I have lately been reading about thinkers who attempt to elevate the particular over the general. But I have trouble even wrapping my head around the idea.
Is it possible to speak of something being particular without implying a relationship to generality? “Particular” is a general term referring to the non-general.
A particular is an individual item in a class—so there can be no particular without classes. If there are classes that only have one item total, then can they meaningfully be spoken of as classes?
To think of the properties of a particular is to think in terms of properties that could apply to others—that is, properties are general concepts, intrinsically.
To say, as Wittgenstein does, that resemblances within a class are family resemblances, is to presuppose the general concept of “family resemblances.”
This is not intended as a critique of Wittgenstein. On the contrary: it is simply a confession that I do not understand the relationship between generals and particulars.
A newborn does not construct reality from first premises or observe a neutral array of objects which must be interpreted. A baby is born into a set of natural relations, especially with the parents and especially with the mother.
Babies don’t have language pressed on them; they instinctively seek it out. Once they find it, they begin soaking it up like a sponge.
Everyone, whether an infant, a child, a teenager, an adult, or the elderly, are thrown into a situation full of significance. Life resembles a game in which both the rules and the purpose are hinted at but never revealed. We encounter most objects in their perceived relation to the game of life. The scissors in our desk in elementary school are not just some meaningless matter; its shape and its location in our desk already hint that it has some specific purpose.
The reason that the rules and purpose of the game are never completely revealed is that they are influenced—I hesitate to go as far as to say “determined”—by the playing of the game itself.
A lot of the game is mere doing—actually using the scissors to cut paper, going to school, sitting at your desk. But a great deal of the game is telling, or saying, or listening—which of course is a kind of doing, but a very special kind.
A community is sustained by a conjective web of significances, including practices understood largely inarticulately, and narratives that give articulated (as well as implied) purposiveness to the world around us.
This web can be usefully thought of in terms of network clusters, rather than something uniform and discrete.
We play sub-games with subsets of the community which nevertheless have implications for the larger game of the community at large.
Sub-games and sub-communities are sources of experimentation with new ideas, rules, and practices. They are therefore the sources of both creativity and disorder for the community at large.
The moves we make can have very different significance depending on which game they’re interpreted as being a part of. A constructive move in a sub-game could be a destructive or counterproductive move if interpreted as a part of the larger game, or a different sub-game. The reverse is also possible.
The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority can be seen as arguing that our current overall situation pushes us to make moves that are considered constructive within our sub-games but are destructive in the larger game. But our current media environment has largely dissolved the walls between such games, so that they are carrying on as before but the moves can no longer be made within isolated sub-games. We tend to view this as good when the moves made by our ideological enemies in previously obscured sub-games are now observable to us, and vulnerable to attack. But the cumulative effect of everyone pursuing such a strategy is negation and nihilism.
Let’s hope that we’re able to adapt the game of life to our new information environment so that such a result is no longer fore-ordained.
It does annoy me, on occasion, before I catch myself and remember that the whole Christian project is a project of open futility–
About that: the Second Sunday of Easter is always Doubting Thomas Sunday, so doubt is much on my mind, being a fervent believer, liturgically speaking, meditating on the elements of my faith, which is something else, at my age, having lived through the emergence of a culture which was mostly Christian into one which is mostly not, especially up here in Western New York and the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario. Doubt, right? It’s essential to the Faith.
They were upstairs, behind locked doors, afraid, those Eleven who were with him from the very beginning, and they all saw him die. Thomas, called “The Twin,” puffs his chest out, saying, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
Well, Thomas, can’t you do that to a corpse?
Strange things.
I don’t understand the intellectual hostility to Christianity, especially when people I consider friends publicly wish there were fewer of me, less of my influence in life and culture. Why? Because there are bad Christians? And the half-baked dismissal of the fervent, you know, glib high school angry atheist stuff, always as an aside, never as a grown-up inquiry into this two thousand year old faith with a billion adherents, and growing (despite Europe and North America), which has roots in a strange Ancient Near Eastern blood cult another two thousand years hence.
The Christian project is a project of open futility, though, and I have to remind myself of that.
Nevertheless, I do take a little pleasure in some of the materialist investigations into the Faith, first transforming Christianity into a “religion,” which is a neat intellectual move, making the Faith, which dominates the life and culture of Western Civilization, indistinguishable from shamanistic druidic magicka, only distinguishing by time elapsed. When the materialists talk about ritual, ignoring my own call for distinctions within these hallowed halls—
This behavior of the materialists, all of them together, namely, wishing there were fewer of me, reducing my beliefs into a primordial pool of beliefs, and talking about my rites and rituals without making proper distinctions, creates in me a sense that a kind of recursion is going on:
The materialist sees the Christian, and comments. The Christian sees the materialist commenting, and comments. The materialist sees the Christian commenting on the comment, and so forth. To me, it’s like one of those wonderfully absurd Monty Python sketches:
Scene: Lower middle-class apartment, evening, husband sitting in comfortable chair reading The Times, wife making efforts at wifely cleaning. Two men appear in the window, dressed in safari clothing, writing in notebooks.
Wife: Herman, they’re watching us again!
Herman: Who are, Margret?
Margret: The Materialists.
Herman: Oh, that’s all right, dear, they’re just researching.
Margret: Researching?
Herman: That’s right, Margret; they’ve come from a long way away just to learn about our behavior in the wild instead of in captivity.
Laugh track
Margret: Well, I don’t like it, not one bit. (closes curtains. The materialist safari move to the other window)
Laugh track
Margret: They won’t go away, Herman!
Herman: Of course not, dear, they’re Materialists.
Laugh track
Herman: Ask them what they want, and maybe they’ll go away.
Margret: What do you want?
Materialists don’t answer. Whisper to each other, writing in notebooks.
Margret: They don’t think we can see them.
Laugh track
Herman: Do what?
Margret: They don’t think we can see them.
Herman: Well, what are they talking about?
Margret: Normativity.
Herman: Normativity? Did you hand them a copy of Proverbs?
Margret: I told you, they don’t think we can see them.
…
And so forth. The laugh track is to my advantage, but you, O Materialist, have the last laugh, the true laugh.
The whole project of the Christian Faith is a project of open futility, and it is actually encoded in the Faith. Saint Paul–excuse me–the Apostle Paul, after fifteen chapters on the wisdom of God putting to shame the wisdom of the world (that would be you materialists) finishes his exposition by saying in his first letter to the Corinthian Christians, “If there is no resurrection of the body, then we are to be pitied more than all men. Send money.”
So, since miracles = impossible (cf. G.E. Lessing), and since the resurrection of the body = a miracle, then, it follows, therefore there is no God.
The materialist has the advantage in an ever-improving society and ever-progressing technology as a result of Science, material proof. The only way for me to prove my faith is for me to become a corpse.
They called Thomas “The Twin” for a reason, you know.
Featured Image is some painting by an overhyped hack
Last year Gregory Lewis advanced a provocative argument: maybe the greats were not all they are cracked up to be.
What’s provocative is not the conclusion, but the statistical manner in which an argument about the humanities is made.
He adds nuance as the argument goes on, but the essence is like this:
Assume “personal greatness” varies randomly from person to person.
Post-population explosion, more people are alive now than at any other time in history.
Therefore, it is immensely unlikely that the greatest thinkers or artists occurred in antiquity, rather than very close to the present.
With that in mind, here is my quick response:
Can we judge the greatness of a work on its merits, or not?
If not, why can we judge the merits of Lewis’ argument?
Lewis’ own method can be turned against his conclusions.
I’m going to start backwards, with the third point. Consider the following from the end of Lewis’ post:
It does mean, though, we should pay less deference to the achievements (and achievers of the past). Instead of the vast secondary literature to try and find a charitable account of Socrates techne based refutation of Thrasymachus at the start of Plato’s Republic (because Plato and Socrates, intellectual titans they are, would not give a bum argument) we should trust our judgement that this was just a bad argument, because Plato and Socrates were not that brilliant, and were living in comparatively unenlightened times, and so our prior on them just making a mistake should not be that low. More generally, much of our scholarly emphasis on the old greats is probably misplaced if this enterprise is motivated (in part) by the hopes of excavating some hidden gems of insight in their work – they’re much less likely to have insight relevant to our current state of knowledge than modern day thinkers.
Let us assume that the ability to discern whether an argument is good or bad varies randomly across individuals.
If that were the case, then what are the odds that Lewis’ individual judgment, or mine, would be superior to the cumulative judgments of a very large number of individuals who have posited a “there’s more to it than that” interpretation of a great work?
As I have said before, when approaching a widely discussed work, it’s usually a good idea to assume:
All obvious criticisms have been made.
All obvious criticisms have been responded to.
A back-and-forth has occurred and the conversation has moved forward.
Statistically, what are the odds that one individual would be able to fruitfully skip the results of such a conversation among many individuals?
Going out of order, let’s go to my first point—can we judge greatness on its merits or can’t we?
It would be one thing if Lewis had actually examined Socrates’ response to Thrasymachus and made a direct case that it was lackluster. No one thinks Plato is perfect; indeed the vast majority of people who would put him in the top 10 thinkers of all time are themselves not actually Platonists. Clearly, even if they admire his greatness, they think he went wrong somewhere.
If Lewis had gone that route, a philosopher or philologist could then have jumped in and argued that Lewis had misread. Perhaps Plato was attempting to demonstrate something indirectly, rather than in Socrates’ argument itself. Perhaps with the right context, which specialists in this subject have and Lewis does not, the meaning will be clearer. In any case, if Lewis had attempted to broach this issue directly, we’d be back at human judgment as usual.
But Lewis tried to make an argument about the odds that such judgments were sound, externally from consideration of the works themselves. And so we must ask: if the case for these works’ greatness is not to be considered on its merits, but based on probability, then what is the probability of Lewis coming along and discovering this novel argument that undermines the judgment of the larger part of people who have considered the matter?
