“‘Publicist,’” wrote Jacoby, “if it once connotated an engagement with the state and law, is almost obsolete, victimized by Hollywood and ‘public relations’: it now signifies someone who handles and manipulates the media, an advance or front man (or woman). A public intellectual or old-style publicist is something else, perhaps the opposite, an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one.” But it had to have another overtone as well: “The definition must include a commitment not simply to a professional or private domain but to a public world—and a public language, the vernacular.”
At this point, one can almost hear a chorus of ten thousand graduate students reciting, “But difficult ideas require complex language! Anything else is mere journalism!” Be that as it may, Jacoby insisted on the vernacular as a necessary corrective to the tendency of intellectual discourse to ossify, thereby excluding readers. The example of scholastic Latin came to mind. The turn to common language “characterizes modern culture since the Renaissance,” wrote Jacoby. “The adoption of the vernacular was not always simple or peaceful, for it meant that groups excluded from religious and scientific controversy could now enter the fray.”
Beneath this historical analogy, another set of references may have been active in shaping this call for a new public-intellectual vernacular. Jacoby’s earlier writing included studies of the Frankfurt School, and there were obvious echoes of Jürgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere—the space of free and open debate emerging in the eighteenth century, in which arguments must be made (and unmade) without respect to rank or privilege. But that may not have been the only Frankfurt School overtone. Jacoby complained about the tics and routines of academic prose—not just the jargon and the tone deafness, but the acknowledgments section, with its compulsive recitation of every colleague ever met (no back left unscratched). Any critical intent toward the larger culture was expressed in a form that served constantly to signal its participation in a subsystem of what Herbert Marcuse had called one-dimensional society.
As a student of both theology and philosophy, I have often marveled at the differences between the prose styles of various thinkers. Reading St. Thomas, for example, either in the original Latin or in translation, the first thing I discovered was the clarity of his writing style. This is not to say that the ideas he offered were either clear or easy to understand. His presentation, however, offered an opportunity for easier understanding precisely because it is a medieval example of Strunk & White in action.
Contrasted with, say, Immanuel Kant or G. W. F. Hegel, Aquinas appears almost simplistic. Kant and Hegel's ideas are no more complex or labyrinthine than the great Doctor from Paris; their nearly impenetrable prose, however, has too often leaving me wishing that "editor" had been an invention of the 18th century.
This is one reason I like Richard Rorty. He is not only a subtle thinker, provocative and subtle; he is an excellent prose stylist. Cornel West is another whose commitment to making his deep understanding of western cultural traditions, and the traditions that arose in protest to them as accessible as possible to as large an audience as possible is palpable.
One need not hide behind the jargon of the discipline to be thought "deep". Too often, opacity of style is a clue that, in fact, not much is really going on. I would much rather spend an evening reading an essay by Rorty, West, or Karl Popper (another philosopher committed to presentation as part of a means to a larger end) than wrestle through a chapter of Kant or Heidegger (perhaps the greatest style criminal in philosophy). The argument from necessity as McLemee presents it is unpersuasive precisely because, if the ideas intellectuals are pursuing are not done with at least a glance from one eye at the larger public and its benefit, it is nothing more than intellectual masturbation, which may relieve tension in the author, but does nothing to propagate public discourse.
25 comments:
Down with Proust! Up with Stephen King!
Would not the more supple mind find room for both? Would not the finer, wider heart understand that human endeavors cannot live within one style, one format? That intellectual life often is, and should be, work, not a popcorn accompanied cinematic experience?
For their first few decades of work, the Frankfurt School produced almost no single work of length. Their essays were written with conditional commitments, ending with partial and contradictory conclusions by intention because they mistrusted totalism, holistic systems. The world wars and the holocaust forever corrupted anyabsolute faith in any process, especially any single process of reasoning.
Sure, German idealism remains valuable in only partial ways. But it is dishonest to think that American pragmatism is any better just because you yourself find you can get through a book or two. What is that except the most self-aggrandizing, anti-intellectual basis of judgment possible?
And yet here you are, being such an American, an arbitrary divider of stylistic taste... having almost nothing to do with substantive contribution.
Pragmatism... American intellectual pop writ with inflation. You are consistent. I'll give you that.
Clarity and consistency. You know the old saw about these values, right?
Good ideas don't have to be presented in a way fit only for a few. Your disdain not only for pragmatism, but simple, clear prose misses the point. Kant had some interesting ideas (to take your favorite philosopher), but his method of presentation left one wishing for a bit of clarity. The pragmatism of Rorty, or James, or Dewey, is not preferable because they are clear. They are preferable because they fit far more with my own understanding of the way the world works. That these three philosophers are also excellent writers is just a plus.
Proust is dull as three-day-old coffee. Just because someone tells me something is important, if it's boring, it's boring. I suppose I fit Dorothy Parker's quip, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."
