Gratitude, Civility, and the Nature of Emotion

For the purposes of this particular post I have little or no interest in the origins of this Thanksgiving that we Americans celebrate once a year in the Fall. I do not wish to celebrate our ancestors, nor to curse the evils of how Native people were treated; still less do I care to lecture on how best we ought to "celebrate" this peculiar holiday. Rather, I want to make some cumulative notes on philosophic matters concerning gratitude more generally.

As can be observed in the brief comedic exchange from Barney Miller, the best humor or comedy is generated by a quite complex web of mutual incomprehension between two people, the absurdity that ensues when desired or accepted outcomes are thwarted by such clashes, mistakes in identity, or in this case, world outlooks and temperament etc. This is the kind of material that was eventually expanded to the highest art form in Larry David's magesterial Curb Your Enthusiasm series.

Yet this most humorous of exchanges is a rich starting point for the most serious of discussions of gratitude. I take Inspector Luger to be a figure for the rules of civility and traditional sentiment, a vision of moderation and social consensus. "Don't worry me and spoil everybody's fun with your metaphysical and philosophic speculations, do the right and civil thing and simply wish others Happy Thanksgiving and in return accept a mutual meeting." On the other hand, Inspector Luger is being the unthinking philistine and detective Dietrich is being the sincere thinker, approaching Socratic territory, and if you are at all curious about the world, would seem an attractive conversation starter (presumably at another more appropriate time).

There is a real question here. Do emotions have to have or always implicitly have objects? And does it matter?

It seems to me that it might matter less than we think. Whether we like it or not, or even whether we conceptualize it or not, the universe is shot through with value and meaning (to quote Akeel Bilgrami on Gandhi). That is, whether or not we believe in or feel a cause of our state, we are, all of us, in one kind of state or another, experiencing the world in such a way that something, however great or small, is at stake.

As you are reading this post I am sure that you, dear reader, are in some kind of state. You might be annoyed while reading this. You might be anxious about family or cooking the turkey. You might be elated, or even distracted, you might be sleepy or well rested, but the important point is that you are experiencing at this moment something of value because you are in a certain kind of relation with the world. Though we understandably take this for granted, it is nevertheless one of the precious and even scandalous things about our humanity.

Looked at in this way, I can imagine being in a certain kind of state that may just be powerful enough so that we may experience thankfulness as an immediate instinct. The positive state may be reason enough for our thankfulness, placing the issue of a clear cause or object of our emotion into a secondary status, (notwithstanding the issue of the believer for whom the Creator is always already omnipresent). This is a thankfulness that a serious nonbeliever can and should, as it were, get behind.

The trouble is, such a state can only be experienced after the foundation of certain preconditions. In this case we are brought back to my Thanksgiving exchange and example. Inspector Luger says that the saying of "Happy Thanksgiving" is connected to "good breeding" as if you'd be an awful barbarian to call it into question or not say it.

In a balkanized world such as ours, full of manifold, competing and sometimes ruthlessly oppositional identities on display, like so many varieties of organic cookies at the local health supermarket, it gets difficult to negotiate competing values.

It is not so much the case that we are two Americas, one conservative and one liberal, but rather the case that we are potentially hundreds or thousands of Americas, (and most importantly, not in the sense of individual identity or liberty but rather group identity) all speaking in languages walled off from all the others by "imaginative mutual incomprehension" in Thomas Nagel's brilliant formulation.

There is a lot to say here about civility but I shall leave the last words to Robert Pippin:

"If civility can be understood as an enactment in daily life of mutuality or the actual establishing of the norm of rational agency, as an active attempt to recognize and help to promote each other as free beings, then, as suggested, such a dependence and commonality must already exist and be experienced in daily life as existing."

In such a climate it seems that for simpler pleasures, if indeed one is lucky enough to be able to experience such pleasures, gratitude is always appropriate. You may be gracious towards a person in particular, it may towards an entity. But the state itself could be at once rational and Romantic or at least be meaningful enough to please both Romantics and Rationalists among us. It is connected to Pippin's notion of civility as "not a duty, a responsibility, or an entitlement but already a manifestation of something else not subject to moral will or legal coercion."

It is useful to meditate upon what one has left once one has eliminated all of these false ways of describing civility. Such meditation would go a long way towards thinking about our emotions as an art, as a reason, or an irreducible virtue, not amenable to quantification or fiat. The first priority, of course would be to realize how "shot through with meaning" each of us stands, maybe even by the simple fact our existence, with no further need of justification or explanation.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell died yesterday on January 26. A classic(al) New York intellectual, he was one of the few intellectuals to resist pigeonholing. Author of The End Of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism, he refused to fall into so many traps into which his peers were almost always thrown. I am most interested in one quote of his in particular which I will reproduce here in its entirety:

"When I had my Bar Mitzvah, I said to the Rabbi, ’ I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God… I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said … ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares’?

Actually that is not the quote I had in mind. Sorry. Here is the correct one:

"I am a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

He meant by this that in politics he started from the sovereign, inalienable, "individual and not the group", thus liberal in politics. And in economics he thought economic justice a priority, thus socialist though, "not statist". And he was conservative in culture because of respect for "tradition" and a belief that some works of art are better than others, though not that these works necessarily need be elite in status. By conservative he did NOT mean pro-capitalist, anti-abortion, or Republican.

The world will be a poorer place without Daniel Bell.

Year's End: A New Year Plea For the "Foxy"

In keeping with my general antipathy to year end resolutions and summaries in particular, and closure in general, this post shall be a late one in the new year. But its lateness is not only for reasons of precision and exactitude on my part: it is above all for reasons of alienation from the whole cultural business of such ways of viewing time and destiny. In short, there is nothing worse than a wrap-up. Everything about it is explicitly and implicitly infected, riddled with all sorts of fallacies.

