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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Wright on McDowell…and the Nature of “Analytic” Philosophy Yet Again

Brian Leiter

I had occasion recently to re-read one of the best review essays I have ever read:  Crispin Wright’s essay on John McDowell’s Mind and World, which appeared under the title "Human Nature?" in European Journal of Philosophy 4 (1996):  235-253.  The essay itself is a densely argued critique of the two central theses of McDowell’s book ("that experience must be conceived as conceptual, and that one should look to a conception of Second Nature for a reconciliation of the normative and the natural" as Wright puts it), but the concluding passages of the review turn to questions of style, which resonate with a discussion we have had here more than once about the nature of "analytic" philosophy.  Here is Wright (p. 252):

If analytical philosophy demands self-consciousness about unexplained or only partially explained terms of art, formality and explicitness in setting out of argument, and the clearest possible sign-posting and formulation of assumptions, targets, and goals, etc., then this is not a work of analytical philosophy….At its worst, indeed, McDowell’s prose puts barriers of jargon, convolution and metaphor before the reader hardly less formidable than those characteristically erected by his German luminaries…..[T]he stylistic extravagance of McDowell’s book–more extreme than in any of his other writings to date–will unquestionably color the influence it will exert…[T]he fear must be that the book will encourage too many of the susceptible to swim out of their depth in seas of rhetorical metaphysics.  Wittgenstein complained that, "The seed I am most likely to sow is a certain jargon."  One feels that, if so, he had only himself to blame.  McDowell is a strong swimmer, but his stroke is not to be imitated.

Is what Wright describes as characteristic of "analytical philosophy" not characteristic of, e.g., Hume and Descartes and, in many ways, Aristotle as well?  If so, then what conclusions should be drawn about McDowell or, for that matter, Hegel?  I am curious what readers make of Wright’s remarks.  No anonymous postings, and post only once.  Comments may take awhile to appear.

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21 responses to “Wright on McDowell…and the Nature of “Analytic” Philosophy Yet Again”

  1. Bill Edmundson

    "To be precise is to make it as easy as possible for others to prove one wrong," or so Timothy Williamson wrote somewhere. When I first read that remark, I was impressed enough to copy it, print it out, and post it over my desk. It has been hard to live up to, and I've caught myself more than a few times doing the opposite, hoping to fly below others' critical radar.

    I take Williamson's remark to express a conception of philosophy as a process of enabling others to know and to correct one's own beliefs and attitudes. Those whose style of expression persistently eludes this process may be philosophers, even great philosophers, in some sense. But not in the sense I think Williamson's remark points to.

    Reply
  2. John Turri

    Personally, I would never dream of calling someone out about their writing style like that (especially when, as McDowell notes in the preface to M&W, he made a conscious effort to preserve the conversational style of his Locke Lectures, from which the book was compiled). I can't imagine what it might achieve, other than embarrassing someone.

    As for whether McDowell should be "drum[med] out of the regiment of analytic philosophers"–as McDowell put it in response to Wright's remarks–because of his style: Does it really even matter? The issues and arguments are what they are all the same.

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  3. Drake

    I think the remarks are reasonable if taken as stating a family of rhetorical and methodological concerns that tend more to preoccupy so-called analytic philosophers, rather than as enumerating a set of essential characteristics. On this reading, perhaps Wright would answer that the difference in degree between Hume and Hegel (say) is enough to make it a difference in kind.

    Reply
  4. Tamler Sommers

    In the spirit of Bill's post (I think):

    When I was in the playwriting program at Columbia, our teacher Romulus Linney told us that the cardinal sin of writing was "willful obscurity." No insult was worse, he said, than calling an author willfully obscure. It meant that the author was disguising the unimportance of his or her work in a cloak of indecipherable language or structure. According to Linney, the worst thing about willful obscurity was that, more often than not, it worked! The audience would either think “well if I can’t understand what’s going on, it must be profound,” or they would discern their own cherished convictions in the opacity of the prose or dialogue. I certainly don't mean to accuse any contemporary philosophers of this vice (although I have my suspicions about someone like Hegel). But I do think it’s unfortunate that not enough value is placed on “willful non-obscurity” or willful clarity–clarity for more than the 15 or 20 people who are conversant in the jargon of a particular field.

