Harry Redner: Failings in the Social Sciences and Humanities

From H. Redner The Ends of Science, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1987 - Chapter 6, "Pathologies of Science"

Philosophy is strictly speaking neither a science nor a humanity. It is an august subject of great antiquity, one that has only since the nineteenth century been professionalised in an academic setting. Such an abstruse and other-worldly subject might be expected to be little affected by the pressures of academic politics. In fact, the very opposite has proved to be the case, for precisely because philosophy is not bound by scientific criteria of utility or by humanistic ones of cultural interest and relevance, it has become all the more readily subject to the determinants of disciplinary authority. Since philosophy is relatively unconstrained by any need to be accountable to other interests and is free to pursue whatever aims it sets for itself in its departmental fastness as a minor academic backwater, it has in fact lent itself all the more easily to the free play of internal academic politics. Thus, Richard Rorty, a prominent philosopher and critic of philosophy, who because of his criticisms is being treated [c. 1988] as something of an outcast, explains that the subject matter of philosophy has largely been determined by the outcome of political struggles within the discipline: "the topics and authors which fall under the care of philosophy departments form a largely accidental and quite temporary hodgepodge - determined mostly by the accidents of power struggles within universities and by current fashions" (Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 30). In his account of current academic philosophy Rorty stresses the struggles between the reigning paradigm of the discipline in Anglo-Saxon universities, analytic philosophy, and the other brands challenging its dominance, collectively called continental philosophy. The history of contemporary philosophy is largely "a story of academic politics. . . one of struggles between kinds of professors" (ibid, p. 228). Rorty tends to be rather nonchalant about this because he believes that "problems created by academic politics can be solved by more academic politics" (ibid). But, as we shall see, it is not easy to reform a disciplinary paradigm, no matter how empty it has become, or to introduce another elsewhere in the university system, since the struggle for academic survival ensures that only one subject-species can fill the available academic niche.

Elsewhere in his work Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 132 - 36) explains how philosophy became a Fach (academic subject) or professionalised discipline, beginning with neo-Kantianism in the nineteenth century German university. The process was completed after WW2 in the American university system where philosophy acquired a professional organisation with journals, a peer review system, grants, PhD training and all the other paraphenalia of the sciences. The earlier preponderance of patronal authority - which is still more or less the norm on the continent - gave way within the Anglo-Saxon system to formal-professional authority with a strong collegial elite of elderly eminences grises. [NB Previous chapters of The Ends of Science have given a detailed typology of disciplinary authority, the patronal and formal-professional types being two among many. CS] This authority rules with a very strong hand, excluding and outlawing any philosophic perspective other than that which falls within the analytic spectrum. Occasional open rebellions against this draconian rule attest to this fact. Thus at the 76th annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York in December 1979, a group of rebels, among them such prominent figures as William Barret and John Smith, "charged that the APA has become a monolith and intolerant, that its programmes neglected philosophic issues and that its leadership has lost contact with other philosophers". The academic political reasons for the dominance of analytic philosophy are openly acknowledged, and the upshot was "that the APA was dominated by people espousing analytic philosophy, preventing those with other perspectives from having an effective say in the organisation." As John Lachs puts it, in philosophy "power is an important and lucrative matter". "It was made clear that differences between the European Continental, historical position and the Anglo-Saxon Analytic position were not merely an abstract matter but touched on such practical matters as grants, government support, endowments, publishing and the placing of students and friends in faculty positions." It remains to be seen how this particular insurrection will fare, though one cannot be sanguine about one that seeks openly to assault an entrenched organisational position.

