Category: Sensibility

Gaita (5): Seriously?

“Socrates called his partners in conversation to a kind of seriousness. They could respond to that call only if they spoke in an effort of disciplined lucidity out of what they had made of themselves. That does not mean that he wanted them to voice their sincere personal opinion. Their sincere personal opinion was worthless unless constrained by the discipline of thought and character which conditions the proper contrast between what is personal and what is impersonal in moral thought and discussion” (Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2^nd edition, 2004, p. 275; my italics).

Lots to unpack here. At a minimum, an effort to attain “lucidity”—and “disciplined thought”—are required to be accorded the accolade of “serious” for Gaita. And one hallmark of seriousness is attention to one’s character, to the integrity and unity of that character, to the way it develops over time, and is instantiated in one’s actions, especially the way one treats others. Furthermore, morality attains “impersonality,” a kind of validity that transcends a merely personal sense of right and wrong, when one approaches moral questions with disciplined thought. Only that way could a moral claim actually carry any obligation for someone beyond the self. Socrates in the dialogues is working to establish articulations of morality that carry weight (may even ascend to a right to be called “true”) for everyone.

Gaita, in fact, seems utterly incapable of presenting the most central planks of his thought without the word “serious” slipped in. Here’s two examples:

“When we ask what makes a principle a moral principle, a rule a moral rule, an obligation a moral obligation—then I think we should seek a least some part of the answer in the kind of elaboration we give when we express most seriously our sense of what it means to wrong someone. Nowhere is that sense more sober than in lucid remorse” (xxi.)

“The concept of goodness is closely tied to need, to being responsive to the needs of others. Simone Weil went so far as to say that all obligation is tied to need. That is to link two notions of necessity—moral necessity and the necessity of need. Whether one wishes to go so far, it seems to me that she is clearly right in thinking that moral necessity is (conceptually) tied (not always directly) to what is inescapably serious in life” (90).

You always know a philosopher is at ground zero of his thinking when the term “necessity” is trotted out. There’s the hard stuff: the inescapable. That to which you must pay heed. If you ignore it, you are not serious. (Please hear John McEnroe ringing in your head at this point.)

I am on record as hating the way philosophers deploy the terms “necessity” and “serious.” I think 95% of such uses are question-begging. Those terms simply plant a flag where the philosopher has run out of arguments against some opposing position. That other position will be dismissed as “not serious.” Gaita devotes the whole last chapter of his book to denouncing various philosophical positions (including moral skepticism) as non-serious and corrupt. I wish some wise editor had told him that this chapter is a terrible way to end his superb—and often inspiring—book. Here’s a good sample of the sputtering that characterizes that final chapter:

“It seems that we cannot take seriously the idea that people could reject or even question the reality of evil . . . merely because they have thought themselves to such a position—no more than we can take seriously the idea that genuine despair could issue merely from an argument that concluded that life is meaningless. There are many different kinds of propositions that cannot be seriously asserted, or seriously asserted as the conclusions of a process of reasoning. I have called them, disparagingly, ‘blackboard conclusions,’ because a proposition which cannot seriously be asserted, or one which we take to be asserted seriously only when we see that it was not and could not be the outcome only of thought, is a conclusion in a secondary sense” (316-317). Six uses of the word “serious” in three sentences! I think he protests too much.

Certainly, you can offer reasons why you will not engage with someone else’s thoughts and beliefs. They may prove uninteresting to you or offer you no point of entry for engagement. But trotting out the charge that they are not “serious” does no work at all. To say Sidney Powell was not “serious” when she proffered her claims about the election of 2020 being “stolen” adds nothing. It’s just another way of saying you think she is wrong—with perhaps the additional claim that she is insincere when advancing those claims. But you need to provide evidence and reasons for the conclusion that the election was not stolen—and for the conclusion that she, in fact, knows that her claims otherwise are false. Throwing around the term “not serious” is not part of that work. In fact, the “not serious” charge absolves you from doing that work. As I have said, one is not obliged to respond to every position someone out there is taking. But dismissing such positions as “not serious,” while a convenient short cut, is simply a refusal to engage, not an actual (dare I say not a “serious”) refutation of a position.

Similarly, as I have written in the past, philosophers repeatedly in my view appeal to “false” necessities. It is one of the professional deformations of philosophy that its work is oriented to identifying a bedrock of necessity. (That’s why it is pretty comical that Gaita claims his position in “non-foundational,” but then can go on to talk of “moral necessity,” and the “necessity of needs,” and the “absolute” obligation that the preciousness of every human individual imposes on us. And can insist we are “not serious” when we don’t pay attention to what is “inescapably serious” in a human life.) Wherever a philosopher identifies a “necessity” is exactly where we should begin any examination of his thought and the ways in which it is warranted.

More globally, I suspect that “necessities” tend to over-simplify, to work to gather within a single framework what is a diverse range of phenomena that don’t actually all boil down to being rooted in the same overarching necessity. I have always taken Wittgenstein’s attack on essentialism, on the idea that everything we call a “game” shares some essential quality in common, to advocate for a pluralism that finds appeals to necessity suspect. J. L. Austin makes the same point in his usual wry way:

“And is it complicated? Well, it is complicated a bit; but life and truth and things do tend to be complicated. It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple. You will have heard it said, I expect, that over-simplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, and in a way one might agree with that. But for a sneaking suspicion that it’s their occupation” (“Performative Utterances,” last paragraph of that essay).

Ruling certain positions out of bounds as “not serious” is just a way of narrowing down the complexities of human behavior, reasoning, and beliefs.

OK. My antipathy to the habitual use of “serious” as a gate keeper for many philosophers is clear enough. But now I want to shift ground and consider how Gaita makes me wonder if the term “serious” points me toward something I want to (for lack of a better phrase) take seriously.

