NDPR Steven B. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-06-02 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Steven B. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, Cambridge UP, 2009, 307pp., $28.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521703994.

Reviewed by Samuel A. Chambers, Johns Hopkins University

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Readers looking for a fight, or the next round of an on-going fight, will not find it here. And by "here" I mean to refer both to the book under review and this review itself. In just the past six years there have been at least a dozen books published on Strauss and Straussians,^[1] on the work of the thinker and on the politics of his putative influence over his students. A student of philosophy who somehow missed the entirety of the past decade might pick up Smith's collection of essays and see nothing more than a standard, rigorous academic treatment of a philosopher in the Cambridge Series. Yet anyone who has paid even scant attention to the recent literature would see something else as well: a careful and purposive choice to avoid rehashing the debate between, on the one hand, those who wish to draw the link between Strauss and neoconservatism and/or the Iraq War and, on the other, those who wish to break that connection, to defend Strauss (and sometimes, but not always, his students as well) from those charges.

Instead, and keeping well with the mission statement of the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy series -- to overcome "intimidation" and "serve as a reference for students and non specialists" -- Smith has assembled a very sober volume. As Smith says in his lucid and succinct introduction, he has brought together the ten essays in the volume (plus his intro and his own brief biographical overview of Strauss's life and work, for a total of 12 chapters) in order "to canvass the wide range of Strauss's interests" (6). Some might question whether the term "wide-ranging" can aptly be applied to the group of contributing authors, most of whom are either self-identified Straussians, students of Strauss, or scholars who have taught or studied at the University of Chicago. Yet I use this passive construction not to smuggle in my own criticism on this front, but rather to displace it. Many recent works on Strauss and contemporary politics have become caught up in a hopeless and seemingly endless process of name calling, and I have no interest in playing that game. More importantly, it should not come as a surprise that when faced with the editorial task of finding experts on Strauss to contribute to an edited volume, Smith would wind up choosing many individuals who fall into one of these three groups. Finally, Smith has, in fact, brought together a wide array of approaches to Strauss – including some criticisms. More importantly, the book proves broad in terms of themes (from the problem of modernity, to religion and reason, to social science method, to political regimes), time periods (from early writings and letters, some still not translated into English, through the well-known and widely-read books, to late essays and spoken remarks), and approaches (some authors treat Strauss as a scholar and actor in his own right, some take him as a teacher, and some address him as a philosopher engaging with timeless questions).

Philosophy Between Religion and Politics

As presented, the volume has no explicit structure other than the 12 chapters, but it divides well into three sections: the first includes Smith's two framing chapters; the second includes the next five chapters, all of which center on questions of Strauss's engagement with ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, dealing in particular with the modern/premodern divide and the question of reason and religion; the final section is comprised of five chapters that engage more with questions of politics and society and includes two chapters focusing directly on politics, two on social science and liberal education, and a final chapter on the very practical and historical issue of "Straussians." Smith's chapters are introductory overviews, of course, but they perform the task admirably and will, I think, provide an excellent resource in years to come both for those approaching Strauss's works for the first time and for longer-term readers of Strauss who want a clear and definitive source. Each of the next two sections appears front-loaded, with some of the more important, controversial or new material coming in the earlier chapters.

If these twelve distinct essays can be said to come together under a single unifying theme or idea (and perhaps they cannot), then it is certainly that of "Strauss as philosopher." In particular, Strauss emerges here most clearly as a philosopher who navigates the pre-modern/modern divide. Numerous authors take up the challenge of re-describing Strauss's critique of modernism, while others take on the task of showing Strauss's relation to premodern philosophical principles and approaches. In Strauss's own terms, philosophy was the best answer to the most important question asked by the ancient Greek thinkers: what is the best way of life? Philosophy responds so well to the question precisely because the philosophical way of life is one of questioning, one of pursuing a truth that can never be grasped, never answered. But the philosophical pursuit of what Strauss fondly and consistently referred to as "knowledge of the whole" -- to be distinguished from the merely instrumental knowledge of facts and data within the epistemological terms of modernity -- proved consistently fraught. Philosophy is threatened on the one side by a politics that would destroy it (3, 33) and on the other by a set of religious principles that would replace its search for knowledge with the positive content of revelation (115, 174). Few readers of this volume will be surprised to hear about the first threat, given the familiarity of the example -- Socrates's death at the hands of the Athenian demos. Most readers will also be acquainted with readings of Strauss that suggest he dealt with the second threat either by rejecting religious dogma (as an atheist himself) or by allowing and subtly encouraging the religious takeover (as a religious believer himself).

In one of the stronger pieces in the volume, perhaps especially for those who are not close readers of Strauss's entire body of work, Leora Batnitzky demonstrates the inadequacies of each of these responses. All the biographical evidence indicates (and there is a wealth of such materials cited in this volume, one of the effects of which is to thoroughly humanize Strauss the man^[2]) that Strauss was a non-believing Jew, an atheist who early in life embraced a strictly political zionism (43). While Strauss obviously understood the role that religious principles played in supporting social order, there is simply little reason to take him as a religious believer. Using a phrase of Strauss's from his later writings, Batnitzky shows that Strauss's entire corpus holds together in the way that it grapples with the "theological-political predicament." This phrase names the competing claims of philosophy and religion. Of course, Strauss, many of his students, and most of the contributors to this volume like to refer to philosophy and religion under the de-historicized titles of "reason and revelation" and they often point to the "theological-political predicament" under the name "the problem of Jerusalem and Athens" (36). The shift to "reason and revelation" serves to indicate that this conflict is not institutional, not reducible to a particular historical battle, while the latter naming technique ironically situates this universal problem within a particular Western context. The West thus becomes the non-place where universal questions are asked and answered.

Those who see reason and history differently would very likely challenge the framing of this predicament by Strauss and his readers; nonetheless, numerous chapters in this volume use such a framing to clarify and illuminate a great deal of Strauss's overall project.^[3] To see Strauss's project as a response to this predicament is to understand why, despite his consistent and sometimes virulent critique of modern philosophy (e.g. 52, 129), Strauss never sought a wholesale return to the pre-modern. The general argument, that Strauss does not simply or literally wish to return to ancient Philosophy, is repeated by numerous authors (7, 41-42, 93, 117, 173), but Catherine Zuckert makes this case most forcefully in her subtle exploration of the way in which Strauss returns to premodern thought. She quotes Strauss's most important statement on this issue: "only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today" (117).

The choice of how one interprets Strauss's own negotiation of the theological-political predicament tells readers a great deal about his positions on key issues in political theory. As most contributors to this volume read Strauss, he saw the conflict between reason and revelation as irresolvable because the positions from which they argue are incommensurable. Revelation can be neither supported by nor blended with reason; this was the main problem Strauss identified in medieval philosophy, especially Thomism (58). Nor, however, can the former be refuted by the latter; this was potentially a problem for the earlier, perhaps more dogmatically atheistic Strauss who was tempted by this possibility, before later recognizing the complete incompatibility of the two. Indeed, it is Strauss's later understanding of the fundamental importance of these two "roots of western civilization" (94), that reveals him fully -- according to most of the contributors here -- as a thoroughly non-dogmatic philosopher who believes in no universal moral standards, no singular truth. Smith emphasizes this perhaps unexpected or controversial point (one that certainly cuts against the grain of many criticisms of Strauss) when he insists that there is nothing absolutist about Strauss's thought, and that his "return to nature" was a return to "flexible" standards (33). Furthermore, a number of chapters emphasize Strauss's "zetetic" understanding of philosophy as quest for truth, but never knowledge or possession of it (146, 183); Michael Zuckert even uses the "zetetic" category as one to help distinguish between the various Straussian "camps" (274-275).

Some readers may balk at the picture of a Strauss with flexible standards, as a skeptical thinker, as one who returned to a "nature" in premodern thought that was not fixed and eternal. But those readers are well-advised to engage closely with the readings in this volume, with the work of Strauss, and perhaps also with the writings of the classic political philosophers that Strauss and his followers have championed. After all, the tension between the skeptical, questioning pursuit of knowledge as that which we can never possess, and the dogmatic claim to have such knowledge is surely the tension between (one reading of) Socratic elenchus and (one reading of) the Platonic eidos. But even if we take Strauss to have had no telos, no knowledge of the "truth of the whole" that he relentlessly presupposed and pursued, there seems much less doubt about his certitude when it comes to the enemy he fought: nihilism.

