David Matthews

With The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom has promised us his “swan song” as a critic. Fat chance. After some thirty original books and hundreds of edited volumes; after more than fifty years of brilliance, boldness, bombast, bathos, and bullshit; after Shelley, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens; anxiety, misreading, repression, and revision; Orphism, gnosis, Lucretius, and the Kabbalah; Shakespeare, genius, the canon, and the Book of J; after evidence of a logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard-put to shut it off, there is little possibility that Bloom has given us his “final reflection upon the influence process”—which in Bloomspeak means his final reflection full stop, since everything he writes is wrapped around that fixed idea. (William Deresiewicz, The Shaman, The New Republic, September 14, 2011)

Bloom is nothing if not loyal to the authors of his choice. His chosen ones (they are many, yet they are select) could not ask for more devotion or in-depth consideration than Bloom has given them over the decades. The unfeigned awe, wonder, and reverence he still feels before the likes of Shakespeare, Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, Browning, Yeats, and Stevens speak loudly for the faith that pervades these pages. I mean the faith in literature’s inexhaustible depths and endless capacity to reward the reader who descends into its Orphic underworld. If Bloom is right—and I believe he is–that “literary criticism . . . ought to consist in acts of appreciation,” he has fulfilled that mandate once again in The Anatomy of Influence. (Robert Pogue Harrison, The Faith of Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011)

Harold Boom is among the foremost literary critics of our time, an impassioned scholar, champion of the best that has been thought and said, to borrow yet again Matthew Arnold’s expression, which I first encountered in Bloom. He has read much and deeply and seems to remember all of it. A love for books and reading comes through on every page he writes.

Bloom can also be arrogant, imperious, full of himself, given to ex cathedra pronouncements that upon close reading dissolve into near gibberish, providing ample fodder for critics, of which there are plenty, for his detractors may well outnumber his defenders. Publication of The Anatomy of Influence, subtitled “Literature as a Way of Life,” presents an occasion for those on both sides of the Bloomian divide to blow hard about his merits and flaws. Of the essays cited here, Harrison’s is the more balanced, critical without being hostile, taking Bloom to task where appropriate while generous in giving him his due.

Deresiewicz  and Harrison lead me to reflect on Bloom and why I find reading him on the whole a pleasurable and rewarding experience. I have not yet read The Anatomy of Illness. My remarks here draw on earlier reading, which though partial is reasonably extensive.

In the prologue to How to Read and Why, Bloom writes of turning to reading “as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational enterprise. . . . Ultimately we read–as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree–in order to strengthen the self.”

. . . the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. I am not exactly an erotics-of-reading purveyor, and a pleasurable difficulty seems to me a plausible definition of the Sublime, but a higher pleasure remains the reader’s quest. There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call “falling in love.” I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

The last two sentences echo earlier references to critics who mean much to Bloom: Samuel Johnson, whose prime concern is with “what comes near to ourself, what we can put to use”; Sir Francis Bacon, who gave the advice “[r]ead not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked that the best books “impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.”

We turn to teachers and critics, and what is a good critic but a good teacher, not to learn the “true,” the “real,” the “right” meaning of a poem or novel but rather to open ourselves up to ways of thinking about what we read that might not have occurred to us left to our own devices, unanticipated insights and perspectives that may yield the higher pleasure we seek. We also read criticism because there will never be time enough to read all that we wish to read, and our choices about what to read within the limits of our time must too often be made on the basis of insufficient evidence or outright chance. A critic with whom we find ourselves in tune can point us to authors who matter whom we would not have read otherwise. It might not be necessary that a critic’s account be strictly speaking accurate to serve this function. An imaginative enthusiasm ingeniously conveyed could do the trick. Conversely, one might also be led to a writer by negative criticism when it reveals something that strikes the reader’s fancy.

The acts of appreciation that mark the best of Bloom’s criticism throw off sparks that have kindled my imagination and enthusiasms. For this I am more than willing to make allowance for his flaws and excesses. We read criticism in ways analogous, if not exactly alike, to the ways we read poems and novels. Criticism is strong or weak, creative and imaginative or not, speaks to us or leaves us cold, and at its best gives us what we can put to use, leaves us with the conviction that the one nature wrote and the same reads. I suspect that Bloom has this in mind when he writes, that strong and creative criticism is his conscious aim. I would not go far as to claim that Bloom’s nature that writes is the same as my nature that reads, any more than I would say that of Keats or Dickinson. What I would say is that there is something in that nature we share, a kinship, a sensibility, an intimation of that secular transcendence for which we thirst, something once referred to as the Sublime, along with our conviction that there is something of worth to us in the quest for it.