Here’s the issue for me. I went to grad school with a number of people whose lives seemed to me to be adrift. I was very focused: I wanted to get my degree and I wanted to have a career as a college teacher. Similarly, I was in a committed relationship which I thought of as having no end point (turns out I was wrong about that.) In short, I was very earnest, very goal directed, very invested in what I was doing. I could be characterized as “serious.” I also, I think it is fair to say, had a fairly strong sense of “integrity.” There were things I would not allow myself to do because I believed not just that they were wrong, but that they besmirched my sense of myself, would undermine my self-respect. I would have called such things shabby, or beneath me, or unworthy of the kind of person I took myself to be. Was I a prig? No doubt, but what I am trying to express here was that I had a strong sense of self, of who I was and who I wanted to be—and that sense of self governed a lot of my choices and actions. In short, I aspired to the kind of “unity” of character and faithfulness to that character that Gaita associates with Socrates. (More on Socrates in a bit.)

It is this kind of “seriousness” to which Gaita appeals when trying to flesh out his sense that every individual is precious—and thus obliges us to care for them (with the full resonance of what “care” means, i.e. an object of concern that calls for our active work to promote its well-being.) “We must not only see that someone has ‘projects and categorical desires with which that person is identified.’ [The quote is from Bernard Williams.] We must be able to take those desires and projects, and so him, seriously. This is a condition of his having the kind of individuality that we mark by speaking of his irreplaceability” (153).

Within these terms, some of my fellow grad students, I think it fair to say, did not take life seriously. They were not bound to projects and desires that were the cornerstones of their identities. They had no strong sense of identity at all—and thus had only the most nebulous of “projects.” They vaguely wanted to get their PhD, but were not making any progress toward that goal. There was a kind of magical thinking here. I am standing at point A and say to myself that some day I will be standing at point D. I may firmly believe that point D will be my position sometime in the future—and claim to be deeply committed to getting there. But I am doing nothing that will actually get me from point A to point D. I am adrift. Similarly, I am sleeping with E, F, or G, but only casually, with no sense that my life is entangled with theirs, or that we have some kind of partnership.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that monogamy, some form of committed and open-ended relationship, is the only kind to be considered “proper” or “morally” acceptable. What I am trying to get at is living a life in which one does things (goes to classes, has friends and sexual partners, works as a barista in order to pay the rent) that are not expected to “add up” to anything in particular, that are done in relation to immediate imperatives, but are not seen as having any long-term consequences (or only in the most vague way)—and are certainly not viewed in relation to some notion of one’s character, of one’s selfhood, of one’s considered way of being-in-the-world and with others.

Again, I want to do justice to the full diversity of human desires and needs. It would be absurd to say that everyone wants a committed relationship or a PhD. What I am trying to get at are lives lived without any kind of attention to desires one is committed to. I am tempted to say: my “unserious” friends were handicapped by having learned (no matter how) that they were unworthy of having desires—or of straight-forwardly pursuing them. Another version: you could say they simply didn’t know what they wanted, and were just trying things out. In either of these two cases, what they lacked was a strong sense of self, an idea of who they were and of how that identity could then be expressed through their actions. They weren’t acting seriously because they didn’t take themselves seriously.

Lots of possible reasons for not taking oneself seriously. Having imbibed the notion that self-assertion is wrong. Fearing failure; feeling like one wasn’t capable to achieving things that looked attractive from afar, but which one had no idea of how to actually achieve; feeling out of place in an environment where the expectations and unwritten rules were an almost complete mystery; diffidence of all kinds; lack of self confidence etc. etc.

What I want to emphasize, however, is the way that such “unseriousness” goes along with a disbelief in the consequences of action. Since I am pretty much a non-entity, then the things that I do make little to no impact on the world, on others, and (perhaps most importantly) on myself. Nothing comes of my actions. Nothing connects up. I am just going from day to day, dealing with what is throws in my path. This has the superficial attraction of the grasshopper life in Aesop’s fable, but is really underwritten by a failure to take myself seriously, a failure to believe I am anything of account. I am adrift—and nothing I do matters.

I think Gaita’s reflections on Socrates push in this direction. Recall his announced “strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to a requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human life” (xxii). Unless we are “serious” in this sense, we have done less with our life than we should have. We have not risen to the occasion that life affords us, we have fallen short of being “worthy” or admirable.

No matter how much I bristle as such moralism, at its arrogant scolding tone, I do have to admit that some lives are more admirable than others, more worthy of emulation. Are those lives characterized by “lucid” reflection, by an ever-vigilant examination of “its meaning(s)?” I am not sure. Temperament, forbearance, kindness all seem crucial here—and I am not sure any of those things are products of reflection, or even require reflection for their presence.

But I do think Gaita may well be right that some kind of image of self that cannot be violated without a strong sense of disquiet is important here. An investment in a certain form of integrity, an investment underwritten by a strong sense of self (both the self I am and the self I aspire to be), if not a sine non qua of an admirable life does seem to offer a strong support of efforts to live that life. Gaita turns to Socrates’s “point . . . that there are things which are impossible to do even though no obstacles of the kind which may be overcome with force, efforts of will or ingenious strategies stand in the way” (292). Rather, the impossibility comes from the fact that doing that action would utterly devastate the agent, completely dissolve his lived understanding of who he is, leave him being nothing at all—or with the despair of self-contempt.

