Agnosticism, James, and the (Missing) Ontological Argument

Over Thanksgiving break, I have been reading James's Varieties of Religious Experience.  This is my first time through the text, but I am certain that I will come back to this well again, and yet again -- and not just for the scholarly uses I can make of it.  This reading has been a profoundly moving experience, in ways I can't quite articulate yet -- just like I can't adequately explain what it was like to sit in the theater on Wednesday and see Ang Lee's stunning film adaptation of The Life of Pi.   But I'll try.

At the risk of revealing the fact that I have apparently spent a good part of the last decade under a rock, I have to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about this story before I saw it in the theater.  I had never read the book, or read anything about it.  I remember seeing the title on display in Barnes and Noble -- either when the book first came out, or perhaps later.  I really don't know. 

So I did not know what to expect when I saw the film.  The poster showed an Indian boy and a Bengal tiger together in a boat.  Magical realism? A dream sequence? A single dramatic moment meant to entice viewers to watch an otherwise underwhelming film?  I just didn't know.

I didn't know.

Now that I have seen the film, all I can think of is Job, shattered at last not by any of his sufferings but by what came after them:  the terrifying presence of the living God. "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye sees thee," says the man who can find the strength or the fury to rail against anything and everything that has befallen him, but falls into stunned silence when brought face to face with the awful terror of a God who comes near. In a similar way, when it comes to The Life of Pi, as the Battle Hymn* says, "mine eyes have seen the glory" -- and it shook me to the center of my soul. 

The Life of Pi is not a perfect film, by any means.  But the few moments of heavy-handed sentimentalism are like so much evanescent vapor -- they will not obscure the filmmaker's vision, or yours.  Go see it, I implore you.  It is likely that you will be entertained -- visually, narratively, dramatically, the film has much to recommend it.  But if your sensibility is at all susceptible to any sense of the sacred, you might also be transported, or enraptured, or awed into a sense of helpless surrender, or at least (as was my case) prompted to raise a desperate plea to no one in particular, a plea that must remain unanswered until the very end:  please, underneath it all, let there be everlasting arms.

Of course, my reaction to this film reveals much about my temperament.  I had wondered, when I started reading James, if I could consider myself to have a "religious" sensibility in the way that James describes, because I just wasn't seeing it.  Yes, this is a horribleway to read as a historian, and I generally don't make the mistake of assuming that texts written in an earlier era might somehow "speak" to -- or about -- me.  I am an intellectual historian, damn it, and we tread a lonely, lofty road.  As Laurence Veysey put it in his Wingspread Conference paper, "Alone among academics [intellectual historians] operated (if they thought carefully about what they were doing) under the paradoxical working assumption that all ideas are false but important."**  

So okay, I admit it -- when it comes to Varieties of Religious Experience, I have broken the rules.  I have been reading James in a regular riot of perspectival multiplicity, paying attention to his argument as it both instantiated and indicated his particular historical context, but at the same time  paying attention to it as a philosophical and even a polemical appeal that might (or might not) ring true for me.

Bad intellectual history?  Probably.  Good existential choice?  Definitely.

Should I bring this personal and personalized reading of James to the seminar room next week?  Probably not.  After raising hell (in a thoroughly professional and intellectually defensible manner, of course) about the methodological difficulties of dealing with both Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics and Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, I would do well to leave inquiries about methodology, situated epistemology, idealism, unmarked/marked gender, identity politics, and hegemonic hermeneutics alone for a week or two, if only so that everyone in the class can recalibrate their doubtless overtaxed irony meters.  Instead, I am happy to come to class next week and talk about James as a representative thinker of his time, rather than as a philosopher whose take on truth might be meaningful or helpful for this time, for this reader.

So in the remainder of this blog post -- and I promise I won't ramble on for too much longer -- let me practice my serene intellectual detachment by pointing out something I noticed in James's text that I found interesting and puzzling.  Now, just because it's interesting doesn't mean it's important.  Indeed, I would love to hear from our readers on this -- especially those of you who are particularly well versed in Jamesian thought.  Hey, if you've read the post this far, what have you got to lose?

