld concludes, “Until the evidence is in …, I recommend abandoning the term microaggression, which is potentially misleading. In addition, I call for a moratorium on microaggression training programmes and publicly distributed microaggression lists now widespread in the college and business worlds.”

I agree that it would be useful to know more about the consequences of definable categories of communication. The consequences of any form of speech will vary depending on the situation, the speaker, the recipient, etc. There won’t be one empirical finding about microagressions, but there may be many useful findings.

Still, note the assumptions that underlie this call for a scientific approach:

A given act (in this case, a speech-act) should be criticized if, and only if, it causes a measurable harm. Moral philosophers would call this assumption “consequentialism.”
Categories of behavior can be usefully abstracted from contexts and defined with necessary and sufficient conditions. This reasoning uses what Jonathan Dancy [in Moral Reasons, 1993, p. 65] calls “switching arguments”–arguments that isolate a given feature of a situation and assume that if it has a moral significance in its original context, it must have the same significance when the context is “switched” to another one.

These are controversial positions. Kantians, virtue-ethicists, and others dispute consequentialism for various reasons, holding that an act can be right or wrong regardless of its causal impact. And particularists deny the validity of “switching arguments,” on the basis that a given feature can change its moral significance depending on the context. They criticize what Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

I don’t want to litigate those debates here, but merely to suggest that a scientific investigation of microaggressions makes strong assumptions about what should matter ethically. Those assumptions violate many ordinary people’s intuitions and ways of reasoning about what is right.

Meanwhile, legalistic reasoning influences the discourse of microaggressions. It’s not that critics want to make these acts literally illegal, but they introduce legal-sounding analysis. A microaggression deserves some kind of disciplinary intervention–perhaps not a punishment, but at least an authoritative statement that the speech is inappropriate in its context. A teacher or other authority figure who fails to intervene can be held responsible for creating a hostile environment.

But disciplinary responses threaten other values: freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, authentic expression of privately held views, and freedom from arbitrary judgments. Jesse Singal thinks that “microaggressions are being defined so broadly and so subjectively that students who are exposed to them are likely to come away very, very confused about what constitutes acceptable speech on campus — and campus disciplinary systems could get seriously gummed up in the years to come.” Thus we feel the pressure to introduce regular rules and policies that strike the appropriate balance and are predictable. Rule by people is to be replaced by rule of law.

Jürgen Habermas laments the tendency to “juridify” or “judicialize” what he calls the “Lifeworld.” For instance, when well-intentioned governments seek to protect pupils and parents against unfairness in testing and discipline, he writes, fairness “is gained at the cost of a judicialization and bureaucratization that penetrates deep into the teaching and learning process,” depersonalizing the school, inhibiting innovation, and undermining relationships [Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, p. 371.] Habermas reads the New Social Movements that have arisen since the 1970s–both on the right and the left–as efforts to protect the authenticity of the everyday Lifeworld from both the market and the intrusive welfare-state. It is an ironic outcome when these movements ultimately “juridify” such contexts as classrooms by turning ethical judgments into legalistic arguments. For example, some people cut their teeth in liberatory social movements but end up as diversity & inclusion specialists inside institutions, writing empirical papers (science) and establishing policies (law).

I am inclined to agree with Habermas that the underlying process is specialization. In large and technically complex modern societies, it pays to differentiate one’s expertise and authority. Constantly increasing specialization is thus a fundamental process of modernity. [Ibid. p. 374]. Science and law are two categories of specialization, each endlessly ramifying into sub-specialties. They seek legitimacy and often obtain it. Lilienfeld’s review of psychological research is an example of a scientist asserting authority on the basis of expertise.

Science and law are sometimes in tension. Behavioral scientists may argue that laws lack empirical basis; lawyers may block empirically justifiable rules on constitutional grounds. But these two systems also easily interlock. For instance, both disciplines need to categorize behavior and draw causal implications.

Science and law offer important checks on the kinds of judgments that we may reach intuitively in ordinary life. When we assert that a given statement has (or does not have) effects on specific individuals, that is a causal claim that must stand up to scientific scrutiny. When we make a judgment about an individual’s speech, we should check it against general principles that would block favoritism and arbitrariness.

