“Because psychoanalysis is a secular paradigm of religious self-knowledge, it aims at abolishing itself…. [T]he psychological man of this post-religious century is struggling to make his deeper and more subjective processes clearer as neuroses, rather than as gods, as his ancestors had done. Later, probably, the therapeutic will have externalized his emotional life successfully, and psychology will then cease to be a post-religious discipline; rather, it will probably supply the language of cultural controls by which the new man will organize his social relations and self-conceptions.”

Philip Rieff’s second-most famous exercise in the cult of Freud is the kind of book that makes one stop and wonder how in the world he has gone so far down this particular road, and whether he wouldn’t have been better off finally forcing himself to work his way through that differential geometry book sitting on his shelf. Where Christopher Lasch’s invocations of Freud can be off-putting or skepticism-inducing, Rieff’s jargon-laced, argument-free meanderings will try one’s patience to its limits. Is there any reason to use “symbolic” as a (count) noun? (Dictionary.com thinks not.) At times, the impression of ESL, or at least a work of translation, is overwhelming—complete with grammatical infelicities (“[B]y positive communities are meant those that offer…” [p. 71]; “were there a lesson…it is that…” [p. 140]), preposition mischoice, and generally barbarous sentence structure. (He also appears to be slightly confused about the meaning of the Latin “cf.”) Nor does Rieff ever hesitate to sacrifice a clear and meaningful sentence to an allusion.

And yet—there is a point. Rieff’s central thesis can be summarized as follows. The modern age, inaugurated by the long death of Christian culture, is inhospitable to institutionalized moral norms—perhaps because material plenty has outmoded a “moral demand system” based on asceticism and community interdependence, or because of the transition from an agrarian to an urban culture. Rather than ushering in a new common culture, then, the latest ethical slogans represent only elements of personal therapy: modern man strives not for righteousness, but for well-being. Or, as Rieff would have it: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when ‘I believe,’ the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to ‘one feels,’ the caveat of the therapeutic” (p. 25).

Freud recognized this, and in his wisdom scrupulously avoided elaborating or endorsing any new modes of commitment, any new faiths, knowing them to
be incompatible with the dawning age. Instead, he advocated the “analytic attitude,” a discipline of self-scrutiny aiming at neutralizing behaviors that conduce to unhappiness—ego strengthening—, by locating them in some powerful but external agency: the unconscious (id) or the culture (super-ego).

Of course, an age without community norms also threatens to be an age without purpose; and “[t]here is no feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen.” (Lasch of course makes a similar point about choice in a culture that insists on the equality of all choices, though he traces this to modes of consumption.) Yet the present dispensation cannot, for one reason or another, support the reestablishment of community norms or purpose, and consequently of individual commitment to something greater than oneself—except insofar as it is seen as a means to a (self-)therapeutic end. For this reason, “[b]alance is the delicate ethic Freud proposes, balance on the edge that separates futility and ultimate purposelessness from immediate effectiveness and purpose. Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty going” (pp. 40-41). The aim of analysis cannot be to provide a source for new commitments, but rather to “limit the folly of being drawn too far outside the protective management of [one's] own pleasures” (p. 51).

This is the unfortunate error of three of Freud’s epigones: Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D.H. Lawrence. Each, Reiff argues, attempted to put psychoanalysis to work doing precisely what it could not: establish a new set of moral demands. Jung found the sources for such a new dispensation in his “discovery” of a “subterranean God,” “the aspect of divinity permanently opposed to ‘Lord Jesus’” (p. 110). He hoped to develop from this revelation a reservoir of new myths (“archetypes”)—to each his own—which could serve whatever therapeutic end the dead Christian myth once had.

Reich, for his part, extolled the pre-analytic, leading him not only to celebrate the “genital character,” but to derogate thinking. “A repressed character is afraid of himself—more precisely, of his own impulses. Instead of relieving the fears, as Freud sought to do, Reich idealized the impulses” (168). The terminus of this line of inquiry was the “discovery” of “orgone energy”—think of the Force in Star Wars—and his final decade in a federal penitentiary. (The FDA was skeptical about the potential of Reich’s “orgone accumulators” to cure cancer.)

Why Rieff devotes a chapter to D.H. Lawrence is perhaps even less explicable, considering that he never received positive notice in the psycholanalytic community. (Reich apparently enjoyed decades of critical success.) Lawrence’s fixation with the sex act is well known, although his psychoanalytic rationalizations less so. I would not alter this state of affairs. I shall only add Rieff’s appraisal that, like Jung and Reich, Larewnce’s idealization of the unconscious was an attempt to take psychoanalysis beyond Freud; to replace his predecessor’s “scientific” and rational management of man’s inner life with its liberation, its fusing with his outer life (in erotic union). Actually, the idea that the good life requires reconciling our inner and outer lives was, Rieff says, equally well understood by Freud. What Lawrence apparently missed was this: True, Freud argued for (some amount of) rationalization of the inner life, but he also understood one’s “perceptual and social world” to be “expressions of the percipient’s intelligence and emotions,” thus giving (I suppose) our interiority its due. Freud, like Lawrence, knew that “futher changes in social and technological arrangements”—i.e., manipulations only of the external world—contra the “fundamentalists of rationalism,” “will serve only to distract men temporarily from the prison of their inwardness” (204).

Whether or not Rieff has provided a fair picture of these followers of Freud, this writer is not particularly qualified to say. He is, if possible, even less interested: Any study that begins with the premise that “well-being is a delicate personal achievement” seems—to me—to say much more about its professors than it ever could about the rest of us. It would however be negligent to omit that Rieff’s gripe with Jung is not entirely impersonal: “The chief gentile of the psychoanalytic movement, Jung, did not tolerate for long the health-mindedness that Freud had imposed upon his science…” (p. 41)

When the subterranean God erupted from out of the unconscious of the Germans, Jung was neither indignant nor morally offended. On the contrary, there were Jungian reasons to believe that this eruption was a therapeutic realignment of an unbalanced German collective unconscious. The incidental cost to many Jews of their lives was an unfortunate by-product of the eruption itself. Jung was not anti-Semitic, in any of the crude sense of that condition. Rather, being unfettered by the pale surface of the moral law and its personified symbol, Jesus, Jung could even utter some welcoming sighs of terror at the reappearance of the dark underside in political attire (p. 111).

Here is animus; with Reich, who rarely in Rieff’s telling rises above a figure of fun, there is merely contempt. “Being above all a scientest, Reich was very precise about the ocean[ic God]: it was an ‘orgone ocean…from which…all being, physical as well as emotional, emerges.’” (179) His attitude toward Lawrence is more ambivalent.

Rieff disapproves, then, of any attempt to put psychoanalysis to work as a new faith, even though he sees it playing an indispensable role in the new culture. But he is also not without nostalgia for the older age. He writes as one who sees himself as facing the future stoically, without illusions. As to whether the present age really is incapable of supporting a new communal ethic, I have some doubts—but only the future can say.

We take a final pause to consider the slow death of Freudian psychology. One thinks to trace the etiology back to its barrenness as a scientific discipline—or really, its insatiate fecundity, its ability to generate explanations for just about any behavior (hence the unfalsifiability that Popper accused it of). But even after it had retreated from mainstream psychology, it maintained outposts in less rigorous disciplines of the social sciences, as well as its fascination for the culture; whereas, in the intervening half-century since The Triumph of the Therapeutic, it sank to the status of a somewhat embarrassing joke. A hypothesis: the appearance of evolutionary psychology has outmoded it, by providing more satisfying answers to the same questions. Think for example of the Freudian vs. the evo-psych explanation of the incest taboo. Strangely enough, then, “your genes” have taken up much of the theoretical burden borne by the “unconscious.” (And of course, evolutionary psychology has likewise been assailed for being unfalsifiable.) Why are we not sexually attracted to close relatives? Why do we behave altruistically? Can we account for the regularities in filial-parental relationships? Maybe, then, the most curious phenomenon is not our having lost interest in any community ethic, but our finding these new questions so compelling.

That ancient philosopher is the guiding light of the book, although it obviously owes a debt as well to Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—not just in topic, but in narrative style.  That novel makes an explicit appearance; but Lasch’s credit is confined to a pair of very brief references to The Culture of Narcissism.  I doubt in fact that Crawford has read TMS, for there is no sign of (self-)consciousness that he is, indeed, reproducing the central arguments of that book—albeit in a very different style—, minus Lasch’s Freudian architectonics.

