Oakeshott Symposium on Science and Religion

oakeshott

This is the first of six contributions to a symposium published in Zygon, vol. 44, no. 1 (March 2009).

Abstract. This paper introduces a symposium discussing Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of the relationship of religion, science and politics. Essays by Elizabeth Corey, Timothy Fuller, Byron Kaldis, and Corey Abel are followed by a review of Corey’s recent book by Efraim Podoksik.

Keywords: category error; creationist science; Stephen Jay Gould; ignoratio elenchi; modality; non-overlapping magisteria; Michael Oakeshott; politics; religion; science.

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) has the twofold distinction of being acknowledged as one of the greatest political philosophers and as one of the greatest philosophers of history of the twentieth century. He also made a distinguished contribution to the philosophy of education, philosophical jurisprudence, the history of political thought, and aesthetics. What is not widely known is that his earliest writings were centrally concerned with religion and theology and that this remained an implicit interest through most of his long career. In his first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933), Oakeshott gave a metaphysical and epistemological account of the place of history, science, and practice in human experience, in which religion and politics are subsumed into the domain of practice. This modal conception (not to be confused with modal logic) is structurally key to all of Oakeshott’s work. It is therefore no surprise that each of the five contributors in this symposium spends a significant amount of time on this aspect of Oakeshott.

The motivation behind my suggesting this symposium had its source in the late writings of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. It struck me that Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” (Gould 1997; 1999) bore a striking resemblance to Oakeshott’s modal conception, presented some 66 years earlier. The resonance was ever so strong when examined in the context of the current hot topic of “scientific creationism.” On both Oakeshott’s and Gould’s terms, scientific creationism is a star example of an oxymoron because it conflates subject matter that they believe ought to be kept distinct. For Oakeshott, human experience comprises distinct spheres or modes of knowledge—practice, science, history, and poetry (aesthetics), each of these domains modal in the sense that each is constitutive of its own criteria of objectivity and standards appropriate to its own subject matter.1 Oakeshott’s modal conception sought to preserve the integrity of each and every mode, including science. Religion and politics, on Oakeshott’s account, were consigned to the world of practice, the realm of agency characterized by the endless deliberation of reconciling is with ought. Thus, the fusion of scientific with creationism amounts to the politicization of science, or its corollary, the politicization of religion. Oakeshott’s modal conception is best known through his critique of “scientific politics.” Scientific politics denotes the attempt to make political activity answerable or reducible to scientific criteria and is a canonical example of what Oakeshott took to be the misunderstanding of an activity and which he famously called rationalism (Oakeshott [1962] 1991). For him, this conflation of modes—the political (practical) and the scientific— is neither political nor scientific. The abstract apriorism implied in scientific politics is profoundly inappropriate to the complex manifold that is human conduct because it abstracts from the minutia of lived experience. The scientific perspective and the practical perspective are of completely different orders, and to allow one to bleed into the other is to generate at best irrelevance and at worst profound human misery. Practice, being ever present, constantly pressing up against human experience, beckons one on; its intrinsic malleability carries with it the greatest of consequence. Indeed a conflation of any of the modes (choose your permutation: history, science, practice, poetry) results in something that is neither fish nor fowl. The modes, for Oakeshott, are not and should not be conversable. To enforce conversability is to commit what Oakeshott terms ignoratio elenchi, which refers to any process of argument that fails to establish its relevant conclusion or any counterargument that fails to establish the contradictory of the proposition attacked. Gould (1997) marks this supposed modality: “No supposed ‘conflict’ between science and religion should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (nor do they encompass all inquiry).”

Conceived thus, any perceived conflict is a pseudo problem, an error of irrelevance, generated through either ignorance or a promiscuous, imperialistic, or immodest ideological viewpoint. Science covers the empirical realm (sub specie quantitatis in Oakeshott’s terms), and religious experience extends over questions of moral meaning and value (sub specie voluntatis), and these two magisteria just do not overlap. Furthermore, they are not coterminous in some metamode. For Gould and for Oakeshott, it would be incoherent to posit the notion that these domains be separated by a noman’s land, and so it seems that magisteria, at least in Gould’s view (1997), will inevitably “bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border.” This then is the crux of the matter. Is this inevitability to be taken as a hostile skirmish or welcomed as a benign and innocent dialogue? This is the question that animates the following discussion—and speaks directly to Zygon’s aims and scope. Many take Oakeshott’s well-known invocation of ignoratio elenchi to be roughly coextensive with Gilbert Ryle’s “category mistake” (Ryle [1949] 1990, 17–18).2 It has to be admitted that Oakeshott’s use of ignoratio elenchi is tendentious. It is so in five ways:

1. Only because Oakeshott holds particular views does he regard certain arguments as failing to establish a relevant conclusion.

