An Incomplete Education

by Judy Jones

  Current Standing: Universally admired for the pure scope of his understanding, his balanced intelligence, his ability to incorporate dualities into vast schemas without getting silly, and his unwavering faith in the possibility of total understanding. But since no subsequent philosopher has shared that faith, and so few of them believe in God, his metaphysics is already obsolete. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889-1951)

  Best-Known Works: Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations.

  Readability: Bedside reading for Bauhaus fans; oddly and intriguingly structured, especially the Tractatus, which was intended as a model of clarity and has the added advantage of being only seventy-five pages long. Not the kind of book you can’t put down, but if you’re in the right mood, it reads a little like poetry.

  Qualities of Mind: Intense, penetrating, exacting, original, analytical.

  Catchphrases: Language games; whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must remain silent; don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.

  Influence: Seminal—and central—figure in linguistic analysis, one of the dominant trends of modern philosophy (and Cambridge’s answer to sloppy French existentialism). Was convinced that language creates a picture of the real world and that most philosophical problems are merely the result of philosophers’ misuse of language; experience only seems complicated because of our confused descriptions of it, which represent knots in our understanding. Untangle the knots and, according to the theory, philosophical questions will simply dissolve. Was notable for having formulated two separate philosophical systems, the second of which (called ordinary-language philosophy) refuted the first (logical atomism, or picture theory). Was a major influence on yet another group of moderns, the logical positivists.

  Personal Gossip: A rich kid who gave away his inheritance because, he said, he didn’t want his friends to like him for his money. Quit philosophy after finishing his first book, spent a few years teaching grade school in the Alps and contemplating suicide. Built a mansion for his sister that is considered outstanding architecture. Could whistle difficult passages of music from memory. Took up philosophy again and became a cult hero at Cambridge.

  Current Standing: Early Wittgenstein gets raves for sheer brilliance, even though no one is into logical atomism anymore; his later work gets mixed reviews, but the subject is still hot stuff in England and America. On the whole, a prestige philosopher. JOHN DEWEY (1859-1952)

  Best-Known Works: Democracy and Education, Reconstruction in Philosophy, The School and Society.

  Readability: No laughs, no tears, just earnest American textbook prose.

  Qualities of Mind: Robust, practical, down-to-earth, zealous, democratic.

  Catchphrases: Progressive education, learning by doing.

  Influence: An intellectual activist, a thinker for the heartland, and one of the dominant American philosophers of the century. Conceived of philosophy as an instrument for guiding human action, and turned James’ theoretical pragmatism into an applied science, using pragmatic principles to help resolve contemporary social issues. Developed a biology-based theory of knowledge, emphasizing the problem-solving nature of human thought processes and the importance of experimentation in learning. Famous for using these theories to reform the American educational system, rejecting learning by rote in favor of learning by doing. A champion of collective social power.

  Personal Gossip: None.

  Current Standing: The thoroughly relevant philosopher. Hard to criticize him on the basis of his ideas because these were never supposed to be eternal verities; even harder to argue with his success in implementing them. Pragmatism itself is still open to debate; Bertrand Russell accused Pragmatists of “cosmic impiety” in making truth out to be nothing more than a tool for human use, and warned that Dewey’s “intoxication” with social power was the greatest danger confronting modern man. All we know is, Johnny still can’t read.

  Toys in the Attic

  ZENO’S ARROW: One of the best-known of the paradoxes with which a whole contingent of early Greek logicians liked to amuse themselves; this one illustrated the impossibility of motion or change. The flight of an arrow, said Zeno, is an apparent example of motion. But at any given moment of its flight, the arrow is either where it is or where it is not. If it moves where it is, it must be standing still, and if it moves where it is not, then it can’t be there; thus it can’t move. This sort of thing drove Zeno’s friends crazy, of course, but it also provoked a crisis among metaphysicians, who were, for a long time, concerned with reconciling the basic features of permanence and change. It also gave rise to a vast literature that set about trying to prove, disprove, or avoid Zeno’s conclusions. In fact, you could probably still get a lively dinner-table conversation going on the subject today, given the right crowd and plenty to drink.

