The President Is NOT a Pragmatist!

What I write today will matter to very few of you. It’s one of those boringly sincere attempts at clarification that generally meets with the response “Oh, who cares?” In this case, who cares other than philosophers? Well, that would be me, so I care, and if anyone else has the patience to bear with me for a few paragraphs, you have my heartfelt gratitude in advance. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

The president and his chief henchman in the Senate are often called “pragmatists” because they will do “whatever works” for their immediate gain. People applying the label to them believe that “whatever works” to win some particular victory, score points over opposition, solidify (if only temporarily) a position (however specious the support for it) – those people think that’s exactly what and all that pragmatism is. 

 

They are wrong. 

 

While those who call the president a “pragmatist” are clearly using the word in the casual, loose, inaccurate sense currently bandied about, the term is wrongly used in a much more important sense that would evidence knowledge of the history of philosophy – and I’m not asking the American public to go back and read Plato, for heaven’s sake, only to have some small, even superficial nodding acquaintance with America's most important contribution to world philosophy, a contribution as recent as the 20^th century. Twentieth century – remember that? Unless you’re an adolescent or a child, there should be something familiar there.

 

Sorry, that was sarcastic. Let me begin again. 

 

The modern school of thought that came to be known as pragmatism, while forerunners of it can be found all the way back to Ancient Greece ("nothing new under the sun"?), originated right here in North America, with honors generally going to logician and experimental scientist Charles Sanders Peirce ((1839-1914). Peirce was by most accounts a difficult and eccentric individual, but he recognized that scientific research could not be carried out along the lines suggested by Descartes, wherein an individual begins an inquiry into truth by doubting everything, but instead requires a community of investigators who begin their investigations with the assumption that reality exists independent of opinion. 

 

I ask you, does this sound like the president’s approach? 

 

Pragmatism as applied to science simply is the much-vaunted scientific principle: based on what we know at the beginning, we predict the results of an experiment and then test our predictions. 

 

If a proposition is true, then anyone who investigated the matter long enough and well enough would eventually acknowledge its truth: truth is a matter of long-term convergence of opinion. “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

-      The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

 

Do not be misled by the phrase “convergence of opinion” and see in it truth as something conveniently made up out of whole cloth. Truth in science is subject to empirical testing. It is provisional, in that future testing can always uncover errors and thus increase knowledge, but Peirce, please note, did not doubt an underlying, pre-existent reality. It is because of reality that extensive experiments by a scientific community can uncover truths.

 

Most of us are not experimental scientists and are more familiar with the name John Dewey than that of Charles Sanders Peirce. John Dewey, I note, has long been made a whipping boy by certain conservative voices, but most of them (in my opinion, because that's what you get here, but I will not leave that opinion unsupported) are whipping a straw man they call “Dewey,” and not the philosopher I know at all. 

 

John Dewey (1859-1952) was concerned with social issues, including education and politics, and he brought the philosophy of pragmatism to bear on these issues. How so? He believed human beings investigate questions of right and wrong by setting up and testing hypotheses about issues, always keeping in mind that conclusions might require future revision. In other words, we learn through experience. Does that sound dangerous? 

Dewey was no wild-eyed mad scientist! He viewed all of human history as having already tested basic rights and wrongs. So we have no need need to experiment to learn that lying or murder or cheating are wrong. Human history has already made those experiments. In this, I believe Dewey remained Kantian, and we see the Golden Rule here, also, as Kant appealed to it in his various versions of the Categorical Imperative.  

 

Dewey on education is a huge subject, and although it is there that his critics generally aim at the straw man they construct, education is a side issue for me today., so I’ll merely quote again briefly from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy:

 

…Dewey focused on the nature and practical improvement of education, arguing that children cannot be understood as empty vessels, passively awaiting the pouring in of knowledge, but must rather be seen as active centres of impulse, shaped by but also shaping their environment.

 

Now I suppose if you see children as empty vessels waiting to have knowledge poured into them, you might find Dewey a wild-eyed radical, but who that has ever been around children – or ever been a child! – could hold the view that children are passive, empty vessels? Really?

 

Actually, I once knew an otherwise very intelligent person who believed that “doing” philosophy (as we all said in graduate school) consisted of “learning the moves” from the best teachers available. The best teachers were necessary because, this person believed, a student could never be (do) better than his or her teacher. I was amazed by such a view. A student unable to criticize? To me, that implied a student unable to think! And so, I ventured to inquire, you believe Western thought has been getting stupider and stupider since Socrates, because all of Western philosophy comes down to us through a succession of teachers and students who began at the feet of Socrates? Yes. Well, I didn’t buy it then and never would.

 

The pragmatists would never have bought such a view of philosophy or anything else, either. They believed in the progress of thought, in the growth of knowledge, and the gradually increasing enlightenment of human beings. --There are times, I acknowledge, when it is difficult to believe in progress of any kind. At least, it does not seem a steady march forward, does it? But that too is a big topic for another day. 

 

My main twofold point today is simply that (1) pragmatism is a serious, native-born American philosophy; and (2) pragmatism is not “whatever works for a single individual” – to score a point, win the pot, or whatever. Pragmatism has to do with the advancement of science and the betterment of society. 