In James's chapter on "The Value of Saintliness," he discusses how to evaluate the merit of saints or saintliness in the real world.  James writes:

...[T]he aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium.  It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness....Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction.  To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted.  His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the 'strong man,' because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not.***

When I read this passage, it occurred to me that James is making something like an "ontological argument" for the value of saintliness.  He is borrowing here, it seems to me, from Anselm and his successors.  But, in true Pragmatic fashion, James is bringing the force of the argument to bear on the world that we can see, or that we might imagine.  This is an ontological argument in the service of a phenomenological epistemology.  We are to measure the value of such saintliness as we encounter in our piebald society against an ideal society than which none greater can be conceived.

Oddly, though, when James comes to discuss systematic theology as a philosophical enterprise with a particular (and polemical) vision of truth, the ontological argument is notably absent from his later lecture/chapter on "Philosophy," in which he reviews not only of the various "proofs" for God's existence, but also various arguments for his essential qualities and attributes.  In "Philosophy," James gives a whole laundry list of theological propositions advanced by the syllogistic methods of Thomistic theology, where divine truths are demonstrable via the tools of logical argumentation and a priori reasoning.  But Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God is not among them.**** 

Of course, Aquinas was one of many theologians who found Anselm's "proof" wanting precisely (and, I think, ironically) because of its reliance on a priori reasoning -- an epistemological foundation that David Hume scorned as well.  And Hume is, it seems, something of a favorite of James.  So I find it surprising that, in setting up his straw man, a concern with abstract ontology as a demonstration of practical irrelevancy, he left out the marquee proof.  He left it out here, but he used it earlier -- he used it because it worked for the purposes of his argument, which is to establish that a world with saints in it is, on the whole, better than a world without them. 

James is not interested in ontology, in the abstract idea of things in themselves; as an empiricist, he is concerned with phenomenology, with things in relation to other things, selves in relation to other selves.  The measure of what might be ultimately true is how well it accords with the truths we can experientially measure.  Any idea of God as he is in and unto himself is of little interest to James.  After considering a few of those divine attributes asserted by Thomistic theology and its epigones, James comments:  "candidly speaking, how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life?  And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what vital difference can it possibly make to a man's religion whether they be true or false?" (400).

So what I'm puzzling over here is this:  given his phenomenological bent, why does James find it necessary, or helpful, or persuasive, to evaluate the phenomena of saints and saintliness against the background of an ontological argument for the (existence of? possibility of? promise of?) the ideal society?

What is he (not) doing in structuring his argument thus?  

________

*I also saw Lincoln over the break -- that's a must-see film for American historians, certainly.  And I saw it not one week after reading Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.  The film might be "based on" or "informed by" Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, but it was Foner's text that made the movie more than just a superlative film.  And it certainly was that.  But that's another blog post.

**Laurence Veysey, "Intellectual History as the New Social History," New Directions in American Intellectual History(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 4.

***William James, "The Value of Saintliness," The Varieties of Religious Experience, in William James: Writings 1902-1910, The Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), 339.

****pp. 387-410.  For the laundry-list of claims about God's essence and attributes, see especially pp. 392-398.

The Moment of the Foxes

There's an epistemological and historiographical problem that I am trying to make sense of in relation to the Pragmatists -- and perhaps in relation to our relation to the Pragmatists -- and I am having trouble formulating my thoughts on the matter.  So I have decided to take my question, such as it is, to the blogosophere, and see if  our good readers here can offer some clarity -- or, maybe, some complexity.  Or both.

This weekend I am reading Twentieth-Century Multiplicity by Daniel Borus  and No Place of Grace by T.J. Jackson Lears.  Both are on my reading list, but only Borus is assigned for a class -- the last organized class, by the way, that I will take in my entire academic career.  Ever.  To plunder the Kuhnian castle: I am headed for a major paradigm shift.  First, though, I have to get through this semester.

