NDPR Richard Deming, Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-06-33 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Richard Deming, Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, Stanford University Press, 2008, 182pp., $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780804757386.

Reviewed by David K. O'Connor, University of Notre Dame

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Richard Deming's main project is to use the responsive openness called for in interpreting a text as a model for the ethical demands of human relationships. His secondary aim is to show that European literary theory and classical American literature are not strangers to each other, and in fact take up many of the same hopes and anxieties. The breadth and generosity of Deming's intellectual engagements are evident everywhere, and they account for the book's clear success in its secondary aim, as well as what I think are its interesting failures in its primary task. The author has done what his title asks, and listened on all sides, but his ethics is too undemanding to live up to Emerson's challenge.

The "sociality" of language, writes Deming, "brings up close the issue of ethics" (14). In a way, it is no surprise that Ralph Waldo Emerson figures prominently in such a project. "I do then with my friends as I do with my books," Emerson said,^[1] and he meant it. For Emerson, reading and writing are the paradigm of all human life, and Deming does Emerson no violence in looking to him for an "ethics of reading," that is, to find guidance in our practices of attentive reading for how to treat people. Drawing the link between hermeneutics and ethics, however, may sound like rather a "continental" project, deriving as it does from early German Romantics such as the Schlegels and Schleiermacher, and having been given a major impetus by Gadamer (who quite surprisingly is never mentioned in the book). Indeed, Deming's theoretical orientation is much influenced by more recent heirs of this tradition: by Deleuze's Nietzsche readings, by Derrida, by The Literary Absolute of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, by Charles Altieri's critical work on modernism and its aftermaths. The Heideggerian gesture of the book's subtitle is also not out of place. However, after the introductory theoretical chapter, Deming focuses on classics of American literature to pursue his theme, devoting a chapter essay each to Emerson, Herman Melville, and the pair Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman all make more than cameo appearances.

Thinking of Wittgenstein's notion of forms of life, Deming says that

Knowing language, by way of looking (and listening) closely (to words and use) can create sensitivity to the intimacies it affords, and such intimacies include, or at least ought to, a sense of how we interact with each other and the world. One need invest his or her attention in the effects of language acts, attending to what words perform on others and on oneself. (14)

This intimate responsiveness is challenged or chastened, however, by what Deming calls skepticism, exemplified especially by the moving and multiple selves of Emerson's essays and Whitman's poetry (22). This skepticism is not a failure of knowledge. It is instead a strategy of freedom, an escape from the tendency to let intimacy harden into conformism. In Deming's pithy formulation, "The economy of resistance [skepticism] and identification [intimacy] is central to Emersonian modernism" (17). The elaboration of this central idea is the work of the strong second chapter of the book, an essay on Emerson's essay "Fate" that shows Deming's breadth and generosity at its best.

A striking virtue of Deming's Americanist slant on continental themes is the help he gives the reader in thinking through a central point of difference between two philosopher/critic pairs prominent in the book, Richard Rorty and Richard Poirier, and (more surprising) Stanley Cavell and Harold Bloom. Deming's critical vocabulary is, to my ear, more attuned to European literary theory than to the self-consciously American idiom of these four pioneers in the engagement of American literature with continental theory. Deming is more likely to sound like Hegel or Heidegger than like Emerson or Stevens, for example. However, though Deming is less successful, or at least less thorough-going, in establishing his own voice than these formidable predecessors, his ethical focus clarifies something at stake in their work. Deming shares Rorty and Poirier's rather chipper optimism about postmodernism's resources for accommodating ideals of solidarity with ideals of freedom, and these two authors appear in the book mostly as authorities to be affirmed. Cavell, despite his obvious importance for Deming's sense that his project is Emersonian, is treated more distantly, and Bloom is explicitly rejected. Deming nods a distant greeting to Cavell's perfectionism, and wants to replace Bloom's anxiety of influence, each great writer trying to trump the others, with a "nexus of sympathetic writers" (22). This sounds too much like a sewing circle to me; at any rate, Deming's optimism is averse to the rather dire imaginings of Cavell and Bloom about the tensions between individual genius and democratic principle. If I try to put this into Deming's own terms, I am tempted to say "intimacy" and an irenic solidarity seem to be the natural state of language-using human beings, with "resistance," conflict, and rivalry no better than an unpleasant tonic against complacency, and perhaps even an unhappy deviation from and distortion of what unfallen intimacy would be. Deming never brings himself, I believe, to embrace the energy or movement provided by resistance and rivalry, as he does embrace intimacy and solidarity.

Deming, then, does see the darker side of sociality, but he tends to treat competitiveness and rivalry as a pathology to be eliminated rather than as part of the very structure of the "dialectic of mutual recognition." Perhaps the desire to make recognition possible without requiring struggle is a noble one. Nevertheless, this desire seems to distort Deming's discussion of Herman Melville's struggles to free himself from Nathaniel Hawthorne's precedence (chapter 3). Deming uses to good effect Alexandre Kojève's account of the Master/Slave Dialectic to frame the issues Melville faced of originality and authority. However, Deming's antipathy to Bloom's antagonistic model of writing is so strong that he refuses it even for Melville's notorious rivalry with Emerson and Hawthorne. After a sensitive discussion of Melville's obsessive attempt to "praise Hawthorne and bury him" (the Shakespeare allusion is Deming's), Deming spoils the chapter by concluding that Melville exemplifies a strategy that replaces dominance with equality and competition with sympathy (105-106). This abrupt turn deflates the chapter and makes Melville sound juvenile or simply base for taking the struggle for recognition so seriously.

This flattening of the writer's ambition makes the concluding fourth chapter on Stevens and Williams the weakest in the book. Deming's extended discussion (126-132) of Stevens' poem "The American Sublime" is a revealing failure. The poem begins, "How does one stand | To behold the sublime" and uses an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson, the exemplary political figure of America as a popular democracy, as an emblem of the tension between democracy and nobility, at least nobility as expressed in the dominate artistic traditions of Europe since the Renaissance. This tension puts a question mark in the title phrase, for it is far from obvious how an authentically American poetry can be sublime. It is the ambition to write sublime but yet American poetry that Stevens is exploring.

This reading of the poem is hardly debatable, especially since Stevens works over the same ground, including a discussion of the very statue he has in mind, in his lecture "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words." The poem hinges on the awkwardness with which Democrat Jackson inhabited, both in the statue and when the statue was made, an aesthetic convention appropriate to aristocrats and mercenaries. This awkwardness is described in the lines "When General Jackson | Posed for his statue | He knew how one feels." That is, he knew how silly an equestrian statue in the grand style could look for a populist icon; and so he knew "how one feels" who aspires to an American aesthetic. Deming mistakenly takes the lines to mean Jackson does know how it feels to really experience the sublime, "because he lived through a war" (127). This gets these lines so wrong that nothing else in his reading has any value. In general, the transcendent longing in Stevens is underplayed, to emphasize issues about poets as creators of solidarity.

A characteristic Emerson epigram says to let your friend "be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy" ("Friendship" 351). Better a provocative enemy than a sleepy friend, someone who puts us into the comfort zone of conformity. "Almost all people descend to meet," warned Emerson, and for Emerson solidarity, even as marital intimacy, could never take precedence over ascent ("Friendship" 345). The costs of giving up oneself inappropriately, or on the other hand of refusing to follow another's lead, the dire dynamics of abnegation and narcissism, are the very stuff of what Cavell has labeled Emersonian perfectionism, exemplified in Emerson's difficult essays. Deming makes his literary heroes less anxious and rivalrous than Cavell or Bloom would have them, or than Emerson saw them. A literary exemplar, as Emerson constantly reminds his reader, will threaten to smother as much as to inspire. For Emerson, Plato is the acknowledged exemplar of exemplarity, and so reveals at their most extreme both the pleasures and pains of writing under an influence. "Even the men of grander proportion," Emerson wrote, "suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. . . . Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, -- at once the glory and the shame of mankind" ("Plato" 633). How are we latecomers to inherit a literary glory that can put us to shame? Can we make that glory our own? For Emerson, this is an acute problem for America, both as democracy and as New World: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty" ("Self-Reliance" 259). We may be grateful for the majesty, but we are bound to resent somewhat the alienation.