Perhaps we should start with the illogical title: In Defense of the Vernacular. If it needs defending, then it ain't vernacular.
Yeah, come back with a quip.
I'll respond with Virginia Woolf: "My greatest adventure was undoubtedly Proust. What is there left to write after that?"
That you cannot find the beauty in Proust is a metaphor for our times.
Some people's meat is other folk's barf. Plain and simple. The whole world could be of one mind about Proust, and it isn't going to change my mind that it's ten pounds of dung in a five pound bag.
And, I changed the title before I read your comment.
And Virginia Woolf was obviously wrong, because even she wrote a few things after Proust stopped.
I hate it when reality impinges on a good quote.
I hate it when a literalist tries to read literature. It's like watching a dingo on an ice floe.
You're not defending the vernacular, or praising it; Rorty is not the vernacular. Russell Jacoby is not the vernacular. Habermas, cited as support for Jacoby is as far from the vernacular as you can get in this day in age, much less the Frankfort School. Have you read any of the Frankfurt school?
It does not seem possible with all the category confusion you display.
You're not talking about the vernacular; you're just advertising subjective grievances and hiding behind populism as cover for doing so.
Talk about a bag of shit.
Talk about literalists! I am using "vernacular" here in a metaphoric sense, writing clearly, eschewing jargon, making complex ideas accessible through as direct and simple a style as possible.
In that vein, from my reading of Habermas, he is far better a stylist than, say, Rudolf Carnap. Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch (in his own, more flowing way), Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson - these are folks who present complex ideas in a manner that anyone with even a modest education beyond high school can grasp. Since their ideas are important for society as a whole (although too often misconstrued or bowdlerized to fit an agenda), this accessibility is the key.
I fail to see where your ad hominem makes any sense whatsoever, particularly since your insult rebounded upon you.
As for advertising subjective grievances, while I might put it another way, all I can say is - yeah, so? Last time I checked, so was Plato, Augustine, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and David Tracy. I am not hiding behind anything; I am merely saying that a whole lot of fancy talk sometimes is a shield for really crappy thought; this does not mean that clear writing is the same as better thought; it just means it is easier to identify as such. One can get lost in the maze-like prose of Fichte, say, or Derrida, and never realize that the creature at the center of the maze is actually a guy in a suit.
All this is guided by my conviction that unless our intellectual life is based bettering our common life - if it isn't just a bunch of academics congratulating themselves for having achieved some professional status, arguing over whether or not Rousseau can really be considered a proto-feminist, say, or if a Kantian reading of Ockham yields better results than a more discursive exegesis - it isn't much good for anything at all.
Of course, the rejoinder that this begs the question of who is to judge what does and does not better our common life before hand is answered quite simply - in this case, by me. We all make these judgments all the time. I am just trying to be honest and up front about them.
I'm not asking you to agree or like it, because frankly, I don't care. It would be nice not to be dismissed as sneaking anti-intellectualism through the back door, damning with faint praise by promoting thinkers you don't like for reasons you find unacceptable. If that's all you can get out of this, once again, you are reading something that not only isn't there, but can only be brought in by the reader.
I know plenty of people who do not get lost in Fichte, or Derrida, Kant or Hegel.
That you do means almost nothing.
This is a puzzling comment: "For their first few decades of work, the Frankfurt School produced almost no single work of length."
Off the top of my head, it would be fairly easy to list book-length works by Marcuse, Neumann, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Lowenthal published individually between, say, the mid-1920s and '50s. I'm sure the list could then be extended if you included less well-known figures. That is not to mention the collaborative, multivolume Studies in Prejudice project.
They wrote in essay form and collaboratively - and against teleologically oriented projects - for a long time. This was largely Horkheimer's direction.
Not until after WWII did they begin to publish longer monographs like The Eclipse of Reason, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Authoritarian Personality.
This would be 25 years after its founding.
The phrase "first few decades" ought to cover at least thirty years. But limiting the scope to nothing earlier than the end of WWII, there would be among others....
Marcuse: Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932) and Reason and Revolution (1941)
Adorno: Kierkegaard, Construction of the Aesthetic (1933) and Against Epistemology (forget exact date, but circa 1935)
Fromm: Escape from Freedom (1941)
Neumann: Behemoth (1941)
Feodor, you're so cute when you get wound up. Like that little monkey that plays cymbals and smiles.
OK, that was my off-hand response.
There's a difference between "jargon" and learning the technical vocabulary necessary to understand any particular discipline. The latter is necessary not only in the humanities, but even in the trades; I daresay that welders, machinists, carpenters, and the like have ways of talking about their work that would confuse those not familiar with their work.
