Do not let us be confused.

Book Reviews: The Civil War

2010-09-06T23:38:00.003-04:00

The following are reviews of four books pertaining to the American Civil War, all written for a course on that topic. They are presented in the order that they were written, and they relate to my ongoing philosophical project concerning historical knowledge. I will never post my first foray into that field (June 2009), except under severe prodding and not without an ample disclaimer, as the paper is indecent, not suitable for wholesome company. This is the fault of two of the books used as examples that comprise about two thirds of the discussion. I did not choose them. Be aware that all my comments are provisional, and I take every opportunity to experiment with different ideas. I would rewrite some of what is below even, if I were to review these books now (e.g., I wrote my account of critical imagination before I read about Collingwood's a priori imagination, and any future account of historical imagination that I should give shall not go without discussion of its merits and weaknesses). I will, however, simply publish them as they are, for the sake of fruitful discussion, even if that is only with myself.

Review: Confederates in the Attic

Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic is an exploration of the American Civil War, but it is not a study in the mold of traditional history; much more, it is a work of journalism that is laden in history and touches on certain important historiographical considerations. Let these be analyzed in grammatical terms. Tense concerns the temporal location of an event, which may be past, present, or future. Aspect concerns the continuity of an event, which may be perfective (i.e. completed) or imperfective (i.e. progressive). Thus, in the past, there are completed actions (Greek aorist, Spanish preterit, French passé simple) and continuous actions (imperfect). Events, however, are not always to be understood just as complete in themselves; events have effects, which may continue beyond the completion of the event. Thus, a completed action in the past (i.e., Jackson opened the door) can be made to emphasize the continuous result of that event (i.e., Jackson has opened the door). The latter indicates that the door is presently open. The former makes no comment on the current state of the door. The effect may also have ceased (i.e., Jackson had opened the door), which carries with it the implication that the door is no longer open. These are the perfect and pluperfect, respectively. In this review, I will be using these terms to look at three ways in which past and present relate (the aorist interpretation, the imperfect interpretation, and the perfect interpretation), as illustrated in Horwitz’s book, and I shall thereby consider the historiographical content of Horwitz’s reflections, which I suspect are greater than he would guess.

To begin, one might see the War as something complete in itself in the past; that is, such a person looks at the War as something that can be understood purely on its own terms, never mind its ongoing effects. Call this the aorist interpretation of the War. Such a view lends itself not only to a naïve historiography, but also to a disconnected view to the War’s symbols (and other such residue), like the rebel flag. With reference to the latter, consider the murder of Michael Westerman in Todd County, Kentucky. Westerman had been driving his truck, adorned with the rebel flag, when some black youths decided to give him trouble, one of whom decided to open fire on Westerman, shooting him fatally. In the aftermath of this event, the prosecution wanted to downplay any potentially hateful interpretation of the flag, redefining Westerman’s alleged understanding (or lack of understanding) of it. One account, via Westerman’s father-in-law, says, “‘It was a school symbol, that’s all…I don’t think he knowed the history of it,’” where his mother-in-law casts the flag just as Westerman’s symbol of himself, and his aunt says, “‘Michael was raised with that flag, just like my own son…It’s just a part of our life’” (108). In all three cases, the flag is rent from its history (or at least what is popularly believed to have been its history) and redefined in contemporary terms. History is in the past, complete; its symbols may remain, but they mean something different now and therefore cannot be attached to the historical event. Michael’s aunt could hardly have put it better: the flag is just a part of our life. The just tells us that the flag is nothing more than a part of our life, and so its meanings outside of our life are beside the point. The War is to be understood on its own terms, left in the past. Our use of the flag is to be understood in our terms, in the present. By extension, the historical meaning of the flag is left to the annals of history.

Later, Horwitz interviews a character from a pro-flag demonstration called Walt, who says of a photo of a German at an anti-Communist rally in former East Germany, “‘he knew what the flag stood for. Being a rebel, raising hell’” (81). The flag has again been stolen away from its historical context, being given instead a new universal meaning for rebels everywhere. In a sense this is the other side of the coin for the aorist interpretation. Where Westerman’s supporters tried to particularize the meaning of the flag to separate it from its historical meaning, Walt reduces its Civil War use to just one rebellion for which it stands (albeit, the rebellion whence it came). Both leave the Civil War as complete in its historical place and reinvent one of its symbols with meaning that has no necessary connection to that conflict. As we have seen in these examples, the aorist interpretation strongly severs past and present, and I would argue that it does so too strongly. So too, I think, would Horwitz, as we shall see below. For exactly this reason it seems that a naïve historiography follows from the aorist interpretation of any event, since it leaves little room to consider the frameworks through which historical reconstruction is invariably undertaken. In this way the absolute severance of past and present is naïve, insofar as it does justice neither to historical reconstruction nor to present understanding of historically loaded symbols (as well as events, narratives, states, and the like). So Horwitz has perhaps unwittingly found himself exposing some good historiographical insights, of which more will follow.

Interestingly, Horwitz stumbles upon a number of people for whom, at least rhetorically, the War never ceased. Call this the imperfect interpretation of the Civil War. Numerous statements echo this attitude. For example, Doug Tarlton, who Howitz met first at the Lee-Jackson birthday celebration in Salisbury and again outside Firearms, etc., said of the average Confederate soldiers (particularly non-slave-owners), “‘they were fighting for their honor as men. They came from stock that was oppressed and they felt oppressed again by the government telling them how to live,’” which evoked the responses, “‘Same as today…Government’s letting the niggers run wild,’” and then “‘Amen’” (35). This 1990s political opposition to government is one in the same conflict that once led the Confederate States of America to secede from the Union. The War was a particularly important episode in the continuous struggle for states’ rights, both tinged in this case with racial politics, as well. Far from being an attitude of a fringe of Southerners, the imperfect interpretation was strikingly stated in a comment by a South Carolina legislator, who said, “‘Our ancestors were a little off with their timing, but their rebellion against federal government is finally seeing fruition’” (77). Again, the Civil War is just a phase in a continuous conflict that has been playing out since long before the War began.

Quite the opposite of the aorist interpretation, the imperfect interpretation tends to over-emphasize the present to the point of ahistoricism. The imperfect interpretation casts the present action as the same continuous action as the War and therefore reads the War through the lens of whatever that continuous action is supposed to be. Typically, this means the war explained in the terms of 1990s politics, which have thus far been associated with segments of the 1990s American right. Near the end of the book, however, we see another imperfect interpretation in the classroom of Rose Sanders at her alternative school for black students who had either dropped out or had been held back in Selma, Alabama. There, Sanders is quoted as saying to the students, “‘The Civil War is still going on…The only difference is that the Union army has betrayed us, too. So we’re fighting a confederacy up North and down South’” (368). Indeed, this is probably the most direct statement of the imperfect interpretation that Horwitz draws from anyone. In this case, Civil War and Civil Rights collide both with one another and with the present in one race-centered view of history, which reads as the narrative of a single conflict: a single ongoing action. The imperfect interpretation has no particular ideological allegiance, but invariably it is shaped more by contemporary agendas than historical evidences, as Horwitz’s research has shown. It does injustice to the past by way of frequently inappropriate frameworks, where the aorist interpretation neglects awareness of frameworks. It does injustice to the present in that it creates false (or at least, much too strong) continuities with historical events. The Civil War is not the same as the Civil Rights movement of a century later, but they are related. A third mode of interpretation is well suited to tell us how, forming a balance between the extremes of the aorist and imperfect interpretations.

The War—or any historical event, for that matter—can be seen as complete with ongoing effects. Call this the perfect interpretation of the War. The perfect interpretation is, I think, the proper way to look at historiography, and it seems that Horwitz, by the very nature of his project of questioning why the War still matters, would agree. The War is over, but its ripples will never cease so long as the flow of time goes on. There is continuity between past and present, in that the past explains the present, and its symbols (&c.) are yet meaningful in the present, even if that meaning has morphed in the meanwhile—history is not blind to that. The naïve view of a complete past, and the present, never mind the in-between, is untenable. Horwitz has shown as much time and again. There is an in-between, but it is not the same as the completed past event any more than the completed past event is the same as the present. The effects, distinct from the event (action) itself are what reside between a past completed event and the present. An imperfect interpretation may be suitable if an event is in fact ongoing, but this is not the case with regard to the Civil War. An aorist interpretation is always historiographically naïve—one cannot ignore the in-between. Horwitz’s book may well be taken as an argument for a perfect interpretation of the Civil War, and a realist one, as well.

The close relationship between the perfect interpretation of the War and historical practice shows itself when Horwitz travels to Shiloh, where he speaks to a certain Stacy Allen, whose study of the battlefield from the perspective of physical anthropology represents not only a turn to a more critical stance regarding sources like the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, but also a turn in the interpretation of the War. Allen says, “‘Each generation sees the War differently, and that’s why interest in it will never die’” (180). The veterans themselves emphasized battlefield heroics where the nest generation emphasized tactics. Allen’s generation, in the wake of witnessing the Vietnam War, emphasizes the horror of battlefield history. In light of this, Horwitz quotes Shelby Foote as saying, “‘I could redo my entire three volumes on the Civil War without using one bit of source material I used the first time…and probably come to very different conclusions,’” and, “‘I don’t think I could have written what I wrote in less than a hundred years after the War…It took that long for North and South to see each other honestly through the dust and flame’” (183). For a moment, it sounds as if Allen and Foote both point to some sort of historical pluralism or even antirealism, but in fact both Allen and Foote point firmly toward a critical view of historical realism that acknowledges the impact that the time following a historical event, up to and including the present, inevitably brings to historical reconstruction. By historical antirealism, I broadly refer to a historiographical approach that tends to deemphasize the fact of the matter concerning some historical event, and likely the possibility of knowing such a thing. By historical realism, I broadly refer to a historiographical approach that does strive for reconstructing the fact of the matter concerning some historical event. The dust and flame are that which, in the present, obscure accurate, or “honest,” history—bad frameworks (astrology, for example), certain political agendas (that may drive an inapt imperfect interpretations, for example), and so on. It is not that each generation is reinventing the war in utterly incompatible ways—there will be incompatibilities, but it may be that one generation shows where an earlier goes wrong, or perhaps both are wrong, or perhaps (pessimistically) one generation goes in a poor direction—it is that each generation latches onto a different facet of the enormity of the War (or any historical event). Courage and valor alongside tactics alongside brutality and injustice: that is the complexity of the war that a good historian begins to see. Understanding does not have to improve with time, but with good historiography, historians can hope to make sense of the War and, dare I say, make progress. Surprisingly, Horwitz’s journalistic adventures treat us to a glimpse of historiographical insight that may even come out as an argument for a realist, perfect interpretation of the War. This is what it means to say the War is unfinished.

Bibliography

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. Vintage, New York: 1998.

Review: Apostles of Disunion

Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion is an important contribution to answering the controversial question, “The Civil War was fought over what important issue?” It is in terms of this question that Dew provides an analysis of certain heretofore largely neglected documents, namely, those relating to the commissioners sent out across the South to court secession. Dew poses this question as a choice between two primary responses: either the Civil War was fought over slavery, or it was fought over states’ rights. Apostles of Disunion is an attempt to dismantle this duality by demonstrating the indispensability of the issue of slavery as a motive for secession. Apostles is therefore in large measure a response to those who hold, like Dew himself once did (1), that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights to the exclusion of the issue of slavery. Instead, Dew argues, these documents of the Southern secession commissioners show that not only were issues of slavery and states’ rights inseparable on the eve of secession and the War, but slavery was also, in Dew’s words, “absolutely critical” (81), as were states’ rights. Dew does not claim that these exhaust the causes of the War, saying, “Like any student of secession, I know that I have not presented the whole story here” (3), but he provides important insights into the two issues that form the heart of the question.

Dew adeptly pursues certain pre-War statements that cohere well with post-war, states’ rights focused accounts of the War’s origin. Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address is the paradigm example, making no reference to slavery at all (13). The idea that Davis did not think of secession as separate from the issue of slavery is quickly dispensed, as Dew points out one of Davis’s other speeches, that to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, in which the twin issues of slavery and states’ rights are intimately linked, and principles of racial order are invoked (14-15). Dew also dispels any plausibility for Alexander H. Stephens’s post-War claim that his comments concerning slavery and race in Savannah in 1861 were misquoted and misunderstood, citing a similar speech in Atlanta that would have to have been similarly misappropriated (16). This minimally illustrates the shift in post-War explanations of secession, but it is far from enough to indicate what exactly the importance of the pre-war, slavery oriented explanations might have in explaining the War.

Before looking at the secession commissioners themselves, we must make a distinction between what the commissioners said and what is in fact the case. Dew’s argument requires that we understand the relationship between what the commissioners had to say and what, in fact, explains secession and the outbreak of the War. Dew describes the role of the commissioners by saying that “the challenge of providing…an explanation—of informing the Southern people of the dark forces threatening their region and driving their states to seek sanctuary outside the Union—was taken up by the secession commissioners” (24-25). So the commissioners were out to perform a persuasive function on behalf of the secessionists. As such, we can expect that they should have mustered the most charged and divisive issues to the front, expressing them in the appropriate oratorical fashion. Dew is out to emphasize the primacy of slavery and race here.

One element of Dew’s thesis affirms the consistency of the commissioners’ rhetoric concerning slavery and race, which he traces back to an early speech by Commissioner William Harris: “The racial themes that [Judge Harris] struck in his speech would echo through the statements of the other commissioners as they spread out across the South in late 1860 and early 1861” (30). These themes include the threat of equality between whites and blacks, into which is built the threat of intermarriage and the consequent sullying of Southern women and the white race as a whole. In other words, Harris hits on two of the three main components of the nightmare vision that Dew analyzes in his closing chapter: “the looming specter of racial equality” (77) “and “racial amalgamation” (79), the other being “the prospect of race war” (78). Another important early text comes from James Buchanan’s Secretary of the Interior, Jacob Thompson, about which Dew not only traces a line from Harris, but he also notes that “Thompson’s prophecy of emancipation, humiliation, subjugation, and ruin runs through the commissioners’ messages like a scarlet thread” (32). Emancipation again is the end of the South. Race-centered nightmare visions abound before the coming of the “Black Republicans,” which Dew notes is a very consistent label (50).

As secession became a reality, beginning with South Carolina, it became the commissioners’ urgent duty to win the other slave states to the secessionist cause so as to have any hope of standing up to the Union. The continued work of the commissioners must be seen in this context. In addition, near the close of his analysis, Dew addresses an important matter concerning the in fact causes of the War: did the commissioners actually believe what they were saying concerning slavery and, more broadly, race? In this way some of the other commissioners become particularly worthy of attention.

