Professor Marcus Arvan of the University of Tampa Philosophy
Department, who originally posted under the webname One Philosopher's Musings, offers a quite interesting response to
the rather pugnacious series of questions I posed as a response to his original
comment. His response is too long to
reproduce here -- I urge you to read it -- but one paragraph raises a question
that I find quite interesting, and to which I have given a good deal of
thought. Let me explain. Here is the paragraph:
"First, I want to suggest that one should [not
ed.] interpret all of a person's work in terms of the very first thing they
published. Authors change their minds and revise their views (heaven knows I
have!), and one should respect that in interpretation. Since, at every point
after "Justice as Fairness", in all of his subsequent work, [Rawls]
uses the veil, appeals to a sense of justice, etc., he should be interpreted as
such. It's only fair to interpret authors according to their considered views,
not their earliest ones that they have come to refine or reject."
This immediately strikes one as measured,
sensible, and, to use a word that Rawls favored, fair. It is also completely antithetical to the way
in which I read a philosophical work, and I should like to explain why.
I never conceive myself as awarding prizes or
rankings when I read a philosophical work.
I am not weighing a candidate's chances for tenure, or determining who
should get published, or choosing which thinkers deserve to join the Pantheon
of the Immortals. I read a philosophical
work for only one reason: because I have
an intuition, a feeling, perhaps even a hope that I will find in it something
powerful, suggestive, even important for my own philosophical concerns. I do not actually read very much, but what I
do read, I read with great intensity. As
the Good Book says of Jacob, I wrestle with the text and will not let it go
except it bless me.
Now whether a text seizes one, and what in it seizes one, is
an entirely subjective matter. For example,
I find Jean-Jacques Rousseau's great work, Of
The Social Contract, a powerful and provocative text, and I have wrestled
mightily with it, but there are long stretches of it that interest me not at all,
even though I imagine they were quite important to Rousseau. I do not think of myself as being unfair to
Rousseau when I ignore them. Good
Lord! He does not need my approbation to
secure his place in the Heaven of our discipline.
Professor Arvan says that we ought not to interpret all of a
person's work in terms of the very first thing he or she published, and that is
certainly good advice on occasion. To
cite just one famous example, it would never occur to me to insist that the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 was
Kant's most important statement of his philosophical views, and that we should
ignore the First Critique where it
deviates from the Dissertation
position. But I would not describe such
a view as unfair, simply as
philosophically uninteresting, and as
I readily agree, even insist, interestingness is in the eye of the
beholder. I can still recall the
uproarious arguments the late Samuel Todes and I had in our Kant Discussion
Group in 1955-56, in which I off-handedly rejected Kant's elaborate
Architectonic as mere philosophical thumb-twiddling while Sam defended it as
the key to understanding everything in the text. Neither of us was right, nor was either of us
being unfair. We were just giving
boisterous youthful expression to two totally different ways of finding inspiration
in the greatest work of philosophy ever written.
When it comes to Rawls, as I have already explained, what I
find dramatically interesting in his work is the brilliant attempt to derive
substantive principles of distributive justice from barren quasi-formal
premises grounded in Social Contract Theory and Game Theory. The rest of what he wrote -- which is of
course most of it -- bores me. Is this
unfair? Of course not. I am not handing out prizes, posthumously or
otherwise. Could someone else read the
same book and find something quite different to focus on and think about? Professor Arvan demonstrates that the answer
is patently yes.
No comments:
Post a Comment