Compared to this, Deming's version of a democratic ideal of mutual accommodation and appreciation strikes me as rather easy-going. His favorite word for this ideal is "negotiation," but it is a negotiation in which enthusiasm for the process of reaching agreement comes close to eclipsing competition and mutual wariness. Just how opposed to Emerson this ideal of "negotiation" is comes out in an extraordinary way in the very title of the book. The phrase "listening on all sides" comes from a passage in Emerson's essay "Experience," a passage that is never, I believe, mentioned or alluded to in the book. There is good reason for this, since Emerson uses the phrase to reject an ethic of sympathy and social solidarity, in favor of an ethic of self-reliance:

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him. . . . In this our talking America, we are ruined by our good nature and listening on all sides. This compliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. A man should not be able to look other than directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people: an attention, and to an aim which makes their wants frivolous. (490, emphasis added)

Deming's anti-competitive ideal of "negotiation" has interesting affinities with John Rawls' ideal of democracy as a "social union of social unions" (in Part 3, Chapter IX, Section 79 of A Theory of Justice). Rawls notes that this ideal has roots in early German Romanticism (especially Wilhelm Von Humboldt), which also nurtures Deming's project. For Deming, as for Rawls, Rorty, Poirier, and Cavell, it is a live philosophical question how to use these Romantic resources to construct an American ideal. One thinks particularly of Rorty's discussion of Whitman in the first chapter of Achieving Our Country (1998), and of Cavell's engagement with Rawls (surely deserving of more attention than it has received) in "The Conversation of Justice: Rawls and the Drama of Consent," in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (2000). It is another virtue of Deming's book that it contributes to this conversation, even though he views the issues from a primarily literary rather than political perspective.

 

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^[1] "Friendship" 353, in Essays and Lectures, New York: Library of America, 1983. Subsequent references to Emerson are to this edition.

NDPR Charles Blattberg, Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-06-32 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Charles Blattberg, Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy, McGill-Queens University Press, 2009, 383pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780773534919.

Reviewed by Allen Habib, University of Calgary

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As the title implies, this is a collection of essays that elaborate the political philosophy Blattberg introduced in his earlier writings, in particular his book From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, Putting Practice First (Oxford, 2000). In that book Blattberg advanced a novel theory of politics that he called patriotism, a theory subtended by a hermeneutical approach to conceptual and political analysis in the style of Charles Taylor. Roughly half of the material in this book has appeared in previous venues in various guises, either as individual articles or chapters in collections, while half is new to publication. Although most of the new material advances themes and arguments from his earlier work there is much new and interesting work in it.

Blattberg's patriotism posits a civil polity with a common good, one that patriots strive to achieve together via the political process. The theory rests on hermeneutical principles, such as a radical version of linguistic and conceptual holism that makes the meaning and nature of things like moral values and political goods entirely context-dependent. On this picture we understand values and goods in the context of our shared social practices. However, although this universe is whole, it is also 'cracked'; there are gaps or holes between the values underlying the practices. These cracks, when they result in conflict, stop the normal social flow and 'throw up' the conflicting values to us, values that are normally invisible due to their smooth functioning in the web of practices. Hermeneutic conflict resolution is an interpretive affair, in which one seeks to reconcile the apparently conflicting values by making alterations either in them, in some other parts of the web, or in both.

Blattberg applies this hermeneutical analysis to politics and political entities. The resultant schema is one that takes conflicts between people as the central issue in politics and classifies political theories in terms of their approaches to such conflicts. Patriotism conceives of social conflict as hermeneutic breakdowns in practice; as such, these are opportunities for interpretive reconciliation, to be achieved through what Blattberg calls 'conversation'. Patriotic conversation is a form of dialogue aimed at reconciliation, as opposed to accommodation or domination. Reconciliation is the re-integration of the conflicting values (or goods) into the web of practice; in other words, it is the re-interpretation either of the values themselves or of some other components of the practice, so as to make them compatible again. Accommodation, on the other hand, seeks merely to negotiate a compromise between (what are taken to be) irreconcilable values, understanding that doing so will sacrifice some value on the part of one if not both parties.

Blattberg claims that contemporary political theories either deny conflicts between values by proposing a single 'neutralist' system of arbitration (e.g. Rawls) or they merely seek accommodation between conflicting values, on the assumption that reconciliation is impossible (e.g. Berlin, Hampshire). However, reconciliation in which neither party 'loses' any of their values is surely a superior outcome to any negotiated settlement, argues Blattberg. Thus a dialogue aimed at this outcome is the best possible form of dialogue. Only the patriotic position espouses such a dialogue.

This collection expands on the theory in a number of ways. There are too many individual essays (13) and too many themes and topics to accommodate a comprehensive review. Instead, I'll limit myself to what I take to be the most interesting new theme Blattberg develops in the book, that of the nature of hermeneutical creation, as opposed to interpretation, and the implications for political and ethical theory.

Breaking with other hermeneuticists like Gadamer and Taylor, Blattberg draws a sharp distinction between the hermeneutical processes of interpretation and creation. Whereas interpretation is a matter of attempting to make sense of the world by integrating and reconciling conflicting practices, creation is a matter of exploiting the very cracks or gaps in the framework of reality that interpretation seeks to mend. Moreover, Blattberg takes creativity to be transcendental: its source is 'inspirational', or outside of the self. In his preferred metaphor, artists create by letting the inspirational light shine through the cracks of reality. As such, creation is an inherently violent process for Blattberg, exploiting as it does the holes in the fabric of the world. This sacred and violent aesthetic theory puts creativity outside of the realm of practical rationality, and thus beyond the reach of dialogue.

Blattberg employs this distinction between interpretation and creation and the associated theory of creation in a number of interesting ways. In "Secular Nationhood? The Importance of Language in the Life of Nations" Blattberg uses the distinction to ground a theory of nationalism and the nation-state, one that plays an important role in several developments of his larger political theory. On Blattberg's view, nations are distinct from other polities in that they are united (in part) by a common aesthetic vision, one created and maintained by national artists. An artist here is understood in the broad sense, as someone who creates the stories (and values) that form the core of a nation.

The aesthetic dimension is one that has been largely ignored by theorists of nationalism (Blattberg surveys in particular Gellner, Anderson, Taylor, Bhabha and Marx). But, Blattberg argues, this dimension has important ramifications, both for our conception of the nation-state and for our practice of intra-state political dialogue. The creative dimension of nationalism explains both the seeming deafness of nationalists and their apparent intransigence to negotiation. The deafness is essentially a matter of creative destruction, while the intransgience is an attempt to mend fragments together. Also, the creative aspect explains the special relationship between nations and language: a nation must always have a national language, as language functions as the medium of artistic expression of the nation. (Here Blattberg uses another metaphor: the national language is the 'mitt' in which the artistic inspirations are 'caught' [p. 72].)

Regarding the way in which his aesthetic political theory might affect our practice of intra-state political dialogue, Blattberg argues that appreciating the aesthetic/religious dimension of nations is the first step towards a proper dialogue between nations that share a state. In the next essay, "Federalism and Multinationalism", he applies this insight to the case of Canada. Blattberg argues that recognition of the Quebecois as a nation, i.e. as a polity united by a common artistic vision inscribed in "the language of [their] poets", will allow us to see the distinction between 'self-determination' and 'self-government' (p. 72). The 'self-determination' is a demand of nationalists, as it relates directly to the control they have over those institutions which bear on their (linguistic) nation. The 'self-government' is not so demanded by nationalists, at least not necessarily, depending on the power-sharing arrangements between the nation and its encompassing state.

In "What's Wrong with Hypergoods?" Blattberg uses the creative/interpretive distinction to ground a critique of Charles Taylor's theory of hypergoods, or fundamental ur-goods that form the basis of moral systems. Blattberg argues Taylor's account doesn't adequately discriminate between interpretation and creation. This causes Taylor to misconceive hypergoods as the results of interpretive efforts, and thus as ethical rather than aesthetic entities. Blattberg argues to the contrary that hypergoods are aesthetic objects (in much the same manner as nations) created by the destructive 'sundering' of the web of values and practices by artists. Blattberg claims that Taylor's hope for 'reconciliation' (as Taylor calls it) via dialogue and practical reason is empty.