Dew’s first argument that the commissioners did believe what they were saying says, “They made these statements, and used the appropriate code words, too many times in too many places and with too much fervor and raw emotion to leave much room for doubt” (80). To start, “raw emotion” is somewhat difficult to analyze. It seems that the second part of Stephen Hale’s letter to Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin is the premier example of this. As Dew says, “Debates over fine points of constitutional interpretation or the meaning of historical events were not generally conducted at fever pitch by any of the commissioners. But as he moved to the climax of his argument, Hale took the rhetorical gloves off” (54). So we see such statements as Lincoln’s election cast as a declaration of war, and white men and white women being left at the mercy of “the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Dew’s method of establishing that a commissioner is expressing “raw emotion,” it seems, is to invoke a rhetorical contrast. This is what he does in sectionalizing Hale’s letter, and this is also what he does with Henry Lewis Benning’s speech in Virginia. Regarding Benning, Dew first emphasizes the sparse and logical style typical of the orator, and then he states, “After he finished laying out his point-by-point argument for the inevitability of Republican-led emancipation, Benning abruptly shifted to a much more passionate and emotionally charged appeal,” predicting a black majority, blacks in holding office, and so on, in addition to the fear of a North-incited race war (66). Not only do we see the nightmare vision again, it is the rhetorical swoop that exposes the contrast through which Dew wants to attach “raw emotion” to Benning’s speech. It seems difficult, however, to separate “raw emotion” from skillful rhetoric, and these cases both serve much better to emphasize the continuity of that rhetoric. Benning has brought forth the nightmare vision, and of Hale, Dew says, “Any doubts about how representative Hale’s comments might be quickly disappear when we look at the messages being delivered almost simultaneously in places as distant as Maryland and Missouri” (56). Whether or not any important measure of “raw emotion” was expressed hardly matters in the face of the commissioners’ consistent messages, which can be explained either by dependence or conspiracy. In either case, it seems wildly implausible to think that the commissioners would agree so well on a fiction. Dew’s point is taken here, but he might have stated it better.

Dew goes on to point out the illogicality of the Southerners’ fears, but he argues for their genuineness on the basis that “the capacity for compartmentalization among this generation of white Southerners appears to have been practically boundless” (81). This inconsistency of the Southerners is supported by William Harris’s comments in support of free labor, implicitly excluding slaves from the equation. Harris’s personal inconsistency is supposed to be established here, as his racial views have already been seen: he was among the first to voice the nightmare vision. Harris’s contradiction, it seems, must rest between the two propositions that slave labor is essential to the Southern way of life, and that free labor is to the benefit of the South. In order for Dew’s argument to hold water, it is first necessary that these propositions represent an actual inconsistency, which is supposed to reside in Harris’s failure to conceive of the idea that the slave population might well serve as free labor. The latter proposition is captured quite clearly in a statement of John Preston, the leading commissioner to Virginia, who said, following another commissioner, Leonidas Spratt, that the essential difference between North and South consists in that “the South cannot exist without African slavery…None but an equal race can labor at the North; none but a subject race will labor at the South” (72). It is such an attitude as this that stands against the encouragement of free labor.

Second, this kind of inconsistency must be extrapolated beyond Harris. Half of the latter task is easily completed for anyone who accepts Dew’s arguments for the consistency concerning the commissioners’ rhetoric. By way of example, “Over and over again the Alabamians described the same nightmare world that Commissioner Harris had painted for the Georgia legislature: a South humbled, abolitionized, degraded, and threatened with destruction by a brutal Republican majority” (58). As to the other half, at least some commissioners can be found fairly certainly to hold a fondness for free labor. Benning, at least, seems to present such an attitude when he sketches “a glowing picture of Virginia’s commercial and manufacturing prosperity in a new Southern Confederacy” (67), as Dew puts it. This is particularly ironic in light of Preston’s above statement about Southern labor, even further amplified by the fact that Preston’s speech followed Benning’s by a single day in the same location in Virginia. Dew’s evidence may do well in establishing inconsistencies in the commissioners’ rhetoric, but a swooping psychological claim about compartmentalization is much more a hand-wave response to a late-appearing issue than a legitimate answer. Still, Dew has what is needed for a satisfying conclusion on a broader scale.

Apostles of Disunion is an important contribution to the question of the literature on the causes of the Civil War, strongly establishing the importance of slavery as an indispensable corollary to states’ rights. As Dew says early on, “There is simply no way to avoid these two factors, in part because the secession conventions and Southern political leaders referred to them constantly in their efforts to explain why their states were leaving the Union” (10). Still, there seems to be a question lingering at the end: did the issue of slavery run deeper than rhetoric? Dew has strongly demonstrated that the racial issues struck a chord among Southerners in driving secession, in that they motivate qua fear. This is the importance of the nightmare vision that we have seen over and over. This minimally shows that fear regarding the potential dissolution of the slave system was a critical cause of the Civil War, which is a narrower claim than “slavery was a cause of the Civil War.” Far from a denial of Dew’s thesis, this specifies the sense in which it is supported by both the texts and the arguments that Dew himself provides. Importantly, this settles the lingering question, in that this claim does not depend on slavery being a cause that is deeper than rhetoric. Thus it can be said, slavery and states’ rights are both absolutely critical causes of the War.

Bibliography

Dew, Charles. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville: 2001.

Review: Victims

Phillip Paludan’s Victims is a focused investigation of a specific event of the Civil War, namely the Shelton Laurel massacre. In January 1863, Confederate soldiers captured thirteen prisoners in Shelton Laurel on suspicion of being Unionist guerrillas, only to execute them all shortly thereafter on the orders of James Keith. In both his 1980 and 2004 prefaces, Paludan offers a brief account of the methodology he sought to employ in Victims. He puts particular emphasis on the interpretive work that goes beyond and between what the sources might strictly indicate. Here the responsible historian may begin to worry. Not only is Paludan focusing on a small-scale event in detail, with its individual and personal characters (for example), but he also seems to be willing to develop them by way of imagination. Our fears are assuaged, however, as Paludan not only states in his preface, but also demonstrates through his text, that this imagination is employed critically, and the risk of collapsing historical reconstruction into historical novel is largely avoided, as a more extreme historical anti-realist might deign to do. Paludan is no anti-realist, saying, “Victims isn’t made-up, in people or events; but, in the gray area between history and fiction, a truer story might be seen than in history alone” (ix), and later, “This book tells a story based on, and grounded pretty deeply in, historical documents” (xv). I propose that Victims is an exploration of the critical imagination as integral to the historical enterprise.

Let us examine the sort of critical imagination, as I have called it, that Paludan is out to employ to develop his historical narrative. For one, Paludan writes, “I have sought to expand understanding of this incident and tried to capture the incident’s complexity, by writing about it in a style that calls forth the reader’s emotional resources as an aid to understanding” (xxv). This is shortly followed by the sentence, “I respect detached objective observation” (xxv), with the caveat that it alone is not enough (never mind the vexed question of its possibility). The latter statement affirms the importance of scientific historiography, albeit that sentence by itself sounds extraordinarily naïve. Fortunately, it is tempered by the former claim among others. The former claim is an affirmation of the importance of empathetic history.[1] Paludan’s philosophical claim is basically that a full understanding of a historical event requires both a scientific understanding and an empathetic understanding, and these two are hardly separable. This approach is borne out time and again in Victims.

One such time is Paludan’s presentation of the character of Henry Heth, replete with psychological comments, derived apparently from an empathetic reading of Heth’s memoirs, the source that forms the backbone of the reconstruction of Heth’s career. This, in conjunction with other relevant literature, constitutes the documents in which the narrative of Heth is grounded. On the one hand is scientific, historical reconstruction. On the other hand Paludan develops a psychological picture of Heth that relies more on an empathetic approach than on the strictly analytical approach that, say, puts the events in order. Thus we find Paludan claiming, for example, that Heth’s military service on the frontier allowed him to “take his father’s place, rule his ‘plantation,’ revel in his skills. Army life was providing much more than just a career” (41). There are important historical facts underlying this claim. Heth’s late father had spent time on the frontier and was known to be an excellent horseman and marksman, for instance. Heth’s service on the frontier placed him in a similar situation. These facts are derived from Heth’s own memoirs, so Heth was conscious of a continuity between his adventures and those of his father, or at least at the time of the writing he came to see his service in this way. A strict analysis of the documents admits of these facts, but in order to reach Paludan’s conclusion, one must make an empathetic inference (if it is properly called an inference), try to enact Heth’s thoughts, as R.G. Collingwood might say.[2] This is more than the mere claim that both Heth and his father had notable careers on the frontier; this pushes beyond that claim in such a way as to develop Heth’s character, so that the reader might similarly empathize. Empathy is imagination, but this example has shown that it is not mere imagination. It can be tempered with evidence to become critical imagination. Here we also begin to see the beginnings of a more robust analysis of the critical imagination, which we shall begin to develop forthwith.

The critical imagination also emphasizes the incorporation of scholarship from other fields. The 1980 preface says, “I have tried to use a writing style that will enlarge understanding, to use such detached observation as a historian is capable of to analyze that experience, and to call upon available insights from other disciplines to enlarge understanding” (xxv-xxvi). Part of Paludan’s account of guerrilla warfare is a particularly forceful example not only of this, but also again of empathetic understanding. In a style that approaches a stream-of-consciousness, having described the torture of women for information concerning the whereabouts of their men, Paludin writes in the persona of the Confederate soldiers, “Then you ride or walk away and hate them all the more for what they were making you do, for what they were making you be, for making you find that sometimes you liked it—Jesus, God—sometimes you liked it” (95-96). This passage, from which this is but a sample, is followed by an extensive footnote citing an assortment of soldiers’ recollections (especially from Vietnam), psychological studies, and works of fiction. To read soldiers’ recollections and, even more so, fictional accounts of soldiers’ experiences and then try and reconstruct them in a different historical context is an ambitious move. In order to do this, one must first empathize with the soldier via the report of the experience, be it veridical or fictional. This constitutes an attempted enactment of their psychological states. This enactment allows for a new expression of those states, which is the writing of a passage like the one cited above. This process is an act of the imagination, what philosopher Alvin Goldman might call “enactment imagination” or “E-imagination,” which is captured by the sentence, “When I imagine feeling elated, I do not merely suppose that I am elated; rather, I enact…elation iself.”[3]

It seems therefore that five necessary conditions must be satisfied for a narrative of this kind to be read historically, properly speaking. First, the source texts must be accurately expressive of the states actually experienced. Second, those psychological states must be relevant to the historical narrative. Third, the historian must accurately enact the psychological states in the texts. Fourth, the historian must express the enacted psychological states accurately, such that his or her text is expressive of the intended states. Fifth, the reader of the historical text must properly enact those psychological states. The fifth should be a corollary of the fourth so long as the reader is competent. Let us consider how well Paludan’s presentation of the Confederate soldiers meets these conditions. For the first condition to be satisfied, Paludan must have chosen sources that express the psychological states actually experienced, or else the enacted states cannot match the actual states, since the conduit between—the text—them is insufficient for the task.[4] Short of analyzing the litany of sources provided, I simply point out the importance of this condition, that Paludan must make use of appropriate authorities. I will add to this, however, that Paludan’s use of fictional accounts of the soldier’s life is a bit problematic here, as the aptness of these sources demands the truth of another proposition: these accounts must be expressions of some set of those psychological states associated with the actual soldiering experience, broadly speaking. The writer of fiction is under much the same set of conditions as is the historian, if the historian is to use fiction as Paludan has.

The second condition could give Paludan some trouble, since it requires that he accept a proposition like “The relevant psychological experiences are applicable between events,” since he is not relying on Civil War texts. There is some merit to a proposition like this, which we see in the varying names for “post-traumatic stress” or “shell shock” or being “terbackered out.” The psychological experience is common across wars and events. The question, therefore, is whether the conditions are relevantly similar between events so as to inculcate a similar psychological state. This is how Paludan uses the idea of psychiatrist Robert Lifton’s “atrocity-producing situation” which is “a situation in which soldiers murder and torture civilians” (ix). Thus the “atrocity-producing situation,” as I understand it, defines the conditions wherein agents are apt to enter into those psychological states that are likely to bring an atrocity to action. These conditions seem to include such as “in guerrilla warfare, men can feel as if the environment itself is hostile to them, that each tree or hillside is dangerous…In regular combat death terrorizes, but not to the same extent. There are things in regular combat that a man can do to restrain his fears, to fight back” (94-95). On the one hand, we see psychological conditions, the feelings of hostility and helplessness, but what produces those conditions? Hidden enemies against whom one cannot easily strike, combat situations for which none have been trained, and there being no easy way to distinguish between combatant and civilian, or civilian and conspirator, and so forth seem to be some. If Paludan is right that these describe the situation in Shelton Laurel, and they seem derived from Vietnam accounts, then the use of those accounts can satisfy our second condition.

As for the third condition, the only way a reader can judge its fulfillment is to look competently to the success of the fourth condition (which also fulfills the fifth condition). So if Paludan has competently enacted the psychological states expressed in his source material, then his text can be an expression of those states, fulfilling condition four. The fulfillment of condition four is impossible without the fulfillment of condition three. To judge the success of condition four, one must establish that the psychological states of the Confederate soldiers expressed in Paludan’s narrative is consistent with those that should be enacted on reading relevant sources. Again, to thoroughly judge Paludan’s success one must extensively review his sources. The reader’s fulfillment of condition five is a corollary of condition four: if the psychological states are well-expressed, then the competent reader will be able to properly empathize. The reader’s competence has nothing to do with the writer’s work, however, and the inclusion of the fifth condition is to account for the whole communication from source to reader, and not to stop at the writer’s act of expression.

The fulfillment of these five conditions provides a means of distinguishing between critical imagination and mere imagination. Where mere imagination is satisfied to draw from any or no sources, critical imagination is defined by these parameters, which define not only the use of historical sources (much of which is very easily satisfied or irrelevant), but also the use of scholarship from other disciplines. Let another example illustrate this point. Concerning the life of mountaineers, Paludan says, “If a boy of thirteen were killed, then death had come to someone just learning to be a man, not yet forgetting what it was like to be a child…someone who had been cared for by older brothers and cousins and uncles, as well as parents. They would all remember him as a little boy trying to be a man” (15). Here Paludan is discussing what it means for a mountaineer boy to grow up, alluding of course to the fact that one of the victims of the Shelton Laurel massacre was a thirteen-year-old boy. Emphasizing the closeness of even extended parts of mountaineer families as part of the community, as well as explaining how a boy could be a soldier with the older men as well as a child in many respects, Paludan’s account once again plays upon his readers’ emotions. The fact that a boy has a gun and is shooting at Confederate soldiers is akin to his going hunting with the older men in more peaceful times (14), and this does not make him any less a child, only that he happens to be growing.