Susan Shell quotes Strauss to define nihilism as: "'a desire to destroy the present world and its potentialities' unaccompanied by the clear conception of any positive alternatives" (176). More important, perhaps, than Strauss's consistent opposition to nihilism was his repeated encountering of it in both modern philosophy and modern society. It is hard not to agree with Strauss's opposition to nihilism, given his very definition of it, but in addition to this understanding of nihilism Strauss repeatedly described for his readers a chain of logic that always inevitably leads to nihilism: historicism leads to relativism, leads to nihilism. And thus, while nihilism is the rhetorical enemy, historicism is the practical, on-the-ground opponent. Smith puts it this way on just the second page of the book: "Strauss showed how modernity exhibited a dangerous tendency toward 'historicism' or what became known as 'nihilism', that is, the view that all standards of justice and morality are historically relative" (2). This is an important formulation: first, because it contains the common sign chain historicism-nihilism-relativism (ultimately, they are really all the same), and second, because Smith here asserts as proven by Strauss precisely what Strauss so frequently simply asserts, that to historicize is to render everything relative, is to "desire to destroy" the world.^[4]

While many contributors to this volume do indeed take it that historicism (because it leads to nihilism) is a danger or threat that must be responded to -- and therefore that "historicist" authors like Heidegger pose their own dangers as well -- Stanley Rosen's chapter challenges Strauss on just this point. Rosen characterizes Strauss's argument against historicism/relativism as resting on this logic: "if everything changes its nature then there is no nature" and if there is no nature then there is no genuine knowledge at all (124). Rosen questions Strauss's logic: "the claim that everything is historical is not equivalent to the claim that everything is permissible" (124). Rosen points to Nietzsche's thought of "eternal return" as suggesting just this possibility. But I think Nietzsche's conception of "perspectivism" poses the most direct alternative Strauss's view. For Nietzsche it is possible to have a view of the better (a better reading, for example, or a better action in the sense that it is more life-affirming) without a view of the best. This is precisely what Strauss sees as impossible: for Strauss, the quest for knowledge cannot merely be a knowledge of particulars but must in fact be knowledge of "the whole." The key to navigating the difference between Strauss's position and that of Nietzsche, or anyone else who affirms the possibility of knowledge as a historical product, depends on how one understands the relation of part to whole.^[5] And this brings us to the question of interpretation.

Esotericism

It can only be understatement to call the question of interpretation a thorny one in the case of Strauss. In general, when faced with the task of bringing together disparate essays all on a single author (i.e., the task of editing a volume like this one) the question of approach must always either be: a) answered at the outset of the book; b) engaged with directly within the volume; or, c) displaced to haunt the text. Festschrift and critical volumes prime the question of interpretive approach in their own particular ways, as does, in this instance, the series description. In the case of a volume on Strauss the stakes are multiplied, and Smith therefore faces an even greater challenge.

Smith can safely start with the obvious: Strauss's most explicit statement on interpretive method, "Persecution and the Art of Writing," also stands as his most famous piece of writing (27). While it is well known that Strauss claimed to have "rediscovered" the ancient art of "esoteric" writing,^[6] this volume clarifies an important related point: precisely this rediscovery led Strauss to his own personal revolution in thought. Strauss's most well known, widely read, and harshly criticized books were all written after Strauss developed his own unique hermeneutics. This volume also places that development/discovery into its rarely discussed historical context. Most readers know that Strauss was a Jewish German émigré who came to the United States between the wars and went on to have a long career as a famous University of Chicago professor. But they may not be aware that between Freiburg and Chicago Strauss spent a year in Paris, a year in London, two years in Cambridge, and then he lived more than a decade of his life in New York City.

Smith says that in New York "Strauss became a Straussian" (27).^[7] And in New York, Strauss stumbled, in a way, upon esotericism. One of the little jewels of this collection, especially for those not already well steeped in the secondary literature on Strauss, is the exegesis by Laurence Lampert (and the summary by Smith and others) of the letters Strauss wrote to Jacob Klein in 1938 and 1939. These letters, only recently published in German and still untranslated into English, show clearly that Strauss did not develop his hermeneutics independently of his own readings, but truly did "discover" it in the sense that he came upon a way to make sense of a text that, for Strauss, was previously mysterious or full of contradictions. In the first letter that Lampert quotes, Strauss tells Klein that "Maimonides is getting more and more exciting" (63) and from this point on Strauss's excitement only builds, with each letter more full of thrill than the previous one. Strauss is thrilled because for him Maimonides makes sense when one sees that "Maimonides in his beliefs was absolutely no Jew" (64, emphasis in original) and therefore he cannot be read as a "Jewish philosopher" writing a guide for believers. He must be read, instead, as a non-believer, writing a "radical critique of the Torah" that sounds to believers as if it is merely a repetition of the Torah, yet which adds "'little' 'additions'" to signal to a few select readers (philosophers) what the text is really all about (65). Strauss's better-known and (as Smith notes) much maligned theory of esoteric writing is contained in this kernel of insight (3). Philosophers like Maimonides who write under conditions of persecution (conditions in which to state plainly the truth in the face of dominant opinion would be to court disaster) must therefore produce texts that contain within them two very much distinct and at times utterly contradictory meanings. This then sets up the requirements for how good readers, those that Strauss refers to with an ambiguity that some might find ominous as "the few," will read.

They will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to very careful and well-trained readers after long and concentrated study. (Strauss, WPP, 221-2).

This quote contains the crux of the Strauss's rediscovery of esotericism -- the path that then led Strauss to reread Plato and many others as esoteric writers -- and it includes some of the elements that most worry non-Straussians about that hermeneutic approach. One problem with esoteric writing as a general theory of interpretation is that it becomes very difficult to know when to take an author at his or her word. Thus, my telling you that I have not written this review esoterically may in fact be the secret signal I give to a certain few readers that I am in fact writing esoterically, and to indicate to them that they should make sure to read me as such. Indeed, on Lampert's interpretation of him, this is precisely what Strauss does in his essay on Halevi. This example gives, at one and the same time, both a powerful illustration of the multiple-layered and sophisticated nature of esotericism while it also points to the potential dangers and internal contradictions of the theory.

Here are the steps of the various readings, starting with Halevi's text and then moving to Strauss's reading of Halevi and Lampert's reading of Strauss.

1) Halevi omits a discussion of the conflict between believer and philosopher.

2A) Strauss says the omission is intentional, designed to show esoterically that this conflict is exactly what matters most. (78)

2B) But Strauss then goes on to say that we should not "lay too much emphasis on this line of approach" (79).

3) Lampert then argues that this last line is Strauss's esoteric claim: "to not lay too much emphasis on this approach is to take this approach" (79).

To sum up, Halevi omits what is, in fact, most important; Strauss downplays what is, in fact, most significant. But if we know that Halevi is writing esoterically (and can only interpret him properly because of this knowledge) and if we know Strauss is also writing esoterically in his interpretation (ditto), then we therefore know how to read Strauss on Halevi.

Fair enough. But what do we know about Lampert? Or about me? That is, Strauss's reading locates "two parts" or two meanings in Halevi's text: the exoteric omission and the esoteric significance of that omission. Lampert then goes on to locate the two parts -- as I have tried to emphasize in my "2A" and "2B" labeling above -- in Strauss's reading (the exoteric downplaying of importance and the esoteric significance of that very gesture). My question "what about Lampert" can be expanded and specified: is there a second part, a "3B" to accompany the "3A" above, to Lampert's reading? If there is in fact a "3B," then I would need to offer an interpretation of Lampert that located that part, i.e., that specified the esoteric meaning (and therefore, in general, delineated the esoteric nature) of Lampert's text. Moreover, it would then be incumbent upon you, my reader, to specify the two parts of my reading -- call them "4A" and "4B." If every esoteric reading also becomes an esoteric writing, then how does one avoid an infinite regress, wherein every interpretation of an esoteric text must call for a future (esoteric) interpretation of itself?

One could try to hold the line, to stop the regress, by showing that this volume itself, precisely because it reveals directly the insights of esoteric writing -- through the exegesis of Strauss's letters of 1938-1939 to anyone who reads the text, and not just to Straussians -- brings the esotericism to a stop. Nonetheless, the message of esoteric writing requires that I immediately question this preceding claim. How would I know that the direct articulation of the content and approach of the esoteric interpretation of texts is not itself the exoteric teaching of Strauss? If it were then the esoteric meaning would be something other, perhaps very much the opposite. And how can I, as a reader of a secondary source on Strauss, discern the difference between Strauss's own exoteric arguments and the esoteric exegesis of those arguments?^[8] Many of the contributors to this volume discuss Strauss's "rediscovery of esotericism," and there are powerful arguments here to show how this hermeneutics leads Strauss to some of his most important claims within political theory. But aside from Lampert, who criticizes Strauss, very few authors here deal with these broader implications of the theory of esotericism.

A Return to Strauss?