What I'm wondering about is how to historically situate or understand a particular kind of interpretive move that historians make, though it is certainly not unique to historians.  What I have in mind is our fondness for typological or characterological binarisms -- the binarisms we can employ as shorthand to distinguish between two seemingly different ways that people extract or construct meaning from events. 

I'm thinking, for example, of how one can look at American thinkers at the end of the 19th century and divide them heuristically into "optimists" (John Dewey, William James on most days) and "pessimists" (Henry Adams).  This particular binary seems especially suited -- or, I guess, favored -- when discussing this period. Fragmentation, fracture, multiplicity, contingency, instability -- however we might characterize the cosmology of that era, we seem to find it useful to situate the thinkers of the time in terms of whether or not that they saw in their own time reason for hope or cause for despair. 

In fact, I would suggest that historians of this period themselves might be seen as tending to be either "pessimistic" or "optimistic."  In a footnote to his introduction, Borus writes, "Two diametrically different but superlative efforts to link culture to political economy are T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace...and James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution" (15). Borus does not say what makes these inquiries "diametrically different," but I would surmise that much of their difference has to do with each historian's sympathy for a particular strain of thought emerging from the period.  I mean "sympathy" in a kind of Collingwoodian sense:  their effort to understand the thoughts of their subjects by re-thinking them and re-constituting them through their historical inquiry. Lears is recovering and legitimizing an elegiac lament for a lost past; Livingston is recovering and legitimizing an exuberant celebration of an open future.  And so in a way these monographs may come to re-instantiate the very sensibilities they explore.

Perhaps one might expect the historiography of this period to embrace binarism as a mode of inquiry or even divide along binaristic lines because the period itself was so marked.  Think, for example, of James's distinction between the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded," where epistemology becomes a matter of two basic kinds of temperament.  What's interesting about James's bifurcation of "minds," and other similar distinctions, is the way that a binary can be used to point toward plurality.

A similar binaristic taxonomy of "mind" that paves the way for pluralism is Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between hedgehogs and foxes.  Of course Berlin is writing after James, and in some senses perhaps in response to him -- I'll let the historians of philosophy weigh in here.  In any case, Berlin uses a binary to accentuate the value of plurality.  Indeed, Borus invokes Berlin's binaristic metaphor in the introduction to Twentieth-Century Multiplicity as a helpful way of distinguishing between two kinds of thinkers or two kinds of thought:  "The early twentieth century," Borus writes, "was the moment of the foxes, even if there were quite a few hedgehogs.  It is salutary to recall that Berlin saw the value of and need for both" (11). 

Borus situates the Berlinian fauna within the period he is studying -- but also, by implication, within his study of the period.  What he says about the thinkers of the time is easily applicable to historians' thinking about it:  "Where foxes remind us of the dangers of overgeneralization, hedgehogs remind us how helpful and at times necessary significant and meaningful generalizations are" (11).  That's not just intellectual history; that's historical method.

So here's the best I can do in framing my question:  to what extent is the epistemology of historical inquiry, especially inquiry about this particular period of epistemic turmoil, indebted to and taking place within the framework of the period itself?  

If we look at American intellectual and cultural history in this time frame and see optimists and pessimists, tough-minded and tender-minded, modernists and anti-modernists, foxes and hedgehogs, are we seeing the object of our inquiry -- the thinking of the time -- or are we seeing everything through it? 

Common Ground for the Culture Wars

Lately I have been keeping company with the post-war intellectuals -- Trilling, Macdonald, Rosenberg, Riesman, Baldwin, Buckley.  Of that last, most formidable fulminator, I had this to say yesterday on Twitter:

Today: reading Buckley, _God and Man at Yale_, wondering exactly how often he rolls over in his grave. Ideas have consequences, dude. #USIH
— LD Burnett (@LDBurnett) August 16, 2012

I spent the rest of the day alternately laughing, rolling my eyes, and -- dare I admit it? -- occasionally nodding in agreement with the old chap.  At the end of the day, I wrote a long-ish two-page precis to map out some future avenues of inquiry for this particular text, which will be making an appearance in my (new and improved!) dissertation. 