To paint a portrait like this and then to discuss the implications of a death that actually occurred is an appeal to empathy and by empathy. It is a use of critical imagination. It is a historical reconstruction pushed beyond what can be strictly derived through the analysis of source material, as we saw in Paludan’s account of Heth. Unlike the stream-of-consciousness presentation of the Confederate soldiers, this account does not rely on interdisciplinary study, but now armed with our conditions for an imagined narrative to be read historically, we can consider how this account fares as history. The first and second conditions are no trouble, since Paludan is imagining from his reconstruction of mountain life, not from other material. The aptness of this basis of imagination is instead contingent upon the quality of Paludan’s strict analysis prior to imagination and to the justification of any prior act of critical imagination on which a further analysis or act of imagination is based. Now, the accuracy of Paludan’s reconstruction is required for his accurate enactment of the psychological states relevant to this situation—the death of a thirteen-year-old boy. It is not just a matter stating that there is a sense of loss, it is a sense of expressing what that loss is like. As we have seen, the historical reconstruction tells us of the closeness of the community within itself and with the land, and it tells us of the status of a thirteen-year-old boy in society as being in some respects child, and in other respects man. From considerations such as these, a narrative can be reconstructed, and imagination can be employed from that narrative, being mitigated by the scientifically derived foundation of the narrative. Then critical imagination enacts something like the sorrow that the mountaineers must have felt with such a loss. As per condition three, this must first be enacted in the historian, so that he or she may express the state in writing per condition four, so that it may be enacted in a reader, per condition five. Any historical narrative for which critical imagination is appropriate should suggest certain psychological states, some more so than others, and if the historian is to employ critical imagination everything that follows depends on his or her ability to enact those states. The reader of history can simply look to Paludan’s depiction of loss, quoted above, and enact the states that Paludan has expressed, which are the states he meant to express if condition four is fulfilled. The historian has the challenging task of constructing the narrative whence the psychological states are imagined, as well as enacting and expressing those states, if his or her history is to involve critical imagination.

Now we have an idea of what it means to employ imagination in a way that is consonant with scientific historiography, and Paludan’s Victims has shown us the way. This should lend some warrant to the claim that Victims is in part an implicit exploration of the critical imagination. We have explored not only critical imagination from reconstructed narrative, but also critical imagination from outside and interdisciplinary literature, and we have conceived of five necessary conditions for a successful reading of a critically imagined passage. This is certainly not a complete account of the potential of critical imagination any more than it is a bulletproof analysis, but I believe that Paludan has pointed us in the direction of something very fruitful, and I believe that the account developed here is a good start.

Bibliography

Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford, Oxford: 1946.

Currie, Gregory. “Empathy for Objects.” Forthcoming.

Goldman, Alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford, Oxford: 2006.

Paludan, Phillip. Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville: 1980.

[1] By empathetic history, I basically mean any historical methodology that tries to read the minds of historical persons by “putting oneself in their shoes” or some such. For a good overview of empathy theory in the twentieth century, see Currie, Gregory. “Empathy for Objects.” Forthcoming.

[2] Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Revised Edition. Oxford, Oxford: 1946.

[3] Goldman, Alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford, Oxford: 2006. (pg. 47)

[4] This is not to make the impossible demand that the expression be perfect and complete, only that it allows for a significant resemblance between the states experienced and those enacted by a competent reader. I cannot very well analyze what counts as resemblance is here, but the idea is that the states are alike in kind if not degree, a significant majority of them have been expressed, etc. No one reads a soldier’s memoir and thinks he understands just what it is like to be a soldier, but that does not mean that one cannot do so to an extent.

Review: Race and Reunion

In his Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory David Blight makes extensive use of the concept of collective (or communal) memory. Unfortunately, nowhere does he do his reader the service of providing an analytic definition of this concept. It therefore behooves the critical reader to search out the philosophical components of Blight’s collective memory and to subject it to scrutiny. The concept of collective memory is introduced when Blight says in the prologue, “there were many warring definitions of healing in the South and the nation’s collective memory had never been so shattered” (3). This suggests that there are different levels of collective memory at work among different historical actors. On the one hand, there is the shattered national collective memory, but on the other hand, there are those collective memories that constitute the larger, shattered memory, including various stripes of Southern collective memory, a few varieties of black collective memory, several sorts of Northern collective memory, and so on. Where these levels of memory conflict, prominently on the national stage, we observe a positively schizophrenic national consciousness. One of many examples of the national collective memory’s divide, the analysis of which is certainly among Race and Reunion’s primary objectives, is the “many warring definitions of healing at play in the late 1860s” (55), including the radical vision of severe retribution against the rebels, the ordinary Republican vision of universal male suffrage, the reactionist vision of reconciliation, and so on. In these terms Blight points to the conflict between justice and healing, “retribution and reconciliation,” which characterize some of the most divisive differences between strains of collective memory discussed throughout the book. Blight’s overarching project is to explain how the conflicted national consciousness changed between Emancipation and its semicentennial.

Minds are the basic subjects of memory. As far as the historian is ordinarily concerned, the minds in question are those of human beings. Thus, memory is an object of human beings. Collective memory, therefore, is a kind of memory that is the object of a plurality of subjects, a kind of memory that is common to many human beings. We may say that memory is common, minimally, in the sense that we may define a set of entities whose conditions for membership are (1) being a mind and (2) assenting to a certain memory. Memory, however, is a subjective phenomenon. How can it be collective? After all, any two human beings experiencing the same event (broadly conceived) will differ in perspective, not only in terms of sensible perception but also in terms of historical perception (having reached the event in question through a different personal history, etc.). All subjects possess different objects; the contents of all memories are different, and therefore no two memories are the same. It seems, then, that collective memory is impossible, and the entire project of writing its history collapses into a chaotic pluralism. This is not how Blight proposes to understand the “memory” involved in collective memory.

Collective memory (as subject) is not related to its object (the thing remembered) as ordinary memory is related to its object. An ordinary memory, intuitively, is a representation of its object, which is thought to have been a temporally prior experience. The sense of memory at work in collective memory is better captured in Blight’s discussion of reminiscence. He even points to a form of communal reminiscence, saying that such is “stimulated by an audience of like-minded rememberers.” Quoting the philosopher Edward Casey, Blight discusses reminiscence as re-understanding in light of the present, answering “the dual need for personal understanding as well as personal recognition” (173). Collective memory as Blight understands it is therefore an exercise not in mere re-imagination of the past, as one would watch a film, but one of reflection on the past, that is, reminiscence. If we attempt to understand collective memory in terms of ordinary memory, it becomes very difficult to make much sense of what Blight has to say. One example comes from the chapter on literature. Having mentioned the arch-sentimentalist Thomas Nelson Page, Blight says, “no writer offered a more artful challenge to the hegemony of Lost Cause ideology, or to the reunion wrapped in the retrospective make-believe world of faithful slaves and the mysticism of Blue-Gray fraternalism, than W.E.B. Du Bois” (251), who took up the emancipationist mantle. What Page and Du Bois did when they wrote was not remembering—indeed, Page’s world is “make-believe”—but reminiscing on received material. What they did was to select, interpret, and even imagine the past under the influences of preexisting collective memory and present needs, and in turn they influenced the course of different strains of collective memory after them.

So, understood properly, collective memory does not refer to a certain mental content shared by a number of minds, but shared thinking about a plurality of mental contents, thought to be related in a way defined by that shared thinking. Collective memory is therefore a way of thinking about thoughts, which might be called a consciousness (as I used it above), or it might be called a philosophy; however, these pre-reflective thoughts are thoughts about the past, so we may narrow the category of collective memory to a variety of philosophical history, or, as R.G. Collingwood would say, just history (as all history is philosophical). Unfortunately, the philosophy in question is rarely representative of genuine critical reflection, and so collective memory more often than not degenerates into what has often been called mythologizing (though I rather dislike that moniker, but that is an issue for another discussion).

As is suggested by the layered structure of collective memory, its subjects do not divide out neatly into mutually exclusive sets. Blight observes this when he comes to speak of the various strains of black Civil War memory, listing a number of them, and saying, “These strains of memory are not definitive; all could overlap and flow into one another. Together they form the conflicted determination of a people to forge new and free identities in a society committed to sectional reconciliation” (300-301). Within the national collective memory is that of the black population, which is itself composed of various collective memories that sometimes were in conflict and at other times consonant with not only one another but also with the collective memories, and these sets often share common elements, and these elements are often common to different sets of sets. Consider Blight’s observation, “In the Christian cosmology and the apocalyptic sense of history through which many Americans, white and black, interpreted the scale of death in the war, Memorial Day provided a means to achieve both spiritual recovery and historical understanding” (72). Those subscribing to the “apocalyptic sense of history” fall all over the board in terms of collective memory. To point to two conflicting understandings that yet fall within this apocalyptic view, we have but to look to the concern of the likes of Jubal Early “that Northern apologists were riveting a Unionist-emancipationist narrative of the war deep into American memory,” leading to the response that said that “the spirit of the Southern people would be redeemed…through the story of the irrepressible and heroic Confederate soldier” (79). Both rooted in the “apocalyptic sense of history,” says Blight, both are mutually exclusive, the former being emancipationist and the latter being the seed of Southern reconciliationism, which birthed the myth of the faithful slave and espoused such arguments for the goodness of slavery as that of paternal masters caring for the child-like savage, civilizing and Christianizing him. This would not cohere with emancipationism, but like emancipationism, it coheres with an “apocalyptic sense of history.” This point can be driven further when we note that some blacks espoused something like the latter paternalistic argument, claiming the Providential arrangement of slavery so that Christianity and civilization might be taken back to Africa. This view, conflicting with both the previous two and still embracing the apocalyptic (in addition to the aforesaid argument), is associated especially with Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (321). Further still, this attitude is one among the conflicted black collective memory mentioned above. Clearly then, defining sets for collective memory is a complex task, and it is one which requires the historian to do careful work as he or she navigates the various components of the set as it is put to use in historical narrative.

At this point, I shall propose the following definition of a collective memory, drawn from Blight’s text and the latter reflection thereupon:

(1) A collective memory, as object, is distributed across a plurality of subjects, namely minds.

(2) A collective memory is not a mere memory, but rather a reflection upon a memory (or past event, etc.) in the present, often in terms of present concerns. This is why collective memory tends to change with time.

(3) This reflection (i.e. collective memory) can be distributed across other memories (or past events, etc.), and it selects which of these are important and influences the interpretation of those selected.

(4) This reflection (i.e. collective memory) can be (and is) applied to the past by those who do not share the mere memory.

(5) Collective memory, with time, influences the selection and interpretation of the mere memories whence it is derived.

(6) Collective memory is multi-layered, and therefore may contain within it strains of conflicting collective memory or, at the lowest level, conflicting individual reminisces.

Let a final example suffice to illustrate this definition. Blight devotes considerable ink to soldiers’ memoirs and other such recollections of wartime experience. One example is Charles Brewster, who left a graphic description of the carnage at Spotsylvania, but “his vision of hell faded with time into more useful and comfortable sentiments” (145). These comfortable sentiments are those associated with the Veterans’ conventions and the like, especially of the 1870s and 1880s, when sentimentalism was a guiding principle for a major strain of collective remembrance. Brewster’s falling in with the collective memory thinking with the Blue-Gray reunions certainly illustrates (1), and the nature of that memory, namely sentimentalism, reunionism, and the like, is clearly not mere memory, but reflection on memory, the fruit of reminiscence (2), it colors the whole set of Brewster’s war memories (3) and (5), it is a reflection shared by many (4)—such as those who attend Blue-Gray reunions, and the mere fact of non-sentimentalist and non-reunionist strains of collective memory in the national collective memory demonstrate (6). These six components are taken to be a proposal of necessary and, taken together, sufficient conditions for the use of collective memory in historical writing.

By way of conclusion, it is worth noting that collective memory, or something near enough, is indispensible for academic historiography as it is ordinarily practiced, and this is because of its close relationship to the concept of a historical actor (or agent, or entity, etc.). Collective memory, as a historiographical tool, is a means whereby the historian may attribute mental states to historical actors that are themselves minds. Thus societies, economic classes, régimes, and other such collective actors in history may be sensibly understood to have philosophies, memories, emotions, and the like. The reality of the matter is of course vastly more complex, as the details will expose myriad conflicts of which the good historian will be aware and give due heed (as Blight does quite well), but the fact remains that collectives can act analogously to individuals, and if we are to explain such action, recourse to a quasi-mental state like collective memory is of considerable value. If mind is prior to action, and mindless collectives are historical actors, then what is the source of collective action? I answer, it is something akin to collective memory.

Bibliography

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA: 2001.

An Account of Expression in Absolute Music

2010-08-30T15:41:00.001-04:00

Though some have fervently denied that music has expressive power, famously including Igor Stravinsky, others are moved by the intuition that music is expressive, not least of emotion. If we are to consider music to be expressive, it is necessary to account for what music expresses and how this expression takes place. In order to do this, it is most suitable to give an account of how absolute music—music alone—can be expressive, though I would argue that there is much continuity between programmatic and absolute music, as well as vocal music. The account of musical expression that I am proposing is a dual-level account, based on a distinction between low-level and high-level expressiveness. I shall detail both these kinds of expression, emphasizing the importance of both for a robust understanding of musical expression. I shall argue that low-level expressiveness is largely a matter of mirroring, and high-level expressiveness is best explained by positing the presence of a persona in the music, to which the low-level expressions can be imputed, though these expressions need no persona to be understood by themselves.

Before proceeding, it is fitting to make some terminological remarks. By absolute music, I mean music that is unadorned by any explicit extramusical content. This obviously excludes song, and it also excludes programmatic music of all stripes, where a program can be anything from a descriptive title (for example, Debussy’s “Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut”) to a lengthy description of what the music is meant to depict (Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique being the paradigm example).[1] These uses are not unusual and therefore should not be problematic. In addition, I will make use of a distinction suggested by Robinson between expression and expressiveness. For Robinson, expression in general is both an author-centered and an audience-centered notion, where “‘expression’ is used for the author-centered aspect,” and where “‘expressiveness’ is used for the audience-centered aspect.”[2] This distinction should lend itself to improved clarity.