Any decent review should give its reader an answer to the most fundamental question of the genre: namely, should you read this book? Given that this is a rigorous and well researched academic volume that both provides an introduction to, and an overview of, a major figure in philosophy, while also adding to the extant secondary literature on that thinker, then in this case, the question transforms into another, much larger and thornier one. Should we read Strauss? Shadia Drury's project seems to be designed to prove to us that we should not. By trying to draw as direct a line as possible between Strauss's political theory and the politics of neoconservative regime change, Drury treats Strauss's thought as somehow "dangerous" in itself, as if the goal of her work consisted not so much in interrogating or challenging Strauss's ideas, but in locating Strauss in a political position that appears to be both the opposite of Drury's and mostly untenable.^[9]

There can be no doubt that the very existence of a volume on Strauss in the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy series argues very forcefully (even if indirectly) for reading Strauss. And obviously the contributors to this volume all make out a small piece of the case for reading Strauss. Ultimately, I might be said to write a concurring opinion: I agree wholeheartedly with the majority that Strauss should be read, but I myself might read him for very different reasons than those provided by the authors of the chapters in this volume. Perhaps like them, I think we should read Strauss because he was, indeed, a brilliant and engaged thinker and because he most certainly demonstrated a dazzling ability to interpret difficult and subtle texts in the history of political thought. But more importantly, and unlike the contributors this volume, I think we should continue to read Strauss precisely because he ultimately defended a set of philosophical (and often political) principles with which I disagree profoundly.

Thus, to me it seems not only problematic but also somewhat naive to say, as some critics of Strauss have been saying over the past decade, that Strauss defended authoritarian politics. Strauss himself certainly did not do so in any obvious way, and many authors here argue strongly against this position. Chief among them are William Galston and Steven Smith, who both make the case for Strauss as quite genuinely "a friend of liberal democracy" (Strauss's line). Put simply, if the debate is "Strauss for tyranny, pro or con?" I come down on the side of Smith, Galston, and the Straussians. For this very reason, however, I think we should resist the narrow framing of the debate that has been provided by those opponents of Strauss, like Drury, who seem to think his work has no merit whatsoever. For in either calling Strauss a tyrant of sorts, or in making the case for Strauss's support of liberal democracy, a very great deal is left out.

And, in a manner that sounds almost like an esoteric reading (but doesn't require double meanings) what is missing here proves very significant. For regardless of whether he was a "friend" of "liberal democracy," there can be little doubt that Strauss never defended or supported democracy as such; indeed, as Galston shows, Strauss praised modern liberal democracy precisely for the ways in which it was more aristocratic than ancient democracy (199). Further, while Strauss never clearly defended authoritarian politics, he did clearly argue against both egalitarianism and any radical sense of equality (203). Moreover, Strauss felt certain that only a few were fit for the life of philosophy that he championed, and he therefore argued fairly directly that philosophy must be protected from the many who are simply unfit for it as a way of life. For this reason, much of Strauss's political philosophy seems designed to make sure that philosophy can continue to exist, but precisely as a private and sheerly pedagogical affair (85, 150).

Those who disagree with Strauss on issues such as philosophy, democracy, and equality will need to make an argument against Strauss. They will need to show why being a friend of liberal democracy is not enough, which requires, in turn, articulating and defending principles or arguments for democracy (perhaps a radical variant) and equality (perhaps beyond liberalism's terms). And they will need to make the case for a philosophy that does not turn in on itself but rather continually makes its way back to the city. To address Strauss's political philosophy is one way among many, but perhaps an important way, to make this case. For this task, among many others, Strauss must be read, and this book offers a good place to start reading him.

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^[1] In a chapter devoted entirely to the category "Straussians," Michael Zuckert defines a Straussian as follows: "one who works to a degree that cannot be entirely specified within a framework of Strauss's question and chief concepts, and, if the scholar in question is concerned with textual studies, deploys Strauss's methods of close reading" (164). For the purposes of this review, I am concerned mainly with Strauss's life and writings as discussed by the contributors to this volume; therefore I use the label only occasionally, and mostly when it has already been brought up by one of those contributors.

^[2] The most ardent anti-Straussian will find it hard not to pause at Smith's account of a 38-year-old Strauss, scratching by on a very meager income in New York City, who writes a letter to his friend expressing both his thrill at teaching his first seminar ("It really happened!" exclaims Strauss) and then goes on to share the ubiquitous insecurities of the teacher ("But I am a charlatan. I asserted a thousand things that didn't add up or that I didn't know anything about" [25]).

^[3] That group of thinkers who understand the relation between reason and history differently from Strauss proves vast. Over the years, Strauss attached the label "historicist" to the vast majority of modern philosophers, to almost all of twentieth century social science, and to a variety of positions in contemporary political theory. Here I seek neither to legitimate Strauss's categorization nor to defend those thinkers. My point is simply that taking Strauss's work as a response to the theological-philosophical problem serves to clarify some of the stakes of the debate between Strauss and those he would call historicist.

^[4] In some texts of Strauss this desire and logic manifests itself in the example of cannibalism; i.e., to historicize is to render everything relative is to see nothing wrong with cannibalism. See Strauss, "Progress or Return" in Ten Essays by Leo Strauss (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989), p. 269; Cf. Thomas Pangle, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 9.

^[5] For Strauss, the very idea of knowledge as a historical product is an historicist notion that undermines or rejects a genuine pursuit of knowledge as quest for the whole. However, many within the large group of thinkers who understand knowledge as produced in history also contend that one can abandon the pursuit of "knowledge of the whole" without thereby giving up entirely on knowledge, reason, or truth (the abandonment of which would surely lead to nihilism).

^[6] Strauss makes clear that he does not invent this mode of writing; as Lampert puts it, Strauss sought to "restore esotericism" (76). The overall theory rests on the essential idea that a work contains two meanings, exoteric and esoteric, but there is some confusion over how to refer to a work that contains both meanings. Lampert suggests that Strauss technically called such works "exoteric," but in any case the convention has been established to refer to such writings as "esoteric works" and to refer to the general theory as that of "esoteric writing." I too follow that convention here.

^[7] See footnote 1, above.

^[8] In addition to this central problem, we also encounter what I would call the second order effects of esoteric writing/interpreting: namely, the radical divide between one group of readers and another -- a divide that can, in turn, lead to a certain insider/outsider status and even to secret societies trading the secrets of secret readings.

^[9] There have been at least half a dozen books that respond to Drury (all cited in the volume under review), so I will confine myself here to two brief remarks. The first is to say the 2007 exchange, in the pages of Political Theory, between Drury and Smith shows clearly enough that the two are talking past one another. In many ways, the previous exchange, twenty years prior, between Drury, Jaffa, and Dallmayr, proved more productive in terms of debating the actual terms and content both of Strauss's work and of political theory more generally. The more recent debate has one side trying to score political points and the other defending Strauss. On a related but very much distinct note, I would suggest that Michael's Zuckert's decision, in the final chapter of this collection, to place Nicholas Xenos's book together with Drury's project might be unfair. Zuckert announces this decision when he states that he will simply ignore any work that has linked Strauss's thought to the actions of neoconservatives, and then follows this assertion with a footnote to Drury and Xenos. Xenos's book is a patient, careful, and incredibly close -- Straussian in its closeness -- reading of Strauss's actual writings. This is not to say that Xenos's reading is the right one (and surely Zuckert would contest it) but to refuse to engage with Xenos is to suggest that he himself has not engaged with Strauss. This suggestion is just not true. Even if they both oppose Strauss in a certain way, and even if they would be challenged or criticized by Strauss's supporters, the projects of Drury and Xenos share little else.

NDPR Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-06-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, Northwestern UP, 2007, 590pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780810123809.

Reviewed by C. G. Prado, Queen's University

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This impressive book is characterized by three special virtues: first, it presents difficult philosophical ideas and developments clearly; second, it manifests an unusual and admirable facility with both analytic and continental positions and methodologies; and third, it boasts an extraordinary level of scholarship. My strongest endorsement of Braver's book is that I dearly wish I'd had it two decades ago.

A Thing of This World is carefully structured, both in terms of Braver's discussion of developments and in his handling of operant ideas and positions. While the substantial structure is clear enough from the Contents page and the Introduction, the basics of the working structure need to be appreciated to insure productive reading. Braver provides a section he labels "Guide to Matrices" at the beginning of the book, in which he articulates twelve fundamental realist and anti-realist theses as well as five other propositions basic to discussion of the philosophers he considers. For example, "R1" is Putnam's thesis that "the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects," and "A1" is Hegel's thesis that "consciousness will arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien" (xix-xx). Again, a basic proposition is the "Heideggerian paradigm" or "Historical Phenomenological Ontology," namely, the view that "There is Being only in this or that historical character" (xx). Braver then proceeds in a manner reminiscent of Spinoza, referring back to individual matrix theses and propositions almost entirely as "R3" or "A5" and with initials like "HPO." Proceeding in this manner facilitates his exposition, but it imposes on readers the need often to refer back to the list. Additionally, Braver uses initials to refer to no fewer than 128 works by the nine major authors he discusses, requiring frequent checks of the abbreviations list provided (xiii-xviii).

I mention all of this to preempt rather than to make complaints. If Braver didn't avail himself of these devices, the book would have been considerably longer than its 600-some pages. Moreover, the book is a comprehensive review of complex developments over a significant period of time, so Braver's devices are appropriate and their use justified even though they sometimes interfere with the narrative flow and introduce minor inconveniences.