  PLATO’S CAVE: The famous allegory with which Plato, using Socrates as his mouthpiece, tries to explain the nature of human knowledge. Picture, says Socrates, a bunch of people who’ve spent their whole lives chained up in an underground den, unable to turn around. Behind them a fire is blazing, but all they can see are their own shadows on the wall of the cave in front of them. Never having seen anything else, they naturally mistake these shadows for reality. In the same way, the rest of us mistake the world as we know it for the real world, whereas the objects, and even the qualities, of this world are only shadows of the pure forms that exist in the realm of ideas. Now, what does this mean for you? It means, for example, that somewhere above us in that realm of forms and ideas, there is one, and only one, perfect automobile, of which the lemon you’ve been driving is merely a crude imitation (you probably suspected something of the sort already). By training your mind to contemplate the idea of the perfect driving machine rather than the expensive heap of scrap metal in your driveway, you can eventually struggle up out of the cave into the sunlight where you’ll see the car with utter clarity. True, you will then be confined to driving the idea of the car on the idea of a highway, but Plato never claimed that being a philosopher was easy, and at least you can be pretty certain you’ll never encounter much traffic in the realm of ideas.

  BURIDAN’S ASS: A famous stumbling block to the concept of free will. An ass, placed equidistant from two identical bundles of hay, has no basis for choosing one over the other and ends up starving to death. Although it was first suggested by Aristotle in connection with astronomy, the image is traditionally attributed to the medieval French philosopher Jacques Buridan, who claimed that a man must choose that which his reason tells him is the greater good, but that he may delay making a decision until his reason has had sufficient time to gather all the information it needs. Actually, it’s a starving dog that Buridan refers to; the ass was his critics’ idea.

  OCCAM’S RAZOR: “Entities ought not to be multiplied, except from necessity.” The maxim for which William of Occam, the Franciscan scholar, is best remembered. Actually, Occam never really said this, but he did say, “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer,” which adds up to the same thing; moreover, he did uphold the principle of eliminating all unnecessary facts or hypothetical entities in analyzing a subject, and he did dissect every question as if with a razor.

  PASCAL’S WAGER: The pragmatic approach to God, and the seventeenth-century French religious thinker Blaise Pascal’s attempt to save the skeptical soul through commonsense reasoning. Basically, his argument goes: OK, so you’ll never know for sure whether or not God exists, it’s all a cosmic game of heads or tails. But you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by betting on His existence. Remember, you’re only staking one finite, so-so little life—no, not even that, only the way you live that life—against a chance to win an infinity of an infinitely happy life. If you win (if God exists), you’ve won everything; if you lose (if God doesn’t exist), you haven’t really lost a thing. And don’t say you’d rather not play, because you have no choice; you’re already in the game.

  Dueling Dualities

  DEDUCTION VS.
INDUCTION: Begin by forgetting what Sherlock Holmes used to do; to a philosopher, deduction is much more serious and far-reaching than being able to guess Watson was at his club all day because it’s been raining and his clothes aren’t wet. So what is it? It’s a formal argument that assumes one or more principles as self-evident, then, following rigid rules and forms and proceeding from the general to the specific, infers one or more conclusions from those principles. The example you’ve heard before: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” Pay attention to that form. It’s called a syllogism, and it’s deduction at its most classic—though you can substitute Michael J. Fox for Socrates if you want.