David :: Oct.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New Philosophy,  NY Times Magazine, 9 December 2007

Joshua Knobe, Experiments in Philosophy, NY Times, 7 September 2010

David Menconi, Putting Philosophy to the Test, Stanford Magazine, September/October 2011

Philosophy’s New Take on Old Problems, NY Times Room for Debate, 20 August 2010

I.

Josh Knobe has comfortable seating in his philosophy department office at Yale University—a small couch somewhere between a love seat and a sofa in size. It is most decidedly not, however, an armchair, which might seem a trivial distinction. But in Knobe’s world, one’s position on armchairs can be a matter of grave import.

“Yeah, it’s a couch rather than an armchair,” says Knobe, [Stanford] ’96. “So there’s room for two, and that’s important. You don’t just sit there alone and think about something. You sit and talk to someone about it.”

For the past century or so, philosophy has primarily entailed solitary ruminations to puzzle out deep truths about the nature of human existence—questions about reason, knowledge, values, free will. Philosophy can seem like a lonely ivory-tower vigil, but the old school holds that sitting and thinking is still the best way to do it. As one prominent philosopher put it a few years back, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.” (Menconi)

For me, it was that an enormous amount of work had been done using one particular tool, sitting in an armchair thinking hard about the problem. How much more progress could we make with that one method was unclear to me, whereas it seemed like there was an enormous amount of untapped potential in trying to understand the processes that generate these judgments. It’s not so much that the old armchair techniques were bad; we’ve just been using them for 2,000 years. We might get more insight by trying a new tool. More than anything else, the difference really is in methodology. (Knobe quoted in Menconi)

Experimental philosophy, called x-phi for short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements the traditional tools of analytic philosophy with the scientific methods of cognitive science. So experimental philosophers actually go out and run systematic experiments aimed at understanding how people ordinarily think about the issues at the foundation of the philosophical discussion.(The Experimental Philosophy page on the Yale University website)

Aha, a new movement is afoot to bring philosophy down from its ivory tower and into the real world, depose those doddering professors gibber-jabbering away about Platonic Forms, the Cartesian dubito, and Ockham’s razor, overturn their armchairs and wake them from their dogmatic slumbers, take it to the streets, again. To the things themselves! Wait, that was a battle cry of another era, another overturning of the old order to put philosophy once again on a firm footing that will, depending on the perspective of the revolutionaries, return her to her ancient, exalted status or put her in her place as handmaiden of the sciences, the kind of thing that plays out every generation or several and has for centuries.

Perhaps Josh Knobe intends his characterization of the traditional technique of philosophy as sitting in an armchair thinking hard about a problem to be taken as a deliberate exaggeration, hyperbole, for the sake of making a point, although there is no indication in the articles cited here that this is what he has in mind. Rather, the assertion is made seriously and without qualification, as if meant to be taken at face value, in which case he is either guilty of some sloppy thinking or he is deliberately engaging in willful misrepresentation of the old order to lay the groundwork for the radically new approach he proposes.

My earliest professors took some pains to hammer into the heads of undergraduates—and grad students, for matter–that philosophy is not just a matter of an individual thinking about problems in isolation, no more than poetry is just writing down whatever thoughts come into one’s head. Dr. Matsen was fond of pointing out that we stand on the shoulders of giants, by whom he had in mind the likes of Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Duns Scotus, and so on. Philosophy begins not with one’s own thoughts, or not just one’s own thoughts, but with study of, to borrow Matthew Arnold’s term, the best that has been thought and said. Precisely what “the best that has been thought and said” comprises is up for debate, all well and good, for that debate is itself part of the philosophical enterprise.

Study entails a personal encounter with the giants on whose shoulders we stand, an attempt to engage them first on their own terms to the extent this is possible, acknowledging the outcome is always problematic, before taking them on from personal and contemporary perspective, rooted in subjectivity, experience, and the conventional thinking of the culture and age into which one was born. Reading and study of primary sources, discussion and dialogue with fellow students and teachers, consultation with secondary sources, all this is part of the deal, as is what I suppose Knobe has in mind with the armchair metaphor, those solitary moments alone, in the armchair, perhaps, or at the desk or on a long walk, when one attempts to digest and assimilate the material and from there to think contemplatively, reflectively, critically of the issue at hand. The metaphor of the armchair to represent this latter part of the process is fine as long as we remember that it is only a metaphor and only one aspect of an array of activity.

II.