So I was very intrigued and gratified to see Kevin Schultz's comment go up earlier today on Andrew's recent blog post on the culture wars and sectarian conflict.  Kevin wrote:

It's funny how a post about the decline of Protestant essentialism (the transformation of David Sehat's Moral Establishment?) has rolled into a debate about the New Left and its role in creating the New Right. But as someone who is writing a book about Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr., one thing I have been struck by is by how much their critiques of Eisenhower's America overlapped. They both hated the mainstream liberalism of the 1950s, and if you look at the early editions of Buckley's National Review and of Mailer and friend's Village Voice (begun within weeks of each other in 1955), their starting sentiments are identical: mid-century liberalism was sapping people of their individualism and their freedoms, it was a sanitary culture where "every child had his own social worker" (that, by the way, is the Village Voice, not the National Review), it was a muted America that had no voice, no expression, nothing interesting to say or do.

Where the two guys went from there is of course the rest of the story (here perhaps Hunter's distinctions help, and also one's Catholicism versus the others Judaism), but it's shocking at how much the starting critiques were the same.

This is an astute observation, and I'm sure that Kevin is on to something. 

For my part, what I find surprising is Kevin's very surprise at the notion that thinkers as seemingly divergent as Mailer and Buckley would share a common sensibility.  That I find Kevin's surprise surprising is, in its turn, evidence of the contrarian nature of (some of) my training by (and, therefore, to a limited extent, as) a historian of sensibilities. (But don't you know that its very contrariety is part of its appeal! If practically everybody is going to zig, then I'm perfectly happy to zag...most of the time.)

But in all seriousness (and what are intellectual historians, anyway, if not Suitably Serious People):  it seems perfectly natural to me that Mailer and Buckley would share a common sensibility.  In fact, having just finished reading Buckley's God and Man at Yale yesterday -- that Ur text of disaffected idealistic undergrads scolding their professors for failing in their moral duty -- I would even up the ante and say that Buckley shared a common sensibility with Tom Hayden and the other authors of the Port Huron Statement.[1]

Buckley's indignation before the inaction and/or alleged conspiratorial silence of the profs sympathetic to his views, along with his insistence that, because the older generation were entrenched in their establishment niceties, it was up to him to sound the alarm -- all this is a sensibility he shares with the authors of the Port Huron Statement.  Indeed, it would not be unreasonable, I think, to argue that Buckley in some sense paved the way for the student activism of the New Left, specifically in identifying the university as the worthy site and center of cultural conflict.  Buckley called higher education "the nerve center of civilization," and he argued that "the guardians...of this sustaining core of civilization...have, in so many cases, abdicated their responsibility to mankind."[2]

With these assertions, at least, Tom Hayden and friends seemed to be in agreement.  In the closing salvo of their manifesto, the SDS affirmed that "the university is located in a permanent position of social influence."[3]  Further, though the authors of the Port Huron Statement no doubt disagreed quite strongly with Buckley that the role of the university is to inculcate and preserve Christian values, they certainly agreed that the university was to be a center and site of moral influence, and that it was badly failing at its task.  "Tragically," they wrote, "the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes.  But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel -- say, a television set -- passing on the stock truths of the day."[4]  Though Buckley wanted those old stock truths protected and preserved, and the SDS wanted those truths challenged, both alike viewed the moral influence of the professoriate as vital to their divergent visions of the good society.

