books – Page 2 – Jeroen Bouterse

How many philosophers does it take to write a dialogue?

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

“The constant direct mode of address was a chore. No one will enjoy having this read to them.” Quoting from a referee report on the Nicomachean Ethics misses the point of James Warren’s hilarious rejection letter, but I looked it up because I remember thinking that the fictional critic was onto something, and not just about Aristotle. “I had the impression at times that some kind of conversational or dialectical background was being assumed but this is not at all marked in the text.” Indeed! Why hide the fun part?

I owe several very happy moments to well-executed philosophical dialogues: Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, Larry Laudan’s Science and Relativism, and Aristotle’s former supervisor come to mind. I will be ever so grateful to anybody who can point me to similarly exciting conversations. The dialogue form draws and holds the attention: it can let worldviews clash in the abstract, but it can simultaneously delve into matters of detail without becoming boring – these details having been established, after all, to flow not just from the idiosyncratic preoccupations of one contingent mind, but from larger intellectual interests common to at least two separate perspectives.

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Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

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In one of the opening scenes of The Chair (2021), we are treated to an ideal-typical self-diagnosis of a struggling English department. Its new chair, Ji-Yoon Kim, narrates:

I’m not gonna sugarcoat this: we are in dire crisis. Enrollments are down more than 30 percent, our budget is being gutted. It feels like the sea is washing the ground out from under our feet. But in these unprecedented times, we have to prove that what we do in the classroom – modeling critical thinking, stressing the value of empathy – is more important than ever, and has value to the public good. It’s true, we can’t teach our students coding or engineering. What we teach them cannot be quantified, or put down on a resumé as a skill. But let us have pride in what we can offer future generations. We need to remind these young people that knowledge doesn’t just come from spreadsheets or Wiki entries. Hey, I was thinking this morning about our tech-addled culture and how our students are hyperconnected 24 hours a day, and I was reminded of something Harold Bloom wrote. He said: ‘Information is endlessly available to us. Where shall wisdom be found?’

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On Feeling Small: Reading John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon

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“I am by nature too dull to comprehend the subtleties of the ancients; I cannot rely on my memory to retain for long what I have learned; and my style betrays its own lack of polish.” Among the benefits that reading the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon has brought me were the pleasure of finding a witty and humane voice to introduce me to the new and faraway world of 12^th-century learning (of which voice I intend to give plenty of examples below), and the fact that he helped me quit Twitter (again, more to follow). Apart from those, however, a major one was certainly the consolation of seeing an unquestionably capable thinker express his intellectual limitations in terms that seem genuine, going further than what perfunctory modesty would have required.

There have surely been thinkers who were more emphatic about their natural flaws, but there is a fine line between the comforting and the disturbing. When the 20^th-century Dutch philosopher Leo Polak dreaded his approaching inaugural address, he wrote in his diary: “I came to nothing […] I have been of no value, for my family or for other people, or even simply done my duty. My pathological lack of memory my only excuse, but it is also partly laziness and sloppiness (no card system) and having whiled away my time, having flattered myself with undeserved success.” That, too, resonates, but not in the uplifting way that John’s confessions do.

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Angry Atheists

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“Why, during the seventeenth century, did people who knew all the arguments that there is a God stop finding God’s reality intuitively obvious?” This, says Alec Ryrie in his Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019), is the heart of the question of early modern unbelief (136).

Ryrie’s point is that arguments pro or contra theism, and the influence of philosophical and scientific developments upon these arguments, are not actually crucial to the possibility of unbelief. The currents that run underneath these arguments are instinctive, emotional, and these are what we should look at if we want to understand doubt and denial of Christian theism historically. The history of unbelief is not primarily the history of eighteenth-century Enlightenment radicals and nineteenth-century science warriors, but of premodern anger and anxiety.

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“A good way of knowing things”: Eric Hayot’s defense of the humanities

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Unfortunately, it is always worth your time to read a book in praise of the humanities. Given the unenviable position of the humanities in public education and in contemporary cultural and (especially) political discourse about valuable expertise, any author that comes to their defense has to find a strategy to shift the narrative, and will thereby almost invariably do something interesting.

They move our focus from economic value to democracy and citizenship, for example. Or they argue that there is not actually a mismatch between the skills provided by a well-balanced liberal arts curriculum and the demands of technocapitalism, or that the humanities themselves produce the same kinds of intellectual goods as the natural sciences with which they tend to be contrasted.