Within these terms, Gaita spends a long time trying to defend Socrates’ claim that “it is better to suffer evil than to do it.” His exposition of his reasoning here is meandering and often (at least for me) hard to follow. But the core is that to do evil would be to violate an identity on which one’s whole sense of one’s life (its significance, its integrity, its unity, its worthiness) is based. If I cannot respect myself, I have no place to stand. I will be devastated. And it seems that if I am not someone who could be devastated in that way, then I am someone who is not taking his life “seriously.” I neither have a sense of an identity in which I am invested, nor a sense of actions being possible violations of that identity. I am (it is only a slight exaggeration to say) no one.

I don’t know what to do with this line of thinking. It seems harsh to me, using “seriousness,” and “lucidity,” and “integrity,” and “the examined life” as clubs to beat the vast unwashed unworthies. Yet I suspect that some sense of integrity, some sensibility that responds to some possible actions as things “it is impossible for me to do” simply because of “who I am,” is central to ethics, to my distinctive answer to what is the best way for me to live my life. And it does seem “unserious” to simply never consider the question of “how I should live my life,” to simply drift through life, taking it as it comes.

I am going to end my engagement with Gaita here. Certainly, we can say that my “unserious” fellow grad students did little harm in the world. They may have heedlessly hurt others or themselves, but the extent of the harm they did was very limited. The harms being done currently by Russia, Israel, and Hamas encompass evils that Gaita’s account seems woefully inadequate to even contemplate, no less explain or ameliorate. Killings that do not generate an ounce of remorse are way outside his ken. It is one thing to be careless and/or thoughtless about the hurt one inflicts on others. It is quite another thing to actively and deliberately act to harm others. Such acts of harm are not heedless, nor the product of a lack of reflection. They are chosen quite self-consciously.

Gaita 3: Examples and Conversation

I want now to discuss the other two ways that Gaita thinks one might achieve “moral understanding,” i.e. move from blindness concerning the infinite worth of each individual human being to an intense awareness of that “absolute” fact. That awareness would then be the most fundamental determinant of how one acts in the world, in how one orients one’s being-in-the-world (to use Heideggerian language that Gaita does not deploy).

What we might call Gaita “a-rationalism” when it comes to “moral understanding” underwrites his turn to examples. “[D]eepened moral understanding is a movement towards necessity, of the world becoming, as Iris Murdoch puts it, ‘compulsively present to the will.’ The example reveals that a deepened understanding of the nature and reality of evil is not always a deepened understanding of the reasons for not doing it, and why it is a mistake to believe that reflection on the nature of good and evil is always, or even most importantly, reflection on a certain class of reasons for action, of considerations which may have a legitimate speaking-voice in a piece of practical reasoning” (234). (I will want to contest the appeal to “necessity” here in a future post.)

I assume the hedge of “not always” in the passage just quoted is to guard against “performative contradiction.” After all, Gaita’s book is an extensive, very reason dependent, argument about the limits of reason. So he has to acknowledge some role reason might play in moral deliberation.

Still, he wants to claim that examples—seeing someone act in ways that display their care for another human being in ways that inspire admiration and emulation–are central to developing moral understanding. What it means to care for someone, to enact one’s valuing of them qua human being, has more to teach us about, to lead us to, goodness than all the generalizing treatises of the intellectuals. “We do not discover the full humanity of a racially denigrated people in books by social scientists, not, at any rate, if those books merely contain knowledge of the kind that might be included in encyclopedias. If we discover it by reading, then it is in plays, novels, and poetry—not in science but in art” (335). [The touching faith of certain philosophers—Cavell, Nussbaum—in the efficacy of art stands in stark contrast to the despair so many artists feel as they accept Auden’s resigned conclusion that “poetry makes nothing happen.”]

The example is concrete, individual, and has a real presence in the world in ways that generalized statements do not. There is a kind of ontological nominalism here; only the particular is real, is actually instantiated—and thus it has the potential to impact us in ways that mere words (or mere reasons made up of words) cannot.

Like many others, Gaita follws Kant here—and suggests that the Critique of Judgment, ostensibly about aesthetic judgments, actually also offers a better account of morality than Kant’s rationalist account of practical reason does. When it comes to ethical judgment:

“[T]here is . . . discussion and argument, but it should be argument informed by the realization that it cannot, discursively, yield a standard, or set of standards, in the light of which all examples are to be judged. No example is self-authenticating, but it does not follow that their place in our judgments is merely to guide us to discursively established principles of which they are intuited instances. Nor can any example play a role akin to that of the standard metre, for that would distort the necessarily provisional place they have for those whose judgments they have inspired and shaped. That is reasonably evident in aesthetic cases, and I think it is the same in ethical ones. When I speak of examples, I am thinking primarily of what has moved us in the speech and actions of others and because of which we stand in certain judgments and reject others. Philosophy has been suspicious of the fact that we learn by being moved because of a mistaken conception of thought that judges this [i.e. being moved] as its [i.e. thought’s] desertion” (270, Gaita’s italics). “I acknowledge that [the} acceptance of [such] judgments as judgments depends upon a richer conception of critical thinking and of the relation between thought and feeling than is presently available in the mainstream philosophical tradition” (41).

It is but a small step from this claim that we are more likely to be moved, to learn, from examples (presumably both positive and negative ones) to coming down on the Humean side of viewing “sensibility” as more crucial to one’s ethical posture in the world than any kind of Kantian rational procedure. “The corruptions of Raskolnikov’s [main character in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment] remorse were not merely a result of his failure to understand properly what he had done, nor were they merely in self-deceiving service to such a failure of understanding. They were a form of his failure to understand [i.e. his reflections and remorse did not focus on the humanity of his victim]. Such interdependence of understanding and response is what I want to stress . . . It is sometime conveyed by the word ‘sensibility.’ Most forms of moral corruption are corruptions of sensibility” (35). I take it that this claim means that it is not reasoning poorly or in faulty ways that makes one morally corrupt, but by having the wrong dispositions, the wrong orientation to the “condition” of being a human who occupies a world with other humans.