As stated, I am attempting to offer a dual-level account of how absolute music expresses emotion, which is modeled on a dual-level account of mindreading, in particular that of Alvin Goldman in his Simulating Minds. Just as, for Goldman, we can distinguish between low-level mindreading and high-level mindreading, we can distinguish between low-level and high-level musical expressiveness. I shall begin by discussing low-level expressiveness, and later I shall address high-level expressiveness. Low-level mindreading tends to be “comparatively simple, primitive, automatic, and largely below the level of consciousness.”[3] The paradigm case for low-level mindreading is face-based emotion recognition (FaBER). By far, the most prominent candidate to account for low-level mindreading like FaBER, and, I contend, low-level expressiveness, is mirroring. According to Goldman, a mirroring system “obtains when there is a systematic, repeatable causal pathway, leading from one individual’s mental state to a matching (or semimatching) state in an observer.”[4] Goldman states two components of a systematic causal pathway: “(a) a subpath within the sender from his own mental state to a behavioral expression of that state and (b) a subpath within the receiver from an observation of the sender’s behavior to a mental state that matches the sender’s.”[5] How does this account for musical expressiveness? Recall that expressiveness is a relationship between an expression, in this case a musical composition, and its audience; that is, an expression is expressive to its audience. This is important in order to make sense of the systematic causal pathway required for mirroring. Music is in a problematic position with regard to (a) because music does not have mental states, but it is expressive. Expressiveness is sufficient for (b), since it is the observation that triggers the mental state in the receiver. Consider the dogs from which so-called “doggy theory” of musical expression derives its epithet: Kivy’s St. Bernard and Davies’s basset hound. These dogs have faces that are expressive of sadness, but that does not mean that the dogs are sad. Rather, it seems plausible to say that these dogs’ faces bear the features requisite for a mirror response of sadness; in other words, their faces resemble[6] human faces enough to elicit a FaBER response.[7] Thus, to have a mirror response does not require the mirroring of something that actually has the mental state in question, it only requires that it be expressive in such a way as to trigger a mirror response, and the expressiveness can be perfectly unmoving, as mirroring can still account for identification. Now, this does not seem to be quite Goldman’s definition any longer, as Goldman does not delve into the possibility of automatic mirror responses to resemblances of human expressiveness, but there is no reason to think he would deny this.

If low-level musical expressiveness is to be accounted for in terms of mirroring, what resemblances are there between human expression and musical expression? There are two parallels to be drawn that lend themselves particularly well to explaining some of the expression of absolute music in terms of mirroring. First is a parallel between vocal expression and certain elements of musical expression. Second is a parallel between bodily expression and certain elements of musical expression. This duo of parallels has been observed time and again. The classic statement likely belongs to Cone, who says that “both the verbal gestures of poetry and the bodily gestures of the dance are symbolized in the medium of pure sound.”[8] Robinson also mentions them, with reference to mirroring, observing that “doggy theory suggests one way in which [aspects of an emotion process can be mirrored by music]: music can mirror the vocal expressions and the motor activity—including expressive bodily gestures and action tendencies—that characterize particular emotions.”[9] This invocation of mirroring is quite in line with the account that I wish to give, though other uses of the term in Deeper than Reason make clear that I am using the term more narrowly.[10] In addition, Davies says, “the voice and music are more alike in dynamic structure, articulation, pitch, intensity, and periodicity of phrase lengths and shapes than in timbre or inflection as such,”[11] (though he downplays this element of musical expressiveness in favor of bodily expression) and shortly thereafter, “I think music is expressive in recalling the gait, attitude, air, carriage, posture, and comportment of the human body.”[12] Davies argues that, combined with a parallel between the temporal unfolding of music and that of human behavior, there is a resemblance between musical gestures and behavioral gestures, and this resemblance accounts for musical expressiveness. I am in agreement with Davies that there is a sense in which musical gestures resemble both vocal and bodily gestures, and it is in the sense that the resemblances are sufficient to evoke a mirror response.

The close relationship between vocal and motoric expression is something that all ordinary communicators know well. Vocal inflection can usually be expected to match bodily expression, including facial expression, posture, &c.) So the body, whose expressions are more primitive, can betray what the voice may try to obscure in an attempted deception. This relationship is even borne out by a common tendency to move the hands (among other mannerisms) when speaking. Thus it comes as no surprise that in music we find a similarly close relationship between the vocal-parallel (or resembling) expressions and the motor-parallel (or resembling) expressions.

A few comments are yet warranted on vocal mirroring in music. In addition to the litany of parallel features that Davies lists above, I am not as hesitant as he is in including the possibility that timbre, inflection, and so forth might have mirror responses, but, as I shall discuss below, low-level expressiveness is limited. That said, I think it is important to note the centrality of the human voice in the history of Western music. Unaccompanied instrumental music developed out of the styles and formalities of vocal music.[13] The idea that much instrumental music should in certain respects be heard in much the same way as vocal music is a historically grounded idea. Now, granted that instrumental lines bear important resemblances to vocal lines, it stands to reason that instrumental music can express content which, if the piece were a vocal composition, would accompany the sung text. Now, if it is also granted that sung lines and, by extension, instrumental lines are capable of resembling, likely in an exaggerated way (to be expounded below), the human voice in such ways as those Davies mentions above, it seems that even absolute music can express through mirroring much of what is expressed by ordinary vocalization apart from the words. Of course, there are ways of speaking that are expressive of certain emotions, and conversely there are certain emotions that can be roused by speaking in a particular way, which is true both for oneself and for one’s company. So certain ways of speaking are correspondent with certain emotions, and so when vocal patterns are mirrored, they give rise to those emotions. This could be minimally expressive, which would admit of little more than the identification of the intended expression, or it could be fairly deeply expressive, causing one to feel the emotion expressed.

Motoric mirroring is evidenced, in part I think, by the naturalness with which human beings incline to move with music, be it foot-tapping or ballet. The fact that there are appropriate dance responses to music, many of which are known automatically, and that such basic movements as foot-tapping are often begun unconsciously, is suggestive of mirroring activity. Of course, two of the indicators low-level mindreading, which are perfectly applicable to mirroring, are that the response is automatic and unconscious. A forthcoming paper by Gregory Currie, “Empathy for Objects,” has much to say about motoric simulation, which includes motor mirroring. Though Currie is cautious about the appropriateness of employing motor simulation to understand artwork, it is important to note that he is focused on visual art forms, for which a motoric response is not at all so natural. He says, “There is little to say in general terms about the relation between these motoric processes and the aesthetic beyond noting, unhelpfully, that these processes play an aesthetic role when they play a role in the generation of a response which is an aesthetic one,”[14] but is unsure about when this is appropriate. I suggest, on the basis of what has been said above, that music is a paradigm case for the appropriateness of motoric response, save for dance itself. If indeed we have mirror responses to musical resemblances of bodily gestures, even unconsciously, and this is as integral to understanding music as I claim, then it certainly seems that motoric simulation has its place in aesthetics. Further, the deliberate invention of dances, constrained of course by what is motorically mirrored unconsciously, is certainly an appropriate response to music, so even conscious motoric simulation can have its place. I make no attempt to comment on the appropriateness of motoric simulation in other arts, but I turn to another issue with low-level bodily expression.

An important problem remains, as Robinson notes that bodily expression in dance is often exaggerated,[15] just as vocal patterns are exaggerated in song. As in the case of song, the gestures still exaggerated resemble their ordinary forms, and they can therefore be expected to be identifiable by mirroring. One might object that such exaggeration obscures what is being expressed, but I think it is quite the contrary. Exaggeration is a means of clarifying an expressive gesture. An ordinary gesture might go unnoticed or be misinterpreted; exaggeration is a means of ensuring a very narrow range of readings.

Now, how is it that these bodily mirror responses are expressive of emotion? As in the case of vocal expression, I contend that certain bodily gestures are correlated with emotions. We speak of jumping for joy; we might slouch and slowly drag our feet when gloomy; in fear we tremble. Facial expression is a perfect example, since the facial expression of emotion is a two way street. To make a face is to dispose oneself toward a particular emotion, just as feeling that emotion is likely to cause one to make that face. FaBER does not factor into music, but it should highlight the close relationship between bodily expression and emotion. So, when music causes a mirror response, we are disposed toward feeling the emotion associated with that bodily expression, which can be highly expressive, hardly expressive, or anything in between.

Davies is somewhat conservative about what music can express, listing such possibilities as “sadness and happiness…timidity and anger…swaggering arrogance, the mechanical rigidity that goes with the repression and alienation from the physicality of existence, ethereal dreaminess, and sassy sexuality,”[16] naming candidates that he thinks are expressible by bodily gesture. Since Davies has largely limited his view to the low-level expressiveness discussed thus far, we can take a lesson from this comment; namely, low-level expression is limited, probably even more limited than Davies’s list suggests. Far more varied and complex are those emotions that can be read in a musical persona, which is the model I shall be using to account for high-level expressiveness.

Before moving on to high-level expressiveness, one more feature of low-level expressiveness is worthy of note. As Goldman points out, “mirroring doesn’t entail mindreading because the receiver may not impute anything to the sender.”[17] Mirroring can be done without reference to the composer, a musical persona, or anything of the kind. A doggy theorist would not likely find too much of what has been said up to this point particularly objectionable, except for the enormous claim that low-level expressiveness is only a part of the story. The fact is, through they do not have to be imputed to a sender, these expressions can be imputed to a musical persona to be included in his or her psycho-drama, which I will argue is the best account of high-level expressiveness. So, the claim is that whenever it is appropriate to posit a musical persona, the low-level expressions should be imputed to that persona, and they are to constrain the high-level interpretation of his or her psycho-drama.

To begin, some remarks must be made concerning what a persona’s psycho-drama is not. It is not to be understood as a drama simpliciter, for the correspondence between music and drama is only a correspondence between certain features. In his Antithetical Arts, Kivy makes much of this alleged correspondence. Though he takes himself to be arguing against the legitimacy of drawing such a correspondence at all, I think his remarks are much better suited to demonstrating the partial correspondence of music and drama, pointing instead to the features for which such a correspondence is legitimate. Kivy advances an argument from repetition. In so doing, he distinguishes between two kinds of musical repetition: external repetition, which is the repetition of lengthy, macro-structural sections of music, and internal repetition, which is the repetition of short motives throughout a piece.[18] He goes on to argue that an external repeat in music is akin to repeating a whole scene of a drama verbatim, and that internal repetition is like Hamlet repeating the line, “To be, or not to be,” over and over again.[19] By arguing thus, Kivy fails to distinguish between the persona’s psycho-drama and the overall drama, including the environment. This is illustrated quite well through the setting of poetry in song. The same music can be used to set more than one stanza of a poem, and each repeat can be just as appropriate as the last. This is because the music is not expressing exactly what is in each stanza, but what is psycho-dramatically common among the texts. So if a poetical speaker expresses the same sorrow in three different stanzas, each can properly be set to the same music. So there is a distinction between the psycho-drama that music is expressing[20] and the overall drama in which the psycho-drama is taking place. With regard to internal repetition, Kivy is guilty of the same error. A motive is not to be taken as representing the whole of a particular utterance, only certain features of it. So internal repetition is not necessarily akin to Hamlet’s repeating “To be, or not to be,” over and over again; rather, it is akin to Hamlet exhibiting the same emotion in various different utterances. Furthermore, internal repeats abound in literature, not least poetry, and it is perfectly possible for each repeat to express subtle differences. Think of Poe’s “The Raven.” This is perfectly applicable to absolute music, the difference being that the overall dramatic context of the psycho-drama is not explicit.

Furthermore, I do not wish to suggest that, when we listen to a piece like Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie” that the music is expressing the events that the program suggests. I wish to suggest that the music is expressing the persona’s psycho-drama in the context of the programmatic setting, as a response to those events. True, Debussy has composed portions of that piece in such a way as to imitate the sounds of church bells, but that is not musical expression; it is musical imitation. Imitative music can be highly expressive, as “La cathédrale engloutie” certainly is, but the imitation is not the expression. The music is an expression, and the imitation is a feature of the music, and the music is not just imitation. This is to further emphasize the the distinctness of the psycho-drama from the environment—it is a response to the environment, for in absolute music, the environment is a mystery, except insofar as the persona expresses his or her psycho-dramatic attitudes—both high and low-level, about it through the music.

I have been operating under the assumption that there is, properly speaking, one persona that might inhabit a piece of music, a view that I shall now defend. Davies has criticized the persona theory (which he calls “hypothetical emotionalism”) on precisely this basis, saying, “there is no constraint on the number of personas imagined as inhabiting a musical work. And there are innumerable coherent narratives about them that would coincide with and reflect the progress of the music.”[21] There are two objections here. I will answer the first by arguing that there is one persona in a given piece of music. I will answer the second by claiming that there is a sense in which “these different narratives all license the same judgment about what the music expresses,”[22] a claim that Davies acknowledges would solve the problem, but which sees no reason to accept as true.

To claim that there is but one persona in a piece of music is not arbitrary. Indeed, this concept goes back to the very beginning of the musical persona’s life as a philosophical concept. In The Composer’s Voice, Cone introduced the persona to the world, and for him, there is, properly speaking, only one persona in a piece of music. This claim includes but is not limited to absolute music; indeed, Cone uses his analysis of accompanied song to frame his discussion of the persona in instrumental music. In the case of instrumental music, Cone distinguishes the virtual persona from the agent and the idea, which correspond to the persona, protagonist, and characters of a song. The complete virtual persona in music “is the experiencing subject of the entire composition, in whose thought the play, or narrative, or reverie, takes place—whose inner life music communicates by means of symbolic gesture.”[23] Agents, “like the characters in an opera, must obey the formal demands of the music; but, again like operatic characters, they must appear to move freely—to compose their own parts, as it were.”[24] Agents come in several stripes,[25] and they could be instruments, they could be a bit of thematic or motivic material, or they could be a bit of harmonic material (perhaps Scriabin’s Promethean Chord is a good example), &c. An idea can be presented to the mind of an agent or to that of the persona: “every musical gesture conveys an idea or image in the minds of the agent making the gesture and of the musical persona.”[26] Now, I am arguing that there is properly speaking only one persona in a given piece of music, and the main reason for this is that there is only one perspective from which the psycho-drama unfolds. Someone must respond to the agents (and the ideas, with the agents), and certain features of those responses, particularly the emotional ones, are expressed in the music. If there is no response, there is no music; for the music is the psycho-dramatic response of the protagonist to whatever is happening in his or her environment. Such is my endorsement of Cone’s insistence on a single virtual persona. Where one might naturally incline to posit multiple personas, such as a piano concerto (the piano and orchestra are each personae), agents come to the rescue, and the whole of a piece of music can still be taken as an unfolding expression of a single mind, and it is the listener’s duty to both mirror and reflect on this mind’s drama, if he or she is to listen to such a psycho-dramatic work properly.

