Babich and Bateman: Claiming the Continental Flag

The dialogue began when I asked Babette Babich what characterises the (dying) tradition of continental philosophy, and why so many philosophers feel the need to ‘claim’ the term for their work. Following on from last week, the discussion continues as we explore the appropriation of the continental title by analytic philosophers with very different methods.

imageChris Bateman: This still leaves open part of my original query: why, given the predominance of analytic methodology, would anyone feel the need to claim continental as part of their title?

Babette Babich: Your original question, brilliantly, stepped aside all the muck I’ve tracked back in regarding the analytics and the continentals, and their disputes and bitter histories, almost up to the veritable ‘existentialist café’ reference to Sartre, to ask why, and everything I’ve brought back in just makes your question even more powerful, to ask why then, after all that, one might want to claim to be continental?

And the answer is venality: it has to do with the getting of posts in academic philosophy: I wish it were something more noble or, as they used to say when I was young, more ‘tough-minded’ than just that. But it is not so, alas, and analytic philosophy, which already had the greater portion of the jobs when I took a doctorate some thirty years ago, now occupies nearly all the jobs. In fact, the late Reiner Schürmann wrote a de Tocqueville style report on the state of philosophy in the US (written in French for the French) claiming, as he wrote in the mid-eighties, that the analytic move was a done deal with 90% of the jobs (he counted), going back to the early 1960s.

CB: This is more than just a coincidence, though, and it’s certainly not any kind of Spencerian survival of the fittest... it must at heart have to do with the prevalence of (and academic bias towards) positivism in the wake of its stricter ancestor, logical positivism. And this ties in also with your aforementioned point that having been connected in any way with Jesuits hurt your career – because for all that I might admire certain contemporary positivists, my quip that they are at heart “atheists for science” is apposite, and an unthinking anti-religious bias goes hand-in-hand with positivism as a broad movement, just as loving one’s country need not end in racism but all too frequently does.

BB: One could say that my worry about continental philosophy corresponds to the standard lament: they don’t make philosophers like they used to! But it seems far too political to simply represent the ordinary decline that goes with golden age thinking (and, contrary to millenarian fantasies, the golden age in such fairy tales is never the age to come, this is Judeo-Christian thinking). And it is massively in force, whether we are atheist or not, in our ‘faith’ in technology which goes hand in glove with our conviction that we are not destroying the world beyond any possibility of remedy (the liberal consensus seems to be that we can solve everything if only we all admit that there is climate change and that we are through pollution and deforestation causing this age we name the anthropocene, as we surely are, and yet not that we are doing anything so nefarious as ‘controlling’ the weather, heaven forfend: of course that’s impossible!).

CB: My philosophy increasingly moves against this mythos of technology as saviour, another of my inheritances from Mary Midgley, of course.

BB: Only Sloterdijk, and very gingerly at that, comes close to suggesting the irreversibility of our environmental crisis and its at least in part militaristic etiology in his book Terror from the Air.  No one else touches this theme.

CB: Timothy Morton’s idea that we and the other animal species around today are the dwindling survivors of an extinction event that already happened also leans in this direction, but I agree it is rare that this perspective comes out at all.

BB: In any case, at issue is reversibility, and there is no chance that pollution or deforestation will be halted. Thus and, just in case everything is ‘beyond all repair’ (to use American military jargon absent its acronymic vulgarity), we can just spend all of everyone’s money and all of the earth’s remaining resources to get a select few of us to Mars, or some other supposed alternate planet, there to rinse and repeat the cycle.

CB: Aye, I’ve found myself forced (paradoxically, from my perspective) to become a space travel opponent precisely because the ‘flee the planet’ mythos, as Lynn Margulis astutely critiqued in her final years, is exactly the wrong way of understanding the problem. For if we cannot work out how to live here on Earth, we shall not be able to live anywhere in the universe, so even if you want a future with ‘space colonies’ and the like the focus must, can only be, on learning first and foremost how to live within our terrestrial resources.

imageBB: And here we are, this is part of a continental style, adding complexities to your question which was only about why one might say that one is continental if one is not in fact continental.  We can coin a new term for philosophers of this kind, the analysts who claim to be continental and call them ‘trans-Continental’ (but I am still going to prefer the original Orient Express to this new terminology). There are a lot of these after all: almost all of those who teach Nietzsche and Heidegger at the university Professorial level. There are exceptions of course (but they are few) in the UK, in the US, in Canada, in Australia, and increasingly, I wrote a book about this, La fin de la penseé, in France and I was just in Berlin to see just how very true this is of Germany too. Today’s professors, you can just read their CVs or listen to them, are analytically trained, by which I mean that they use analytic argumentation and do what is recognized as analytic. This is so far advanced that mentioning analytic is not necessary. It is goes without saying as the default mode. And on the basis of this, one can define or specify what analytic philosophy would call ‘really’ analytic, which last stipulating distinction is a quite analytic thing to do.

CB: Indeed – Stephen Yablo wrote a brilliant paper that influenced my engagement with the analytic practices known as ‘fictionalism’, about the difficulties entailed in shrugging off commitments with ‘really’. It emerged from his examination of discussions between Carnap and Quine – the logical positivists once again having a historical role here in making analytic philosophy what it is. This reminds me that even the disagreements within analytic philosophy move in analytic circles: the analytic methodology lurks at the foundation of academic philosophy today.

BB: All, but all, of my new colleagues at Fordham, even the so-called ‘continental’ ones, naturally have analytic formations. The department head once told me, not unlike the email example I began with [back in part 1], not to say such things to younger colleagues as it upset them.  But for me what is at issue is a matter of style and what that style does to philosophy and how it limits it.

CB: By excluding entire ways of thinking?