In "On the Minimal Global Ethic" Blattberg appeals to the creative process to help ground a minimal global ethic, a core of ethical values common to all cultures to serve as a conversational bridge between them. Blattberg's theory is that the ethic is actually indigenous to all cultures and that it emerges through both interpretative and creative processes. Blattberg attributes the interpretive process to the working of physical humor like slapstick. Blattberg proposes a theory of humor that makes it out to be a matter of breaks in practice, which invite us to focus on the conflicting values and to attempt a reconciliation. Slapstick's breaks, centered as they are on the body and its foibles and frailties, invite us to consider the vulnerability of the body as well as its universality. This is the source of common ethical values that Blattberg calls 'body-friendly', i.e., those that forbid the infliction of damage or pain.

In order to explain the creative source of the minimal global ethic, Blattberg again depends on the idea that true creation, as opposed to interpretation, is a matter of taking advantage of the 'cracks' or breaks in the fabric of the world, allowing the transcendent to get through. He calls those texts and practices that allow for such inspiration 'epiphanic sites', and he cites the Torah and the Halakhah laws of the Talmud as examples of such sites. Then, borrowing a central concept from Lévinas, he claims that the 'faces' of others are such sites; by watching us they invite revelatory creation, which Blattberg characterizes as a "consistent communication emanating from them, demanding . . . that we give them a certain minimum of respect" (pp. 181-2).

In "Good, Bad, Great, Evil", Blattberg uses the distinction between creation and interpretation to define basic ethical terms. He takes good and bad to be matters of interpretation. While good interpretation is that which leads to reconciliation and integration or re-integration of values, bad interpretation leads in the opposite direction, to the disaggregation and disharmony of values. Greatness and evil, however, are matters of creation rather than interpretation; more specifically, greatness is a matter of creation, and evil a matter of destruction. Both are fundamentally irrational, however, since neither is a matter of the interpretive attempt to 'make sense' of the world. Rather, both concern the 'cracks' or 'gaps' between the parts of the world -- creative acts allow the light of inspiration in through these gaps, whereas destructive acts "forc[e] people's identities into the cracks of non-being" (p.199). The ostensive motive for evil is generally also one of creative force -- the evildoer asserts that the victim is preventing him from achieving creative greatness. One insight to take away from this rendering of the terms is that evil, as an irrational, destructive force, isn't amenable to dialogue of either the conversational or negotiational sort.

I turn now to criticism. My principal complaint is with the volume's ambitious scope and sometimes skimpy supporting argumentation. Blattberg often posits bold new philosophical claims without offering very much in the way of argumentative support. The theory of creativity is a paradigmatic example of this.

What the brief survey above shows is that the theory of creation and creativity that subtends the distinction between interpretation and creation does a tremendous amount of philosophical work in Blattberg's thought. We see it here acting as the crucial differentia of nations, as the ground of Taylor's hypergoods, as (one of) the sources of the minimal global ethic, and as a crucial element of a general ethical theory. However, for such a central theoretical component, there is not very much argument for it in its own right.

There are some arguments offered in support of the theory, but generally tepid ones. In "Secular Nationhood", where the theory first appears, Blattberg admits it is "idiosyncratic", but he asserts that "it supports an account of the role that artists have played . . . as regards their national communities that serves as an important complement to those that have been developed so far" (p.60). This abductive sort of appeal to the fit with other theories is not very rhetorically powerful. In "On the Minimum Global Ethic", Blattberg argues in a similar vein that the theory goes some distance in explaining modernist art, but again, this is not an adequate defense. This lack of support for framework elements such as the theory of creativity is mirrored in other aspects of the book (e.g., the novel theory of humor advanced in "On the Minimal Global Ethic"). Blattberg often rests elaborate rhetorical structures on novel conceptual grounds without very much in the way of a substantive defense of those grounds.

In its favor, however, the theories and insights that he advances in support of his claims are thoroughly original and often quite provocative. The analyses he provides of traditional elements in light of his new theories are fruitful and interesting. While the collection suffers from over-breadth and a lack of systematic focus, it rewards the careful reader with a rich and ingenious tapestry of related strands, and a distinctively fresh and different perspective on traditional political and ethical topics and puzzles.

As a work of scholarship, the book reveals an author who uses a tremendous range of materials and commands of a variety of analytic techniques. Blattberg effortlessly moves through vastly different canons of scholarship -- from classical hermeneutics to contemporary theories of justice and politics to Talmudic interpretation and Kabbalic mysticism and many others besides -- with enviable ease, and this prowess results in some fascinating synergistic insights.

NDPR Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-06-31 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, Oxford UP, 2009, 405 pp., $40.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780199551453.

Wellesley College

Reviewed by Mary Kate McGowan, Wellesley College

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Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification is a collection of fifteen essays by Rae Langton, a leading political philosopher and feminist. Although many of the essays have appeared before, this collection brings together in one handy volume all of her important work in this area. Three of the essays are previously unpublished and offer new material as well as responses to critics. Most of the essays have been at least slightly revised. There is some repetition, which ensures that each essay is intelligible in isolation. Langton's crisp, clear, and careful argumentation proves that philosophy has much to offer the socially, politically and even legally charged issues addressed here. This book will not disappoint.

What, one might wonder, is sexual solipsism? To understand, consider first a solipsist who believes that she is the only person who exists. If solipsism is false, she will fail to treat people as people. In short, she will treat people as things. Suppose instead that solipsism is true but that one does not realize it. In such a case, one treats things that are not people as if they are. In short, one treats things as people. As Langton stresses, these two forms of solipsism (treating persons as things and treating things as persons) come in more localized sexual forms. After all, sexual objectification essentially involves treating a person as a thing, while the consumption of pornography involves treating pornographic objects (in other words, things) as sexual partners (in other words, people). There is also an important connection between these two forms of sexual solipsism. According to Langton's MacKinnon-inspired view of pornography, consuming pornography (which, as we just saw, involves treating things as people) brings about the sexual objectification of women that, in turn, involves treating women as things. This relationship between the two forms of sexual solipsism connects pornography to the sexual objectification of women.

Essays on Pornography

There is considerable controversy over the free speech status of pornography. Most feminists who argue that pornography ought to be regulated (and there are many who believe that it should not be) focus on an alleged connection between pornography and harm. Typically, they claim that pornography somehow causes harm and that the harms caused are sufficiently great to warrant regulation. Following Catharine MacKinnon, however, Langton here pursues a different approach (MacKinnon 1987, 1993). Rather than focus on the harms allegedly caused, Langton explores the hypothesis that pornography actually constitutes harm. In her "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts", published in 1993 and reprinted here as chapter 1, Langton uses the tools of speech act theory to develop her analysis of this constitutive approach. Although this may be initially surprising, speech can constitute harm. Suppose, for example, that an executive verbally enacts a new hiring policy for his company when he says: "From now on, we only hire men. Women are just too damn irrational." This utterance both causes and constitutes harm. It causes the harm of discrimination by causing a discriminatory hiring practice. Since it also enacts a discriminatory policy, it also constitutes the harm of discrimination. According to both MacKinnon and Langton, pornography works in a similar way. It causes women harm and it does so, in part, by enacting social norms that are (at least partially) constitutive of women's subordinate social status.^[1]

Again following MacKinnon, Langton focuses on two harms allegedly constituted by pornography: subordination and silencing (MacKinnon 1987, 1993). I consider each in turn. First, according to Langton, pornography subordinates women because it is an illocutionary act (speech act) of subordination. Akin to the executive who enacts a discriminatory policy, pornography somehow enacts social norms that subordinate women, according to Langton, by ranking women as inferior, legitimating discriminatory behavior towards them and depriving them of important powers. Although this is an extremely interesting and fruitful proposal, this speech act approach nevertheless faces several challenges. It is unclear that pornography can helpfully be understood in speech act terms. (Who is the speaker? Assuming there is an identifiable speaker, does that speaker have an identifiable communicative intention? If so, is that intention compatible with pornography doing what Langton contends? If not, does it even make sense to think of pornography as a speech act?)

