What is Pragmatism? For James and Against Peirce

I'm not that interested in pragmatism per se. My interest in William James is because of his radical empiricism, not really his pragmatism. But I do want to clarify some things here. I want to explain what pragmatism is (namely a method), and show how even though James and Peirce agree about the method of pragmatism, the understanding diverges significantly. 

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Few things were as bad of an idea as naming your philosophical movement pragmatism. I wonder how many objections and misunderstandings can be traced to how terrible of a name it is. According to EtymologyOnline the world pragmatic in the 1600s meant "meddlesome, impertinently busy," in other words, a busy body. Yeesh. More recently, of course, it doesn't get much better. A "pragmatist" is one who faces so-called hard truths, and doesn't let things like principles, ideals, or ethics get in the way. The vision and imagination of a pragmatist is taken to be quite small. That William James called himself a pragmatist, and an empiricist, that he described judging truth based on its "cash-value," and discussed how a "will to believe" could shape and change the truth--well, it's no surprise that many take James to be a figure like Dale Carnegie, or whomever wrote The Secret. Indeed, Max Horkheimer, in Eclipse of Reason, famously attacks pragmatism.  He knows it is bad, but he can’t figure out if it’s bad because it’s too objective, trying to reduce all knowledge to laboratory experiments. Or is it bad because it’s too subjective, and can’t resist ideology on the basis of reality. When I posted this comment about Horkheimer on Facebook, many responded that the correct answer was both/and. Of course that is a great response, but I believe the only way to make it both is through a pragmatic understanding. So, let's talk briefly about what pragmatism is, and how it is a method or a tool. 

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The pragmatic maxim, as it is often called, is usually traced to C.S. Peirce's essay, "How to Make our Ideas Clear." There he states, "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." Now Peirce is said to have regretted this exact formulation, and if you are interested, you should check on the discussion from Cheryl Misak The American Pragmatists, pp. 29-32. But for our purposes, this is good enough. Pragmatism is a method, by which we ask what are the practical consequences of any philosophical problem. If there are none, we are free to ignore the issue as a pseudo-problem. 

Here is William James, in chapter 2 of his book Pragmatism, where he famously gives an example of how pragmatism works. In it, he presents a story of professors arguing over, what else, words. Here is the full, long example:

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel—a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."
Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.
I tell this trivial anecdote because it is a peculiarly simple example of what I wish now to speak of as THE PRAGMATIC METHOD. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right.

And as he will add just a little further down in the chapter, "No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts."

The passage seems both obvious and banal at first glance. It simply seems to say that language's meaning is simply useful, rather than somehow the truth being inhered in the words themselves. There is no fundamental truth of a word's meaning outside of us. So, "around" can mean multiple things. 

This might be obvious, but the implications are actually very controversial. Because James is not actually trying to say anything in particular about language. He is trying to to say something about truth, of which the use of words is but an example. So, what is James saying about truth? 

He is saying the way to determine truth is it's usefulness in specific ways. This is the claim of pragmatism. Therefore, pragmatism becomes a system of verification. How do we decide what are the practical consequences? This issue of verification is where the whole system falls apart between James and Peirce.
 

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For those of you who know the work of the logical empiricists (also known as the positivists or the Vienna Circle). Verification is at the center of their work. As Misak describes them, "Their positions were crisp and clear; their knowledge of logic and science was unassailable; they were driven by a sense of purpose and a mission to clean up the metaphysical squalor in which they thought philosophy lived; and they thought that progress is possible only if all inquiry is scientific." (p. 157) And they therefore believed that the "meaning of a concept lies in the operations of its verification." (p. 159). Now, I don't know the logical empiricists that well, and honestly share the biases against them articulated so well in Barry Allen's Empiricisms, chapter 7.  But I think I am being accurate to say that Peircian pragmatism and the logical empiricists, despite their differences, lay down a series of tools that will inform American analytic philosophy, particularly in the work of Lewis, Sellars, and to a lesser degree, Quine. And the upshot of this strand of philosophy is to be metaphysically deflationary. To what degree changes from thinker to thinker, but the world shrinks. Verification means some combination of scientific experiment or formal logical verification. And anything that cannot be verified as such, is not in the domain of philosophy. The world, very much  in the singular, is made safe for a scientific and materialist monism. This is about as far from James as one could get, so how does his verification change things? 