Cheating and lying, blaming and name-calling undermine our trust in one another and would, as strategies adopted by us all, make our institutions unworkable. These strategies are not pragmatic! They may be the moves of an egotistical opportunist who can’t see further than tomorrow, but they do not serve to further the cause of business or government or science or ordinary life in civilized society or anything that might be called progress. 

President Obama was a pragmatist, and his first concern was for the United States and for all Americans. The Republican-led Senate, however, cared more about blocking any positive achievements that might reflect well on a Democratic administration than with across-the-aisle cooperation to make gains for ordinary Americans. Now, for all President Trump’s bellowing “America First!” his impulsive, richocheting utterances and shifting, unstable, momentary alliances illustrate something very different. 

In short, to call the current president a “pragmatist” is to give a good American philosophy a very bad name.

You don’t have to read between the lines.

Anyone can be a book critic. All you have to do is read each word, each sentence, each paragraph carefully, generously but analytically, and then weigh the author's overall vision as well as the book's details against your wealth of background cultural knowledge. And the way to read a review is just the same. So in today’s post I invite you to come along with me for the reading of a book review and the questions and reflections it prompted in me. I don't imagine we will be a large party, but we happy few can enjoy ourselves.

Saturday morning, having come to the last page of a book I'd been reading, I picked up a New York Review of Books, the Nov. 21 issue, and found in it a stunning review by Robert Kuttner of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. Having thoroughly appreciated Kuttner’s Everything For Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets, I was eager to read what he had to say about Deneen’s book, which was published last year to wide acclaim and has already been issued in an expanded paperback edition.

A careful reader and astute reviewer, Kuttner wastes no time in accusing Deneen of setting up a straw man argument. 

Liberalism is not and never was merely, as caricatured by Deneen, ‘the greatest possible freedom from external constraints.’ Rather, it is fundamentally about limiting abuses of public and private power and creating space for free inquiry. 

What Kuttner calls the 'liberal project,’ then … “included the rule of law, limits on inherited privilege, constraints on arbitrary power, freedom of conscience and speech, and reliance on liberty to develop a natural aristocracy of talent” — all features we might hope to find flourishing in a democratic society. It was not about encouraging individual excess or magically freeing mankind from constraints imposed by nature, as Deneen would have us believe. Thus Deneen's cartoon version has little relation to either the origins or historical development of true liberalism.

Of course, the point of setting up a straw man is to have an easy target, so it is probably not surprising that Deneen goes on to blame his cartoon 'liberalism’ for every woe of modern society. He conveniently ignores the fact, Kuttner points out, that much of today’s so-called ‘conservatism’ [so-called is my addition] takes its starting point with libertarianism, not classical liberalism, and it is this hybrid libertarian ‘conservatism,’ not liberalism, that has led to such modern ills as 

...the commercialization of health care, the commodification of education, the sale of private data, the outsourcing of employment, and the economic collapse of entire regions….

Even given the easy target he has created, Deneen still resorts to cherry-picking quotes, according to Kuttner, thus misconstruing and misrepresenting Locke, Toqueville, and others.

I have read enough of Locke and Tocqueville to side easily with Kuttner on the cherry-picking question. Also, having taught as well as studied logic, I am alert to the trickery of a straw man argument. Finally, as a one-time though not long-term follower and advocate of libertarianism (I got over it), it didn’t take Kuttner to open my eyes to fairly recent radical changes in American so-called conservatism and in today's Republican party. (My father would not recognize his party today.) What today’s Republicans call conservatism, religious avowals aside, is “based on a common embrace of corporate capitalism,” an ideal in which [here I extrapolate] privatization, i.e., having "everything for sale” — banking, education, health care — is the only legitimate goal.

Perhaps Kuttner’s most serious criticism, though, is the one he makes on pragmatic grounds -- and here, as a self-described romantic pragmatist, I perk up my ears. This will be the payoff! Deneen, he tells us, having indicted what he calls liberalism, offers no idea whatsoever about what would support democracy better. Surely it would not be the “Benedict Option,” that  option that counsels forming groups to retreat from secular society. Such orthodox religious communities, guided only by religion precepts and without liberal, secular safeguards to rights, would hardly be immune to autocrats and would-be dictators. And here I note that the position of women in such communities is almost always subservient, submissive, and silent. Deneen has already decried the emancipation of women, so now any remaining doubts I may have had are dispelled.

"Democracy does not work perfectly," Kuttner admits, but what system of government ever has? Before the state was overrun by the market, democracy worked better than it's working today, but whatever form it takes, Kuttner does not see -- and Deneen does not offer -- a viable alternative. 

...All of the alternatives are even more corrosive of human dignity and personal virtue. Liberal democracy may indeed be under siege; but if we are to constrain the tyranny of dictators on one flank and the rule of overweening global corporation on the other, democracy is all we have.  

- Robert Kuttner, "Blaming Liberalism," The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2019 

The book Kuttner reviewed was Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen (Yale University Press, 2019).

Disclaimer: Some readers might consider that, as an emancipated woman, I am biased in favor of liberalism, and they would be correct. I would say, however, that my bias is the result of being persuaded by facts, logic, and experience, not an undisciplined outgrowth of ignorance or brainwashing.

But that's not all I think.