Perhaps because of previous failures at open reform, there have been many attempts to infiltrate continental philosophy into Anglo-American university by the backdoor of other departments. Thus the so-called "deconstructive" movement in literary criticism is partly such an attempt to smuggle in continental thought - mainly that of Derrida and his predecessors such as Heidegger and Nietzsche - through departments of comparative literature, English, French and German. This tactic has caused an inordinate amount of confusion and bitterness among the older style literary critics who cannot understand how and why their theories are being outflanked by something that claims to be more sophisticated than mere criticism but which they see as less interested in literature than in literary philosophy. [one might add older style anthropologists, classicists, historians, political theorists and numerous others. CS]. The battle lines are being drawn, with the opposed literary camps organising in cliques and possibly to become rival professional bodies. [One sees a whole front of the contemporary culture wars opening out from this point. Sickening stuff. CS] If the deconstructionists succeed in taking over some departments completely, two kinds of philosophy will be taught in Anglo-Saxon universities which have nothing to do with each other. This is already the situation at Sydney University in Australia. Rorty's (1982, p.328) rather blase' view that all this is "not much more, in the long run, than a matter of what sort of professors come under which departmental budget" seems mistaken, because once departmental divisions are set up there is no way of breaking through them and the discipline becomes fragmented, narrowed and impoverished.

Analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are already narrow, puristic subjects, the one stemming largely from the ideas of Wittgenstein and his predecessors Russell and Frege, the other from those of Heidegger and his predecessor Husserl. Both versions have by now become highly abstruse and almost empty of substantive content. Both shun involvement with the sciences, the arts or politics or with any other extra-mural thought. Practitioners of analytic philosophy have even gone as far as to show a disinterest in history, including the history of philosophy itself, so that they have almost lost touch with the metaphysical traditions of philosophy. The younger practitioners are little interested in the classics and are almost solely preoccupied with the latest issues of the journals, as set out by the prestigious figures of the field. The result, as Rorty sees it, has been as follows:

"Analytic philosophy was thus left without a genealogy, a sense of mission, or a meta-philosophy. Training in philosophy turned into a sort of "casebook" procedure, of the sort found in law schools. Students' wits were sharpened by reading pre-prints of articles by current fashionable figures, and finding objections to them. The students so trained began to think of themselves neither as continuing a tradition nor as participating in the solution of the "outstanding problems" at the frontiers of science. Rather, they took their self-image from a style and quality of argumentation. They became quasi-lawyers rather than quasi-scientists - hoping an interesting new case would turn up (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 227)"

Like philosophy, politics is a subject of great antiquity which was transformed beyond recognition to become present political science. A brief sketch of this metamorphosis is offered by Habermas:

“In Aristotle’s opus the Politics is part of the practical philosophy. Its tradition reaches even into the nineteenth century, till it is finally broken off by the critique of Historicism. And its course dries up even more completely the more its currents are diverted into the channels of the specific sciences. Thus, since the end of the eighteenth century, the newly emerging social sciences and the disciplines of jurisprudence have drawn off the waters of classical politics. This process of separation from the body of practical philosophy has ended for the time with the establishment of political science on the model of the modern experimental sciences, having little more than the name in common with the old politics. Wherever we still encounter the latter, it seems hopelessly old fashioned to us.”

The discipline of politics has also experienced an insurrection against its current reduction to the “science of political behaviour”. As long ago as 1967 a Caucus for a New Political Science was founded to work within the instituted discipline appeared subsequently in a representative publication by members of this new caucus. Once again the main burden of the criticism is against the organized conformity of the discipline and its attempt to institute the behaviouralist paradigm as the sole intellectual content and method of politics. This disciplinary prescription was frequently buttressed by reference to Kuhn’s idea of a single paradigm per science. Peter Euben sums up this approach:

“A paradigm must be ‘enforced’. To achieve a science of politics, we need enforcers, we need those whose authority in a community of political scientists would function in ways comparable to that in the community of science. Tolerance for diversity within such a community, as within the “normal political science[‘ it would be there to defend, would necessarily be limited in order to guarantee cumulative knowledge.”

Euben predicts that such a paradigm community would soon cease to have much to do with real politics and become an ivory tower discipline: “the community of political science will be fairly small, embrace the concept of professionalism maintained by one or two core journals and the key textbooks, provide opportunities for closeness, common purpose etc.” This course, however, has not been followed since the pull of real politics is too strong to resist, especially by leading professors called to political office or advisory capacities. The converse danger is that the discipline will be staffed by ready apologists for the regime and its policies.