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Before going further, I want to push against how we group thinkers together. I was very convinced by Misak about the story she tells of Peirce, and his linage. If you are interested in this story of a kind of pragmatism playing a role in the foundation of analytic philosophy, I suggest reading Section III of her book. But I am not convinced by her story of James and his lineage. Misak essentially reads Rorty as being an extension of Jamesian pragmatism. And it is true that Rorty didn't much care for Peirce, and saw himself as being a Deweyian and to a lesser degree, a Jamesian. But I follow Alexis Dianda's excellent book, The Varieties of Experience here. Particularly in chapter one, she shows how the linguistic turn in philosophy, which includes both Sellars and Rorty here, displaces the centrality of experience. And in seeking to displace experience for, as Rorty wants, discourse, we make James' position on verification and pragmatism completely incoherent. Let's look at James' famous lines on verification from chapter 6 of Pragmatism:

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.
This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

This is very different from the conception of verification as scientific experiment or formal logic. Indeed, that becomes but one process of verification and validation, rather than the process. Truth becomes something existential in James' formulation. When James argues that truth must make a difference, he means in our lives. But also his pragmatic method is not deflationary, but rather pluralistic. 

James' system of verification and validation allows for a multiple ways of verifying something. If there are many processes that can arrive at different answers about if something is true, and there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy, we have utterly exploded the metaphysical possibilities of the world. We have therefore a multiverse, a pluriverse, a pluralistic universe (to use some of James' terms). The world is, as James puts it, "ultra-Gothic." 

So, the scientific methods are all fine systems of verification. But there are others! For example, in Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art he gives us this system of verification if art is good or bad. 

In a mysterious, puzzling, and mystical way, the true work of art arises "from out of the artist." Once released from him, it assumes its own independent life, takes on a personality, and becomes a self-sufficient, spiritually breathing subject that also leads a real material life: it is a being. It is not, therefore an indifferent phenomenon arising from chance, living out an indifferent spiritual life, but rather possesses-- like every living being-- further creative, active forces. It lives and acts and plays a part in the creation of the spiritual atmosphere that we have discussed. It is also exclusively from this inner standpoint that one must answer the question whether the work is good or bad. If it is "bad" formally, or too weak, then this form is unsuitable or too weak to produce any kind of pure, spiritual vibration within the soul.

Kandinsky's truth is every bit as true as any logical inquiry. 

In Patricia Lockwood's recent review of Simon Critchley's book on mysticism, she has this to say about William James:

To read The Varieties of Religious Experience is to believe not only that God might exist but that men might be good – and more, that they may be taken at their word. He simply (it is so radical) presents us with their paragraphs. It is in every way the opposite of those pretensions we gather to ourselves as protection against irony. It is not in wordplay, in hazelnuts and hazelnots, though theology has tangled itself so much in those things. The wound of experience is presented, open; it does not need to be probed, it is believed. [...] In James there is a sense of many doors opening on dimensions; he goes between them with his lively and solemn gift, his curiosity. And what I think of as his characteristic nouns: lustre and reality. The corrugated rays coming off the first, and the second almost seeming to have human eyes.

Against Peirce's metaphsical deflation, James gives us a metaphysical plenum. Pragmatism, for James, means living in a world that is disenchanted, re-enchanted, never disenchanted, never enchanted all at once. It means living in a world of scientific rationality and base materialism alongside the energies of God, all the Gods, things older than Gods, and beings that are yet-to-come. Horkheimer's critique turns out to have some weight, James' pragmatism makes the world both too subjective and too objective, both too rational and too mystical. 

As James puts it in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant.”

"You see castration everywhere you look": Some unbecoming thoughts about Wicked

(This is a surprisingly spoiler free discussion of the novel Wicked, with some comparisons to the movie and musical. I don't believe I give away any particular plot points, though). 

Recently I went to see the movie Wicked, based on the first half of the Broadway play. I've never seen the play, however I read the novel over a decade ago. Upon watching the movie, I immediately reread the novel, and then went and watched the movie again. Outside of sharing character names, they have little to do with each other. Indeed, I bet there are many people who would hate the movie and musical, but would enjoy the moody, often slow pace, frankly weird novel. 