The central argument is that for one’s labor to be gratifying, one must submit to external standards of excellence.  These are hard to come by in the factory, where one’s contribution to a finished product is opaque, and very often undemanding of skill; but equally rare in the modern white-collar workplace, the large bureaucratic organization, where the distance between the execution and appraisal of work is great, and one’s engagement with standards concomitantly attenuated.  Here, presentations of self outbid all other aims (encouraging, as Lasch would say, narcissistic responses), assignment of blame and reward having taken on a provisional and arbitrary character in the face of distant and ambiguously assignable criteria of success.  Likewise, we find in the culture of consumption—the flipside of the degradation of work (again cf. Lasch)—the glorification of autonomy under the watchwords of “freedom” and “choice”—even though in practice this amounts to picking from pre-selected options.

The practical mastery of the shop, contrariwise, offers an alternative to radical autonomy (which can hardly be gratifying anyway, since all options are strenuously insisted to be equally acceptable): the assent to—and engagement with—standards of quality, standards imposed by the external world (like the mechanics of a motorcycle engine) and by a community of the skilled, and thus made real.  In thereby reuniting thinking and doing, the skilled trades provide the conditions for practical wisdom (“It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals”), and hence for human flourishing, which can only occur in the pursuit of excellence.

It is difficult indeed not to hear Lasch in all of this—Crawford even connects the subordination of self to external reality found in mechanical work to that spirit in the representational arts (cf. Lasch on the “opposition to subject matter” of modern abstract artists).  His closing, however, echoes a different paleoconservative student of Aristotle, Thomas Fleming, concluding that solidarity—for Crawford, as found in the common perspective made possible by shared acquaintance with one of the “useful arts”—is a better underpinning for ethics than the universalism of liberal humanitarianism.

Mr. Crawford is not a bad, but neither a very fine writer: his prose is a little choppy, with unfortunate vestiges of academic writing (particularly contemporary analytic philosophy: “I would like to consider whether….”; “I believe this remedy remains valid.”  What???  Who starts a sentence with “I believe…”??).  The attempt to lighten things with the occasional obscenity often feels like what it is—namely, a contrivance, aiming at street cred—just as the too numerous citations feel like a play for highbrow respectability.  (No one feels utterly un-self-conscious putting the f-bomb in print, so some kind of pretense is involved, if only the need to tell oneself, “No, this is too natural to censor.”  Likewise, the heavy citation of very recent sources undermines the feeling of genuine scholarship: a work, like the present one, of very broad synthesis cannot be so indebted to the last decade; so the references can seem like padding, or an arbitrary sample determined by the author’s recent casual reading).  But often enough these colorful remarks do feel natural, easy, and funny; and making a case for the useful arts, even an intellectual case, need not after all require full command of some academic literature to be effective—which, indeed, this book is.  One may, I suppose, stop to consider the possibility that a book which purports to justify, in terms of “unsuitable” economic organization (“absentee capitalism”), the odiousness of working for a living, will always find credulous readers; but this reader, for one, nevertheless considers the argument quite persuasive.

Now, it must be said that a great portion of the book comprises very thinly disguised bragging: Crawford makes sure to mention—repeatedly—his PhD (in philosophy!), the prestige of his graduate institution, his bachelor’s degree in physics; and of course, to regale the reader with his mechanical know-how.  The latter appears (prima facie, at least) to be integral to a book about the virtue of a tradesman’s life; but the former would’ve have been easy enough to omit.  But then, a great portion of the book’s effectiveness is its thymotic appeal to pride, or perhaps even machismo. Just about all American men have some degree, more or less pronounced, of mechanic-envy, as Crawford is well aware: not to know one’s way around the workbench is not to be a man.  This feeling is particularly acute in the high-IQ man, whose self-image is predicated on competence and achievement.  Yes, periodically this man finds himself, to his great discomfort, helpless; depending on someone else—and a blue-collar man, to boot!—for a basic need; and and at great cost, so there’s no feigning insouciance.

Crawford never explicitly invokes this weakness, but he certainly exploits it.  And then his credential burnishing serves to rub in the coup de grace: “I can do both.”  Now this last must work at a tacit level, since our polemicist is at least ostensibly unimpressed by abstract intellectual work (but what about writing a book??)—presumably the reader is to take Mill’s position that the man with experience in two domains is the more qualified to judge properly on their gratification.  But work this tactic does, and there is no doubt that this was Crawford’s true aim (unconscious or not).  One will not find curious, then, its omission from other reviews: the mechanically disinclined reviewer would rather not expose his shame, and the others will use the cover to insinuate their own prowess. (See e.g. Francis Fukuyama’s review, in which we learn of his furniture-making skills; although, really, this is hardly fair: Fukuyama’s autobiographical note is the furthest thing from vulgarity, restrained and as modest as such a thing can be.)

In addition to persuasive, the author comes across as (more or less) genuinely and appealingly humble, and his personal anecdotes are always tasteful, neither exhibitionist nor exploitative.  Crawford is also refreshingly unencumbered by the prevailing structure of taboos: there is little attempt to balance hypothetical he‘s with she‘s, and none of the usually obligatory demonstrations of racial goodthinking (in spite of ample opportunity).  His tone ranges from a conversational pedagogical, i.e. without any hint of hectoring (much like Pirsig’s in ZatAoMR), to light sarcasm, without ever descending into irritation or brusqueness. These serve his purpose well.

Is the book a full success, then?  I think it achieves essentially all of what a book of this type can achieve—but two serious questions are left lingering.  First, Crawford, like Lasch, ignores the question of talent (or IQ) distribution.  He blames scientific management of labor, in its separation of the planning and manual sides of production, for the de-skilling of the work force.  This may well be true.  But surely there had been, are now, and ever will be a portion of the population unsuited to skilled craft and (particularly) proprietorship.  Factory division of labor was supposed—in theory, at least—to lower production costs. (Lasch explicitly denies this, and Crawford argues likewise that it did so only by making labor more fungible and therefore cheaper.)  But did wage labor not also provide employment for a pre-existing type with little capacity for independent, skilled labor?  I don’t want to oversell the point—the answer might well be “no,” or the question might be otherwise finessed—but surely it can’t be disregarded.  What’s the minimum IQ for a competent mechanic?  Crawford, addressing himself to the right half of the bell curve, doesn’t say.

Second: is capitalism to blame?  Crawford appears to be a conservative, albeit (semi-)covert (and he does give a nod to the fashionable bête noire of the modern liberal, legal personhood for corporations—the 21st-century psychic equivalent of the School of the Americas), so he sympathizes with the theory of market-driven efficiencies.  Yet for all that, the market has an uncanny penchant for churning out bad products, and particularly for demoralizing its workers, alienating them from their labors.  So managerial capitalism (“absentee capitalism”) comes in for a beating. Crawford provides a psychological explanation for this failure (see above)—but is this then the empirical falsification of the economists’ theories?? or explainable on some other such theory? or just a non-equilibrium phenomenon?  I don’t suppose Mr. Crawford is obliged to answer such a question; but nevertheless one is tempted to exhort: “Bite the bullet! Say that there might well be a trade-off between, on the one hand, general standard of living (measured in purchasing power), and on the other, general job satisfaction—and the pursuit of excellence.”

The story follows young Jonas as he anxiously awaits the year-end ceremony at which all the twelve-year olds of this highly regimented but superficially pleasant “community” will receive from its Elders their appointed vocation. To his surprise and dismay, the protagonist is selected to the mysterious role of “Receiver,” which turns out to be the repository of communal—indeed, pre-communal—memory, memory which must be acquired from his superannuating predecessor. Through a magical laying on of hands, the old man daily transmits his own vast magazine to the boy, joys and sorrows both. The transmission awakens Jonas for the first time to the full range of human emotion—and to the comparative poverty of life in the community. Here is revealed explicitly the (literal) color-blindness of his neighbors, and soon after the true meaning of “release” from the community, his own (adoptive) parents’ duplicity and heartlessness (though not of course cruelty, which is unknown), and other horrors.