This evolution has been steadily taking place since the 1950’s, especially in American universities where politics is now frequently the study of what politicians are currently engaged in doing, mainly with the purpose of offering them acceptable academic advice and so making the scholars indispensable to the politicians – the example of Kissinger and Brzezinski looms large in the aspirations of political scientists. Long before he had assumed office, Brzezinski had already proffered such a programme for political studies:

“As engagement in the world is encouraging the appearance of a new breed of politicians-intellectuals, men who make it a point to mobilize and draw on the most expert, scientific, and academic advice in the development of political programmes . . . (so) the largely humanist-oriented, occasionally ideologically-minded intellectual-dissenter, who saw his role largely in terms of proffering social critiques, is rapidly being displaced either by experts and specialists, who become involved in special governmental undertakings, or by generalist-integrators, who become in effect house-ideologues for those in power, providing overall intellectual integration for disparate action.”

He has been as good as his word, both as academic and politician. Most other academic mandarins have followed suit. The result has been that foreign policy, diplomacy and international relations studied at present are mainly concerned with the balance of power in the period since the end of the war, with nuclear deterrence as a technical speciality and with the major power blocs as areas of specialization. The study of domestic policy, government and institutions has become focused on the current workings of corporatist representative democracy, concentrating on parties, pressure grops, administration, and the strategies and tactics of electioneering – the last even going to the ludicrous extreme of attempting to become established as a special science with the name of psephology. One-party systems are the preserve of specialists calling themselves Kremlinologists and China men. To this body of studies at the top of the status ladder are sometimes added bits and pieces derived from other sciences, such as political sociology or psychosocial politics, or the occasional subjects dealing with issues such as totalitarianism or Third World politics. An outline of the main modern ideologies is presented largely for undergraduate teaching purposes, though since the “end-of-ideology” thesis these are looked on more as historical curiosities. Only the ex-student radicals, with their influx of new Marxisms, have altered this development a little here and there. Political theory is frequently presented only for teaching purposes as a potted history of political philosophy. Political theorists have gone to the length of trying to establish a separate association called the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. But such secessions do not improve the discipline as a whole, which now suffers from an absence of integrating theories. There is usually nothing of what used to be considered the main staples of politics: no comprehensive theory of the State (Staatslehre), no theory of sovereignty, right or law, no ethical political philosophy or morality of power, no comprehensive theory of representation or power and authority, no utopian speculations, no comparative study of political systems in different countries and epochs, no political economy, no study of politics in relation to culture, no study of the “spirit” of politics, such as the classical concern with the civic virtue of citizens. In short, there is hardly anything left of what was thought worthy by classical political thinkers, as indeed Habermas declares.

What is The Great Stage?

"A review of the reviewers might at long last yield an idea or two about art and writing. For wouldn't such a meta-review make clear one or two authentic feelings of distress about Art's pitiful condition in this an-aesthetic era of artistic over-production? The poetry, novels, essays and anthologies themselves have nothing to say. They refer, if they refer to anything, to a lost time in which these forms of literary art had form, when Time itself had time and made a present of it to Art, which can manifestly not arise in a world that no longer believes in Eternity, when no one with the ability to write could have faith that the future would grant him readers that are any different from those he sees around him: those infernal writer-readers who are all just about to drop the pose of readerly attention and begin to shout into the latest digitised megaphone of egotism. You seek in vain amid the literature of today for world-views. You look up from your book and find tvs and billboards and inadvertently come across the closest you can get to Weltanschauungen nowadays: Anschauungen, which is to say – rapaciously multiplying percepts."

- or so I thought three years ago.

The Great Stage is turning out to be something more than than the open-ended exercise in criticism it was originally intended as. Still, for the sake of partial self-definition, here's a draft of the answer to the question "What is the Great Stage?" that dates from the early days.

"The Great Stage is a response to a three-fold critical malaise:

1. Print media in Australia is visibly faltering. At present the only dynamic aspect of Australian newspaper culture would seem to be the interaction between the business models of the supermarket managers in command and the tabloid-cum-glossy fare they judge can be sold to the largest number of readers. Under such conditions, the public function of revieweing and criticism is becoming harder to sustain as the culture pages of major broadsheets fill up with monster-sized pictures, interview-pieces, endless food and wine tips and the diary-like musings of celebrity columnists. The 800-word book review – already of limited use for the purposes of the critic – is itself coming to seem a luxury; for a long time it has formed part of the penumbra of a life-style journalism with most of the qualities of advertising (even if it appears above the line separating paid publicity from what claims the reader's attention on other grounds).