But these two limited forms of reasoning can distort or block ethical judgment–as when Lilienfeld uses the lack of scientific evidence to support a “moratorium” on the use of the word “microagression,” even though that is ultimately an ethical category. The imposition of law and science can overwhelm the following values:

Responsibility: We are obligated to make judgments about speech, our own and others’. We can’t offload responsibility onto bureaucratic or scientific systems.
Judgment and discretion: There is no algorithm that can settle subtle cases. It is up to the moral agent to decide, under circumstances of uncertainty and moral ambiguity. Discretion cuts two ways, sometimes requiring us to excuse behavior that violates policies or that has negative effects, and sometimes requiring us to condemn behavior that is allowable and inconsequential.
Holism: Good judgment requires concern for the whole individual, the whole situation, and the whole community.
Relationships: Ultimately, what matters are relationships among differently situated human beings. Relationships are affective as well as rational, embodied as well as communicative, implicit as well as explicit, and prolonged over time.

psychoanalyzing presidents

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Peter

There’s lots of conversation right now about Donald Trump’s mental condition. It includes claims that he demonstrates narcissistic personality disorder and that changes in his speech patterns reveal cognitive decline. I [analyzed] his speech pattern from a particular angle here.

This discussion evokes the episode in 1964, when Fact magazine surveyed psychiatrists about then-candidate Barry Goldwater’s psychological fitness to be president.

Just under half (49.2%) of the 2,417 respondents thought he was unfit, with the rest split evenly between those who didn’t believe they could answer and those who considered him fit for office. Fact also gave respondents a chance to write comments and printed 40 pages of quotes from their answers. Goldwater sued and won over $1 million in damages (which bankrupted Fact magazine), leading to the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” which forbids members from making evaluative comments about public figures whom they have not examined as individual patients. A patient/physician relationship triggers ethical responsibilities that are absent when psychiatrists discuss public officials.

For me, the original Fact magazine issue is a fascinating example of professional authority encountering politics. It’s important to note that a considerable minority of the quoted statements either object to psychoanalyzing Goldwater without examining him in person or vouch for his mental health. Some of the surveyed psychiatrists even opine that he is the only sane candidate, surrounded by crazy socialists. But the majority of the quoted MDs make claims that now seem risibly dated and morally problematic. They do so under their professional titles, in a magazine entitled “Fact.” For example:

“Descriptions of his early life that I have read indicate to me that his mother assumed the masculine role in his family background. … The picture, therefore, is of a domineering, emasculating mother and a somewhat withdrawn, passive, narcissistic father. … This would provide a fertile background for sado-masochistic temperament, such as is seen in paranoid states.” — M.D., name withheld.
“From TV experiences, it is apparent that Goldwater hates and fears his wife. At the convention, she consistently appeared depressed and withdrawn. Certainly she was not like the typical enthusiastic candidate’s wife, e.g., Mary Scranton.” — M.D., name withheld.
“Barry Goldwater’s mental instability stems from the fact that his father was a Jew while his mother was a Protestant. This ethnic and cultural split accounts for his feelings of insecurity and spiritual loneliness. … ” — M.D., name withheld.
“In trying to analyze Mr. Goldwater’s behavior I am tempted to call him a ‘frustrated Jew.’ … He has never forgiven his father for being a Jew. … What the Senator from Arizona stands for is the antithesis of the traditional Jewish concepts of social justice, of humility, of moderation in speech and action, and of concern for the feelings of others, especially the vanquished. In eschewing these concepts, the Senator subconsciously expresses his hatred for his Jewish father.” — Max Dahl, M.D. Supervising Psychiatrist [etc.]
“In allowing you to quote me, which I do, I rely on the protection of Goldwater’s defeat at the polls in November; for if Goldwater wins the Presidency, both you and I will be among the first into the concentration camps.” – G. Templeton, M.D., Director, Community Hospital Mental Health [etc.]
“Characterologically, Goldwater is like many middle-class Americans. He is ‘formula’ oriented with a belief in the infallibility of his own rhetoric. … In short: Goldwater is an anal character who believes all’s well in his ‘tidy’ world.” — M.D., name withheld.
“From his published statements I get the impression that Goldwater is basically a paranoid schizophrenic who decompensates from time to time.” — M.D., name withheld.