BB: Yes. Analytic philosophy does not connect with approaches such as Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s or Derrida’s... unless in an analytic or domesticated mode.  But the text is the problem. Thus Dreyfus made Heidegger analytic and other scholars just followed suit. The trouble is the text, meaning the trouble is a hermeneutic one. I note, because it is important, that one should make an exception for Foucault as one can manage to leave out all reference to Pierre Hadot and a different way of writing on ancient philosophy and so too, for more arcane reasons, Deleuze, who counts in today’s analytic modality as the new Bachelard, who was, for his part, always a name, positivistically, poetically as he was, congenial to analytic philosophy of science. So yes, there is a kind of disconnect with respect to a great many significant thinkers, but including certain names such as Simondon and Stiegler. But always, the problem seems to be the need to exclude any reference to history or context at all and that is why analytic philosophy is, to my mind, a disaster.

CB: There are no shortages of disasters caused by philosophy either narrowing its own perspective, or being compartmentalised and shuffled off the stage where matters are discussed in public. It’s one of the reasons that I see my own role as being in part about popularising philosophy – because when it comes to avoiding disaster, philosophy is one of our best and least used tools. Do you see other disasters beyond those we’ve already mentioned?

BB: I think there are fascinating questions and challenges involved with popularizing philosophy, something that has been a great trend in Europe for a few decades but that I have worries about. On the disaster front, I ought to underscore that (and of course all of this is in my own judgment) the analytic turn, now consummate as it is, can only be a disaster for a Jesuit school just to the extent that analytic scholars cannot offer training in the kind of philosophy that is of use to the priest-to-be. Lacking connection with theology but not less with other traditions in philosophy, between philosophical schools as well as further connections to history and to art and to poetry, all those complexifying details one might have objected to leaves us today with an impoverished philosophy. The same thing is true of Jesuit schools in the UK and so on. Maybe the better question is how can it be otherwise? Those who determine what counts as ‘good’ philosophy are analysts and they do not recognize any but their own approach to philosophy. And “there’s an end on’t.”

CB: The connection with theology is an important one, I think, and not because religion itself is essential, per se, but because it remains the fundamental matrix of culture, even when it is not recognised as such. There are so many people who consider themselves atheists today and think that this means they are completely outside of religion. As a result, they fail to see how their thinking is resolutely bound up with the Abrahamic traditions, and especially Christianity, which is the analytic philosophy of world religions. The result – much as with the relationship between analytic and waving a continental flag – is that we say we are not going to talk about theology, when what actually happens is that a particular theology (or rather atheology) is the unacknowledged dominion of thought on a rather wide swath of topics.

The dialogue concludes next week: Analytic Philosophy and the Sciences


Babich and Bateman: What is Continental Philosophy?

Last week I asked Babette Babich what characterises the (dying) tradition of continental philosophy, and why so many philosophers feel the need to ‘claim’ the term for their work. This week, the discussion continues as we move towards a positive exploration of continental philosophy practices, as opposed to the thriving analytic philosophy tradition.

New YorkBabette Babich: Analytic philosophy privileges argument and persuasion, making a case, making a claim, proving a point, persuading an opponent and so on and it is to this extent fairly legalistic, case-focused. From this perspective it is rather easy to wave a flag and think that waving a flag is all that is needed. So if one talks about Heidegger or Nietzsche that will justify calling oneself continental.

Chris Bateman: Can you provide a definition of what constitutes continental philosophy, even if such a definition is a simplification?

BB: We are so very analytically minded – it is the dominant mode in philosophy after all! – that a definition is certainly in order. What is continental philosophy? Continental philosophy is thinking, it is questioning, elaborating questions, making them more comprehensive, deeper, making them worse, proliferating these same questions and adding more and other associated questions. It includes reflection, musing, quandaries, provocations, sometimes it includes comparisons, say, but this was a joke after all, connecting M&E — analytic metaphysics and epistemology — to M&M’s. And this range of different things has been true for quite some time going back to the beginnings of analytic philosophy with the Vienna Circle and logical ‘analysis,’ whereby any time one mentions Vienna it makes a difference to note that one should not forget Freud but one does.

CB: Mary Midgley, who has been a huge influence upon me, never forgets Freud, but I am younger and sadly tend to ignore him, even though I have frequent recourse to the Vienna Circle and the ‘logical positivists’, who I often draft in as a ‘bad guy’ in my philosophy, because they demonstrate (as Midgley said to me in a recent exchange) an excess of certainty that is part of the complex of problems we face today, along with (paradoxically) a voiding of the very possibility of certainty that is just as problematic. But you were talking about Freud...

BB: Yes, Freud, because that adds a layer of complexity to the word ‘analysis’ but not less to the historical context of the term in its genesis and development. Thus to logical positivism and logical empiricism and logical analysis one ought I think to review the relevance of psycho-analytic investigations along with the psychological investigations that animated so many at time at one side or the other of psychologism, including Frege and most saliently Husserl and Heidegger.

CB: So was the Vienna Circle the original confrontation between analytic (which they effectively founded, riffing off Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – much to his chagrin!) and continental, represented then as the early phenomenologists, Husserl and his one-time assistant...?

BB: I would make that claim but of course historically speaking they were all continental. The dream of analytic philosophy is an expat philosophy and Wittgenstein only became Wittgenstein as himself an expat, an import: Austrian wine in British skins as it were. Mercifully, and I am thinking of all philosophy in the last century, pre-Brexit! But it was Carnap who was the original analytic baiter, as it were, and he took on Heidegger. Thus his analytic challenge to Heidegger’s reflection on thinking and being, thinking and nothing, quite independently, as Carnap sovereignly ignored Heidegger’s context just as analytic philosophy has, with a perfectly good conscience about it, been doing ever since. Carnap ignored Heidegger’s reference to the origins of philosophy with Parmenides as this directed Plato and thus all the rest of us footnotes, as Whitehead regarded us. Heidegger sought to raise the question of Being, to think Being, as he put it, thereby appropriating Leibniz’s question: why are there any beings at all much rather than not being in the first place or at all, in order to ask after and thereby connecting the thought of nothing (i.e. no thing at all, no being at all) with the thought of being.