So now, my take: 

The more I survey this whole messy political stew, the more I mistrust both socialists on the far left and libertarians on the far right, and I mistrust them on pragmatic grounds; therefore, insofar as socialist ideology has saturated progressive movements and libertarian ideology has certainly taken over and cannibalized what used to be conservatism, the more and more I mistrust all ideologies and ideologues. To say either that government intervention and regulation is always (socialist) or never (libertarian) the correct prescription to social problems — the extreme opposing ideological positions — strikes me as so short-sighted as to be downright blind to reality. 

Kuttner’s own view is more nuanced, but I wonder if even his prescriptions have the flexibility I see as absolutely necessary. It’s been a while since I’ve read Everything For Sale, so I cannot say with certainty that he would put whole domains under government oversight and leave other entire domains completely free-wheeling. Banking, education, and health care are, as I recall, fields in which he advocates government regulation, and while I have no quarrel here in general, I would still not have the federal government regulating every aspect of banking, education, and health care in every state of the union. Neither would I leave domains on the free market side of things absolutely free. Think about it. How can the two domains possibly be completely separate, when manufacturing necessarily affects health, commerce necessarily involves banking, and the education of youth comes before entrance into any section of the workplace?

What makes more sense to me is to have general federal safeguards enforced and leave the fine-tuning of details to the local level (regional, state, town -- whatever is appropriate), since conditions on the ground vary so widely from one part of the country to another. Imagine, for instance, a hospital and its procedures for admittance, care, and billing. Doesn’t it make sense that the situation in Los Angeles will be vastly different from that in a farm town in North Dakota or an isolated mountain community in eastern Kentucky or a university teaching institution in Illinois? A procedure that works in one place may be very ill-suited in another. The mix of public and private funding and control, therefore, will also vary, and we should expect that variation.  There must be room for variation to meet local needs. 

It is foolish, when advocating social policy, to ignore variations of climate, physical geography, culture, history, and demographics across a country as large as the United States — almost as foolish as believing that some populations of the nation can be governed and protected by law while others can operate as gangsters.

Pragmatism, as a social philosophy, does not say that whatever course of action gets me the most is the right thing for me to do. That is a perverted view sometimes attributed to so-called “pragmatic” individuals in business. Pragmatism is not egoism ("what’s best for me is best”). Rather, pragmatism tells us that we should look for policies that work to achieve community goals, local or state or national. Sometimes but not always a government hands-off approach will be best. Sometimes but not always a government program will solve a particular problem. What I am advocating, you see, is attention to particularity. What approach is best for a particular community problem? Can we set up a small test and see how it works out? Which aspects of the results will then be applicable to some other community, and which ones do not travel well? It is exactly this kind of experimentation that is the justification for a federal system.

All too often politicians and Americans and, I suppose, human beings in general want a “hammer mechanic” solution: I’ve got a hammer, and I’ll just pound until this thing is fixed! Not generally the best approach, I’m saying, whether you hammer from the far left or the far right. An ideological hammer will generally create as much mess as it tries to eliminate, leaving you no further ahead. 

Surgery is not always the best answer. Neither is avoiding surgery always the best answer. 

That’s my two cents’ worth, anyway.

A New Kind of Radicalism

Before sunrise

The ‘right’ answer is no longer understood as one that can’t go wrong but rather as one that everyone can agree is worth trying, given the knowledge available. ‘Adaptive management’ … stresses the importance of constantly reevaluating our knowledge and assumptions … based on the results of previous action.  

- Nathan F. Sayre, Working Wilderness: The Malpai Borderlands Group and the Future of the Western Range

The ellipses I have inserted in the quote opening today’s post are not intended to slant the discussion but to broaden it. The quotation comes from a book that focuses on the Western range, and the approach of the Malpai Borderlands Group is ecological. Material omitted above is as follows: (1) “from which ecosystem management is derived” and (2) “about ecosystems.” I omitted that material because what I’m wondering is whether or not — and if so, how — the approach this group has taken, their formation of a “radical center,” might be broadened to address divisions in American society beyond ecosystem management. 

To understand my question, though, it will probably help to go back to the particular problem faced in southern Arizona and New Mexico and how the Malpai Group has sought to address it. At stake — for everyone — was protection of the land they loved. How best to protect the land and for whom and for what: the crucial ecological questions could not be addressed outside political considerations. Ranchers, understandably, wanted to continue ranching, which meant grazing their cattle on both private and public lands. Environmentalists believed, because the assumption had been enshrined in public policy for decades, that grazing degraded the environment and had to be reduced, if not stopped outright. (When a conservation group acquired land, therefore, it generally took that land out of the ranch economy entirely.) Battle lines had been drawn, therefore, with positions entrenched and parties unable to grant an inch to their opposition. 

Meetings of ranchers, land managers, wildlife officials, and environmentalists routinely degenerated into insulting tirades….

What have I left out at the end of that sentence? Here’s how it wraps up: 

… whereas the Malpai discussions and subsequent get-togethers managed to remain civil and constructive. 

With, I might add, people coming from the same kinds of groups and backgrounds as attended the disorderly, unproductive meetings marked by “insulting tirades.” What was the difference? That difference was not in the life experience of those involved or in their educations or larger political allegiances.  It was a genuine concern for a specific geographic area and the realization that without new and genuine solutions for that area’s problems, everyone involved would lose. 