The Introduction begins with a comparison of the contemporary split between analytic and continental philosophy and the split between rationalism and empiricism at the end of the eighteenth century, a split that culminated in rationalist metaphysical excess and empiricist epistemological bankruptcy. Braver maintains that the ground for reconciliation of analytic and continental philosophy is "the very idea that forms the core of the Critique of Pure Reason and the linchpin of its rationalist-empiricist synthesis" and this is "the idea that the mind actively organizes experience" (5).

This is where Braver's originality shows itself, and also where things begin to get complicated for readers who don't approach the book with an open mind. Braver goes on to say that the mind's organizing activity is seen as entailing anti-realism by analytic philosophers and has been extensively discussed by such notables as Davidson, Dummett, Goodman, Putnam, Quine, and Wittgenstein. Given Kant's influence on continental thought, the mind's organizing activity is also pivotal for continental philosophers. Braver's idea is that if the two traditions' different vocabularies are properly understood and correlated by members of each, we will be able to "identify Kant's idea as seminal for both camps" and thereby have a basis for "informed dialogue and debate" (5).

My first reaction to Braver's proposal was to think that differences in application of Kant's idea by analytic and continental philosophers go beyond diverse vocabularies, with the latter taking anti-realism ontologically much further than a Putnam or Quine who mainly try to accommodate the reality of the mind's experience-organizing role without drawing skeptical, much less irrealist, ontological conclusions. However, recalling my own efforts to show that Foucault is a "tacit realist," I realized that my reading of Heidegger or Derrida could well be distorted regarding ontological claims and implications by my failure to appreciate vocabulary differences.

Braver's first chapter after the Introduction is given over to the nature of realism. He articulates the six realist matrix propositions, the first being Putnam's about the world consisting of mind-independent objects and the second being that truth involves correspondence between words or thoughts and external things (14-15). This is the chapter in which Braver lays out the basic position that contrasts with continental anti-realism. In the process he makes a statement that struck me; while discussing the way in which background and education dispose one to accept certain ideas more readily than others, Braver remarks that "Common sense is largely a matter of the ideas one is used to," which speaks directly to my reading of his exposition of Heidegger and Derrida (29). The content of this chapter poses no problems for readers with an analytic background and demonstrates Braver's understanding and appreciation of one side of the philosophical chasm he is trying to bridge.

Chapter Two, "Kant's Revolution," is the first of three in Part One. In it Braver offers an impressively clear and solidly supported account of Kant's making "the phenomenal world mind-dependent" and his changing of "the passive substantial knower to an active organizer of experience" (57). The first anti-realist matrix-propositions are referenced in connection with Kant's claim that rather than being so many givens, "objects, as appearances, conform to our mode of representation" (33). Braver stresses how fundamentally Kant's view "alters the conception of knowledge and the role the subject plays in knowing" (35). The point is to articulate clearly the truly revolutionary nature of Kant's vision to prepare the way for what follows regarding Hegel and Nietzsche's responses to the idea of the noumenal and how "the difference between [being] nothing to us and nothing at all becomes hard to pin down" (41). The chapter also includes perceptive discussion of two ideas that prove crucial in later discussion: correspondence and the reality of the self.

Prior to the second chapter of Part One, on Hegel, Braver's exposition is readily accessible to readers having either an analytic or continental background and related predilections. Discussion of Hegel is where what I'll call "canonical impatience" may pose problems. That this is likely is not Braver's fault; his exposition of Hegel is clear, and while the chapter runs some 54 pages, the discussion is as concise as is compatible with responsible exposition. Problems center on abandonment of the noumenal and multiplicity of conceptual schemes. Braver sums up by saying that

Hegel's greatest contributions to continental anti-realism are the introduction of historical change . . . into the self with the concomitant plurality into conceptual schemes and reality . . . and the complete dismissal of noumena (112-113).

He adds that Hegel "rigorously follows out the implications . . . to reach Objective Idealism, which eliminates the distinction between an objective given and our subjective projection" (113).

The problem is why an acknowledged conceptual instability in Kant's work regarding postulation of the noumenal has to be resolved in favor of our undoubtedly limited conceptual ability. It seems to be philosophical egocentricity to conclude that because we can't really make much sense of extra-conceptual, inaccessible noumena we must conclude that historical phenomena are all there is. Physics, for instance, would have long since become impossible if it could not postulate directly inaccessible causes of phenomena. What would a Hegelian physicist do with string theory? I make this point to indicate how Braver's faith in better understanding of mutual vocabularies might not be enough to ground productive interaction between most analytic and continental philosophers.

The chapter on Nietzsche aims to demonstrate that "Nietzsche is not free of the Kantian paradigm" (160). The exposition is again first-rate. Braver describes "Step Six Physics" to establish that Nietzsche doesn't successfully rid himself of something beyond the purely phenomenal. Braver concedes that "Many commentators . . . believe that Nietzsche avoids the vestiges of realism I have saddled him with," appealing to Rorty regarding the conceptual difficulty of avoiding implications that mind "shapes facts out of indeterminate goo" (151). There could be no question of omitting Nietzsche in a history of continental anti-realism, but the chapter left me feeling that it is somewhat marginal. This is likely my own fault because of my experience of hearing and reading Nietzsche interpreted in so many ways that no one interpretation ever seems totally convincing. In any case, the chapter on Nietzsche closes Part One; the next chapter, "Transition," is on the early Heidegger.

Braver's two chapters on Heidegger -- one 90 pages, the other 84 -- are admirably clear and should make Heidegger more accessible or at least intriguing to analytic philosophers. Central to the first of the two chapters is explication and criticism of how realists' "exclusive focus on presence-at-hand as the sole mode of Being" both distorts our understanding of existence and precludes understanding truth as anything but correspondence to the disposition of things in the world (165, 168). Early in his discussion of realism Braver offers a succinct statement regarding Heidegger's understanding of Being, saying that

Being and Time outlines three modes of Being . . . : readiness-to-hand . . . , presence-at-hand . . . , and existence. Equipment, objects or things, and Dasein are then, respectively, the entities that are [exist] in these different ways (165).

Against this, realism limits existence to only one sort of Being: presence-at-hand or how the world's physical furniture exists, and in this way "profoundly distorts our daily lives" (165). What makes the early Heidegger's work transitory is that while he "radically redefines both subject and phenomena, there is a strong continuity with Kant's thought, as he himself recognizes" (176). The Heidegger of Being and Time is still working with the Kantian paradigm, but the work is transitory because it paves the way for the Heideggerian paradigm.

Braver's first chapter on Heidegger, well supplied with numerous substantial quotations, begins his most concentrated attempt to establish that identifying the Kantian paradigm as "seminal for both camps" will provide a ground for "informed dialogue and debate" among analytic and continental philosophers (5). Two key aspects are Braver's lucid restatements and explanations of Heidegger's remarks, and his criticism of Davidson's preclusive treatment of conceptual schemes (228-50). The criticism is necessary because the Hegel-Nietzsche-Heidegger progression depends on the at least potential proliferation of conceptual schemes that result from rejecting the idea of a noumenal world. Personally, I was unconvinced by the criticism of Davidson, and my siding with realists like Searle remained unaffected, but Braver's is a most interesting discussion and often striking, as when he compares passages from Heidegger and Davidson. The upshot of the chapter basically is the point Braver makes early on: "without noumena, the experienced realm that is affected by Dasein is reality itself; hence our [conceptualizing, organizing] effects on it are not distortive but constitutive" (176). The "meaning of the Being of beings" for Heidegger, therefore, "is ultimately whatever is involved in becoming present to Dasein" (184). Nonetheless, this is the early Heidegger, the Heidegger still caught in the Kantian paradigm and held back by "his commitment to an ahistorical permanent structure of the self" (253).

The second chapter on Heidegger, "The Great Turning Around," begins with a summation:

For the thinkers of the Kantian Paradigm . . . Active Knower's faculties partially constitute . . . dependent reality by either organizing it with space, time, and the categories (Kant), volatilizing historical movement (Hegel), congealing chaotic flux (Nietzsche), or temporalizing into the forms of engaged instrumentality or disengaged inertness (early Heidegger) (257).

According to Braver, the later Heidegger's abandonment of truth as correspondence in favor of aletheia or "unconcealment" enables him to also abandon realism of the subject, and so to leave the Kantian paradigm behind in establishing the Heideggerian paradigm: "In his later work, Heidegger places everything within history; there is nothing essential and self-same that transcends historical change." There is no Cartesian ego, no Kantian self; "for anyone who wishes to escape the subject-centered philosophy of the Kantian Paradigm, later Heidegger is the unavoidable thinker" (260). This is how Heidegger established "the first genuinely non-Kantian position in the continental tradition" and why the later Heidegger is of such great importance to the development of continental thought (253). For Braver, Heidegger's abandonment of truth as some sort of correspondence, and of the underlying picture of thought/assertion relating to objective states-of-affairs, is "a new beginning in the history of Western thought" (259). He goes on to say that this is why "recent continental philosophy can appear so strange: it operates outside of assumptions that have widely been considered necessary for all discourse," and aptly refers to Searle as an example of philosophers who resist the Heideggerian shift (260).