CB: And these kinds of questions were bordering upon nonsense to Carnap, Quine and the other logical positivists I suppose, since they were ‘straying into’ metaphysics which was the Vienna Circle’s bugbear...

Heidegger QuoteBB: Nonsense does not say the half of it. Carnap zeroed in on the logical contradiction in the reifying move, that is: the object contradiction of treating the nothing as something (I note that Heidegger himself adverts to just this), whereby it is said of nothing that it is: or as Jimmy Olson, could say “Holy Parmenides!” Sartre, in an unsung effort to come to Heidegger’s aid, for which Heidegger who did notice this, was, predictably, ungrateful, wrote Being and Nothingness, which adumbrated how he, Sartre, with no little assistance from Simone de Beauvoir with whom he wrote the book (unless you ask the Fullbrooks and a number of other scholars who would tip the balance of contributing authorship in de Beauvoir’s favour – count one more for female philosophical minds!) would have proposed at least one answer to Carnap. For his part, Heidegger was deeply affected by Carnap’s attack as it highlighted what he regarded as a failure to hear his question as such (Being and Time, after all, is all about not hearing questions, in addition to not having posed them to begin with, there is also the problem of not being able to see that the questions he is talking about are questions, to which must be added the persistence of the habit of assuming that there are no questions to be asked in the first place.

CB: Very much an inheritance from Nietzsche, I would hazard.

BB: To be sure! As I am fond of pointing out, Nietzsche himself claims his special excellence to have been the asking of heretofore unconsidered, unasked questions. In fact, Nietzsche uses this philosophical habitus as it characterizes academics now and in his own day as the basis for one of his better jokes in what is for me the key to his philosophy of science, namely: our assumption that because we fail to perceive something we are justified in concluding that there is nothing, that there is nothing there at all, an assumption we make in perception, as empirically as we like, and an assumption — and this is where Nietzsche rightly ambitions to doubt more radically than Descartes and to take critique more critically than Kant — that also obtains on the level of the concept. We think that whatever exceeds our conceptual grasp exhausts the range of the possible. In my thinking on the philosophy of science I would bring Eugene Wigner and Nietzsche together right at this point, but unfortunately there is rather a great deal to say beforehand, so I leave it at that for the moment.

CB: Perhaps we should return to Heidegger... I’m curious to discover how this pans out.

BB: Well, Heidegger remained deeply affected, interested as he was in logic, having written a dissertation on logic and science (he remained, as I think it important to note, qualified to examine doctoral theses on both subjects throughout his university career) and I think his objections to what Carnap missed in his thinking, his questioning, illustrates the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. Continental philosophy uses all the resources of language and thinking and indeed experience, this is the life-world, this is the body, to think about the questions it raises.

CB: All of which is far too messy for the logically-grounded analytic approach!

BB: For the most part, analytic philosophy is interested in making claims. These are also effectively ‘answers.’ For the sake of the question as such, continental philosophy complicates matters. Thus, along with Nietzsche, from whom I do argue that Heidegger did borrow this a bit, it is Heidegger who teaches us how very difficult it is to question anything, especially as an academic, especially as a trained philosopher without immediately jumping ahead to what one supposes the answer to have to be, or even, as Nietzsche was terrible critically-minded in pointing out, to smuggle it in in advance with one’s initial definition and then triumphantly, all Jack Horner about it, to pull out the very thing one had inserted, insinuated, defined, stipulated at the start with the appropriately exultant noises of discovery.

The dialogue continues next week: Claiming the Continental Flag


Babich and Bateman: Last of the Continental Philosophers

Babette Babich's philosophical writing is exuberant, poetic, and very much in the spirit of Nietzsche. Hardly coincidental that she is director of The Nietzsche Society and editor of the journal New Nietzsche Studies. In these series of dialogues, we talk about philosophy, music, and corporate venality, starting with the discussion that follows concerning the state of continental philosophy.

clip_image002Chris Bateman: You have suggested that despite the growing number of academics claiming to wave the continental philosophy flag, the art of continental philosophy is dying out. What would you say characterises this tradition, and why do you think so many feel the need to 'claim' the term for their work?

Babette Babich: This is a challenging and important question but it also touches quite a few nerves! The problem for me is just that your formulation elegantly excludes the term ‘analytic’ and I am not sure one can do that.

CB: Ha, well they are certainly bound together as concepts since ‘continental’ has typically meant ‘not analytic’, but you’ve convinced me in the past that there are practices at the heart of continental philosophy that make it more than just a shadow term.

BB: A few weeks ago, I was very pleased to be invited to give one of two presentations for the first meeting of a series of 13 lectures on Nietzsche —Nietzsche plus ‘Mr. X’ variations – which have been scheduled throughout the year 2016-2017 at Columbia University, that glorious movie-icon (thank you Woody Allen) of a campus in New York City. The first meeting was on Nietzsche-Heidegger, and there were two speakers and we were asked to write little blog summaries of our presentations and mine included, just in passing, a slightly provocative but orienting reference to the analytic-continental divide as a difference that is important to point out. The other speaker teaches at Barnard (which is part of Columbia), Taylor Carman, who is an analytic philosopher who writes on Heidegger (and Taylor is so very analytic that analytic is part of the title of his book). Yet Taylor would regard himself as ‘continental’ as would many of my analytically formed colleagues at Columbia (those trained in both the US and the UK) and this holds for many, many universities. But this automatically excludes any space for the kind of philosophy I do, which is part of the point of appropriating the term ‘continental.’