Much of Langton's ensuing material focuses on the question of authority. Clearly, some speech acts require that the speaker have, and be exercising, some form of authority. Notice that it is only because the executive has the authority to do so that his words can enact a hiring policy for his company. Since Langton maintains that pornography enacts social norms, and since enacting such norms appears to require authority, Langton must treat pornography as authoritative speech and it is not at all clear that it is. Both Judith Butler and Leslie Green argue that Langton's approach is undermined because this authority condition is both necessary and unsatisfied (Butler 1997, Green 1998). Although Langton here deftly responds to these criticisms, she does not establish that pornography actually has the requisite authority. She shows only that others have not shown that it does not. Of course, this is a complex empirical matter and one should not attempt to settle such matters from the philosopher's armchair. Fair enough. Nevertheless, there is still the unsettled philosophical question regarding what would constitute the requisite authority. A positive characterization of the informal, implicit, non-institutional sort of authority at issue remains important work to be done.

Langton also argues, along with MacKinnon and Jennifer Hornsby, that pornography silences women in such a way that it violates women's right to free speech (MacKinnon 1987, 1993; Hornsby 1993). If this is correct, then the free speech right of pornographers (to produce, distribute and consume pornography) is in direct conflict with the free speech right of women. According to Langton and Hornsby, silencing is systematic communicative interference constituted by (a systematic pattern of) hearers failing to recognize the communicative intention of speakers. Pornography is alleged to bring about silencing since consuming (certain sorts of) pornography brings it about that (some) men fail to recognize (some) women's intention to sexually refuse. When this happens, those women thereby fail to communicate their refusals to those men and they are thus silenced.

Many are critical of this work on silencing. Daniel Jacobson argues that a right to free speech cannot involve a right to illocution and that their work on silencing relies on false assumptions about the role of hearer recognition in successful speech acts (Jacobson 1995). Judith Butler argues that silencing is everywhere and this is a good thing since the possibility of reinterpreting speech is the best route to positive political change (Butler 1997). Ronald Dworkin argues that treating silencing as a violation of the right to free speech (absurdly) assumes that this right guarantees an encouraging respectful audience and perfect understanding (Dworkin 1993). Although Langton skillfully and successfully responds to these important criticisms, there are other important issues not addressed either by her or by her critics. Langton does not discuss, for example, whether consuming pornography really causes such silencing (and, if so, how exactly). Even more important perhaps, the question of whether there are any actual cases of silencing, and how we would prove it, is not addressed. Granted, this is a tall task. It would require proving, for example, that a particular rapist, on a particular occasion, failed to recognize a woman's communicative intention (as opposed to, say, falsely believing that her refusal was insincere or recognizing but ignoring her refusal). As one can see, important work remains to be done. This is hardly surprising (and hardly a criticism) when one cuts new ground as Langton has done.

Finally, I would be remiss if, when discussing Langton's work on pornography, I did not also mention her brilliant "Whose Right? Ronald Dworkin, Women and Pornographers." In this essay (chapter 6), she carefully lays out Dworkin's system and methodically argues that his positions on segregation and affirmative action actually require him to reject (rather than uphold, as he does in Dworkin 1981) the standard liberal defense of pornography. This is a stunning exemplar of feminist political philosophy: a careful and ambitious argument for a surprising and important conclusion.

Essays on Objectification

Langton's treatment of sexual objectification is also both subtle and complex and I cannot do justice to it in what little space remains. Instead, I shall focus on just one of many interesting threads. This one concerns a connection between objectification and autonomy. To objectify someone is typically understood to involve regarding (and perhaps even treating) her as a mere plaything to be used and violated (Nussbaum 1995). Such a stance offends her autonomy by assuming that she has none. Nevertheless, as Langton here stresses, there are other ways to objectify that also offend autonomy but do not deny it. In fact, these other forms of objectification actually presuppose, in some sense, the affirmation of autonomy. Consider, for example, sadistic rape. Here, the rapist derives sexual pleasure from the victim's terror and this requires regarding the victim as having a will (and thus as being no mere thing). In this way, we see that the connection between objectification and autonomy are not quite as straightforward as some have supposed (Nussbaum 1995).

This insight also has consequences for a feminist interpretation of pornography. Some feminists, for example, argue that pornography is autonomy-affirming since it portrays women as actively choosing to engage in sex. Comparing this to the repressive sexual norms of the 1950's, pornography can thus seem liberating and hence socially good. Opening up the possibility that autonomy-affirmation can be perniciously paired with one of these other forms of autonomy offense, Langton here demonstrates the complexity of pornography's social meaning. Is it really so liberating to portray women as choosing to engage in sex that is both painful and degrading? As one can see, the issue is not so simple.

Another important theme in Langton's work on objectification concerns the complex way that expectations shape the social world. Our gender norms prescribe how men and women ought to be and, by so doing, help to make us that way. Such self-fulfilling beliefs, as Langton calls them, both make the world conform to our expectations and mask the fact that this is what's happening. In this way, our gendered behaviors can come to seem both natural and just.

The book is full of unexpected, but welcome, twists. Langton finds surprising comrades to feminism in the history of philosophy. Although Kant is not usually seen as a feminist, Langton's use of his work certainly is. Hume's work on projection is also applied to the masking of social construction and Descartes' rationalism is celebrated as a reliable method for ridding oneself of prejudicial beliefs. She also draws on contemporary philosophical work in resourceful and imaginative ways. Recent work on color perception is applied to the projective aspects of sexual objectification, current epistemology is used to support the claim that pornography generates (a problematic form of) knowledge, and work on the difficulties associated with deciding to believe are applied to her assessment of self-fulfilling beliefs. Finally, although Langton is definitely an analytic philosopher, she occasionally alludes to work in the continental tradition. Continental feminist work on projection is applied to both sexual objectification and the manner in which its construction is hidden, and existentialist bad faith comes up when discussing how some participate in their own objectification.

In sum, the book is superb. Many are inclined to dismiss feminist scholarship on the grounds that it lacks clarity and rigor. Langton's work is a prime counter-example. It is both clear and careful. Some are suspicious of feminist scholarship since it has a clear agenda and that agenda is thought to undermine the integrity of the work. Langton's scholarship proves that this suspicion too is misplaced. As we have seen, Langton believes that women are oppressed via sexual objectification and that the consumption of pornography contributes, in complex ways, to women's inferior social status. Thus, although it is clear that Langton has a substantive agenda, it is equally clear that she has rigorous arguments in support of that agenda. Finally, Langton is not merely preaching to the choir. She is keenly fair-minded. She engages openly with critics. She explicitly states her assumptions and she herself identifies the work that remains to be done in supporting the views that she here endorses. This is feminist scholarship at its very best. It's first-rate philosophy.

References

Butler, Judith. 1997. "Sovereign Performatives" in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London, Routledge: 71-102.

Dworkin, Ronald. 1981. "Do We Have a Right to Pornography?" Oxford Journal of Legal Studies I: 177-212.

Dworkin, Ronald. 1993. "Women and Pornography," The New York Review of Books, 21 October: 36, 37, 40-42.

Green, Leslie. 1998. "Pornographizing, Subordinating and Silencing" in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, Robert C. Post (ed.), Los Angeles, CA, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities: 285-311.

Hornsby, Jennifer. 1993. "Speech Acts and Pornography," Women's Philosophy Review 10: 38-45.

Jacobson, Daniel. 1995. "Freedom of Speech Acts? A Response to Langton," Philosophy and Public Affairs 24: 64-79.

Langton, Rae. 1993. "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts," Philosophy and Public Affairs 22: 305-330. Reprinted in Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification, Oxford, Oxford University Press: 25-87.

MacKinnon, Catharine. 1987. "Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech," in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press: 163-197.

MacKinnon, Catharine. 1993. Only Words, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha. 1995. "Objectification," Philosophy and Public Affairs 24: 249-291.

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^[1] Although MacKinnon believes that pornography causes a variety of substantive harms to women, she argues that it ought to be regulated because of the harms it constitutes. According to MacKinnon, pornography violates women's civil rights. Langton is here less concerned with regulation than she is with philosophically substantiating the claim that pornography constitutes harm.