    (And like Bill, I'm often troubled to find that I don't always practice what I, or more precisely, what my old playwriting professor preaches.)

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  5. Matt McAdam

    I see no reason why we should assume that the term "willful obscurity" applies to McDowell's work. In fact, he stated in response to Wright that he tried to be as clear as he could in M&W. We should take his word for it. Of course, there's a separate question about whether McDowell's best effort is still obscure. But the suggestion that McDowell aimed for obscurity is at best uncharitable. Moreover, without denying that clarity is a virtue in any kind of writing, I hardly see any reason for a writer to worry that a reader will embrace his work on the basis of the fact that the reader doesn't understand it. Surely, the writer's not responsible for this. There are bad writers, but we shouldn't forget there are plenty of bad readers as well.

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  6. Tamler Sommers

    I think I made it pretty clear that I wasn't accusing any contemporary philosopher of being willfully obscure, never mind "assuming" that they were. If I had a complaint it was only that not enough value is placed on willful non-obscurity in general (for both good and bad readers).

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  7. Richard Fitch

    Oh dear. I am an admirer of Williamson, McDowell and Hegel. Perhaps the problem is that Hegel deliberately tried to write philosophy so that it might be understood by people of his community and time who did not have a philosophical education. Given that very few of us now have a grasp of the patois of Hegel's home and time, we assume that Hegel was being wilfully obscure. His obscurity was actually one of the first attempts of a philosopher to speak directly to his whole community. As far as I know Hegel was the first to do attempt this post 1789. Hegel was aware of the danger this entailed which is a reason why he aspired to articulate a logic. So that people from other times could grasp his thought by this gesture towards objectivity. But Hegel was a better philosopher than poet. Hence his reputation. It seems to me this is an interesting question: why does it seem to (some of us) that Nietzsche with his explicitly exclusionary rhetoric succeeds (as Leiter asserts with such power) where Hegel, with his rhetoric that aspired to inclusion, seemingly fails?

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  8. Pavel Davydov

    Regardless of how we judge McDowell in any of these regards, it should be remembered that while obscurity is not a virtue in any expository writing, whether within the confines of analytical philosophy or elsewhere, obscurity of a text is not incompatible with it containing valuable ideas. While we often encounter people hiding their philosophical inadequacy or inanity behind a veil of jargon, the latter obscures equally well whatever else is behind it. Writing in analytical philosophy, at its best, aims at transparency, at least to its practitioners. But there is a difference between not having things to say and not being able to say them well (by whatever standard).
    Wright criticizes McDowell’s writing for not exhibiting 1) self-consciousness about unexplained or only partially explained terms of art, 2) formality and explicitness in setting out of argument, 3) the clearest possible sign-posting and formulation of assumptions, targets, and goals, etc. At worst, these shortcomings necessitate only interpretative problems. They prevent the space of possible interpretations from being sufficiently restricted. But then our situation, annoying though it is, is like that of a person reading several different texts on related topics at once.
    Furthermore, if a part of the complaint is that the author’s intentions aren’t clear to us, then I think we are making a mistake as philosophers. I am not sure why the author’s intentions should matter to us all that much. At a certain level, it shouldn’t matter to us if the text has been produced by a monkey on a typewriter.

    Reply
  9. Oran Moked

    One thing that hasn't been noted so far: Hegel, to mention just the most obvious example, did not think that the stylistic features mentioned by Wright and instantiated in the writing of contemporary 'analytic' philosophers (and, to some degree, in texts by, say, Descartes or Hume) were unquestionable virtues of philosophical writing. On the contrary, he thought that that sort of writing, that way of using language, obscured certain aspects of what he took to be true about the world, whereas his own idiom was well suited to expressing such truths. And I suppose similar things could be said about Nietzsche or Heidegger.

    Now, of course, perhaps Hegel or Heidegger were wrong to hold these views about their respective styles. Here there are two options: (1) Perhaps they were right about the connection between the substance of their respective doctrines, on the one hand, and their chosen styles of exposition, on the other, but wrong about the truth of that substance, and therefore also wrong about the suitability of the style to expressing philosophical truths. (2) Or perhaps they were right about some doctrines, but wrong to think that these were only expressible by their own respective idioms. In either case, we would be mistaken to think that they tried to express their ideas clearly (by our standards) but simply failed (for lack of writing talent, or for lack of critical self-awareness, etc.).