From the organizer, my elegant and kind host, Professor Bernard Harcourt, who trained at Chicago and now teaches at the Law School at Columbia, came a fairly strong email response in reaction to my blog post, received as I was still writing my lecture. ‘Oh no!’ was the general drift, don’t mention the analytic-continental divide. Everyone there, the email message reassured me, would be firmly on the continental side. Well I wasn’t sure how that could be true when the other main speaker wasn’t at all continental and where the entire event was to be held at Columbia, boasting as it does a solidly analytic philosophy department.

CB: You’re almost suggesting the prevalence of philosophers claiming to work in the continental tradition is a tactic to exclude continental practice from consideration at all, a kind of colonial appropriation?

BB: You folks have the REF in the UK, we have the Leiter Report, and it all comes to the same foregrounding of analytic approaches for everything and everyone, including analytic approaches to continental philosophy.

CB: Yes, I see, and the trouble with this it that analytic philosophy has a clear footprint – the construction of logical argumentation – quite distinct from continental philosophy which, as you have stressed to me, has roots in philology and the hermeneutics of language, all of which is antithetical to the analytic methods. So if you foreground analytic methods you can’t then simply add continental – analytic with continental is not like having a quarter pounder with cheese, it’s more like having white and red wine together, which does not make rosé.

BB: True! Alas! And I have had some experience with this at Boston College, the university where I took my doctorate just because I could work directly with Hans-Georg Gadamer and which choice in retrospect was probably not so hot for my career, not because training with Gadamer was not a great thing – it was – but because BC was a Jesuit school and there is a kind of enduring anti-Catholic sentiment that lingers in the academy. The graduate students were inspired to organize a conference to get folk to come and talk about the fortunes of the analytic-continental divide, and who proceeded to invite analysts mostly to speak (remember these are not folk who will agree with this designation but their background in analytic philosophy belies that to my mind), Nancy Bauer and Rae Langdon, to mention several external speakers, and I too was invited as an alumna. Now the program at Boston College has in the interim (meaning post-Gadamer, and post-Taminiaux), hired only ‘safe’ sorts of continental-cum-analytic folk.

Indeed all of their younger hires enjoy, as is largely the case everywhere, more rather than less of an analytic formation. Because, and this is the reason to parallel the REF and the Leiter brigade, the standing recommendation in philosophy at BC and everywhere, as at Fordham and to be sure you will recognize this from your position in the UK is to hire ever more analytic people, and they could not be more clearly blunt about it, even when it came to staffing continental positions. This does not mean that one will have many positions for Heidegger or Nietzsche experts, but when you do have a position it will be filled by an analyst, however counter-intuitive that may be.

CB: In terms of my position in the UK, I have no involvement whatsoever with the philosophy establishment, which is why I tend to describe myself as an ‘outsider philosopher’, and don’t get paid to teach philosophy at all (although that doesn’t stop me sometimes teaching philosophy when I am supposed to be teaching game design or narrative!). Yet I still encounter what you’re describing. I had a rejection from The British Journal of Aesthetics, which is a crowd of analytic philosophers that I have great respect for, and which sent me the greatest rejection letter I’ve ever had the pleasure to read in the past. But for this paper the rejection clearly hadn’t understood my paper at all, and it wasn’t until weeks afterwards that I realised that I’d inadvertently written in a broadly continental style and was lacking any analytic argument at all. Which is a shame, really, as it was a great paper – but one for which there might be nowhere it might be able to fit. That’s not quite the same as your remarks about hiring analysts for continental positions, but I think it points to a related problem – that there are ways of doing philosophy that don’t even look like philosophy when analytic philosophy is taken as primary.

BB: Thanks for the clarification on your post, and indeed I well believe that you would bring philosophy into your courses! As for the example you give it makes sense to me as a parallel because the problem is to be sure not merely the exclusion of classical sorts of continental philosophy but all kinds of things that don’t fit an increasingly narrower analytic mode. I am just keenly attuned to the analytic co-opting of the continental tradition as I have long written on this topic, and like your account of the BJA (a journal I admire as well), I also have suffered from it – you seem to take the engagement in good stride but that could also be because you have a buffer of another, new and growing field (I am kind of crashing your discipline a bit at the moment in the course I am teaching on digital philosophy, so I have huge respect for this).

But the problem is actually the same sort of thing that, so it would seem, drove Brexit and the recent presidential  elections in the US and that is digital media to be precise, the social matters but very specifically in terms of both lability (anyone can edit) and backlash (only certain edits are tolerated).  But social media also has a very personal or harsh side. Thus, I have recently encountered a stunning bit of hostility from the persons of, on Facebook, Brian Leiter, who insisted, contra the notion of a difference between the analytic and the continental, that there is only a matter of doing ‘good’ philosophy, and still more recently, on Twitter, Barry Smith who insisted on the very same non-existence of the analytic continental (calling it “an old divide,” such that supposedly it no longer matters as such) and likewise insisting on only “good philosophy.”

CB: This is one of those rhetorical moves that lacks internal consistency, for it cannot be ‘good philosophy’ to think that context cannot matter. Only if you have committed to analytic philosophy’s uncomfortable alliance with the sciences does this kind of claim even seem plausible. And I have to question the motive behind denying an evident conflict, since there is clearly a strategic choice being made in this denial.