Foucault certainly escapes the Kantian paradigm; for him the self, the subject, is constructed: a product of practices and power-relations. Braver's seventh chapter, on Foucault, is again first-rate with respect to exposition. It is with respect to interpretation that my reservations increase. Though Foucault himself may have described Heidegger as the essential philosopher for him, Braver's efforts to show that Foucault "is best read as a disciple of Heidegger" left me unconvinced (427). This is especially true when Braver discusses a "serious problem" Foucault faces regarding inconsistency between his own goal to provoke change regarding subjectivity and his alleged "allegiance to the Heideggerian Paradigm's Historical Phenomenological Ontology" (421). In my view, Foucault's rejection of "deep" abstractions and philosophizing about them precludes any such allegiance. Heidegger inspired and to a great extent enabled Foucault's thought; that did not make Foucault a disciple of Heidegger. I'm almost out of room, so will gratefully forgo commenting on Braver's last substantive chapter, the one on Derrida. I'm sure the exposition is as good as in previous chapters, but I don't know Derrida well enough to say more.

Braver's Conclusion illustrates his fairness and facility with both continental and analytic positions: he considers some of the important differences between analytic and continental philosophy. In the end, does Braver make his case that appreciation of the role of the Kantian paradigm and clarification of vocabulary will provide common ground for productive interchange between analytic and continental philosophers? What he does do is succeed remarkably well at making the continental progression from Hegel through Derrida clear and intriguing to analytic philosophers. To a lesser extent, in rehearsing the elements of the progression he makes analytic philosophy clear and accessible to continental philosophers. But two major factors impair the sought rapport. One is that however well explained, anti-realism won't wash with most analytic thinkers. The idea of a noumenal, an inaccessible-as-is, reality is admittedly problematic, but so is that of light as both waves and particles. The other is a point Rorty makes, which Braver himself quotes in a note -- namely, that it's pointless to try to bridge the analytic/continental split because it's not a matter of the two sides addressing the same problems with different methods but rather that they address different problems (515; Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism, 225-26).

NDPR Bernhard Weiss, How to Understand Language: A Philosophical Inquiry

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-05-24 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Bernhard Weiss, How to Understand Language: A Philosophical Inquiry, Acumen, 2010, 271pp., $27.95(pbk), ISBN 9780773537354.

Reviewed by Jaroslav Peregrin, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and University of Hradec Králové

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There are many ways of applying philosophy to language, and there are many ways of writing about this topic. Bernhard Weiss is firmly rooted within the tradition of analytic philosophy, and this predisposes him to approach the topic along the lines of the analytic pioneers; however, he is far from ensnared by tradition. He wants to report on current trends and he wants to enter into conversation with their exponents. Another crucial feature of his book is that Weiss does not want to concentrate on a partial problem; his aim is to address language in its complexity as a challenge for philosophy. The result of blending these two ambitions is a compromise between an advanced introduction to the philosophy of language and a discussion of those topics in analytic philosophy that he takes to be the deepest -- mainly discussions within the intellectual space opened up by the writings of Donald Davidson.

The trouble with analytic philosophy of language is that it has amassed a huge heap of technical and semi-technical results that are deep in their own way, but their direct significance is often far removed from the questions raised by a layman contemplating language. When I teach my introductory course on analytical philosophy for philosophical fresh(wo)men, I find it not so difficult to present the technical side of, say, Russell's theory of definite descriptions or Tarski's theory of truth. To be sure, it requires some pedagogical experience to make these technicalities intelligible to beginners in philosophy; nevertheless, the real trouble is to explain to them why they should see these things are interesting and relevant for understanding language.

In this respect, Weiss's book cuts deeper than many other books on the general philosophy of language written in the analytic tradition: his point of departure is devoted to considering language as a puzzle. How does language relate to the world and how is it related to the mind? How does language work and how do words possess their meanings? Such questions are posed from the position of an outsider, who is only subsequently initiated into the labyrinth of methods and results of analytic philosophy and shown that this approach may help us alleviate the original puzzlement.

In the first part of the book, Weiss offers a quick look at the traditional considerations that have forged the framework for analytic philosophy of language: the basic Fregean distinctions, the Russellian analysis of definite descriptions, the Kripkean scruples about Russellian descriptivism, and also the Austinian and Gricean speech acts theory and the Quinean rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction. Weiss then moves to his main problem, around which he circles throughout the rest of the book: the (Quino-)Davidsonian approach to language from the perspective of the radical translator/interpreter. (It is a little bit strange, given that radical interpretation is such a central topic for the book, and given that this project is largely continuous with the Quinean project of radical translation, that Quine is only an episodic figure in the plot of the book.)

The review of the Quinean thought experiment with radical translation and the following discussion of use-conditional vs. truth-conditional foundations of a theory of meaning is still presented in a rather disengaged textbook style. (This is not a criticism, for I think that the pedagogical qualities that Weiss displays in these non-controversial parts of the books are admirable.) But then it is time for Davidson to appear on the scene and here Weiss's disengagement slowly gives way to an engaged -- and no longer uncontroversial -- rethinking of the foundations of the Davidsonian program.

Weiss starts with a reconstruction of Davidson's method of radical interpretation, from which he moves to a review of Davidson's more enigmatic theory of interpretation, couched in terms of "prior" and "passing" theories, as presented especially in Davidson's "Nice Derrangement of Epithaphs". At this point Weiss starts to present some interesting and bold theses. The first of them is that Davidson's account of language and meaning is essentially normative, which appears to go against the grain of Davidson's own general aversion to taking normativity as something essential for language. At least at first sight.

Weiss tries to show that despite Davidson's own pronouncements, his approach could not work if there were no rules underlying language. I concur. I think that Davidson's occasional hostility towards linguistic rules derives from the fact that what he understands when he hears "rules" and "normativity" is an idea Davidson (correctly or not) ascribes to Dummett, namely that language forces us to speak as others do. I agree that one can read Davidson normatively, and Weiss does a wonderful job of working out the details of this reading.

The rest of the book is devoted to what seem to me to be the most interesting contemporary discussions within philosophy of language: the role of normativity within the foundations of language, the nature of the publicity of language, the relation of language to social practices and the nature of the theory of meaning. Weiss tries to show that Davidson's theory of meaning and interpretations as articulated in terms of the prior and passing theories is not fully compatible with his earlier notion of radical interpretation and writes:

interpretations are not just the constructs of radical interpreters and hearers; speakers are guided in their use by interpretations. In being guided by a scheme of interpretation a speaker intends to uphold patterns of use: those patterns that would ground the interpretative scheme. Because these patterns of use are objects of the speaker's intentions they are not mere regularities, but regularities to which she intends to accord, regularities to which she is bound by her linguistic intentions. Her use is thus subject to standards, in the absence of which it is mere babbling. So the argument is very simple. It depends on the radical interpreter to make plain the primacy of regularities of use and then uses the fact that interpreters (or hearers) are speakers too in order to show that these patterns of use acquire normative significance. (p. 132)

Weiss takes issue with those who have recently argued vigorously that meaning is not normative in any nontrivial sense of the word (Boghossian, Hattiangadi), that any "ought" contained in our semantic talk is at most instrumental and hence dispensable. I am happy to join him in his campaign against the anti-normativists, but I would prefer to use different weapons. Weiss grants the anti-normativists that it is unwarranted to assume that if a speaker S means that F by the sentence s, then she ought to assert s only if F; his proposal is that while this assumption is unwarranted, we may safely assume that if S means that F by s, then she ought to assert S only if s intends to assert that F. I would not grant this. It seems to me that the rules of language do make us assert what is true, not because of any norm over and above the rules of language, but because truth is nothing else than correct assertability (where this is, to be sure, one kind of correctness among others that we can think of in relation to language). Hence it seems to me that just as a chess player who takes a piece to be a bishop ought to move it only diagonally (otherwise it would be an error -- independently of any intention the player may or may not have), a language speaker ought to use sentences according to the rules of language. I think that to assert "It is raining" on a cloudless day is simply incorrect (incorrect, that is, in the sense of correctness that amounts to truth; it might be simultaneously correct in some other sense). This does not in any way contradict the fact that we may intend to assert it despite this incorrectness, perhaps by way of irony.

