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“There are good reasons to think that some AIs today have wellbeing.”
In this guest post, Simon Goldstein (Dianoia Institute, Australian Catholic University) and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (Rutgers University – Newark, Center for AI Safety) argue that some existing artificial intelligences have a kind of moral significance because they’re beings for whom things can go well or badly.
This is the sixth in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Posts in the summer guest series will remain pinned to the top of the page for the week in which they’re published.]
We recognize one another as beings for whom things can go well or badly, beings whose lives may be better or worse according to the balance they strike between goods and ills, pleasures and pains, desires satisfied and frustrated. In our more broad-minded moments, we are willing to extend the concept of wellbeing also to nonhuman animals, treating them as independent bearers of value whose interests we must consider in moral deliberation. But most people, and perhaps even most philosophers, would reject the idea that fully artificial systems, designed by human engineers and realized on computer hardware, may similarly demand our moral consideration. Even many who accept the possibility that humanoid androids in the distant future will have wellbeing would resist the idea that the same could be true of today’s AI.
Perhaps because the creation of artificial systems with wellbeing is assumed to be so far off, little philosophical attention has been devoted to the question of what such systems would have to be like. In this post, we suggest a surprising answer to this question: when one integrates leading theories of mental states like belief, desire, and pleasure with leading theories of wellbeing, one is confronted with the possibility that the technology already exists to create AI systems with wellbeing. We argue that a new type of AI—the artificial language agent—has wellbeing. Artificial language agents augment large language models with the capacity to observe, remember, and form plans. We also argue that the possession of wellbeing by language agents does not depend on them being phenomenally conscious. Far from a topic for speculative fiction or future generations of philosophers, then, AI wellbeing is a pressing issue. This post is a condensed version of our argument. To read the full version, click here.
Artificial language agents (or simply language agents) are our focus because they support the strongest case for wellbeing among existing AIs. Language agents are built by wrapping a large language model (LLM) in an architecture that supports long-term planning. An LLM is an artificial neural network designed to generate coherent text responses to text inputs (ChatGPT is the most famous example). The LLM at the center of a language agent is its cerebral cortex: it performs most of the agent’s cognitive processing tasks. In addition to the LLM, however, a language agent has files that record its beliefs, desires, plans, and observations as sentences of natural language. The language agent uses the LLM to form a plan of action based on its beliefs and desires. In this way, the cognitive architecture of language agents is familiar from folk psychology.
For concreteness, consider the language agents built this year by a team of researchers at Stanford and Google. Like video game characters, these agents live in a simulated world called ‘Smallville’, which they can observe and interact with via natural-language descriptions of what they see and how they act. Each agent is given a text backstory that defines their occupation, relationships, and goals. As they navigate the world of Smallville, their experiences are added to a “memory stream” in the form of natural language statements. Because each agent’s memory stream is long, agents use their LLM to assign importance scores to their memories and to determine which memories are relevant to their situation. Then the agents reflect: they query the LLM to make important generalizations about their values, relationships, and other higher-level representations. Finally, they plan: They feed important memories from each day into the LLM, which generates a plan for the next day. Plans determine how an agent acts, but can be revised on the fly on the basis of events that occur during the day. In this way, language agents engage in practical reasoning, deciding how to promote their goals given their beliefs.
The conclusion that language agents have beliefs and desires follows from many of the most popular theories of belief and desire, including versions of dispositionalism, interpretationism, and representationalism.
According to the dispositionalist, to believe or desire that something is the case is to possess a suitable suite of dispositions. According to ‘narrow’ dispositionalism, the relevant dispositions are behavioral and cognitive; ‘wide’ dispositionalism also includes dispositions to have phenomenal experiences. While wide dispositionalism is coherent, we set it aside here because it has been defended less frequently than narrow dispositionalism.
Consider belief. In the case of language agents, the best candidate for the state of believing a proposition is the state of having a sentence expressing that proposition written in the memory stream. This state is accompanied by the right kinds of verbal and nonverbal behavioral dispositions to count as a belief, and, given the functional architecture of the system, also the right kinds of cognitive dispositions. Similar remarks apply to desire.