Now, my fundamental claim regarding the sense in which we distinguish between acceptable interpretations of absolute music is that our range of interpretations is constrained. The most important interpretive constraint comes from what is automatically perceived as low-level expressiveness. Whatever the persona does or feels, it must be consistent with what the low-level expressiveness dictates. This is feasible as a constraint because I take these low-level mirroring responses to be nigh-universal[27] among comprehending listeners, to borrow Levinson’s term,[28] and so they are suitable as objective constraints. After all, if I am right about low-level expressiveness the music was written by and for people who mirror sound constructs in the same way. It therefore comes as no surprise that absolute musical expression should have objective expressions like this. As we have seen, if we are to consider a high-level interpretation of musical expression, it is necessary to impute the low-level expressions to the virtual persona; this way, these constraints are immediately in place. It behooves the listener then to consider the unfolding of these expressions as part of a similarly unfolding psycho-drama, so as to account for the relations among them in suitably psycho-dramatic terms. It is also here that we can point to sections of music as the agents and ideas that the persona is experiencing, which is probably best done with the help of structural and harmonic analyses. Sometimes, it may prove helpful to bring historical considerations to the table, for example, it might be a rare case in which one might be warranted to identify the persona with the composer,[29] or perhaps we can identify someone as an agent or specify an idea. Lastly, simpler interpretations tend to be better interpretations. All this allows one to attribute complex emotions and other mental states to the musical persona; for example, if a gloomy piece comes to its close with a perfect authentic cadence, one might attribute hope or some such to the persona. Mirroring will never reveal that; only reflection, and without a persona, one is left wondering to what to attribute hope.[30]

Robinson has a few comments on consistency and legitimacy among different interpretations. Perhaps the most striking one is the limitation of her claims about the justified invocation of the musical persona almost exclusively to the music of the Romantic era. More precisely, Robinson formulates the constraint to say, “one way of specifying content is in terms of how the composer broadly intended the piece to be construed.”[31] So, listening to music as a persona’s psycho-drama is just one way of listening that is only appropriate insofar as the composer has such a thing in mind, as did nearly any composer writing under the influence of the Romantic theory of expression. I count it as an advantage of my dual-level account that it can adequately capture how both psycho-dramatic Romantic music and J. S. Bach can be expressive from this historically sensitive perspective. The Romantics take the low-level expressiveness and let it guide a grander dramatic expression, where baroque expressiveness cannot often be said to go beyond what can be derived from low-level expressiveness. The advantage here is that all sorts of music can be called expressive, to the degree that the composer conceived appropriate. No one wants to argue that, in the absence of personas and psycho-dramas, music was not expressive; that person will have a dreadful time making sense of historical ecclesiastical disputes over the primacy of text and appropriate expressiveness in sacred music. My account allows for low-level expressiveness to be highly expressive at times, albeit limited as to what it is can express.

Here, then, is the sense in which, for high-level expressiveness, “these different narratives all license the same judgment about what the music expresses.” We must distinguish between the objective constraints on interpretation, which define the range of possible interpretations. We must impute the objective, low-level expressions to the persona. We must define the agents, ideas, and the like that comprise the composite persona, for only then do we have any conception who the persona is in terms of high-level emotions that are only attributable through reflection on the music’s expressiveness, not mere mirroring. Additionally, historical considerations may be appropriate, depending on the composer and the piece. Finally, we must bear in mind that simpler interpretations tend to be better interpretations. Now, it is indeed possible to arrive at several different versions of the persona’s psycho-drama, and therefore it is doubtful that Davies could be satisfied with this response. It does not satisfy his condition as he wanted it to be satisfied, but I contend that fulfilling the condition as Davies would like would not do justice to musical expression. The reason for this is that, just as the interpretation of music in performance allows for several legitimate interpretations, as Robinson says in reference to her interpretation of the Brahms Intermezzo op. 117, no. 2, mentioning several other possible interpretations: “Possibly different pianists could perform the piece in each of these different ways and thus arrive at a different resolution to the psychological drama,”[32] so too does psycho-dramatic interpretation.

In summary, I have proposed that there are two levels of musical expressiveness, following Alvin Goldman’s high-level and low-level mindreading. I have argued that low-level expressiveness can be explained largely through mirroring, and this allows us to recognize musical expressiveness automatically and sometimes unconsciously. These are not necessarily attributed to any mind, but in cases where a musical persona is an appropriate interpretive method, according to whether or not the composer thought of his or her composition in that way, the low-level expressions are imputed to the persona, and this constitutes an instance of low-level mindreading. These imputed emotions constrain the psycho-dramatic narrative in which high-level emotions and mental states that cannot be mirrored are attributed (through high-level mindreading) to the persona (I have suggested that hope is such a state, but examples are many), as does a guiding principle of simplicity. Historical considerations, when appropriate, are also suitable constraining interpretation. This, I hope, is a framework that provides a responsible means of musical interpretation that is sensitive to a variety of considerations, be they historical, psychological, literary, or philosophical.

Bibliography

Cone, Edward. The Composer’s Voice. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1974.

Currie, Gregory. “Empathy for Objects.” (forthcoming)

Davies, Stephen. “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music.” Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Matthew Kieran, ed. Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts: 2006. pp. 179-191

Goldman, Alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford, New York: 2006.

Kivy, Peter. Antithetical Arts; On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Muisic. Clarendon, Oxford: 2007.

Levinson, Jerrold. The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Cornell, Ithaca, New York: 1996.

Robinson, Jenefer. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Art, and Music. Oxford, New York: 2005.

---. “Expression and Expressiveness in Art.” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics. Vol. 4, no. 2 (Aug., 2007), pp. 19-41

[1] Edward Cone would distinguish between an explicit program of the Symphonie Fantastique and an implied program of “Et la lune,” but the definition stands: both are programmatic. See Cone, Edward. The Composer’s Voice. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1974. Pg. 83.

[2] Robinson, Jenefer. “Expression and Expressiveness in Art.” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics. Vol. 4, no. 2, (August 2007), pp. 19-40. Pg. 19.

[3] Goldman, Alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford, New York: 2006. Pg. 113

[4] Ibid. 133

[5] Ibid. 133

[6] Resemblance is important to Davies’s theory, as we shall see below.

[7] Robinson remarks that “There is something comical about the basset-hound’s sad face, after all: it looks sad, but it doesn’t make me feel sad” (Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Art, and Music. Oxford, New York: 2005. Pg. 310). This is to emphasize that the dog’s face is not particularly expressive of sadness, and, I would add what expressiveness it might have had is easily ignored in light of the irony to be found in a human-like expression on a non-human face that is not actually expressing anything of the sort.

[8] Cone (1974) 164

[9] Robinson (2005) 311

[10] On pg. 311 and 312 of Deeper than Reason, Robinson says that music can mirror “the cognitive or evaluative aspects of emotion," such as desire. In addition, music is said to mirror memory and “evaluations of the environment.” I do not claim that any of these are beyond the capacities of musical expression, so I am not disputing what Robinson is actually saying here. I am merely noting a terminological difference.

[11] Davies, Stephen. “Artistic Expression and the Case of Pure Music.” Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. Matthew Kieran, ed. Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts: 2006. Pg. 181

[12] Ibid. 182

[13] Interestingly enough, an enormous proportion of it was dance music early on. Here again we meet the duo of vocal and bodily expression.

[14] Currie, Gregory. “Empathy for Objects.” (forthcoming) pg. 16

[15] Robinson (2005) 286

[16] Davies 183

[17] Goldman 134

[18] Kivy, Peter. Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music. Clarendon, Oxford: 2007. Pg. 109

[19] Ibid. 110

[20] This is not to say that music is just expressing a persona’s psycho-drama, since music is perfectly capable to expressing more than that, including some elements of the drama external to the psycho-drama; for example, by imitating sounds in nature, such as birdcalls.

[21] Davies 190

[22] Ibid. 190

[23] Cone 94

[24] Ibid. 88

[25] Ibid. 96

[26]Ibid. 92

[27] This is not to deny that there will be variations in things like degree of affect among different listeners at different times (and even the same listener at different times).

[28] Levinson, Jerrold. “Musical Literacy.” The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Cornell, Ithaca, New York: 1996. pp. 27-41

[29] As Robinson (Deeper than Reason pp. 337-348) does with her interpretation of the Brahms Intermezzo op. 117, no. 2. Other examples arguably include Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and of course the Symphonie Fantastique, though the latter two are both programmatic and therefore have even greater interpretive constraints placed upon them.

[30] This is not to say there are not other accounts, but it is not apt to discuss them here.

[31] Robinson (2005) pg. 325

[32] Ibid..344

Sainthood, Heroism, and Autism

2010-08-30T14:00:00.000-04:00

Autism has made an appearance in moral philosophy because, despite the fact that lack of empathy is one of autism’s defining characteristics, some autistic persons display what look like sincere moral concerns. This is an important consideration for any philosopher who would like to draw a close link between empathy and morality, and naturally autism has been called upon in the epic struggle between the Kantians and the Humeans. That debate aside, in this paper I will approach the issue of autism in relation to that of supererogation, moral sainthood, and moral heroism. I will begin by discussing the sort of autistic person that is relevant to our enquiry, describing autism in broad strokes and distinguishing a subset of autistic persons that are plausible candidates for moral agency of the sort that will be interesting in further investigation. I shall then argue that there is a sense in which these people can be thought of as moral agents, and I shall attempt to define what that sense is. Thereafter I shall apply the idea of the moral saint and the moral hero to this sort of autistic person, following Urmson’s classic paper on the subject with additional reference to Carbonell on sacrifice, which will substantiate certain conclusions concerning a unique sense in which certain autistic persons can be called saints and heroes.

The diagnosis of autism is typically based on three common criteria: “difficulties in social development, and in the development of communication, alongside unusually strong, narrow interests and repetitive behavior.”[1] This makes for a very broad category, but it can be subdivided according to the “autism spectrum,” which lists four distinct sub-groups. In order of decreasing severity, they are classic autism, Asperger Syndrome, atypical autism, and PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified).[2] This quadripartite division was developed from earlier efforts that included only classic autism and Asperger Syndrome. There are two main factors that determine one’s place on the spectrum: language development and IQ. Simon Baron-Cohen employs these criteria to point out six varieties of autism, which is achieved by distinguishing high, medium, and low-functioning cases of classic autism. According to Baron-Cohen, low-functioning autistics have an IQ below 70 and may or may not have language delay. Medium-functioning autistics have an IQ between 71 and 84 and may or may not have language delay. High-functioning autistics have an IQ above 85 and language delay. Asperger Syndrome requires an IQ of at least 85 and no language delay. Atypical autism has two forms: late onset or lacking a basic diagnostic criterion (Baron-Cohen would say either social development and communication or narrow interests and repetitive behavior). Someone with PDD-NOS has many, mild autistic traits.[3] Because autism is such a broad category, it is fruitless to attempt to consider it as a whole. Rather, an appropriate subset of autistics must be defined for the purposes of our enquiry. Following Jeanette Kennett’s “Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency,” I shall restrict my interest to those with high-functioning autism[4] and those with Asperger Syndrome. I do this because, as we have seen, these cases are reasonably well-defined (as opposed to the likes of PDD-NOS) and because they are sufficiently severe so as to impact everyday life, including, it would seem, moral life (a facet of which this paper seeks to explore).

What sort of moral life can this subset of autistic persons lead? Jeanette Kennett, commenting on the lack of empathy[5] common with autism, says that autistic persons “in some cases seem capable of compensating for this deficit and becoming conscientious, though often clumsy, moral agents.”[6] By way of warning, however, Victoria McGeer suggests that “a good part of the behavior we identify as manifesting moral sensibility among individuals with autism may stem from a need to abide by whatever rules they have been taught without sharing our understanding of the ends those rules are meant to serve.”[7] This should not be taken to mean that no autistics can be taken to manifest moral sensibility; what this does mean is that not everything that looks like moral sensibility among autistics should necessarily be counted as such. Thus it is important to note that McGeer herself does not take this suggestion to extend to all apparently moral expressions by autistics; on the contrary, she goes on to explicitly agree with Kennett, saying, “many high-functioning individuals do become autonomous moral agents; i.e., they become able and willing to govern their own behavior and to judge the behavior of others by reference to a deeper, more reflective consideration of the ends such behavior might be thought to serve.”[8]

The latter point is well supported by contrasting two cases, one that gives an idiosyncratic appearance of moral concern, and another that exhibits what I contend is a kind of moral agency. On the one hand, there is the case of a certain young man, Jack, who once advocated a constitutional amendment mandating that all households possess a well-tuned piano;[9] on the other hand, there are people like Temple Grandin, who go to great lengths to systematize the moral rules that they perceive should be followed.[10] One thing is clear: Jack and Grandin are not approaching their rules in the same way. Minimally, they differ in that Jack (at least at the time in question) does not distinguish between what ordinary agents see as idiosyncratic rules and what ordinary agents would think of as genuine obligations, where Grandin’s rules are systematized, even including a place for rules whose ends she does not understand but follows anyway. It is this category of forbidden deeds, “sins of the system” as she calls them, which are particularly interesting for our argument. McGeer is also struck by this category. She offers two parts of a “mixed” explanation as to why Grandin thinks they should be followed. First, it is “a rationally driven response to her persisting need to simplify, to order, to maintain clarity and control, even at the cost—if it is a cost—of avoiding what others consider to be morally loaded terrain.”[11] Second, “it is this passion for order that both motivates their rule-oriented behavior and encourages [autistic persons] to such virtuoso displays of reason in trying to enlarge their understanding of the kind of order that exists in the social world so that they might participate in it.”[12] So, autistic persons may follow such rules to avoid overwhelming difficulty or to assimilate into society as best they can or for some yet unnamed reason.

McGeer leaves much room to speculate further about the motivation behind adherence to such rules as these, and so I will suggest that following rules regarding such prohibitions as those against “sins of the system” stems from a general motivation to do the right thing—to be good. Kennett suggests as much of Jim Sinclair, who recounts a situation wherein he identified that it would be good for him to do something to comfort a grief-stricken person, but had a good deal of trouble figuring out what he could possibly do. Kennett explains, “He has, it seems, a generalized moral concern, what we might call a sense of duty, or a conscience.”[13] Autistic persons want to do good, but they often have trouble determining how to do that exactly. McGeer offers a similar insight, saying of autistic persons that “their apparent need to figure out the ‘right’ thing to do based on taking the concerns and interests of others into account leads them to make extraordinary efforts to understand those concerns and interests.”[14] It seems, therefore, that some among the high-functioning set have not only first-order moral concerns for those rules that make straightforward sense, such as prohibitions against murder and theft, but also a second-order (generalized) moral concern to do what is right, which motivates them to follow rules and do deeds that they know in some sense advance that end, without understanding exactly why. This, then, is the sense in which we shall consider autistic persons to be moral agents. Our enquiry is concerned with those autistic persons motivated by a general desire to do what is right and who draw distinctions among rules in an effort to bring that end (perhaps among other ends, such as those McGeer mentions) to fruition. It may be that some autistic persons who do not meet these criteria can still properly be called moral agents, but this is not a problem. Our goal is not to define all autistic moral agents, but to consider some philosophical implications that some of them pose, including those meeting the above criteria.