NDPR Peter Ulrich, Integrative Economic Ethics: Foundations of a Civilized Market Economy

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-06-30 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Peter Ulrich, Integrative Economic Ethics: Foundations of a Civilized Market Economy, James Fearns (trans.), Cambridge UP, 2008, 484pp., $117.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521877961.

Reviewed by Jeffery Smith, University of Redlands

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In the Preface to the new English translation of Integrative Economic Ethics Peter Ulrich writes that "no other comparable overall conception" of how to integrate the study of ethics, economics and political theory "exists to date in the Anglo-Saxon literature" (p. ix). This claim, while somewhat of an overstatement, points to an important divergence between the ways in which academic study of business ethics has emerged within the continental European and Anglo-American traditions. Whereas debates in the English-speaking business ethics community have centered on the creation of moral business, centrally having to do with the moral development of management practices, Europeans have drawn upon a rich body of work in the last century that views ethical questions in business as a subset of larger questions having to do with the design of just economic and political institutions.

This basic difference in orientation is reflected in the original title of Ulrich's work, Integrative Wirtschaftsethik. The term Wirtschaftsethik (literally translated as "economic ethics") does not have an equivalent in the Anglo-American philosophical discussion. Indeed Ulrich and his colleagues take special care to distinguish Wirtschaftsethik from Betriebs- or Unternehmensethik, where the former denotes the study of ethical problems related to the design of economic institutions and the latter denotes study of ethical problems within the management of firms. His insight is that while separate, these two perspectives on commercial life are inherently interrelated, for the ethical nature of business conduct by any one firm is structured by the ethical nature of the institutions in which they operate. Ulrich's attempt at providing a holistic analysis of the interplay between the design of economic institutions and the behavior of individual market actors will stand as the most challenging, yet rewarding aspect of Integrative Economic Ethics for English-speaking business ethicists.

This orientation is also fused with what Ulrich views as an inescapable feature of contemporary Western market economies, whether liberal or socialist in orientation. Ulrich's work is a prime example of what others have recently termed "German republicanism."^[1] Economic actors, whether individual or corporate, should not be conceived of as private actors seeking to further a narrow set of self-interested goals; rather, economic actors are always implicated in decisions and practices that can support or hinder the attainment of other public goods that are part of a well-ordered society. As such, economic activity in general, and economic actors specifically, are part of larger social arrangements that are in need of moral legitimation. This demonstrates the close link that Ulrich wants to preserve between historical work in "political economy" and contemporary business ethics. What we expect of market actors will be answered, in large part, by what is required of businesses to maintain and preserve the legitimacy of the free market as a device through which public goods are secured and protected.

Ulrich therefore begins the first part of Integrative Economic Ethics with a basic question: how should we assess market-oriented economic arrangements from the moral point of view? This question is motivated by a kind of skepticism that the social consequences of markets and market institutions have achieved their purpose of serving the good of humanity. Ulrich writes, "more and more people are beginning to doubt whether an economic rationalization process which is increasingly gaining a momentum of its own does actually operate in the service of life" (p. 2). He by no means intends the book to serve as a blanket criticism of markets. Instead he is careful to focus his attention on the way that markets can strengthen or diminish civil and political society.

Ulrich provides us with a method for answering this question well before providing us with an actual answer. His project is termed "integrative economic ethics" to underscore a contrast with other methods in business ethics. He resists many approaches that conceive of business ethics as "applied ethics" where the economic rationality of business firms is not questioned and ethics is seen as an "antidote" to unrestrained economic pursuits (p. 106). In contrast, integrative economic ethics attempts to redefine the normative aspects of economic activity itself. Building upon notions such as Ed Freeman's rejection of the so-called "separation" between ethical and economic rationality and Daniel Hausmann and Michael McPherson's claim that ethical commitments are always part of the individual choices made by economic actors, Ulrich maintains that the moral point of view prescribes a "different socio-economic rationality" that rejects the notion that practical reason in economic life is solely concerned with individual interest satisfaction. Integrative economic ethics "wishes to subject the entire normative substructure of . . . rational economic activity to . . . unconditional ethical reflection" (p. 109). His aspiration is to find an ethically integrated account of economic rationality that prompts economic actors to reflect continuously upon the normative legitimacy of their decisions.

To accomplish fully the task he sets before himself, Ulrich needs to dispense with the standard ways in which economic thought has defined such concepts as rationality and value. Thus, much of part two of Integrative Economic Ethics is spent criticizing the view that he refers to as "economism", or the notion that economic theory provides a "self sufficient" utility maximizing rationality that is "autonomous and absolute" and leads to "mutual advantage" for individual members of the economic system (p. 111-113). The basic problem, for Ulrich, is that while economism is correct in asserting that competition in the market will make "ethical reflection" unlikely (i.e., the pressures of competition will make it too costly for self-interested economic actors to embrace ethical behavior), it is mistaken to think that this is a necessity that we cannot change. Ulrich rejects the "rational determinism" of economism and argues that the presumptive autonomy of economic rationality is a contingent intellectual product of Western social history, rather than a normatively grounded assumption (as it is often cast) (p.136).

Part of what enables Ulrich to make this move is his use of "systems theory" as discussed by German social theorists such as Jürgen Habermas (p. 129). Anglo-American readers may miss much of the substance of this analysis, but it remains quite important to the development of Ulrich's attempt to provide an integrated normative theory of ethics and economics. Habermas draws an important distinction between modern society as a "lifeworld", where life is coordinated according to consensual norms that everyone recognizes as legitimate, versus society as a network of "sub-systems" designed to accomplish certain functional or instrumental goals. The economy is a sub-system of modern society where competitive exchange contracts produce "mutual" interest satisfaction for its participants. It is, in Habermas' terminology, a "functionally specified domain of action" that continues to expand its influence over the actions and thought of individuals.^[2] Ulrich's critique of economism essentially maintains that the economic sub-system in modern societies is entrenched because its functional aims and internal logic have become immune to criticism. The goals of profit seeking and competition have usurped other spheres of the lifeworld thereby displacing non-economic norms in the coordination of social action.^[3] The antidote to this current problem is to make the economic sub-system pervious to the norms identified in the lifeworld, i.e., norms that reflect shared insight into how coordinated social action can be made just. Thus Ulrich concludes that

the institutional political decision as to where the market should rule . . . always requires justification and legitimation . . . for the same reason, in a truly free society, the social intentions and ends pursued through the rule of the market must always be open to criticism (p. 131).

Ulrich's use of the concept of "lifeworld" plays an important function. First, citizens within the lifeworld engage one another as equally dignified members of a society where each is to receive basic levels of respect and recognition. Second, the terms of legitimate social cooperation are defined by dialogic interactions among citizens. This harkens back to Ulrich's earlier endorsement of Habermas and Karl Otto Apel's "discourse" or "communicative" ethics whereby the moral legitimacy of social arrangements rests on the support those arrangements receive from norms that everyone can, in principle, endorse.^[4] To the extent that economic activity is a "social event", not merely an iterated sequence of private exchanges, Ulrich maintains that it is an integral feature of society as a lifeworld. Despite the private nature of particular business transactions, market economic arrangements are "always subject to public regulation and justification" if they are to be seen as legitimate from the moral point of view (p. 217).

However, there is a significant problem still awaiting resolution. Supposing that Ulrich has made the case that economic activity stands in need of legitimation, he must still demonstrate how an "integrated economic ethics" can institutionalize the requirement that the moral point of view is taken up in economic life -- either by those institutions that regulate economic activity or by economic actors themselves. This task occupies the fourth part of Integrative Economic Ethics.