BB:  No Continental WikiAs recent as these unpleasant encounters were, the tactic is old and has been at work as long as I have studying it. I like to compare it with Rumpole of the Bailey (largely because I am fond of Rumpole) and the smear tactic that worked wonders in antiquity but has really come into on and with social media, whether Facebook, or Twitter, or Wikipedia Usertalk back and forthings. And I noted just recently at Fordham as indeed as part of a kind of wiki hive collective action, there was a day devoted to teaching students and faculty to edit pages, fairly capriciously, on Wikipedia.  O, joy.

CB: Well don't get me started on Wikipedia (given my recent book...) or we'll never get back to the topic at hand! What happened with this purportedly analytic-continental conference in the end?

BB: Yes, back to Columbia. Well, I am as cowardly as the next academic and when my host asked me not to mention something, even something I am passionate about, I could not but take his request to heart, suffering as I do from such exclusions has not meant that I have gotten used to the same (quite the contrary!), and when I read my lecture, in deliberate deference to my host’s sensibilities as he had made them clear, I trimmed out the reference to the analytic and the continental (I did leave a slide, the video of the event shows only my slides during my talk, featuring a comparison with M&Ms, a type of candy that may, if you are lucky, be unobtainable in Manchester), even though it was the one of the most important points I had to make in talking about and between Nietzsche and Heidegger on the assigned topic of Heidegger’s Nietzsche. In the course of the evening, I could not but be struck by the overwhelmingly analytic tenor of the topics highlighted. Indeed it couldn’t have been more analytic, with the exception of Seyla Benhabib who asked a question to which she did not want an answer, wondering as she did, why Heidegger would say that Nietzsche had ‘destroyed him’ i.e., “Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht”. The answer involved philological hermeneutics and, as I said, although she said that she did want an answer, in fact, the complexity was not of interest. But Columbia put it on YouTube — one can see the M&Ms for oneself if one likes.

CB: I regret to report that there is practically no place on Earth one can hide from M&Ms these days – which makes the parallel with analytic philosophy all the more apposite, I suppose! If, as I am suggesting, logical argumentation is at the heart of the analytic methods, can you express the essence of the continental practices in philosophy?

BB: Continental philosophy includes a historical sense, a sense of historical context which it does not name ‘the history of philosophy.’ If Heidegger writes about Anaximander he is not reflecting on philosophy’s history as if this were a thing once done, passé, whereas we now, today, do some other sort of thing when we ‘do’ philosophy. At the same time the continental tradition also emphasizes everything that has to do with context, with interpretation, as a difference that makes all the difference.

CB: This indeed was the trouble with my paper for the British Journal of Aesthetics... I wanted to make a point about creative works that were art-like, sport-like, and game-like, and how this was historically situated, and how this could not be hidden away by asking “what is art?” or “what is a game?” as if it were only a matter of some kind of observational analysis. The paper, rather impishly, was entitled “Can a Rollercoaster Be Art?” – which was about the most analytic aspect of its construction, and even then I confess halfway through to having built a Trojan horse... and that’s not what an analytic philosopher wants to read, not even close.

The dialogue continues next week: What is Continental Philosophy?


Steve Crow: Thirty Years in Games

Over on ihobo today, my interview with the legendary 8-bit programmer-game designer, Steve Crow! Here's an extract: 

CB: Do you miss the way the videogames were back in its 'infancy'?

SC: Looking back I consider myself so fortunate to be in the industry at a time when one individual could be the author of an entire game. By the late 80's games started to be created by small teams of people as the programming, music and graphics became more complex and people began specializing in particular aspects of game creation. Since the mid 80's I have been involved in many very successful games so I don't consider the mid 80's as a 'golden' era of my career but it was a very exciting time to be involved in video games!

You can read the entirety of Steve Crow: Thirty Years in Games over at ihobo.com. What are you waiting for!


Letters with Allen Wood (3): Against War

In Part II: Allen Wood on Tolerance, Professor Allen W. Wood argued against my concept of ‘intolerant tolerance’. This final part explores the contemporary political situation in the United States, and asks what hope there might be for peace.

Anderson - Red Chris: One clear difference between us is that, in resisting political injustice in the U.S., you are on a ‘war footing’ – and as I argue in this book, we need people to take such positions to defend against what is indefensible – especially in your nation at this perilous time. But as is well known, a warrior cannot make peace. I have my eye on a future peace, one perhaps beyond your horizons. We could not afford everyone to be on my path... evil must be resisted... but we cannot afford nobody to be on my path either.

Allen: ‘War’ is being used metaphorically here, I assume, and also hyperbolically. But let's be literal for a minute. When it comes to literal war, my position is not different from yours. And I want to be among those who are on the side of peace when it comes to literal wars. Of course I am not going to go out and murder Republicans (except in my fantasies). I want them defeated (decisively) in political terms. Unlike Obama, I do not want to compromise with them, or tolerate them, because I think their position on most issues, and their modes of political conduct (buying elections, gerrymandering, voter suppression) are intolerable – beyond what may justifiably be tolerated. So in that sense, I do not want to make peace with them. But we are talking here about politics, not violent slaughter. (The gun-carrying faction of their side wants to intimidate with weapons, but I do not.) To want to defeat someone politically, and not compromise (or that sense, make peace) with some people, is not wrong, if their views and actions are beyond what can be justifiably tolerated. But do not confuse this with war in the literal sense, or a refusal to behave peacefully, in the literal sense. I am, when it comes to literal violence, a pacifist. This dates from the Vietnam War, and even before it.

Chris: Just to clarify that I of course meant ‘war’ figuratively, politics-as-war, and I am in no doubt that you are a pacifist at heart. It is politics-as-war that I hope to find a way to move beyond... I am uncertain it is possible – perhaps, as Kant has it, it is “merely possible”. But such is my hope.

