Category Archives: Philosophy

Vote early and vote often

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The response to the election of Ed Miliband as new leader of the Labour Party was interesting not least because it was the occassion for various commentators to articulate their views on what counts as properly ‘democratic’. Julian Glover is The Guardian‘s resident apologist for the coalition, in the sense that he keeps writing these pieces which try to articulate the idea that the coalition reflects some sort of ‘intellectual powerhouse’ rather than, say, a political deal (what would be wrong with admitting this?). Today Glover came up with a very weak argument against equality, on the grounds that any argument which prioritises this value “overlooks the possibility that the actions needed to compel equality may be seen as unfair by those who do not benefit from them”. Er, yes, I suppose they might. This might be true of people earning lots of money who don’t want to pay higher, progressive taxes, just as it might be true of white South Africans benefitting from apartheid who might not have welcomed the onset of a new democratic dispensation. Glover goes on to claim that “An equally valid idea of a fair society may be one in which people are given the space and the right to strive for inequality: advantage achieved by their own efforts”, and then admits that this might all sound “horribly right wing“. It actually just sounds a bit dim (not much intellectual power-housing going on in this sort of argument), although it is certainly provocative to read Glover at the moment because he seems to be trying to articluate a kind of Nozickian-style hyper-individualistic take on coalition spending plans as not just unfortunate necessities but as positively welcome. Each to their own, I suppose, and Glover’s perspective does at least have the advantage of suggesting that ‘the Big Society’ idea at least has some intellectual substance to it compared to what passes as ‘orangist’ Liberal Democract thinking – it reminds one of how far the Big Society narrative departs from a fully-loaded ‘liberal’ individualism of the sort ascribed to ‘Thatcherism’, how far Cameron’s rhetoric for a long-time has been geared to transcending the burden of ‘there is no such thing as society’, and how far the Big Society is properly part of a ‘conservative’ tradition of thought with some intellectual weight.

Anyway, where was I? A few weeks ago, Glover described Ed Miliband’s victory as ‘peculiar and undemocratic’, without quite explaining why. It might have been peculiar, certainly, in so far as electoral college arrangements always generate some oddities; but the ‘undemocratic’ charge seems peculiar itself. Firstly, Ed Miliband won within the rules, of course, which no one contested. Secondly, though, the results indicate that Ed Miliband would actually have ‘won’ the election on just about any electoral system one can think of, if the ‘bias’  built into the unequal loading of the three-way division of the electoral college system between Labour MPs and MEPSs, party members, and members of affiliated organisations is lifted and one only looks at total number of individual votes casts for the Labour leader: he would have won under a first-past-the-post system counting first preferences (the system the Tory party uses); and he would have won under an alternative vote system which counted each indivual vote cast equally too (the system the Liberal Democrats use). It was only close because the votes of those individuals most likely to vote for Ed Miliband were systematically discounted in the electoral college system – quite legitimately, of course (the real issue in all this is whether one thinks trade union members should be enfranchised in this particular electoral system; and more broadly, this episode exposed the deeply undemocratic attitudes of many commentators to the position of trade unions in functioning liberal democracies).

Anyway, somehow Glover’s hyper-individualism seems connected for me with a certain sort of self-righteousness that is associated with current arguments about electoral reform, in which it is widely presumed that proportional representation is the preferred ideal against which any other alternative voting system is an unfortunate, temporary compromise. But what if PR harbours a horribly thin, de-racinated conception of political life, in which all that matters about politics is being counted as an individual bearer of opinions? There are other values worth considering, and across the spectrum from Tory (and not so Tory) worries about representing geographical communities to genuine concerns about accountability and efficiency, these seem worth acknowledging. I have always had a soft-spot for electoral geography, a much maligned field which actually has really interesting things to say about the politics of Politics, and one thing this field reminds us of is that ‘choosing an electoral system‘ is always a thoroughly interested, grubby, political act. We are about to experience, in the UK, at least 9 months of public debate about the fairness of different models of voting, and it will be interesting to see which democratic values are given most prominence as we publicy learn more about the pros and cons of different voting systems – the deafult assumption of ‘proportionality’ bundles up just some of the relevant values, certainly, but while it appears to be intuitively the most ‘fair’, it also tends to cover a series of mathematical problems which means that no purely proportional system is really possible, and might even mean that any imaginable democratic system must always contain an element of electoral dysfunction. The point of all this, I think, apart from any interest one might have in social choice theory or rationality, is that the mathematics of democracy reminds us that there is always a politcal, normative excess in any discussion of ‘fair’ procedures of the sort to which we are about to be subjected. Let’s see how much of this excess is allowed to be clearly articluated these next few months (this excess is precisely why elections are the place where the ‘the political’, in the sense this idea is conceptualised by post-structuralists like Mouffe or Ranciere, is routinely exposed and made public).

