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Week #8: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, March 8th.
Previous Notes for 1st two weeks | 3rd week | 4th | 5th | 6th&6bth | 7th
 The Works (to be studied and discussed): |
 1. Booth, Wayne. Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Chicago: The UP, 1974.
Supplemental Readings:
1. Sass, Louis A. "Anthropology's Native Problems: Revisionism in the field."
2. Geertz, Clifford. "Chapter 1 / Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures.
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Booth, Modern Dogma, and Starting from Assent |
I am probably going to cloud issues here by saying that Booth wants to start from affirmation instead of negation. (But this saying may lead but to a confusion, for "I" am doing the thinking, saying, and asking here. On another day and in another venue, I can assert and argue that Booth does not really escape the negative of modern dogma by embracing John Henry NewMan's An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent. Or by embracing Aristotle as Neo- . Or by any other affiliation that he might wager on. The Yes that he would give as an assent is still [insidiously and invidiously] based on the negative. WB's quasi-thick description is too thin: The source of the problem of modern dogmatism is not simply to be found in the difference--or dogmatic split--between facts & values! Modern Dogmatism, in whatever variety of ways it manifests itself, is not the only negating force at work contributing to the befouled rhetorical climate WB would coax us out of. Nor is the dominant 'criterion of falsifiability' [101- ] the only force. Negation in general is the culprit, even as it is found in rigidified and rerigidified forms in Aristotelian or Neo-Aristotelian rhetorics!) But let us move on to an exposition and a clarification of how WB himself would want to be read, if it is possible for me to give such an account.
WB is interested in being an advocate for "good rhetoric," which he defines as "the art of discovering good reasons, finding what really warrants assent because any reasonable person ought to be persuaded by what has been said" (xiv). If there is a "good rhetoric," there must be a "bad rhetoric," which, WB, in fact, defines as "the rhetoric that lacks genuine power to move reasonable auditors, if any should happen along" (xv). WB anticipates the obvious problem that would arise in the minds of some interlocutors: " 'Who are you to determine who is "reasonable"?' To which these lectures reply: 'The question is not "Whho am I?" but "Who are we?" ' " (xv). So he attempts to locate himself not in a single subjectivity but in an intersubjectivity. And yet, we still have the problem of congreation by segregation, for he will have to exclude those (the unreasonable ones!?) who would not agree. To be reasonable is to agree, for he has very carefully defined the unreasonable as modern dogmatists!
And so What are the various modern dogmas? There are five kind but can be summed up in two (thick descriptive) ways that WB gives:
1. The scientismist version: "the modernist credo that results when the five kinds are held together runs like this: (a) There are no good reasons for changing my mind, especially in questions involving value judgments; there are only motives or drives, and therefore there is no meaning to 'should' in the expression 'I should change my mind.' (b) A mind is nothing but a brain the operations of which are reducible to chemical or physical laws--we don't change minds, we change behavior. (c) The universe is inherently impersonal, indifferent to all human values, and therefore all value judgments are ultimately on an equal footing. (d) Truth is found primarily by critical doubt, by discrediting untrue assertions, by subtracting human perferences or intuitions or values and uncovering the cold hard truth that really underlies our warm inventions. (e) My purpose in trying to change minds about purposes or values or ends can thus only be to make my desires and purposes triumph, since about such matters there is no truth or falsehood; only about means or techniques can men dispute rationally."
2. The irrationalist version of modernism: "(a) The heart has its reasons that the reason ignores--and therefore to hell with reason! It is simply what other men use to restrain my freedom or to disguise their true motives. (b) The conscious mind is really a subordinate and potentially limiting element in the total self or soul or spirit of man; the mind may try to think about facts and truth, but the organism drives for superior irrational realizations that the mind with its scientific analysis cannot touch; mind kills spirit. (c) The universe revealed by thought, as instructed by the scientific revolution, is impersonal--God is dead. Therefore I renounce all hope of finding a hrmaony with it, and I assert my personhood and my values as a rebel against nature. In one alternative version, increasingly popular in the last decade, I assert that nature and I are in harmony, in spite of what science teaches, and I commune with it in deliberate contradiction of what the mind tells me about it. In another, gods or devils as lesser deities live again, battling on my side, more or less ineffectually, against blind or hostile nature or against the older gods. In the world of the irrationalists, each inner voice speaks with absolute authority, and new cults are born daily, some with terrifying consequences. (d) The truth found by reason is trivial or inhuman; scientific reason destroys personal and thus individual truths; the only truth worth having is what I can find for myself in an honest probing of my individuality, that is, in my differences from all other men. (e) Since each man's truth is uniquely valuable for him, [sic.] the purpose of changing minds cannot be to lead us to superior truths shared with other men, much less truth shared with all reasonable men. The purpose is to release creative individuality--and this means that one does not marshall reasons for beliefs to produce an enslaving consensus but rather one works on emotions to liberate unique self-expression." (23-24)
This argument is, for some, rather dated today. Booth is coming out of the turmoil of the heavy modernist period of Russell and D. H. Lawrence and especially so-called age of aquarius. So we need to be reasonable and fair in reading his thoughts here. Since these passages were written, there has been done, e.g., so much work by feminists that would greatly question this rather simplistic rendering of the super rationalist and irrationalist version of NOT accepting what "experts" say. Moreover, there is yet another community of revisionist ethnographers (see the readings for this evening) who would question not only WB masculine-centered views but also his own group's ethnocentric reliance on "good reasons." There is a huge intersubjective communities of people who see masculine reason or western reason as finally not life-furthering, or life-enhancing. Not the baseline for rhetorical judgments. It is the case, however, that WB deals with this objection too. Or does he? I will eventually raise the question again. But let us move for now in search of these values of good reasons that WB is referring to. We will get there toward the end of the book, and I will speed up matters toward the end as quickly as I can.