2. The irreducible plurality of modal worlds forbids any commonalities—the use of relevant evidence, the use of logical inference, and so on. Oakeshott seems to rule out the notion that there are general virtues of evidence and inquiry that we appeal to regardless of the domain of inquiry (of course the standards of accuracy will vary between subject matters).

3. Given the irreducible plurality of the modes, Oakeshott has to rely upon some notion of coherentism. Coherentism in epistemology and metaphysics— that is, justification and truth—inherits several well-known difficulties. It invites transference to ethics, politics, and society—else we are incoherent in having coherentism in one sphere and something different in the other. Coherentism about ethics, politics, and society leads directly to relativism (Marsh 2005), because it is empirically and conceptually possible for there to be any number of sets of ethical, political, and social beliefs and activities that form equally coherent systems, with ex hypothesi no decidability on grounds of coherence between them.

4. How does Oakeshott handle the blending of religion and politics if they are both intramodal?

5. Oakeshott’s later addition of poetry as a mode complicates matters— it is just a mode of sensibility and is devoid of evidence or inquiry. (Interestingly, Gould also mentions the magisterium of art).

With these points in mind, Oakeshott’s modal conception plays a vital role in the discussion that follows. The authors, through their unique expository styles and particular substantive concerns, all contribute to getting a grip on what may be for some a rather obscure notion. First up is Elizabeth Corey (2009), who makes a case for the view that although Oakeshott’s writing is not conventionally religious, there is a religious sensibility that infuses all his philosophy. Timothy Fuller (2009) specifically offers an analysis of the relation of science and religion in Oakeshott’s modal scheme, although he is not directly concerned with the public-policy implications of this view. Byron Kaldis (2009) presents a close-grained examination of Oakeshott on science, examining its internal consistency and locating it within contemporary discussions in the philosophy of science. Corey Abel (2009) looks at the implications of Oakeshott’s modality for public policy, refracted through Oakeshott’s metaphor of civil conversation. Abel focuses here on the hot topic of the day—creationist science. By way of a postscript, Efraim Podoksik (2009) reviews Elizabeth Corey’s book Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (2006). Her discussion of the relation between religion and aesthetics in Oakeshott brings to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s gnomic remark “Ethik und Asthetik sind Eins”—Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same (Wittgenstein 1969, 24.7.16), both to be conceived as sub specie aeternitatis (from the standpoint of eternity) or, more loosely translated, as “free from considerations of time.” The atemporality ascribed by Wittgenstein to ethics and aesthetics seems to have more than a faint resonance in the “delicate” noninstrumental link between religion and aesthetics that Corey discerns in Oakeshott. As is clear from the title of Corey’s book, it is a perfect accompaniment to the main course.

I Am a Strange Loop: The Life and Times of John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces

Here is the intro to a review essay:

 

Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Cory MacLauchlin. Boston and New York: Da Capo Press, 2012, 319 pages, $26.00 hardcover.

The book is not autobiography; neither is it altogether invention. While the plot is manipulation and juxtaposition of characters, with one or two exceptions the people and places in the book are drawn from observation and experience. I am not in the book; I’ve never pretended to be. But I am writing about things that I know, and in recounting these, it’s difficult not to feel them.

No doubt this is why there’s so much of [Ignatius] and why his verbosity becomes tiring. It’s really not his verbosity but mine. And the book, begun one Sunday afternoon, became a way of life. With Ignatius as an agent, my New Orleans experiences began to fit in, one after the other, and then I was simply observing and not inventing . . .