One of these fallacies is a linear temporality that makes us servants to the future and enemies of the present. Another fallacy is a progressivism or historicism that thinks that there is a quantifiable measure of our many losses and improvements into a final verdict of decline, or as we are wont to prefer, ascent.

I remember one particularly obnoxious wrap-up that circulated through the mail from one of my many married acquaintances. The whole things was so glowing with prideful self assertion; it all but nakedly stated how great everyone involved had been over the previous year and how surely they were to be better in the forthcoming year. It read as an advertisement for a chain restaurant rather than a report on a family, though I would argue there is little difference between the two in our current historical moment.

Related to the wrap-up and though less egregious, yet still problematic, is the resolution.

People make resolutions not only because of the perennial cult of self improvement but because of a peculiarly linear temporality. This temporality admits of a straight line of onward and upward Progress, with History falling in line, in increasing maturity, wisdom, even enlightenment.

To clarify where I deeply stand on such matters I must interrupt with what may apparently be a digression but, as we shall see, connects to where I have been heading all along.

One of the most brilliant, most distinguished minds in legal (or indeed any other kind) philosophy, Ronald Dworkin, has just published a book called Justice For Hedgehogs. Now, given the fame of the author, there will doubtless be hundreds of responses to the book. The book itself is magisterial and as such I am only halfway through it, and there is much good in it and much with which I agree. Yet his central claim, and the book's title are most contrary to my disposition, as readers of my blog will undoubtedly see.

You see, dear reader, though Dworkin is a most brilliant mind and his book covers so much -from the question of free will through the role of the state and even aesthetics - he is on the opposite side to me since I am most deeply influenced by the late great Sir Isaiah Berlin.

This explains Dworkin's title. Isaiah Berlin wrote the essay "The Hedgehog and The Fox: An Essay On Tolstoy's Conception of History".

The Greek poet Archilocus said: "The fox knows many little things but the hedgehog knows one big thing".

While Berlin admits Tolstoy was a combination of the two as a thinker, Berlin himself was an advocate for the "foxy" position as he was a passionate defender of pluralism.

The title is incorrect in more than one way since hedgehogs don't need justice; we foxes, however do. Most of the world, like Dworkin, believes the world is one and that there is a right or wrong answer to most questions. They believer such unity is backed up by some sort of grand metaphysics. Ronald Dworkin is more modest and sophisticated than that: but like grand theorists before him, he aims to create a unifying and unified theory where all things go together.

The last highest and most noble attempt to present such a grant theory was John Rawls in A Theory Of Justice. Yet what made Rawls' theory notable was that it made space for subjective difference and diversity. It recognized irresolvable problems; that is why Rawls felt a need for a neutral space from which to govern.

Dworkin, on the other hand, wants more than neutrality; he seems to want to pronounce what the good and the true are at every turn; where any controversy or disagreement is but a cover for genuine error or misunderstanding of the facts, rather than irreducible, insoluble difference. If freedoms are sacrificed for social justice then there was not really freedom to be sacrificed to begin with, but, rather, a too narrow definition of freedom as license. (Which is how I do define freedom). Yet some freedom we must sacrifice if we are to prevent certain suffering. (The suffering caused by other's freedoms).

Dworkin would retort that we have been under assault from moral relativism, and thus, a variant of objective all inclusive theory like his is sorely needed to set the record straight and keep us safe from fashionable relativists.

But the world is as hostage to monism like Dworkin's as it is to relativism; indeed I consider relativism as serious a sin as Dworkin's monism. It has nothing in common with my or Isaiah Berlin's "Objective Pluralism."

Josh Cherniss states three propositions in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Isaiah Berlin:

All genuine questions must have a true answer, and one only; all other responses are errors.

There must be a dependable path to discovering the true answers, which is in principle knowable, even if currently unknown.

The true answers, when found, will be compatible with one another, forming a single whole; for one truth cannot be incompatible with another. This, in turn, is based on the assumption that the universe is harmonious and coherent.

Like Berlin, I deny all three of these propositions which is why I am a thoroughgoing pluralist.

A relativist, on the other hand, believes such problems are clashes of merely subjective points of view. At worst, the relativist denies the existence of true or false statements altogether, denies the existence of good and evil, however construed.

I believe such problems as the inability to answer the three propositions in the affirmative to be caused not by relativity but rather, ironically, by objectivity! It is precisely because we can see - most painfully - the truth of the various sides, and yet see the impossibility of fulfilling all sides simultaneously; it is because we can see the inevitable necessity of tragic choices that we pluralists are anything but relativists.

And, above all, because the world is not one in any systematic way, it is perfectly possible for there to be some answers that are clearly right or wrong, as in the science of gravity, Hitler's evil, Bach's grandeur, and so on, and simultaneously other answers that are undecidable, like trying to weigh the relative merits Japanese filmmaker Ozu in comparison with French filmmaker Robert Bresson.

Yet Ronald Dworkin wants to apply his monistic inclinations to a comprehensive legal theory. It is a curious thing to be reading a book in which I agree with so many of his conclusions (about issues of the day in the courts) yet disagree most vociferously with how he arises at our shared conclusions.

But I have said too much about this issue. Please enter this new year in the spirit of the fox. Be flexible. Don't be afraid of being called a dilettante if you happen to have more than one single minded interest. Take each day and each case, one at a time. Think for yourself. Not all situations are identical. No two people are alike. Respect the profound differences around you. Not merely differences backed by group identity and and pride of membership; those as of late have been more acceptable to tolerate. But pricklier and trickier differences: ones that reside in the innermost recesses of an individual human heart.

And that is all I can stand to say in anything like the spirit of a new year.