I think we should talk about Donald J. Trump’s character and psychological fitness for office. It seems problematic to use the Goldwater Rule to keep the whole psychiatric profession out of this discussion. And yet these quotes from 1964 remind us how historically-relative, value-laden, and agenda-driven people can be, even when they present themselves as scientific specialists dealing only in Facts.

is everyone religious?

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Peter

In the perennial debate about the place of religion in politics and public life, one available stance is: “Everyone is religious.” This position has weaknesses, which I will mention below, but here are three points in its favor:

Ethical people hold beliefs that are hard, if not impossible, to justify with empirical evidence. For example, I believe that all human beings are equal. That is not a scientifically demonstrable claim. Science finds all kinds of inequalities of capacity, potential, and importance among actual human beings, who include speechless infants and late-stage Alzheimer’s patients. Equality is instead a moral premise. I don’t happen to take it directly from an overtly religious source, but it could be viewed as similar to a religious statement, such as “God loves the world.”
Everyone should recognize that the universe exceeds our capacity to understand it, even by means of cumulative empirical research. I know things that our dog just can’t. I know, for example, that he and I live in the United States, which is a republic. Perhaps he knows some things that I can’t. With appropriate tools, I could collect the same information that he takes in with his remarkable nose, but I wouldn’t know what it feels like to sense that a cat crossed “his” yard five hours ago. A creature with a much different brain from either my dog’s or mine could know things that neither of us can. One needn’t believe in God, then, to acknowledge the likelihood that the universe is permanently unknowable by us and a place of mystery.
Religions do not have foundational articles of faith from which all their other beliefs flow. Sometimes they present themselves that way. Some Jews say that the whole Law follows logically from the revelation on Sinai; some Christians, that everything is implied by God’s sacrifice of His Son on the cross; some Muslims, that everything results inevitably from believing in God and His last prophet. But I don’t think these claims do justice to their respective traditions. Religions are actually large webs of metaphysical beliefs, stories, characters, rules, examples, traditions, rituals, and hopes. Everyone has such a web, whether we see ourselves as religious or not. In fact, many items in the idea-network of a religious person are also present in my network.

In the end, it’s probably a mistake to lose the category of religion or to view religious worldviews as completely parallel to secular ones. The main reason is sociological. Since (I think) the Babylonian Captivity, the Abrahamic religions have organized themselves in a certain way within larger societies. They treat membership in the religious community as an identity: something you are, not just a set of ideas you endorse. They view certain texts as canonical. They emphasize beliefs that are matters of faith (“things hoped for, evidence of things not seen”) over memories or observations. And they gather their believers in groups that form larger networks or structures. The original meaning of the words “congregation,” “synagogue,” and ecclesia (Greek for “church”) is coming-together, a tangible social act. I think the great Asian traditions have been influenced by these sociological forms and have begun to look somewhat like Abrahamic faiths, as a result of isomorphism.

Such religions operate as identity groups and convene in organized structures. They can thus be oppressed and persecuted but can also dictate to others when they control power. That means that a liberal state is wise to identify religions for protection but also to make the government and law neutral among religions. The reason is not metaphysical or epistemological–it’s not that religious people fundamentally believe in different kinds of truths or think in different ways from secular people–but sociological. Religions function differently from other clusters of beliefs and practices.

However, if we adopt this position, then we should at least inquire into whether certain secular belief-communities have also taken forms parallel to those of the Abrahamic faiths, again perhaps due to isomorphism. Doesn’t, for instance, medical science offer its own bounded identities, canonical texts, hierarchies, moral premises, rituals, heroes, and exemplary cases? If it does, then possibly it should be viewed as similar to a religion–which is an idea as old as Durkheim.