2. Universities have ceased to offer critics meaningful points of intellectual contact, much less places of refuge. Our educational institutions were once one of two indispensable reference points of critical activity: in the person of the critic, the relatively heady world of academic scholarship remained connected with the everyday reality of the theatre, the studio and the writer’s corner. By contrast, today universities’ very intellectual function is under threat as "serious scholarship is replaced by an entrepreneurial striving for research money and media attention." (Harry Redner) In short, criticism and academic life until recently belonged together as part of the same cultural manifold – both offered something to the artist, because both sought to give shape to free intellectual perspectives. In an era like our own when university education is subject to the equally sterile logic of bureaucratic control and free market economics, that ceases to be the case in a radical sense. Free critical activity and routinised academic life have come to mutually exclude each other; the social sciences and humanities in particular have increasingly become the haunt of radical academic conformists who dish up their sensibilities for the book market, shuffle their specialities between journals and conferences, deliver up their mechanical models of mind and society to a passively assenting public or join the ranks of administrative power-brokers and let fly with that disgraceful mixture of bombast and blandness with which our universities are expected to procedurally justify themselves.

3. The net poses a range of very different problems, though as the social domain freest of political constraints it remains the obvious place to launch a venture in general criticism. Yet the dilemmas of specialisation which present an obstacle to general criticism in the world-beyond-the-net are often reproduced online at a higher level of complexity; the generalism required to interpret art in relation to the social and cultural problematics of our day is even less likely to emerge in a virtual world where every fragment of an idea generates its own authoritative-looking pronouncements within its own teeming online enclosure. And that’s not even getting started on the raft of further problems the web generates for the critic. Foremost among them is the problem of.taking critical responsibility: in a medium where too many writers let fly with their opinions from behind a veil of anonymity, criticism either fails to develop or degenerates into self-important snark; where speech acts take on the quality of sound-bites for quasi-technical reasons – where the sheer volume of speech determines the speaker’s visibility – two essential aspects of criticism, analysis and interpretation, fall away and a third, evaluation, is radically abbreviated. . . So if yours truly is going to get a spot of criticism going, he might have to take evasive action against all sorts of things – against the purveyors of cheap ironies – against the army of sub-commentators for whom being online means first and foremost giving up on self-control - against all who spare themselves the labour of the concept, in order to be ready with the snappiest instantaneous assessments of everything the world of art and writing have to offer." 

Truly,

CS

Review: Harry Redner's Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures

Harry Redner’s account of aesthetic life in his book of the same title is one to which the classic dictum of Lichtenberg applies: Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. Replace “good taste” with the more awkward “sense of aesthetic value” and you have Redner’s guiding insight in a nutshell: giving an account of what art is means avoiding all artful pleas for one’s own taste. It means submitting taste to multi-dimensional critical scrutiny on the highest intellectual level. Redner, in short, always has his reasons at his disposal. In Aesthetic Life he is never tempted to evade careful explanation of his whys and wherefores with picturesque rhetorical gestures or baroque theoretical artifice, or by sprinkling the names of the classics across the page.

The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.

In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.

In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .

Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)

Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.

Public Lecture: Science, Society and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change

Concluding Oration to “Images of Nature: Ethics and the Environment” – Part 1 of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy’s “Global Warming: Science, Politics, Ethics” series

Delivered at the Trades Hall, Carlton, July 22, 2008

I’ve talked often in the second half of the course about what I’ve called the three fundamental projects of modernity: science and technology (seen as one project), the capitalist economic system and liberal democracy. When I first talked about them I tried to show that the cultural drive that led to these three things becoming fundamental came from a peculiar ethical sphere, the sphere of Protestantism, with its work ethic and its essentially ascetic idea of duty.