Allen: I dearly wish I lived in a country where the range of potent political options never exceeded the acceptable. I think it probably was this way for a long time in the US during the twentieth century. But it no longer is. The other side has claimed that we are now at a stage comparable to before the U.S. civil war. I think that is an exaggeration, but it is an exaggerated version of a truth, and what is more frightening, it is the way some of them definitely see it. Republicans will be the first to tell you that ‘peace’ (in your sense) is not possible. They are the ones who declare this not an option, and refuse to compromise or to accept the will of the majority, the interests of the majority, even the rights of the majority.

Chris: Indeed [the political options do exceed the acceptable in the contemporary US] – and its troubling that the situation seems to have become far worse in the last thirty years or so. I always think it disturbing that the citizens of the US were able to get outraged over Watergate, and now seem to take in their stride all manner of horrors perpetrated in their name...

Allen: I do not think that peace in your metaphorical sense is a realistic option when dealing with such a party. My honest conviction is that if the U.S. is to survive as a country worth living in, the Republican party in its present form must cease to exist as a potent political force. The party must either fundamentally change – go back to being something like what it was about mid-20th century – or it must lose its capacity seriously to affect our political life. But mid-century Republicanism (of Eisenhower, for instance) is as much an enemy of the present day Republican party as anything. At the time, Eisenhower was accused of being a communist by the direct ancestors of today's Republicans.

Chris: I do not believe ‘peace’ in my sense can be attained in the US by the current politicians – Democrat or Republican – it must begin elsewhere, at the grassroots, perhaps, anywhere but Capitol Hill where peace is perhaps already impossible under the current conditions of political practice. As I suggested before, it is not something I see attainable in the short term – but it must be something we see as at least possible in the future, certainly if the Kantian Realm of Ends is to remain “merely possible”.

Allen: There is no moral equivalence here. Democrats and Republicans are not equally to blame for the present metaphorical state of war. Indeed, regarding the point on which you are focusing (and without denying that there are many other things on which I’d be the first to criticize Democrats), I don’t think the Democrats are to blame at all for it.The mentality that now dominates the [Republican] party is one which for most of the 20th century (even as late as the Reagan era) was that of a tiny marginalized and fanatical minority that was out of touch with basic realities and believed whatever suited its ideology and its quest for power. ‘Peace’ (in your sense) with such a mentality is not possible on mutually acceptable terms, because the only terms acceptable to them would be their total domination and the total acceptance of their delusions, which would preclude dealing realistically with the world as it is, and preclude even recognizing the basic rights of the vast majority of society.

Chris: Something is required to restore politics to governance in the United States, but I do not think this is a problem solely for the Republicans. It disturbs me that Obama has felt it acceptable to pursue drone assassinations with fearful loss of live to innocents, or at the very least has been unwilling or unable to intercede against these attacks. Your nation has fallen far from its ideals – and this, we can agree, is a tragedy.

Allen: I criticize Obama too, for perpetuating the wartime policies of the previous administration. This is literal war, and it is not about the political conflicts within our system. On that subject, I fault Obama only for thinking naively that he can treat Republicans as if they were reasonable people and expect them to respond in kind. He began his presidency this way and learned the hard way the high cost of it. Even now, he has this tendency more than is desirable. Obama is himself a decent, reasonable man; this is not always optimal in a politician, though it is refreshingly rare among American presidents, which is why I have a hard time condemning him even where I disagree with his positions or actions.

Chris: It may be that Obama’s political hands are tied, but this only serves to emphasise the terrible problems in US politics at the moment. But I do not know if I can forgive him for letting the CIA rain death upon innocents... what can be done when the President cannot stop the institutions of his own nation from doing evil?

Allen: Regarding drones, deportations and other acts of the current administration that we on the left deplore, I think Obama is politically boxed in on these issues. Even as it is, Cheney and McCain accuse him of being "weak" in foreign affairs, and people still listen to that crap. The way the US is positioned in the world now, when you elect someone President you are essentially electing them to be Darth Vader (or whatever metaphor one wants). It’s not a question of forgiving or not forgiving a given individual. It is a question of what the world is going to do about an empire out of control that increasingly is being run by a party, which, even when it is supposedly out of power, is quite literally criminally insane. The insanity is even increased when the party is out of power, because then its members feel they are not responsible for what happens. They can force the government to do or not do certain things, or to continue policies and actions inherited from the previous Republican administration, and then the government (in this case, Obama) takes the blame. This dynamic explains a lot of what is going on in American politics right now.

The opening image is Red by Matthew James Anderson, which I found on his website Abstract Art Sydney. The artist suggests this painting “represents peace and innocence”. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended, and I will take the image down if asked.

Chris’ first book of moral philosophy, Chaos Ethics, is out now from Zero Books, while Allen Wood’s twelfth on the subject, The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right, and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy is out now from Oxford University Press.


Letters with Allen Wood (2): Tolerance

In Part I: Against Chaos the conversation focussed upon Professor Allen W. Wood’s arguments against my association with liberal movements and chaos. In this second part, the discussion switches to tolerance, and the political implications of intolerance.

The Canary Test - Levels of Tolerance Allen: I resist your criticism of intolerant tolerance [in Chaos Ethics]. Tolerance is a virtue, but by its very nature, it must have limits. Tolerance is the willingness to permit what you regard as dubious or even wrong to go on unhindered. Clearly there have to be limits to this, and good judgment is required in deciding what may be tolerated and what not. One obvious limit is that practices that make tolerance itself impossible cannot be tolerated. Unlimited tolerance leads only to chaos, which is bad. Tolerance must be intolerant of some things or it is not only not a virtue, but it is nothing at all (it is even self-undermining).