And, on a sort of related issue, there is a new podcast interview with Michael Dummett, on Frege, on philosophy bites. Dummett is one of the grand old men of English-language, Analytical philosophy, but kind of interesting despite that (!) – an anti-racist campaigner (who has reflected on the relevance or not of Frege’s anti-semitism for interpreting his philosophy), and author of an important theory of voting in precisely that same tradition mentioned above. A different model of engaged intellectual from the one we have inherited from the ‘Coninental’ tradition.

‘Big Cuts, Big Society’

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My colleague at the OU, Nick Mahony, has just posted an invite to contribute to a new blog hosted by the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), discussing ‘the politics of the present’, focussing initially on the theme of ‘Big Cuts, Big Society’ – see: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/dialogues/blogs/big-cuts-big-society

Slow Work in Progress

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I have been on leave the last couple of weeks, though not quite on holiday. I’ve been decorating various rooms of our house, sanding walls, filling holes, painting. So I have been in the house for two weeks, apart from forays to Swindon’s enormous B&Q for supplies. I have ended up listening to an awful lot of radio as a result, which has become a project in itself. There is BBC Radio 6 of course, thankfully saved, but actually quite difficult to listen to all day – too much ‘mortgage indie’. Oddly, I did end up listening to 4 days of county championship cricket, an unexpectedly exciting end of season round of games – I can’t ever remember first class county cricket being broadcast on the radio, but digital radio makes is possible. I suppose, when I think of it, this wasn’t really broadcasting, not even narrowcasting, rather something like sliver-casting.

Between these delights, I have been catching up with some favourite podcasts, or experimenting with some new ones. I usually only listen to these in the car on the way to work, and over the summer haven’t really kept up the habit. I first started listening to podcasts regularly in 2008, during the US Presidential election, and it’s election time again in the US, so I have been listening to various things to keep up – Slate’s weekly Political Gabfest is fun in an anguished liberal sort of way, and there are now a couple of podcasts which provide regular highlights from progressive/liberal radio and TV in the US – the Best of the Left podcast, and Democracy Now! I have also discovered Stephanie Miller, who is a bit like John Stewart on speed, without the pretence of exasperated moderation. More soberly, The New Yorker has a great weekly podcast The Political Scene, and The Nation’s Chris Hayes has a regular podcast The Breakdown. These provide my sources for up to date analysis of the currently ever more bizarre world of US politics. There isn’t anything I know of which does the same sort of thing in the UK – The Guardian’s Politics Weekly is very good, but in general this medium of public debate doesn’t seem well developed in the UK. Maybe because we don’t have a madly partisan media scene. Yet.

These sorts of podcasts work well because they have a regular rhythm to them, updated daily or weekly, and none of them is too long – an hour or so at most, for the ‘magazine’ style podcasts. The other podcasts I have been listening to these last couple of weeks, and which I sometimes listen to in the car, are more resolutely academic. I feel I should listen to these ones more often than I do, but actually after two weeks of trying, I have decided that many of them do not really suit the ‘medium’ of the podcast as well as they might. There are some exceptions, but these prove the rule – Philosophy Bites, which consists of short, 15 minutes or so of interviews with philosophers talking big philosophy – Pat Churchland on ‘eliminative materialism’ , Galen Strawson on conceptions of the self. Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds, who host Philosophy Bites,  have an interesting podcast about podcasting here. The OU also has a great list of podcasts, some of which are bespoke course materials, some of which are ready-made for iTunesU. These shows work because they are relatively short, and often take the form of the interview or round-table discussion. There are some longer ones – Canadian educational broadcaster TVO has Big Ideas, which seems to be mainly lectures by academics – I listened this week to a great talk by the late Gerry Cohen, using Olivia Newton-John to elaborate on his distinctively radical understanding of conserving existing values, and Toby Miller laying out a great agenda for studying the environmental impacts of cultural practices. Australian public radio has The Philosopher’s Zone, which is more interview based. And Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine, has a magazine style monthly podcast as well.