Weiss considers Dummett's criticism of the Davidsonian project of radical interpretation, and portrays the difference between the two philosophers as the difference between aiming at a "radical" versus a "robust" theory of meaning. It is only later that it becomes clear how deep Weiss's doubts about the entire Davidsonian project of radical interpretation are, but already here he presents some arguments pro Dummett and contra Davidson. Perhaps the most telling point is the one related to the joke where a person is asked whether she can speak Spanish and answers "I do not know, I haven't tried". Weiss then claims:

Dummett diagnoses the humor as stemming from an absurdity. In some cases there is obviously no absurdity in a similar remark: just imagine that the character had been asked whether or not she can swim or ride a bicycle. In cases such as these one can have a clear conception of the capacity in question in advance of possessing it but in the linguistic case it makes no sense to suppose that the character can conceive of what it is to speak Spanish in advance of speaking it. (p. 169)

This is surely a deep observation: Weiss interprets it as showing that knowledge of a language, though it may be thought of as a kind of know how, differs importantly from such skills as knowing how to swim. I would add that it is precisely this overhasty assimilation of language to the more practical skills that feeds the theory Davidson develops in his "Nice Derrangement of Epithaphs".

Now it becomes explicit that Weiss has serious doubts about the very concept of radical interpretation: he sees the project as based on the idea that whereas it is true that we must have learned language from scratch, it does not follow that there must be a way of describing its usage in some 'neutral' terms, uncontaminated by the concepts we possess thanks to our mastering language -- i.e., in terms that would be, as it were, 'the world's own', not ours. But this, Weiss urges, is a hopeless project. Thus, instead of a radical interpretation, Weiss argues for a similar, but different project that he calls robust interpretation and that takes seriously Dummett's criticism of Davidson.

When Weiss puts all his cards on the table, his account of the relationship between language and the world, underlying the understanding of language to which he converges throughout the book, is a view he calls "modest realism" that is condensed into the following four points (p. 217):

(i) realism is constituted not by a relation of the practice to something external to it but by its own internal richness, for instance, the necessity of an appropriate policing practice for any apparently rule-governed practice;

(ii) the world we describe is conditioned by our means of describing it;

(iii) the position is established by showing that it is the only position that coheres with our self-conception -- here as beings capable of binding their use to a norm;

(iv) although we cannot make sense of the idea in full detail given the contingency we discover at the base of our practice, we must admit the possibility of alternative practices, alternatives based in different forms of life.

This clarifies Weiss own position vis-à-vis not only those of Davidson and Dummett, but also other contemporary thinkers of a similar provenance, e.g., McDowell or Brandom. It seems to me that out of them, Brandom is Weiss's most natural ally, although he obviously does not want to be anybody's blind follower, thinking things through in his own way without paying excessive attention to the authorities. To follow him on his path through the labyrinth of language is not only very enlightening; it is also a great enjoyment.

NDPR Mark S. McLeod-Harrison, Make/Believing the World(s): Toward a Christian Ontological Pluralism

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-05-25 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Mark S. McLeod-Harrison, Make/Believing the World(s): Toward a Christian Ontological Pluralism, McGill-Queen's UP, 2009, 386pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780773535930.

Reviewed by Cristian F. Mihut, Bethel College

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McLeod-Harrison articulates a surprising view that combines cognitive irrealism, ontological pluralism, and aspects of orthodox Christian doctrine. The ontological pluralism he defends (to be distinguished from the view in metaontology) is indebted to Nelson Goodman's view that human noetic feats shape the actual World in plural, incompatible ways. One might expect this position to be attended by some of the usual suspects: nominalism about properties, a deflationary theory of truth, extensionalism about possible worlds, and the concept of "God" as at best a Feuerbachian projection or cultural make-belief. But that's not what we get. Following Michael Lynch, McLeod-Harrison endorses a realist account of truth. His version of pluralism relies on Platonism about properties (especially those of truth and existence) combined with modal actualism (ersatz modal realism) about possible worlds. Most startling perhaps is the theological motivation for this position. Evoking the naming of animals in the Garden of Eden, McLeod-Harrison argues that humans carve new worlds because God endows them with creative powers analogous to or continuous with his. Even though God's core does not depend on human conceptual reaching, still "God is embedded in God's conceptual scheme(s) and therefore does not escape noetic dependence" (5).

The book is divided into four main sections. The first section introduces, among other things, two seminal sets of distinctions, noetic realism/irrealism on the one hand, and alethic realism/irrealism on the other. A noetic irrealist holds, while the noetic realist denies, that human cognizings (conceptualizing, believing, knowing, emoting, gesticulating etc.) contribute causally to the ways the World is. An alethic realist affirms, while the alethic irrealist denies, "that a truth-bearer is true when things are as the truth-value bearer says they are" (26). The ontological pluralism under consideration combines noetic irrealism with alethic realism. Humans cannot create ex nihilo; rather, through their cognitive feats they carve worlds out of "the noumenal material" of a mind-independent World created and sustained by the noetic activity of God (31).

A main focus in section two is to flesh out a compelling response to the consistency dilemma. This is the challenge. If pluralism is right, two distinct metaphysical perspectives could provide equally true yet mutually incompatible descriptions of reality. To avoid embracing contradictions, the pluralist relativizes the two descriptions to different conceptual frameworks. Suitably relativized to conceptual schemes, these perspectives can be lined up side by side without contradiction. But now, all true descriptions either describe the same absolute aspects of the World in different languages, or they pick out different aspects of the world such that the conjunction of perspectives yields an absolute account of the World. Either way, there is no reason to deny that there is only one way the World is. So, pluralism seems unmotivated.

The strategy for responding here is heavily indebted to Michael Lynch. The core insight is that the pluralist must draw a distinction between thin and thick metaphysical concepts (truth, existence, object, etc.). For instance, a thin or minimal concept of object is shared across conceptual schemes, but then is filled out, enriched, or thickened differently in different worlds (Aristotle fills in the concept of an object as a discrete entity, whereas Whitehead fills it in as a momentary event). More generally, descriptions containing metaphysically thickened concepts could wind up mutually incompatible relative to each conceptual scheme, while also overlapping in light of their shared minimal contents. Following Lynch, McLeod-Harrison argues that commitment to the minimal concept of truth requires accepting truth as a thinly realistic property. But unlike Lynch, he extends this to the concept of existence:

Were existence a thin property and hence fluid enough to be filled out robustly in different worlds, pluralism would still work. After all, if truth is a property and can be thinly taken in general but thickly filled out in different worlds, I don't see why existence can't be just as well. And if existence, then surely objects also. (105)

The pluralist irrealist seems happy to embrace Platonic realism about properties, if these properties are general or thin enough. But the irrealist also insists that humans creatively crystallize or thicken these concepts, creating through their noetic work different world-versions.

The third part motivates and provides a substantial positive explication of a Kantian inspired pluralistic irrealism. I take the following to be the main claims of this section: (1) Pluralism is motivated by the intractability of metaphysical debates, and this in turn is due to the nature of the metaphysical concepts themselves. (2) Epistemic commitments are explained by the ways we have already conceptualized the world and not the other way around. (3) Our experience of the world is already conceptually shaped. (4) But our concepts are worldly shaped as well, for the contents of our beliefs are just chunks of the world. (5) Our paradigmatic noetic engagement with the worlds is not representation but presentation: we aim to rightly render the worlds not only alethically, but also aesthetically and morally. (6) God fixes the limits and coherence for what counts as rightly rendered worlds.

This is a rich but also challenging account. I will only comment on a couple of its features. Support for claim (3) rests on John McDowell's view that our passive, empirical concepts are always embedded in a large network of reasons. As such, the work of free spontaneous thinking is always involved in shaping our perceptions. Furthermore, on McDowell's view, the complex sets of conceptual lenses that codify our experiences of the world are themselves historical, shaped by the free activity of the human mind. McLeod-Harrison charges that the complex capacity for meaning-making must be explained ultimately by God, or else the irrealist position collapses into an untenable idealism. If the World depends crucially on noetic contributions, then if there were no humans, we would have no World. But I don't think this has to show, as McLeod-Harrison claims, that "Any Bildung we have is rooted, ultimately, in God's creative activity" (153).

To be fair, McLeod-Harrison considers the possibility that the capacity for meaning-making has evolved, or as he puts it, that we "have simply moved from bald nature (bits of organic matter) to thoughtful, reasonable humans with a Bildung" (217). This possibility, however, is dismissed in a rather facile fashion. He claims that our "cultural education and history started somewhere and that . . . remains the central mystery of philosophy to which theology -- and for my money, particularly Christian theology -- provides a most cogent answer" (217). A more robust strategy here is to give an argument to the best explanation. For on the one hand, the evolutionary hypothesis appears to be at least as simple, coherent, fruitful and empirically adequate as the theistic explanation. If these aren't helpful criteria, then at least we need motivations and specifications for other criteria that do the trick. On the other hand, grounding human capacity for meaning-making in God appears equally mysterious. To some it seems nothing short of puzzling that a self-sufficient, resplendent, infinite triune being should create finite beings that have the ability to create. So, it seems, we need reasons to prefer one mystery to another.