I would be reluctant to draw radical implications for US constitutional law. Our traditional ways of defining and protecting religions reflect some pragmatic experience and help to constitute our political culture. I wouldn’t necessarily rock that boat. But if the question is not “How should the Supreme Court interpret the Establishment Clause?” but rather, “What distinguishes religious thinking?” then I am inclined to suspect that everyone is religious and that religion is everywhere.

what does it mean to attribute narcissistic personality disorder to a person?

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Peter

(St Louis, MO) We have two rival languages for analyzing personality: the medical and the moral. They are largely incommensurable, yet cases force us to choose between them.

For instance, psychiatrists and pundits are currently debating whether to diagnose Donald Trump with “narcissistic personality disorder.” The Mayo Clinic tells us that the DSM-5 defines this disorder using the following criteria (of which five are normally considered adequate for a diagnosis):

Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
Exaggerating your achievements and talents
Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people
Requiring constant admiration
Having a sense of entitlement
Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
Taking advantage of others to get what you want
Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
Being envious of others and believing others envy you
Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

All “disorders” defined in medical discourse are like diseases or injuries. Any disorder must be found repeatedly in a population: the various criteria must cluster statistically. It must harm the individual who suffers from it: the patient. The harm usually takes the form of preventing the patient from enjoying “normal” or healthy functioning. Medical science seeks to explain the disorder as a result of prior causes, and it looks for treatments that prevent, remove or at least mitigate any impairment.

Medicine marginalizes moral judgments. Even if you broke your leg because you were jumping on your bed, once you get to the ER, you’re a patient suffering from a fracture, and the point is to make you better so that you can jump again.

Thus the Mayo Clinic uses its standard format (Definitions, Symptoms, Causes, Risk factors, Complications, Preparing for your appointment, Tests and diagnosis, Treatment and drugs, Lifestyle and home remedies, and Prevention) to discuss narcissistic personality disorder, exactly as it discusses strep throat. It’s all addressed to the patient, who is assumed to want to avoid the impairments attributable to this disorder. “If you recognize aspects of your personality that are common to narcissistic personality disorder or you’re feeling overwhelmed by sadness, consider reaching out to a trusted doctor or mental health provider. Getting the right treatment can help make your life more rewarding and enjoyable.”

The causes of narcissistic personality disorder are unknown, but likely suspects fall into two clusters that are equally beyond the control of the patient: “Mismatches in parent-child relationships with either excessive pampering or excessive criticism” and “Genetics or psychobiology.” Complications are said to include “Relationship difficulties,” “Problems at work or school,” “Depression,” “Drug or alcohol abuse,” and “Suicidal thoughts or behavior.”

After preparing for your doctor’s visit and receiving a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, you may be prescribed psychotherapy (which “may take several years” to work) or given drugs for anxiety or depression, because “there are no medications specifically used to treat [this] disorder.”

Moral discourse, in contrast, views every item on the list above as a vice. Olivia says that to be “sick of self-love” is to “taste / with a distempered appetite,” which means misinterpreting what others say. To be sure, our personalities are not fully under our control: parents, genes, and other factors shape us. Still, if we have a vice, we must acknowledge and strive fix it. The primary reason is that it hurts other people. That means that a vice is a vice even if it causes us no “complications” along the lines of “problems at work or school” or depressive thoughts.

Nor does it matter whether vices correlate statistically in a population so that they can be treated as a single syndrome. Each fault stands on its own. However, there may be interesting logical or causal links among specific vices. For instance, maybe it’s because you are “envious of others” that you “exaggerate your achievements and talents.” Since Aristotle, moral philosophers have closely analyzed vices and virtues to understand their logical interrelationships. But even if you happen to be the only person in the world who has put together a given set of moral flaws into its own ugly combination, you need to fix them.

In Vox recently, David Roberts wrote:

All nine [criteria of Narcissistic Personality Disorder] describe Trump’s public behavior with eerie accuracy. But a disorder, by definition, inhibits normal functioning, impedes success. And Trump is inarguably successful. He’s one of the most powerful people in the world. Whatever kind of personality he may have, some psychiatrists argue, he can’t have a disorder. He’s doing well for himself.