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  10. John Schwenkler

    With regard to the general question of McDowell's relationship to analytic philosophy (whatever "analytic philosophy" is supposed to be), I thought it might be worth quoting these remarks about McDowell from the preface to Gregory McCulloch's "The Life of the Mind":

    "I somehow got the message [from McDowell] that there is more to philosophy than the main stream of the analytical sort that I'd been taught. It was all more or less between the lines and to do with what he wouldn't say, but still …" (p. xvi)

    And again:

    "[T]he real problem was that I didn't really know what I was going on about. I was groping for what McDowell had hinted at in his silences. Writing 'Using Sartre' and 'The Mind and its World' was a continuation of this groping, but with external constraints to keep me grounded. Looking back, I see that I was trying to find a way of teaching myself how to get liberated from analytical philosophy without becoming a non-philosopher or a know-nothing, without throwing away my teachers' efforts and much else that I admire unreservedly. This book is a manifestation of that still ongoing process." (pp. xvi-xvii)

    McCulloch, of course, wrote a lot about Sartre and the other phenomenologists as well as traditional analytic figures like Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson, but it should be said that his writing tends to have many of the characteristics that the first sentence of the quoted remark from Wright takes McDowell to task for lacking. In any case, I've always found these remarks about things unsaid but still present "between the lines" and being "hinted at in [McDowell's] silences} puzzling and suggestive, so it seemed worth quoting them.

    Reply
  11. John Turri

    Hey, Pavel. "At a certain level, it shouldn’t matter to us if the text has been produced by a monkey on a typewriter." I must say that it would matter greatly to me. I wouldn't even waste my time on anything produced that way! (Grading papers by more sophisticated primates is bad enough.)

    In connection with your remarks, it might be worth pointing out–since it's not explicitly reflected in the quoted passage in the original post, though Brian does partly indicate as much in the setup–that Wright does go through the difficult interpretative work, and tells his readers that it's worth it in the end, because McDowell is advancing interesting positions on important questions.

    Reply
  12. Pavel Davydov

    Hi John,
    Exactly.
    And as far as the typewriting monkey products are concerned, I meant to speak of a situation where you have already wasted your time…

    Reply
  13. Nick Treanor

    There is a passage in Wittgenstein's notebooks that captures what is, for me, the principal virtue of clarity:

    You are staring into a fog and for that reason persuade yourself that the goal is already close. But the fog disperses and the goal is not yet in sight.

    To be sure, it is important to formulate one's claims and arguments as clearly as possible for the sake of those who might read one's work and for the sake of whatever goods might come from that (if what you say is clearly put, it is more easily refuted, etc.). But clarity is much more important than this, for so many philosophical problems arise only when we realize that we do not understand our own thoughts. (What is it to be good, what is it to be true, what are beliefs, what is it for x to cause y, what is it for something to be possible, necessary, impossible, etc.)

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  14. Rich Booher

    One aspect of historical interest is that one of the early greats of analytic philosophy, Friedrich Waismann, later came to reject the "formality" and "explicitness" that Wright claims is essential to analytic philosophy. In his sadly neglected essay "How I See Philosophy", he claims that one of the worst consequences of logical positivism was that it spawned an obsession with clarity, which led to trivial thinking, rather than the deep and searching thoght that characterizes great philosophers:

    "It's all very well to talk of clarity, but when it becomes an obsession it is liable to nip living thought in the bud."

    While intentional obscurity is not to be commended, one way of looking at philosophy is as a search for questions as well as the dissolution of questions which seem pressing but whose formulation is itself mistaken.

    Even if this 'quietist' conception of philosophy (one which has unboubtedly had an influence on McDowell) is not to be granted the possession of the entire field of philosophy, it may nonetheless offer important insights into the way that many philosophers have actually proceeded and deserves not to be rashly dismissed.