Haunted by the memories of pain, frustrated at his inability to communicate the notion of color, pleasure, and familial love to his childhood friends, burdened by the uniqueness of his role, and desperate to emancipate his community, the young Receiver convinces the old to defy the rules and restore individual memory. Knowing that the “release” of a previous trainee Receiver had briefly liberated her memory stores to the townsfolk, the old one plots for Jonas to escape from the village (on bike) to effect the same end. Jonas does, but taking with him an infant boy set for euthanization himself.

The story ends scores of miles from town and weeks later, with its
protaganist in a state of starvation and parlous exhaustion, descending a snowy hill while clutching to himself both the child and the feeling of
being awaited and welcome at the bottom—and hearing distant strains of, for the first time, music.

For the most part, the novel reads straightforwardly as coming-of-age
allegory, complete with: the first stirrings of romantic attraction
(forbidden—in fact medicated away by the community); the substitution of work and vocation for play; disillusionment with parents; growing away from old friends; first acquaintance with the vaster, adult emotional milieu (death and grieving, contextualized family love); even the appearance of protectiveness for the young and helpless in Jonas’s devotion to the infant he saves.

But this interpretation has less to offer for the ambiguous ending. Lowry, provocatively, refuses to specify precisely what is required of the Receiver to discharge his accumulated memories to the community. Need he merely leave its borders? or must he reach the Elsewhere that Jonas thinks he has found at the story’s end? Or, more disturbingly, must he—like the previous young initiate—die? We might even suppose that the old Receiver had himself known this fact when he sent Jonas away—knowingly sent him, then, to his death; although the young protagonist knew not. The final scene is then our young friend’s unraveling, his destruction—his martyrdom, in fact, so that his community might live. This sounds indeed like allegory, putting in a new focus Jonas’s unknown parentage (all children are adopted away from their “birthmothers”), his anxiety about being chosen for such a role (cf. Gethsemane), and his relationship with the all-wise father figure, the old Receiver—who styles himself, to Jonas, the Giver—and who perhaps chooses to sacrifice his young apprentice. Yes, this sounds like allegory, but not for the normal transition to adulthood.

However: having said all that, still, this interpretation is not a perfect fit.  Setting these questions and, for now, the intended audience, aside, nevertheless it must be said that Ms. Lowry is not a fine writer: Her prose is plain and without elegance, making little use of imagery or figure. Her characters, including the protagonist, are neither particularly realistic nor engaging. Even the pacing is slightly awkward. And then there is the “memory transmission.” The unfortunate choice of ceremonial peculiars—the boy must remove his “tunic” (why do our descendants invariably wear one-pieces?) and lie face down on the bed while the old man grasps his apprentice’s naked shoulders—, coupled with the even more unfortunate cognomens “Giver” and “Receiver” (resp.), ineluctably conjures the image of pederasty. One assumes that the author was entirely insensitive to this fact, though it is frankly hard to imagine an age that innocent, even at a remove of fifteen years. (Perhaps we may blame the Clinton years.) This renders the novel’s central conceit somewhat (involuntarily) distressing, if not wholly unacceptable.

And yet: it’s an absorbing book (I read it in one sitting), and has its
moments of minor cleverness (in its allegory) and pathos. Also: won the 1994 Newberry Award. Rating: 3/10

Précis: The purposefully contrary but peerless Christopher Lasch—social critic, historian, Marxist/Freudian theorist—follows up his surprise bestseller The Culture of Narcissism with an even more explicitly—in fact, thorough-goingly—Freudian analysis of the current (mid-80s) cultural scene.  Self-consciously rejecting not only liberalism and conservatism, as currently conceived, but the very language of contemporary politics, Lasch forges a new matrix for the politico-cultural state from Freud’s model of the human psyche.  Meant in part as a clarification and extension of its putatively misunderstood predecessor, The Minimal Self precises the notion of narcissism explored in that work; explains this pathology’s dominance of late-industrial, managerial capitalism; and traces its etiology through Freud’s theories of  psychological development and prevailing social conditions.  Along the way, Lasch explores related themes: the emergence of a survival mentality, moralization of the Holocaust, and the minimalist aesthetic in art.

After rejecting the “liberal” and “conservative” responses (defenses of rationalism and authority, respectively) to the current cultural sickness, Lasch paints a sympathetic portrait of the “Neo-Freudian” New Left—and proceeds to dismiss it as well.  Narcissism, the attempt to obliterate the distinction between self and world, is rooted in the inevitable and universal anxieties attending the detachment of desires from their gratifications—the emergence of self—at birth.  The culture of  consumption and the division of labor together encourage narcissistic responses both by weakening our sense of the world’s reality and by abetting our illusions of limitless gratification.  Coping with these anxieties, then, requires not the strengthening of authoritative sanctions; nor increased reliance on our rationalism; nor technological emancipation from work, the subordination of work to play, or mystical reunion with Mother Nature; but practical experience with the world—the kind of mastery of our surroundings currently discouraged by productive and consumptive patterns in which the link between man-made objects and man’s labor has been severed.  Such practical wisdom (phronesis) respects our fundamental tension between dependence on nature and the ability to transcend it.

The present volume having been written, in contrast to TCoN and the subsequent The Revolt of the Elites, as a book rather than as a series of re-worked essays, it sacrifices some of those books’ range for a much tighter focus.

Production, Consumption, and Narcissism

Critiques of mass consumption are common enough, but Lasch interestingly links his to a critique of mass production, insisting that “[c]onsumerism is only the other side of the degradation of work—the elimination of playfulness and craftsmanship from the process of production.”  Mass production discourages practical mastery of the world, while the “second nature” of disposable commodities contributes to its unreality. Consumerism promotes, then, not hedonism but “a state of uneasiness and chronic anxiety.”  While ostensibly stimulating human potential in multiplying the available options, the “pluralist conception of freedom” underwriting mass consumption actually undermines the meaning of choice by strenuously refusing to pass judgment on it, “by denying that its exercise leads to any important consequences.”

Are there not some compensations of large-scale industrial production that might be weighed against the costs: “the loss of autonomy and popular control, a tendency to confuse self-determination with the exercise of consumer choices, a growing ascendency of elites, the replacement of practical skills with organized expertise”?  In fact, Lasch denies any connection at all between technological advancement and “material and social progress”: that modern surgery has contributed to an increase in either longevity or physical well-being; that human control over the physical environment has been anything more than “superficial” or “short-term”; that industrial technology has in practice (no matter what the theory) expanded the range of options.

The elite critique of mass consumption, then, which sees the issue as one of decline of high culture and the culprit as democratization, is doubly flawed, since the expansion of democracy is also illusory.  True, authoritarian social controls have indeed been abandoned, but only in favor of therapeutic ones: the use of psychiatric counseling and observation in “neutralizing” wage and supervision grievances; the “subordination of instruction to testing and counseling” in the school system; the rise of technocracy in politics and its consequent commodification (choice among the pre-selected options determined by the managerial elite); the use of opinion surveys to stigmatize and pathologize unpopular political positions.

Survivalism: the Discourse on Mass Death, Minimal Art, and Everyday Life

Another distinctive feature (though not obviously a narcissistic one) of the times, according to Lasch, is the emergence and especially the ubiquity of a “survival mentality.”  Manifesting itself in political sloganeering, commerical advertisements, newspaper reports, pop-psychology and self-help manuals, personal memoirs, and science fiction, the rhetoric of survival represents the “normalization of crisis,” issuing from an awareness of the enormities of twentieth-century horrors, especially the death camps.  But it also testifies to the loss of faith in cooperative political action—and here, though he doesn’t make it explicit, Lasch foreshadows the book’s later chapters on narcissism and its connection with the feeling of helplessness, of being the mere victim of circumstances.  Likewise, the mystic anti-individualist ethic that emerges in Doris Lessing’s survivalist science fiction represents, as much as the self-styled survival guide Kurt Saxon’s arch-individualism, a narcissistic defense (see the final section below).

An alternative critique of survivalism correctly espies in some species of it a cheapening of life in its refusal to see anything as worth dying for.  Unfortunately, however, this argument has been deployed in countering the advocates of (e.g.) nuclear disarmament and ecological conservation, who correctly recognize that there will be no survivors (of which to speak) of either nuclear war or environmental devastation.