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Philosophy: A History of Failure

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Three times have we started doing philosophy, and three times has the enterprise come to a somewhat embarrassing end, being supplanted by other activities while failing anyway to deliver whatever goods it had promised. Each of those three times corresponds to a part of Stephen Gaukroger’s recent book The Failures of Philosophy, which I will be discussing here. In each of these three times, philosophy’s program was different: in Antiquity, it tied itself to the pursuit of the good life; after its revival in the European middle ages it obtained a status as the guardian of a fundamental science in the form of metaphysics; and when this metaphysical project disintegrated, it reinvented itself as the author of a meta-scientific theory of everything, eventually latching on to science in a last attempt at relevance.

Indeed, this means that the last serious attempt to revive philosophy faded out many decades ago. Unlike David Hume, who figures in this book as one of only a few thinkers in the Western canon who saw and confronted directly the problems inherent in the ambitions of philosophy, Gaukroger does not regard himself as writing in a “philosophic age”. Nobody now looks at philosophers as having something interesting to contribute, the way we look at scientists (although Gaukroger has a thing or two to say about them, too). For all intents and purposes, we live in a post-philosophical era, though ending his book on a Picardy third, Gaukroger does not completely reject the idea that there are things to be salvaged.

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A WEIRD book

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Here’s an interesting game. You receive 20 dollars, and you and three others can anonymously contribute any portion of this amount to a public pool. The amount of money in this pool is then multiplied by 1.5 and divided equally among all players. Repeat 10 times, then go home with your money. What will happen? How much would you contribute in round one, if you knew nothing about your fellow players?

This ‘Public Goods Game’ is one example of the many sophisticated social-psychological experiments that Joseph Henrich brings into play in his recent book The WEIRDest people in the world. It is also a good example of how he puts those experiments to use. One lesson from this game is that people are more cooperative than models of economically rational behavior would suggest (are more homo reciprocans than homo economicus (211)). Another is that average first-round contributions vary significantly between populations. ‘WEIRD’ stands for ‘Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic’, and also serves to emphasize that WEIRD populations are weird in the sense of unusual: they are psychological outliers in a lot of ways.

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Windmill-bashing Squared

(new 3QuarksDaily-column)

The most charitable, forward-looking take on the science wars of the 90s is Stephen Jay Gould’s, in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox (2003), a delightful book about dichotomies between the sciences and humanities. His diagnosis is primarily that scientists have taken too literally or too seriously some fashionable nonsense, and overreacted; and if everybody can just calm down already, things will be alright and both sides could “break bread together” (108). Gould saw the science wars themselves as a marginal and slightly comical skirmish, almost a mere misunderstanding. “Some of my colleagues”, he said,

“have become legitimately disturbed by a few truly silly and extreme statements from the ‘relativist’ camp, largely made by poseurs rather than genuine scholars, and have mistaken these infrequent sound bites of pure nonsense for the center of a serious and useful critique. Then, falsely believing that the entire field of ‘science studies’ has launched a crazed attack upon science and the concept of truth itself, they fight back by searching out the rare inane statements of a few irresponsible relativists […] and then presenting a polemic defense of science, ultimately helpful to no one”. (99)

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A gospel and theodicy according to Rutger Bregman

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Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History is a clearly written argument if ever there was one. Bregman believes humans are a kind species and that we should arrange society accordingly. The reason why this thesis needs intellectual support at all is not that it is particularly profound or complicated, but that there are so many misunderstandings to be cleared away, so many apparent objections that need to be overcome.

You have already thought of those objections, or you will if you take half a minute. Bregman confronts many of them squarely. He looks at historical atrocities, social-psychological experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment, and famous anecdotes about human cruelty or indifference, patiently explaining how we should look at these in a different light. The anecdotes turn out to be less damning to human nature, and the experiments more flawed than common perception has it.

Of course, this leaves, well, human history. Bregman is aware that his beloved humans have committed all kinds of horrific acts of violence over the millennia. This is a problem for his thesis, and it remains one. Though the book does present an attempt to explain all the violence in a way that lets human nature off the hook, I do not think that this attempt is satisfactory.

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A Sacrifice to a Dark God: Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Bradley, I want you to go with me to the lawyer, and I want you to go with me to the hairdresser, I must get my hair rinsed. I think I can do just that, it won’t be too much for me. Then I think I’ll rest.” (299)

In the first part of The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson wants to get away from London to start writing the great work of art he believes he has in himself. He sees himself as a puritan; art is not something produced lightly and easily, but is the fruit of discipline and ascetic preparation. This high-minded view of art and the artist stands in contrast to that of his friend and rival Arnold, a successful writer whose success Pearson resents and with whom he often clashes. “‘Art isn’t chat plus phantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silence.’ / ‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art!’” (50)