[The moralistic drive of Calvinist Protestantism] was directed to the fulfilment of duty – not to live in the world, but to work in the world – for “the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs is the highest form which the moral activity of the individual can assume.” As Weber’s studies show, this resulted in the channelling of the full thrust of Christian moral motivation into inner-worldly activities that served as the driving force to implement the new developments of the modern world, particularly to capitalism, but also to science and technology and liberal politics. . . Redner, p. 176

To wind up I want to make some broad generalisations about the images of Nature that each of these fundamental projects of modernity imply. Given that each of the three fundamental projects is still with us, I want then to try to fulfil my promise from two weeks ago and say something about the particulars and perversities of the reactions taking place within each of the fundamental projects to the alarming environmental predicament we find ourselves in today.

My starting point for talking about all this is actually one of my endpoints from last week. We saw last week that for Redner culture is always technological, that technology for him goes part of the way to actually defining culture rather being external to culture or antagonistic to it, because culture, on Redner’s definition, is always made up of a technical, an ethical and a representational element. In a similar sense, I said last week, for me nature is always also culture. Nature and culture might in other words look like polar opposites, but the polarity, under close scrutiny, breaks down, in the same way the polar opposition between technique and culture breaks down. Our image of Nature is always a cultural image. There is no Nature which is strictly speaking or completely external to us (though of course there are physical systems that are more or less subject to human observation, understanding, influence and use. Nature is something that culture has always already gone to work on. That is, I understand, a vague slightly windy philosophical pronouncement. Let me give it now a more tangible meaning by saying roughly how the three keystones of modern culture, our societies’ fascination with science and technology, its economic system and its liberal democratic political system constitute or pre-form our image of Nature.

The claim that our image of Nature is always a cultural image is maybe most difficult to accept in the case of science. Science, according to a certain received picture, is the objective knowledge of Nature. And technology according to the same received picture is something like the objective mastery of Nature, based on the knowledge science provides us with.) But the received picture, I would argue, is distinctly one-sided. Nature in the case of science is already a cultural category in the sense that knowledge of nature and its physical laws is not only the object of scientific research, but also the object of society-wide expectations and meanings, expectations and meanings that get attached to the scientific enterprise of research into Nature from the beginning. The same is doubly true of technology, it is inseparable from the societal meanings and expectations it is imbued with, especially from the Industrial Revolution onwards, because technological innovation is the dynamo in many ways of the entire process of industrialisation and the industrial-scale domination of Nature. Industrialism, according to my thumbnail definition in Week 9, is best understood as technological innovation harnessed so as to enable the production of goods on a mass basis. Industrialism, in other words, is what supplies the field of expectations through which the projects of scientific representation of nature and technological manipulation of it are interpreted.

So can we speak of an overall image of Nature here? At the risk of overgeneralising you could say that the image of nature involved in the process of giving scientific representation a meaning through technical manipulation and industrial production is an image of nature as purely an object of domination. (You’d incur the risk of over-generalising of course because the image of nature as object of domination is hardly characteristic of science, technology or its industrial and economic applications in anything like the same way.) Another way of putting it would be to say that the image of nature involved in the process is thoroughly disenchanted. With scientific representation and technical manipulation as our main modes of relating to Nature, we have taken enormous strides away from the magical and mythical modes of relating to the nature which, in vastly different ways, enabled us to imagine ourselves as a part of it. This is not to say, however, that disenchantment, or an attitude of domineering instrumentalism, are in any way the inevitable or uniform products of scientific representations of Nature. If the disenchanted, rational, methodical investigation of the natural world which is both the cause and effect of modern science has on the one hand led to enormous possibilities of technological and economic use of Nature, it has, paradoxically, also led to an enormous expansion of our sensibility towards nature. It is through science that the variety, complexity and in a sense the depths of Nature are known in a new way. Science need not be the prelude to rampant instrumentalism. And anyone who looks at David Attenborough communing with tree ferns or canoodling with turtles and sees nothing but a prelude to the invasion of bulldozers and pharmaceutical companies; or who thinks Attenborough is just providing entertaining kitsch for stupefied cultural consumers should put down his social theory textbook and get a breath of fresh air. Scientific representation of Nature in this permutation has clearly made possible a sort of re-enchantment of Nature, a second secular enchantment that bears only a superficial resemblance to pre-modern mythic experiences of Nature, which themselves often bear only passing resemblance to each other.