Survivalism may be a natural response to Auschwitz and the Gulag, but its invasion of everyday life threatens to trivialize those atrocities; just as the “language of extremity, the only language appropriate to extreme situations, soon loses its force through repetition and inflation.”  (“The destruction of the Jews of Eastern Europe did not become a ‘holocaust’ until the mid-sixties.”)  Yet, on the other hand, the attempt to maintain the uniqueness of the Holocaust also jeopardizes our ability to imagine,  and therefore to descry harbingers of, future atrocities, future genocides.  “By locating the Holocaust in the past, by reserving it for the Jews, and by associating it with insane racial policies now universally condemned (officially at least), the most sober and responsible historians of the Holocaust, seeking to prevent the routinization of the language of atrocity, unavoidably obscure the point that the United State and the Soviet Union, in pursuit of legitimate national goals, under leadership not of criminals but of ordinary men in full possession of their mental faculties, even now prepare themselves to commit genocide against each other in the event of a nuclear war.” Attempts to draw moral lessons—particularly lessons for “everyday” survival—from the Holocaust per se are equally misguided: that barbarity can have meaning only within the context of “a moral order transcending it.”

It is not surprising to find the minimal self appearing in the arts, as well: the “protagonists” of the novels of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, dominated by external circumstances; the affectless pop art of Warhol, Lichtenstein, et alia; the incorporation of randomness by conceptualists like Robert Barry; and the “opposition to subject-matter” of abstract painter Ad Reinhardt.  “The survival of art, like the survival of everything else, has become problematic, not…because mass communications have usurped the representational function of art, nor…because reality outstrips the artistic imagination, but because the weakening of the distinction between the self and its surroundings…makes the very concept of reality, together with the concept of the self, increasingly untenable.”

“The Politics of the Psyche”

The idea that men are animated by different and sometimes competing “parts”–or faculties, or essences–is at least as old as Plato’s tripartite division into nous (intellect), thymos (passion), and epithumia (appetite); and Freud’s version–ego, id, superego–can be seen as an attempt to supplant the traditional Western organization (at least reason and desire, thymos making an occasional showing) with a new model.  Lasch follows Freud: id is the faculty of the unconscious and of primitive drives; ego of realism, perception, cognition, and organization; the superego of internalized fear of punishment.  In utero, we are all id, but the separation of our desires from the source of their gratification occasioned by birth initiates the distinction between self and not-self (the distinction on which all future ones are based), and therefore the emergence of the ego.  The resulting separation anxiety is the crucible in which human personality is forged.  The superego emerges last, originating not, as sometimes thought, in the external world, as a strict internalization of parental authority; but in the id, in the “individual’s  own aggressive impulses, directed intially against his parents…projected onto them, reinternalized as aggressive and domineering images of authority, and finally redirected in this form against the ego.”

The emerging infant ego (purportedly) responds to the separation anxiety of birth with defense mechanisms: over-idealization of the source of gratification (mother); dissociation of “the frustrating…[and] pleasure-giving aspects of the adults who take care of” it; fantasies of ecstatic reunion with the mother; and grandiose illusions of omnipotence. Narcissism, then, is not egoism or selfishness but the (vain) longing to recapture that oneness that precedes birth and annul separation anxiety.  This denial of the external world, in its refusal to accept that the source of gratification lies outside oneself, manifests itself in “a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires”—clinical narcissism.

Three distintively modern features encourage narcissistic defenses: “the emergence of the egalitarian family, so-called; the child’s increasing exposure to other socializing agencies besides the family; and the general effect of modern mass culture in breaking down distinctions between illusions and reality.”  Thus emancipation of the child from parental, particularly paternal, authority, accompanied by the colonization of family functions by “other socializing agencies,” in exposing the child to  early sexual indoctrination (and increasingly, perhaps, exploitation) while undermining his confidence in adult authority, weakens resistance to narcissistic “fantasies of sexual and generational interchangeability” and to the illusion of omnipotence.  Thus the cult of consumerism promotes not hedonism but uneasy self-consciousness; and surrounds individuals with fantasies, illusions, and disposable commodities; weakening, then, both the sense of self and the sense of a durable external world.  “Even  science, which takes as its task precisely the disenchantment of the world, helps to reactivate infantile appetites and the infantile need for illusions by impressing itself on people’s lives as a never-ending series of technological miracles, wonder-working drugs and cures, and electronic conveniences that obviate the need for human effort.”

Lasch goes on to parse contemporary reactions to the culture of narcissism in terms of Freud’s partition of the psyche: the party of the ego, corresponding more or less to the “liberal, humanist tradition,” places its confidence in the powers of human reason and increase in enlightenment; the party of the superego, corresponding most closely to “the position of those labeled neoconservatives,” “regard[s] a restoration of the social superego and of strong parental authority as the best hope  of social stability and cultural renewal”; and the so-called New Left, which Lasch can’t quite bring himself to identify with the id but which he does say “originate[s] in the central contention…that ‘our politics begin with our feelings.’”  He identifies it instead with the so-called ego ideal, the variously described “heir to the state of primary narcissism” (Freud’s term).

Lasch proceeds to critique all three.  The strengthening of moral prohibitions is counterproductive if it is based only on fear, which it must be in a culture which cannot inspire “confidence, respect, [or] admiration.”  The party of the ego, on the other hand, slides inexorably into technocratic social control, since on the one hand, liberal humanism rejects authoritative traditions (dominance by the superego); and on the other, its therapeutic morality ultimately “destroys the idea of moral responsibility,” a conclusion vainly disavowed by (e.g.) the game- and group-therapists, but openly endorsed by behaviorists like Skinner.  Their disagreement is only cosmetic, since both “[share] the liberal faith that the problems of modern social organization are administrative and psychological, not economic and political.”  More significantly, they both  share a faith in technological or “scientific” emancipation from our natural condition of psychic conflict, a faith rooted once again in “the illusion of infantile omnipotence.”

Finally, the New Left, to whom Lasch is most sympathetic, appreciates the need for a genuine “cultural revolution.”  But its neo-Freudian exponents—Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and the Freudian feminists—although they appreciate that “[n]either liberalism nor Marxism provides an adequate explanation of the destructiveness” of modern culture, each ultimately makes a wrong diagnosis.  Thus Marcuse rightly rejects the “tender-minded” psychoanalytic radicalism of the 1930s that wrongly emphasized cultural determinants of character at the expense of biological ones, but misfires in locating the source of human unhappiness in the subordination of the “pleaure principle” to the “performance principle.”  This leads him to advocate the “technological abolition of work” and to see the division of labor and proliferation of technology as liberating, rather than as the original sources of both labor alienation and narcissistic responses to the external world (resp.).  Brown, contrariwise, sees the existence of the death instinct (Thanatos, of which Lasch is skeptical) and its striving for a resting point as implying a condemnation of restless activity and ultimately the endorsement of “play”—overlooking, then, any “virtue in the impulse to master our surroundings.”  Finally, the Freudian feminists (Stephanie Engel, Nancy  Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Jessica Benjamin) see in modern narcissistic tendencies a salutary “feminine” desire for “mystical union with nature,” and correspondingly decry “substitute gratifications” for a sense of connection with Mother Nature.  But such gratification, particularly purposeful activity, “becomes pathological not when it serves to compensate us for earlier losses but when it serves to deny those losses.”

“The Case for a Guilty Conscience”

If there is a way out, then, it lies in the practical mastery—Aristotle’s phronesis—that is acquired through the kind of work in which instrumental reason has been subordinated to the cultivation of craft and virtue.  “[T]he choice of means has to be governed by their conformity to standards of excellence designed to extend human capacities of self-understanding and self-mastery.”  Lasch goes so far as to claim that politics, which for Aristotle were the “highest form of practice,” were not reduced to mere means-ends resolution until Thomas More and Machiavelli.  “[F]or Aristotle and his followers…[the] rules and conventions [of politics were] designed not so much to solve the problems of social living as to encourage citizens to test themselves against demanding standards of moral excellence (for example, in contests of oratorical skill and physical process) and thus to develop their gifts to the highest pitch.”

Or, taking a psychoanalytic view, practical activity furnishes individuals with “transitional phenomena” which mediate between the unresponsive external world and the fantastic inner world of instant gratification. (Winnicott’s “transitional phenomena” are a generalization of his “transitional objects,” the teddy bears and security blankets that “provide children with libidinal gratification and serve as substitutes for the mother’s breast,” that ease the process of ego emergence.  They serve as both substitute gratifications and, importantly, acknowledgments of the separation of want and satiety.)  Mass-produced commodities cannot play this role, since they bear no connection either to personal craft or to a durable and realistic outer world.  “Commodities cannot take the place of hand-made objects any more than science can take the place of practical worldly experience.  Neither contributes to a sense of exploration and mastery.”