That these young visionaries with practically antithetical visions should alike look to the university as a place in need of and in command of ideological transformation suggests that they are both drawing upon the same underlying sense of the role and reach of (higher) education in public life.  Of course, the call of the SDS to focus on the university might be characterized as a move to counter the New Conservatives' bid for influence there.  However, even for the New Left -- indeed, especially for the New Left -- the university remained the single institution that might still provide a safe haven for ideals and idealists.  To be sure, even in this tenuous, provisional faith in the ivory tower, they differed markedly from Buckley, who looked to the Church as the repository of changeless truth in a changing world and who sought to (re)align the university with its ecclesiastical origins.  But as secular a document as the Port Huron Statement is -- and it is, it seems to me, quite secular by design -- there yet remains the sense that the university, the professoriate, has a sacred trust to keep.

I would venture to say that this sensibility, shared by Buckley and Tom Hayden alike, has not been without its adherents in the decades since.  Further, I would surmise -- though I will defer (for now!) to the judgment of others here -- that it is this shared ideal that, more than anything else, made American university campuses ground zero for many a conflict in the culture wars. I wonder, though, if Buckley's ideas have not finally overcome his ideals.  He wanted the university to champion religion over secularism, and individualism over collectivism, but he based his defense of these ideals on the notion that alumni and parents are "customers" or "consumers" of education, and that it is the job of the university to meet market demand.[5]  That seemingly hyper-individualist idea, such as it is, seems to have carried the day, dislodging humanistic inquiry, along with the search for both meaningful individual existence and enduring or effective social value, from the center of a university education. This result, it seems to me, is something that both Buckley and the signatories of the Port Huron Statement might alike deplore. 

Or am I cutting that cantankerous old Eli too much slack?

__________________
[1]It's quite possible that someone else has already made this argument far more convincingly than I have in this post -- but, for the time being, if it ain't on my reading list, it ain't on my radar screen.  If you know of a scholar who has drawn this particular connection, please pardon my (temporary) ignorance, and please give me a link in the comments.  This would be helpful for my dissertation research.  Added 9:15 PM:  On the more general idea of the university as a guardian and purveyor of moral values, see Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).  

[2] William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom," 50th anniversary edition (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1986), 172-173.\

[3] Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005), 165.

[4] Hayden, 60.

[5]This idea, a major theme of Buckley's work, is highlighted in John Chamberlain's 1951 foreword.  See especially p. lx, where Chamberlain puts the matter in the plainest terms:  "The autonomy of the customer should hold whether he is buying toothpaste, tennis rackets -- or education for his children." 

The Sensibility of Historians

By L.D. Burnett

What gives Andrew Hartman the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Richard Hofstadter or Daniel Wickberg?  The same thing that gives Daniel Wickberg the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Thomas Haskell and Michel Foucault.  As historians, they evidently share a certain sensibility, a certain sense of responsibility, to themselves and to their profession.   As I hope to show in this post, this particular sensibility of historians is what makes our work difficult, and what makes it matter. 

In the comment thread on Andrew Hartman's recent post about Kevin Mattson's oeuvre, Bill Fine challenged Andrew Hartman to a friendly fracas regarding matters of style and substance in historiography.  Their discussion explicitly addressed and implicitly raised a number of questions.  Is "style versus substance" a heuristically useful or a deceptively divisive binary?  Is style insubstantial? Do substantial differences come down to matters of style?  Or, to paraphrase the kid from Stand By Me, "What the hell is style, anyway?"

It seems that for the purposes of this post Hartman is picking up the term straight from Mattson's Rebels All!.  Hartman doesn't define how Mattson uses "style," but he dismisses the significance of Mattson's conclusions about it. Hartman writes:

I find Mattson’s argument that conservatives are the legatees of sixties radicalism very problematic. Conservatives are rowdy anti-establishmentarians in style. So what? In the first place, sixties radicals were hardly the first Americans to evince such a style. But more importantly, style should not always be conflated with substance, especially in this case. Sixties radicals were anti-establishment because they were against the war, racism, and sexism they thought endemic to the establishment. Obviously, the same cannot be said about conservatism.