These podcasts all work well. I’m not so sure about all of the stuff you can access on iTunes mind. Lots of the content available on iTunesU seems to be there for promotional or recruitment purposes, without a lot of thought being put in to making material interesting. The OU has a big presence on iTunesU [I’m even on it], but this material is well produced with an eye to the nature of the medium being used. On the other hand, while you can download lots of famous people talking and lecturing from UC Berkeley or Oxford, much of this material is just recordings of seminars or lectures, which means that you don’t get the benefit of any visual aids people might be using, and the overall lesson I learnt from two weeks of trying to listen to these sorts of podcasts was that the academic lecture, as a communication form, really is pretty dysfunctional.

One of the first things I listened to over the course of my two weeks of decorating was David Byrne on TEDTalks, reflecting on how far different styles of music are generated in symbiotic relationship with the architectural spaces of performance, recording, and listening. I think you might extend the same sort of idea to thinking about how well different styles of talk-heavy analysis – of news, cinema, or philosophical concepts – translate to platforms that are beyond-radio, as it were. Lectures work in so far as they literally have a captive and immobile audience. But the academic podcasts which work are shorter, less analytical, and tend to work more as ‘tasters’ than substitutes for reading – they are better attuned to the spaces and rhythms in which one might find oneself listening to them, in the car, or standing on a ladder with a paint brush in your hand.

Back to work now – writing/reading/thinking work, that is, not painting/listening work.

What is it like to bat? Dreyfus, McDowell and the exemplary game

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The first conference I attended after becoming a parent, and therefore experienced in the ‘concentrated’ way described in my last post, was in Boston in 2008. One of the things I did manage to squeeze in between arriving on a Wednesday afternoon, spending two days in presenting, chairing, or discussing, was to go to a baseball game at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. So many highlights: riding a rickshaw through Friday night rush-hour/game-night traffic; singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ at the seventh-innings stretch…

To coincide with the start of the new season that month, The Boston Review published a letter written by the Harvard-based political philosopher John Rawls, in 1981, in which Rawls outlined why he considered baseball to be ‘best of all games’. It turns out that baseball’s superiority to basketball, tennis, football and soccer lies in the degree to which it embodies the virtues which Rawls invested in his own theory of justice as fairness – it has a certain sort of equilibrium, contains aspects of publicity, it is inclusive of plural talents, and it has a temporal rhythm that means that “there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback”. The editors of the magazine noted that Rawls had himself once been an accomplished baseball player, and that he had made reference to baseball in his own academic writing. In his essay ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Rawls used examples from baseball to make philosophical arguments about what a practice is, and what role rules play in practices (arguments which revolve around the puzzle that running, sliding, and throwing are things people do in all sorts of situations, but that stealing base or striking out are aspects of a practice known as baseball, and yet these events are not reducible to the rules of baseball which define them). It is common enough to use games, of one sort or another, to develop arguments of this sort. I wonder if it matters which games philosophers and social theorists consider best exemplify the most fundamental aspects of human action. Rawls’ brief, half-serious analysis of baseball’s virtues is one example of how certain sports attract the attention of intellectuals – baseball and cricket are the obvious examples, both of which lend themselves to the attention of those with a certain ‘nerdy-academic’ cast of mind. Maybe it’s all the statistics, plus the veneer of ‘literariness’ that attaches itself to lots of the books about both of these sports. And in both cases, they aren’t football.