Of course, a reliance on transitional phenomena embodies a certain tension, since it recognizes both the human capacity for manipulating and directing the physical environment, and the limits of that ability—the awareness of which first elicits narcissistic responses.  But Lasch sees in the “Western, Judaeo-Christian tradition” an individualism which defines selfhood precisely in terms of “tension, division, conflict.” Human freedom means, among other things, the freedom to fail—which is,  incidentally, what is overlooked by the Freudian feminists’ emphasis on “mutuality and relatedness” at the expense of self-sufficiency.  “The innocence of nature is harmony without freedom.”  The “party of the ego,” for its part, fails to appreciate those limits; and the “party of the superego” confuses conscience—an awareness of the tension between “freedom and the capacity for destruction”—with submission to “a received body of authoritative moral law.”

Christopher Lasch has a gift for graceful prose, a knack for pithy phrasing and felicitous word choice that lend his writing a certain crispness, an economy, an elegance.  I daresay I know of no equal in that regard.  I will give him the last word, then, on the potential of human conscience, so conceived.  Linking its emergence with the transition from the “idea that the dead call for revenge” to practices of “genuine mourning,” and the corresponding replacement of vindicative gods by loving and merciful ones, Lasch says of the new gods’ “morality of loving your enemy”:

Such a morality has never achieved anything like general popularity, but it lives on, even in our own enlightened age, as a reminder both of our fallen state and of our surprising capacity for gratitude, remorse, and forgiveness, by means of which we now and then transcend it.

Miscellaneous Quotations

“Competition, for example, now centers not so much on the desire to excel as on the struggle to avoid a crushing defeat.”

“[Contemporary] social arrangements…support a system of mass production and mass consumption [that] tend[s] to discourage initiative and self-reliance and to promote dependence, passivity, and a spectatorial state of mind both at work and at play.”

“All medical technology has done is to increase patients’ dependence on machines and the medical experts who operate these ‘life-support systems.’”

“I find it hard to imagine a less attractive prospect than a society made up of intellectuals.”

“The school system, the child-care professions, and the entertainment industry have now taken over many of the custodial, disciplinary, and educative activities formerly carried out by the family.”

“The mass media make an earnest effort to tell us who and what we are, indeed to generate a spurious sense of national identity, but they do this by telling us what programs we like to watch, what products we like to buy, what political candidates we plan to vote for, how many of us will marry, how many of get divorced, how long we will live, how many of us will die of cancer, how many of us will die in traffic accidents on a holiday weekend, how many of us will die in a nuclear war, how many of us will survive a nuclear war if adequate precautions are taken.”

Out of fellow-feeling, compatriotism, guilt, or just the bad luck of getting dragged into the affair—we can never say for sure—Plarr tries his best to save Fortnum’s life, even as the police themselves close in on the kidnappers’ hideout in the poor barrio.  He succeeds, but at the cost of his own life, which he loses along with several of the kidnappers, including both of his childhood friends: Aquino, the victim of (Paraguayan) state torture, and the ex-priest Leon Rivas.  Against the official story, in which the rebels have killed the doctor, a grateful but conflicted Fortnum—knowing now Plarr’s violation of his wife’s marital bond—attests in vain to the real version.  The book ends with Fortnum’s surprised relief in discovering that his wife really loved the loveless Plarr, finding himself in comforting the grieving Clara closer to her than he ever had been before.

The book’s subthemes are Plarr’s inability to feel—or maybe just express—love [you know: because he's English!]; a version of Catholicism that can survive in the harsh world of South American revolutionaries, articulated by the ex-priest, Father Rivas, and ultimately (maybe) found compelling by Plarr; and the (, at times, comically) self-destructive machismo which suffuses Latin American society, exemplified in the middle-brow but vain novelist, Dr. Saavendra [why the double "a"??].

Conclusion: Enjoyable but not actually any good in any artistic sense; marred a little by 1970′s faux-profundity, Hollywood-cinematic aspirations (lurking in the background), and English provincialism (“if only Latin America were more like us! stiff upper lip and all that!”).  I leave open the possibility that I’ve overlooked some deeper content.  Recommendable mostly on its humor, typical English irony and absurdity (e.g.: the British ambassador keeps accidentally referring to the overlooked Fortnum as “Mason”).  Rating: 6/10

That influence came primarily through his protege, amanuensis, and unflagging champion, John Stuart Mill, the son of Bentham’s pal and catechumen, James Mill. Young Mill, arrogant and hectoring to Bentham’s pseudo-precise and pedantic, shifted utilitarianism’s emphasis from the law to ethics, thereby giving it wider significance but burdening it with greater philosophical difficulties (see below—though some might see those as inhering in Bentham’s original pretentions to rigor and universality). Mill, however, was so impressed with the Romanticism of the age as to modify Bentham’s thesis to accomodate its “higher” virtues: the “sense of honour and personal dignity…, the love of beauty…, of order…, of power…, of action…, of loving.”

The thought alone of providing a blow-by-blow account of the present collection enervates the mind and demoralizes the soul. Briefly, then:

The introduction is a wide-ranging and useful essay written by editor Allen Ryan in 1987. It’s followed by chapters 1-5 and 13-14 of Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, laying out the principle of utility (“that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question;….[i.e.,] to promote or to oppose happiness”), its vindication, its competitors (asceticism, sympathy/antipathy, and “pretended systems,” relying on a “moral sense” or common sense or etc.), its application to penal law, and an elaborate taxonomy of plearures and pains. This last manages, against all odds, to be the most edifying.

Next we find excerpts from Mill’s A System of Logic: “Of Liberty and Necessity,” espousing a compatibilism on free will (faintly presaging Ayer’s position) [note that this question appears to have become acute around the end of 18th century, when Boswell repeatedly raises it with Johnson in much the way as: culture in the "Indies," the existence of ghosts, and the phenomenon of "melancholy"]; and “Of the Logic of Practice, or Art; Including Morality and Policy,” arguing (1) against a purely deductive method (“the habitual error” of the “geometrical school…especially in France”), but (2) in favor of a quasi-deductive method exploiting where possible the results of “speculative science,” and relying on a fixed telos (his word)—in this case, the utility principle.

Mill’s eponymous essay on Bentham [1838; 1867] puts one in mind of Boswell’s observation of Johnson that he allowed only himself to criticize Garrick. Mill’s principal scruple with his old master was his failure to appreciate the Romantic virtues enumerated above. Otherwise, the essay is interesting for its tacit endorsement of the purportedly historical judicial activism in “English law, as in the Roman before it….” Mill comes across altogether as a proponent of increase in state power. [It also includes the curious contrast of "an essentially subjective people like the Germans" with the "essentially objective people... (of) Northern and Central Italy." I should like to find a book on changing national stereotypes since the Renaissance.]

Coleridge, in turn, is feted as the Acceptable Conservative: though he toiled to preserve the good in existing institutions, he was no reactionary! No: the establishment church was defended as chief promoter of civilization rather than on religious grounds; the Reform Bill (reorganization of representation in Parliament) opposed for defects in its drafting rather than for its intent; Tories disparaged; laissez-faire governance rejected [curious that this political philosophy appeared self-consciously at the turn of the 19th century]; limits conceded to (land-)property rights; Scripture endorsed only insofar as reason could, and its literal interpretation condemned.

With “Whewell on Moral Philosophy,” Mill’s writing style hits its peak of arrogance and boorishness. Dr. Whewell’s work is reproached for its tendency “to shape the whole of morality, physical as well as moral, into a form adapted to serve as a support and a justification to any opinions which happen to be established.” In the main, Mill’s criticisms appear sound, even if his manner is churlish. Nevertheless, the deficiencies of utilitarianism are on full display. I suppose a word or two on these is obligatory.

For implementing (discovering? inventing?) his method of deriving ethical claims, Mill credits Bentham with “a position in moral science analogous to that of Bacon in physical.” Obviously the very phrase “moral science” is emblematic of the hubristic Enlightenment scientism that mars much 19th-century thought. One only wonders whether Bacon himself is not overrated in his own role.