Trust was not immediately granted to the group, and not everyone in the area was interested in joining. The movement that created the group was literally and metaphorically grassroots, but it did not spring full-blown into being overnight. It began with a discussion group coming together to determine points of agreement, finally culminating in an official statement:

To reverse this [existing political] polarization [between ranchers and environmentalists], which is a no-win situation for the land and everyone concerned, the ‘Malpai Meeting’ proposes that a concerned effort be made to identify the conservational common ground that unites all of us who love the land, then to create programs in which we can work together to implement the values we share.

Valuing the land itself was the bedrock common value of the group.

All [of us] who love the land agree that it should not be cashed-in or mined-out and that its health takes precedence over profits.

That “over profits” part makes for a strong statement, given that ranching families depend on making their livelihood from the land, but that livelihood depends on the land’s health, and so the ranchers have the strongest economic stake, along with a deep love often going back generations — what Wendell Berry calls “affection” for the very specific piece of the earth they call home. 

The scourge of mesquite that the Artist and I could not help noticing when we first arrived in southeast Arizona is more than an aesthetic concern. When shrubs outcompete grass, grazing suffers. On land dominated by woody plants with increasingly bare earth between shrubs, the desert’s sparse rainfall is lost more quickly to runoff, carrying with it more and more of the already thin topsoil. Without topsoil, and with shrubs having gained the upper hand, merely removing cattle from the land is no guarantee whatsoever that grasslands will regenerate. Old “wisdom” that called for maximum numbers of grazing animals per acre has proved insufficient protection for the land. Rainfall varies from season to season and year to year, and so both available water and season need to be taken into account when determining where and how many animals to graze. A universal formula (the holy grail of science) doesn’t cut it. “Averages” do not occur in nature. 

— And here I will cut to the chase and reveal that fire is a big part of the long-term solution for preserving Southwestern desert grasslands. Decades of fire suppression are what gave mesquite the upper hand over grass. The overall situation, of course, is much more complex than what I have presented here, and anyone interested is advised to look into the book from which I have drawn my information. My own point today, here, much as I have come to love southeast Arizona and care for its future, is a broader one. 

The “radical center” position created by the Malpai Borderlands Group, the author of the book explains, “was not simply centrist.

Rather than splitting the difference between two extremes, the radical center aimed to discard the polar oppositions that defined the spectrum in the first place.

I love that! This “center” is not some meaningless compromise where no one ends up satisfied. The goal of the group was nothing less than —

to unite ranching and conversation, to make them complementary and symbiotic if not synonymous … [in an] effort that would have to be public and multilateral.

Persons involved began by meeting in conversation to find common values. Their conversations were kept civil. Rejecting “expert” advice that had not worked in the past, they did not reject science but insisted on research conducted locally by scientists not wedded to specific outcomes promoted by any particular group. Members of the MBG, like the researchers on their lands, were determined to maintain open minds. 

Quick recap:

Civil conversation among open-minded people not wedded in advance to specific political outcomes but agreeing to examine empirical evidence to determine what best accomplishes their shared goals. 

That is how I see the MBG example as applicable to widely diverse economic, social, and environmental problems in other parts of our country. Can you see it, too?

Not everyone in the AZ/NM borderlands area, I’m sure, has joined the Malpai Borderlands Group. True, that’s just a guess on my part, but think about it. Even when a new approach to solving an old problem outperforms previous attempts, there are usually a few people who continue, in the face of all evidence, to clutch tightly to their previous ideologically-driven beliefs. That’s why I wouldn't be surprised if a few unconvinced extremists remain on both ends of the political continuum. But I bring that up not to cast any bad light on anyone but merely to urge those who would seek consensus and cooperation — and results — to realize that it is possible for committed individuals to join together and move forward without everyone within earshot being on board. 

No individual or group in history has ever had 100% support and devotion. It isn’t necessary. Without 100% of a population being on board, however, the more people who come to see cooperation and empirical research bringing tangible benefits to all concerned, themselves included, the more support the “radical center” will gain — provided it holds to a nonconfrontational, noncoercive, open-minded approach. 

What do you think? Worth a try in other areas of community life, in other parts of the United States? “Git ‘er done!” How about it?

Postscript, 4/10

In my eagerness to share the story of the Malpai Borderlands Group and my ideas for how what worked for them could work in other places and other situations, I may have glossed too quickly over another piece contributing to the group’s success. You see, it was not only that a civil conversation uncovered common values. It was much more. This group of property owners, environmentalists, ranchers, scientists, and government agency employees came together to address a specific problem because they shared a common goal. 

“Our goal is to restore and maintain the natural processes that create and protect a healthy, unfragmented landscape to support a diverse, flourishing community of human, plant, and animal life in our borderlands region.” 

The problem was that their regional landscape was threatened in several ways. Their mission was to find strategies to reach their shared goal (“to restore and maintain … natural processes…”) by accomplishing clear objectives embedded in the goal statement — preventing fragmentation, restoring grasslands, remediating shrub encroachment, and conserving ranching as a livelihood. 