It is crucial that we really understand (let's be reasonable!) precisely what WB is saying. Remember he writes that "good rhetoric" is "the art of discovering good reasons, finding what really warrants assent because any reasonable person ought to be persuaded by what has been said" (xiv). About midway in the book, WB recalls this passage and sharpens it even more. He writes:
"It is reasonable to grant (one ought to grant) some degree of credence to whatever qualified men and women agree on, unless one has specific and stronger reasons to disbelieve." Abstract commands to "doubt pending proof" are now to be replaced with the ancient and natural command to "assent pending disproof." We will weight many kinds of evidence, including testimony and authority; we will work as hard at discovering good witnesses as Russell would work at spotting logical fallacies. We will thus appraise more or less dubious reasons, assenting to the degree that in the particular case seems warranted. (101; WB's emphasis)
What words pop out here that did not pop out or, if so, less dramatically. Or more dramatically! Or not at all! How do you respond to this passage? What 'thick description' can you give of it?
We can in part understand one layer of the argument as, let's us, by analogy, follow the Roman rule of law--innocent until proven guilty--and not follow the Nepolianic rule of law--guilty until proven innocent. It is the case that someone like Karl Popper (modern scientistic dogmatist that he is) says that since we cannot prove any theory to be true, we can prove it to not be true. What this give 'us' then is the use of theories until we can prove that they no longer work for us. On the other 'epistemological anarchist' side is Paul Feyerabend and his view that 'we' should use any and all things to prove the world true. As an anarchist (the really big NO!) is Feyerabend, therefore, also an anarchist for assent to everything? "Anything Goes"? (See his Against Method, all three editions.)
Again, the claim restated: WB recalls and calls us,
"A recent convocation speaker at Chicago characterized the university as essentially the place where things are doubted until proved: 'If I have a prayer for you, ' he said, and it was clear that he used the word prayer metaphorically, 'it is that you continue to cultivate what we hve worked to inculcate--an attitude of benigh skepticism about virtually everything--a constant query of 'where is the evidence?' in support of ideas and institutions, new and old.' How many times I myself have said the same thing, and felt virtuous as I said it!
But I ask you to think a bit, as I turn now from motivism to the remaining four dogmas, about what would happen to your intellectual and moral life if you reversed that formula, cultivating a benign acceptance--perhaps temporary and tentative, but real--of every belief that can pass two tests: you have in particular, concrete grounds to doubt it (as distinct from the abstract principle to doubt what cannot be proved); and you have good reason to think all men who understand the problem share your belief. <40; WB's emphasis)
Again, but this time in "Many freshman English texts":
"Many freshman English texts [sic.]--those new mass media studied by hundreds of thousands of Americans--have in the past several decades been defensive rhetorics in this sense. Accepting without question the dogmas of scientism, they have taught--as I accuse myself of having taught, during my first losing battles with freshman composition [sic.]--that the goal of all thought and argument is to emulate the purity and objectivity and rigor of science, in order to protect oneself from the errors that passion and desire and metaphor and authority and all those logical fallacies lead us into.
A teacher of literature I natrually lived an entirely different and more romantic life, asserting values aggressively and cheerfully, though often becoming cross with my students if they denied--using principles derived from my scientism--the literary values I tried to educate them to embrace. It should have been clear to me that the very word educate was suspect, if modernism were right: whenever I touched on values, all I could do was indoctrinate, unless in some sense the pursuit of literary values is reasonable." (88)
Suggested Solutions (or, are they?) to the problem of modernist dogmatism: "Changes of Scene and Dramatis Personae":
WB offers three possible solutions (or thick descriptions):
1. Nature and Knowledge Revivified: "One obvious possibility is to develop a religious or metaphysical counterpart to behaviorism--that is, to try to build new pictures of man-in-nature that will see men's values as inseperable from God's or nature's values. To the claim, 'All values and emotions and preferences are simply the result of environmental controls that can be described in the language of scientific fact,' many have replied, 'The universe is made of, or permeated by, values; all (or many) facts can and should be described in the language of value or purpose.' All of man's ethical [and her etical, herethical?] and political and aesthetic and emotive life is thus taken back into the natural, and new ways are sought for talking about the old scholastic notion of an analogy of being between God and man."
