227. How Error Philosophers Find Truth

  

Say you're worried only about mistakes.  Then you call yourself a "philosopher."  Owners of that word are all over you: "You've grabbed the wrong name, friend.  You're a functionary, a technician, an agent.  You carry out what's already been determined, a purpose.  Until there's a purpose there are no mistakes.  Don't we have enough stories establishing this?  You know, guy goes into a place, asks to be castrated, is castrated, then discovers that the place also does circumcisions.  'Oi, that's what I meant, circumcised!'" 

All right, error philosopher, you're only the guy with the knife.  "Great technique" is the highest compliment you can aspire to, "zero mistakes" the best entry in your record. Somebody else decides what you're supposed to do with your knife.

Think of the praise his kind of decisionmaking can bring.   "Oh, he knows what's best for genitals I'll tell you.  With some castration is best, with others even circumcision is bad.  Depends on what kind of life is best."  If the purpose is to live the best life then this doctor can aspire to the highest compliment: "He knows what's best for human beings.  He knows what they should go for, what purposes they should have in living."  So no wonder he gets the big compliment-word, "philosopher."

In a way I can accept that.  People who determine ends should get more credit than people who carry out means.  Their job is harder and they influence our lives more.  Where I complain is in the assumption a lot of those people make: that people worried only about means are no help determining ends.  They haven't thought about them or studied them.  They don't need to.  No wonder some of them are clueless. 

I speak up because I have a clear memory of the moment when, feeling most intensely the absence of purpose in my work as an English Composition teacher, I had a vision of purpose.  Not a clear vision, not the kind where you can say, "I know just where I am going," but a vision nevertheless.

It came to me in a supermarket checkout line, as I was contemplating the reading matter offered on the racks.  Maybe you remember, in the eighties:  "Space alien abducts baby." "Dead mom gives birth in coffin."  It was the extreme of what we have now, and will probably always have.  And, because it said to me, "Trash, trash, trash," so loudly, I could see the outcome of my teaching that I most wanted to avoid, the Worst Possible Case, the Big Mistake, the Failure: students writing crap like that, students believing it, students not recognizing it.

That gave me my purpose, my ideal, my shining Truth.  But it didn't locate it.  It just gave me instructions for a good guess at it, in navigator's terms: "Identify the outcome of your work that would most disappoint you — which, in the teaching of writing, would be the biggest pile of what will make you spontaneously say 'trash' — then set your course so that you leave that pile directly behind you.  180 degrees.  Your goal, your ideal, your truth, your destination, will be somewhere in the direction your bow is pointing in."

Since we distinguish among philosophers according to their different ways of finding truth, and I see this as a way, I call English Composition teachers (and all such functionaries) "error philosophers."  They come at truth the back way, in the daily workroom, grappling with error.  The model error philosopher, as I have said, is Florence Nightingale who, claiming no more knowledge about what a hospital should do than that it shouldn't spread disease, took us from the germ-pits of the 1850s to the shining wards of the 1890s.

224. Error Philosophy

 

 

-->

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.