This sort of objection generalizes to other parts of McLeod-Harrison's argument. For instance in support of (6) above he claims that the law of non-contradiction has to hold in all conceptual worlds in order to provide coherence and unification for human noetic exertions in each world. The law of non-contradiction could not be a fact in a superworld, on pain of an infinite regress. So, God's own being grounds the law of non-contradiction, and more generally affords the unification needed across worlds. Yet it seems that the universality desired for unification would also obtain on the hypothesis that the law of non-contradiction is a constitutive feature of our psychology. Furthermore, reasons are needed to show that the Trinitarian God's specific way of grounding the law is not any more perplexing than the available alternatives, be they transcendent, transcendental, or naturalistic.

As McLeod-Harrison recognizes, his worldly content theory of belief (4 above) will raise suspicion. As I've mentioned, his irrealism implies that the world is constituted by noetic material. So, although the truth-maker (on the World side) and truth-bearer (on the mind side) are so close as to be "merging," he still wants to maintain the distinction. Beliefs and not propositions are the primary truth-bearers, whereas propositions are to be understood as concrete bits of the World. So, propositions being the content of beliefs do not represent the world. They are identical with it, or bits of it. None of this implies that beliefs constitute the world. McLeod-Harrison draws the distinction between act-beliefs and content-beliefs. To illustrate, that the snow is white just is the fact that the snow is white: "Snow's being white is not an abstract entity but a concrete bit of the World" (174). To believe that the snow is white is to take a certain mental attitude toward a bit of the world. He elaborates:

The thinkable isn't independent of the World -- it is the World. The only thing independent of the World is the believing (the mental action) . . . What is clearly mental is the attitude one takes toward the World -- in this case, the act-belief. It is only the mental that has actual content. The proposition or the thinkable just is a bit of the world itself and cannot, as such, have content. (174)

Furthermore, the distinction between generative truth and statement truth tracks the distinction between act-belief and content-belief. When I get things right in my attitudes, my act-believings, I thereby generate facts, since facts just are true propositions. This connection is forged "through concepts, construction of a world, experience of that world, and believings that grow within a world" (179).

An interesting illustration of how act-believing enriches a world involves a father who chooses to "go along" with his son's observation as they both watch a bar of soap floating in the bath water. "That is a great boat," says the son. On McLeod-Harrison's analysis, the father's

act-belief changed, which changed the ontology of the world, which changed the object of belief 'that's a bar of soap' into a false one (an empty bit of the world) and a previously false belief 'that's a great boat' into a true one. (186)

But now consider an alternative analysis of the mental act in this case, which does not require a change in ontology and which relies on standard psychological assumptions about the interaction between adults and children. Suppose the father forms the thought "that is a great boat," but on analysis what he truly believes is: "that is a soap which on this particular occasion functions as a boat". Some such translation seems to me more natural, and has the upshot of not requiring a change in ontology.

Many more questions could be asked about McLeod-Harrison's worldly content theory of truth. Are all propositions concrete bits of the world? What about propositions about mathematics, modality and God? Since act-beliefs are truth-bearers, can other mental attitudes such as wishing, desiring, fearing, lusting be true or false? If yes, how so? If not, what principled reason keeps them out, since it's clear that at least some of these have propositions as contents?

The fourth and last section provides a stimulating and nonconformist account of the Christian God's involvement with the World. I appreciate the commitment to the creeds, and the emphasis on orthodoxy as a living thing (225). The account of God's ways of being as the objective standard for rightness of rendering (alethic, aesthetic, and moral) for the worlds is a welcome challenge to the narrow focus on the intellectualist models of God. His articulation of the Trinity betrays a poetic and pastoral sensitivity, the discussion of metaphorical language about God is both sharp and profound, and his defense of a theology of history is timely.

But the account will also raise some eyebrows. Some will wonder just how it is that the being of the Triune God grounds all possibilia and the principle of non-contradiction, if God has no beliefs (312). It's true that McLeod-Harrison claims God must have thoughts. But how can God provide for the coherence of all noetic worlds without cognitive items that play the functional role of belief? Some will worry that the account implies a radical responsiveness on God's part to the vagaries and "stupidities" of human choices that impinges on God's providence. And some will worry about the doctrine of physical creation. For, if the account is right, and "the actual world is itself a set of God's thoughts," it's hard to see how we can believe literally that God created a physical body, or that he inhabited one (274).

NDPR Mark Balaguer, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-05-22 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Mark Balaguer, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem, MIT Press, 2010, 202pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262013543.

Reviewed by Joseph Keim Campbell, Washington State University

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1. Introduction

Mark Balaguer's Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem is a must-read for anyone working in free will, or metaphysics in general. Balaguer offers a set of provocative solutions to problems about free will and provides the welcome beginnings of something more. The main views can be summarized as follows:

(1) "the metaphysical issue inherent in the problem of free will and determinism comes down to . . . the which-kinds-of-freedom^[1]-do-we-have question" (165-6).

(2) "the which-kinds-of-freedom-do-we-have question reduces largely (though not entirely . . . ) to . . . the question of whether humans are L-free" (166), where L-freedom is a kind of libertarian freedom (incompatible with determinism).

(3) "the question of whether humans are L-free comes down to the purely empirical question . . . of whether TDW-indeterminism is true" (166), where TDW-indeterminism is the thesis that "Some of our torn decisions are wholly undetermined at the moment of choice" (78).

(4) "we currently have no good reason to accept or reject TDW-indeterminism" (166).

From these, various other claims appear to follow. Three are of interest to me:

(A) There is no compelling reason to deny that humans have free will.

(B) "the metaphysically interesting issue in the problem of free will and determinism boils down to a straightforward (and wide open) empirical question about the causal histories of certain neural events" (1).

(C) "there are no distinctly metaphysical facts" (169), at least when it comes to claims about free will and moral responsibility.

Balaguer never explicitly mentions (A), perhaps the most intriguing part of his project. (B) and (C) are more contentious, more bold, more fully developed, and lie at the heart of Balaguer's anti-metaphysical approach to free will and his more general neo-positivism. Balaguer writes: "all so-called metaphysical questions boil down to questions that are either (a) straightforwardly empirical questions about the nature of the physical world, or (b) straightforwardly logical questions, or (c) factually empty questions" (169).

What follows is an explication and critique of Balaguer's project. By way of full disclosure, I am a compatibilist although my approach is more methodological than partisan. I'm just an argument away from incompatibilism. Compatibilism has advantages, all other things being equal, for it requires one fewer necessary condition for free will. This points to a tension in Balaguer's book. On the one hand, we should conclude that the compatibility problem -- the problem of whether free will is compatible with determinism -- is relatively unimportant. Balaguer describes a kind of freedom -- L-freedom -- that is essentially incompatibilist. Balaguer is not committed to incompatibilism, because he doesn't claim that L-freedom is free will, yet given the central role of L-freedom in his theory the compatibility problem seems to matter. I can't help but think the project would be better placed within a compatibilist framework. Indeed, at the end of the review I argue that Balaguer is committed to compatibilism.

2. Problems and Questions about Free Will

The best way to understand Balaguer's theory is to understand the problems and questions that interest him as well as the ones that don't. Consider "the traditional problem of free will and determinism" (3):

Determinism is true (i.e., every event is causally necessitated by prior events together with causal laws);

Human beings have free will; and

Free will is incompatible with determinism (1-2).

Each individual claim seems true yet they are mutually inconsistent. Balaguer acknowledges the worry but develops a "new and improved version of the problem of free will" and determinism:

FE-determinism is true (i.e., libertarianism is false).

Human beings have free will.

Free will is incompatible with determinism (and, hence, with FE-determinism) (13; 15).

According to FE-determinism (short for "No Freedom-Enhancing Indeterminism"), "There are no freedom-enhancing indeterminacies," or more explicitly, "there are no undetermined events in our decision making processes that generate or increase appropriate nonrandomness" (12).

There are two important differences between the new and improved version and the traditional problem of free will and determinism. The traditional problem held that determinism was true but now the claim is only that libertarianism is false. Further, the third proposition in the new and improved version is revised. Overall there is a shift in focus from the truth of determinism to the absence of libertarian freedom.

Another problem that captures Balaguer's attention is the "free will" crisis: there is no generally endorsed meaning of "free will" (Campbell forthcoming, Ch. 2). Balaguer adds that there is not even an agreed upon method of determining its meaning (Ch. 2). Two responses to this crisis are monism and pluralism.^[2] According to monism, all philosophers -- compatibilists and incompatibilists -- mean the same thing when they use the term "free will" (van Inwagen 2008). Pluralists note that the literature includes multiple and contrary varieties of freedom. Each variety of freedom may be interesting and worth wanting, whether or not it counts as the meaning of "free will." For each we may ask: Is that kind of freedom required for moral responsibility?, etc.