The moral point of view is assured when citizens, regulatory bodies of the state and corporations are seen as simultaneous, interactive "sites" of morality in public life (p. 269). Citizens, as political and economic actors, maintain both rights and responsibilities in this regard. On the one hand, they must be assured certain rights of equal standing in order to carry out their private aims alongside their roles as citizens who deliberate about the legitimacy of social arrangements. On the other hand, they have responsibilities as employees, consumers and investors to make decisions that are supportive of, and compatible with, the maintenance of social norms. When citizens collectively identify legitimate collective goals it is functionally important for the state to enact legal frameworks to structure economic activity that supports these goals. Regulatory bodies, thus, are a place where respect for morality in economic life is institutionalized. Incentives, enforceable proscriptions, rules, etc. are ways in which the state can administer and be answerable to the "republican" values identified by citizens in a critical "public sphere". Corporations, too, play an important role in facilitating the realization of publicly identified moral norms by developing their own strategies to uphold the ends of morality while simultaneously engaging in the pursuit of profit. When corporations cannot find solutions to moral problems on their own, moral norms provide reason for managers to engage state institutions critically to rectify such problems or, when possible, develop joint efforts with industry competitors to identify standards of operation that can prevent moral problems from becoming permanent features of the market.

This last "site" for morality will be of particular interest to Anglo-American business ethicists. Corporate ethics, for Ulrich, is centrally about the integration of moral and economic aims whereby corporate managers are constantly answerable to the norms identified by citizens:

Integrative corporate ethics sees itself as a permanent process of unconditional critical reflection and the shaping of sound normative foundations for entrepreneurial activity in the service of life (p. 409).

This is perhaps the most significant feature of the fourth part of Ulrich's discussion: corporations not only have responsibilities to be supportive citizens and work with other social actors to improve the conditions of legitimacy of the market, but they also have the duty to contribute to morally attuned action through their own operations.

The most natural way that this can occur is through management and governance practices that take seriously the rights and standing of each party that contributes to the success of the firm. Employees, investors, financiers, suppliers, local communities, non-governmental organizations and even managers themselves are corporate "stakeholders" in this sense.^[5] Corporations are accountable to the creative integration of moral norms into their operation by opening social spaces that examine the norms governing corporate activity. The implementation of corporate ethics, then, is centrally about the creation of management systems -- e.g., behavioral norms, cultural expectations, incentives, evaluation methods and interactive processes -- that place value on the standing of each stakeholder "citizen" group while acknowledging their relative needs, interests and risks.

Ulrich is intentionally vague on what such a management system might look like; he mentions the possibility of a thoroughly democratic approach to the governance of corporations through stakeholder dialogue or even stakeholder governance boards. If these notions are effectively institutionalized one can only wonder to what extent the nature of the modern corporation as we know it today would fundamentally change.

Still, the theoretical foundation behind Ulrich's call for stakeholder management has proven to be influential, even if only indirectly. Stakeholder theory itself has been taken up by many scholars in management and business ethics since the original publication of Ulrich's book in 1997. What is perhaps most compelling and unique about his theoretical stance, however, is that he weaves together an entire program of Wirtschaftsethik where other stakeholder theorists in the United States have been narrowly focused on the ethics of how to manage firms within the bounds of profit maximization. Ulrich's call for corporate ethics as effective citizenship combined with stakeholder management is, at bottom, a call for us to see how the legitimacy of free market economies rests upon a nested set of social activities, all of which play a role in identifying and implementing norms of just social interaction.

Ulrich's work will likely receive mixed reviews in Anglo-American circles. It is complex and encyclopedic, and it relies on literature that most will not have studied. It remains nonetheless very important reading for business ethicists who are unfamiliar with twentieth century German conversations about social theory, economics and business administration.

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^[1] Andreas Scherer, Guido Palazzo and Dorothee Baumann, "Global Rules and Private Actors: Toward a New Role of the Transnational Corporation in Global Governance", Business Ethics Quarterly 16 (2006), pp. 505-33.

^[2] Jürgen Habemas, The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2: Lifeworld and System -- A Critique of Functionalist Reason, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 115.

^[3] Compare with Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 143-63.

^[4] Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Nielson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

^[5] See R. Edward Freeman, "The Politics of Stakeholder Theory: Some Future Directions", Business Ethics Quarterly 4 (1994), pp. 401-21 and "The Stakeholder Approach Revisited", Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik 5 (2004), pp. 228-41.

NDPR Ronald R. Sundstrom, The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-06-29 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Ronald R. Sundstrom, The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice, SUNY Press, 2008, 190pp., $24.95 (pbk.), ISBN 9780791475867.

Reviewed by Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.), Vanderbilt University

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The United States is undergoing the most profound demographic changes in the country's history so that in a few decades, if not sooner, persons identified (and identifying themselves) as white and tracing their ancestry to Europe will have become part of the nation's racial and ethnic plurality, no longer its numerically dominant racial group. This historic development portends others equally historic and transformative, among these the gradual -- possibly even dramatic -- displacement of white people as the dominating group politically, economically, socially, even culturally.

This is not what this nation-state's founders envisioned or intended. Formed out of colonies of settlers from Western Europe, the United States was a quite historic political enterprise, an experiment in representative federated democratic governance at the national level that preserved increasingly more participatory democratic self-government down the levels of state, county, town and country. However, equally foundational to this new experiment was a hierarchical social ontology ordered by philosophical anthropologies of valorized racial distinctions, confirmed and articulated by the very best of prevailing scientific understandings and legitimated by the very best of prevailing philosophical and theological speculations. In these very confident polity-ordering anthropologies and ontologies, the white race ranked highest, as the superior race that had the God-given burden of responsibility of serving as the vanguard of civilization and progressive, Christian history-making. The United States was thus deemed a sacred venture in state-craft; so, too, the predominance of the superior white race and the subordination or elimination of the weaker, inferior, colored races, whether through enslavement or annihilation.

There was enslavement and genocide, and more. Two hundred plus years later, however, the Coloreds are on the threshold of predominating demographically. The United States, a nation-state by and for the white race, is going brown!

What are literate citizens, teacher-scholars and public intellectuals in particular, to make of this momentous development (which is hardly a single phenomenon)? With what appropriate terms and concepts, with what praxis-guiding agendas of understanding, should we attend to this historic moment through which we are living? Ronald Sundstrom's The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice offers to assist us with these very challenging questions.

Over the last few decades, a tremendous amount of intellectual and scholarly effort has been devoted to clarifying, critiquing, even eliminating terms and concepts intended to identify, define, describe, and otherwise express understandings, valuations, and investments of various kinds and degrees in specifications of raciality and ethnicity. These specifications have served as guides to order both the political economy of the United States as well as the intimacies and relations of social life foundational to all levels of the polity and its operations, at home and abroad. Some persons advocate, even press for, the elimination of all references to and use of racial designations in governmental work and policy-making since such designations are without -- and cannot support -- "scientific" verification in the biological (i.e., genetic) makeup of human individuals long thought to share identifying racial characteristics. Many of these persons argue for "race-blind" or "color-blind" policies and practices in keeping with what some argue were key intentions and articulations in the foundational documents that gave formation to the nation-state as a formal union of independent colonies. Certainly, many of these persons argue, a necessary step in discontinuing the long history of invidious racial discrimination is to discontinue use of misguided and erroneous, "metaphysically empty" concepts of race when formulating and implementing policies and practices by which persons are selected for rewards and sanctions, opportunities and exclusions.

Other persons disagree and argue for revised conceptions of raciality -- or in some instances argue for the substitution of concepts of ethnicity for notions of raciality -- to be used to determine the best terms and means for achieving justice for persons and groups harmed by invidious racial and/or ethnic discrimination, and to be used to keep a watchful eye on policies and practices, and outcomes of their deployment, as history unfolds. Without the markers of raciality or ethnicity, it is argued, there will be no way of determining whether or to what extent invidious practices have been curtailed and with what effects on persons heretofore identified as being members of groups subjected to racialized oppressive invidious discrimination.

What have such concerns and arguments to do with the "browning" of the United States? For Sundstrom, a great deal. First, the use of "browning" to characterize the profound demographic changes underway serves to indicate that the focal agents of the changes are persons who are identified as members of bio-cultural groups heretofore distinguished by the racial/ethnic color codes as the "brown" races: that is, persons from Latin America and South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. On what terms are these persons to be accommodated or denied opportunities and rewards, sanctioned or supported in their endeavors? In answering, we must keep in mind that the work of retributive, redistributive, or restorative justice is far from finished for persons descended from native peoples who had settled the continent eons before the coming of the rapacious, supposedly racially superior white settler-colonists who appropriated lands and resources for themselves and their descendants "by any means necessary", physical and cultural genocide included.  In doing so, the colonists also appropriated resources for the generations of descendants of African peoples, who were enslaved and otherwise oppressed for centuries with humanity-deforming consequences still being experienced today. Will the challenges of the "browning" of the United States usher in compelling opportunities for refining our terms and concepts, practices and policy-making, so that all forms of justice needed will be better worked at and achieved?