We have picked out a subset of autistic persons in order to consider them in relation to the concepts of the moral saint and the moral hero. These terms have been employed quite differently by different philosophers. Our interest is in moral saints and moral heroes, which are taken to be a class of persons of whom there are legitimate examples, who need not be in any sense morally perfect[15] and who need not be affiliated with a religious tradition,[16] or anything of the sort. In his classic paper “Saints and Heroes,” J. O. Urmson offers three definitions of moral sainthood and moral heroism that are quite useful to that end. Saint (1) “does his duty regularly in contexts in which inclination, desire, or self-interest would lead most people not to do it, and he does so as a result of exercising abnormal self-control,” and the parallel hero (1) “does his duty in contexts in which terror, fear, or a drive to self-preservation would lead most men not to do it, and does so by exercising abnormal self-control.”[17] Saint (2) differs from saint (1) in that saint (2) does his duty “without effort” rather than by abnormal self-control. Hero (2) is parallel.[18] Saint and hero (1) share with saint and hero (2) the feature that they have merely done their duty, which we shall see they do not share with saint (3) or hero (3). A Saint (3) “does actions that are far beyond the limits of his duty, whether by control of contrary inclination and interest or without effort,” and hero (3) is parallel.[19] This definition, however, begs to be split into saint (3a), who goes beyond the call of duty by abnormal self control, and (3b), who goes beyond the call of duty without effort, with parallel definitions of hero (3a) and hero (3b).

In defining this third category that we see a description of the supererogatory, a word that Urmson deploys once, later in his paper,[20] as a moral category. A supererogatory act is one that goes beyond the call of duty; in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, “A work of supererogation is by definition one that is not numbered among the normal duties of life.”[21] The concept of duty at work here is that of absolute duty, not just duties that the agent considers him or herself to be obligated to fulfill. Urmson says, “I have no desire to present the act of heroism as one that is naturally regarded as optional by the hero, as something he might or might not do; I concede that he might regard himself as being obliged to act as he does.”[22] The agent can consider him or herself to have duties that he or she in fact does not have. This is important to the case of autism because it allows us to dodge the prickly problem of whether or not an autistic person’s commitment to an apparently moral principle, such as truth-telling, is considered obligatory by the autistic person. Whatever the agent thinks about his or her obligation to do such-and-such, heroism (3) and sainthood (3) are only concerned with obligations whose fulfillment can be demanded by other agents. Urmson cites J. S. Mill as saying that absolute duties can be “exacted from persons as a debt,”[23] and it is these sorts of duties that are relevant to sainthood and heroism (1) and (2). For an act to be supererogatory its fulfillment cannot be demanded by another; in this sense it is not obligatory.

Now considering the first sense of sainthood and heroism, autistic persons are in a peculiar position. There are some obligations, no doubt, that both ordinary and autistic agents (in the above sense) can fulfill so as to be labeled a saint or hero (1); however there seem to be other obligations that an ordinary agent can fulfill effortlessly that an autistic agent can fulfill only with considerable effort, such as offering comfort when another is distressed. This resembles sainthood (1) in every way except that it is not an obligation that most would fail to fulfill. Now, if an ordinary agent were to be in the position of fulfilling such obligations with difficulty, we would likely conclude that such an agent has certain weaknesses in his or her character; for instance, one who does not even try to offer comfort to a distressed person likely has callous character. This does not seem appropriate for an autistic person, however, because the difficulty is a result of his or her autistic condition, which we do not equate to moral character. Consider an individual like Jim Sinclair mentioned above, who recounts an encounter with a distressed person and his sense that he should do something and his dumbfoundedness as to what that something might be. With difficulty, he concluded that “touching might be appropriate.”[24] What we can say, minimally, is that Sinclair did the right thing (or a right thing), which would ordinarily be considered obligatory, with difficulty as a result of his autism, not his moral character. Thus there are two apparent reasons to conclude that Sinclair’s actions do not convey upon him saintliness (1). First, his deed is not one at which most would fail, and second, it is not clear what his obligation really is in such a situation. The first problem, I think, can be dissipated by distinguishing between an autistic condition and a weak character, so as to include in the “context” of the condition of autism.[25] A stronger problem, then, (sticking with the example of Sinclair) is with his obligations. If he has merely fulfilled his obligation in doing this difficult deed, then he is on the same level as someone with a callous character who denies that disposition. If he has not just fulfilled his obligations, however, another conclusion might present itself, as we shall see further below.

A problem arises for sainthood and heroism (2) with Kennett’s observation that “the meaner human dispositions, for example, jealousy, lying, cheating, vengefulness and Schaenfreude, are not part of the autistic personality.”[26] In the event of a situation in which most agents would be inclined to lie, take revenge, or some such, an autistic person would fulfill the purported obligation without effort. Worse still, the autistic person, if he or she is a moral agent in the sense we have described, can legitimately be said to be obligated to do the deed that would seem to win him or her sainthood or heroism. This is because the autistic agent so defined has drawn distinctions among various rules to the end of generally doing what is right in such a way that he or she can be said to understand a category of moral obligation (or perhaps “moral” obligation—the point is the category, not necessarily how deeply its importance is understood). So, it is quite conceivable that an autistic person could fulfill an obligation quite effortlessly where most agents would fail to fulfill it. There is, however, a problem in that the autistic person’s apparent moral success comes as a result of his or her condition, not as the result of a virtuous character in the Aristotelian sense, which is the sense that Urmson has in mind with this variety of sainthood and heroism. It seems that we must be prepared to equate the relevant components of an autistic character with those of a virtuous character in identifying saints and heroes (2), which is the same problem that presented itself with regard to the first category above: the autistic condition cannot be equated to moral character. As in the case of sainthood and heroism (1), there are certainly autistic persons whose moral agency (in the sense described) would justify attributing to them sainthood or heroism (2), but based on the distinction between autistic condition and moral character, cases in which an autistic person effortlessly does a saintly (2) or heroic (2) deed in virtue of his or her condition cannot be counted as saints or heroes (2). The same interpretation used before can apply: in the context, if the context is taken to include the autistic condition, most if not all would succeed in doing the duty in question; therefore, the deed is not saintly or heroic (2). This argument can be extended to the case of sainthood and heroism (3b).

Thus we have seen the problems that arise when we reflect on the idea that autistic agents find some ordinary obligations (where ordinary obligations are those obligations that belong to ordinary agents) to be extraordinarily difficult to fulfill and some obligations that ordinary agents would usually find difficult to be rather easy to fulfill. It seems we can deal adequately with those obligations that autistic agents can fulfill more easily than ordinary agents, but a problem lingers with respect to those ordinarily easy obligations that autistic agents find difficult. The first issue that needs to be addressed is the sense, if any, in which autistic agents have such obligations. Two possibilities present themselves: either they are nonexistent or they are more minimal than those of an ordinary agent. In either case, the successful fulfillment of the ordinary obligation turns out to be a supererogatory act; it is something that is beyond the obligations of an autistic agent in the sense that such an act could not properly be demanded of the autistic agent. An autistic person who does such a deed is a good candidate for sainthood or heroism (3a), one who goes beyond the call of duty by way of abnormal self-control. The claim, then, is this: some autistic persons can achieve moral sainthood or moral heroism by fulfilling an ordinary obligation, if the autistic person’s obligation in the same context is less demanding than the ordinary obligation, since in that case the fulfillment of the ordinary obligation is an act of supererogation, which is achieved with “abnormal self-control.”[27] In addition, it is important to note that many autistic agents of this sort no doubt consider themselves obligated to fulfill some of the ordinary obligations that no one could properly demand that they fulfill; however, Urmson points out, “that there is no action, however quixotic, heroic, or saintly, which the agent may not regard himself as obliged to perform, as much as he may feel himself obliged to tell the truth and to keep his promises.”[28] Just because an autistic person thinks he or she is obligated to fulfill even an ordinary obligation, this is not necessarily the case.

Let us now consider more closely how an autistic agent’s completion of what would ordinarily be a merely obligatory act can become a saintly or heroic act of supererogation. A very good way of looking at this is through the concept of sacrifice. Vanessa Carbonell construes sacrifices as “gross losses of well-being,”[29] which of course is to allow that a sacrifice might not represent a net loss of well-being. With respect to well-being, Carbonell makes reference to Darwall’s rational care theory, saying, “a person’s welfare is whatever it is rational for us to desire for her insofar as we care about her.”[30] In addition, in much the same way that a supererogatory act can be thought of as obligatory by the agent, certain losses can count as sacrifices even when the agent does not consider them to be sacrificial, or in Carbonell’s words, “we must be willing to accept that an agent need not be aware of a given cost for that cost to count as a sacrifice.”[31] This is an objective account of sacrifice, which “requires that individual tastes and preferences be at least somewhat intelligible to others, and it accords them value in virtue of that intelligibility.”[32] In addition, a sacrifice in this sense is possible both in the completion of an obligatory act and in the completion of a supererogatory act. As such, sacrificial acts are one way in which an agent can become a saint or hero in all three of Urmson’s senses. With regard to the first sense, if an agent makes a sacrifice that most would fail to make in order to complete a duty, and the agent does so with effort, then an agent is either a saint or a hero (depending on the nature of the sacrifice). The second category can accommodate this sense of sacrifice just as well. The fact that the sacrifice is made without effort is no reflection on whether or not there is, objectively, a sacrifice being made. Lastly, both senses of the third category of saints and heroes can accommodate sacrifices such that they are supererogatory acts, in the sense that the gross well-being lost could not be exacted as a debt.

This account of sacrifice is advantageous in that it does not take the loss of unintelligible or even harmful things that an agent might consider good or valuable to be a legitimate sacrifice. Interestingly, the example given to illustrate sacrifice in this sense is an autistic example: Raymond, of Rain Man fame. Raymond has a rigid schedule for television viewing, which, if broken, leads to harmful consequences. If we try to understand Raymond through his autistic love of rules, patterns, routines, and the like, we can see his behavior as intelligible, and on this basis it can be considered a sacrifice for Raymond to miss his scheduled programming.[33] Sacrifice is thus highly applicable to our account of autistic sainthood and heroism (3a). For an ordinary agent, it is obligatory to miss a favorite television program in favor of certain other demands, such as picking a friend up at the airport. For someone like Raymond (someone who also fits the profile of an autistic agent in our sense), the obligation to miss a television program does not exist; this level of sacrifice is not warranted by a friend’s request. Should our agent decide that it is better to pick his friend up, being motivated by a general desire to do the right thing, the sacrifice would render what would for an ordinary agent be an obligation a supererogatory act for the autistic agent. Additionally, it is easy to see that this kind of behavior and the sort of consideration behind it can meet the conditions for moral heroism and perhaps even moral sainthood (3a). Through great self-control, the autistic agent has gone beyond the call of duty in doing something that is just obligatory for an ordinary moral agent. This is why autistic persons often seem worthy of admiration for behaving even somewhat clumsily in some moral situations.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert. “Saints.” The Journal of Philsoosphy. Vol. 81, no. 7 (Jul., 1984), pp. 392-401.

Baron-Cohen, Simon. Autism and Asperger Syndrome (The Facts). Oxford, New York: 2008.

Carbonell, Vanessa. “The Ratcheting-Up Effect.” (forthcoming)

Kennett, Jeanette. “Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency.” The Philosophical Quarterly. Vol. 52, no. 208 (Jul., 2002), pp. 340-357.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. “What Morality is Not.” Philosophy. Vol. 32, no. 123 (Oct., 1957), pp. 325-335.

McGeer, Victoria. “Varieties of Moral Agency: Lessons from Autism (and Psychopathy).” Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2008.

Urmson, J. O. “Saints and Heroes.” (? [1958])

Wolf, Susan. “Moral Saints.” The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 79, no. 8 (Aug., 1982), pp. 419- 439.

[1] Baron-Cohen (2008), pg. 6

[2] Ibid. 25

[3] Ibid. 12

[4] It seems likely that at least some cases of Baron-Cohen’s medium-functioning autism could be appropriate objects for this enquiry. By no means will I deny this, but I need not worry much about the fine distinctions of autism as long as I can point to at least some appropriate objects of enquiry.

[5] Kennett construes empathy as an “imaginative process of simulation” with “resulting emotional contagion and reciprocal awareness.” (2002) pg. 345

[6] Kennett (2002) pg. 345

[7] McGeer (2008) pg. 240

[8] Ibid. 242

[9] Ibid. 232-233, also in Kennett 351

[10] Ibid. 243

[11] Ibid. 243-244

[12] Ibid. 244

[13] Kennett 352

Kennett goes on to argue that autistic persons like Sinclair are operating in an essentially Kantian framework, but we need not commit to either side of that debate. McGeer’s paper argues the Humean line in a direct response to Kennett.

[14] McGeer (2008) 234-235

[15] See Wolf (1982)

[16] See Adams (1984)

[17] Urmson (1958) pg. 200

[18] Ibid. 200

[19] Ibid. 201

[20] Ibid. 214

[21] MacIntyre (1957) pg. 328

[22] Urmson (1958) pg. 203

[23] Ibid. 208

[24] Kennett (2002) pg. 352

[25] This is a plausible move. We frequently invoke conditions like physical injury (to choose a relatively arbitrary example) by which to render the fulfillment of an obligation more praiseworthy, perhaps even heroic or saintly. A soldier who has been severely wounded but continues to fight, according to his orders, may be a hero (though probably not a hero (1)), where his wounds are taken to be part of the context of the situation. This would seem to make the relevant question for sainthood and heroism (1) whether most autistic persons would fulfill a particular obligation. This does seem to be a way in which autistic persons can achieve sainthood or heroism (1), if indeed there are obligations for which autistic persons are responsible but most of them fail to fulfill, which sounds problematic. After all, if all obligations can be exacted as a debt, then I fail to see what we could demand of autistic persons knowing most of them would not be capable of fulfilling the obligation.

[26] Ibid. 349

[27] If the autistic person could fulfill an ordinary obligation without effort, then that just would be the autistic person’s obligation. Thus only ordinary obligations that the autistic person finds difficult qualify.

[28] Urmson (1958) pg. 204

[29] Carbonell (forthcoming) pg. 6

[30] Ibid. 6

[31] Ibid. 4

[32] Ibid. 5

[33] Ibid. 6

Heidegger and Aristotle on Technology

2010-08-30T01:27:00.005-04:00

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger relies heavily on an exegesis of a few passages of Aristotle. In this paper, I will not only attempt to provide an exegesis of Heidegger’s important paper—it is arguably the genesis of the philosophy of technology—but also, in so doing, look closely at what Heidegger has to say in reference to Aristotle. Ultimately, Heidegger is trying to “prepare a free relationship to [technology],” a relationship that “opens our human existence to the essence of technology.”^{^[1]} A free relationship to technology is therefore open to the essence of technology; therefore, Heidegger devotes considerable attention to the essence of technology.

With the mention of essence, we seem already to be treading Aristotelian ground, since it is the Aristotelian sense of essence that Heidegger is employing here. This sense is captured in the several words that Aristotle used at various times that are commonly translated as “essence,” among them ti esti, to einai, to ti en einai, and ousia. These are not all exactly the same thing, but I will address them as they come to bear on the matter at hand.