  Induction, by contrast, is empirical, factual, ordinary-feeling; it makes use of experiment and/or experience—the scientific method, if you will—to arrive at an inference and proceeds from the specific to the general. When you make an induction, you begin by recording instances, monitoring behavior, counting noses. If you go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant a dozen times and each time you wake up at 3 A.M. with horrible indigestion, you may well induce that your digestive tract can’t take Mexican food, at least not late at night. Of course, you could be wrong; maybe you’d have gotten sick those nights anyway, or maybe it’s the particular Mexican restaurant, not Mexican food in general. Or maybe your roommate is poisoning you and trying to make it look like Mexican food. Don’t worry, though: Unlike deduction, which, assuming its premises are sound, is certain, absolute, and airtight, induction is about mere probabilities; its success depends on how accurately you observe and over how many cases.

  Historical note: For at least two hundred years philosophers have been looking for a logical proof for why induction works as well as it does or, failing that, even just an orderly way to think about it. No soap. About the closest anybody’s come to actually legitimatizing it as a philosophical entity, as opposed to a useful day-to-day skill, is John Stuart Mill, who cited “the uniformity of nature” as one reason why induction has such a good track record. Of course, that nature is uniform is itself an induction, but Mill was willing to give himself that much of a break.

  Sometimes the line between deduction and induction is clear-cut: For instance, noting (with many a famous philosopher) that the sun always rises, you may have deduced it from the laws of planetary motion, or you may have induced it from the last three thousand or so dawns. Sometimes you think you spot incest—after all, whoever first said that all men are mortal must surely have felt the need to do a little field work first, thereby inducing deduction’s single most famous premise. But the flavors of the two will always be distinctive: Deduction is, in the end, all about the axiom (“A triangle has 180°”), while induction has the ring of the maxim (“Faint heart ne’er won fair lady”).

  A PRIORI VS. A POSTERIORI: In a way, we’re back with deduction and induction. That is, a priori knowledge is based on assumption-as-bottom-line, on belief that doesn’t depend on experience for validation, on “general principles” of the two-plus-two-equals-four, no-plant-can-get-up-and-walk variety. And, like deduction, it’s absolute. A posteriori knowledge derives from observation, of the this-box-is-red, everybody’s-sentimental-on-Valentine’s-Day variety. You get to it after (post-) looking around for yourself. (Your professor probably added that a priori reasoning proceeds from cause to effect, a posteriori reasoning from effect to cause, but that seems like a harder way to think about the whole business.) A good example here, and we owe it to English grammarian, lexicographer, and all-round curmudgeon H. W. Fowler: Browning’s famous line “God’s in his heaven—all’s right with the world” would be interpreted by an a priorist to mean “Given we know there’s a God, the state of the world must be OK,” by an a posteriorist to mean “The world’s so obviously OK, there’s got to be a God.” Caution: A priori thinking can have negative connotations in some circles, implying arbitrary judgments based on preconceived notions.

  What Was Structuralism?

  Structuralism was a French intellectual movement that peaked in the Sixties. Because it was French, as opposed to, say, German, it had automatic chic and cachet. And because it was French, as opposed to, say, English, it was a problem for the Anglo-Saxon mind right from the start.

  Even less focused, less definable, and less happy-go-lucky than existentialism (its immediate predecessor on university daises and at Left Bank café tables), structuralism wasn’t a philosophy exactly, but a method, a way of analyzing and, with any luck, understanding things. Many, many things. Everything, in fact. As such, it cut across academic disciplines and art forms, from linguistics and anthropology (its two major incubators), to literary criticism, film, history, and sociology, to psychology and politics.

  Structuralists believed, fervently and at great length, that (1) the component parts of any system have meaning only in terms of their relations to one another; that (2) those relations tend to be binarily organized, i.e., to involve a pair (or many pairs) of terms, each half of which is parallel, or opposed, or inverted, or equivalent, or duplicative, or whatever, with regard to the other; and that (3) all cultural phenomena, from linguistic structures to kinship practices, table manners to skirt lengths, wrestling to insanity, and so on, long into the Paris night, are governed by the same principles, and hence related to each other. They, as well as all patterns of human behavior, are codes in which the inherent structuring tendencies of the human mind are reflected. And they directly reflect the ways in which the mind sorts, clusters, and mediates every image, every stimulus, every bit of information it stumbles across. Structuralists claim that if you pay close enough attention to these phenomena, ask the right questions, and construct the appropriate “model,” eventually you couldn’t help getting to the bottom of things.