    There also seems to be a distortion of the possible goals and methods of philosophy to group philosophers into 'clear' (usually code for analytic, which often is the expression of a prejudice of one's training rather than a genuinely considered opinion) and 'obscurantist' (or some other such epithet). The virtues that philosophers may have are various, and the variety of methods is valuable, if for no other reason, because it enables the exhibiting of those virtues in their many forms.

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  15. Jessica Wilson

    Nice point, Nick.

    Reply
  16. Kati Farkas

    Wright's characterisation probably matches how analytic philosophy would like to see itself, but I don't think it matches how it actually is. Surely Quine and Davidson are analytic philosophers, but is "the clearest possible sign-posting and formulation of assumptions, targets, and goals" characteristic of their work? I don't think so … McDowell is not a very easy read, but personally, I have always found say, Davidson, equally hard.

    As for the question about Descartes, Hume and Aristotle – I've always thought that the idea was that everyone was an analytic philosopher up until Kant, and then things started to go continental with Hegel.

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  17. Chris

    "As for the question about Descartes, Hume and Aristotle – I've always thought that the idea was that everyone was an analytic philosopher up until Kant, and then things started to go continental with Hegel."

    I can't tell if that was meant as a joke, but it made me laugh.

    That may be how analytic philosophers would like to see the history of the discipline, but I don't think that's how it is.

    I assume Brian's question was meant to throw some doubt on Wright's characterization of "analytic philosophy" as essentially involving clarity of expression and arugmentation since, by that characterization, pre-Kantian figures such as Descartes and Hume could count as analytic philosophers. It seems to me that if the analytic/continental distinction is anything at all, it is a post-Kantian distinction. Any proper characterization of the camps has to identify them, at least partly, in terms of their reactions to (including neglect of) Kant's critical work.

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  18. Brian

    I didn't take Kati to be joking. Since "analytic" philosophy collapsed as a discipline with distinctive methods and subject-matter some forty years ago, what gets called "analytic" philosophy now is really pretty continuous with what most philosophers have been doing for a very long time. Some idioms change, and a lot of background, unarticulated assumptions change, to be sure, but it's all about arguments about the nature of mind, knowledge, goodness, substance, causation, etc. Since Kant's critical work is hugely important for, among others, Sellars, Strawson, and Davidson (in different ways), I'm not sure reaction to Kant is going to help demarcate the "analytic" and "Continental" (though it will help demarcate German Idealism from other philosophical developments in the 19th- and 20th-centuries). Or so it seems to me (but this won't surprise any long-time readers).

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  19. Kati Farkas

    It was meant as a bit of a joke, actually (the idea being also that you read "started to go continental" as "started to go pear-shaped"). But I also wanted to make the point Brian makes: that contemporary analytic philosophy regards itself (correctly, it seems to me) as continuous, in its philosophical aims and methods, with the Western philosophical tradition from the Greeks till Kant – and whatever seems to be alien in the continental tradition in the eyes of analytic philosophers, begins after that.

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  20. Brian

    I'm not sure I quite agree with Kati's reformulation. There's lots that is alien to "analytic" philosophers that pre-dates Kant, and there's lots after Kant that looks familiar (think of, e.g., McDowell and Hegel; Williams and Nietzsche; Rawls and later Habermas; and so on). The differences between Anglophone and German and French philosophy are exacerbated after Kant, and perhaps that's all that was meant.

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  21. Tony Cheng

    I would like to further the discussion by considering one of McDowell's metaphors. He says that "in experience one can take in how things are" (MW, p.25). One might wonder what the phrase "take in" is supposed to mean. Here is my brief comment. For McDowell, conceptual capacities are actualized passively in experience. The subtlety here is that normally "conceptual capacities" is taken to be always active, but for some transcendental reasons, McDowell insists that conceptual capacities are only passively actualized in experiences. In order to capture this point, he picks a phrase that is active but not one-hundred percent spontaneous: in daily life, what we take from others is normally partly determined by others' decisions. I am not saying that McDowell is right at this point, or that the metaphor does capture the point perfectly. What I would like to suggest is that some metaphors from McDowell are essential for his points. If others think of any example of bad metaphors in McDowell, please post them and maybe we can discuss them as well.

    Reply

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