A major part of the contrast for me is that novel pretty much seeks to undermine, sidestep, invert, or call out virtually all the tropes of the movie. (Before we go further I should say I enjoyed the movie. It was visually compelling, the songs are catchy, and the lead actress was quite good. But I enjoy a nice piece of mass entertainment). But the book is strange, the pacing odd. It is quite slow in places, and defies normal fantasy storytelling. Elphaba tells us a few times that she "never believed in child saviors." There is no chosen one in the novel, no one born with fantastical but wild powers. Indeed, the novel itself is a long form critique of the notion of innocence. There is, of course, the obvious targets of the those who believe God is on their side and justify anything, there are those politicians and leaders of state who drap themselves in a mantle of innocence and purity. We are told, “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of." But if it was just this, Wicked would be telling us nothing different than any number of YA dystopian novels. What makes the novel interesting is that those who are outcaste or rendered monstrous by the righteous are not immediately somehow innocent because of these conditions. There is a sort of Adornian pessimism throughout the whole thing, a kind of "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" as Adorno famously puts it. (the novel's echo here, saying something similar yet so different asks, "Is life worth living in the wrong form?"). 

In one of the several discussions that are overt meditations of evil, we are told:“You old fools, the Oziad is just a frilly, romantic poem of older, harsher legends. What lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it. In folk memory evil always predates good.” Now I think it would be wrong to say this was the argument of the novel, the novel is far too ambiguous to have clear arguments and moralizing messages, but the novel very much wants to hold open the possibility that this true of existence. We are asked to explore what it would mean for evil to be ontologically prior to good. Not to see evil as some sort of deprivation of the good, and not to see evil as some sort of dark side to a light side, but to see evil as foundational. 

In the first few pages, the Wicked Witch of the West spies on Dorothy and her companions. The witch was surprised to hear a discussion of her genitals. There are rumors that she is intersexed or trans (those words are not used). And we are told later: "Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents." But back at the beginning of the novel, the Tin Man tells us that the Witch was castrated at birth, to which the Lion responds: “Oh you, you see castration everywhere you look.” What the novel purposes is a non-castrated evil, but rather that evil is part of what Bill Haver always called your "fundamental existential comportment." In other words, what if innocence is foreclosed to all of us? What if we by existing, we become part of some sort of unforgiveable wrong? What if we are all wicked? 

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I was trying to find how the movie in the second part would diverage from the novel, and I came across this article about TikTokers discussing the differences between the novel and the musical. In particular, I was caught by this discussion:

Among “Wicked” fans, the book’s content is divisive. Kieffer, on her end, said that the sexual content “muddles the plot.”
Ribeiro says she loves the “shock value” in the books and that the unexpected parts were her favorite to read — but ultimately took away from what she considered the “point” of the book.
“I think I was so distracted by all of the weird stuff that was going on that the political aspect of it was overshadowed,” she says.

I mean, the weird sex and gender stuff is very much a part of the "political" message of the book. I was reminded here of necessity for projects like Christopher Breu's recent book In Defense of Sex. In the novel, they do not have the OzDust Ballroom, but instead the Philosophy Club. The Philosophy Club is some kind of psychedelic sex club, that seems to explore the limits of selfhood through extreme acts. While some people visit and leave unscathed, other leave, unable to come back to their old ways of being. Indeed, if I told someone who had read the book that it was published in the mid-1990s by a gay, Catholic, professor of children's literature, I believe universally people would respond with, "Yeah, that makes sense." 

So yeah, perhaps there is a bit of stereotypical  Catholic guilt running throughout the book, but the book pushes against that reductive reading, as well. It asks the same kinds of question about forgiveness that Derrida does in his essay on it, what does forgiveness mean when confronted with the unforgivable? But where Derrida uses this as a way of thinking about forgiveness, in Wicked we are confronted with what does it mean to live in such a way that some things we do cannot be forgiven? Elphaba's father sought forgiveness and was denied it (as Elphaba does, and Dorothy does for killing Elphaba's sister). "I see him shocked: It doesn’t occur in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable." And, a little further on in the book,

Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her. Daily his habits of loathing and self-loathing cripple her. Daily she loves him back because she knows no other way.
I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing—by dint of ignorance and innocence—that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame.

Even without forgiveness, is there a way to live? I said the book had an Adornian pessimism, and I meant it. Because like Adorno, the novel seeks to still find some way out. Not hope, per se, but something outside of the the dialectics of the "Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked." Because, we are reminded, "there was much to hate in this world, and too much to love." 

But while there is a desire for a way out, nothing is promised, no maps are given. The Witch, as we know, still dies at the end, killed by water and fear (both her own, and fear of her). She is unmade. Perhaps we are all unmaking. 