Balaguer favors pluralism and the Hybrid View (36), which is stipulative. He makes a strong case that the meaning of "free will" is an empirical matter settled by ordinary usage (and possibly various other factors) (32ff.). Hence, the compatibility problem is an empirical issue too. If "free will" means libertarian free will, compatibilism is false; if it means Humean free will, compatibilism is true (4ff.). What we should care about is "the nature of the freedom that's inherent in human decision-making processes," which is also ultimately an empirical matter (54).

3. Torn Decisions

Balaguer develops a libertarian theory of freedom but he makes it clear that he is just developing the theory and not necessarily endorsing it (69). It has two essential and interrelated parts. One is TDW-indeterminism (see section 1 above). The other is the thesis that "if our torn decisions are wholly undetermined in the manner of TDW-indeterminism," then they are L-free because

(a) they are sufficiently rational to count as L-free; (b) we author and control them; (c) the indeterminacy increases or procures the authorship and/or control; and (d) the indeterminacy-enhanced authorship and control that we get here is worth wanting (119).

Thus, L-freedom is a freedom worth wanting that is essentially indeterministic. Balaguer doesn't commit to the claim that L-freedom is required for moral responsibility, but he says that if we have L-freedom, then we have the kind of freedom we need to be morally responsible for our actions. Whether we have L-freedom boils down to the empirical question of whether our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way.

Torn decisions have two main phenomenological components. First, the agent "has reasons for two or more options and feels torn as to which set of reasons is strongest, that is, has no conscious belief as to which option is best, given her reasons." In addition, the person "decides without resolving this conflict -- that is, the person has the experience of 'just choosing'" (71). Torn decisions are opposed to Buridan's-ass decisions, where "the reasons for the various tied-for-best options are the same reasons" (72): equal desires for two piles of hay, for instance. In these cases "the agent doesn't feel torn as to which option is best" (73). Torn decisions are similar to Kane's self-forming actions (1996) but there are several differences worth noting (73ff.).

The key is that torn decisions are such that "If they are undetermined at the moment of choice . . . , then they are L-free" (68). This is because if our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way, they are (a) "appropriately nonrandom" and (b) "the indeterminacy in question increases or procures the appropriate nonrandomness" (68). Balaguer claims that "if our torn decisions are undetermined at the moment of choice, then (a) and (b) are true" (69). It is for this reason that "the question of whether libertarianism is true just reduces to the question of whether some of our torn decisions are undetermined in the appropriate way" (69), an empirical question "about whether certain neural events are undetermined" (70).

4. The Problem of Luck

My concerns are about authorship and control, the most fundamental freedoms that Balaguer discusses. First, why think that if our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way that the indeterminacy increases or procures the agent's authorship and control? Second, is it possible that determinism might procure authorship and control? These questions correspond to the two parts of Peter van Inwagen's problem of free will (2008): the problem of luck (1983, section 4.4) plus the compatibility problem (1983, Ch. III). The first question is discussed here and the second question in the next section.

According to Balaguer, if our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way, then this is "a freedom-enhancing sort of indeterminism" (79). I'm skeptical that Balaguer has established this claim. Distinguish between these two proposals:

First proposal: If our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way, then we have as much authorship and control over them as we do over decisions that are determined by our reasons (cf. 96);

Second proposal: If our torn decisions are not undetermined in the right way (for instance, if they are determined), then we have less authorship and control over them than we do if they are undetermined in the right way (cf. 100).

Balaguer makes a good case for the first proposal but one might accept it even if one thinks humans lack authorship and control. Balaguer attempts to establish the second proposal (3.3.2) but this touches on the compatibility problem, discussed later.

Some reasons for doubting the second proposal arise from the problem of luck, which Balaguer discusses (92). Here is van Inwagen's example:

does postulating or asserting that the laws of nature are indeterministic provide any comfort to those who would like to believe in metaphysical freedom? If the laws are indeterministic, then more than one future is indeed consistent with those laws and the actual past and present -- but how can anyone have any choice about which of these becomes actual? Isn't it a matter of chance which becomes actual? If God were to 'return' an indeterministic world to precisely its state at some time in the past, and then let the world go forward again, things might indeed happen differently the 'second' time. But then, if the world is indeterministic, isn't it just a matter of chance how things did happen in the one, actual course of events? And if what we do is just a matter of chance -- well, who would want to call that freedom? (1998; cf. 1983)

There is a related story illustrating the compatibility problem. Suppose that God 'returns' the world to the same state 100 times over and each time things turn out the same. We'd think that our acts were compulsive rather than free. The two stories can be combined. Suppose you make a choice between two alternatives 100 times over and each time the choice is the same. Compulsion. Suppose now you split the choice, half the time choosing one option, half the time the other. Luck.

We can distinguish between two claims, either of which might follow given the problem of luck. According to the strong conclusion, "freedom requires determinism" (6). Balaguer offers a consistent and plausible model of indeterministic freedom, lending support to the denial of the strong conclusion. According to a weaker conclusion, the problem of luck casts doubt on the prospects of indeterminism increasing or procuring the required authorship and control of our actions. It casts doubt on the second proposal, which is a comparative judgment: we have less authorship and control in cases of determinism than in cases of indeterminism. Which leads to the final topic.

5. The Compatibility Problem

I wonder whether indeterminism is a necessary component of Balaguer's story. Nothing in Balaguer's theory commits him to incompatibilism. L-freedom is an essentially incompatibilist variety of freedom yet that is a matter of stipulation. Still, the compatibility problem looms throughout Balaguer's book. Recall the second proposal (roughly): If our torn decisions are determined, we have less authorship and control. Why accept this claim?

Balaguer makes two points in support of the second proposal. First, conscious choice in the case of our torn decisions provides prima facie evidence of authorship and control. It seems as if, when an agent is making a torn decision, he is "doing the just-choosing" (97). Second, determinism results in a decrease of authority and control even if it does not explicitly rule out freedom (104-5). Balaguer prefers indeterminism (under the right circumstances) over determinism because the undetermined agent is "not causally influenced (at the moment of choice) by any factor external to his conscious reasons and thought" (101). The presumption appears to be that if a decision is causally determined by factors external to the agent -- such as events in the remote past together with the laws of nature -- then this detracts from the agent's authority and control. I'm reminded of no-choice transfer principles, like van Inwagen's (β) (1983, 94).

Let me conclude by offering the possibility of a more basic freedom underlying L-freedom. Call it "X-freedom" (167). A person has X-freedom iff he has authorship and control over his actions (cf. 87; 94). L-freedom is the indeterministic manifestation of X-freedom but X-freedom is a compatibilist theory.

Even Balaguer thinks that authority and control is possible given determinism. Consider the case of Brandy, who has three choices for dinner: a salmon dish, a mushroom dish, and a beef dish. She strongly prefers the latter over the others, so "this choice was causally determined by her . . . preferences" (124). Balaguer adds that in cases like this,

determination by reasons is . . . what we should want, and this includes libertarians. My argument for this is that it is only through determination by reasons that we can get a guarantee that, in cases like Brandy's, we author and control our decisions. For if reasons don't determine our choices in cases like this, then that just opens the door to the possibility . . . of something happening against Brandy's wishes (127).

Balaguer accepts that we have authorship and control in cases of determinism. Furthermore, he does not think that such authorship and control need trace back to some previous torn decision (124). Hence, the authorship and control is not increased or procured by some prior indeterminism. It is possible that the same act might be both determined and free. If this is not a commitment to compatibilism, I'm not sure what is.

It is not too surprising that I see the consequence argument, and thus the compatibility problem, everywhere in Balaguer's book. Nonetheless, I remain hopeful about the future prospects of philosophical analysis. Criticisms aside, this is a very interesting project, one that deserves attention. The book is a model of precision and clarity. It is accessible to the beginning student and makes an important contribution to scholarship in free will and metaphysics. Given the difficult nature of these topics, this is impressive. ^[3]

References

Campbell, Joseph Keim. Forthcoming. Free Will. Polity Press.

Kane, Robert. 1996. The Significance of Free Will. Oxford UP.

Van Inwagen, Peter. 2008. "How to Think about the Problem of Free Will." Journal of Ethics 12: 337-41.

———. 1998. "The Mystery of Metaphysical Freedom." In Metaphysics: The Big Questions, edited by Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman. Blackwell Publishers.

———. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Clarendon Press.

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^[1] Most of the freedoms that Balaguer discusses are at least candidates for the title "free will": libertarian freedom, Humean freedom (4), Frankfurtian freedom (5), etc.

^[2] Balaguer offered this terminology in correspondence.

^[3] An earlier draft of this review was presented the University of Idaho as part of the WSU/UI Philosophy Colloquium series. Thanks to Nicole Brunson, Justin Caouette, Ryan Hebert, Douglas Lind, Shairylann Lisonbee, Daniel Mistak, Michael Myers, and Michael O'Rourke for questions. Brunson, Caouette, Justin Horn, O'Rourke, and V. Alan White provided helpful comments on a subsequent revision. Thanks especially to Mark Balaguer for commenting extensively on several drafts.