ViaMedia

Category: Philosophy

  • Arguing with a Madman? Cranks, Trolls, Consistency, and ‘Come off it’

    by Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. Her two most recent books are Songs For Winter Rain, a poetry collection, and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.

    (in view of the House of Bishops apparently pushing on with yet another working party on trans people and gender identity, here is a further extract from Professor Chappell’s forthcoming book, Trans Figured; original posting here)

    This no-debate demand is often misunderstood as a refusal to engage in philosophical argument. That is a misunderstanding, and the reasons why it is a misunderstanding go rather deep. G.K.Chesterton says this (Orthodoxy p.32 (New York: Lane, 1909)):

    If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

    There is a scene in the fine 2016 film Denial that makes a rather similar point to Chesterton’s. Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers are constructing their defence against a libel action brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving. To show, against Irving, that there was (alas) nothing fake about the Nazis’ mass murders in 1941-1945, Lipstadt wants to go into the witness box herself, and she wants Holocaust survivors to testify too.

    Her lawyers dissuade her. It is not that she and the survivors do not have a convincing story, and one that any decent interlocutor would be ashamed and embarrassed to deny, dispute, or question. The point is that Irving will not be convinced—nor ashamed, nor embarrassed—to carry on with an aggressive and sceptical cross-examination of old-age pensioners who have lived out the rest of their lives in the shadow of the hellish nightmare of Auschwitz. In Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, “See how much stage-setting” must already be in place before a “rational debate” can even begin. It is very difficult to discuss proofs of the reality of the Holocaust with people who will not accept the same standards of proof as any reasonable person accepts in any other debate, and who are not ashamed to browbeat, jeer, and heckle old and frail survivors of the worst genocide in human history.

    Just this lack of epistemic responsibility—and of shame—is all too evident in all too many people who come at transgender people and their allies waving the much-misused banner of “free and open debate”; as for example when those campaigners complain that they themselves are being “silenced” by harassment and mockery and intimidation, but are entirely happy to harass and mock and intimidate anyone who tries even to run a conference that they don’t like the look of; or when their immediate response to the harrowing statistics for transgender suicide and transgender assault is not to express sympathy and solidarity, but to cast doubt on the reliability of those statistics; or as when supposedly respectable journalists and academics are perfectly happy to promulgate bizarre myths about “transgenderism being bankrolled by Jewish billionaires”—myths that strikingly close the gap between transphobia and anti-semitism, and sometimes between both of those and conspiracy theories like Q-Anon as well.

    Such claims get us into the territory of what Rai Gaita calls “the crank”:

    “Cranks” is an interesting word… it is not just a term of abuse. It refers to someone who has so radically lost his capacity for judgement that his views are not even worth considering. Like those who are severely mentally ill, the most interesting thing about cranks—about what makes someone a crank—does not show itself when they declaim what they believe. It does so when they do not rule certain things out of consideration. They suffer from something far more serious than ignorance. Knowledge and understanding—and therefore, all serious radical critique—depend upon the exercise of sound judgement about what counts as evidence, about when authorities can be relied upon, when they are justifiably discredited, and so on… Reason is not what determines what it is to be “in touch with reality”. Rather, being in touch with reality is a condition for the sober exercise of those critical concepts which mark our sense of what it is to think well or badly, concepts whose proper application is what we call the exercise of “reason”.[1]

    Among other things, Gaita is writing here about how we should do philosophy—a question on which I have myself learned a great deal from him. I am almost echoing Gaita when I say that I think philosophy should not be a bureaucratic pigeonhole within a university’s administrative structure, kept “pure” of “non-philosophical” material by vigilant gatekeeping (and outgrouping). Rather philosophy should be a loose-bordered range of inquiries that are kept rigorous, maybe even a little bit austere, by the rather different but very much complementary requirements of two things: first of logic, and secondly of a grown-up, and open-minded, and kind, and humane, and humorous, and inquisitive, and un-fanatical, and tolerant, and mature—and sensible—sensibility.

    So there are two kinds of quality-controlling challenge in particular that philosophers should push each other hard with. One is “That is logically inconsistent”, the other is “Come off it”. In the academy today, partly because of the bureaucratic pressure to mark research territory, we hear plenty about inconsistency, but rather less about “Come off it”. In an age of perversely brilliant research programmes, for example about whether we’re living in a computer simulation—and also, in an age of conspiracy theories, many of which are, among other things, transphobic—“Come off it” is an important challenge too.