Whewell objects that our inability to calculate all the results of an action fatally undermines utilitarianism (or for that matter any purely consequentialist ethic), to which Mill responds that inability to calculate precisely is a feature of all human practices. (“[B]ecause we cannot foresee everything, is there no such thing as foresight?”) But this misses the more serious ramification: predicating rightness and wrongness on a calculation opens up the possibility that tomorrow we may have to radically—and all at once—reform our moral notions; making the sinner a saint and vice versa. And that’s really queer. Moral theories which take intentions into account avoid this problem. And to concede that the former saint’s actions were nevertheless “commendable” is to put utilitarianism in the following dilemma: either “commendable” is to be stripped of (most of?) its moral content—in which case the concession buys nothing—or the utility principle is trivialized: We should reform our ethics when they manifestly lead to great unhappiness. Oh, yes. (Note that the “great” is required, once again on account of calculation issues: since the calculation cannot attain precision, moral reforms based on them require more evidence.)

[Another historical curiosity appears in this essay: Whewell apparently classified the virtues under five types: benevolence, justice, truth, purity, and order. These bear a remarkable resemblance to J. Haidt's five "psychological foundations of morality": harm/care, fairness/justice, ingroup/loyalty, purity/sanctity, and authority/respect. Oops, Jonathan, I guess you forgot Truth! Well, maybe if you'd read Whewell....]

Finally, we have Mill’s famous “Utilitarianism.” Here Mill’s meliorist instincts are on full display: “The present wretched education, and wretched soicial arrangements, are the only real hindrance to happiness’s being attainable by all.” Is this the foundation for the modern liberal worldview?? Or is Mill merely articulating a view in the air in the mid-nineteeth century?

Here again the grotesque utilitarian conceit that motives are irrelevant to the right- or wrongness of an action is affirmed: “[U]tilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the actions, though much with the worth of the agent.” What work is the second clause supposed to do?? (See my remarks on “commendable” above.) For elaboration we look to the affixed footnote, in which one Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies submits that “Surely the rightness or wrongness of saving a man from drowning does depend very much upon the motive with which it is done. Suppose that a tyrant” saved his enemy from drowing so that he might torture him; etc.

Mill responds that the tyrant’s action as well as his motive differ from that of the Good Samaritan, apparently because he had not just a different “Motive”—“the feeling which makes him will so to do [something]”—but a different “Intention”—“what the agent wills to do” (“confound[ing] the very different ideas” being “an oversight too common not to be quite venial”). Presumably Intentions matter because good (happiness-oriented) Intentions usually eventuate in good actions. Still, then, the Intention plays second fiddle to the consequences: if someone consistently achieved good ends under the influence of bad Intentions, the utilitarian would have to endorse those bad Intentions.

But the more serious problem is that this way trivialization lies: The Motive is not supposed to matter, but can we think of a case in which Motives differ but Intentions do not? I give to the Rotary Club to receive the plaudits of my peers rather than to help the poor. Well, then I didn’t really will that the hungry be fed; I never even thought about it; I willed rather that I might be perceived as magnanimous. Or again: I share with my sister to avoid my parents’ punishment rather than out of love. The motive is not supposed to matter and hence my action is equally good—except that I Intended not that my sister have my toy, but that my parents not punish me.

The issue is quite serious—though not, apparently, enough to warrant inclusion in the text proper. Oh well!

Further on, Mill endorses what looks at first to be a kind of “rule utilitarianism”: “The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another.” But on second glance this appears to be a purely practical concern: such rules are useful, but they are not the ultimate criterion for moral action. So even in surely following the rules one is not sure that he has done right.

What this apparently odd view suggests is that Mill had—was perhaps pioneering—an unusual, “philosophical” notion of right and wrong, or
perhaps right- and wrong-making features; effectively divorcing them from everyday choices to do the right thing, from practices of moral censure and praise, etc. The former and latter maintain some connection, inasmuch as the utility principle, the real source of normativity, provides reformative guidance for the latter: e.g. if it turns out that blaming people for x leads on balance to a great deal of unhappiness, we ought to start accepting x. Now, this conclusion is not terribly contentious. But the strange thought is that the everyday choices, systems of blame, etc. derive their ethical content strictly through the utility principle; upshots of which, apparently, are that (1) motives don’t matter (although see above), and (2) our practices are susceptible to radical revision, and this on purely descriptive grounds (a calculation shows that…).

Was Mill making the queer claim or the uncontentious? Given the ambiguity about Motives sketched about (differences in Intentions = differences in Motives??) and his silence on radical revision, it’s not clear. Of course this possible reconciliation still leaves the other vexing utilitarian thesis: that happiness trumps all. But here Mill evinces—in the present essay—a casuistical streak, inclining him to bend his calculations so as to include his own fancied virtues (e.g. the list of romantic ones above) among the determinants of happiness.

Justification of the principle of utility is itself fraught. Mill’s argument of course runs afoul of the naturalistic fallacy: how can the apparent orientation of ethics toward maximizing social happiness imply that it ought to be thus? This is doubly problematic, in fact, for modern evolutionary thinking would suggest that the aim of a society’s ethics will be, on the contrary, the reproduction of that culture and perhaps (as a consequence) its bearers, i.e. a particular people. Such ethics will sometimes conform to its society’s happiness (hence Mill’s observation) and sometimes not. How could Mill and Bentham—both early observers of the “is-ought problem”—fall prey to the fallacy?? Well, both seem motivated by a felt need for a criterion on which to base ethical calculations—“moral science.” Setting aside even the possibility of other criteria (the dominance of that culture, e.g.), one could easily read this proof as a reductio ad absurdum: so much the worse for a so-called science of morals. The intuition that there must be one such is, again, perhaps the paramount weakness of utilitarianism, especially for modern readers, much less sanguine about any such project.

Précis: Richard Rorty interprets contemporary philosophy, especially in Quine, Sellars, and Davidson (with hints from Wittgenstein) as unraveling its central conceit since Descartes: philosophy as epistemology. He views the arguments of these philosophers as all showing, in various ways, that justification is a fact about social practices (including the sciences and common sense); and that the attempts of modern philosophy to ground justifications in something deeper or more permanent (through investigations of the mind, or of language, or etc.) is based on a series of mistakes—mistakes which reflect (at least in part) the use of ocular metaphors—particularly the idea of man’s Glassy Essence—and as such, are doomed to failure. He recommends that philosophy move on from the quest for certainty to the seeking of edification, with a recognition that human culture always contains the possibilities of saying newer and more interesting things—things which may not be commensurable with our current way of talking.

Rough notes:

Ch. 1: Rorty argues that “the mental” as conceived by Descartes is a heterogeneous thing, particularly comprising both intentional but non-phenomonal things (like beliefs) and the reverse (like pains—although I think some will claim that pains are intentional), as well as things having both properties (like occurrent thoughts and mental images). He claims (via a very loose argument) that the only chance of mental entities having claim to the status of another substance (“ontological gap”) is via their phenomenal qualities (so the intentionality is sort of a red herring, he says), their “raw feels.” These do the work if we take them to be entities, objects: then these hypostatizations are (he says) like abstract versions (“abstracting from the person feeling the pain”), generalizations of the originals—like universals are to particulars. So the physical/mental “ontological gap” is parasitic on the particulars/universals ontological gap. [This seems really implausible to me; in fact it seems like a very bad argument.]

But how did the intentional things get thrown in? Idea: Descartes, via bad arguments based on a “good” hunch, noticing that we can’t be wrong about “seems” statements nor about what we think or believe [pre-Freud, anyhow: Rorty says the subject cannot doubt that he has "thoughts and most beliefs"], carved out the mental as that which is indubitable. He was able to throw in the former (raw feels) because he had what the Greeks did not (according to W. Matson): a word for “sensation” [!]. Rorty claims that the Greeks used indubitability as the basis for distinguishing the eternal; but Descartes substituted “clear and distinct perceptions” for this distinction (or anyway, Rorty says, for eternal truths), leaving undubitability to serve as the mark of the mental (and particularly perhaps of consciousness). Clever idea: Now that there were different grounds for certainty and for eternal truth (the mental ones of indubitability and all the rest depending on clear and distinct perceptions), “and once Descartes’s own confusion between certainty that something exists and certainty about its nature was dissipated, empiricism began to edge out rationalism”—because our intuitions that pain and blueness signify something real are much stronger than our intuitions that we have clear and distinct ideas of “substance” and “motion.”

