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Andrew Delbanco’s insightful new book on the history and future of the American college exposes an institution that has no idea what it should be.
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Delbanco’s survey of the tradition of college education and its basis in Puritan faith, both its provision of a universal liberal education and its focus on building character, is a salutary reminder when today’s colleges and universities brand themselves ‘Comprehensive Knowledge Enterprises’, distance-learning hubs or engines of social mobility. Teaching at Columbia – one of the few colleges still to make two years of the liberal arts compulsory – Delbanco is in a good position to diagnose the slow death of the college model even where it should be healthiest: in the well-endowed and elite institutions of American higher education.
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Yet it was just this democratic approach to tradition that was to be thrown out along with the bathwater of religious faith. Not in the 1960s, but nearly a hundred years before, when the college began to be seen as hopelessly backward, full of dull clergymen boring America’s youth with ancient history, ill-suited to the pressing demands of the modern world and the new industrial nation. The issue came to a head with a famous debate, recounted by Delbanco, between James McCosh, president of Princeton, and Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, who met, like boxers, on neutral ground in New York in 1885 to decide what a college curriculum should be.
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Badiou's philosophy of the subject is an extrapolation of Sartre's existentialist slogan "Existence precedes essence" and incorporates a communist hypothesis that Althusser might have liked. It's also a rebuke to postwar and often postmodern French philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault with whom he argued and all of whom he has outlived. What is a subject for Badiou? "Simone de Beauvoir wrote that you are not born a woman, you become one. I would say you are not a subject or human being, you become one. You become a subject to the extent to which you can respond to events. For me personally, I responded to the events of '68, I accepted my romantic destiny, became interested in mathematics – all these chance events made me what I am."
How does truth come into all this? "You discover truth in your response to the event. Truth is a construction after the event. The example of love is the clearest. It starts with an encounter that's not calculable but afterwards you realise what it was. The same with science: you discover something unexpected – mountains on the moon, say – and afterwards there is mathematical work to give it sense. That is a process of truth because in that subjective experience there is a certain universal value. It is a truth procedure because it leads from subjective experience and chance to universal value."
"So I continue to believe both things: that statements about social entities and powers must be compatible there being microfoundations for these properties and powers; and that it is theoretically possible that some social structures have properties and powers that are relatively autonomous, in the sense that we can allude to those properties and powers in explanations without being obliged to demonstrate their microfoundations."
"There is an active and extended group of scholars in Europe with a very focused concentration on the philosophy of the social sciences."
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There is a common set of topics and references that bind this extended research community together from Finland to Belgium to the Netherlands to Italy. They share a focus on social explanation. They are intellectually committed to the construct of "causal mechanisms" rather than causal laws. They have affinities and connections to the Analytical Sociology network, though few would explicitly identify themselves as analytical sociologists.
"Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions. "
"An evil twin is defined as somebody who thinks exactly like you in most ways, but differs in just a few critical ways that end up making all the difference. Think the Batman and the Joker. Here’s why evil twins matter, and how to discover yours."
"Consequently, operational closure need not be a tragic thesis that we are forever doomed to completely misunderstand one another. Our ability to enter into the world of others– animal, social, human, and technological –can grow and develop, even if it will never be complete."
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What Hume articulates here in the portion I have bolded is a variant of why, as Lacan liked to put it, all communication is miscommunication. Put in terms of the theory of relations between objects I advocate under the title of onticology, Hume is here articulating the principle of operational closure characteristic of all objects. Drawn from autopoietic theory but extended to all objects, autopoietic and allopoietic, operational closure is the idea that external stimuli do not determine internal states of an entity, but rather only trigger them. The determination of internal states in an entity results from the internal structure and dynamics unfolding within the object.
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The upshot of this is that our interpretations of others say more about us than they say about us. When we interpret another what we are doing is making a statement about the sort of things that would motivate us.
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"In his short book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou argues that today all that remains of the ideological machinery of freedom, human rights and Western values is a simple, negative statement: communism failed. The labors of the capitalist philosophers, he says, amount to little more than the assertion that there is no choice but to consent to the capitalist, parliamentary present. But what "exactly do we mean by 'failure' when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?" he asks."
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On this occasion, though, Žižek's response was serious. In speaking of a communist "we," he explained, he was not evoking an already existing political subject, let alone an inherently revolutionary sociological class. Rather, the use of "we" could best be understood as a speech act or a performative utterance – that is, as one of those utterances identified by the philosopher of language JL Austin that do not describe an existing reality but instead produce a new one. Just as statements like "I do" or "You're fired!" are themselves actions, transforming rather than describing a situation, Žižek said he hoped the act of evoking a communist "we" would contribute to bringing a collective subject into existence.
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Badiou's point is not that the participants in these uprisings are subjectively communists – indeed, after decades of successful annihilation of the left across the Middle East, this would hardly be expected. Rather the point is that a successful popular uprising points toward the horizon designated by Marx as the withering of the state, opening up a realm of non-state political action in which that elusive figure "the people" comes into being.
"Communism", Badiou writes, "here means: a common creation of a collective destiny." Such a common, he argues, is generic, representing humanity as a whole, and capable of overcoming statist contradictions between substantive identities. When female doctors from the provinces sleep peacefully in the middle of a circle of young men, when a row of Christians keeps watch over Muslims at prayer, when a group of engineers entreats young suburbanites to hold firm, these situations and inventions, he suggests, constitute the communism of movement.