Through the word ousia, essence is inseparably linked to substance in Aristotelian thought, since ousia is not only a word often translated essence, but it is also the word for substance. For Aristotle, substances come in two kinds: primary substance and secondary substance. In the Categories, Aristotle explains that a primary substance “is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g. the individual man or the individual horse,” where the secondary substance are “the species in which these things primarily called substances are…as also are the genera of these species.”^{^[2]}

Essence can be understood in relation to both primary and secondary substances. Socrates is a primary substance, and there are properties without which Socrates would cease to be the individual, Socrates. Similarly, Socrates is a human being, which is a secondary substance, and there are properties—rationality, for instance—without which Socrates would cease to be human (and would therefore cease to be Socrates, as well). Anything that Socrates might lose but would still allow him to be Socrates is an accidental attribute, such as his hair. Essences and accidents do not exhaustively describe properties, however, since there is a third category, called propria. Propria are properties that are necessary but not essential. Socrates cannot be human without the capacity to understand grammar, since rationality entails this capacity. But rationality is explanatorily prior to grammaticality, and so it is essential, where grammaticality is a proprium. In the Topics, Aristotle explains 102a18-30 that a proprium “is something which does not indicate the essence of a thing, yet belongs to that thing alone, and is predicated convertibly of it.”^{^[3]} So an essence, in Aristotelian terms, consists in properties that are both necessary for an entity to be what it is and that are explanatorily basic. So Heidegger’s investigation into the essence of technology can be expected to be aimed not only at seeing through what is accidental to technology and finding what technology is wherever and whenever it appears, but also at finding what is explanatorily basic among the necessary features of technology. For this is what an essence is for Aristotle.

In light of this Aristotelian conception of essence, Heidegger offers two common definitions of technology, which are the instrumental and anthropological definitions. First, “technology is a means to an end,” and second, “technology is a human activity.”^{^[4]} Though these are both correct about technology, they do not in any way constitute the essence of technology, which Heidegger explains in terms of a distinction between the correct and the true. The true is in the correct, just as tree-ness is in every tree, but the correct is no more the true than any tree is tree-ness. This distinction is remarkably like the distinction between essence and proprium. Both the instrumental and the anthropological are necessary for technology, but they are posterior to some more explanatorily basic essence. Whatever explains all the propria is the essence. Similarly, whatever is in all the particulars is the universal, and since the universal is in any particular, it can be found in any particular, but so are propria, hence the aforementioned basicality requirement. Hence the principle, “we must seek the true by way of the correct,”^{^[5]} whereby Heidegger puts the instrumental definition of technology to use as a correct definition to seek the true concerning technology.

The concept of instrumentality leads Heidegger to causality, since means effect ends. This is not the Enlightenment or mechanical model of “billiard ball” causation (wherein one billiard ball strikes another and the latter reacts), following the example found in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of David Hume.^{^[6]} For Hume, that a particular effect follows from some purported cause is unknowable to the Understanding, that is, unknowable by reasoning a priori; rather, the association of causes with effects is learned a posteriori by the empirical observation of constant conjunctions and probabilistic reasoning. Whether there is a connection between them called “causation,” whatever it might be, is altogether secret. Heidegger appeals instead to the Aristotelian framework of causation, putting the four-causal structure of explanation to use in order to expound upon instrumentality. Traditionally, the four causes have been called the material cause, the formal cause, the final cause, and the efficient cause. For Heidegger, the modern concept of causation is mired in problems, mainly insofar as it limits itself to the efficient cause, “which brings about the effect.”^{^[7]} Heidegger asserts that what we now call the efficient cause was unknown to Aristotle, whose “doctrine neither knows the cause that is named by this term nor uses a Greek word that would correspond to it.”^{^[8]}

There are three passages in which Aristotle gives an account of his four causes, one in the Posterior Analytics, one in the Metaphysics and the other in the Physics. The Posterior Analytics account, referring to four types of explanation, says, “one, what it is to be a thing; one, that if certain things hold it is necessary that this does; another, what initiated the change; and fourth, the aim.”^{^[9]} What is called the efficient cause is of course that which initiates change.

In the Physics,

In one way, then, that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists, is called a cause, e.g. the bronze of the statue, the silver of the bowl, and the genera of which the bronze and the silver are species. In another way, the form or the archetype, i.e. the definition of the essence, and its genera, are called causes (e.g. of the octave the relation of 2:1, and generally number), and the parts in the definition. Again, the primary source of the change or rest; e.g. the man who deliberated is a cause, the father is the cause of the child, and generally what makes of what is made and what changes of what is changed. Again, in the sense of end or that for the sake of which a thing is done, e.g. health is the cause of walking about.^{^[10]}

In the Metaphysics, we read something very similar to that which is found in the Physics:

We call a cause (1) that from which (as immanent material) a thing comes into being, e.g. the bronze of the stature and the silver of the saucer, and the classes which include these. (2) The form or pattern, i.e. the formula of the essence, causes of the octave) and the parts of the formula. (3) That from which the change or the freedom from change first begins, e.g. the man who has deliberated is a cause, and the father a cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the thing made and the change-producing or changing. (4) The end, i.e. that for the sake of which a thing is, e.g. health is the cause of walking.^{^[11]}

In both the Physics and the Metaphysics, Aristotle goes on to relate the formal cause to one term for essence, both times the Greek to ti en einai. Given our earlier discussion of essence, however, it is important to note that Aristotle goes on to say in the Metaphysics that the essence is “the whole, the synthesis, and the form,”^{^[12]} which emphasizes the inseparability of the four causes in explaining something. There is no essence, there is no form, without the matter, nor without telic parts, nor without a source of motion. To inquire into the essence is to enquire into the whole.

As we can see, that Aristotle gave no particular name to that cause that came to be called the causa efficiens is true enough. The question is the extent to which Aristotle’s third cause corresponds to that which is called the causa efficiens: the mechanical cause of the Enlightenment. Clearly, Aristotle’s cause is much richer than the mechanical cause. Not only does it explain the billiard ball causation, but also addresses, in part, what we might call agent causation. The third cause is not only the billiard ball but also the agent that deliberately sets the cue ball into locomotion. Already we are distancing ourselves from the causa efficiens. Further, the causa efficiens as Heidegger is using it can hardly account for the motion that takes place in artistic creation. Aristotle’s third cause easily names the sculptor as the cause of a sculpture, but the causa efficiens is at a loss to do this, since it can hardly describe anything besides locomotion, where Aristotle’s third cause accounts for all kinds of motion. Now, Heidegger phrases the Aristotelian cause as “that from which the [thing’s] bringing forth and resting-in-self take and retain their first departure.”^{^[13]} If we understand “bringing forth” as motion and “resting-in-self” as rest, then there is no trouble in counting Heidegger’s definition as equivalent to any of Aristotle’s. Whether this is the case shall become clear below.

The thrust of Heidegger’s use of the Aristotelian four-causal structure of explanation is to establish the sense in which causality is relevant to the question of instrumentality; namely, what is required is causality in the sense of aition, or responsibility.^{^[14]} The four causes are four ways of being responsible, none of which alone constitutes a complete account; the four causes, the four ways of being responsible, must be taken together, as we have already seen in our investigation of Aristotle’s text. Heidegger equates his sense of aition to the verb “to occasion.” To occasion is to be responsible in the sense that “the principal characteristic of being responsible is…starting something on the way to its arrival.”^{^[15]} This is not mechanical causation, and it certainly sounds like Aristotle’s third cause, but it must not be forgotten that all four causes are modes of occasioning, since all four are ways of being responsible. Accordingly, Heidegger translates a passage of Plato’s Symposium n order to introduce the concept of poiesis: “‘Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth.”^{^[16]} So poiesis and bringing-forth are interchangeable. Recall Heidegger’s account of Aristotle’s third cause, which can now be read as “that from which a thing’s poiesis and resting-in-self take and retain their first departure.” The key, then, is the “first departure.” The cause is that which initiates poiesis; in this sense, Heidegger is true to Aristotle.

Now, “bringing-forth brings hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment,” and this is within “revealing,” which is the Greek aletheria, which is the Latin veritas, which is truth in the sense of correctness, discussed above.^{^[17]} Inquiry into instrumentality has yielded revealing, in which all bringing-forth (or poiesis) is “grounded,” and bringing-forth “gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning,”^{^[18]} which are the four causes, which bring with them instrumentality. Instrumentality is revealing; therefore, “technology is a way of revealing.”^{^[19]}

The Greek poiesis, says Heidegger, includes techne, technical craft. Techne is a way of revealing. He emphasizes the inclusiveness of the Greek concept of techne as being closely bound up with episteme as a way of revealing truth in the sense of bringing-forth, in the sense of unconcealment.^{^[20]} In pointing to the distinction between techne and episteme, Heidegger evokes Aristotle once more, attributing the origin of the distinction to the Nicomachean Ethics VI.3-4. In fact, Aristotle distinguishes among five modes of aletheuein, of revealing, in Heidegger’s teminology: techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, and nous. Of episteme, Aristotle says:

knowledge [episteme]…is a state of capacity to demonstrate, and he has the other limiting characteristics which we specify in the Analytics; for it is when a man believes in a certain way and the principles (arche) are known to him that he has knowledge, since if they are not better-known to him than the conclusion, he will have his knowledge incidentally.^{^[21]}

In addition, episteme is concerned with things that cannot be otherwise.^{^[22]} Now, in the Analytics, knowledge can be gained by demonstration of what is less obvious from what is more obvious. Such demonstration is done from first principles (arche), which are known without need of demonstration. Aristotle famously discusses the origin of how we come to know archai at the close of the Posterior Analytics (II.19). There he claims that “from perception comes memory” and “memories that are many in number form a single experience [empeiria]. And from experience…there comes a principle of skill (techne) and understanding (episteme)—of skill if it deals with how things come about (genesis), of understanding if it deals with what is the case.”^{^[23]} So both techne and episteme come to be known in the same way: empeiria, experience. Aristotle presents this process by analogy with the formation of a battle line. One perception takes a stand in the memory, and others join it and form a strong position until one has gained understanding of the universal. Still, we have seen one difference, but it is not the difference mentioned in the Ethics.

Returning to the Nicomachean Ethics, of techne, Aristotle says that “art [techne] is identical with a state of capacity to make [poiesis], involving a true course of reasoning.”^{^[24]} In addition, techne concerns things that can be or not be^{^[25]} (which is why they can be brought forth). As we just saw in the Analytics, technai are learned empirically, by repeated perception, just like the truths of episteme; however the Analytics concerns techne with genesis, where the Ethics concerns it with poiesis. Does this suggest any problem? A genesis is a coming into being, where a poiesis is a bringing into being. Thus, it seems that the Analtyics account is simply approaching techne from the angle of epistemology—what is learned as techne is a genesis—but the Ethics is concerned with techne in practice. To have techne is a capacity to engage in poiesis, which to know about the genesis of whatever one is bringing-forth. So the texts are consistent in their usage of techne, and so we can draw the following conclusion. We have seen that episteme is knowledge of what is the case that cannot be otherwise, but techne is knowledge of how things come to be the case (what is responsible for a thing), concerning things that can be otherwise. (No work of art has to be—a point of profound importance when we reach the end.)

Next, Heidegger questions whether this relationship between episteme and techne is the case only with respect to Greek handwork technology, or whether it is applicable to modern technology, also. For Heidegger, the relationship between handwork technology and modern technology involves both continuity and discontinuity. On the one hand, both are modes of revealing, but on the other, only handwork technology is revealing in the sense of poiesis. This is near the heart of the problem with modern technology as a mode of revealing; that which it brings into unconcealment (i.e. that which it reveals), taken by itself, is not true. But this is to jump ahead a bit.

Heidegger looks at the difference between handwork technology and modern technology in terms of technology’s relationship to modern, post-Enlightenment science, which is at once before modern technology and dependent on technological apparatus.^{^[26]} For Heidegger, modern technology is chronologically posterior to modern science, but in its essence it is historically prior to modern science.^{^[27]} That is, modern science is of the same essence as modern technology. This all makes sense when considered from an Aristotelian perspective. In terms of explanation, or of being responsible—that is, in terms of the four causes—it is not difficult to see how modern science can both be responsible for modern technology and arise later. Since the four causes are inseparable, the appearance of the essence of modern science in modern technology, where modern science is more explanatorily basic, is perfectly consistent with modern science’s later appearance, as itself, in the chronology of history. Heidegger proceeds to pursue the question of what the essence of modern technology is in a framework in which his assessment of modern technology and science makes sense.

Ultimately, Heidegger calls the essence of modern technology Gestell or “Enframing,” which is “that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve.”^{^[28]} This definition consists in several parts, which Heidegger has spent the preceding few pages developing. First of all, the revealing of modern technology cannot be understood in terms of a bringing-forth or poiesis; rather, this revealing is “a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.”^{^[29]} The difference is in storage. Heidegger points out that though the windmill, known to pre-modern technology, draws energy from nature, it does not store it. It draws on the wind as it would blow anyway; the wind is not revealed as anything but wind. This is contrasted with modern mining operations, for which “the earth reveals itself as a coal mining district [etc.]”^{^[30]} The ways of revealing are, in this case, “unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about,”^{^[31]} and this comprises unconcealment of beings as “standing-reserve,” or Bestand. Specifically, “everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered in this way has its own standing.”^{^[32]} So, modern technology as a way of revealing unconceals beings as standing-reserve by way of ordering. For instance, an automobile in a garage is standing-reserve until it is ordered for transportation, and this ordering reveals in such a way as to conceal and unconceal. So, in order to be revealed as standing-reserve, a thing must be ordered as such. Modern science, for Heidegger, is an enormous exercise in ordering. It is now possible to make sense of Enframing, the essence of technology. Inasmuch as Enframing challenges beings, it reveals them to be resources, and these resources are ordered as the standing-reserve, which is what is revealed by the aforementioned challenging.