It’s one thing for people who disagree politically to come together to try listening to one another’s views. That’s very, very hard — and maybe it isn’t even worth the time spent. On the other hand, when people in a community, who share some common core value or values, disagree over how to accomplish a shared goal — that’s when conversation is most likely to be successful, as long as political ideologies, religious differences, “how we’ve always done things,” and the like can be set aside and the question at hand approached with open minds. When there is something that people agree needs doing, their problem is no longer a matter of abstract principle but a question of what will work. Pragmatism is America’s contribution to Western philosophy, and Americans have always been noted for their ability to find ways to get things done.

An ecological community, a village, a school district, a county fair committee, even a church — all, from time to time, face specific problems requiring consensus on how the problems will be solved. Too often the necessary discussions disintegrate into unproductive, painful, “insulting tirades.” A better model is available, if we’re adult enough to adopt it.

“We Must Cultivate Our Garden”

The latest self-assigned reading project for our intrepid Ulysses group was a double-header: Candide and Zadig, by François-Marie Arouet, known to the world as Voltaire. Comparing notes when we met to discuss Voltaire, we learned that all of us had read Candide first. It is, after all, Voltaire’s most famous work, and in the Signet Classic paperback edition we read (translated by Daniel M. Frame, with introduction by John Iverson and afterword by Thaisa Frank), Candide gets top billing on the cover and is the first work in the book, Zadig and Selected Stories trailing after.

Voltaire was no stodgy writer. When one member of our group observed, a trifle disparagingly, “He’s no Proust,” another agreed enthusiastically and gratefully. (Only five of the nine of us will meet in November to discuss Swann’s Way, the others begging off.) Voltaire’s outlandish adventure tales move right along, calamities and reversals of fortune piling up so fast it makes a reader’s head spin. This is not ‘realism,’ magic or otherwise, but sharp satire.

So, like the others in the group, I read Candide first, and when I reached the last page and the final words, I was overcome with deep satisfaction. Candide’s teacher, Pangloss, having learned nothing from all his experiences, is still holding forth with his metaphysics of optimism:

“All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for after all, if you had not been expelled from a fine castle with great kicks in the backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunégonde, if you had not been subjected to the Inquisition, if you had not traveled about America on foot, if you had not given the Baron a great blow with your sword, if you had not lost all your sheep from the good country of Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied citrons and pistachios.”  

“That is very well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our garden.”

I loved that, and the morning I finished Candide, I posted a line or two on Facebook about how satisfying I found the protagonist’s final words. One of my friends objected. He felt the end of the book counseled withdrawal from the world and a retreat from action. (What is the word I’m forgetting here? The entire Fb exchange appears to have vanished into thin air, including the message I sent my friend.) I hadn’t read it that way at all! Metaphorical, yes, but meaning -- ???

Set that aside for a moment. I'll come back to it.

Turning to Zadig felt like coming down a few steps on the literary-historical ladder. The character Zadig was nearly perfect in the beginning – not only handsome and rich but also wise, generous, etc., etc., etc. – and rewarded in the end. He had a hero’s challenges (ho-hum) but not much to learn. Well, he did have a little something to learn, not in how to behave or how to live or how to counsel others but how to view the world. The most intriguing and bothersome passage to me in all of Zadig was his conversation with the hermit who transformed into an angel, come to enlighten him.

Immediately before the following exchange, the old hermit threw a widow’s nephew into the river, where he drowned. When Zadig protested, the hermit said that the young man “whose neck Providence has wrung would have murdered his aunt in a year and you in two.” The hermit then sprouts wings, Zadig falls reverentially to the ground, and the following conversation takes place.

“Men,” said the angel Jesrad, “pass judgment on everything without knowing anything; of all men you were the one who most deserved to be enlightened.” 

Zadig asked his permission to speak. “I mistrust myself,” he said, “but may I venture to ask you to clear up one doubt for me? Would it not have been better to have corrected that child and made him virtuous than to drown him?”  

Jesrad replied, “If he had been virtuous and if he had lived, his destiny was to be assassinated himself, together with the wife he was to marry and the child that was to be born to them.”  

“But,” said Zadig, “what? Then it is necessary that there be crimes and misfortunes? And the misfortunes fall on the good!”  

“The wicked,” replied Jesrad, “are always unhappy. They serve to test a small number of just men scattered over the earth, and there is no evil out of which some good is not born.”  

“But,” said Zadig, “what if there were nothing but good, and no evil?” 

“Then,” replied Jesrad, “this earth would be another earth, the chain of events would be another order of wisdom; and that other order, which would be perfect, can exist only in the eternal abode of the Supreme Being, whom evil cannot approach. He has created millions of worlds, not one of which can resemble another. This immense variety is an attribute of his immense power. There are not two leaves of a tree on earth, or two globes in the infinite fields of the heavens, that are alike; and everything you see on the little atom on which you were born had to be, in its appointed place and time, according to the immutable orders of him who embraces all. Men think that this child who has just perished fell into the water by chance, that it was by a similar chance that that house burned down; but there is no chance; all is test, or punishment, or reward, or foreseeing."

Is the angel Jesrad a precursor of Pangloss? All that is, must be? But Pangloss, for all his contorted reasoning, did not go so far as to see reward and punishment in necessity! Pangloss told Candide, “...private misfortunes make up the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more all is well.” It is not that those visited by misfortune have been punished. Besides, pointed out a sharp-eyed group member, the angel goes on to say that Zadig has been sent to change the fisherman’s destiny! Change it? Change destiny? Is it destiny, or isn’t it?