2. Nature as Will or Act: "A second possibility is to expand the domain of action or will to repudiate or encompass the scientific picture of a value-free world. We find innumerable modern existentialisms claiming that though the universe, scientifically considered, may be absurd or unknowable, we can honestly affirm our purposes, and thus excape the trap of meaninglessness. What we know is our own existence, and we can will that existence to be whatever we want it to be, in opposition to the absurdity of the universe that created us. We need not worry over rational doubts about free will or the objectivity of values: we can simply affirm ourselves and thus in a sense come to know our freedom....
To me a much more satisfactory effort at reunification under 'will' was that of the pragmatists, especially Peirce, Dewey, and James know, and scientific knowledge becomes a special case of fulfillment of human purpose--the purpose to know. Logic is no longer here an abstract propositional logic seeking truths that are certain, objective, divorced from man's needs and desires: it becomes instead the logic of human values. That I desire certain qualities, know and pursue certain relations, and 'live my purposes' can here no longer be relegated to epiphenomena--purposes are as real and known as anything can be, and the world and nature are thus transformed."
3. Reality as Feeling: The Wisdom of the Body: "A third possibility is to expand the domain of feeling to absorb all of what is called thinking and all other grounds for action. Sometimes the new center is an undefined feeling, as in Hemingway's repeated formula of what is good is what feels good, or Lawrence's [whatever] ... Wallace Stevens' [whatever] ... Nietzsche's [whatever] ... Wilhelm Reich's [whatever] ... Norman O. Brown's celebration of the 'polymorphous perverse.' [...] (98; WB's emphasis)
And Yet:
"If my goal were to find a single systematic philosophy that could be embraced once and for all, I clearly ought to choose one of the three and develop--from a conflation of 'the genuinely known' or the 'validly willed' or the 'truly felt'--my alternative to modernism. But it is immediately clear, when I say that all three have yielded decisive alternatives, that I am exploring a different, pluralist direction. My goal is (once again) not to establish a philosophy: my concern is with a befouled rhetorical climate which prevents our meeting to discover and pursue common interests. What we must find, I think, are grounds for confidence in a multiplicity of ways of knowing." (99; boldface mine)
The U.S. Pragmaticists, and Hemingway, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown--SYSTEMATIC PHILOSOPHers!!! But we can see that WB wants to rework a "befouled rhetoric" and of course 'we' can easily agree with that notion to rework but perhaps not with how and in whose name we can rework the befouledness--namely, Aristotle ("A Great Resovoir of Good Reasons" [143- ]). Is this really a change of scene and dramatis personae, as WB promised! What follows under this rubric in the book is a long discussion of Aristotle as the source for good reasons, values, etc., though this name Aristotle is kept offstage for the most part. (The earlier phrase "qualified men and women" is now, more than before, aristo(tle)cratic.)
But we would have to agree that 'the criterion of falsifiability' (101- ) is definitely invidious and must be denegated. And Yet (again), Questions about Aristotle keep coming to mind:
What about Aristotle's (own systematic, philosophical) thinking and Rhetoric?!
Does Aristotle give us knowledge of ourselves (111- )? Is knowledge of selves ahistorical? If not, then is Arisotle's knowledge applicable today for us, or for them, or them, or them?
Is NeoAristotelism really an updated rhetoric? for us today? Richard Young and James Berlin believe so!
Does Aristotle give us the self as a field of selves (126- )? How could we, today or when WB's book was even published, read this discussion about a field of selves and not think of all the poststructuralist work on the problem of the ethical self and the fractured self, and the sub-jected?!
How would Clifford Geertz's reading process--thick description--apply to a rereading of what WB says in Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent? Are there moments, many moments, of WB's being ethnocentric? Could a thick description of human beings in and out of a particular culture give us a more life-furthering self as a field of selves?
Is it the case that WB is, unbeknownst to himself, inviting us to give assent to an invidious form of the negative (more invidious than modernist dogma)? If so, How so?
One of the criteria that WB affirms is that of "teachability or corrigibility" (121). Last week, when discussing Introduction to Composition Studies we dealt with this issue of the necessity for a rational process (generic --> codifiable --> teachable) in the teaching of writing (e.g., in relation to critiques of Peter Elbow). How much has WB given back to the rationalist tradition of Plato and Aristotle (though they differ in many ways in this tradition, they do agree on this rational process)? What would--could--WB criteria of affirmation offer to "composition studies"? What would it take away from the field? WB is, yes, interested and invested in "the making of knowledge." What constitutes knowledge for him? (To think about these particular questions, you might review what Lisa Ede has said in ICS about Peter Elbow and James Berlin.
NOtes9 >>>>
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