And it is in shaping such a sensibility that Gaita places the efficacy of examples. The love displayed by “saints” in their actions in the world “has a revelatory role. Sometimes we see that something is precious only in the light of someone’s love for it. Love’s capacity to reveal is, in part, a function of the authority of the lover. It also depends on our openness to this kind of authority. . . . The love of saints depends on, builds on and transforms, [a] sense of individuality. It deepens the language of love, which nourishes and is nourished by our sense that human beings are irreplaceable and, because of that transformation, it compels some people to affirm that even those who suffer affliction so severe that they have irrecoverably lost everything that gives sense to our lives, and even the most radical of evildoers, are fully our fellow human beings. As with the love it transforms, the love of saints plays a constitutive and revelatory role” (xxiv).

The educative role of the example—and its relation to “feeling and character”—is stressed when Gaita writes (again, the italics are his): “Aristotle was closer to the truth when he said if we want to know what justice is then we should turn to the example of the just man—but we must have eyes to see. For Aristotle, the education of feeling and character was an epistemic condition of right judgment on what could only be discussed as authoritative example” (46). From Wittgenstein, Gaita derives the conviction that “[k]knowledge that another person is in pain is not an achievement that can be characterized independently of certain affective dispositions” (176).

To place such a strong emphasis on “sensibility” and “affective dispositions” and “feeling and character” is to end up with 1) fairly bald assertions when it comes to trying the see why some people have “moral understanding” while others do not and 2) trying to find the mechanisms (remorse, examples) for moving people toward moral understanding (i.e. the topic of this post and my previous one).

Here’s the bald assertion: “Moral understanding requires that those who would claim to have it should be serious respondents to morality’s demands. Someone who cannot be responsive to morality’s demands is one for whom morality has no reality. The ‘reality” of moral values is inseparable from the reality of it as a claim on us, and serious responsiveness to that claim is internal to the recognition of its reality” (59). [I will have much to say about the ways “seriousness” is deployed by Gaita in his book in subsequent posts. The term is close to a tic in his writing, trotted out every time his argument hits a nodal point where sheer assertion is offered.]

The example does something reason, as the philosophers understand it, cannot do. It inspires emulation. I think in fact, that Gaita often verges on saying that the example compels emulation. Certainly, that explains his concern with “authoritative” examples. But he hasn’t much to offer as to what would actually lead someone to be properly “responsive” to the example, to accept (through its offices) the “authority,” the “reality,” of “moral values” and their “claims” upon him. It seems obviously, trivially, true that a moral person takes moral values seriously. And it seems at least plausible to say that examples can work to move a person toward taking moral values seriously. But there is still the mystery of why examples “move” some people, but fail to move others.

The final means toward moving someone to moral understanding that Gaita offers is “conversation.” The transformation conversation offers is not (emphatically) our “need to learn from others only because of our limited epistemic and logical powers” (275). Rather, what conversation can open our eyes to is “the reality of other human beings” (277),–that is, to the fundamental truth that Gaita has hammered on as the most important plank for a human morality. Here is the full description of how conversation is to effect this realization. (Thus, conversation like love, and the examples of saintly and dastardly action, is revelatory.)

“Conversation promises and threatens surprise. Martin Buber said that ‘talking to oneself’ is utterly different from talking to someone else, and that the difference is marked by the fact that one cannot be a surprise to oneself in the way that another can be. [Here we get a long passage of Buber’s.] The surprise Buber speaks of is not conditional upon routine or ignorance. It is a kind of shock at the realization of how other than, and other to, oneself another human being can be. It is the shock of the reality of other human beings, and the strange and unique kind of individuality of their presence. . . . It is in connection with such as sense of reality that we should understand Socrates’ insistence on conversation and the kind of presence he required of himself and his partners” (277).

Conversation, then, stands for a full encounter with the other, the kind of encounter which brings home forcefully the other’s reality as other. That, of course, does not guarantee that I will then value that other (although Gaita seems to assume some kind of equivalence between recognition of otherness and valuing the other’s irreplaceable individuality.)

But I don’t mean to sneer here. One of the dilemmas in current day America is how to communicate across divides that have become entrenched, how to even have any communication take place at all when everyone is locked into their own echo chambers. The inefficacy of general (broadcast) media to shift hearts and minds is all too obvious (even accepting the influence of Fox News). Gaita’s discussion of conversation is still too abstract—we want the dialogue to lead to more nuanced, particular, convictions than some general affirmation of the other’s otherness. On the other hand, even getting that far would be very welcome. And it certainly does seem that face-to-face encounters are more likely to “move” people from entrenched stances than anything they are going to get from the non-face-to-face flows of opinion and information from the news media or from social media. How to enable potentially transformative conversations does seem to me a vital question for our times. To pooh-poo in advance the possible effectiveness of such interactions is to throw in the towel before even making any attempt at betterment.

Enough for today. I want to make a detour into talking more directly about hatred and violence in the next post—before returning to Gaita’s Socrates-inspired understanding of a meaningful life.

Reading Group Thoughts

I have mentioned before that I am a member of a reading group comprised of political theorists and literary studies folks that has been meeting once a year since 2012. We missed 2020 completely—and gathered virtually this past Friday for the first time since June 2019.

Our reading for this meeting was five essays written by members of the group that appear in the recently published African American Political Thought: A Collected History, edited by Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2021). The five essays were: Robert Gooding-Williams on Martin Delany; Nick Bromell on Harriet Jacobs; Jason Frank on Langston Hughes; Lawrie Balfour on Toni Morrison; and George Shulman on Bayard Rustin.

The conversation was far-ranging, but I want to record here four issues that stirred my imagination.