John Kennedy Toole, cited in Butterfly in the Typewriter, pp.178-179

We are all “strange loops” but perhaps none more so than John Kennedy Toole. His life’s narrative is a Möbius strip of irony layered upon irony, a loop of consciousness that had a deep seated self-prescience heightened by our presentism; a consciousness that continues to writhe, twist and fold back upon itself, throwing up a raft of self-referential and feedback paradoxes that concern the nature of the self or the soul.[1]

Where does the boundary between the protagonist George Arthur Rose (Hadrian the Seventh, 1904) and his creator Frederick Rolfe (a.k.a. Baron Corvo) lie? The same question can be asked of a handful of other twentieth-century literary titans, including Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Yukio Mishima. Joseph K. has been taken to be Kafka’s alter ego in Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925), as has Ulrich in Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities, 1930–42), and Kochan for Mishima in Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1949). To this very select group one must add John Kennedy Toole and his creation Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces (1980/1981).

One cannot help but feel that one is communing directly with Toole when Ignatius opens up his feverish letters with “Dear Reader,” a style of writing that displays a conceptual precision and biting observation that is more plausibly Toole than the whimsy of Ignatius.  This autoscopic[2] phenomenon had particularly deep implications for Toole, clearly exacerbated by a prevailing cultural antipathy to an autotelic[3] conception of aesthetic experience. This Gordian knot of the autoscopic and the autotelic presents a philosophical minefield for any would-be biographer.

With this in mind, Cory MacLauchlan’s new biography judiciously and deftly fills the lacuna between the low-grade psychological speculation that marred an earlier biographical (René Pol Nevil and Deborah George Hardy’s Ignatius Rising, 2001)[4] and the unabashedly affectionate but still informed memoir by Joel Fletcher entitled Ken and Thelma: The Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (2005). The former, an exercise in “farthing” journalism, shamelessly rides on the coattails of Confederacy. The latter was issued as a promissory note, awaiting someone with the right motivation and finesse to come along.

The discussion that follows is very much in keeping with MacLauchlin’s own methodological stance, sidestepping the hackneyed trope of the troubled artist: “I neither aimed to diagnose him, nor cast him in the mold of the tortured artist” (MacLauchlan, 2012, pp. xiv, 216). The body of discussion falls broadly into two sections. In the next section I discuss the notion of autoscopia as it relates to literature, discussing the “blurred” sense of self between the author and his creation.  The section that follows focuses on the notion of autotelic art, the idea that art should not answer to any extrinsic considerations, political or economic. This scaffolds the publishing backstory to Confederacy and the role of the didactically inclined editor – Robert Gottlieb – the then head of Simon and Schuster and an avatar for a broader cultural malaise. The closing section offers a few concluding remarks.

 

[1] Hofstadter, 2007, pp. 101-102. “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond” (Toole, 1981, p. 194; Hofstadter, 2007, pp. 9-10).

[2] “Autoscopic”: from the Greek autos (self) and skopeo (looking at). A dream-like apprehension of a duplicate self. Other literary names that are invoked in connection with autoscopic phenomena include Dostoevsky, Goethe, Hoffmann, de Maupassant, de Musset, Nabokov, Poe, Richter, Shelley and Stevenson (Mishara, 2010b; Sforza and Blanke, 2012).

[3] “Autotelic”: Greek autos (self) and telos (end). A self-complete artifact that doesn’t depend on any extrinsic considerations.

[4] As MacLauchlin summarizes it: “[T]hey also depict Toole as a man suffering from an Oedipal complex, suppressed homosexuality, alcoholism, madness, and an appetite for promiscuity” (MacLauchlin, 2012, pp. xiii-xiv, 214-216). Myrna writes to Ignatius: “Great Oedipus bonds are encircling your brain and destroying you.” (Toole, 1981, p. 156). Even a clinical psychologist such as Mishara resists the idea of diagnosing Kafka’s supposed schizophrenia on the basis of his literary work (Mishara, 2010a, p. 24).

Herb Hardesty @ Jazz Fest

"Fats" Domino, music

The very excellent Keith Spera reports on day 2:

Hardesty is best known for his many decades in the Fats Domino band. His tenor is featured on the original recordings of many Domino classics, “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday” and “Ain’t That a Shame” among them. As Domino’s bandleader, Hardesty was known for his explosive, acrobatic solos.