“It’s unbecoming,” she agreed. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un." 

The Purpose of Rhetoric is to Harm Idiocy

 (This post is inspired by teaching Classical Rhetoric this semester, particularly the kinds of questions that were brought up reading and discussing Robin Reames' The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself. My students really brought it this semester in that class, and I got a lot out of thinking alongside them).

Deleuze famously proclaims, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, that the purpose of philosophy is to harm stupidity. But, of course, this is Deleuze, so stupidity has a technical definition that he works out in several places, but mostly chapter three of Difference and Repetition, "The Image of Thought." Stupidity has nothing to do with error, or IQ, or nonsense. Rather, stupidity comes from a kind of cliched, unthinking. The sorts of "thought" that goes along with "as everybody knows," and "it goes without saying." While there are important differences, this certainly rhymes with Arendt's criticism of Eichmann as unthinking. The purpose of philosophy, then, is to produce concepts that manage to exist outside of the dominate image of thought, and create something new. Deleuze's understanding of stupidity is strange, because it assumes that thinking, rather than being something given and commonplace, must be made. And further, it is uncommon. Most of us are not thinking most of the time.

The idiot, briefly referenced in D&R, and made a full conceptual persona in What is Philosophy?. Etymologically the idiot is the private thinker, rather than one taking part of public affairs. As Wikipedia explains:

The word "idiot" ultimately comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, individual' (as opposed to the state), 'a private citizen' (as opposed to someone with a political office), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios 'personal' (not public, not shared). In Latin, idiota was borrowed in the meaning 'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common', and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'. In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', and added the meaning 'stupid' in the 13th century. In English, it added the meaning 'mentally deficient' in the 14th century.

 It shares the obvious cognates of idiom, idiosyncratic, idiopathic While it might seem that the idiot escapes stupidity because they avoid the public doxa of the image of thought, Deleuze is more ambiguous. Deleuze ties Descartes to the idiot, but sees him working within and replicating the image of thought. He opposed this to Dostoevsky's idiot. Some thinkers, particularly Stengers, has created even more positive models of the idiot against stupidity.  But while Deleuze leaves open the possibility that stupidity can infect (for lack of a better verb) the idiot, he doesn't really explore how the opposite can be true. In other words, he doesn't explore how I kind of idiocy can produce stupidity. 

For this, we need to perhaps broaden our definition of idiocy from a personal and private relationship to any kind of closed off conceptual group. Idiocy, in this sense, comes from an inability to share or understand the image of thought of another group. Rather than ever being one image of thought, we belong to many images at once. Because, as Deleuze well knows, each of us are many, so we belong to many images of thoughts at once. Many worlds, many places, many tropes. Idiocy comes from the inability to think and understand others, who have different values, terms, and goals than our own. Idiocy further implies an inability (perhaps even and unwillingness or a lack of realization) to communicate to people in these other worlds. So, just as stupidity can infect idiocy, idiocy can cause and create stupidity. That is, many cases of stupidity comes from people being unable to understand there are other ways of thinking, being, and valuing in this world.  Indeed, if part of stupidity is the inability to have a thought from the outside, that outside must include other groups' thinking. 

Deleuze, of course, famously hates communication. He tells us again and again some version that if anyone comes to the philosopher asking to debate, or have a conversation, the real philosopher runs away. He sees communication as as a kind of Universal set to build consensus, and thus, along with contemplation and reflection, are often confused with philosophy, but are the opposites or enemies of philosophical thinking (this is in lots of places, but mostly What is Philosophy?). This is understandable from the standpoint in which Deleuze was working, and that his real targets were of course the New Philosophers, and the particularly French obsession of putting philosophers (especially New Philosophers) on Television. But while I am sympathetic, he has this wrong. 

While some communication scholars have posited that one can not *not* communicate, they seem to mean something like we are constantly putting out information into the world. That is not the same as communicating. Just as Deleuze understood that thinking was something that perhaps happened rarely, and that needed conditions for its happening, the same can be understood with communication. Communication, that is, the creating of a common, happens rarely, and it is something that must be actively made. The problem of idiocy is a problem of communication, and depends upon our inability to actually communicate. We think we are communicating with other people, but we truly understand only our own in-group. Those that understand the world definitely are not simply mistaken, but evil, alien, and barbarian. They are not understandable to us, and we are not understandable to them (in the US today, this can be most easily seen in our hyper political polarization). 