Baseball turns out to play a significant part in a recent debate between two of the heavyweights of contemporary philosophy, Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, played out in the philosophy journal Inquiry in 2007 (although Dreyfus’ initiation of the debate appeared in Topoi). This debate is interesting because it serves as an example of an interesting convergence between what are often labeled Continental and Analytical traditions – Dreyfus, a leading exponent of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, stands here for ‘Continental’, McDowell for ‘Analytical’. These are problematic, even silly terms of course – Simon Glendinning has a lovely little book on this topic, called The Idea of Continental Philosophy. The subject of the Dreyfus and McDowell exchange is how to understand unreflective, embodied action, and differences over how far conceptual capacities extend into the world. They tend to accuse each other of clinging to unacknowledged ‘Cartesian’ dualisms, which tends to be the way with these debates – Rorty accused lots of people of this, Charles Taylor accused him of Cartesianism, and so on and so on. Dreyfus has developed a distinctively non-representational view of embodied action as unreflective, non-rational, non-conceptual – as ‘unminded’. He accuses McDowell of still holding to ‘the myth of the mental’ by presuming that the deconstruction of any clear divide between ‘mind and world’ teaches us that that ‘perception is conceptual all the way out’ (McDowell’s work is interesting to me not least because of just how important spatial vocabularies are to his re-casting of traditional questions of the philosophy of mind; something for which he has been taken to task for by others, such as Simon Blackburn).

Dreyfus’ position is that phenomenology, by which he means primarily Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, teaches us that the capacity to routinely carry out any number of ordinary embodied actions of different levels of complexity without thinking about it is fundamentally a non-conceptual, intuitive capacity, shared with animals and infants. In an entertaining reversal, McDowell then accuses Dreyfus of being the one who holds fast to a Cartesian dualism, by seeking to separate mindedness from intuitive, embodied coping – McDowell reads phenomenology as supporting his recasting of rationality as thoroughly embodied, and suggests that it is Dreyfus who is clinging to a detached conception of rationality.

Now, in the middle of this exchange, the two philosophers end up arguing about Chuck Knoblauch. Knoblauch was an All-Star second-baseman for the all-powerful New York Yankees of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But in 1999, Knoblauch developed a version of the ‘yips’, losing his ability to execute the quick-fire pick-up-and-throw-on-the-run-in-mid-air manoeuvres crucial to his position. Knoblauch was thinking too much, it was widely agreed at the time (he had various off-the-field issues it turns out). Dreyfus invokes Knoblauch as proof for his position, arguing that his skill levels declined because he stopped being absorbed in the activity at hand, but was instead allowing thought and reflection to intrude. Knoblauch’s ‘mental blauch’ (as headlines of the time describe it) shows that mindedness is not an aspect of the immersion involved in ongoing activities of embodied coping, so Dreyfus argues. McDowell takes issue with this reading of Knoblauch’s tribulations – according to him, this case proves his point, that the problem for coping arises when mindedness becomes detached from immersion in activity.

So it turns out that Knoblauch is central to making explicit what is at most at stake in this debate – this is a dispute between two variants of ‘non-representational’ accounts of action, not between a non-representational view and a representational view. Dreyfus stands as the figure for a view in which phenomenological insights correct mistaken views about activity being permeated by conceptual rationality; McDowell thinks phenomenological insights are a ‘supplementation’ to that view, re-ordering how we think of rationality rather than leading to a commitment to notions of non-conceptual or non-rational coping (I like McDowell’s usage of ‘supplementation’ because I have a pet hypothesis about his style of philosophy being similar methodologically to Derrida’s, in so far as it messes with the spatializations of key concepts in philosophical traditions).

The dispute about how to interpret Knoblauch’s freeze is interesting because it underscores one feature about how arguments in this style of philosophy, as well as in social theory, tend to lean on particular exemplars of what a ‘game’ is when they develop arguments about the meanings of concepts such as practice and embodied agency. There is a widely shared tendency to focus on individual, repeated acts within games – throwing, kicking, or taking free-throws in basketball. Oddly, the Dreyfus/McDowell debate might be much more narrowly focussed than Rawls’ discussion, which dates from the 1950s – they are focussed on the sliding/throwing/running aspects of baseball as discrete activities, outside of their wider place in not just particular ‘plays’, but in whole games, seasons, and beyond. Knoblauch’s problem with throwing didn’t end his career. He just got moved to the outfield; he wasn’t paid millions of dollars just as a second-baseman, but also as a batter. And the Yankees still kept winning (besides, Knoblauch has more recently been implicated in on-going scandals about endemic use of performance-enhancing steroids in professional baseball in the 1990s, which might cast an entirely different light on the episodes the philosophers disagree about).