Only in the humanities, however, do we seem to have a culture that revels in obscurantism and opacity as a badge of insight and intelligence. Apparently believing that making something as inaccessible as possible to the educated lay-person makes a work of literary criticism or theory every bit as "intellectual" as the explosion of equations in a physics or chemistry or mathematics paper.
In a collection of essays from a panel discussion over at Crooked Timber, one of the respondents makes the point that while it may be important for an educated individual to learn more than, say, the basics of economics in order to discuss the issue with some intelligence and insight, this isn't really all that difficult. We get intimidated when we enter a field not our own. Yet, it is important to remember (and this thought is not original with me although I'll be damned if I can remember where I read it) that accountants and economists and policy experts and historians and what not are not smarter than anyone else; they just do this for a living. Learning a technical vocabulary is a kind of craft or skill; I am impressed and intimidated by those who work well with their hands because I cannot. That doesn't make them better human beings, just differently talented than I.
Given patience and time, in all likelihood I could achieve some small measure of success, say, building small objects out of wood. It wouldn't make me a carpenter, but it is achievable. In the same way, a non-expert can learn the basics of any particular technical vocabulary, and in the process gain an insight in to any particular discipline, and use it intelligently.
This last phrase is important. Intelligent use is part of the process, and one I wish graduate student advisers would pound in to the heads of their proteges. Part of clarity is using words not just correctly, but with a bit of finesse.
From a stylistic vantage point, this is my main point. It isn't about setting aside a particular technical vocabulary, precisely because they are, indeed, necessary. Rather, the point is not to revel in technicality for its own sake.
I never said I get lost in those, or other, writers. I do know those who do, however, and toss them to one side, missing out on their insight.
This isn't about me. You keep making it so (of course, I don't help because by making the point that I am doing nothing more than offering my opinion I may make it confusing as to what point is about me and what is not), but it isn't.
"The phrase "first few decades" ought to cover at least thirty years."
OK, that's kind of funny in an OCD, outpatient way.
But you do name some important exceptions. And exceptions prove...
Scott, how marvelous!
I was looking into Marcuse's "Hegel's Ontology" and was delighted to find that has been translated by Seyla Benhabib, the great contemporary interpreter of Kant's Cosmopolitan peace notions.
Kant and Hegel - foundational to Marcuse and one of our best internationalist minds - yet neither is allowerein our reading lists by GKS.
What's more, Hegel, Marx, and Freud are the three legged stool on which the whole enterprise of the Franfurt School rests. But for GKS they allhave to be thrown out as mere jargonists.
Amerikanist style philosophy, I guess.
Actually making the point that 25 years is not "a few decades" is pretty typical of someone who makes his living as a writer.
Of course it is a mistake to hold anyone else to that standard. Verbal sloppiness and a tendency to run off at the mouth without knowing what one is talking about are the norms in other milieux.
"One need not hide behind the jargon of the discipline to be thought "deep". Too often, opacity of style is a clue that, in fact, not much is really going on."
Indeed. Or at least it is an indication that the person has not thought very much about their particular work or discipline.
Jargon is useful if one needs a shorthand to communicate within the discipline. But if one hasn't thought about ways to communicate important ideas to people outside the discipline, in a clear and concise manner, then one probably hasn't thought very much about their work.
It doesn't take a genius to explain chemistry to a chemist. But if you're going to try to explain chemistry to a 6 year old, you better know what you're doing.
roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/hobbes-in-hebrew-the-religion-question/
When we teach 6 year olds about numbers, we usually go with this definition...
Few: not many but more than one.
Scott oddly chokes on the gnat of what "few" means, but swallows the camel of my point without trouble: for an unusually long, long time, the Frankfurt school avoided long, systemic productions; that this was deliberate; that the essays and productions during this time was also deliberately spiraled and indirect in their telos - precisely in order to break up the illusion that clarity and simplicity gives a greater representation to truth.
Contra GKS's post.
If, though, you need simplicity, Scott, just simply check with Andrew Arato or David Held or Susan Buck-Morss for an introduction to the Frankfurt School. They cover this point and you can cut down on jargon, thereby getting the kind of education GKS advocates. And introductory one.
Once one has taught chemistry to a 6 year old in a way they have understood it, have you really taught chemistry?
How about astrophysics?
When the issues are being, time, essence, existence, the dialectic between labor and value, tell me, Great be-Knighted Soul, the language of the vernacular, or, since vernacular wasn't really it, the technical vocabulary that one can learn with flash cards, thereby able to go from Kant to Hegel to Marx to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Jaspers to Dewey to Rorty with one technical understanding of being, time, essence, existence, the dialectic between labor and value?
And tell me how you would teach a 6 year old the same?
And then tell me what is the scope of the hold on the subjects that the 6 year old then possesses.