But the 88-year-old’s epic resume also includes collaborations with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington and the Count Basie Orchestra, among many others. It was that jazzier mindset that Hardesty, a 12th Ward native who has lived in Las Vegas since the early 1970s, tapped on Saturday.

A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 9

A Confederacy of Dunces

I would very much like to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this . . . “A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss” (p. 37).

Pilgrimage for “Pops”

Louis Armstrong

It was a dream come true (as they say) to finally visit “Pops” Corona house and  take in the archives at Queens run by Ricky Riccardi, who did such a brilliant job in writing Pops’ biography. The highlights:

1. What is striking is that all employees, paid or volunteer, are so passionate about “Pops.”

2. My favourite room of course was “Pops'” den the only room in the house that had his imprint. It was lovely hearing him tell an interviewer about Tony Bennett’s portrait of him while I was standing right next to it.

3. Thanks to one of the volunteers (and Ricky) she sent me a shot of a Hebrew bible sent to “Pops” and inscribed as follows: “To Louis Armstrong who made the bible sing, from Yacov Uriel whose people wrote it.”

4. Highlights at the archives included being able to page through Pops’ original handwritten ms where he talks about the Karnofkys.

5. Courtesy of Ricky, listening to Pops pleading letter to Joe Glaser to ensure that forthwith he need a) an constant supply of dope (weed) and b) that he needed protection from prosecution – read the full details in Ricky’s bio.

6. Listening to Pops and Lucille having an argument with her showing her ability to use language as colourful as Pops’ in contrast to “Lady” Armstrong’s public persona.

7. Seeing the shelves of tapes (and Pops decorated boxes) and artifacts of all sorts from around the world.

8. Last, but by no means least, and I can’t believe this actually happened, Ricky allowed me to hold one of Pops’ gold-plated horns.

I would urge all New Yorkers who love that musical Einstein and God’s angel on earth (reference to Wings of Desire), to visit the house and by appointment the archives. It’s a very modest place, nicely cared for and will only take 45 minutes to see. I was in tears which came as no surprise to the folk that work at the archives – apparently not an uncommon phenomenon. Support them please. Thank you Ricky and Enid.

Tucson 2014: The 20th Anniversary Toward a Science of Consciousness

consciousness

Save the Date

Companion Luncheon Launch

a companion to michael oakeshott

Thanks to Corey Abel, Paul Franco, Steven Gerencser, Ken McIntyre and Ken Minogue, five of the Companion’s contributors, all of whom did such a sterling job of expressing to the assembled audience why Oakeshott is such a worthwhile thinker. Thanks also to our AHI hosts Bob Paquette and Thomas Cheeseman.

Image

Stigmergic dimensions of online creative interaction

stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Extracts from Jimmy’s paper:

The web has experienced a recent proliferation of design expert communities in domains from software engineering (e.g. Sourceforge and Github) to art (DeviantArt and others). These communities have become hotbeds of creative interaction, with users posting their projects, closely interacting on new endeavors, and engaging in spirited discussion about their craft. With users in these communities constantly generating out new software, images, music and any other artifact imaginable, it is hard to deny that there is significant creative interaction happening. Members of these communities often possess widely varying degrees of proficiency, but more often than not, they have some baseline amount of talent that allows them to enter the community.

Enter Picbreeder. Picbreeder is a web-based system for collaborative interactive evolution of images. The Picbreeder applet starts by randomly generating several images, which are then mated and mutated based on the user’s selections. The user can then publish the image to the Picbreeder website where other users can download and continue the image’s evolution. Within Picbreeder, one need not have artistic talent to contribute to the community, although good taste typically helps. As in more traditional design, new innovations are typically small modifications to the existing structure, which can change the design incrementally or effect a larger shift. Even though users followed their individual interests when evolving this phylogeny, new interesting directions emerged. Many users contributed repeatedly to an evolving lineage, using the design itself to encourage and facilitate collaboration.

Successful collaborative design in Picbreeder does not require shared intentions, suggesting that effective collaboration may be emergent rather than planned from the top down. The surprising result of this emergent process is the gradual discovery by untrained users of hidden treasures within a vast uncharted space. Picbreeder also serves as a fascinating, though initially unintentional, experiment in stigmergic creativity.