John Iverson writes that Voltaire was troubled by the philosophical system of Leibniz, “who reasoned that if God was perfect then He must have created a perfect world.” My French edition of Candide has an introduction (in English) by Julian Eugene White, who claims that Voltaire was better acquainted with Alexander Pope’s “perversion” of the Liebnizian philosophy reconciling the existence of evil with God’s perfect goodness. The general view, at any rate, still assumed everything in nature to have a purpose, or what Aristotle called a “final cause.” This is not ‘cause’ as we understand it today, coming before the effect and bringing it about, but one serving as a goal, a reason “in order to” rather than a reason “because of,” if you will.

At this point, one group member took off after Aristotle, blaming him for centuries of convoluted rationalizations on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, but I’m not going to take up that fight. Instead I’ve looked up birth and death dates for Voltaire, the three giants of European rationalism, and the triumvirate of European empiricists.

Rene Descartes, 1596-1650

Baruch Spinoza, 1632-77

John Locke, 1632-1704

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1646-1716

Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694-1778

David Hume, 1711-1835

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-78

Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz are the rationalists, and to understand the world, they simply reasoned about it. No telescopes or microscopes needed – an armchair would do. Descartes, by means of a famous thought experiment, demonstrated to his own satisfaction that he could always trust his own God-given mind to lead him to the truth. Cartesian confidence was clearly at work in the reasonings of Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss.

But John Locke, the first of the empiricists, was born ahead of Voltaire, and David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were of Voltaire’s generation. Voltaire, then, is on the cusp. The authority of the rationalists is waning, and scientific experiment and the authority of experience are coming to the fore. Candide, malgré lui, is an empiricist: although his only goal was to be reunited with his beloved Cunégonde, he learns from his travels and his experiences. Interestingly, one of the things he learns is to judge and think for himself, which was a very Cartesian proposition, but let’s not think too much about that....

Here’s something I found myself wondering: How optimistic, really, was the philosophy of Doctor Pangloss or Alexander Pope or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? It was not, surely, the optimism of a happy modern individual, sure that things will always go right in his or her life. The optimism, if one wants to continue calling it that, was instead a faith that the clockwork of the world was running on some rational basis. Thus, early in the story, when Pangloss reappears exhibiting all the ravages of venereal disease, he reasons that his personal sufferings are all necessary to go into making up the general good. Punishment? No, simple necessity! – So what I wonder is, why could we not call this fatalism?

And now, looking back at Zadig (1748), don’t the angel’s pronouncements – pronouncements the author seemed to endorse at the time of writing that work – seem only ever so slightly improved upon in the philosophy of Pangloss, the latter philosophy one that the author at the time of writing Candide (1759) clearly rejected? Pangloss may have thought it “not fitting” for a philosopher to recant an earlier opinion, but the philosophe Voltaire, it seems, was not ashamed to learn and move forward.

The group member who noted the inconsistency in the angel’s lesson on destiny was concerned with Voltaire’s opinion of his imaginary Eldorado, the land where all goods were freely shared, no courts of law needed, and God only thanked, never petitioned. This was the only place Candide visited, she observed, that the author never seemed to mock. Was this, then, his Utopia, his ideal society? Was it a possible society? I asked. Wouldn’t it get boring? a couple others wondered. We left the question unresolved.

But now, let's come back to our sheep. For me, the most burning question was the meaning of “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” or, “We must cultivate our garden.” Admitting the phrase to be ambiguous, White nevertheless chooses what he calls “the more optimistic interpretation” (!), which he articulates in the following proposition: “Practical action should be substituted for ... vain speculation.” White argues passionately that in the latter part of Voltaire’s life, “cultivating his garden” took the form of unremitting battle for humanitarian causes, unceasingly writing pamphlets against all manner of intolerance and injustice. Écrasons l’infâme (“Let us crush infamy!”) is hardly the slogan of a man who has retreated from the world to live complacently behind his garden walls! Thus the author’s life supports the pragmatist interpretation.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Écrasons l’infâme!

If not identical, the two phrases are certainly compatible, n'est-ce pas? I would even say quite compatible.

Voltaire’s garden was the world. It was not that of Eden, where no work was necessary. And as for Voltaire, so for us: our garden is the world we have, it admits of improvement, and it is up to us to do the work. At least, that is the lesson I take from Candide. And to my mind, he could not have chosen a happier metaphor.

This past year I have cultivated my bookstore garden very well, I think. Dog Ears Books hosted fewer events, but every single one of them was a roaring success. I have used this blog, at least from time to time, as a platform for important social and environmental causes. My vegetable garden, on the other hand, the literal garden in my life, was the victim of shameful neglect. I’m not happy about that. I can’t do everything, but I hope to have a real garden again next year -- even with the realization that, for my bookstore customers and guest authors, the metaphorical garden of my bookstore is undoubtedly the more important ground to be worked.

“In My Next Life....”

Sometimes I like to say, “In my next life, I’m going to be High Maintenance.” In that scenario I imagine myself commanding every room, like visiting royalty, and not giving a rip how much anyone else might be annoyed by my indifferent take-over. Yeah, right. I know! Not in a hundred lifetimes would that be me!