In Aristotle's On Rhetoric (I, 2, 1358a), he tells us that rhetorical enthymemes (the kind of logical arguments particular to rhetoric, as opposed to the more formal syllogism of the dialectic) come from two different kinds of places. There are the topoi koinoi (common places, common topics) and the topoi idioi (the particular, or special, or private places and topics). So, the common place might be the ability to distinguish between the bigger and the smaller. The special places are the kinds of arguments that might make sense in physics or the law court, but not outside of them. Virno has a very interesting reading of Aristotle here (Grammar of the Multitude, 3.2). While I am mostly in agreement with Virno here, his reading here is incomplete. He sees the power of the special places, understood as a kind of expertise, as fading away. What remains is just the commonplaces, which form both a kind of danger and hope in Virno's analysis of the general intellect. But everywhere around is the particular places and topics are taking over. This is not the particular place of the law court of the physic's laboratory, but rather the particular places we get our news from, the topics we think of as important and valuable, and our ability to understand what is at stake in our decisions about the world. The topoi idioi are taking over the topoi koinoi. 

Now, there are plenty of people (in all sorts of political orientations), who don't see any problems here. The diminishing power of rhetoric, argumentation, and persuasion is only finally revealing what they have long known to be true--politics is about power, especially power over one's enemies. Any appeal to civic virtues or common places has always been a lie by liberalism to hide the fundamental truth of political power, and using it. I want to be clear, this is a profoundly stupid position, and one that demands the stupid loyalty of others. This is why Ranciere tells us in Disagreement that "politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of relationships between worlds" (p. 42). Rather what we need now more than ever is rhetoric, argumentation, and persuasion (one might say simply communication). These fields are made for the creation of the common, with their attempts as audience analysis, stasis theory, identification, and other tools that are made to create, however temporarily, a common. Theses commons are not the grounds of consensus, but the ground necessary for disagreement, debate, agonism, and dissensus to take place. It is an alternative to power, and one that is sorely needed. Philsophy and rhetoric are not the same things, but they are here allied forces. If the purpose of philosophy is to harm stupidity, than the purpose of rhetoric is to harm idiocy.  

The non-distinction of ethics and morals

 I am about to teach a chapter on Ethics in Public Speaking in my public speaking class. The chapter is fine for what I want it to do (mostly cover research and citational practices for public speaking), but there is brief aside where the chapter distinguishes between ethics and morality, and it drives me nuts. Often when I complain about this to others, I get some version of this seems like special pleading from a philosopher. Which, sure, point well taken. But I want to spend a little time here explaining why I think this distinction is not incoherent, but actively harmful. 

Ethics, as you know, comes from the Greek ethos, meaning custom, character, habit, habitat. It's what you do in the place you live. Cicero, seeking to translate ethos, coins moralis, taken from the Latin mos. So, when I used to teaching a lot of moral philosophy and ethics courses, if students asked me the difference between ethics and morality, I would say for the purpose of my course, ethics comes from the Greek, and morality from the Latin. Now, thinkers have created distinctions between morality and ethics for a long time, and if clearly explained, I in principle do not object to those distinctions. But something happens in a lot of professional ethics that seek a distinction. Here, let's look at a pretty typical distinction from NASBA Center for the Public Trust (which is what google highlights for me if I search "ethics vs. morality"). 

Both ethics and morals refer to “right” and “wrong” behaviors and conduct. While they are sometimes used interchangeably, these words are different: ethics refer to rules provided by an external source, such as a code of conduct in the workplace. Morals refer to an individual’s principles regarding right and wrong.

From the standpoint of wanting to quickly teach professional "ethics," I can understand the appeal of this distinction. Students come with a variety of beliefs about right and wrong, and you want them to shelf them. You don't want to get into fundamental questions that invite discussions of religion, culture, etc. So, you call all of these things morals, basically gesture to a kind of relativism about them. But you also need your students to adhere to certain rules, behaviors, and norms. You call these ethics, and say they don't have anything to do with your morality. Now you can say that it doesn't matter about what you morally feel is important about what is right and wrong, a lawyer has an ethical duty not the pierce confidentiality. It doesn't matter if you ethically disagree with the lifestyle or health decisions of your patient, a nurse has an ethical duty to provide the best treatment possible. We could go on, but you get the drift. This makes the life of the professional "ethics" instructor easier. Especially if they understand their job as teaching you how to not get sued, or bother HR. Essentially, the solution of the public and private sphere has been imported into the realm of ethics and moral philosophy. 