Aristotle begins Nicomachean Ethics with an account how people think about what is good, how most of us lead our lives, and how we think we ought to live. The ordinary, everyday, common-sense way of looking at things is a point of setting out, not a conclusion. One thrust of philosophical inquiry historically has been to think critically about the everyday way of looking on things, reflected in the Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living. The data gathered through an x-phi investigation are not an end in themselves. It is not just a matter of getting a show of hands on this or that issue.

The Knobe Effect is the conclusion derived from what seems to be a paradigmatic x-phi investigation, recounted by both Appiah and Menconi.

In many ways,[Joshua] Knobe is the closest thing experimental philosophy has to a rock star. Since last year, he’s been an essay contributor to the New York Times. An admirer from Australia maintains a Joshua Knobe fan page on Facebook. And a phenomenon bears his name: The Knobe Effect, derived from an experiment of his, is frequently cited to explain the effectiveness of negative political advertising.

Conducted in 2003, the experiment examined people’s perception of intentionality based on their opinions about two scenarios. In the first scenario, a business executive is told that a new product will increase profits but harm the environment. He responds that he doesn’t care about the environment, just profits. The program is implemented, profits go up and the environment suffers. When asked if the executive intentionally harmed the environment, 82 percent of respondents answered yes.

Scenario No. 2 is the same except for one key detail: The word “hurt” is replaced with “help.” Again, the executive says he doesn’t care about the environment. The program goes on, profits rise, and this time the environment benefits. But when asked if the executive intentionally helped the environment, only 23 percent of respondents said yes. So the Knobe Effect holds that people are more likely to assign blame for things that go wrong than to give credit for things that go right, a gap Knobe has spent the past eight years working to explain.

Why should the results of an action have a bearing on intentionality? And when it comes to questions of character, why do we tend to give more weight to negativity? Why does it sometimes happen that a single misdeed in a lifetime of otherwise exemplary behavior can destroy a reputation? (Think of how one racial slur can get someone branded a racist.) (Menconi)

The two scenarios are presented as if the only difference were that the outcome of one set of actions is harmful while the other is beneficial. Is the Knobe Effect the only, or even the best, interpretation of what is going on here? Might something else be at work other than a human tendency to assign blame when things go wrong but not give credit for things that go right? Are there methodological gremlins lurking about to confound Knobe’s conclusion?

Let us begin with scenario 2, where benefit to the environment is an unintended consequence of the executive’s program to increase profits. There is a tradition of moral thought that holds intentionality paramount. From the moral perspective, it is not sufficient that good result as an unintended consequence of action taken out of self-interest. One acts rightly in a moral sense only when doing the right thing because it is the right thing. Thus, the executive does not get moral credit for having benefited the environment. We might all be happy that the environment benefited from the executive’s action, and no doubt capitalists would be equally delighted that she or he profited, but morality has nothing to do with it. Intentionality is a necessary condition for one to be credited with moral responsibility for doing good.

On the other scenario, however, where a bad outcome results, intentionality and responsibility come into play in a different fashion. The executive is not setting out to harm the environment. The scenario would be trivial if that were the intention. Rather, the executive embarks on a course of action knowing it will do harm, though the explicit aim is to maximize profits, not to do harm. The executive’s moral culpability might be mitigated were she or he ignorant that the action undertaken for the sake of profit would be harmful. Here the executive bears moral responsibility for harm done because she or he knows these actions will be harmful and, acting from self-interest, forges ahead in callous disregard of that knowledge.

The sense of what it means to bear moral responsibility is not identical in the two scenarios. Might the responses recorded in the experiment be driven not, or not entirely, by a psychological inclination to more readily give blame for the bad than credit for the good, but by a sense, perhaps unarticulated but I think fairly conventional, that the relationship between intentionality and responsibility might reasonably be viewed differently depending on whether the outcome is beneficial or harmful? But, one might point out, have you perhaps subtly shifted the topic? You are talking about the nature of moral action and responsibility. The survey asks if the executive intentionally benefited or harmed the environment. Are these the same things or different things? Survey participants might have responded differently if the question had been explicitly couched in terms of moral action and responsibility, just as, conversely, responses to the question of intentionality could plausibly have been shaped by notions of the relationship between intentionality and responsibility and how that relationship might differ in the two scenarios.

An investigation such as the one presented here is useful insofar as it can open new avenues of discussion and ways of thinking about an issue. The real work lies in the discussion and thinking that ensues. Some of that work, not all of it by a longshot, but some, is a matter of solitary reflection, trying to think critically and well about the matter at hand, and for some of us the best place for that just might be an armchair.

David :: Oct.03.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »