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Stanley Cavell and Timothy Williamson: Must We Mean What We Say? And How?

This is an extension of earlier thoughts on Wittgenstein, and particularly about how philosophers think of meaning and to what extent culture gets involved in it. I want to contrast Stanley Cavell, for whom culture is very nearly the starting point of philosophical investigation, and Timothy Williamson, for whom it seems to be a recurrent nuisance. Both claim very different aspects of Wittgenstein for their own projects. I side with Cavell.

“Must We Mean What We Say?” is very early Cavell, dating from 1957, before he had gotten his PhD. I am not sure how widely read it is today, because it is written in the argot of the Ordinary Language Philosophy of the time (Cavell was a student of J.L. Austin’s). Although the essay goes far beyond Austin in its underlying concerns, Cavell is still working within an orthodoxy that he would soon transcend.

The signs are clearly already there, as Cavell concertedly links the technical aspects of Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy to looser concerns of art, literature, and taste. His yokes the ideas of language games and social practice to somewhat Kantian ideas about the experience of art, beauty, and meaning. His skill in doing so is already manifest. His employment of technical discourse (here Wittgenstein, elsewhere psychoanalysis) never overshadows the literary humanist sense that comes to the forefront in his later work; Cavell fits in my mind next to William Empson, Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye rather than to Austin or Ryle.

Notably, he draws out those aspects of Wittgenstein closest to this sensibility, which Austin and Ryle clearly did not possess: the amazement and bafflement at culture, the ability to be temporarily transported by a “game,” be it a work of art or a conversation, the sense of awe. Wittgenstein’s deployment of these moments was very sparing and always cautiously conditioned by his radical uncertainty. Cavell seems to possess more holistic certainty, and as Nightspore suggested in a comment, this allows parts of Wittgenstein’s work to come forward more fully in a way that Wittgenstein would never have allowed.

Cavell does defend Ordinary Language Philosophy from an attack by the logician and skeptic Benson Mates. I have not read the attack, but from Cavell’s quotes, it seems a bit more temperate than Ernest Gellner’s attack, but not all that much more sympathetic, akin to Timothy Williamson‘s recent urgings that we forget about all those ordinary language anecdotes and platitudes and once more get down to solving logical and metaphysical issues for all time. Reading Williamson’s “Must Do Better” seems to indicate that we haven’t come very far in the last 50 years:

What about progress on realism and truth? Far more is known in 2004 about truth than was known in 1964, as a result of technical work by philosophical and mathematical logicians such as Saul Kripke, Solomon Feferman, Anil Gupta, Vann McGee, Volker Halbach and many others on how close a predicate in a language can come to satisfying a full disquotational schema for that very language without incurring semantic paradoxes. Their results have significant and complex implications, not yet fully absorbed, for current debates concerning deflationism and minimalism. One clear lesson is that claims about truth need to be formulated with extreme precision, not out of kneejerk pedantry but because in practice correct general claims about truth often turn out to differ so subtly from provably incorrect claims that arguing in impressionistic terms is a hopelessly unreliable method. Unfortunately, much philosophical discussion of truth is still conducted in a programmatic, vague and technically uninformed spirit whose products inspire little confidence.

Precision is often regarded as a hyper-cautious characteristic. It is importantly the opposite. Vague statements are the hardest to convict of error. Obscurity is the oracle’s self-defense. To be precise is to make it as easy as possible for others to prove one wrong. That is what requires courage. But the community can lower the cost of precision by keeping in mind that precise errors often do more than vague truths for scientific progress.

In addition to the humdrum methodological virtues, we need far more reflectiveness about how philosophical debates are to be subjected to enough constraints to be worth conducting. For example, Dummett’s anti-realism about the past involved, remarkably, the abandonment of two of the main constraints on much philosophical activity. In rejecting instances of the law of excluded middle concerning past times, such as ‘Either a mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago or no mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago’, the anti-realist rejected both common sense and classical logic. Neither constraint is methodologically sacrosanct; both can intelligibly be challenged, even together. But when participants in a debate are allowed to throw out both simultaneously, methodological alarm bells should ring: it is at least not obvious that enough constraints are left to frame a fruitful debate.

When law and order break down, the result is not freedom or anarchy but the capricious tyranny of petty feuding warlords. Similarly, the unclarity of constraints in philosophy leads to authoritarianism. Whether an argument is widely accepted depends not on publicly accessible criteria that we can all apply for ourselves but on the say-so of charismatic authority figures. Pupils cannot become autonomous from their teachers because they cannot securely learn the standards by which their teachers judge. A modicum of willful unpredictability in the application of standards is a good policy for a professor who does not want his students to gain too much independence.

Timothy Williamson, “Must Do Better” (2004) [I wish he had called it "Must Fail Better"]

The details are different, but the resemblance to Mates’, Ayer’s, and yes, even Gellner’s criticism of the post-Wittgensteinian movements in analytic philosophy is uncanny, right down to the excoriation of mystic philosophical oracles. And Cavell’s defense could just as well apply to the unnamed folks whom Williamson is bashing:

 But the philosopher who proceeds from ordinary language is concerned less to avenge sensational crimes against the intellect than to redress its civil wrongs; to steady any imbalance, the tiniest usurpation, in the mind. This inevitably re­quires reintroducing ideas which have become tyrannical (e.g., exist­ence, obligation, certainty, identity, reality, truth . . . ) into the specific contexts in which they function naturally.

This is not a question of cutting big ideas down to size, but of giving them the exact space in which they can move without corrupting. Nor does our wish to rehabilitate rather than to deny or expel such ideas (by such sentences as, “We can never know for certain . . . “; “The table is not real (really solid)”; “To tell me what I ought to do is always to tell me what you want me to do . . . “) come from a sentimental altruism. It is a question of self-preservation: for who is it that the philosopher punishes when it is the mind itself which assaults the mind?

Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” (1957)

This reintroduction that Cavell recommends inevitably carries with it all the ambiguity and unprovability that Williamson (and Gellner) detest. It comes as little surprise that Williamson’s take on Wittgenstein and Austin is rather off-the-mark:

A standard framework for description is an incipient theory; it embodies a view of the important dimensions of the phenomena to be described. Since Wittgenstein and Austin were notoriously suspicious of philosophical theory, they inhibited theory-making even of this mild kind. Of course, many philosophers of the period escaped their influence. Austin himself permitted philosophical theories, if they were not premature; it was just that he put the age of maturity so late.

Wittgenstein held that philosophical theories were symptoms of philosophical puzzlement, not answers to it, but that was itself one of his philosophical theories. His work was always driven by theoretical concerns. This applies in particular to his account of family resemblance terms, his specific contribution to the study of vagueness, as it does to Friedrich Waismann’s similar notion of open texture, developed under Wittgenstein’s influence. However, theory does not flourish when it must be done on the quiet. It needs to be kept in the open, where it can be properly criticized.

Timothy Williamson, Vagueness (1994)

Williamson’s demands pose positivistic, scientific criteria for theories that much of Wittgenstein’s work cannot meet, and I gather Williamson is happy to throw that out and keep only what he deems satisfactory. But regardless of accuracy or inclusiveness, if the question comes down to whether I prefer Cavell’s Wittgenstein or Williamson’s Wittgenstein, the choice for me is obviously Cavell, as much as it must seem obviously Williamson to others. But I also don’t think that we know more about truth today than we did 50 years ago, at least not in any ordinary language sense of that claim.

And yet there is a worthy theory behind Cavell and Cavell’s Wittgenstein, but not one having to do with vagueness or predication. It is closer to the early Quine, and it certainly is miles from Williamson’s emphasis on referential semantics. It comes out toward the end of “Must We Mean What We Say?” and it speaks of a cultural, functionalist holism:

Few speakers of a language utilize the full range of perception which the language provides, just as they do without so much of the rest of their cultural heritage. Not even the philosopher will come to possess all of his past, but to neglect it deliberately is foolhardy. The consequence of such neglect is that our philosophical memory and perception become fixated upon a few accidents of intellectual history.

The mistake, however, is to suppose that the ordinary use of a word is a function of the internal state of the speaker.

I should urge that we do justice to the fact that an individual’s intentions or wishes can no more produce the general mean­ing for a word than they can produce horses for beggars, or home runs from pop flies, or successful poems out of unsuccessful poems.

Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” (1957)

I take this to first propose an externalist, functionalist idea of meaning: what we “mean” when we say something has nothing to do with some private intention we may possess, and everything to do with the rules and standards of language use in our linguistic community. Cavell’s specific contribution is to say that if this is so, philosophy must take on the full burden of the linguistic and cultural history of our community, which includes (and even privileges) the difficult and arcane effects produced by literature. This is a huge responsibility, and no doubt a huge burden to those like Williamson who would rather examine meaning on a semantic or locally pragmatic level. Unfortunately, I think the burden of a more holistic pragmatism, one that inevitably requires heuristic inexactitude, is unavoidable.

A more formal attempt to describe this sort of functionalist pragmatism had already been given in 1948 by Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars later refined this vision to be considerably more complex, but already Sellars’ grasp of the problem in a non-skeptical way is inspiring. Rejecting empiricism, he describes a meeting of idealist and analytic traditions in a hybrid of metaphysical realism and linguistic idealism:

I like to think we have reformulated in our own way a familiar type of Idealistic argument. It has been said that human experience can only be understood as a fragment of an ideally coherent experience. Our claim is that our empirical language can only be (epistemologically) understood as an incoherent and fragmentary schema of an ideally coherent language. The Idealism, but not the wisdom, disappears with the dropping of the term ‘experience.’ Formally, all languages and worlds are on an equal footing. This is indeed a principle of indifference. On the other hand, a reconstruction of the pragmatics of common sense and the scientific outlook points to conformation rules requiring a [world-]story to contain sentences which are confirmed but not verified. In this sense the ideal of our language is a realistic language; and this is the place of Realism in the New Way of Words.

Wilfrid Sellars, “Realism and the New Way of Words“, in Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds (1948)

It is not that language defies all attempts to place it under precise understanding. It’s just that we are only local participants in a huge linguistic world to which we have only limited access, which makes the problem very, very hard, but also much richer the problems posed by Williamson. Determinations of meaning are theoretically possible, but in practice inexact, though not indeterminate. We can still proceed with provisional, pragmatic investigations, much in the way that Peirce did, within Sellars’ overarching structure, which I think is a great achievement.

For contrast, see Williamson here, trying to localize problems of vagueness in meaning. Williamson’s view of this community of meaning is limited and emaciated because of the limits imposed on it by his demands for atomistic quantification. The bottom line is that I wouldn’t want to live in a world and a community  in which language could be sufficiently quantified in the way that Williamson thinks it can.

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By David Auerbach – 11 October 2011

More Carnap and Some Raymond Smullyan

Rudolf Carnap, what a card. Eric Schliesser sums it up with a reference to Carnap’s infamous “The Elimination of Metaphysics“:

In the history of philosophy, “the nothing itself nothings,” has, of course, a dubious status as either brilliant ridicule or very uncharitable reading. But as Stone has taught us, in context that sentence is a very charitable reading of Heidegger. No, the real insult to Heidegger occurs near the end of Carnap’s (1931) paper [I have linked to an English translation]. Carnap ends his paper (which is rarely read, but often cited) with a two-fold insult to Heidegger: first, “Metaphysicians [that is, Heidegger] are musicians without musical ability.” (Cf. Heidegger’s Stimmen in “What is Metaphysics?”) Second, Carnap THEN GOES ON TO PRAISE NIETZSCHE and his poetry. To say this as a serious joke: Heidegger’s lecture courses on Nietzsche are a response to Carnap’s two-fold insult.

His ingenuous waggery reminded me of this story that Raymond Smullyan tells about Carnap:

In item # 249 of my book of logic puzzles titled What Is the Name of This Book?, I describe an infallible method of proving anything whatsoever. Only a magician is capable of employing the method, however. I once used it on Rudolf Carnap to prove the existence of God.

“Here you see a red card,” I said to Professor Carnap as I removed a card from the deck. “I place it face down in your palm. Now, you know that a false proposition implies any proposition. Therefore, if this card were black, then God would exist. Do you agree?”

“Oh, certainly,” replied Carnap, “if the card were black, then God would exist.”

“Very good,” I said as I turned over the card. “As you see, the card is black. Therefore, God exists!”

“Ah, yes!” replied Carnap in a philosophical tone. “Proof by legerdemain! Same as the theologians use!”

Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies

[I read Smullyan's books of logic puzzles when I was a kid and recommend them to all parents. I always enjoyed them until he started talking about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, at which point my brain melted. I'm not sure if I was mentally capable of understanding logic to that extent at a young age, regardless of how it was explained.]

It’s possible that if Heidegger had more anecdotes like this, I might feel more fondly toward him. But let’s hear more of Carnap’s words and his praise for Nietzsche, where he seems to in part be channeling Cassirer as well as a bit of Wittgenstein. Metaphysical systems are myths, he says, they are forms of life.

I thought of editing this down but it’s lovely enough that I decided just to quote the entire concluding section:

Our claim that the statements of metaphysics are entirely meaningless, that they do not assert anything, will leave even those who agree intellectually with our results with a painful feeling of strangeness: how could it be explained that so many men in all ages and nations, among them eminent minds, spent so much energy, nay veritable fervor, on metaphysics if the latter consisted of nothing but mere words, nonsensically juxtaposed? And how could one account for the fact that metaphysical books have exerted such a strong influence on readers up to the present day, if they contained not even errors, but nothing at all? These doubts are justified since metaphysics does indeed have a content; only it is not theoretical content. The (pseudo)statements of metaphysics do not serve for the description of states of affairs, neither existing ones (in that case they would be true statements) nor nonexisting ones (in that case they would be at least false statements). They serve for the expression of the general attitude of a person towards life (“Lebenseinstellung, Lebensgefühl”) .

Perhaps we may assume that metaphysics originated from mythology. The child is angry at the “wicked table” which hurt him. Primitive man endeavors to conciliate the threatening demon of earthquakes, or he worships the deity of the fertile rains in gratitude. Here we confront personifications of natural phenomena, which are the quasi-poetic expression of man’s emotional relationship to his environment. The heritage of mythology is bequeathed on the one hand to poetry, which produces and intensifies the effects of mythology on life in a deliberate way; on the other hand, it is handed down to theology, which develops mythology into a system. Which, now, is the historical role of metaphysics? Perhaps we may regard it as a substitute for theology on the level of systematic, conceptual thinking. The (supposedly) transcendent sources of knowledge of theology are here replaced by natural, yet supposedly trans-empirical sources of knowledge.

On closer inspection the same content as that of mythology is here still recognizable behind the repeatedly varied dressing: we find that metaphysics also arises from the need to give expression to a man’s attitude in life, his emotional and volitional reaction to the environment, to society, to the tasks to which he devotes himself, to the misfortunes that befall him. This attitude manifests itself, unconsciously as a rule, in everything a man does or says. It also impresses itself on his facial features, perhaps even on the character of his gait. Many people, now, feel a desire to create over and above these manifestations a special expression of their attitude, through which it might become visible in a more succinct and penetrating way. If they have artistic talent they are able to express themselves by producing a work of art. Many writers have already clarified the way in which the basic attitude is mani-fested through the style and manner of a work of art (e.g. Dilthey and his students). [In this connection the term "world view" ("Weltanschauung") is often used; we prefer to avoid it because of its ambiguity, which blurs the difference between attitude and theory, a difference which is of decisive importance for our analysis.] What is here essential for our considerations is only the fact that art is an adequate, metaphysics an inadequate means for the expression of the basic attitude.

Of course, there need be no intrinsic objection to one’s using any means of expression one likes. But in the case of metaphysics we find this situation: through the form of its works it pretends to be something that it is not. That the metaphysician is thus deluding himself cannot be inferred from the fact that he selects language as the medium of expression and declarative sentences as the form of expression; for lyrical poets do the same without succumbing to self-delusion. But the metaphysician supports his statements by arguments, he claims assent to their content, he polemicizes against metaphysicians of divergent persuasion by attempting to refute their assertions in his treatise. Lyrical poets, on the other hand, do not try to refute in their poem the statements in a poem by some other lyrical poet; for they know they are in the domain of art and not in the domain of theory.

Perhaps music is the purest means of expression of the basic attitude because it is entirely free from any reference to objects. The harmonious feeling or attitude, which the metaphysician tries to express in a monistic system, is more clearly expressed in the music of Mozart. And when a metaphysician gives verbal expression to his dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic system, is it not perhaps because he lacks the ability of a Beethoven to express this attitude in an adequate medium? Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. Instead they have a strong inclination to work within the medium of the theoretical, to connect concepts and thoughts. Now, instead of activating, on the one hand, this inclination in the domain of science, and satisfying, on the other hand, the need for expression in art, the metaphysician confuses the two and produces a structure which achieves nothing for knowledge and something inadequate for the expression of attitude. Our conjecture that metaphysics is a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for art, seems to be further confirmed by the fact that the metaphysician who perhaps had artistic talent to the highest degree, viz. Nietzsche, almost entirely avoided the error of that confusion. A large part of his work has predominantly empirical content. We find there, for instance, historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or an historical-psychological analysis of morals. In the work, however, in which he expresses most strongly that which others express through metaphysics or ethics, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he does not choose the misleading theoretical form, but openly the form of art, of poetry.

Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics”

Karl Popper, among others, later complained that Carnap was giving away the store with this attitude. Perhaps he was. Shoving huge domains of life (including much of what falls under the rubric of “science”) out of philosophy and into the realm of art is not exactly a philosophy-boosting move, even if it taunts Heidegger.

Smullyan extends and somewhat reverses this line of thought as follows:

Suppose I have a world view that is internally perfectly consistent, that is, logically consistent, consistent with all the experiences I have ever had, and consistent with all my feelings and intuitions. For the moment, let us make the further assumption (totally unrealistic as it almost certainly is) that the view is consistent with any experience I ever will have in the future. Let us call such a view a perfect world view. Now suppose that you also have a perfect world view but that yours is logically incompatible with mine. It seems to me that the valuable contribution of the positivists (and, for that matter, the pragmatists) is the realization of the question, “How in principle could you or I ever show each other to be wrong?” In other words, can we really hope to get anything more from philosophy than consistency?

It could well be that our world views are in fact perfect, yet it might be consistent for each of us to deny that the other’s world view is perfect. (Indeed, it might even be consistent to deny that one’s own world view is perfect!) Actually, if I believed your world view to be perfect (though false), I think I am now sufficiently influenced by the positivists to realize that my arguing with you could be of no avail. Thus, I think that our very process of arguing with each other indicates our lack of belief in the perfection of each other’s world views; we hope either to show the other view to be inconsistent or to produce some new experience in the other person that will change his mind or call forth to full consciousness some latent intuition. This, I think, is what metaphysicians of the past have been up to. As Carnap has rightly pointed out, metaphysicians are not content just to present their systems (unlike artists and poets, who only present their works of art), but they try to refute the metaphysical systems of others. I have just proposed what I believe this refutation to really be.

The point, then, is, in mathematical language, to construct a model of your language within mine. Put less precisely, though more expressively, the point is for me to be able to see the world through your eyes. After having gone through such an experience, it is more than likely that my own world view might become considerably enlarged. After all, even in a perfect world view, one has not necessarily decided the truth of every statement; there may be many alternative ways of extending it to produce a more comprehensive perfect world view.

To the reader with some knowledge of mathematical logic, I acknowledge that I of course realize that my fanciful analogies have their weak points… But I believe that all I have said about perfect world views should apply a fortiori to those that are not perfect.

The technique of philosophizing that I am suggesting might be put in the form of a maxim: “Instead of trying to prove your opponent wrong, try to find out in what sense he may be right.” This is a sort of tolerance principle, not too unrelated to that of Carnap.* To repeat my main point, much may be gained from constructing possible models of other world views within one’s own. I believe that this is in the spirit of much of modern analysis. But I would like to see this applied more to some of the great metaphysical systems of the past.

*  Indeed, it can be thought of as a semantic counterpart of Carnap’s principle of tolerance. His principle says that a language should be regarded as acceptable if it is consistent–or equivalently, if it has a model. My principle is to try to find such a model–or rather an interesting model of the language.

Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies

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By David Auerbach – 8 October 2011

Freud and Nude Psychotherapy for Criminal Psychopaths

One more addendum to the question of Freud and science. The gravest deployment of psychoanalytic theory was in psychopathology, and it’s here that I have the greatest trouble with Freud’s influence. Now, the history of the treatment of the severely mentally ill, in asylums and otherwise, has been generally dismal, and so it is hard to credit Freud with making things any worse on that front. Perhaps he even made them better, and to be sure Freud avoided the area himself, probably figuring it (correctly) to be a minefield. But as psychoanalysis grew, some of his followers were not so hesitant, and the application of psychoanalysis in psychopathology yielded some disturbing results.

There are no shortage of examples, but Oak Ridge recently came to my attention. As Jon Ronson tells it in The Psychopath Test:

Dr. Elliott Barker successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD from a government-sanctioned lab, Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto. He handpicked a group of psychopaths (“They have been selected on the basis of verbal ability and most are relatively young and intelligent offenders between seventeen and twenty-five,” he explained in the October 1968 issue of the Canadian Journal of Corrections ); led them into what he named the Total Encounter Capsule, a small room painted bright green; and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven-day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. The patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, “in a state of arousal while doing so.”

Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test

Ronson’s book is unfortunately scattershot and unfocused, mostly good for anecdotal pointers. Richard Weisman wrote a far more detailed reflection on the Oak Ridge experiments. In either version, Barker  and Gary Maier and other empathetic psychiatrists display jawdropping irresponsibility..

Granted, this does not seem any worse than what one can read about in Foucault or, more vividly, in the horrific chronicles given by Erving Goffman in his amazing book Asylums and shown by Frederick Wiseman in Titticut Follies. (“Titicut Follies portrays the existence of occupants of Bridgewater, some of them catatonic, holed up in unlit cells, only periodically washed down with a hose and taken out in order to receive force feeding. It also portrays the indifference and bullying on the part of the institution’s staff.”) Humane treatment is a very recent invention and still practiced inconsistently.

If anything, Freud may have helped push forward increasingly humane treatment of the severely mentally ill, as manifested in Barker’s good intentions. But this does not excuse the rampant irresponsibility that was at hand at Oak Ridge, and Barker’s genial enthusiasm (he quotes Buber in “The Hundred-Day Hate-in”!) is in some ways even more frightening than the disdain, malice, and indifference that was historically the rule. The casual certainty that their mental model, derived primarily from psychoanalytic theory, would produce productive results is borne out of the same pool of certainty from which Freud drew capaciously.

Ronson gets one of his most disturbing quotes from one of the Capsule members named Steve Smith:

“I remember Elliott Barker coming into my cell,” Steve told me. “He was charming, soothing. He put his arm around my shoulder. He called me Steve. It was the first time anyone had used my first name in there. He asked me if I thought I was mentally ill. I said I thought I wasn’t. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘I think you are a very slick psychopath. I want you to know that there are people just like you in here who have been locked up more than twenty years. But we have a program here that can help you get over your illness.’ So there I was, only eighteen at the time, I’d stolen a car so I wasn’t exactly the criminal of the century, locked in a padded room for eleven days with a bunch of psychopaths, the lot of us high on scopolamine [a type of hallucinogenic] and they were all staring at me.”

I obviously cannot lay the full responsibility for Barker’s behavior or psychoanalysis’s influence on psychopathological treatment at Freud’s feet. Yet I cannot fully excuse it either. Freud’s model of the psyche became instrumentalized as an well-meaning institutional cudgel, and it could only have done so had it claimed such a scientific authority for itself.

Regarding that authority, George Makari (an avowed psychoanalyst himself) writes of the fight between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud’s psychoanalytic factions in England in 1942:

A talented member of Melanie Klein’s group named Donald Winnicott protested that Freud would never have wanted to “limit our search for truth.” He too asked the society to adopt language that put the aim of the group as the furthering of “the psychoanalytical branch of science founded by Freud.”

The Kleinians had taken the high ground of science, despite the fact that their leader had been accused of dramatically departing from basic scientific principles. Like the old Freudians, the Kleinians had become defenders of an empirically unknowable belief regarding unconscious mental life. Nonetheless, the Kleinians draped themselves in the principles of free inquiry. Like others before them, they seemed to want the freedom of scientific pursuit without accepting the responsibilities that came with it.

George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

It is a hubris seen very frequently.

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By David Auerbach – 6 October 2011

Alasdair MacIntyre on Freud: A More-than-Scientific Unification of Concepts

As a follow-up to Ernest Gellner’s attack on psychoanalysis, here is Alasdair MacIntyre with a more charitable critique of Freud.

Up until the time of After Virtue (still a fascinating book), MacIntyre was a fairly keen observer of ethics and social philosophy, as well as an enviably clear writer. I suppose he still is, but since the time of his conversion to Catholicism in the 1980s, his increasing focus on religion and increasingly tendentious positions have had much less to offer me.

But here he is on Freud, speaking like Gellner (but more sympathetically) of how Freud threaded the needle of modernity:

Psychoanalysis need not become the self-enclosed system which it so often is. But how do we avoid this?

Part of the answer is surely obtained by considerting the strain within Freud’s own writings between observation and explanation, between the material he amasses and the theoretical forms into which he cast his presentation of the material. The comparison with Newton misled not only his expositors but Freud himself. What Freud showed us were hitherto unnoticed facts, hitherto unrevealed motives, hitherto unrelated facets of our life. And in doing so his achievement broke all preconceived conceptual schemes–including his own. As a discoverer he perhaps resembles a Prsout or a Tolstoy rather than a Dalton or a  Pasteur. We could have learnt this from reading Freud himself; but the division among his heirs also reveals the fact clearly.

Yet both sets of heirs are legitimate. The sterility and perversity are as Freudian as the perceptive fertility of a Bettelheim or an Erikson. Freud, too, was a victim of the need to explain, of the need to be a Newton. The paradox of the history of psychoanalysis is that it is those analysts most intent on presenting their subject as a theoretical science who have transformed it into a religion, those most concerned with actual religious phenomena, such as Bettelheim and Erikson, who have preserved it as science. The achievement of Bettelheim and Erikson has been to extend our subjection to the phenomena themselves. But in so doing they have not diminished but increased its complexity.

Alasdair MacIntyre, “Psychoanalysis: The Future of an Illusion?” in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971)

Well, this may be too kind to Bettelheim anad even Erikson, but MacIntyre certainly presents the kernel of Freud’s theory of the unconscious in a theoretically compelling fashion, as well as the problems it means to address.

What problems are these? They are problems of self-knowledge, or rather of lack of self-knowledge, of the nature of desire, and of the relationship of both to our actions. One of Freud’s insights, and here he had been anticipated by both Plato and Augustine, was that these problems are inseparable, that there is no adequate solution to any of them that does not involve a solution to the others.

Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious (1958)

His 1958 critique of the unconscious holds up quite well 50 years on. He gives this pithy summation of the lack of explanatory power Freud gives us, as well as the inevitability of that lack of explanatory power in any understanding of the human. (Here he is clearly alluding to the scientific explanation vs. human understanding dichotomy proposed by Dilthey).

My thesis then is that in so far as Freud uses the concept of the unconscious as an explanatory concept, he fails, if not to justify it, at least to make clear its justification. He gives us causal explanations, certainly; but these can and apparently must stand or fall on their own feet without reference to it. He has a legitimate concept of unconscious mental activity, certainly; but this he uses to describe behaviour, not to explain it. This thesis, that Freud’s genius is notable in his descriptive work is not of course original. G. E. Moore has told us how Wittgenstein advanced it in his lectures in 1931–3. But it is important to understand how much of Freud’s work it affects….

But the grounds on which we ought to be dubious of speaking of the collective unconscious are ones which ought to make us dubious about speaking of the unconscious at all, except perhaps as a piece of metaphysics, an attempt at a more-than-scientific unification of concepts.

This suggestion, that in speaking of ‘the’ unconscious, we have left science for metaphysics is one that should not surprise us. At the beginning we saw that the attraction of the concept was that it seemed to promise a general formula by means of which a theoretical unification might be achieved in the study of human behaviour. It is now time to ask whether such a unification is in fact possible. The model for this project is drawn from physics which as the most advanced of the sciences tends also to be taken as the type to which others should approximate. To explain what human beings are and do in terms of a general theory is no doubt in some sense possible: the neurophysiologists will one day give us their full account, which will itself be reducible to a set of chemical and finally of physical explanations.

But will such an account give us what we want? It will state all the necessary conditions of human behaviour, but it will mention nothing of the specifically human. For this we need a different kind of account, the kind of portrayal that the novelist rather than the scientist gives us. In other words to portray the specifically human as human, and not as nervous system plus muscles, or as chain molecules, or as fundamental particles, is not to explain at all. Or at least it is to explain as Proust explains or as Tolstoy explains. Freud was certainly a scientist: but to remember this is to expand one’s conception of science. For his chief virtue resided in his power to see and to write so that we can see too. Or can we? He sowed also this doubt in our minds.

Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious

In short, we are speaking of a metaphor (and of literature in general) far more than we are of a science.

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By David Auerbach – 5 October 2011

Ernest Gellner and The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason and the Cunning of Freud

The best cover of The Psychoanalytic Movement

Finishing off the examination of Ernest Gellner and his well-meaning but somewhat pig-headed Enlightenment Fundamentalist Rationalism, we come to his attack on psychoanalysis, The Psychoanlaytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason. This book was published in 1985, 35 years after Words and Things, his attack on Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy.

Like Words and Things, it is a centaur, half-sociology and half-philosophical critique, and just as ill-tempered. It is a better book than Words and Things, because the game is much bigger. Here, Gellner is going after an intellectual and social movement a million times more successful, and at least several times more dubious.

The attack is successful, but as with Words and Things, the centaur form of the book makes it a mixed success. I will try to separate the threads and pick out the book’s vital core from the sometimes shaky surrounding membrane.

Because it is so much more an inviting sociological target, and because the sociology of psychoanalysis is that much more mixed in with its underlying philosophy (i.e., the patient-therapist relationship), psychoanalysis is in many ways the perfect subject for Gellner, ripe for the sort of attack that ordinary language philosophy didn’t seem to merit.

The danger is his being too obvious or unoriginal. Adolf Grunbaum has carefully critiqued the theoretical work of psychoanalysis, while George Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis showed the bizarre evolution and personal flaws of the movement’s leaders. Both are books Gellner would not have bothered to write. Gellner’s task rather is to place a quicker critique of that sort into a larger sociological framework.

Consequently, there is a sense at times that Gellner is struggling to make more out of the material than there is. Having identified the endless flaws of psychoanalytic theory and how they yielded a hegemonic power structure in the psychoanalytic community, Gellner has to walk a line between the dangers of (a) restricting his critique to Freud and his direct scions and thus letting the larger societal trend get away, and (b) extending his critique to psychotherapy in general and thus reducing the theory to mere therapeutic practice in all its myriad forms.

Gellner’s solution is to approach things genealogically. By showing how Freud’s initial paradigm caught fire and appealed to the bourgeois masses, he can indict both Freudian psychoanalytic theory as well as its less-direct consequences today, which are the polluted offspring of a manipulative intellectual charlatan. This is his goal, anyway. Ultimately, the minute particulars of psychoanalytic theory and practice seem to fall away in favor of a sociological exploration of psychotherapy in general, which is still heavily influenced, as are we all, by Freud’s ideas.

In some ways Freud is an easier target than a more obscure thinker like Austin or Ryle because a good chunk of his thinking has been absorbed into the common argot. His tripartite psyche, repression, the unconscious, and assorted other concepts have become ubiquitous cultural abstractions even if they aren’t metaphysical entities. So what’s left over seems even more objectionable because we take the less objectionable stuff for granted.

And yet just as Wittgenstein eluded Gellner’s grasp, Freud dodges Gellner’s shots better than the rest of the psychoanalytic community. This is not because Freud’s theory is so very defensible, but because Gellner is attacking it on grounds on which it has never been seriously judged. By 1985 psychoanalysis was definitely not seen as the sort of science that you’d find in the DSM (however dubious that might be), yet its therapeutic children continued unabated.

The story that George Makari tells in Revolution in Mind  is that of psychoanalysis emancipating itself from the empirical sciences and going into pure speculation and mythology, often excessively so. Yet if anything this probably aided in its success. As Gellner says:

A purely hermeneutic psychoanalysis would not sound like science, confer no power, and few men would turn to it in distress; a purely physicalist or biological psychoanalysis would have been too much like a science, and no fun. But the plausible-sounding fusion of both is very different, and most attractive.

Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement

Yet as the “science” is quite loose, it’s rather pointless to attack the ideas for not being scientifically grounded, at least in 1985. It’s akin to criticizing Hegel for misunderstanding Sophocles or, indeed, criticizing Freud for misunderstanding Sophocles. It doesn’t teach us anything about their success.

No matter what ridiculous claims Freud made for his theory being “scientific,” psychoanalysis was never even provisionally held to the sort of rigorous standard to which Wittgenstein held his own thoughts, or else it would have collapsed. The scientific rhetoric was necessary, as Freud well knew, to getting his project off the ground and initially accepted in the medical and psychological community, but it became secondary once success was assured. The interesting story is not psychoanalysis pretending to be a science, but psychotherapy’s underlying Freudian groundwork surviving the debunking of those scientific claims.

As the Freudians are still fond of quoting:

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives . . .

W. H. Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud

Freud was an incisively creative mind, which Gellner acknowledges, and in conjunction with his brilliant self-marketing, he managed to gain an astonishing amount of traction for some of his psychological metaphors and models. That his theories were held to be science among several influential groups for quite some time is one depressing measure of his success.

Gellner succeeds, however, when he tries to understand the success rather than attacking the theory.

Two stories emerge, related but distinct. First there is Freud the empire-builder, who keeps reins on psychoanalysis and jealously guards the keys to his process and movement. Freud was indeed autocratic, though not quite the tyrant Gellner makes out. Makari shows Freud as a self-doubting genius (albeit one who is careerist, unethical, narcissistic, and a plagiarist) who had good reason to keep control, as most of his followers are far from his intellectual equal. Of the Freudians, Ferenczi and Melanie Klein acquit themselves without too much damage but do not impress, while Carl Jung and Anna Freud come off very badly indeed.

Makari’s book is far more successful than Gellner’s in showing the poison that went around in these circles, and his lack of a blatant axe to grind allows the twisted process to emerge organically. Gellner is right to see Freud as a demagogue of a sort, but he really can’t be bothered to do the background.

Yet this does not prove fatal to Gellner. The second story, and the one Gellner is more effective in telling, is the large scale story of the success of psychoanalysis and consequently psychotherapy in general. Here Gellner can deal with the received ideas of psychoanalysis in general and try to figure out its place in society.

Somewhat ironically, Gellner must consequently credit Freud with having pulled off something amazing in selling his wares to the public. But what did he sell? A secular mythos and practice.

One way of seeing the ideological achievement of Sigmund Freud is to understand that he has constructed a solid, non-conjectural, support-providing world, something that had disappeared from our life; that he invented a technique for supplying this commodity made-to-measure for individual consumers; and that he had erected it using exclusively modern, intellectually acceptable bricks.

Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement

Freud’s achievement, then, was appealing to a societal neurosis (I use that term ironically) in an instinctive, brilliant way, and offering a solution that was less an idea than a ritual. It is a cutting of the Gordian knot of modernism, of God-is-Deadism, as Gellner points out in a fairly compelling comparison with Nietzsche.

Gellner sometimes puts it as the need for an authority (the therapist), but the better way to put it is the need to find a stable, validated frame narrative for one’s existence. The accomplishment of psychoanalysis is to turn this process not into a one-time fix (which would never work), but into a repeated ritual to shore up the authority.

Again, the irony. By identifying a neurosis that requires ritual treatment, Gellner very nearly excuses the psychoanalytic requirement for potentially unending treatment. He points out a number of problems of modernity which Freudian practice claims to solve, two of which are particularly spot-on:

  • The Weberian problem of a ‘disenchanted’, cold, impersonal world. The modern world is in fact bound to be such: cognitive growth goes jointly with specialised, single-strand cognitive inquiry, which inevitably separates the intellectual exploration of the world from personal relations, values, and the hierarchical ordering of society. Freud restored a form of cognition which, while articulated in an impeccably modern idiom, and seemingly part of medicine and science, was firmly locked in with a hierarchical and comforting personal relation, and with values and the hope of personal salvation. Thus a reality is reenchanted, and its enchantment is permanently serviced, albeit at a price.
  • The Durkheimian problem of reuniting cognition, ritual, and social order. Psychoanalysis has or is an astoundingly effective ritual, adapted to an individualist age, engendering all those affective consequences which Durkheim associated with ritual, and indeed separating the sacred and profane with all the neatness which that theory postulated.

To offer a persuasive solution to so fundamental a set of problems, and to offer them in a way that the solution is lived out rather than merely thought, ratified by both ritual and an intense personal relationship, and generally not consciously thought out at all, is an astonishing achievement.

I find this extremely compelling, not least  because it seems so obvious after reading it that Freud provided one very dominant mythos of our age. (Others helped out too, as did amorphous cultural processes.) Foucault and others had already been here, but this is the best summation I have read, and a testament to Gellner’s intuitive thinking.

Those philosophers today who ask for a reenchantment of reality to brighten our supposedly cold, industrialized world do not realize that we have already reenchanted our mental frameworks as much as any past culture, albeit in a more tenuous and somewhat neurotic way. But any further reenchantment would require religious dogmatism, so I’m not complaining.

I think Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy does a good job of explaining in depth what Freud contributed in this direction. If Freud was a philosopher, he is best thought of as hermeneutic.

Gellner’s statements about the analyst as shaman, the analyst as mystic, the analyst as deity, are interesting and sometimes compelling, but they detract from his more powerful point that the raw practice itself is what’s successful, not the particulars of the relationship. Hence why psychotherapy continues even as classical psychoanalysis has waned.

Core elements of the original framework remain, of course, which is why Freud survives even if psychoanalysis mostly does not. Gellner points out that one key technique is providing a safe space for the externalization of one’s inner demons: that is, treating them as demons, not one’s conscious self.

 The flaw of the Freudian Unconscious is not that it constitutes a scandalous inversion of conscious proprieties, but that it remains far, far too close to them. Freudianism is a kind of animism. It projects (rightly or wrongly), on to forces outside our consciousness, the kind of trait or attribute which our culture had habitually attributed to our conscious activity. As in other forms of animism, this is combined with the claim that these spirits of the deep can be understood, conjured up, appeased and rendered harmless only by certain practitioners of mysteries, members of a restrictive guild with specialised initiation rites.

Yet the guild has opened up now, and the process remains, with whatever bits of the theory have been appropriated by the collective societal consciousness. Not surprisingly, most of these do come from Freud himself rather than his less brilliant followers.

Consequently, Gellner’s position is weakened a bit. Because psychoanalysis qua theory proves to be a bit of a red herring (you don’t need the Oedipus Complex and the Death-Instinct for psychotherapy to be successful), the therapist doesn’t come out looking too bad. An expensive luxury? Certainly. A disingenuous practitioner? Perhaps. But having acknowledged the contemporary human’s unstinting desire for a healthier structure/mythos for understanding–or perhaps more accurately, simplifying–one’s own life, Gellner is too quick to assess that the result is unavoidably meaningless.

There is a pragmatic evaluative process, albeit not a terribly scientific one, which is the practical terms of the individual patient’s life. This was the process that slowly killed off psychoanalysis proper. Today, in the absence of a proper theory, evaluations are now performed ad hoc. Such case-by-case evaluations guarantee mixed results at best and gross abuses of power at worst, but psychotherapy is not the self-validating closed system that psychoanalysis-the-theory was. Such systems survive only by opening up, and I think that Freud laid the groundwork for that himself by reversing and revising his positions over the course of his life.

So oddly, Gellner makes the case that psychotherapy was more or less an inevitable coping mechanism that needed to arise given the conditions of modernity. If Freud had not existed, society would have had to invent him. (And, indeed, society did invent its version of him, throwing out the psychosexual and anthropological esoterica it could not use and keeping the basic model and method.) Gellner would like it if we could shrug off those needs and abandon the enchantments that psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic metaphors provide, but since he’s made such a powerful case for why they’re so appealing, it doesn’t seem very likely. Genuine science is never enough. Something always gets piled on top, and frequently it’s called science too.

The grave issue remains that Freud’s absolutist claim to truth for his theory was necessary if psychoanalysis were to gain purchase, so that it could then, under some duress, shrug off its claims to absolute knowledge in favor of a more humble, pragmatic stance and then live on more deftly as psychotherapy. Alas, though, this is the paradox of all of the human “sciences”: we only ever hear about the ones that started with absurd hubris.

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By David Auerbach – 28 September 2011