Fine takes issue with the sharp distinction between style and substance that Hartman wants to draw "especially in this case," and instead offers "a richer, if less precise meaning" for the term.  Fine references Hofstadter's study of the "paranoid style," and invokes Dan Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter (and others) as making a "contribution to the history of sensibilities."[1] 

Situating the work of Hofstadter as a contribution to a larger -- and better, in the sense of being more comprehensive -- inquiry that takes "sensibilities" as its object of study is just one of the more daring rhetorical moves Wickberg makes in his essay, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New." As part of making his case for the "superior" scope of "sensibility as an object of study,"[2] Wickberg encompasses Hofstadter's historical understanding within his own.  That's one way to claim your place in the profession.

Hartman doesn't challenge Fine's reading of Wickberg, or Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter.  However, he does re-situate Wickberg in relation to Hofstadter.  Hartman places Wickberg alongside "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, [and] Hofstadter," only to dismiss them all as historians who have "a tendency" -- might one say a style, or perhaps a sensibility? -- "to overstate the conflation of style and substance."  That's another way to claim your place in the profession.

So, to review:  Hartman challenges Mattson's conclusions on the grounds that giving undue weight to "style" is a methodological mistake.  Fine challenges Hartman's binaristic division of style and substance, invoking Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter.  Hartman groups Wickberg and Hofstadter together with Derrida and Foucault, which at first glance seems like high praise for Wickberg.  However, lumping historians together with theorists -- especially these theorists -- and suggesting that they think alike is not exactly a compliment.  Indeed, as I noted above, the fact that Thomas Haskell purports to explore the history of sensibilities but does so through a "rather abstract and speculative argument"  -- that he views his object theoretically, rather than historically -- is precisely what draws Wickberg's criticism.[3]

Wickberg and Haskell take a similar approach, though, when it comes to Foucault.  However, Wickberg seems more willing to acknowledge the usefulness of Foucault's theories than Haskell, who accuses Foucault (and Stanley Fish) of playfully or perversely choosing to operate under particular methodological and epistemic assumptions that "constitute a blank check for tendentiousness."[4]  Wickberg is more moderate in his critique of the French theorist, as one might expect from a historian whose recent challenge to the purported consensus regarding the state of the field of intellectual history included the suggestion that we "listen to Foucault instead" of assuming that contexts (and therefore the questions that come with them) are not in many ways fashioned by our very inquiry.[5] 

Nevertheless, Wickberg claims, Foucault's usefulness is limited, because Foucault's vision is limiting.  Wickberg bases this claim on the same pragmatic ground that Haskell occupies:  what does Foucault get us?  Here is Wickberg's answer: 

The overwhelming focus on instrumentalizing culture as a tool of power in some of the dominant forms of cultural history finds no room for those elements of culture that cannot be implicated in power relations.  Culture is not power, nor is power the only or the most important element of culture.  Power is but one dimension of culture, a dimension that might be more or less important for the historian and analyst, depending upon the concrete specifics of the cultural moment being studied.  It is an impoverished vision of human life that insists on turning people's whole ways of experiencing, perceiving, and feeling into expressions of one dimension of human life.[6]

What I find most striking here is not the fact that a cultural and intellectual historian who has taken the linguistic turn dares to challenge the hegemony of Foucault (though I have to admit that I somehow missed this enchanted doorway to the Land Beyond Power/Knowledge in earlier readings of this essay).  Instead, what is so singular -- and at the same time so typical, so exemplary -- about this assessment of Foucauldian historiography is the way Wickberg grounds his critique in the autonomy of historical understanding.

The "autonomy of historical understanding" can refer to (at least!) two things.  On the one hand, it refers to historical epistemology as distinct from and free from the constraining necessity of (social) scientific reasoning -- historical inquiry as ideographic rather than nomothetic.[7]  In this sense, Wickberg can set aside an exclusively Foucauldian approach because it subsumes and effaces the particularities of the past beneath a homogenizing general theory about power.  For the same reason, Wickberg can sharply criticize Haskell's treatment of "sensibilities" for its abstraction; rather than focusing on concrete historical manifestations of a particular humanitarian sensibility, Haskell discusses "the humanitarian sensibility" via theoretical, hypothetical speculations. 