But say it’s a different career path that looks alluring. “In my next life, I’ll be a geologist,” I occasionally say. Not that I want to work for an oil company--no, I’m thinking more of those survey camping/field trips up into the Boundary Waters, exploring and mapping, and, of course, being able to identify rock samples, knowing how old every stone is and how it was formed. So what’s stopping me now? If I really cared all that much?

Fact is, I’m not counting on a “next life,” don’t have any sense of having had “past lives,” and don’t expect an “afterlife.” This one life I have is the only life I expect, and I believe (despite these silly imaginings) that it’s up to me to live it well and to make it what I want, within the constraints of my starting place and historical and circumstances. Whatever “garbage” I need to shed, I believe I’ve picked it up in this lifetime, and the same for whatever good “karma” (I’d call that goodwill) I’ve accumulated. If I live well and treat people decently, I believe I’ll be happier and make the world a better place than if I live and treat people badly.

Is mine a boring point of view? Not to me. Odds are, anyway, that if “past lives” were reality I’d have been scrabbling around for a crust with the faceless, illiterate hordes, not ruling the surrounding countryside from a castle.

No, this is my time, and I’m happy with it. I was born into a post-Hitler world that still had passenger trains running, and as a kid I got to ride them often. Being a woman did not keep me out of university. My world is one of freedom, nature, art and books, not only for me but for more and more people worldwide. And while I’ve never been (and never expect to be) wealthy, I am able to do my small part for those less fortunate. So all in all, I call this a good life, a downright priceless gift of a life.

But what of those who believe in reincarnation, who believe they have lived before and will live again, in other bodies and other parts of the world? “Doesn’t it explain a lot that’s hard to make sense of otherwise?” a friend asked me years ago. I remember where we were standing when she asked the question. It felt to me as if the Grand Canyon had opened up between us. But we are still friends.

How so? Because pragmatically, there is no distance between us effected by our diametrically opposed beliefs. We both try to live good lives—she for what it means to her in terms of future lives, I because I believe this is my only chance at life. Our reasons are different. So what? It’s like the difference another friend and I discovered when she acknowledged that she thought the universe had a specific plan for her life and I admitted that I didn’t think any such plan was setting up personal lessons for me. The sameness of our living is that both of us look to see what we can learn from whatever happens to us, so (again) pragmatically there is no difference in how we approach life.

Wow, I didn’t plan to go on and on like this on the subject when I set out this morning! What got me started was thinking again about The Book of Lost Fragrances, by M. J. Rose, and how that fictional story required that I perform a “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to enter its world. (What I wrote earlier about the book can be found here.) For quite a way into the story, I kept pulling back, and part of my hesitancy the author encouraged, through the doubts of the main character. Maybe her traumatic experiences were psychotic episodes rather than insights into former existences? This uncertainty added to the story’s interest.

I said in my last post--and not for the first time--that I love the way books let me travel through space and time. Rose’s novel took me back to ancient Egypt, forward to modern New York, and gave me long stretches in my beloved Paris. The story was engaging, entertaining and suspenseful. I particularly appreciated the author’s lingering, voluptuous descriptions of aromas, scents, smells—call them what you will.

Buy a novel’s philosophy wholesale or take it on trial for the length of the book? Either way is possible. Reading knows no boundaries to the possible!

For Me (I Speak Only for Myself), Art and Theory Don't Mix

...Nothing is ever exhausted or definitely explored within the creative process. The same object engages us in endless variations day after day.

...We tend to flee from repetition with fear that it will absorb our spirits.

...Don’t be afraid to do the same thing repeatedly. The practice will reveal that creation pervades everything. ...Nothing can ever be repeated in an absolute sense. There are always nuances that go unnoticed when we see our lives as monotonous drudgery.

-Shaun McNiff, Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go

(Why bagels with this post? These were mindfully made and prayerfully eaten.)

I cannot imagine ever calling myself a Buddhist. Sitting za-zen is foreign to me, and “living in the moment,” as an ideal, runs counter to the way I see human nature (that most amorphous and malleable of existential concepts!), with consciousness providing a temporal gap between external stimuli and the response of this complex organism, the human being, in which choice and freedom can emerge, consciousness by its very nature permeated with memory and anticipation, remembering the past and imagining the future. And yet, un-Zen, skeptical, hyper-conscious philosopher that I am, the books on art that speak to me with the most meaningful voices are those written by artists, such as Frederick Franck and the author quoted above, who approach art as meditation, as a losing of subjectivity (self) in seeing objects and interacting with them wordlessly.

Is this surprising? Would it seem more natural for a philosopher to approach art analytically? Ah! Of all my graduate school philosophy courses, the ones that tortured me most were classes in aesthetics, and I can analyze the reasons for my discomfort, because I not only find reasons paradigmatically amenable to analysis—I find that reasoning, of all human activities, cries out most loudly to be analyzed, for it is usually in our thinking that we go astray.

(1) First of all, from the very beginning, analysis struck me as completely inappropriate in the realm of art, its vivisection—it always felt like that to me—treating something living as if it were something dead. The poem I had to analyze in high school French class was one I chose because I loved it. After taking it apart, line by line, word by word, I gained an interpretation but lost the poem. The same thing happened in graduate school to the poem in English I had to analyze for my first “Theory of Art” class. After that I didn’t want to analyze poems—particularly poems I loved. (Caveat: I realize this may say more about me than about literary analysis and that many people find their appreciation and love deepened rather than destroyed by close reading, as my own close reading of important fiction or philosophy texts adds to my enjoyment. So my rejection of analysis is not tout court, and perhaps my second reason for discomfort will shed light on why that is so, in an indirect way.)