    “Come off it” matters both within and beyond philosophy. In both cases, another way to put it is, quite often, “Do not feed the trolls.” And that is, unfortunately, something we very often have good reason to say in the case of “debates” about transgender.

     

    [1] Gaita, A Common Humanity pp.160, 165-6. Gaita too quotes Chesterton. For my review of Gaita’s fine book, see Mind 2002, 411-413.

  • Trans Figured: Experience Trumps Theory

    by Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. Her two most recent books are Songs For Winter Rain, a poetry collection, and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.

     

    (an extract from her forthcoming book, Trans Figured)

    I hope to get a wider audience with this book than a philosophy professor might normally expect for most of her writings. But who knows: you yourself, dear reader, might have read some of my more conventional writings in philosophical ethics. (My much more conventional writings in philosophical ethics.) And if you have, you may know this about me as a philosopher: that I think experience trumps theory almost everywhere. Let me say a little bit about why.

    One of my favourite philosophers is Bernard Williams.[1] At the outset of his writing career, Williams took for his own “a phrase of D.H. Lawrence’s in his splendid commentary on the complacent moral utterances of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Find your deepest impulse, and follow that’” (1972: 93). Thirty years later he added, when looking back over his career, “If there’s one theme in all my work it’s about authenticity and self-expression… It’s the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren’t…. The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity.”

    Yes, that; very much that, about me and transgender. “I just want to,” but in capitals. An inner necessity, a need to be authentically and above all openly who I actually am, and to be known as who I am by those around me, and accepted and, yes, loved, even so. That is exactly what it’s all been about.

    However, that doesn’t mean that I have a theory of transgender to offer. I tend to steer away from philosophical theories of anything, at least in those parts of philosophy that aren’t best understood as handmaids of science. But even in science, I think the real truth of things often resists systematisation. (And what is being transgender but resisting systematisation?)

    I am never quite sure what a theory of anything outside strict science is supposed to do. Ever since Plato’s Meno philosophers have been saying, and rightly so of course, that the point of philosophy is to change right belief into knowledge: into a state where you don’t just think true things, but also understand, deeply, why they are true. Fine. But is it obvious that constructing a philosophical theory always helps with this? Can we really not have a deep understanding, and an explanatory understanding, that (for example) murder is at least typically and maybe always wrong, or that love is usually a good thing, or that flowers are generally beautiful, or that paedophilia is profoundly wrong, until we have a philosophical theory’s kind of explanation of why this is so? Why is some set of words, arranged in propositions with inferential relations between them, the sole kind of explanation that we need to understand the goodness of love or the badness of murder? For most ethical cases, that seems to me an oddly inappropriate picture of understanding and explanation. In ethical matters understanding can be verbal and articulate, but quite often it isn’t at all; oftener still, the propositional bit isn’t the only bit—and not the most important bit, either. And likewise for explanation: explanations don’t have to be verbal, and often are better if they’re not. (Think of explaining how to do something—by doing it.)

    Science limns the structure of reality, as Quine says in Word and Object. Sure it does, at least if it’s any good. But so does poetry, if it’s any good. There isn’t just one correct way to grasp the deep structure of things. There are lots, because there are lots of things that we might call “the deep structure of things”. Propositional structures are great for the understanding, but experience matters too, and experience is no less cognitive for being, sometimes, non-discursive and not expressible in propositions. All these general considerations about theorising apply in the particular case of transgender: here too it should be experience first, theory later—if at all. In Nietzsche’s famous words, “the will to system betrays a lack of integrity”.

    In any case, and also with particular reference to transgender: trans people don’t owe cis people, or anyone else, an explanation of why they’re who they are. No more than gay people do, for instance, or black people or Jewish people, or any other historically stigmatised minority. Our right to exist as transgender people is not conditional on our being able to prove it, by demonstrating the truth of something called “gender ideology” (our gender ideology, that is, not the rest of society’s). The onus of proof is not on us transgender people at all. It is on those who want to exclude us. By what right do they discriminate against us? By what right do they demonise us, marginalise us, gaslight us, ridicule us, patronise us, in ways that no one would accept for a minute of any other minority?

    We shouldn’t be refused admission to society until we’ve won some abstract rhetorical cage-fight, or arrived at a philosophical theory of transgender that is “satisfactory” (to whom?). Our right to be ourselves, without apology and without explanation, is simply not up for discussion, any more than anyone else’s. We don’t get kindly admitted to equal status once we have satisfied our critics. Like everyone else, we have equal status from the start.

     

    [1] For more from me on Bernard Williams, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/williams-bernard/.