But there are serious problems with this stance. The first is that it essentially affirms some sort of principle of moral relativism. While I am a moral pluralist (as I am a pluralist in most things), it is not a moral relativism. Indeed, most of the thinkers that create the schools of ethics and morality are not relativists. But this might not even be the worse. The real problem is the way this version of professional ethics dodges the real issues of ethical reasoning. You have private morals, and you have public ethical standards. By asking the students, or really future and current practitioners, to simply follow pre-given rules, behaviors, and norms, we are asking them not to think, not to reason, not struggle. The part about ethics that is compelling is how it addresses us existentially. Life demands of us to make decisions that are fundamentally undecidable, and yet we must still make decisions. Ethics and morality are not, therefore, principally concerned with "the good," but asking questions about what sort of being do you need to be to care about the good, to do the good, to even understand the good. To engage with ethical reasoning is resist turning ourselves into some sort of calculator (this is even true of the calculative ethical systems such as utilitarianism). It requires us to think and act, as Arendt might say, without bannisters. One cannot simply memorize a bunch of rules and norms and be ethical. To be ethical often requires of us to know exactly what rules and norms need to be challenged or broken. The idea of a private morals and a public ethics brings us into an Orwellian reversal of language, in which people are told to be ethical is to follow this or that code of conduct, to make sure you follow the law, etc. And this is against the very reality of the ethical, which demands us to be able to think when rules, laws, and norms breakdown. Actual professional ethics are essential and important. Ethical philosophy confronts us with profound questions of what it means to be, think, and act. And so often we fail to be ethical by going along with what we have been told, by following our received standards.   

Why Metaphysics? Some Thoughts on Weird Empiricism and Animal Studies

 Those who know me, or even just looking at my recent blog posts, know I have been doing a lot of work on metaphysics. Particularly on the work of William James, and the trajectory of thinkers that could be called radical empiricists (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Stengers, Massumi, etc.). I often get some sort of question from people who know my work on animal studies why I have started studying metaphysics so seriously. The point of this post is to briefly explain some of my metaphysical commitments, and why I think they matter (especially for animal scholars all who are concerned with the more than human world). 

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I have been working on what I call weird empiricism. Weird empiricism is a subset of radical empiricism. Radical empiricism, for James, differed from the classical empiricists (you know, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, & co.) in a few ways. First, the classical empiricists saw empiricism as essentially passive (one received experiences), whereas for James empiricism is both passive and active (one wills the world and self). Second, the classical empiricists separated the objects we experienced from our own experiences. That is, they jettisoned the relationship of experience as not real. Radical empiricism affirms the realness of relations. 
Weird empiricism sees how these principles opens up a strange, bizarre, yes weird, pluriverse. One that can bring in the more than human world. Weird empiricism both sees the reality of our relationship to the more than human world (our relationship to other animals, but also ghosts, the sacred, imagined geographies, the dead and the undying). But also weird empiricism takes seriously the experience of the more than human world. That is, we can understand that other animals have a stake in claims of the truth because they can experience just as well as human. Though their truths may be alter than ours--weird truths from weird worlds.
Okay, so weird empiricism has something to do with the more than human world. Cool. But that doesn't answer why I think animal studies needs a metaphysics. And I do think it needs a metaphysics. I'm going to give three main reasons. 

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To the degree that animal studies has an avowed metaphysics, it is a rejection of anthropocentrism. That is, of course, simply a negative commitment. We know what we are against, but it doesn't produce the kind of answers I think we have assumed that it will. First, any number of people have tried to critique animal activism, and the commitments of many animal scholars, as being insufficiently anti-anthropocentric. As if the point of what we are engaged in is trying to simply reduce anthropocentrism, rather than trying to create a more just and livable world. And there is no guarantee that only overcoming anthropocentrism will lead to that more just and livable world. As Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa argues in his recent book The Celluloid Specimen, B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists were dedicated to overcoming anthropocentrism, and not for any sort of liberation. 

Crucially, this shift did not lead to any programmatic improvement in the lives of animals. As Haraway and, more recently, the animal studies scholar Nicole Shukin have argued, one of the strongest catalysts for a posthuman worldview has been global capitalism, which often actively encourages the blurring of boundaries between human and animal. Yet animals are still cruelly tortured, killed, and driven to extinction at rates far exceeding any previous historical period. More than the centuries-old philosophies of Cartesian dualism, this late twentieth-century social formation remains far-and-away the largest threat to both animal and human life in our current milieu. (pp. 14-15). 