But the autonomy of historical understanding means more than just the epistemological distinctiveness of historical inquiry; it can also refer to the competence of the professional historian's intellectual and moral judgment as such an inquirer.  The historian must exercise autonomy; he or she must be able to adjudicate between competing visions and versions of the past.  This autonomy is not the automatic possession of the historian; it is the hard-won habitus of seasoned practitioners who, by their participation in the profession, agree to work within a set of basic norms and constraints that Haskell identifies elsewhere as characteristic of a pragmatic objectivity.  Among other things, professional historians are committed

to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and, most important of all, suspend or bracket [their] own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers.[8]

Historians' demonstrable commitment to this pragmatic objectivity -- verifiable because it is testable, contestable and gamely contested by their fellow practitioners, as Fine and Hartman so congenially demonstrate -- is what gives someone like Dan Wickberg the professional authority to say things like, "Foucault is of limited use here." Further, he does so not only on epistemic but also on moral grounds -- and those grounds are situated within his own understanding as a historian, and within his own understanding of history as a humanistic discipline, an understanding that, if not acquired in the contest, was doubtless sharpened by it.  Wickberg's rejection of a narrow Foucauldian vision is not based on an appeal to extra-professional norms and standards, but rather grows out of a professional commitment to a particular way of understanding the past, a way that would be morally indefensible if it were not methodologically sound -- at least methodologically sound enough to be put to the test in the pages of the AHR.  In a similar way, Hartman's take on the (in)sufficiency of the history of sensibilities as a methodological approach has already come under an (informal) kind of peer review, and will be subjected to the collective critical scrutiny of the professional community.

Ultimately, the legitimacy of Wickberg's challenge to Foucauldian theory, as well as the legitimacy of Hartman's challenge to Wickberg, or Fine's challenge to Hartman, derive from these historians' autonomy as members in good standing of what Haskell calls the community of competent inquirers, a community whose epistemic integrity as a whole depends on the adjudicative integrity -- the intellectual morality -- of its individual members.[9]  

The challenge Fine has issued to Hartman regarding the finer points at the heart of 1960s historiography calls into question not only Hartman's methodology, but also his moral vision.  Understood in terms of Wickberg's contrarian state-of-the-field essay, Fine is asking Hartman to account for the questions he asks, and the way he frames problems, precisely because this is a way that precludes other approaches.  Fine wants Hartman to explain what he gains, and also to acknowledge what he loses, by eschewing approaches that do not assume sharp distinctions between "style and substance."

Just as Fine demonstrates his autonomy by asking the question, so also Hartman asserts his autonomy in giving his answer.  His response to Fine demonstrates the freedom of historians to choose when to follow established models and when to set them aside.  While a U.S. intellectual historian might be expected to be familiar with "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, Hofstadter, Wickberg, etc.," he or she is under no obligation to see matters just as these scholars have viewed them individually or collectively.  (Is there anything, I wonder, that they have all viewed in like manner?)  Indeed, the historian's obligation is to exercise his or her own best judgment as a critical, competitive member of the "community of the competent."[10]

Nevertheless, I find Hartman's response to Fine somewhat unsatisfying, precisely because it does not draw upon the full authority of Hartman's moral autonomy as a historian.  Hartman has explained that he doesn't like the way the history of sensibilities seems to flatten the very distinctions he would prefer to draw in sharp relief.  But what he does not explain is why it is important to him -- methodologically, epistemologically, ethically -- to draw that sharp distinction. 