  Structuralism had its beginnings in linguistics, in the work of the Swiss (but French Swiss, if you get our drift) linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who observed, among other things, that the “signifier” c-a-t was an arbitrary way of calling attention to the “signified” concept of cat and an even more arbitrary way of designating Muffin over there, the “referent.” And that all that kept c-a-t from being c-o-t or b-a-t was a single sound, more specifically, a single sound difference, enough of which differences together went to allow us to encode meaning in language—arbitrarily, granted, but with a high degree of success. Also, to decode meaning. And what’s more, Saussure hinted knowingly, it’s not just language. We “understand” Coke in terms of its not being Pepsi, a mimosa in terms of its not being a Bloody Mary, Top-Siders in terms of their not being motorcycle boots.

  Saussure, who died in 1913, had been very provocative. But outside the linguistics community, which he’d provided with a whole new lease on life, it took decades for the news to trickle down to intellectuals-at-large. Enter Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist (and the high priest of structuralism), the publication of whose Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949 launched the structural phase of anthropology. For the next thirty years, Lévi-Strauss chiseled away at primitive cultures and mythologies (as he called them) as if no white man had ever seen a clay pot or a loincloth or an incest taboo before.

  Picture him, for instance, in residence among the Bororo Indians of central Brazil, dealing with their every routine, from cooking to marital fidelity, as if each were a language, a system of communication, structured by unconscious but absolutely binding and consistent laws, laws that were binary in nature (as suggested by two of Lévi-Strauss’ better-known titles, The Raw and the Cooked and From Honey to Ashes).

  Claude Lévi-Strauss

  Of course, the Bororo Indians could themselves have applied the structuralist method to an analysis of Parisian department-store layouts or social-kissing practices had they cared to make the trip. The method is, you understand, up for grabs, employable by anybody who’s familiar with it precisely because it is rooted in the structures of the mind. Or, as Lévi-Strauss himself put it, “We do not claim to show how men think in myths, but how myths think themselves
in men, and without their knowledge…. Myths think themselves among themselves.” In fact, Lévi-Strauss had already sorted through a lot of those myths, eventually decreeing the existence of units called mythemes, the equivalent in culture of phonemes, the lowest-common-denominator elements of speech.

  Structuralism was an attempt to apply science to areas where it had never been applied before, to banish the old belles-lettres approach to literary criticism, the old pencil-and-notebook approach to anthropology, the old roots-and-prefixes approach to linguistics. But it also had certain Marxist overtones (and what French intellectual movement does not?): By questioning the codes—of behavior, of meaning, of authority—it implicitly questioned who had power and why we went along with his having it. Its real beauty, though, lay in its ordering principles. Lévi-Strauss would hear everybody’s folktales and kinship-system stories, thousands and thousands of variations of a theme, and, working structurally, reduce them to a few potent—and lucid—“systems of difference.”

  Roland Barthes, the bottle imp of Paris intellectual life from the Fifties until his death in 1980, could watch a wrestling match or a Molière play, read a fashion magazine or a novella by Balzac, spend an hour at a striptease parlor or several months in Japan, and break the experience down into its component, binarily opposed parts—many of which would then be interchangeable from spectacle to spectacle, experience to experience. Other structuralists worth knowing about: Michel Foucault, the French historian, decoder of insanity, imprisonment, sexuality, and other “marginal” social institutions; Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, who maintained that the unconscious is structured the same way a language is; and Umberto Eco, the Italian scholar and cultural commentator, a specialist in semiotics, or communication through signs, a variant of structuralism that emphasized subject matter over methodology. (Sometimes called structuralists, but not exactly in this way: Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, and Jean Piaget, the French child psychologist.)