But contemporary philosophers (at PMN‘s publication) focus on raw feels, basically because they’re willing to concede the purely intentional to Ryle. Yet the remaining “mental entities” are only a problem if we think of them as things (“pains,” rather than “people having pains”), which Rorty thinks is just a sad vestige of Descartes’s use of the word “substance.” Still, a fuller account of the alternative has to be provided, and that’s:

Ch. 2: Antipodeans, etc. By lacking a word for incorrigibly known entities (but naturally having one for “incorrigible” reports: “seems” statements), these imagined aliens raise the question of whether we need such things at all. Actually, Rorty is willing to grant them raw feels—he doesn’t care what we say, really—and even “privileged access” to them. His objection is to their serving a justificatory role (as opposed to a causal one). In fact he thinks Wittgenstein’s “hostility to privacy” is “entirely misguided”; he should have been hostile to “immediacy” only (i.e. should’ve confined himself to making Sellars’s point: “we cannot know the meaning of one word without knowing the meaning of a lot of others”). [I think this is wrong. Wittgenstein's point is that "knowing the meaning of a lot of words" is also something that can't be done alone. It's not just that words (entities) only have meaning within a language-game, it's also that the game can't be played alone (because then whatever feels right will be right, etc. etc.).

[Rorty claims that Cartesian skepticism (about other minds) is not impossible but uninteresting; and that it only captured philosophers' interest because of (essentially) the Mirror imagery (really, the Myth of the Given), which rendered the skepticism imperative: if all our knowledge proceeds outward from the Given sense-data, how can we ever get to other people's sense-data? But I don't think that's right. I think Cartesian skepticism really is impossible, i.e. is based on a mistake. That's the point of Wittgenstein's beetle-in-the-box thought experiment (which Rorty thinks is a mistake! conflating incorrigibility and incommunicability): If we allow that pains are a "something" (i.e. entities as in the object-designation language-game), then they can accrue bizarre (though ultimately inconsequential) properties: e.g., his pains are different than mine.

[So when Rorty says that "It is quite possible that our companions always simulate pain-behavior without ever having any pains," he's got the wrong target: that's not Cartesian skepticism; Cartesian skepticism implies that they're not faking it ("simulating") but rather really don't have pains (or have differently flavored ones or etc.) Would Rorty say that spectrum inversion is "quite possible"?? It's not, because it's a wheel that turns though nothing moves with it.

[Could we, if we really liked, insist on spectrum inversion? Sure, I guess, but it would be a mistake for philosophers to get vexed over it not because that means they're taking the Myth too seriously, but because (1) it would be to misunderstand the way the language-game is played; but more important (2) because the concepts of "correct" and "incorrect" don't apply here! (Whatever feels right will be right.) So philosophical investigations will necessarily be futile. This is what Rorty's rejection of the beetle-in-the-box thought experiment makes him overlook.

[The Myth is a separate worry....]

Ch. 3: Epistimology has been central to philosophy since the seventeenth century—whether openly or under the guise of “philosophy of mind” or “philosophy of language”—and this is what allows philosophy its pretension to being foundational. Rorty claims that this self-image appeared in its full form with Kant (and his followers), who gave us the modern view of two warring traditions (Rationalism and Empiricism) which he synthesized. Locke had maintained Descartes’s inner realm, but lost the certainty. Kant got both (with the question of “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?”).

Locke’s big mistake was to confuse explanations with justifications, giving rise to “self-authenticating inner episodes.” This mistake was possible because Locke didn’t think of knowledge as (more or less) justified true belief, i.e. as a relation between a person and a proposition (“knowledge that”), but as a relation between a person and an object (“knowledge of”).

Kant noticed this mistake (sort of)! Nature can’t make us know things just by impinging upon us (Kant said). No: intuitions without concepts are blind. So we must synthesize our judgments by putting together intuitions (greenness) and concepts (froghood). Rorty says Kant’s mistake was here: he confused predication with synthesis. I.e. what he should have talked about were sentences rather than representations (and combining them together). The latter retains the inner realm—and Cartesian certainty about mental items! Why? Because Kant’s project won’t go through unless we somehow can say something about our concepts (or at least the constituting process where concepts and intuitions are brought together) a priori. So, though he got rid of self-authenticating intuitions, he kept self-authenticating concepts. Rorty also points out that manifoldness being “given” and unity being “made” is an unaccounted premise that “runs through the first Critique.”

The notion that “differences in certainty must correspond to differences in the object known” (G. Pitcher’s Platonic Principle), Rorty concedes, is older than modern philosophy, but is still a philosophical (as opposed to pre-analytic) intuition, arising from the use of ocular (or otherwise sensory) metaphors for knowledge. The general mistake is an attempt to substitute confrontation (of our minds with objects) for conversation.

Ch. 4: We can dispense with a “theory of knowledge” if we drop the (bad) distinctions (1) between given and added by the mind, and (2) between necessary and contingent. Rorty says these are addressed by Sellars and Quine, resp., “both…forms of holism.” However (!), each man seems unable to transcend the opposite distinction: hence Quine’s stimuli/posit distinction and Sellars’s “giving the analysis of….”

Rorty’s gloss on the overall lesson of both philosopher’s works: “‘How do our peers know which of our assertions to take our word for and which to look for further confirmation of?’”—whether those assertions are about inner states, “analytic” sentences, or “synthetic” sentences. When we realize the constraints are public (social) rather than inner, we can dispense with both “self-authenticating non-verbal episodes” and “meanings.” So we can talk about raw feels and innate ideas and etc. if they are helpful in explaining human behavior—but they have no (epistemic) authority.

Sellars’s ideas are not “mean to babies” because we can distinguish “knows what x is like” from “knows what kind of thing x is,” where the former doesn’t require being in the space of reasons, etc. (but is attributed on the basis of the person later being able to justify himself, i.e. when he’s older).

Quine goes too far in saying that there is “no matter of fact” involved in attributions of meanings. He reaches this conclusion by noting that more than one attribute (rabbit/rabbit-stage/etc.) is attributable by the anthropologist—even given a complete physical theory. But Rorty says that this “indeterminacy” will show up even in natural science. Only by holding the results of physics as a priori true can we eliminate this indeterminacy and thereby locate the trouble in other disciplines—including, by the bye, biology and chemistry, which will also have indeterminacy with respect to physics. And there’s no good reason to privilege physics that way. “Quine is led into these difficulties…by an attempt to preserve the view which he, like Sellars, inherits from Carnap and ultimately from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: the view that the world can be `completely described’ in an extensional language.” Rorty says, sure, if you like, but by fiat: we declare what physics talks about to be a “complete description”—but that doesn’t change how useful (indispensible, even) the other ways of talking are.

Ch. 5: Some Wittgensteinians (Malcolm) and Ryleans go too far in opposing the idea of mental processes at all. Again, Rorty wants to allow them if they turn out to be useful in constructing (e.g.) psychological theories; we just have to remember that they can’t shed any light on justification. Likewise, there’s no need for fear of ghosts: post-Sellars we can just use people’s introspective deliverances as data which will be useful for certain purposes. [Rorty's description sounds a lot like D.C. Dennett's heterophenomenology.] So psychology can make use of these reports and of notions of “sense data,” if they prove useful—but (contra Quine) this science will have nothing to do with epistemology (which should die). The exact same applies to computational investigations (explanation in terms of “subroutines”). (And in this connection Rorty discusses Fodor—thinks he goes too far in finding something important about the “abstractness” of a Lillibulero detector; and Dodwell, who proposes the subroutines thing.) Here Rorty makes the interesting claim that just as, “had physiology been more obvious psychology would never have arisen,” so likewise: “if the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought to invent the mind.” [Note that Sec. 3 of this chapter is written in a weird way; seems like R. is a little confused, or didn't bother to think out the chapter before writing it.]

Likewise, Rorty takes Fodor to task for suggesting that discovery of the “language of thought” will show us “how rationality is structured.” Rorty says, “Rationality is no better than ‘true’ (or ‘honest’ or ‘chaste’ or ‘good’) as a candidate for an evaluative notion which we might understand better by knowing how our mind works.” Same story for Zeno Vendler [!], who makes a similar claim for innate ideas.