Stated elsewhere, “The essence of modern technology starts man upon the way that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve,” where “to start upon a way” is “to send.” This leads to the idea of destining, which is “that sending-that-gathers which first starts a man upon a way of revealing.”^{^[33]} Destining is to be distinguished from “a fate that compels,” which is antithetical to freedom. Thus, Heidegger says, “Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing,” which is not to say that “technology is the fate of our age, where ‘fate’ means the inevitableness of an unalterable course.”^{^[34]} A destined course is alterable, in that one can destine a different way of revealing. Heidegger calls Enframing, the essence of technology, “a destining of revealing,”^{^[35]} that is, (again) it starts man upon the way (destining) of revealing (as standing reserve); however, “In this way [Enframing as a destining of revealing] we are already sojourning within the open space of destining, a destining that in no way confines us to a stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to be the same thing, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil,” and that is unexpectedly a “freeing claim,” says Heidegger.^{^[36]} So much for Heidegger the romantic reactionary or Heidegger the progressive.^{^[37]}

If the essence of technology results in a freeing claim, then what is the problem? It is the destining of revealing itself, which is “in itself not just any danger, but the danger.”^{^[38]} Further, the destining Enframing as the mode of revealing is “the supreme danger.” The danger in general, with any destining of a revealing, is captured by the famous gestalt figure of the duckrabbit. One can destine the duckrabbit to be unconcealed (revealed) as a duck, thereby concealing the rabbit, or vice versa. Both duck and rabbit are correct, but neither is the whole truth of the duckrabbit; neither is the formal cause of the duckrabbit; neither is the essence of the duckrabbit. Each is a revealing, but neither reveals the truth as duckrabbit. Applied to the case of technology, “Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance,”^{^[39]} and also, “Enframing blocks the shining-forth and holding-sway of truth.”^{^[40]} This is because Enframing is but one mode of revealing, and if it is taken to be the only mode of revealing, then disaster ensues. Hubert Dreyfus explains, “The threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition from which we can be saved.”^{^[41]} That ontological condition stems from man taking everything as standing-reserve, and “he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve,” but short of falling into that condition, man “exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth,” and so man views everything as his construct, and “it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”^{^[42]} In short, the destining of Enframing as revealing leads man to look at being in a way that distances him from even his own essence.

Heidegger takes the words of the poet Holderlin, “‘But where danger is, grows/ The saving power also’” as his guide to the investigation of the soteriological question, which he takes to be “fetch[ing] something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into genuine appearing.”^{^[43]} The saving power, according to the poet, is to be found growing precisely in Enframing, the essence of technology, where the danger is. At this point, Heidegger shifts his concept of essence away from the classical sense and toward “the ways in which [things] hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay—the way in which they ‘essence.’”^{^[44]} To “essence” in this sense is to endure; in technology, Enframing as a destining of revealing is what endures. Heidegger goes on to claim that “Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.”^{^[45]} Enframing endures, therefore Enframing is granted, as is its destining as revealing, and “the granting that sends [destines] in one way or another into revealing is as such the saving power.”^{^[46]} So, through the investigation of Enframing—that danger, the essence of technology—we find that the saving power does indeed arise, and “the saving power lets man see and enter into the higest dignigy of his essence. This dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment—and with it, from the first, the concealment—of all coming to presence on this earth.”^{^[47]} Man is for this reason free, that a destining is not fated, but a destining is granted; therefore, the saving power grows. He is not free in that he has control over technology—such a view obtains the opposite result—and he is not free in abandoning technology—in its essence the saving power must grow that allows for the free relationship to exist. Man is not yet saved, and his destiny is not fixed, so he may either go the way of pure Enframing, revealing being just as standing-reserve, or the saving power, whatever it is—Heidegger strongly suggests it might be art—which “must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it.”^{^[48]} At this point, we have returned to Heidegger’s aim stated at the beginning; we have seen how he thinks the growth of the saving power can allow man to enter into a free relationship with technology. On a final note, recall that techne concerns what can be otherwise, where episteme, so dear to modern science, concerns what cannot be otherwise. Techne, in the sense of poiesis, speaks to freedom—it is a way of knowing that is apt to reveal things as being other than standing-reserve, to say the least. This, it seems, was Heidegger’s suspicion, and it is why he devoted such attention to the Aristotelian sense of techne. Is the poiesis therein the saving power?

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Jonathan Barnes, ed. Princeton, Princeton: 1984.

Dreyfus, Hubert. “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham: 2004. Pgs. 53-62.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham: 2004. Pgs. 35-51.

Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Tom Beauchamp, ed. Oxford, New York: 1999.

^{^[1]} Heidgger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham, Maryland: 2004. pp. 35-52

^{^[2]} Categories 2a14-17

^{^[3]} Topics 102a18-19

^{^[4]} Heidegger 35

^{^[5]} Ibid. 36. Even this seems to be an Aristotelian principle: “The mode of existence and essence of the separable it is the business of philosophy to define” (194b14-15).

^{^[6]} Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Tom Beauchamp, ed. Oxford, New York: 1999. Sec. 4, pt. 1

^{^[7]} Heidegger 37

^{^[8]} Ibid.

^{^[9]} Posterior Analytics 94a21-23

^{^[10]} Physics 194b24-35

^{^[11]} Metaphysics 1013a24-34

^{^[12]} Ibid. 1013b23-24

^{^[13]} Heidegger 37

^{^[14]} Ibid. 37

^{^[15]} Ibid. 38

^{^[16]} Ibid. 38

^{^[17]} Ibid. 38-39

^{^[18]} Ibid. 39

^{^[19]} Ibid. 39

^{^[20]} Ibid. 39

^{^[21]} Nicomachean Ethics 1139b31-35

^{^[22]} Ibid. 1139b20

^{^[23]} Posterior Analytics 100a4-9

^{^[24]} Nicomachean Ethics 1140a9-10

^{^[25]} Ibid. 1140a12-13

^{^[26]} Heidegger 39-40

^{^[27]} Ibid. 43-44

^{^[28]} Ibid. 42

^{^[29]} Ibid. 40

^{^[30]} Ibid. 40

^{^[31]} Ibid. 41

^{^[32]} Ibid. 41

^{^[33]} Ibid. 45

^{^[34]} Ibid. 45

^{^[35]} Ibid. 45

^{^[36]} Ibid. 45.

^{^[37]} Hubert Dreyfus dispenses nicely with these misunderstandings in Dreyfus, Hubert. “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology.” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology. David Kaplan, ed. Rowman, Lanham: 2004. pp. 53-62

^{^[38]} Heidegger 46

^{^[39]} Ibid. 36

^{^[40]} Ibid. 37

^{^[41]} Dreyfus 54

^{^[42]} Heidegger 46

^{^[43]} Ibid. 47

^{^[44]} Ibid. 48

^{^[45]} Ibid. 49

^{^[46]} Ibid. 49

^{^[47]} Ibid. 49

^{^[48]} Ibid. 50

Foul Harvest

2010-08-27T20:37:00.008-04:00

Every season reaps the foul harvest sown in the season before it. This is not a historical law. All historical laws are false. The latter is true, but it is not a historical law; rather, it is a meta-historical principle. Historical laws concern the basic actors of history. If the basic actors of history perform in generalizable ways, then there are historical laws. I contend that the basic actors of history do not do this.

There are some who claim that the basic actors of history do perform in scientifically generalizable ways. How this is conceived depends upon how one conceives the basic actors of history. Intuitively, it seems that human beings are these actors, and so the claim that human beings behave according to generalizable laws according to the fixity of their nature is a sufficient condition for the existence of a historical law. This is how Mr. David Hume conceived of human nature and history, and indeed he saw history as a repository of data whence to derive laws of human nature. Whether one classes the laws of human nature among the laws of nature proper is another matter.

Others claim that basic physical entities are the basic actors of history. Marquis Laplace, when he infamously claimed that by physical analysis a super-intellect could determine all past and future states of the universe, endorsed this kind of determinism. History is hereby reduced to a single, extraordinarily complex formula. The laws of history are the laws of nature.

Others still claim that various collective entities belong among the basic actors of history. So Herr Marx has his economic classes, Herr Spengler has his civilizations, and M. Comte has his societies, for example. The reasoning behind such theses differs among proponents. As far as historical laws are concerned, M. Comte demands attention. M. Comte told us that the sciences necessarily arise in a particular order in history: Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Sociology. This is a historical law. Sociology was inaugurated by M. Comte, and it was to be the master of all the sciences. It was to be the science of human affairs, defining the lawful structure of human activity. (Psychology, by the way, was thought to reduce to mere biology.) Societies are governed by unique laws that are not expressed by any other science, and history is subsumed under these laws, and in so doing it is absorbed into sociology.

Sociology after M. Comte, a somewhat different creature, retained this fixation on generalizing data into social laws, under the lordship of logical positivism, itself a rather different creature than M. Comte's classical positivism. In any case, sociology was the ill-conceived effort to absorb history into the epistemology of positivistic natural science. This, too results into the absorption of history under some other discipline, perhaps sociology, perhaps physics. The autonomy of history, in any case, is eliminated, as the basic actors of history are at best no longer historical actors, but sociological (or psychological, or some such) entities, and at worst they are reduced to the basic entities of another science, such as physics or biology, and history becomes a description of the complex outworking of that autonomous field of inquiry.

The autonomy of history, therefore, demands that we reject the idea of historical laws in the sense of a law of nature. To say that these laws are of individual human actors is to do psychology (positivistically). To say they are of collections of individuals (be they structures or what have you) collapses history into sociology (again, of a positivisitic variety). To say that they are of a more basic science is to reduce history to that science, save for some emergence thesis. This, however, would only give us sociology or psychology again.

As we said, Hume believed that history could provide data whereby generalizations concerning human nature could be derived; however, never has anyone come close to succeeding in an undertaking like this, which in itself suggests that no such account of human nature can exist. History is not suitable for such a task, for human nature is not an unchanging substance over which historical change flows. Human nature is, at least in part, a historical product; therefore it is impossible to derive an account of human nature in terms of scientific laws from history. Considering also that human beings are the basic actors of history, then it follows that the basic actors of history do not perform according to scientific laws; therefore, there are no historical laws. The guiding light for the latter argument, not to mention many other instances above, is of course the late Prof. Collingwood. One can deny that the basic actors of history are human beings in order to avoid this conclusion, but we have already seen the consequences of doing that; namely, one ceases to do history and denies the autonomy of the discipline.

Hence the meta-historical principle: All historical laws are false. Now, here is another meta-historical principle: Every season reaps the foul harvest sown in the season before it. There are two historical time-units involved in this principle, namely seasons. One is prior and the other is posterior, both logically and temporally. There is an action ascribed to each season: in the prior season there is sowing to be done, and in the posterior season, there is harvesting. Being that seasons follow one after another, each posterior season is also a prior season to another, more posterior season, and each prior season is posterior to another, more prior season. So in each season there is both sowing and harvesting, for history is a continuum and not a cycle. A task of the historian is to relate what is sown to what is harvested in terms of logical priority and posteriority, not mere temporal priority and posteriority. Were the latter his task, he would have finished his task simply by saying that Augustus Caesar died before St. Augustine was born. The historian must tell us what Augustus Caesar has to do with Augustine. A historian might therefore argue that the idea of Rome that Augustus Caesar inculcated during his reign set a tone for the idea of Rome that can traced through the sack of that great city, and in this way we can understand how Augustine's idea of Rome, say, in City of God, falls in the development of the idea in broad perspective. Augustus Caesar sowed the seed, and St. Augustine harvested some of it. This gives us a more general meta-historical principle: Every season reaps the harvest of the seed sown in the season before it. As a principle, it merely notes that there is historical priority and posteriority.

If the harvest is foul, then foul seed was sown in a prior season. At present we reap many foul harvests, and we sow the foul harvest of next season. The foulness of the harvest follows from the foulness of the seed sown, and the foulness of the seed sown follows from the foulness of the historical actor that sows the seed. Therefore, the foul harvest follows from the foulness of historical actors. This foulness has been stated in a meta-historical principle, but it is tempting to argue that such foulness can only be derived historically. To say that a historical actor is foul is to know what it means for an actor to be foul, and then to find a season in which the actor sows seed for a foul harvest. This argument is sound, but it does not dismantle the meta-historical principle as stated. The principle simply states that foul harvests follow from the sowing of like seed. It alone does not claim that any foul harvest has actually occurred.

A stronger argument against the principle is to make foulness out to be a historical construct. If we cannot understand foulness except through history, then we are invoking a historical entity in a meta-historical principle, and therefore that principle is viciously circular qua meta-historical. It can be used as a merely historical principle, to describe a particular harvest as foul, where foul is a product of a defined historical development, but again, it is not meta-historical. Thus the principle qua meta-historical must be defended on the grounds that foulness is a meta-historical concept. Foulness, as I am using it, is a broad term meant to include such moral terms as evil, injustice, and the like. If at least one such term can be established to be meta-historical, then this principle can be sustained as meta-historical. Thus the integrity of this principle depends on a moral ontology that includes meta-historical terms: in some sense, evil (or whatever the terms are) is the same for Caesar as it is for me or any other possible basic historical actor, or human being.

If we grant the integrity of the principle, then the following consideration proves interesting. Suppose there is such a sowing as the Fall of Man. The harvest of that seed is all posterior history, and it is a season of foul harvest. In this sense, history can be conceived as a single season of foul harvest following from a change in the basic actors of history. It is also conceivable to think that human beings, as in some sense historical products, could be changed again, restored, as it were, in history, not by their own performance, being condemned to a foul harvest, but by the performance of a good gardener, sowing good seed. This of course demands that human beings not be the only historical actors, but this, I believe, coheres with all claims made thus far.

This illustrates a way of viewing historical time not as divided into atomic units in an absolute sense, but as divided relatively, as explanandum relates to explanans. The season of foul harvest is the explanandum, whose explanans is the Fall of Man. Another example would be the explanandum, St. Augustine's idea of Rome (with all its components), and the explanans, Augustus Caesar's idea of Rome, and the sack of Rome, and so on. This also serves to illustrate the possibility of very complex relationships between a complex explanandum and a complex explanans. Returning to the original example, we can see how human beings as (in a sense) historical products may be explained as foul relative a certain explanans, but how a re-explanation of human beings according to a new explanans that answers the prior explanandum can change (in a sense) what a human being, as a historical actor, is. When it is God doing the explaining, we can see how the unfolding of historical events can change the disposition of human beings relative God; that is, how God considers a human being to be. For God's ordering of historical time by explanandum and explanans and action by a new explanans to effect a new explanandum also orders historical actors. This is a history with great continuity and yet with radical breaks.

Note that an explanans works in two directions. With the temporal direction, it works in the sense of explanatory priority or "causation" broadly conceived (that is, not the limited sense known to Enlightenment philosophy or natural science). Against the temporal direction, it works teleologically. So the death and resurrection of Jesus, says the Christian, is teleologically prior (in the sense of an Aristotelian final cause) to all that came before it since that earlier explanans: the Fall of Man. It is causally prior (in the sense of an Aristotelian efficient cause--a cause that initiates or stops change) to the explanandum that is the present age, which Christianity knows as the Last Days. Both of these are logical directions. By the same token, the explanans, the parousia, amounts to the present age being teleologically posterior to the New Heavens and the New Earth, and the New Heavens and the New Earth being a causal explanandum posterior to the present age. An explanans in the sense I am employing it here is therefore akin to a pivot on which the surrounding history turns. History has its radical breaks, and its radical continuities, according to the ordering of historical time.

Such are, I hope, the speculations that will set in motion a far richer philosophy.