So, while I think it is still important to resist anthropocentrism (see Fiona Probyn-Rapsey's chapter in Critical Terms for Animal Studies, and Matthew Calarco's Beyond the Anthropological Difference) , it is far from sufficient as a ground for our metaphysical commitments. Weird empiricism's emphasis on relationships allows it to honor the specific forms of entanglements that we are involved with in the more than human world. As Lori Gruen points out in Entangled Empathy, "recognize life and its various entangled processes doesn't necessarily help us to respond to differences among kinds of fellow creatues" (p. 69). It is not enough to avow we are entangled, we must pay attention to the specific needs and relationships of those beings we are entangled with (see also my chapter on "Matter," also in Critical Terms for Animal Studies). Such a move allows us to have different conversations, such as engaging Eva Haifa Giraud's claim that we need an ethics of exclusion, and not one of entanglement. 

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So, we need an weird empiricism because we need more than simply a negative metaphysic against anthropocentrism. But we also need weird empiricism to help explore one of the central tensions in animal studies. Are animals fundamentally similar to humans, just another creature on evolutionary distribution that refuses any kind of human exceptionalism, or are other animals fundamentally other, alter, different? The answer seems to be yes, and rather than either/or. Matthew Calarco provides an excellent overview of this tension, as well as his own third term, indistinction, in Thinking Through Animals. Weird empiricism's emphasis on experience as the unit of truth, and the plurality of worlds, allow us to gesture to way to keep the relationship we have to other animals, while also demanding that attention be paid to the radical alterity of the worlds of other animals. 

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Lastly, for me at least, I have turned toward radical empiricism as a way of answering questions about how novelty and change come about. There are those who can only imagine our relationship towards other animals as fundamentally broken and in need of repair and restoration. They understand the factory farm and many invasive experiments are wrong, but they fundamentally cannot imagine a world of co-existing in a just way. Some wish to return to a model of dominion, and they simply reject the cruel excesses of the current order. Others, including many who see themselves of animal abolitionists, still do not see a possible world of co-existence. The problem for them is that all human relationship with other animals would be exploitive, and the goal is to create a human world for humans, and a non-human world for the non-humans. And on this, I can at least agree with both groups, what I dream of has not yet existed. What I want is something different, something new. And weird empiricism grants us the possibility of demanding the new, of having a metaphysics that depends upon novelty, change, creativity. I have tried to get at that here, here, and here.  As Alexis Dianda argues in Varieties of Experience: 

We must organize if we are to survive; yet, James cautions that we must not forget the subjective character of the world we take for granted. Such forgetfulness would likely increase the danger that we will not take responsibility for re-creating the world in new and better ways. This forgetfulness comes hand in hand with blindness to the ways in which other people value and make their world, and blindness to the power held to the power held by those in a position to enforce their views of reality under the auspices of objective, preexistent state of affairs. (p. 113)

In other words, we have made the world as it is. Our empiricism is not just passive, but  also active. Our wills and desires and actions make and remake the world. But we also often depend upon a metaphysics that tells us to forget the ways we have made the world--a metaphysics that limits our creative forces. Instead, we need a metaphysics that understands the productive power of belief, will, and action. 

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In a 1903 letter to the philosopher Francois Pillon, William James described his "humble view of the world" as "pluralistic, tychistic, empiricist, pragmatic, and ultra gothic, i.e. non classic in form." The weird empiricist would say yes to all of this. And simply add, "and more than human." 

A Pedagogy of Festina Lente

I have started including the below in my class syllabuses.

The Latin Motto Festina Lente means to make haste, slowly. Perhaps you remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Despite the seeming speed of the rabbit, it was the tortoise that wins the race. We must develop within ourselves the ability to make haste, slowly. We must learn to focus, and to grind away at the problems around us. Our word school comes from the classical Greek skholē, which means literally leisure or free time. When you leave school, and enter the so-called real world, some of you might discover that school was the last time that people wanted you to think deeply and believed you might have some important insight into how the world should be. This is the kind of free time we cultivate in this class. Not the free time to do less, but the free time to do more. Here we still can think, read, argue, plan, and strive for a different tomorrow. Here we still think we have a chance to become someone else before we become some more efficient cog in some ever more efficient workplace. I hope this sense of school stays with long after you graduate. 