Chris: Here I am indebted to Isabelle Stengers, and probably should not fight her corner. But her point, that I support, is that there is a risk with 'tolerance' that we have not fully appreciated, an ability to destroy the hope of equality by dismissing other people's practices for living as 'mere belief'. In doing so, we are saying 'we know better' and in so doing the conditions for the Realm of Ends are lost because autonomy is undermined. As a Kantian, even a heretical Kantian, that is too great a price to pay.

Allen: Tolerance implies disagreement. It is like forgiveness, which implies grounds for blame. If you think the other should not blame you, you will be insulted if you are forgiven. Analogously, if you think the other is required to agree with you, you will reject their tolerance. But I think we should take it for granted that people disagree, that what some do or think will not be accepted by others. And then tolerance is what we should hope for. To disagree is, in one sense, to put yourself above the other, since you must think you are right and they are wrong. But we have to accept that others will think this too about us, and (always within limits) that it is OK for them to think that. To be tolerant is to invite tolerance in return. Those who are offended because you are tolerant (and therefore think you are right and they are wrong) are already being intolerant. Unless your position here is intolerable, that puts them and not you in the wrong.

Chris: Yes, perhaps I wasn't clear that 'intolerant tolerance' is a specific risk – it is not necessarily inherent to tolerance, although whenever people relate to each other through toleration rather than mutual respect, the risk can manifest as a kind of bigotry.

Allen: I find it odd to contrast ‘mutual tolerance’ with ‘mutual respect,’ since I think tolerance is precisely the way you do show respect for those with whom you disagree. How else could you show respect for them except by tolerating them? I think the cases you are thinking about (where "tolerance" becomes problematic and begins to look objectionably intolerant) are those in which there is something important going on that is well beyond the question of disagreement and tolerance. If an economically, politically and militarily dominant colonial power is engaged in minority rule over a foreign population, with different beliefs and practices, it may describe its attitude toward them as 'tolerant'. But in such cases that may be a euphemism, distracting from the real issue. If the colonial power is imposing its way of life on the native majority, and says it "tolerates" it (but only at those points where its capacity to dominate has given out), then this is not an admirable or even an acceptable attitude. (I don’t think it is even a form of genuine tolerance, though it may feel like it from the self-deceptive standpoint of the dominators.) It masks the unjust domination that is really the basic fact about the situation.

Chris: This is an extremely salient perspective on the issue I am raising, although it applies not just in the colonial situation – it can happen anywhere that there is a power imbalance, which is to say, everywhere. The intersectionality critique within feminism is an example of coming to terms with what I am calling 'intolerant tolerance'; the gradual recognition that in fighting for 'women' the feminists have inadvertently been enforcing ideals of white, middle-class women in developed nations. The clearest and most disturbing sign of this for me was those feminists willing to support war in Iraq on the grounds that the military action would be 'liberating' Muslim women... To my knowledge, none of the politically active women's groups in Islamic nations asked for war – nor, it might be added, was it wise to think that liberty could flow effortlessly from the barrel of a gun.

Allen: I think before I can decide what you or Stengers object to is something I would defend, I would need to know which cases you are talking about in particular, and I would have to decide what I think about those specific cases. I think if our only choices are tolerating the abuse of women and invading (with the aim of dominating) other cultures, then so far we have been offered no acceptable alternative.

Chris: This is undoubtedly a wise response, and both Stengers and I have somewhat different targets, although we are working on similar ideals and our goal is little more than to invite a pause, a hesitation, a scruple, whenever we are tempted to place our values and culture above those of others whose actual values and experiences we know very little about beyond our own ragged assumptions. This is what she calls 'the curse of tolerance', which is very close to what I mark by 'intolerant tolerance': the risk that our toleration is actually masking an unrecognised attempt to have power over others, to pre-empt the discourse or respect necessary for equal partnership, because we are sure that 'we know' and others 'merely believe' (i.e. are mistaken).

Allen: I think the issue we are now discussing illustrates a point I tried to make earlier. It is always a mistake to turn your justified reaction to common rhetorical abuses of certain moral concepts or principles into a general objection to those concepts or principles. This is what I fear may be happening in the case of your objections to tolerance.

Chris: Although I may oversell this point in the first chapter [of Chaos Ethics] for dramatic effect, I am not arguing against being tolerant. I am only trying to warn that we are unable to fairly judge whether we are tolerant when the only people we speak to share identical values to us – and even more so when the only people we will accept as part of our world are those who share our values. That, in essence, is the risk.

This discussion continues in the final part: Against War. The opening image is The Canary Test: Levels of Tolerance by (and copyrighted to) Nicola Moss, and is used with permission. I found it on her website, Layers of Life.

Chris’ first book of moral philosophy, Chaos Ethics, is out now from Zero Books, while Allen Wood’s twelfth on the subject, The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right, and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy is out now from Oxford University Press.


Letters with Allen Wood (1): Against Chaos

Earlier this year, I exchanged emails with Professor Allen W. Wood after sending him a copy of the page proofs for Chaos Ethics which I described as “the least Kantian book of Kantian ethics thus far written”. To my surprise, Professor Wood got back to me with some interesting challenges to my ideas. This is the first of a three-part edited version of our exchanges.

Turmoil Allen Wood: I haven't had time (nor will I) to read all of your provocative, lively, engaging, and erudite book. But I have looked at parts of it. I am pleased by the way it engages with Kant and Parfit, as well as my own work. I appreciate your quotation from Anscombe, with whose moral and political views I generally strongly disagree. But her quoted remark about consequentialism seems to me right on target.