The concept of stigmergy was first introduced by Pierre-Paul Grassé, a zoologist, who used it to describe the activities of the termite mound. As he described it, “(s)tigmergy manifests itself in the termite mound by the fact that the individual labour of each construction worker stimulates and guides the work of its neighbour”. The concept of stigmergy can be extended to human endeavors if one expands the notion of the mound to human venues, and replaces “construction worker” with any type of worker. If such an extension is permitted to human creative communities, this description becomes even more apt. Part of the excitement inherent in creative pursuits, whether it is visual art, music or creating open source software, is the moment when the work of a colleague “stimulates and guides” ones own work. Add that “(in) an insect society individuals work as if they were alone while their collective activities appear to be coordinated.” This description too can apply to creative communities. Points out that “(s)tudies on creativity . . . have focused on the individual, obscuring the fact that creativity is a collective affair. The ideas and inventions an individual produces build on the ideas of others (the ratchet effect).” It is very easy to focus on individual creative luminaries, while forgetting the environment and social milieu that are a large part of their creative interaction.

The results of Picbreeder not only demonstrate the truth of creativity as collaboration, but that a large component of creativity can be stigmergic. By abstracting out almost all direct communication and collaboration, and allowing users to be stimulated only by their work and the work of others, Picbreeder demonstrates the extent to which stigmergic processes can yield astounding results. This paper expounds on this point by first describing in detail what Picbreeder is and how it works (section 2). Next, the paper casts creativity in general and Picbreeder specifically into the context of memetic evolution, a model of how ideas spread, change, evolve and die out (section 3). The point is then made in section 4 that these collaborative creative environments draw a great deal of their effectiveness from stigmergic interaction facilitated through creative artifacts. In sections 5, an analysis of the Picbreeder data is described that shows, despite the fact that Picbreeder users engage in almost no direct communication, it shares numerous properties with other collaborative creative environments. Finally, some conclusions and recommendations are made in section 6.

This paper has shown that Picbreeder, an almost fully stigmergic means of collaborative creative interaction, follows many of the same patterns as other collaborative creative networks. Picbreeder demonstrates that it is possible to facilitate creative collaboration through entirely stigmergic means, and this paper explored the mechansisms that gave rise to that stigmergy. Because in other creative communities, stigmergic and non-stigmergic components of creative interaction are difficult to separate, Picbreeder provided an ideal opportunity to study this dimension. It is hoped that future studies will be able to isolate and study the contribution of stigmergic components in other creative communities.

It is also hoped that more quantitative analysis will be done on other creative communities. Academic publishing bibliometrics were used because they are plentiful and easy to access. While it is difficult to trace influence in similar way in musical or visual arts communities, developing techniques to analyze these communities is a worthwhile pursuit. This analysis may provide answers of real economic value. For instance, to answer the question, what will create a broader, more economically viable base of musical development, a U.S. style system in which music distribution is dominated by a few large gatekeepers to the music industry, or a Canadian style system which frequently uses government sponsored incentives to encourage development in musical communities?

There is a great deal of analysis left to be done and questions to be answered with respect to the dynamics of creative communities. For instance, how can Axelrod’s model of cultural diffusion (1997) explain creative influence? Also, how can Friedkin’s analysis of weak ties versus strong ones in organization flows (1982) inform the analysis of how creativity develops within and between organizations. Picbreeder is currently a “flat” community, which does not fully represent the wide variety of social creative arrangements. The addition of this dimension to analysis will hopefully yield additional insight.

Stigmergy is clearly involved in creativity. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is well known for technical innovation and Paris is a well known muse of artists. These physical locations host large collaborative and competent communities for one, but also frequently display and demonstrate the results of their interaction, to “stimulate and guide” other participants. Other creative communities might benefit by explicitly taking advantage of stigmergic concepts to improve their efficcacy. Imagine a paint studio where artists paint in a circle, with the paintings facing inward. Or a research lab where everybody’s latest work in progress is posted to a highly visible electronic board. The more we understand the role of stigmergy in creativity, the better we can shape and guide the process. Ultimately, every creative discipline, along with humanity itself, will be the beneficiaries of this advancement.

A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 8

A Confederacy of Dunces

The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot; death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition, and self-improvement were to be Piers’ new fate. And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK (p. 26).