Ch. 6: If empirical psychology can’t serve as a replacement for epistemology, then neither can “philosophy of language.” R. distinguishes two kinds of philosophy of language: “pure” and “impure.” The former are “problems of how to systematize our notions of meaning and reference in such a way as to take advantage of quantificational logic, preserve our intuitions about modality, and generally produce a clear and intuitively satisfying picture of the way in which notions like ‘truth,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘necessity,’ and ‘name’ fit together.” These (exemplified in Davidson) are fine. The impure philosophy of language is epistemological: eternal truths as “conceptual” or “linguistic.” This is exemplified in the “problem of reference,” so that’s the focus of the chapter.

The “problem” appears when we wonder whether our ancestors were making false statements about real things, or (possibly true) statements about non-existent things. To have no criterion for determining this is disconcerting because it makes it (seem) possible that none of our present science “refers”: that it’s all about non-existent objects. Post-Quine, it was hard to use analyticity to pick out “what things our ancestors were talking about” and syntheticity to pick out “what they were saying about those things.” So the hope became that a theory of reference would somehow do the work that the analytic/synthetic distinction no longer could.

The approach of the heroes of PMN tends to be misconstrued as idealism, because in denying a once-and-for-all criterion for fixing what other cultures are talking about, it seems to imply that the very notion of truth is relative to a conceptual scheme. Hence Putnam sees positivism as being “idealist-tending” in that it insists that the real facts are about experiences (and all other facts are derived from these). Rorty, contrariwise, sees the insistence on operational definitions (needles on instruments) as a way of maintaining the analytic/synthetic distinction ["the needle points to 4.5" being a purely synthetic statement, I guess]. The solution, then, is to give up on operational definitions along with the analytic/synthetic distinction, rather than to invent a way of connecting speech back up with the world (a theory of reference).

Putnam has three arguments for a theory of reference. (1) “True” can’t be translated as anything else (including warranted assertible), so requires a different kind of explanation (reference) (parallel to Moore’s argument about “good”). Reply: “True but not warrantedly assertible” is like “good but disapproved of by all cultures so far”: a philosophical construct (from before Socrates), but not obviously either useful or admitting of a theory. (2) Useful? Well how else do we explain the “convergence” of science? Reply: That’s just the way we tell the story of science. And the fact that our old theories go wrong just where our new theories say they will does not require a “realist” explanation: this is just the way theory improvement works (piecemeal). (3) We need to block the meta-induction that no theoretical term ever refers (see above). Reply: How could a theory of reference—or any theory—possibly guarantee that we shall not stand to our descendants as our ancestors stand to us (i.e. in terms of our scientific theories)??

How did we get to taking reference so seriously?? Answer: People noted (1) that the Searle-Stawson criterion (SSC) for reference (a person is referring in the use of ‘X’ to whatever objects make most of his beliefs about X true) has exceptions; and (2) the idea that meaning determines reference seemed to leave open the possibility that the more false beliefs we have the more we “lose touch with the world.”

(1) seemed to indicate that we have intuitions about this thing Reference; (2) made it seem like we needed such a thing. But really, the SSC is just the notion of “talking about,” and the exceptions are cases of “really talking about,” i.e. situating the speaker’s utterance with respect to a more knowledgeable audience. “Really talking about” is also about justification, then, and anyway won’t do reference trick because (i) we can be “really talking about” non-existence objects (“You think you are talking about lithium, but you are really talking about kryptonite”), which was what the Theory of Reference was supposed to prevent; and (ii) the considerations that govern “really talking about” are too heterogeneous (“nothing save tact and imagination will serve”).

The fact is that no special relation (causal or otherwise) can do anything “transcendental,” since that relation will itself be relative to/situated within the context of our current best theories. Rorty then discusses Davidson. His gloss: the notion of radically different conceptual schemes only gets going if we imagine that the world is originally cut up by (e.g.) acts of ostension, and everything else derived from there (perhaps holistically). Then the possibility that an alien culture has done the original cutting differently appears. But if we can “divide through” by that difference in original ostension—if it makes no difference to our translation—then there’s no problem. [Is this really the right take???] Rorty compares the inverted spectrum.

This will only look “verificationist” if we have in mind Platonic notions of the True (or etc.). Without them there’s no problem. So the burden of proof should be on the others, not Davidson.

Chs. 7-8: Philosophy should take as its goal “edification” rather than the accumulation of (objective) “knowledge,” and as such hermeneutics will often replace (much) epistemology. The aim will be to keep conversation going rather than to find its final resting point. Something like epistemology may be possible again with (new!) philosophical research programs—this will be like conducting “normal science,” in Kuhn’s language—but we must always be open to the possibility of new vocabularies, and here only hermeneutics will do.

The book is notable for the importunity of its author, as well as his occasional self-promotion and his (apparent) general obliviousness to the kind of figure he consequently cut among Johnson’s accomplished social circle [which included, inter alia, Edmund Burke—ultimately one of SJ's pallbearers!].  Boswell periodically confesses (usually in footnotes) his unabashed desire for literary fame; which, given what I have just said, should have rendered his ridiculousness complete—were his biography not in fact to become one of the most famous and well-read of all time.  In this respect, too, the book is notable, since it (purportedly) established a new and lasting style for the biography.

Modern readers may find themselves unmoved by this evaluation, however, given Boswell’s curious uniform omission of transitional sentences or even words between the various anecdotes that compose the book.  The result is a strong impression of disjointedness: the book doesn’t come across so much as a narrative as a collection of incidents—and these, mostly witty remarks that the great lexicographer made at this or that dinner party.  In a sense, this was  inevitable, given that Johnson was known for his conversation and his writing and not for his deeds; but the effect is nonetheless unsatisfying to those looking for anything resembling a story, or even a break from the stream of soirees, names of participants, and recalled bon mots of the central figure.

Indeed, this stream is interrupted periodically, but more often than not by Boswell’s own correspondence with Johnson, which almost invariably features the author’s wince-inducing maudlinism (he accosts Johnson with complaints of his melancholy over the course of literally years, very often on feeling “neglected” by his correspondent), and the philologist’s gentle but firm reproofs on this head.  A great deal of SJ’s other correspondence also appears in this volume, and these Boswell sometimes organizes according to their topic rather than their chronology, further weakening what sense of narrative the book can claim.  Likewise, the content of the book being proportional to Boswell’s acquaintance with his subject, details accumulate as Johnson ages, so that the second volume—six-hundred pages, or half the book—begins at his 68th year: less than a decade before his death, and with only one major work remaining to be published.  Six hundred pages for an old man in semi-retirement is a bit much for any biographer.

Modern readers will also have difficulty with the peculiarly windy and self-conscious writing of the late-eighteenth century—e.g., incessant references to what the indulgent or amiable or discerning reader will or won’t allow.  Whether Boswell is a particularly egregious offender I could not say, not having read much literature from the period; but it certainly seems to suit his character.

What recommends such a book then??  Well, Johnson does have many witty, pious, and useful things to say—although here too the book is defective inasmuch as its author omits relevant excerpts from the Sage’s writings if they had recently been published elsewhere—which is naturally of little avail to the twentyfirst-century reader, who would probably prefer to have all the relevant material in one place rather than to restrict himself to what happened to have been unpublished in 1793.  But the book does give a feeling for Johnson’s life and a frankly quite excellent and (seemingly) complete one for his character.  One puts down the book with an acute consciousness of a very distinct personality.  Likewise, Johnson’s role and importance in English letters is pretty well laid out: A modern appraisal will of course supply perspective that a contemporary one cannot, but it seems to me Boswell’s estimation of his “esteemed friend” has been vindicated by the present consensus.

Boswell’s tome also provides a decently detailed picture of manners, customs, and culture in late-eighteenth century Britain—including the interactions among its leading lights, who were in general better acquainted with each other than I had imagined—and a perhaps more thorough depiction of London; although as this was obviously not his goal, the image is (as it were) accidental, to be inferred rather than simply read.  The writing style of the era—not just Johnson’s and Boswell’s, but those of the protagonist’s other occasional correspondents—is minutely exhibited—and inevitably acquired.  Boswell himself, in spite of his verbosity and character deformities, writes well, and ultimately—somehow—ingratiates himself with the reader (at least this reader), so that as the book closes with Johnson’s death, we feel great sorrow not just for the wonderful man himself, but for the devoted friend he left behind.