 This class is housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Well, science comes from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge, understanding, or study. So, we have not just the natural and physical sciences, but also the social and human sciences. But what about the liberal arts? Liberal here comes from the word for freedom (think liberty), and art here means simply practice. The Liberal Arts are the practices and techniques of freedom. They are the things a free people should know, they are the practices a citizen should develop. We study the liberal arts and sciences to not become better workers (though we surely will gain that too), but to become better citizens—to become freer within our responsibilities to each other. 

 My training is not in the social sciences or the physical sciences, but the human sciences, also known as the humanities. We study what it means to be human. Our techniques for doing that are text based. We will read difficult, often strange texts in this class. We will learn to slow down when we read them. To make haste, slowly. And in so doing, we will carefully rebuild and understand the arguments of the books, articles, stories, and other texts in this class. And we will learn to build our own arguments through our careful understanding of the arguments of others. The first skill that all the others are based on is careful reading. We must learn to read with minimum distraction, to make friends with the frustrations of difficult prose, and to seek after the excellence of finding what is front of us. Few tasks are harder than seeing what is front of you. So, festina lente everyone.

Empiricism and the Lines of Flight

On Friday I taught Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" again. This is probably the piece I have taught the most in my career. Inevitably my students make the same objection: why are they walking away? Aren't they just quitting? Shouldn't they, as the title of Jemisin's story goes, stay and fight? As I then try to get my students to understand, the students are transforming the kinds of questions that Le Guin's story is asking of us. She wants us to wonder what we are willing to give up, how we are willing to change, what we are willing to remove of our lives, in order to no longer be complicit of the suffering of the child. Political change is not outside of the questions, but rather deeply connected to them. The story implies that for change to happen, people need to transform through the outside. 

The same is true for Deleuze. As you point out, these are questions here of subjectivity and subjectification. Who are we? Who are we becoming? What do we want? What are all the ways we have learned to hate our bodies and desires? And what are all the ways we've learned to turn that hate on others as much as on ourselves? These questions are not ancillary to questions of the political, they are bound up with each other. Strangely, we need to turn to Deleuze's empiricism to understand the political questions of subjectivity here. 

In the preface to the English edition of Dialogues, Deleuze starts by saying, "I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)." This is a very strange claim at first, that empiricism is fundamentally about a commitment to pluralism. In my empiricism primer I tried to explain some of the connection of empiricism and pluralism, but what is key here is that for Deleuze, empiricism--that is, a focus on experience--provides what he calls in his book on Foucault a "thought of the outside." This is what I was trying to get at in my posts on "Belief in this World" and in this post on Jamesian pure experience. There needs to be something outside of interpretation (however fleeting, however absurd, however unthinkable) in order to undue the images of thought. For James this is pure experience, for Deleuze it is the chaos of the plane of immanence. For Deleuze, it is the outside that gives us someway to contest not just the answers that are produced in the present order, but to contest the very questions that we ask. (While there are plenty of reasons that it might be hard to include Ranciere with this discussion, there certainly is something that rhymes here. For Ranciere, the part that has no part disrupts the counting logic of post-political consensual order. The post-political consensual order, what Ranciere often just calls the police, is used to fights about how to recount society. That is, they are used to arguments about how to cut up the pie. But the part that has no part challenges the very logic of counting and pie cutting. And that is why it is so unhearable and unseeable, so unthinkable. This is why Ranciere tells us in Disagreement that "politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of relationships between worlds" (p. 42). )

Just as Deleuze's metaphysics depends upon a transcendental empiricism to provide an outside to the problems of doxa and stupidity, the issue of lines of flight, nomadism, becoming-molecular, etc. are ways thinking the outside of subjectivity. And that is why they are always paired with other political questions. The nomads come with war machines. The witch's flight calls forth a new people and a new earth. The line of flight is articulated with George Jackson's imperative that as one runs, one should be looking for a weapon (and again, from the essay "On Societies of Control," "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons"). So Deleuze does not bring up lines of flight, nomadism, etc. as some sort of quietism, but rather as an outside that can create new forms of politics. Just as his empiricism is his answers to how we have novelty and creativity in thought, the lines of flight are his answer to how we have novelty and creativity in politics and subjectivity. 

Think of that Deleuzian movie: Mad Max: Fury Road. They flee down fury road, but eventually the War Rig is turned around, and the Outside comes back to destroy the realities of Immortan Joe and his brothers and sons.