Why is it essential for Hartman to draw a sharp distinction between the New Left and the post-60s conservative movement?  I am not suggesting that such sharp distinctions don't exist, nor accepting that they do.  What I want to know is this:  what does that distinction get Hartman, and what does it get us?  In other words, I would like to know the practical consequences of choosing to see post 1960s conservatism as sharply distinct from all the varieties of conservatism that came before.   

Again, I'm not questioning the accuracy or the adequacy of that understanding; Andrew is the expert here.  I just want to know how that understanding fits within Hartman's vision of the 60s and the Culture Wars (and I may have to wait for the book on that), and how that understanding in turn fits in with his more general "vision of human life." 

Of course, by asserting that a historiographical method does in fact express a particular and ethically valent vision of human life, I am identifying myself with the sensibilities of similarly minded historians.  However, that is not the same thing as identifying myself as a historian of sensibilities.  That methodological approach is certainly well-represented in my reading list and in my graduate program, and it may or may not be well-represented in this blog post.  But the extent to which I will adopt it or not is a matter of my own autonomous judgment as a historian. 

This is my ethical obligation to my fellow-practitioners: to choose the methodological approach which I believe will allow me to give the best possible account of my subject, while at the same time accounting as best I can for the methods I use to attain that goal.  That professional ethos characterizes the sensibility of historians,  a sensibility I am pleased and proud to share with Andrew Hartman, Bill Fine, Dan Wickberg, and all the other fractious combatants in this fracas of the competent.


______________

[1]Daniel Wickberg, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New," The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 3 (June 2007), 677.

[2]Wickberg 664.

[3]Wickberg 680.

[4]Thomas Haskell, "Justifying Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge," in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 212.

[5]Daniel Wickberg, "The Present and Future of American Intellectual History," U.S. Intellectual History: The Blog for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH), 3 April 2012. http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/04/present-and-future-of-american.html Accessed 15 June 2012, 7:45 a.m.

[6]Wickberg, "Sensibilities," 674 (italics mine).

[7]The most systematic explication of this distinction that I have read to date is Louis Mink's essay on the subject.  A perceived need to define and defend the distinctive epistemic and disciplinary autonomy of history, especially intellectual history, emerges quite clearly in many of the essays presented at the Wingspread conference and subsequently published by Higham and Conkin.  See Louis O. Mink, "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966): 24-47; John Higham and Paul Conkin, editors, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), especially the essays by Hollinger, Wood, Ross, May and Haskell.

[8] Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, Vol. 29 No. 2 (May, 1990), 132.

[9]Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 176. 

[10] Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 178.

Susan Pearson's Book Wins Merle Curti Award

The blogging staff of the USIH blog and the members of the S-USIH would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Susan J. Pearson, whose outstanding book The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (U. of Chicago, 2011) won the 2012 Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History.

The publisher's website offers a brief summary of this brilliantly-conceived text, and includes a few of the many well-deserved accolades the book garnered from early reviewers.  Here, for example, is Dan Wickberg's early assessment of  Pearson's important work:

The Rights of the Defenseless is much more than an examination of the development of specific policies by humane societies, more than a case study of the emergence of Progressive era reform as it applied to the protection of children and animals.  Rather, Susan Pearson uses the very specific concern with these two forms of dependency to explore the definition of rights in liberal discourse; the boundary between person and animal in modern thought and practice; the symbolic configuration of self and society in nineteenth-century political culture; the emergence of a modern mode of linking feeling to reason to action. I do not think it is too much to say that this book will redefine the understanding of the humanitarian sensibility and its place in modern American culture. This is history as an act of the moral imagination in the very best sense.

Pearson's history is pathbreaking indeed, and we are all pleased that the 2012 Merle Curti Award Committee recognized her truly outstanding achievement. 

Susan was not able to accept this honor in person at the 2012 OAH meeting in Milwaukee. She was busy with another outstanding achievement:  she was having a baby.  So double congratulations to Susan and her lovely family, including especially her husband, Michael Kramer, a frequent, smart, savvy commenter on this blog.  I believe they have set the bar for the Best Week Ever for intellectual historians.