These psychiatrists cited in this article epitomize medical discourse. Their standard is the “normal functioning” of the patient who might make an appointment because of an impairment.

I have no doubt that the medical framework has to some extent liberated us. By analogizing psychological problems to diseases or physical accidents, it has challenged the presumption that emotions lie under the conscious control of actors and has put us on the path to at least a few treatments–when otherwise all we would have is censure. In his homage to Freud, who had devoted a whole 1914 essay to Narcissism, W.H. Auden wrote:

[He] showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,
deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,
     our dishonest mood of denial,
   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

With Freud’s death, said Auden,

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
     sad is Eros, builder of cities,
   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

But notice that Auden’s encomium was deeply moral. He rightly saw that the only value of a scientific/medical discourse is its potential to improve the world. If that discourse makes it impossible for us to censure, judge, and demand restorative justice from a person who is harming others, then it is clearly inadequate.

It is a moral, not a scientific, assertion that Trump is a narcissist. Narcissism is compatible with his successful functioning, and it may even partly explain his success to date (although I have the feeling that a reckoning is not far off now). If lots of people exhibit the same set of traits he does, that is interesting; it increases the odds that some kind of drug or standardized treatment may ultimately target the syndrome as a whole. But even if Donald Trump is the only person with his precise list of vices, he merits condemnation. As Lord Byron (who had plenty of personal experience of the matter) observed, “self-love forever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens, even accidentally, to stumble upon it.”

Habermas on the French election

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Peter

Here are Jürgen Habermas’ recent remarks on “the future of Europe” at an event with President-elect Emmanuel Macron and German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel. They spoke in March, before the election, but Habermas credits Macron with courage in “a challenging situation.”

Habermas calls for broad public deliberation about the basic values of the European Union, in contrast to a technical negotiation among elites.

European unification has remained an elite project to the present day because the political elites did not dare to involve the general public in an informed debate about alternative future scenarios. National populations will be able to recognize and decide what is in their own respective interest in the long run only when discussion of the momentous alternatives is no longer confined to academic journals – e.g. the alternatives of dismantling the euro or of returning to a currency system with restricted margins of fluctuation, or of opting for closer cooperation after all.

This has been a consistent theme for Habermas for more than seven decades as a public intellectual. In the 1950s, he argued against counting on the German Constitutional Court to define and protect the Federal Republic that had been designed by the Western allies. Instead, the German people must hold a democratic conversation that led to democratic institutions. Likewise, when East Germany fell, Habermas argued that its political institutions were worthless, but that the peoples of East and West should come together to design a new constitution for a unified Germany. (Instead, the GDR was simply absorbed into the post-War Federal Republic.)

Habermas names a list of crises that he thinks are forcing a broader and deeper conversation: Syria, terrorism, and (in a word) Trump.

Nationalist, racist, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic tendencies that have acquired political weight with the program and style of the new US administration are combining with authoritarian developments in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and other countries to pose an unexpected challenge for the political and cultural self-understanding of the West. Suddenly Europe finds itself thrown back upon its own resources in the role of a defensive custodian of liberal principles (providing support to a majority of the American electorate that has been pushed to the margins).

Habermas has always been friendly to the American people and culture, which is a noteworthy stance for the head of the Frankfurt School. He seems to have been a fan of Barack Obama. I appreciate his support for the liberal part of our electorate.

Finally, Habermas calls for an expansion of democratic public spheres beyond the nation-state, in response to the globalization of public problems.

The institutionalization of closer cooperation is what first makes it possible to exert democratic influence on the spontaneous proliferation of global networks in all directions, because politics is the only medium through which we can take deliberate measures to shape the foundations of our social life. Contrary to what the Brexit slogan suggests, we will not regain control over these foundations by retreating into national fortresses. On the contrary, politics must keep pace with the globalization that it set in motion. In view of the systemic constraints of unregulated markets and the increasing functional interdependence of a more and more integrated world society, but also in view of the spectacular options we have created – for example, of a still unmastered digital communication or of new procedures for optimizing the human organism – we must expand the spaces for possible democratic will-formation, for political action, and for legal regulation beyond national borders.

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