(2) Another source of my reluctance to analyze art came from the nature of art theory, where each thinker in turn (as one studies the philosophers’ views of art in historical survey) put forward a thesis on what art is as if it were a unitary category! Worse, all of these theories made claims for the goal of art, as if there were only one. They took it for granted, that is, that all artists were aiming in the same direction, coming closer to the bull’s-eye or missing the mark according to their degree of talent and skill. Married to an artist and having had artist friends since adolescence, I simply could not accept this unstated premise on which every aesthetic theory was constructed. It was too tidy, too articulate, too finished to be true to any artist’s life and work. The very act of generalization, I still think, is more a demand of theory than of understanding art, which is not one activity but many, multiple in terms of media and in terms of those engaged. I am beginning to suspect that the same is true of interpretive theory, but I’ll leave that question aside for now.

(3) What was my third reason? It seems to have slipped around the corner while I was looking at something else, but I think it was that theories of art, with the refreshing exception of John Dewey’s pragmatism, began with finished products. Here is this statue, this poem, this symphony, etc., the philosophers would say, and then they would ask what all had in common, because if all are art, they must share something (whatever lacked that something would not fit the category ‘art’), and the answer to that first question set the stage for the claim that the artist had aimed at creating that very whatever-it-was in the object. Again, too neat and tidy, my heart would protest unhappily. (This stuff really made me miserable. I’m not kidding.)

The poems I wrote for many years of my life were certainly not a process of envisioning an endpoint and then working toward it. More often a poem began for me with a single phrase scribbled on a paper napkin or the back of an envelope. More phrases would follow. Somehow they would come together, awkwardly stitched at first, then some of the threads ripped out, pieces discarded and reworked, finally groomed and stroked until the poem itself told me it was done. And as my mind held no image of finished work beforehand, neither was there a purpose given in advance. Why did I write a poem? Not “in order to” achieve something else and certainly not for some large, general purpose. (Of course, the philosophers can say here that the artists don’t need to be conscious of their own reasons. Copout! With an assumption like this, no disconfirming evidence is even conceivable, and the theorist gets a blank check to spend.) No, I began my poem because the phrase whispered in my ear and begged to be written down, as if it were saying, in the words of the song, “Take all of me. Why not take all of me? Can’t you see I’m no good without you?” Except that there was no you or me, no consciousness of self or other.

(4) That’s it! That last sentence there brings back to me the reason I had thought to give as my third and will now call my fourth, and that will bring me back, miraculously, to where I began. (I swear I did not plan this out beforehand! Do you believe me?) This last reason has to do with the spiritual nature of art. That is how I see it, how I feel it. A chain of reasons is an intellectual construct, the most appropriate subject for analysis. Analyzing historical events, too, whether in our own lives (as problems in ethics) or globally, across the ages, can teach us a lot, helping us make decisions for the future, and there are many situations where the question “Why?” is important. At other times, however, no question can be more wrong or less to the point. I think spiritual journeys are very rarely a search for something, e.g., a Holy Grail. More often they are more a journey away from the known and into the unknown. Direct artistic engagement, however small or amateurish, takes one on this kind of spiritual journey. (Important question: am I guilty here of generalization, and if so, is it any different from the generalizations of analysis?) John Dewey’s great contribution to aesthetic theory was the realization that activity is central to the making of art. That is, he focused on the making, rather than on the product, and at that point in my graduate class (the professor’s capstone, which told me that he too found Dewey’s picture more satisfying than those of his predecessors) I breathed a big sigh of relief. Still, as I recall, even Dewey proposed a (single) purpose, arguing that art was essentially a problem-solving activity.

Well, it doesn’t matter. Scientists don’t pay much attention to what philosophers say about science, and artists probably pay even less attention to what philosophers say about art, and that’s fine. To each his own. But artists and philosophers may have more in common than they realize. Most philosophers like to think they are uncovering hidden structures, as do scientists, but my own feeling is that philosophy, like art, is as much creation as exploration and just as individual to every practitioner. The difference is that the philosophers, engaging in intellectual activity, bring consciousness to the fore, while the artists, spiritual practitioners, must leave consciousness off to the side somewhere or stay stuck and not get anywhere.

Today’s post has been a very analytical presentation of my thinking on the subject of art, and all of this will go back in the box when I pick up a pencil and a pad of paper to draw, even when I walk out the door into the sunlight, into the waiting world of water and fish, birds and green plants. I will want to be there, not stuck in my head.

Years ago, when David and I were first living together, I used to try to stay quiet when he was working, even avoiding the room where he stood in front of his easel. Then one day he said, “You’re not bothering me. You can talk to me while I’m working. I’m painting, not thinking.”

I don’t advise interrupting a working novelist or a composer or a poet with conversation, and some painters do prefer solitude. I include this anecdote merely as a hint to how thinking interferes with “doing art,” just as it interferes with meditation. This truth extends beyond the visual arts. Even in writing one must make choices with every word without thinking about making choices with every word. To find something new, it is important to become lost.

Now, out into the world!