[The 1958 quote referred to is as follows:

...the point of considering hypothetical situations, perhaps very improbable ones, seems to be to elicit from yourself or someone else a hypothetical decision to do something of a bad kind. I don't doubt this has the effect of predisposing people - who will never get into the situations for which they have made hypothetical choice - to consent to similar bad actions, or to praise and flatter those who do them, so long as their crowd does so too, when the desperate circumstances imagined don't hold at all.]

I have made a similar (analogous) point myself about something else (which may be related): I think that most instances in which people invoke the true proposition that moral principles have exceptions are cases in which they are trying to rationalize violating a moral principle in precisely a case where they should not be violating it. More generally, moral truths are more often used to justify wrongdoing that moral falsehoods, because if they are misapplied, they make good rationalizations for bad conduct. The most important truths are often the most easily abused. It is a common mistake made by non-philosophers in reading moral philosophy, especially the moral philosophy of the past, to react only to the rhetorical force that some assertion might have for us (for instance, the way it might be abused in some present-day political context) rather than considering what it actually means, and whether it is true. Thus to argue that some principle P is a bad or false principle because it has been used by Nazis, terrorists (or whoever your bugaboo happens to be) is in general a bad form of argument. This point might even be turned against Anscombe, if she were to use the common abuse of consequentialist reasoning as an argument that consequentialism is false.

Chris Bateman: There are definite problems here, and difficult ones to iron out! I learned a lot thinking about your "ends justify the means" argument [i.e. that all means are by definition justified by the ends they aim at], which is indisputably correct – and indeed, I had a go at refining this particular objection. My alternative "the goodness of ends cannot justify the immorality of means" seems to me an improvement (and obviously Kantian), but I feel it could be snappier!

Allen: I note that you even read my footnotes, to the extent of having caught me in one footnote from 1999  - a dismissive one about Lévinas – that I now regard as hasty, regrettable and based on insufficient engagement with his thought. It may be that further acquaintance would lead me back to the same dismissive conclusions, but I now think there is more to his views than I appreciated in 1999 and that I shouldn't have written what I did. My consolation over the years is that this was buried in a note in the back of the book, which few people would read. You have, at least to a degree, deprived me of that consolation. Some people will have the persistence to seek out my precipitous remarks, and even report them. I am at least glad that you do so in a way that makes me look moderate compared to Badiou, who himself is flatteringly presented in your book.

Chris: I always read footnotes – and yours are far more interesting than many philosophers! I have found a wealth of treasures hidden away in the back of your books... Although you may not appreciate this particularly ‘find’, I was glad of finding someone who would say aloud what many analytic philosophers think when facing Lévinas. I have to say, I dread to think what is going to be thrown back at me in the years to come! Perhaps it is best not to think about it...

Allen: I don't want to try to engage with all, or even very many, of the deliberately controversial things you thrust at us in this book. But I do want to dispute – as not only mistaken, but also too easy – the association of law with conservatism or the right and chaos with progressive politics or the left. I think we leftists have the correct take on law, seeing it as arising from reason rather than tradition, and capable of correction without relinquishing its authority.

Chris: I may need to stress that this association is more complex than a simple 'conservative = law' and 'liberal = chaos', since many aspects of the liberal political traditions (and especially in the U.S.) are deeply engaged with Law. Although this is how I introduce the concepts, the complexity of the concepts build slowly across the chapters so that it is only by the end that what I am gesturing at with 'Chaos' (and 'Law') is clear.

Allen: I am myself not in favour of chaos at all. I see chaos as simply the result of confusion and error. I do defend uncertainty and an awareness of our own fallibility. But that is not chaos. Conservatism can easily lead to chaos. Of course I may be taking the term ‘chaos,’ in your use of it, too literally. You are defending chaos in order to be provocative, and when someone does that, they usually have a more complex thought than the provocative word would normally suggest.

Chris: I am well aware that you have no truck with 'chaos' of any kind – but again, I think the concept of moral chaos I am defending is defensible, and actually inherent to virtue ethics. But key to my argument is that an excess of either Law or Chaos is always problematic, and one needs to be conditioned with the other.

Allen: 'Conservative' itself is a problematic term, especially in this period and in the U.S. One might associate it with a tendency to caution, taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, believing according to the evidence, reluctance to embrace untried solutions too hastily, and wanting to preserve things as they are if they have proven to be the things that work best. But none of these traits characterize our self-described political 'conservatives' at present. Our self-described conservatives are really impetuous radicals, who substitute a simplistic dogmatic ideology for evidence and use it to rationalize any kind of corrupt or unwise scheme that seems to fit it.

The only things associated with the word that do characterize them is a stubborn tendency to defend unjust privileges and a bigoted and dogmatic defence of traditional superstitions. Conservatism in the present day U.S. sense leads directly to chaos, and this is not good. Conservatism leads to chaos when it confronts conditions under which traditional superstitions, entrenched privileges, and even excessive or misplaced caution or what you erroneously think of as responsible behaviour, result in "blowback" and conditions the conservative cannot have contemplated.

Chris: I believe I discuss the problems of 'conservative chaos' under the discussion of drone assassinations and recent unjust wars, in which I recognise a highly immoral chaos emerging from conservatively-motivated foreign policy... My goal is to recognise some forms of chaos as moral and some forms of law as immoral – not to give a free ride to either, and also to suggest that the Realm of Ends is unobtainable without this recognition.

This discussion continues in Part II: Tolerance next week. The opening image is Turmoil by Vitor, which I found at his site, The Fractal Forest. It is used with implicit permission of the author, who retains all rights to this image.

Chris’ first book of moral philosophy, Chaos Ethics, is out now from Zero Books, while Allen Wood’s twelfth on the subject, The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right, and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy is out now from Oxford University Press.