"Its one thing for physicists exploring carbon nanotubes to say they have no use for philosophy. Their work lives or dies by experimental data that can be collected tomorrow. But over the last few decades, cosmology and foundational physics have become dominated by ideas that that appear to take a page from science fiction and, more importantly, remain firmly untethered to data."
"Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, wrote a book on the physics of how "something can come from nothing," and thought it answered the old philosophical question to that effect. He got lots of praise from other philosophical ignoramuses, and then along came David Albert, a distinguished philosopher of physics at Columbia University (who even has a PhD in physics), who pointed out the confusions in a rather wicked, but as far as I can see apt, review in The New York Times. "
"Exploded view diagrams open up– a little –these black boxes so as to discern the multiple-composition that objects or units are as complexes of relations. What we discover is that every object is both a unit and a crowd of other objects or units."
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This is why there is not only a democracy of objects where every object is on equal ontological footing despite there being hierarchy and inequality among units, but also a democracy in objects. In Irreductions Latour notoriously says that “we will never do better than a politician” (1.2.1). Here Latour is referring not to state leaders (though them too), but objects or actants in general. Every entity that enters into relations with other entities is a politician insofar as it must navigate the tendencies or singularities of the other entities to which it relates.
"Tim seems to conceive world as a container that entities are in. For me, by contrast, the world is anything but a container. Ultimately there are no containers, there are just relations between entities. And as a consequence, in the framework of my ontology, a world is nothing but a network of relations between structurally coupled entities. "
"If you've seen that bumper sticker, you've seen what our culture has made of one of the central ideas in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 50 years and 1.4 million copies ago. For the marketers and boosters of personal transformation who casually talk about paradigm shifts, the phrase designates not just a gestalt switch that casts things in a new light, but a world so insubstantial that it can be thoroughly transformed by a single idea. Tomorrow there may be another paradigm shift, and another after that. There is thus no real progress, just a new bubble as good as the old bubble."
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Kuhn rejected our old metaphysics—consciousness consists of an inner representation of an outer reality—as incoherent, impossible, and fundamentally inhuman. That's why he begins SSR by invoking history not as a discipline that can be applied to science, but as a necessary part of scientific understanding. All understanding is historical, and no human project escapes the characteristics of history-based humanity: fallible, limited, impure of motive, social, and always situated in a culture, a language, and a time. Not even science with its method and its formulas. Our very words have meaning not because of a set of definitional rules, Kuhn thought, but because they are based on ostensive exemplars, paradigms. Our age, characterized by a Network that refuses to keep ideas, communication, and sociality apart, is making manifest the messy, inescapable humanness of all of our endeavors.
The problems that dominated Kuhn's life after his great moment of insight arose not because Kuhn wasn't brilliant enough. Rather, they arose and persist because while we increasingly understand that the old metaphysical paradigm has failed, for several generations now we have not found our new paradigm. Our culture has inappropriately latched on to Kuhn's message as an exaltation of the rootless disconnection of our ideas from the world because we were ready to hear that knowledge is not apart from our knowing of it. But he and we have not yet come to a new shared understanding about what it means to live truthfully as humans.
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Philosophy of Science Reading List
Confirmation and Falsification
Hempel, C. 1966. Philosophy of Natural Science, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, especially Chapters 2-4 (pages 3-46).
Popper, K. R. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, New York: Basic Books Inc., Publishers, especially Chapters 1 and 10 (pages 33-59 and 215-250).
Duhem, P. 1914/1954. Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press, especially Chapter VI: “Physical Theory and Experiment” (pages 180-218).Quine, W. V. 1951/1953. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Goodman, N. 1955. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th edition, Chapter 4.Kuhn and the Historical Turn
Kuhn, T. S. 1962/1996. Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, especially Chapters 9-10 (pages 92-135).
Lakatos, I. 1970. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pages 91-196.
Kuhn, T. S. 1977. Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, especially Chapters 9-13 (pages 225-339).
Feyerabend, P. 1975/1988. Against Method, Revised edition. London: Verso, especially Chapters 1-5 (pages 14-54).
Shapere, D. 1966/1981. “Meaning and Scientific Change,” in I. Hacking, (ed.), Scientific Revolutions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 28-59.Realism and Anti-realism
Van Fraassen, B. C. 1980. Scientific Image, Oxford: Clarendon Press, especially Chapter 2 (pages 6-40).
The various papers in
D. Papineau’s (ed.), 1996. Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
especially:
Laudan, L. 1981/1996. “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,” pages 107-138.
Fine, A. 1984/1996. “Natural Ontological Attitude,” pages 21-44.
Lipton, P. 1993/1996. “Is the Best Good Enough?,” pages 93-106.
Worrall, J. 1989/1996. “Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?,” pages 93-106.
Hacking, I. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, especially Chapter 16 (pages 262-275).
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics.
"One interesting question provoked by my “Is Philosophy a Science?” series is about whether philosophy ever makes any progress. Does our thinking, our theories, get better? Or are we simply going around in circles, endlessly?
As I noted in my first piece on this topic, in a way the question is a bit unfair. Parts of philosophy do start to lend themselves to regular empirical inquiry and progress. At which point they usually branch off, forming disciplines of their own. Psychology at the end of the nineteenth century was one such case. So what is left is almost by definition non-progressive, at least in a scientific sort of way.
But we do have change and in a way it is progressive. Take the argument from design – the eye is like a telescope; telescopes have telescope designers; hence the eye has a designer, the Great Optician in the Sky."
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