We spent a lot of time considering how the figure, metaphor, trope of “fugitivity” recurs in black thought and literature. For starters, it is obvious that an emphasis on fugitivity leads to very different configurations of black experience than an emphasis on slavery. (Fair to say, I think, that slavery and its after-lives is central to the work of Sayida Hartman, Christina Stead, and many other contemporary black writers in the US.) The fugitive is more active than the slave, having moved himself or herself into that condition by a chosen action—as contrasted to the passive suffering of the condition of slavery. Of course, there are possibilities for action (and forms of resistance) within slavery, but the fugitive has made a more dramatic move, one that lends itself to the romanticization of fugitivity.

But within the shadow of the Fugitive Slave Law, romanticization is forestalled by the ever-presence of insecurity, exposure, and violence for the fugitive. He or she is always aware of being hunted down, of being on the lam. There is no safe place—a fate that resonates with the current prevalence of violence in black lives, the absence of any refuge. Hence the quest for safe environments—and the sense of being constantly under surveillance in most public settings—for blacks in the US.

George Shulman had taught a class on fugitivity—and his black students protested against the use of that condition as a trope or figure. This led the group into a long discussion of the tension between abstraction (after all, most of us are “theorists” of one sort or another) and the concrete. I think there was general agreement that a) some kind of abstraction is necessary for any kind of thinking, any kind of reflection on concrete conditions on the ground; b) that allowing a metaphor to exfoliate is one way of getting thought to move off well-worn tracks, to gain fresh purchase or insight into specific situations; c) that the tension between the generalities of theory and attention to the specifics of actual relationships/conditions is always going to bedevil thinking that aims to intervene in those present conditions; and d) that the resistance to abstraction by those trying to find ways to live in challenging (euphemism alert!) circumstances is completely understandable and to be expected. How, then, to honor that resistance while still doing some kind of abstraction was not a tension we knew how to resolve. But perhaps acknowledging and describing the tension could help some.

All of this was complicated by the fact that Sheldon Wolin’s notion of “fugitive democracy” has been very appealing to and formative for the political theorists in the room. In the light of the black students’ objection to the metaphor, Wolin’s appropriation of the image of the “fugitive” does seem very romantic. Wolin’s ideal democratic actors are hardly in significant danger from the powers that be, hardly being hunted down. It does come to seem blinkered to move the image of the fugitive from its historical grounding in the Fugitive Slave Act to an image of a kind of underground, outlaw democratic practice. More on that in a minute (under #2).

Wolin’s appropriation becomes even more remarkable—and more suspect—when Patchen Markell told the group that Wolin’s dissertation advisor was associated with the Southern Fugitives in the 1930s. (Sorry that I don’t have the name of the advisor handy. I will try to track it down.) Our discussion made clear just how remarkable it is that that group of Southern white guys (intellectuals who also liked to fancy themselves Agrarians as well as fugitives) appropriated to themselves the label of fugitive. I can only marvel at the constancy with which the conservative and privileged make themselves out to be the victims of progress and threatened by the unwashed masses. The “real” victims here are not oppressed black people, but we whites whose “way of life” is endangered. Aggrievement is, I come more and more to believe, the one sine non qua of the reactionary sensibility—and what passes for “thought” in conservative circles.

2. Talk of our students and the difficulties of teaching in our politically fraught moment (all moments are politically fraught, but I don’t think it unfair to see 2020—with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and then the election and its aftermath—as especially intense) led, inevitably I would suppose, to Lawrie Balfour commenting on the “skepticism about democracy” in the current moment. For the theorists in the room—as for me personally ever since I wrote Postmodernism and its Critics in 1988-89—“democracy” has always been that place of refuge, that site where not only could political aspirations be articulated through developing an account (a theory) of democracy, but (crucially) a value that we could see as embedded in American political culture. We theorists on the left, if we appealed to democracy (as contrasted to socialism for example), were not importing something into the US, but only striving to activate energies and commitments and values already present (even if sometimes more latent than manifest) in the sensibilities of the citizenry. (This is not to deny that appeals to democracy often served to camouflage smuggling in various commitments indebted to Marx and other non-American socialist writers.)

But maybe (probably?) we were fooling ourselves. A commitment to democracy does not run deep in the culture. It hardly seems present at all. Obviously, this is true of the right wing, a fact we should have known before four years of Trump made is patently obvious. But it begins to look true of the younger generation of left-inclined students. This has nothing to do with the fake outrage over “cancel culture.” That whole charade is just another example of reactionaries (who use their power to cancel votes, and to censor school curricula) accusing their opponents of their own crimes in order to invert who the victims of oppression really are. No, it is not some kind of phantom anti-liberal left, the bogies of an imagined anti-fa (whose numbers pale in comparison if put up against membership in right-wing militias), who embody a loss of faith in democracy among the young.

The problem (or cause) is our utterly broken political system. There is absolutely no accountability. Substantial majorities want gun control, action on climate change, increased taxes on the obscenely wealthy, etc. etc.—and our system is completely unable to deliver. Thus, many among the left are finding themselves in agreement with black thinkers like Fred Moten and Christina Stead, whose loss of any faith in political solutions I have discussed in this blog. “Democracy” as an idea and as a practice comes to look like the football Lucy keeps enticing Charlie Brown with. Why place any faith in democracy? It has not proved up to the task time and again. Isn’t it simply foolish to think it will work this time after its repeated failures. Better to walk away than to take another run and attempt to kick the ball, especially since the fetishism of a non-existent and non-attainable “democracy” keeps us from attending to and doing other things.

What to do if there is this loss of faith in government’s ability to act effectively? Localism. Retreat into local communities and try to make life better there. For some in our group, not surprisingly, such an approach smacks of “participatory democracy,” of what they might even be tempted to call “real” democracy, where the people take power into their own hands and work together for ends forged in common. So democracy is not voting and not asking a government to do things for you. It is doing things for yourself. So, for example, Christina Beltran in our group saw her students as divided between those who were in despair (not just about political, but also about personal, prospects in a declining and increasingly cruel America) and those who were energized activists throwing themselves into various nascent social movements (BLM, climate change activism, LBGTQ groups, and the like).

This is not the time and place to consider the promises and perils of local, participatory activism—or its relation to what we might theorize as “democracy.” But it is worth noting that Christina also pointed to the appeal, in our dark times, of work like Anna Tsing’s that meditates on what it means to carve of a way to survive, to live, in the “ruins.” Our prospects in every way—politically, economically, ecologically—look so bleak that stories about foraging a minimalist existence within worlds that barely offer the means to sustain life have a deep emotional appeal right now.

3. We spent a fair amount of time considering this issue of the kind of stories we tell ourselves—and the kinds of stories that are appealing, that do seem to speak especially profoundly to the moment. George Shulman, in his essay on Rustin, invokes the notion of “organizing fantasy,” a term that manages to merge both the sense in which “ideology” is used to characterize a worldview based on falsity and a sense that imagination (as the projection of a possible future not determined, but not utterly ruled out, by current facts on the ground) offers ways forward. Kelvin Black put a more positive, less ambivalent, spin on this (inevitable?) reliance on stories that orient us within a social world and in our relations to others. Kelvin referenced the notion of “moral ecology” and expressed the hope that an established ecology could ground “good judgment” and a way to move toward some kind of collective understanding of what the situation is and how to address it. This appeal to judgment—as well as seeing judgment as emanating from the stories we tell—clearly resonates with Zerilli’s attempt to activate Arendt’s thoughts on judgment.

The hope that stories can build community connects with Nick Bromell’s interest (in his essay on Harriet Jacobs) in second-person address—those moments in a narrative where the narrator breaks the frame to address the reader directly. These moments are a dramatic “call” to the reader, a solicitation of participation, or (at least) of an “amen, brother” (thinking of African-American church practices here). Nick then connected this kind of appeal to the “deep relational organizing” that has emerged out of Stacy Abrams’ work in Georgia. As this was explained to me recently by someone here in NC who is part of the effort to replicate Abrams’ work in NC, the basic idea is to embed black activists in various communities so that they are a long-term presence and able to build relationships with the people who live there. My NC activist-friend said there are one million unregistered black voters in North Carolina. But you are not going to get them registered (and actually to go to the polls) through one—or even three– encounters. “Outside agitators” (all right-wing fantasies to the contrary) don’t actually succeed in moving anyone to action. Shared lives and shared stories are needed, not just the arguments you can set out in bullet points on a piece of campaign literature.

4. Within this talk of despair, or impasse, and of the continual experience of feeling unsafe (the ever-presence of premature death in the black community—attested to in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, which I will discuss tonight with my UNC alumni reading group), George Shulman (picking up a theme from Jason Frank’s essay on Langston Hughes) pointed out the vitality in black expressive culture that flows forth from the continual encounter with “mortalism.” Danger and death are generative—certainly aesthetically, and perhaps politically. George Floyd’s death (as Vincent Lloyd in our group pushed us to consider) proved generative.

I have what I guess are the predictable worries. Freedom in expression is tolerated because it is mostly not a threat. Yes, fanatics on the far right are agitated (and Fox News strives to stoke the outrage), but non-censorship of expressive content can co-exist fairly easily with the retention of political and economic power in the hands of whites. The entertainment industry is full proof of that. The prominence of black musicians, novelists, poets, even actors, doesn’t put a dent in the ownership (and most of the profits) of those businesses going to whites. I always suspect (as someone devoted to literature only can) that expressive culture simply doesn’t much matter. It is mostly powerless—and thus safely ignored by the economic and political power-holders, mostly convenient to them as a way of stirring their base.

It is true that the crazies out on the fringes of the right could upset this whole set-up. It is instructive, I believe, that the American Civil War was instigated by the far right crazies, who couldn’t take Yes for an answer. Lincoln made it clear that he wasn’t going to abolish slavery—that, in his reading of it, slavery was constitutionally sanctioned and that his oath was to uphold the Constitution. But the fanatics couldn’t be satisfied with that; they (apparently) wanted the nation to affirm that slavery was a good thing, a righteous and Christian thing. Our current right wing may similarly overplay its hand—going in for high-handed censorship where an easy-going tolerance would better suit its ends. Maybe there are outrageous Supreme Court decisions coming—including ones on abortion and gun ownership—that will upset the current political stalemates, the odd and uneasy equilibrium that makes our politics completely static without ever pushing any of our numerous crises to becoming a tipping point toward undoing our multiple dysfunctional institutions and practices.

Tipping points are never recognized until they suddenly are upon us. And that’s where expressive culture does seem to do important work of “softening” people up. Changes in sensibility, in the kinds of stories that people see as making sense of themselves and the circumstances in which they live, do register in altered practices as well as altered attitudes and aspiration. I just am very impatient for the concrete pay-offs.

Aesthetic Education and Democracy

I have just participated in a terrific three day seminar on Aesthetic Education as part of the 2021 ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) conference. I got caught up in (instigated?) a debate about expertise in which I think I failed to clarify my position or, more importantly, what is at stake for me in taking the position I did. I think it likely that I misunderstood the paper by Michael Clune that I was over-reacting to. At the very least, I need to wait until I read Michael’s forthcoming book on judgment and Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension before pursuing that quarrel. Clune thrillingly described the ways in which subject and object can be co-constituted through their encounter, especially (it was implied) when the object is an aesthetic one. “The work organizes our experience of the world” and “the subject is shaped by the work” are two phrases from his talk. One is changed by this encounter; one’s world is enriched.

Inspired by this account, I wanted to say that such meaningful encounters are open to all. Everyone has aesthetic experiences from an early age. Aesthetic education can (I hope) heighten or intensify those experiences and (at a high school and college level) make students more reflective about the nature of their aesthetic experiences and the reasons/causes for their tastes. (Mark Wollenberg in his talk introduced me to the wonderful notion of a “taste journey,” the narrative of one’s evolving tastes.) But I want us to understand aesthetic experience as utterly normal and as universal as the ability to speak a language. One acquires aesthetic sensibilities and aesthetic tastes pretty much the same way one acquires a language or one acquires a set of moral commitments: through the give and take with others and the world, shaped by feedback loops that point in one direction as the way to “go on” and tell us that other directions are inappropriate, non-fruitful, or actively harmful.

The barrier to entry into language, into aesthetic experience, and into morality is incredibly low. As Kant says, we expect these competencies of everyone past a certain age (probably four years old). We expect people will become more adept at all three practices as they grow older—and education aims to facilitate that enhancing of competence. But there is no clear threshold between the expert and the novice, only a continuum because from a very early age people are always already linguistic beings with a sense of right and wrong and with a sensuous engagement with worldly objects that shape their selves and their selves’ understanding of the world. To put it a little differently, one’s way of being in the world (one’s character in an Aristotelian sense) is a product of one’s interaction with others, with the language into which one is born, with the prevailing mores of one’s society, and with the sensuous apprehension of worldly objects, situations, and events. And lest that list look too sanguine and ethereal, let’s make sure to add the society’s compulsions, the things it demands of its members in terms of norms of productivity and accountability. Systems of debt are omnipresent as David Graeber taught us, and Kristen Case’s talk at the conference introduced me to the notion of chrono-normativity, the ways in which our time is structured for us by social demands.

So, in this post, instead of pursuing what quickly became a muddled and unhelpful debate over the term “expert,” let me try to articulate the positive vision that was behind my inclination to instigate that debate. Of course, the clarity of this positive vision only came to me after the fact—and so is a good result (at least I hope so) of the ruckus. Thinking it all through afterwards helped to clarify for me why I think aesthetic education and democracy can (and should) be deeply intertwined.

My position is an unholy mixture of Arendt, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Kant, and Latour. The best way to start is with Arendt’s insistence that truth and politics don’t mix. Here’s a simple way to illustrate her point. The local river does not have a bridge over it. That’s a fact and is pre-political for Arendt. If we can’t agree that there’s no bridge, we’ve got nowhere to go. A scary thought in this day and age when millions deny the fact that Biden won the 2020 election. Fact (the truth about the way things are) is compulsive for Arendt. There is no room for negotiation or compromise; that’s why it is not political. I can only insist that the election was fair and won by Biden.

But let’s go back to our bridge-less river. Should we build a bridge over it or not? That’s a matter of opinion—and the very stuff of politics for Arendt. The political community should meet together as equals, with everyone’s opinion heard. In this agonistic understanding of democracy, some opinions may, in the course of the debate, prove more persuasive than others. But the community is engaged in a fundamental process of asking for and giving reasons—and of weighing those reasons. Chances of reaching consensus are pretty slim. We live in an irreducibly plural world, ranging from the mysteries of individual idiosyncrasies (evident to any parent who has more than one child) to different social positionings, to different life experiences. Where a decision has to be reached, a vote is a way to cut off discussion. But in aesthetic matters we don’t take votes. We simply let the discussion, with the different judgments about an aesthetic experience’s worth, and different descriptions of its distinctive qualities, roll on. In fact, those endless disagreements are much of the fun, a point to which I will return.

Once the community decides to build the bridge, we exit politics again and call in the expert. Everyone’s opinion is not equally entitled to be heard and respected when it comes to the question of how to build the bridge. We are back in the realm of positive knowledge, where only certain trained persons know how to build bridges that won’t collapse. Because any debate on that subject will not be between equals and only among a small group of qualified people, the debate (if there is one) is technical, not political.

My positive point overlaps with Nick Gaskill’s wanting to identify plural modes of apprehension, although I don’t know enough Whitehead to be sure. Still, I like the idea that science as a mode of knowledge deals in facts ranging from the river has no bridge to assertions about the stress loads a particular bridge can hold. Aesthetics is more attuned to the “qualities” of things—more properly the qualities of experiences since I want to hold on to the interactive emphasis I saw in Clune’s talk. As Kant tried hard to explain, aesthetics is about the self’s engagement with the non-self, and the non-self meant not only nature but also one’s society, as represented by the sensus communis. Everyone is engaged with the world and others—and they are the best witness to their own understandings and judgments of that engagement. And surely we wouldn’t want to have it any other way. The only thing worse than a world in which everyone disagreed with me all the time would be a world in which everyone agreed with me. The parent delights in the child’s first signs of willfulness, of independence, just as the English literature teacher delights when students discover pleasure in a Browning poem. In the case of the poem, the teacher can lead the student to water, but can’t make him drink. The class can be the occasion for discovering how the self can be shaped by the work, but the occasion is non-compulsive, and there is no single or right way for that shaping to occur. Mathematics is compulsive, aesthetic experiences are not.

Thus, when aesthetic education fosters the formation of aesthetic opinions, reflection upon the reasons and felt experiences that underlie those opinions, and debates with others about them, it is a simulacrum of democracy itself.

This linking of aesthetic education with democracy (as Arendt envisions it) entails that the job of the aesthetic ed teacher is 1) not to claim his students begin in ignorance; 2) not to disparage the views they currently hold; and 3) not to intimate in any way that his views are preferable in any way to those of the students. But that last point is outrageous!!!!

[Digression #1: it seems to me no surprise that when aesthetic education and aesthetic educators are threatened, it will seem particularly foolhardy to downplay our expertise and our contributions to positive knowledge since those are the coin of the realm. But I agree with Nick Gaskill that we aren’t going to fool anybody, including ourselves, by trying to assimilate what we do to the knowledge producing protocols of the natural or social sciences. Better to grab the nettle and explain how and why we are doing something different.]

Not so outrageous if you consider how seldom we offer to students the experience of equality. If, as I believe is true, democracy is dependent on all members of society taking equality utterly seriously, then why would we think that depriving people (in the workplace as well as the classroom, not to mention the patriarchal family, and hierarchical stigmas of race, profession, wealth etc.) of any experience of equality would redound to the health of democracy? I am suggesting that the aesthetics classroom is an ideal place (and currently one of the few places) where equality can be the norm. Dare I say that’s because so little is at stake, that in the last analysis aesthetic disagreements have very few consequences, that (as I have already suggested), disagreements are what give flavor to aesthetic debates. The aesthetic is a safe space in which to practice the democratic ethos of meeting with one’s peers in equality to debate about things on which you disagree, but where there is never a conclusive, knock-down argument to be had, one that brings the debate to a halt because now everyone agrees or because we have reached a disagreement about fact that is conversation-stopping.

[Digression #2:Joseph North and Kate Stanley in our seminar would point out how individualistic this account of aesthetic experience and aesthetic debate is. What about the ways that aesthetic experiences can foster, even generate, collective identities? Arendt seems to think that the ability to participate in the conversation as an equal, to be heard, is enough to underwrite a commitment to the necessarily collective action that establishes and sustains the conversation. In other words, our collectivity is enacted–performatively created–through our talking to one another even as the substance of that talk is often our disagreements. It is also the case if no one’s opinion was ever changed, if we never achieved some partial agreements, the conversation would seem utterly futile and would most likely come to an end. That attachment to the collectivity achieved through the conversation may explain why almost everyone in the seminar tried to say that Clune and I really didn’t have a deep, fundamental disagreement.]

I challenge your opinions and you challenge mine. In that pragmatic give-and-take, that attempt to offer reasons and grounds for one’s opinion, opinions and even experiences are changed. I come to see that I had failed to see some aspect (Wittgenstein) of a work that now leads me to reconsider my opinion of it. But maybe not. Maybe I still think it trite and meretricious. In Arendt’s lovely phrase (which she claims she takes from Kant, but which I can’t find in Kant), my challenger can only “woo” my consent with her view, lacking any way to compel it.

So what does the teacher of aesthetic education bring into the classroom? Three things, I would hope. 1) An ability to facilitate productive conversations about aesthetic experiences. These conversations enhance our ability to reflect upon those experiences and (absolutely crucially as will become clearer in a moment) foster an ability to hear about other’s different experiences/values/tastes and accept the way their views challenge me to revise my own. The teacher helps the student learn how to assemble (Latour) his reasons, his evidence, his articulation of his experiences in order to make an eloquent rendering of his opinion to himself and to his auditors.

2) The teacher can bring a trained eye or ear. That is, the teacher has spent a lot more time around aesthetic objects and thinking about them, and thus may be in a position to enhance the students’ aesthetic experiences by pointing out features of the aesthetic object they may miss. If this is what we mean by expertise, I’m down with it. But with the important reservations that the teacher’s judgments, at the end of the day, are no more authoritative than the students’ judgments. If someone still finds Shakespeare a bore after all I have done to make him more accessible and interesting, that student (once again) is fully entitled to that opinion. We cannot expect to persuade everyone all the time—and it would in fact be a nightmare if we did persuade everyone to hold the same views. Which is another way of saying that communicability (Kant), not assent, is what is crucial here.

3) Communicability means that success in articulating my position—and yours as I comprehend it—is the good the teacher should be aiming for. Students are to be engaged in the language game of asking for and giving reasons. The teacher has been around the block and so is familiar with many of the moves in reason giving, with various types of reasons, of evidence, of persuasive appeals, and can guide the students toward a recognition of those means, and work to enhance their abilities of expression and comprehension. One way to say this (I would reference Nick Gaskill’s paper here) is that intelligibility, not knowledge, is what is at issue. I don’t know definitively that Moby Dick is the greatest American novel ever written after talking to you; but I understand (you have made intelligible to me) your reasons why you think it is and the reasons you think I should agree with you. You have done your wooing—and our teachers (and other exemplars in this art of reason giving) have helped me learn how to hone my reason giving. Communicability rests on the same feedback loops I keep invoking. I know I have to try again when my auditor says I don’t see what you are driving at. What we have here is a failure to communicate. That failure, not a failure to agree, is what is fatal to sociality–and any hope of democracy. Need I add that the person who believes the 2020 election was stolen is not intelligible to me–and apparently not at all interested in talking to me in an effort to make his views intelligible, or listening to my account of how his conviction threatens our polity. Which is why I fear for democracy.

There are other things aesthetic education can aim to achieve. I don’t mean to slight the value of aesthetic experience in and of itself—its essential place in anything I would deem a flourishing life. But I do think, if stringently tied to equality, that the aesthetic classroom can be a laboratory of democracy in a world where we talk democracy all the time but very rarely experience it, which is another way of saying that our social spaces and social interactions persistently infantilize people, belittling their own understandings of their experience, their confidence in their tastes, and their ability to articulate their opinions in the face of a healthy, but respectful, skepticism.