That is, how are we to evaluate Lewis’ own argument, if the evaluation of things on their merits is off the table?
He might respond that a statistical argument can be evaluated more objectively than the greatness of a philosophical work or a painting. But the statistical argument is quite weak without simplifying assumptions that themselves require a non-statistical defense—that is, a defense on the merits.
I am reminded of a statement I’ve heard attributed to Asimov, to the effect that the probability of life just happening to spring up on a given planet is so small as to be just this side of impossible. Conjuring up a probability distribution in which what has happened is unlikely isn’t very revealing—in my humble opinion.
I believe it comes down to how much judgment can be relied on to evaluate arguments, ideas, and art on the merits. If we can’t rely on it at all, then we can’t rely on it to determine whether Lewis’ own argument has merit. If we can rely on it, then odds are Lewis’ argument is in the same position as Asimov’s—good for a soundbite, but not very informative.
New York’s cardinal virtue is hustle. It is also its chief vice.
New Yorkers’ hustle seems a poor fit for Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean; the greatness and the excess of it seem too tightly intertwined. Quite possibly they are aspects of the very same thing. It seems instead more at home in a tragic view of human nature, which both precedes Aristotle and comes later in the form of Christian fallenness. New Yorkers hustle to get where they are going so they can work hard on whatever work they are called to do.
The deli where I occasionally get my breakfast is most alive when the line is most backed up. The unyielding energy and efficiency of the two men who handle orders for breakfast sandwiches and wraps is quite a sight to behold. What impresses me the most, as someone with an unreliable memory, is their mental queue—they take an additional order while still working on two or three ahead of that one. Each order is broken out into specific tasks, which they work on concurrently, usually concluding two at right around the same time.
In the two years or so that I have been going there, they have never made a mistake, and they always remember who it was that ordered each item. I’m sure they make mistakes—I’m not saying that they are perfect, superhuman breakfast sandwiches factories, though you might forgive me for beginning to suspect as much.
If there is a virtuous hustle, without vice, it is the ordinary, every day hustle that is embodied behind that counter, day after day. No stockbroker, or programmer, or statesman, could possibly outmatch the extraordinary wonder of such ordinary virtue.
It almost makes one forgive the hustle of fellow New Yorkers who shove you aside on the street or in the subway, or run you over in their cars.
Ryan’s recent post relies on an optimistic hermeneutic. At least, it is optimistic in the sense of holding that it is possible to know the relevant context for understanding something, if pessimistic that most people will bother. I share his optimism.
But in discussing the post with him, it seems that he believes a lot of meaning is radically historical, where most believe there to be more general meaning outside of the most contingent of context.
I may indeed be radically historical, but I haven’t ever considered that. In fact, the mere notion of a “radically historical perspective” is an entirely new ingredient not initially contained in my post about frames of reference. It’s entirely possible that Adam is correct about my perspective – but I honestly don’t know about that, and it doesn’t directly pertain to my point.
The reason I’m writing about this is to highlight a risk in the consumption of ideas: Not only is it possible to lack context, it is also possible to import context that was not or should not be there.
I see this quite often. The news is replete with stories of well-meaning university faculty whose innocuous emails receive an identity-politics reevaluation, and next thing we know, a scandal has erupted. Scarcely can any major crime occur that the media begins saying things like, “We don’t know yet if the suspects are tied to terrorist groups,” which is a factually correct statement that nevertheless imports the context of terrorism to a situation that might not actually involve real terrorists.
I see this also in the marketplace for ideas. For example, Paul recently wrote a blog post about capabilitarianism that I quite liked. I felt that he was correct in the main, but Paul references the ideas of Amartya Sen in absence of the context of the Indian partition, the Pakistani genocide of Bangladeshis, the subsequent Bangladeshi war of independence, and the resulting martial law and systemic bifurcation of Bangladeshi society between “rich” and “poor.” In that context, the context in which Sen’s ideas actually emerged, the comparison to American civil liberties is much weaker. And because I know a bit about Bangladeshi history, I found that part of Paul’s otherwise excellent blog post less strong than the balance of it.
In short, it is possible to universalize something that is not truly universal. It’s possible to bend the language of the civil rights movement so that it can be deployed against campus faculty emails, it’s possible to use emerging market societies’ theories to attempt to explain developed-market social trends, and so forth.
My view is that we should be very cautious about generalizing intellectual principles. In some cases they can indeed be generalized, but in some cases not. What you include in your frame of reference can affect your conclusion every bit as much as what you exclude. The goal should always be not to be “right in a manner of speaking,” or “right from a certain perspective,” but to simply be right.
I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m just saying that’s the goal.
The risk of talking about context is the temptation to treat it as some undifferentiated thing. Just add three more cups of context, stir, and voila—a valid interpretation of the facts. I tried to show by example that this was not so, but the distinctions among context are worthy of independent investigation.