Introductory is an American mode. A pragmatic mode. A mode that uses reading as power, as manifest destiny, rolling over the fathomless, the strange, the alien, the non-instrumental, the things in life that do not conform to technique.
(word verification: "rebutro")
Scott McLemee.
Scott McLemee.
Scott, I get the feeling that we've met. Texas? Yale?
How do you teach this stuff to a six-year-old? Why, you start out assuming, for lack of anything better, that these concepts - being, essence, whatnot - are quite alien to their understanding for developmental reasons. You find different, concrete examples. Aristotle's beds are as good a place to start as any (but, I suppose that's not technical enough).
Since I know Feodor has children, I'm going to move out of philosophy and in to another area - how do you talk children of different ages about sex? How do you warn children of the dangers of sexual harassment and exploitation? First, you give them general guidelines - your body is your own, don't ever let anyone you don't know touch you, etc., etc.. Then, as they age, you give them a bit more information. With our 12 y.o., we are starting to talk in a more candid way about human sexuality, finding out what she knows, helping her with what she doesn't know. It is all age-appropriate, and stays away from discussing the biochemical nature of human development, the nature, say of sexual arousal, and speaking in generalities of the fusion of emotional and sexual love as necessary concomitants of one another.
Your entire position, Feodor, is undermined by the notion that somehow I am arguing that all of us should ever only grasp certain general concepts and short-hand versions of things. On the contrary. If one is seriously interested in, say, Gadamer's aesthetics-as-play as a source for a career as a university researcher, by all means do it. If, however, as a citizen, one wants to seriously engage on a variety of topics before the American people, one had better have at least a fundamental, or even slightly-beyond-fundamental grasp of various things, and be able to discuss them in a way that is appropriate.
I fail to see how this has sailed either over your head or under your radar. This is a blog, a public forum, and I always have one eye on the fact that there might just be a reader or two who isn't educated in theology, or philosophy, or history, or anything else, but might be interested in the relationship among them, and how they impact our public life. If you want a serious academic essay on a subject, write it. Here, the medium determines, to a large degree, how I approach a subject.
After some words from McLemee's quote of Jacoby, my point:
"The turn to common language “characterizes modern culture since the Renaissance,” wrote Jacoby. “The adoption of the vernacular was not always simple or peaceful, for it meant that groups excluded from religious and scientific controversy could now enter the fray.”
The violence went both ways. The vernacular simply became the new battleground. After a few centuries of enlightened scholasticism softening the doctrinal ground that the bureaucracy found disagreeable (Scotus and Occam got into hot water, remember), and when ecclesial power began to be contested by cities and princes - a hundred years before 1517 - the vernacular became an instrument for building popular local cohesion and enmity against the hegemony of Rome. Luther was not the first to employ it this way but, by accident, he became the earliest powerful user of it. From then on it became a race to appeal to the masses with reductionist populist vernacular arguments from both sides and a marshaling of local power executives.
After Luther and Calvin, who do we have that exhibit theological brilliance for the next three hundred and a half centuries? After Aquinas, Scotus, Occam, and later Erasmus (the humanist who sided with tradition), who can the Roman church name as a supple, progressive mind steeped in tradition?
The reductionism necessary to inspire reformation and counter-reformation - the two hundred years of European wars that followed - rests on the common relationship whereby vernacular hortatory was used to stir motivations for going to war over ideas.
Bush was a vernacular President. Obama is not.
And while I would never argue that Proust has to be read and the beauty has to be seen by everyone, when you say Proust is a bag of shit - or Rorty is to be preferred to Kant because of style - you've entered into that old process of the instrumentalization of the vernacular for reasons of power, of populist rejection, rather than applauding its artistic power to clarify, to thereby open one up for more abstract truths, ever more developed ideas that may simply and currently be in a developing stage, a kind of stage where the intellectual male or female is still wrestling with jargon trying to pin down an angel of truth.
I will be as clear as possible. I do not prefer Rorty to Kant because Rorty is a better writer. I prefer Rorty to Kant because the way he describes the world, and human agency, his minimalistic moralism, not only jibes with my own understanding of the world; it is also cognizant of the changes the world has gone through in the past two centuries. WHile I understand your approval of much of Kant's thought, especially his cosmopolitanism, the big ugly pimple on the face of his philosophy - a deep strain of anti-Semitism - puts me off. That's just me, and I wouldn't say he is worthless for anybody and everybody to consider.
You seem to take my comments on my own position as some kind of argument or something; they aren't. I read and enjoy Kant, and find much of worth in there, in bits and pieces. I appreciate his negotiation between the various schools of his own day, and the way forward that can still be of use.
It's just not my thing, that's all.
Unfortunately, Rorty's project of self-criticism which, at the same time, disestablishes an identifiable basis for social criticism, does not allow you to call out Kant's anti-semitism. You are only allowed to cull it out of yourself.
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