Strong and principled voices have offered seemingly persuasive and well-reasoned arguments in response to these and other important questions having to do with achieving justice in our multiracial, multiethnic polity.  This polity has a troublesome history of conditioning peoples' histories by the complications of a founding state- and people-making project -- E Pluribus Unum: Out of many [peoples], One [people] -- that, simultaneously, sanctioned racialized genocide and enslavement, and the exclusion of other "colored" non-white races. Some persons envision a United States no longer ordered by racial or ethnic considerations, where color-consciousness has been dissipated by practicing color-blindness, and by the demographic predominance of "brown" Americans to such an extent that the sorting of persons into hierarchically valued, color-coded racial and ethnic groups will not have a demographic basis. Such was the wish of Frederick Douglass: that the nation's racial population groups would intermingle and interbreed -- in his words "amalgamate' -- to such an extent that a new "blended" race, neither black nor white, would emerge and rescue our country from the scourge of color-conscious, color-valuing racialisms and racisms.

In the first chapter of The Browning of America, Sundstrom explores what he terms "Frederick Douglass's Political Apostasy". He takes into serious consideration Douglass's principled investments in the notion of human brotherhood as more ethically foundational than raciality or ethnicity and thus more appropriate as a foundation for a democratic republic with a multiplicity of races and ethnic groups since, by Douglass's reasoning, neither raciality nor ethnicity should have ethical significance. In the words of contemporary thinkers who are soul-mates of Douglass, raciality and ethnicity are "irrelevant from a moral point of view". However, Sundstrom is not persuaded by Douglass, and views the latter as a tragic figure pressed into "radical alienation" by the disappointments of the continuing ethical failures of invidious racialisms and the failure to achieve color-blindness in the organization and functioning of the United States, notwithstanding the Union victory in the Civil War and the emancipation of Negro slaves. Justice was evaded . . .

Sundstrom would not have contemporary heirs of Douglass's intellectual and political agendas hijack the browning of the United States in well-intentioned but misguided, even naïve, efforts to describe, define, or direct the transformation as a realization of color-blindness, for doing so would "threaten progressive color-conscious policies, and thus aid in the evasion of righting past racial wrongs" (p. 37). His efforts in the second chapter, "Color Blindness and the Browning of America", are devoted to countering this hijacking while working out careful considerations of the key notions of color blindness, color-consciousness, and the browning of America. This is a particularly meaty chapter, one worth reading for the range of voices Sundstrom surveys (and for the references!). It is also worth reading in order to savour the commendable efforts expended to highlight the virtues of each notion and some of the very important relationships of each to the realization of both backward-looking and forward-looking justice-making in our nation. Moreover, Sundstrom works with care to give respectful, though critical, treatment to the positions of the racial and ethnic "conservationists": those (this writer among them), that is, who, like W.E.B. Du Bois, argue for color-conscious policies and practices that will help to "conserve" racial and/or ethnic groups as producers and sharers of cultures the diversity of which enhances the well-being of the human species. Of course, the arguments of the conservationists are heavily challenged by prevailing understandings held by many that contemporary sciences have proven that there are no distinctive racial groups within the human species that can be singled out on the basis of biological characteristics. Accordingly, "race" can refer, at best, to social groupings by social convention, but cannot, does not, pick out "natural kinds."

Even so, the matter has not been settled once and for all. Differences and diversities of cultures and culture-making peoples (individuals who form, and are formed by, self-identifying group-distinguishing characteristics, biological as well as cultural) prevail and are the focus of democratic politics (for recognition and for life-enhancing appreciation). As Sundstrom notes:

The real moral and political work involves reconciling the fact of differences, whether these differences are socially or biologically generated, and building moral communities within and between just and stable political societies. (p. 48)

For this moral and political work principles of color-blindness are often quite appropriate, sometimes even necessary. So, too, are principles that require color-consciousness. Sundstrom assures us, through careful argument, that this important work cannot be accomplished by misappropriations of "the browning of America".

However, this development demands that the many of us who carry out this work cease thinking, talking, and acting as though the United States's racial problems are exclusively, or even primarily, matters having to do with relations between the "white" and "black" races. This has never been the case, even from the founding. Native "red" peoples were on hand and characters in the opening drama; their descendants are largely tragic figures still for whom justice in almost any form has not been realized. Likewise, "brown" and "yellow" races have been important characters in the nation-making drama, though hardly with proper billing or compensation, to say nothing of proper justice. In chapter three, "The Black-White Binary as Racial Anxiety and Demand for Justice", Sundstrom provides an educative survey of struggles over how best to take proper note of the increasing racial and ethnic diversification of the United States while continuing the work of retributive, redistributive, and restorative justice for people of African descent in particular, as well as for other peoples of color.  This work must be done while attenuating the troublesome and potentially explosive worries of those white people who equate the loss of numerical predominance with the loss of their rights and privileges long rationalized as being sanctioned and secured by their superior whiteness. Also of note, Sundstrom challenges those working for the browning of the United States not to be misled in believing that in doing so they will come to have special rank and associated privileges in a reshaped (and re-colored) racial and ethnic hierarchy. Rather, he reasons, "brown" peoples have a special responsibility not to reconfigure and further consolidate the hierarchy. Social justice is not to be evaded . . .

In the midst of all of the many aspects of invidious racial and ethnic oppressions that have been devised and practiced across the history of the United States, the aspect most sensitive and productive of the most grotesque violence has been that having to do with the most intimate and consequential of human involvements: intimate relations, intimate sexual relations especially, between persons of different and differently ranked racial groups. These are subjects, Sundstrom argues, that have been systematically avoided by contemporary thinkers who wrestle with race matters. He would have us stop avoiding the subject, not least because of the foundational importance of intimate relations for the formation and continuation of polities. Without such relationships, there can be no polities. There can be no resolution of our racial and ethnic difficulties without being forthright about intimate and sexual interracial matters. These, argues Sundstrom, must not be relegated to the realm of privacy and thus put off limits to philosophers and theorists of the social and political. Moreover, he would not have these matters be wedded to the "browning of America" as their presumed resolution, as Frederick Douglass had hoped out of anguished alienation and desperation. Chapter four, "Interracial Intimacies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America" is required reading for us all, if social justice is not to be evaded.

So, too, chapter 5, "Responsible Multiracial Politics". Here the reader will experience, as well as come to understand, the personal existential weight and philosophical significance for Sundstrom of political endeavours for persons whose identities are neither easily nor accurately given fulfilling, coherent, authentic, and healthy articulation and lived-experience if forced into a seemingly singular, unitary, and thus supposedly harmonious racial designation. Persons who are descendants of multiracial, multiethnic unions -- even when the races and ethnic groups are understood as social, rather than biological, constructs -- need the terms and concepts by which they can identify, identify with, and live their important various heritages, by which they can, in all appropriate instances, 'remember their grandmothers'. Needed, too, are modes of politics that sanction and nurture this important existential work as another crucial aspect of multiracial, multiethnic democratic polities, modes of politics by which persons of complex identities can be made ready for and welcomed to shared and responsible political life. Social justice without evasion . . .

Sundstrom offers his own conclusions to his chapter-focused discussions of the various issues being brought to the fore by the "browning" of the United States. I urge readers to consider his final offerings, but to be persuaded to them, or not, only after a careful and considerate reading of the entire book. For whether or not one is persuaded by Sundstrom, I am confident that the considerate reader will be better informed by the experience, more thoughtful about her or his own convictions regarding the matters he addresses, and better enabled to assist with avoiding the evasion of social justice.

NDPR Irving Singer, Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-06-28 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Irving Singer, Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up, MIT Press, 2009, 125pp., $14.95 (hbk.), ISBN 9780262195744.

