224. Error Philosophy

 

 

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Error philosophy is what a teacher of English Composition develops after he discovers that truth philosophy is no use to him.  Aspiring truth philosophers, graduate students, ask, "How does one reach the highest truth?"  Compelled error philosophers (graduate students forced to teach freshmen) ask, "How does one climb out of the deepest error?"

You want an example of the deepest error?  There's one in the latest (11-21-13) New York Review.  Mark Lilla, writing about the response of postwar German youth to their parents' conformism, observes that "when left-wing radicalism was at its violent peak in the 1970s the following false syllogism became common wisdom: Nazi crimes were made possible by blind obedience to orders and social convention; therefore anyone who still obeys rules and follows convention is complicit with Nazism, while anyone who rebels against them strikes a retrospective blow against Hitler" (page 36).

Here's another example.  Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, finds that reason is "impotent" in the face of a "meaningless" universe.  He concludes that reason is impotent in the face of anything in the universe.  It's all or nothing.   (Je veux que tout me soit expliqué ou rien.)   We recognize the common wisdom of the agonized adolescent.

I call that mistake in syllogistic reasoning deep error not because it's down disturbing the theoretical fundament but because it's so hard to dig out.  It's down there in human nature, deep in human nature.  Something in our genome (or in what fallen Adam passed on to us) says to German youth, "If a thing is bad everything associated with it is bad.  If you're good you'll believe this." 

In America we sometimes fix, or locate, this error in freshman nature, but that's wrong.  Graduate students, when the political fight gets warm enough, can commit as many informal fallacies as anybody.  "Be logical," I heard a cool one say to a warm one in 1974.  "Logical?" said the warm one.  "Nixon was logical."

What makes it so hard to dig this error out is that students, the best students, want to be deep.  They arrive shallow, or thinking themselves shallow, Midwest shallow, and the sooner they get deep the better.  They don't know what's deep but they think profs know.  "So who do the profs here think is deep?" It's not always Plato or Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or John Rawls.  In the 1960s in English departments it was Albert Camus, as evidenced by the number of profs who repeated his fallacies.

Have we forgotten?  "Reason and language, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless."  The absurdist credo, repeated again and again in commentary on books like Catch-22.  (The above is in Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, A 'Catch-22' Casebook, p. 255)  Repeating the old, deep, elementary errors.

In a semester you don't have time to dig these errors out.  You just chip away at them.  With the absurdist credo, for example, you would try to get the writer to recognize the equivocation (one of the informal fallacies) in the word "meaning."  Most of the time "meaning" means "signification" (as "means" does right there!) but some of the time it means "purpose."   "I mean to be a 'saint,' meaning one canonized by the church."  There are both meanings, properly distinguished, in the same sentence.

But look at that professor's statement of the absurdist credo: "Reason and language, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless."  Does Jean Kennard's word "meaning" mean "signification" or "purpose"?  If it means "signification" then "of his existence" makes no sense but "describing his world" does; if it means "purpose" then it's the other way round.  The writer has "reason and language," willy-nilly, doing both, giving him (and Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman, and about a hundred thousand Yippies) a false syllogism that looks like a deep European justification for the trashing of reason.

It would be easier to blame stupid Americans if the equivocation hadn't started with all-or-nothing Camus.  "Look, Reason, if you can't show me the purpose of my existence don't come around trying to explain the street outside."  (Note:  If British philosophers weren't so reluctant to get personal they'd have had Camus' case analyzed in an instant: he's been deprived of God, the traditional giver of meaning (purpose) to man's existence, and is having a hard time getting used to it.  When he matures in his atheism he will, as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer — those old hands at Godlessness — can tell him, be less excited and more careful.)

The patron error philosopher is Florence Nightingale, who, though she had a hard time saying just what a hospital was or should be, knew one thing about it: that it shouldn't be a place that spreads disease.  That's starting at the small end.  And from that start she went a long way.  If there had been a Jean-Paul Sartre in her day, or teachers in awe of Jean-Paul Sartre, or any awe in her of such teachers, she'd have never gotten on the road.  "Before there can be any truth whatsoever there must be an absolute truth" (Existentialism, p. 43).  Awesome.

From the point of view of an English Composition teacher a European philosopher, then and now, is a regular Typhoid Mary, spreading writing disease from ward to ward.  Forget about philosophy, I say.  That's upstairs.  This is low level: making sense.  With meaningful words.  If you don't know what I'm talking about read Post #209, on the infected Hannah Arendt, whose prose was hailed (then and recently, in their memorial issue) by New York Review editors, themselves looking a little green around the gills.

So what philosophy will you get when you send students, aspirants, up to it sick?  A lot of French and German postwar philosophy, that's what you'll get.  Don't be surprised if there's an Anglophone quarantine.

What will surprise you is not that the quarantine was broken but that the breakthrough came in English departments, the very departments where disciples of Nightingale struggled, carrying lamps through the night.  I wish I could explain it.  I was there.  But it's the biggest mystery of my 42-year career, how we could pound away on the principles of good writing in one room and then walk across the hall and teach (and write respectful articles about) authors who contradicted those principles right and left, not only in their writing but in their theory, their philosophy.  Go figure.