None of which seems terribly philosophical, but it does provide a nice link to an essay by John Haugeland, another important philosopher in these debates, who died earlier this year. Haugeland has a long essay called ‘The Intentionality All-Stars’ (from 1990), re-published in his book Having Thought. He uses the fielding positions on a baseball diamond to map out different philosophical positions on the topic intentionality. He actually focuses on three main positions, using first, second and third base to differentiate thinkers like Searle, Quine, Dennett, Brandom, Heidegger and Sellars (Derrida, Rorty and others are consigned to the outfield, because they don’t really think these issues are that important – and Wittgenstein is shortstop, a joke I think about how he mediates between more rejectionist and more reconstructive positions on this classical topic). Haugeland is only using baseball here as a device to delineate these positions – it’s a mere metaphor in his essay, not part of a central philosophical argument (although he does end with a funny line nodding at Thomas Nagel about the importance of the question “What is it like to be at bat?”). A point I make only to underscore the fact that in other cases, like in Rawls or Dreyfus/McDowell, it might well matter that they use this game, rather than others, to exemplify fundamental philosophical points.

One of the things that McDowell’s position in his debate with Dreyfus suggests is that we might do well to pay heed to the sort of ‘immersed activity’ that is involved in doing intellectual work. There might be an interesting aspect of disavowal and projection involved in academics having to invoke games or dancing in order to elaborate on the relations between knowing that and knowing how (while choosing games which tend to push to the side forms of knowing-with which are implicated in both). The point is made succinctly by an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, collected in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, his essays on baseball. Gould’s essay, written contemporaneously to Knoblauch’s freeze, is called ‘The Brain of Brawn’, and refuses to buy into the straightforward dualism in which athletic excellence is presented as wholly opposed to, as either superior to or lesser than, scholarly accomplishment. Gould doesn’t want to interpret Knoblauch’s problem as the intrusion of the brain upon feeling, mind on matter either, and he draws an arresting analogy which cuts straight to the heart of the philosophical debate which Dreyfus and McDowell have more recently staged in part around Knoblauch’s trouble: “Knoblauch’s problem takes the same form as many excruciating impediments in purely mental enterprises with writer’s block as the most obvious example, when obsession with learned rules of style and grammar impedes the flow of good prose. And we surely cannot designate our unblocked mode as less intellectual merely because we cannot easily describe its delights or procedures”. Thinking well, it seems, is something that also might be embedded in intuitively grasped, not-too-reflective coping skills as well.

I’m not sure where Dreyfus and McDowell would stand exactly in Haugeland’s ballpark, although I think it’s somewhere between second and third base – in his account things get more pragmatist, phenomenological, and social as you round second. It’s probably quite crowded there. One thing the Dreyfus/McDowell exchange seems to confirm is that being ‘non-representational’ isn’t much of a discriminator these days – the issue is about different ways of being non-representational. And might it not matter just a little which game you take to be the model of having a ‘feel for the game’ when making arguments about non-representational aspects of action? The Australian philosopher John Sutton, who also works on phenomenology, distributed cognition, and the embodied mind, develops his argument with reference to cricket. More precisely, he uses batting as his favoured example. Batting in cricket is the basis for his argument about how thinking too much disrupts the accomplishment of embodied coping skills, showing how conceptual memory and procedural memory are dynamics aspects of embodied practices. They have batting in baseball too, of course, so maybe the point translates across fields, so to speak. But of course batting in these two games is not quite the same practice, it involves different sorts of coping skills. Sutton’s argument about the importance of memory seems an opening to understanding this difference, in so far as it suggests that the rhizomatic lines of flight passing through any discrete ‘at bat’ or ‘taking guard’ carry markedly different worldly resonances. And I can’t help thinking that all of these arguments amongst philosophers of embodied action might be helped by taking Iris Marion Young’s phenomenological analysis of ‘Throwing like a Girl’ a little more seriously – it reminds us that all these seemingly universal features of ‘embodiment’ and ‘coping’ might be cut through with social relations all the way down, as it were – that there is no universal phenomenological domain waiting to be exemplified by this or that particular game.