Reviewed by Erica Lucast Stonestreet, College of St. Benedict/St. John's University

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Irving Singer's Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up traverses different paths through themes of his work that will already be familiar to his readers. In fact, a reader might wonder what, if anything, this new book adds to his wide-ranging body of work. A new contribution, however, is not the intention; instead, Singer takes his audience on a personal philosophical journey through his love affair with humanism in general and philosophy of love in particular. Because of this, the book visits its themes without regard to historical chronology, unlike his more systematic works. Over the course of the discussion, Singer recounts his distinction between bestowal and appraisal, his preference for the idea of love as wedding rather than merging, his sense of love as an imaginative and creative acceptance of another human being, the pluralistic nature of love (love of things, of persons, and of ideals), and the hope that a dialogue between humanistic and scientific thinking on love can add much more to the conversation on both sides.

No doubt because of its origin in a series of radio interviews, the book has the wandering, personal character of conversation, with natural breaks and jumps and tangents. Its structure is admittedly "amorphous"; it lacks an overarching thesis and may for this reason be disappointing to someone who is looking for a systematic introduction to the philosophy of love that does some philosophical work. In this respect, the fact that the book opens with a question -- Is romantic love a recent idea? -- is a bit deceptive. If one keeps in mind that the book is a personal work, however, the question comes to make sense: this is the question that started Singer himself out on his journey. He began with the suspicion that the notion of romantic love as a recent invention was incomplete at best, and set out to find out whether this suspicion would be borne out. Hence his trilogy, The Nature of Love, which is a detailed exploration of the intellectual history of love in the Western world, beginning with Plato. So, too, the partial summing-up begins with Plato.

Singer recounts his interpretation of Plato's sense of love as a striving toward the Good, starting with overindulgence in sex (to purge oneself of these more earthly desires) and proceeding from there in stages toward the ultimate goal in life, full perception of the Good. His treatment here differs in focus, though not ultimately in substance, from his treatment of the same ideas in The Nature of Love. Since he sees the Platonic journey from "primordial" love of carnal and sensual pleasures to intellectual and spiritual love of the Good as "the most fertile and powerful single body of thought on love that anyone has ever created throughout Western civilization," his presentation of Plato's ideas is one of the longest and most sustained in the book, a total of six pages.

From this beginning in Plato, Singer steps back and remarks on the way the dialectic of ideas proceeds. Plato's idealism and the "vertical" progression from a baser kind of love to a nobler one contrasts with the more "horizontal" thinking of later times -- more empirical thinking which, according to Singer, avoids the attempt to find a single key to the universe and instead allows us to see love in its diversely plural manifestations. This is an important strand of his own thinking, and occurs throughout the book. Love is not just love of persons; it is love of things and ideals as well, and each of these categories can have endless variations within it. In separating these three types, Singer characterizes himself as a maker of distinctions, claiming that the best we can do as philosophers is explore a vast subject matter and try to clarify it "with ever-finer analysis or dissection."

As Singer continues his reflections, the sections make something of a patchwork. The structure of the book is neither historical nor fully thematic -- more like a concept map.  Although transitions between ideas are often made by returning to Plato, several of them feel artificial and do not seem to grow organically from the end of a previous line of thought. This sort of jump is natural in conversation, though somewhat difficult to follow in writing.

Despite the sometimes desultory course of the discussion, a few themes recur. Perhaps the most important of these has already been mentioned: Singer's insistence on the pluralistic character of love. The most prominent meaning of this lies in the repeated reminder that love can have many different objects. (One might wonder where religious love, which he discusses in detail in other works, fits into his categories of love of people, things, and ideals, or whether he would add a fourth category.) Most discussions of love center on romantic love, which is between people, and Singer's discussion spends proportionate time on romantic love. However, he reminds us how the love of things and ideals can be good, and includes examples from his own life: how he loves the writing process, loves the computer he uses in it, loves humanism and philosophy.

Pluralism causes Singer to resist both the narrowing or reductive tendencies of figures like Plato and Freud, and also the expansive tendencies of figures like Nietzsche. His pluralism helps to support his criticism of Freud's reduction of all love to libidinal desire, though he does not elaborate the critique in great detail in this work. Pluralism also suggests to Singer that Nietzsche's notion of "amor fati," stretched into a love of everything, goes too far. We can love many different kinds of things, but only so many total objects. It is simply impossible to be familiar enough with everything in the universe to bestow on it all the value and attention that characterize love.

Although we are limited in the number of things we can love, Singer does not diminish the importance to us of loving in itself. In his preface, he writes, "I realized that understanding love or its related conditions required an investigation into problems about meaningfulness in life as a whole and the human creation of value in general" (xvii). Our lives are most meaningful when we love objects outside ourselves, and love loving those things. This is a strand of thought that Singer has in common with Harry Frankfurt. Readers who know Frankfurt's recent Reasons of Love will find that Singer mentions many harmonious ideas, though the two philosophers come to them from quite different directions. Singer writes that "What matters most is doing what you can for the sake of living most fully in the present. . . . Only by exercising a vital effort of this type can you love the life in others and in yourself" (96-7). Singer and Frankfurt both believe that love involves bestowing value on the beloved (though at this point in his thinking Singer makes less of this aspect of love than he used to). Frankfurt adds that in doing so, the lover's welfare is bound up with the beloved's, and in that sense it becomes a part of the lover. This is in turn good for the lover because loving things motivates him or her to act on their behalf or in enjoyment of the things loved, and thus gives him or her reasons to keep going. Singer is less explicit in this book about the logic here, but he agrees with the thrust of Frankfurt's conclusion.

Toward the end of the book, Singer picks up a theme that first appears midway through: the relationship between scientific and humanistic thinking on love. As a humanist who takes a naturalistic stance, Singer acknowledges with some admiration the interest and importance of work taking place in cognitive science. Yet, he suggests, "There is a lack of proper recognition of the role of feelings, of affective realities, that are not wholly amenable to the current modes of investigation" (57). The scientific approach is too "rationalistic" and therefore rests on a fundamental mistake. He believes that we need a "completely new lexicon and analytic approach" to understand the affective side of love in all its glory and messiness: emotions, intuitions and instincts, sexual desires, and so on. He expresses a worry that the humanities are undervalued in the name of technological advancement and pragmatic values. Still, he offers little in the way of concrete suggestions as to how the collaboration between them would look (though he does mention that his work on love and sex is an effort in this vein).

What is the interest of a book like this, if it does no new philosophical work and treats no theme with much depth? Why should we be interested in one man's reflection on his own thought over a long career? Again, the book's origin as a series of interviews holds a clue. Imagine the perspective of interviewer or audience: here is a philosopher who has spent a long time ruminating on themes that matter a great deal to most of us. Here is a man who can talk graciously and thoughtfully about things that matter. He has written volumes on love, creativity, and meaning in life -- things most people experience and would like to understand better -- with both precision and insight. Isn't that a man you'd like to talk to? In this respect he does not disappoint, though he can offer no ultimate answers. Perhaps this is as close as he comes to a single summary of his thinking on love:

Like the world itself, love is an emanation grounded in matter, and comparable to its parental origin. It is a dynamic and always changing process. At the same time, it can empower us to live our brief lives with significant fulfilment, sometimes with joy, and often with a sense of residual satisfaction. (105)

Most people don't know what philosophers really do, and what insights philosophy can (and can't!) offer. It is best, then, to read the whole book as an offering to non-philosophers concerning what the humanities, and philosophy in particular, can contribute to a holistic approach to the expansion of human knowledge.

Singer writes:

If you are a philosopher, you can only make a personal portrait that may be true to yourself, to your times, to your style of thought or writing, and thereby proffer imaginative and possibly genuine insights into the nature of human experience. If what you write is both lucid and suggestive, it may excite the imagination of other people, and that's marvelous. (95)

Using these criteria, Philosophy of Love is marvelous, although it is not a work of philosophy in the strictest sense, and will not satisfy those who seek an organized, sustained inquiry about love. The "ventures up the tree of the human spirit" Singer describes within it constitute a needed defense of humanism in a time when the world seems to be growing more pragmatic and less reflective. In addition to introducing some important themes in the philosophy of love, the book should remind humanistic philosophers why they do what they do, and it should whet the appetites of a broader audience for further reading.