According to the interpretationist, what it is to have beliefs and desires is for one’s behavior (verbal and nonverbal) to be interpretable as rational given those beliefs and desires. There is no in-principle problem with applying the methods of radical interpretation to the linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior of a language agent to determine what it believes and desires.
According to the representationalist, to believe or desire something is to have a mental representation with the appropriate causal powers and content. Representationalism deserves special emphasis because “probably the majority of contemporary philosophers of mind adhere to some form of representationalism about belief” (Schwitzgebel).
It is hard to resist the conclusion that language agents have beliefs and desires in the representationalist sense. The Stanford language agents, for example, have memories which consist of text files containing natural language sentences specifying what they have observed and what they want. Natural language sentences clearly have content, and the fact that a given sentence is in a given agent’s memory plays a direct causal role in shaping its behavior.
Many representationalists have argued that human cognition should be explained by positing a “language of thought.” Language agents also have a language of thought: their language of thought is English!
An example may help to show the force of our arguments. One of Stanford’s language agents had an initial description that included the goal of planning a Valentine’s Day party. This goal was entered into the agent’s planning module. The result was a complex pattern of behavior. The agent met with every resident of Smallville, inviting them to the party and asking them what kinds of activities they would like to include. The feedback was incorporated into the party planning.
To us, this kind of complex behavior clearly manifests a disposition to act in ways that would tend to bring about a successful Valentine’s Day party given the agent’s observations about the world around it. Moreover, the agent is ripe for interpretationist analysis. Their behavior would be very difficult to explain without referencing the goal of organizing a Valentine’s Day party. And, of course, the agent’s initial description contained a sentence with the content that its goal was to plan a Valentine’s Day party. So, whether one is attracted to narrow dispositionalism, interpretationism, or representationalism, we believe the kind of complex behavior exhibited by language agents is best explained by crediting them with beliefs and desires.
What makes someone’s life go better or worse for them? There are three main theories of wellbeing: hedonism, desire satisfactionism, and objective list theories. According to hedonism, an individual’s wellbeing is determined by the balance of pleasure and pain in their life. According to desire satisfactionism, an individual’s wellbeing is determined by the extent to which their desires are satisfied. According to objective list theories, an individual’s wellbeing is determined by their possession of objectively valuable things, including knowledge, reasoning, and achievements.
On hedonism, to determine whether language agents have wellbeing, we must determine whether they feel pleasure and pain. This in turn depends on the nature of pleasure and pain.
There are two main theories of pleasure and pain. According to phenomenal theories, pleasures are phenomenal states. For example, one phenomenal theory of pleasure is the distinctive feeling theory. The distinctive feeling theory says that there is a particular phenomenal experience of pleasure that is common to all pleasant activities. We see little reason why language agents would have representations with this kind of structure. So if this theory of pleasure were correct, then hedonism would predict that language agents do not have wellbeing.
The main alternative to phenomenal theories of pleasure is attitudinal theories. In fact, most philosophers of wellbeing favor attitudinal over phenomenal theories of pleasure (Bramble). One attitudinal theory is the desire-based theory: experiences are pleasant when they are desired. This kind of theory is motivated by the heterogeneity of pleasure: a wide range of disparate experiences are pleasant, including the warm relaxation of soaking in a hot tub, the taste of chocolate cake, and the challenge of completing a crossword. While differing in intrinsic character, all of these experiences are pleasant when desired.
If pleasures are desired experiences and AIs can have desires, it follows that AIs can have pleasure if they can have experiences. In this context, we are attracted to a proposal defended by Schroeder: an agent has a pleasurable experience when they perceive the world being a certain way, and they desire the world to be that way. Even if language agents don’t presently have such representations, it would be possible to modify their architecture to incorporate them. So some versions of hedonism are compatible with the idea that language agents could have wellbeing.
We turn now from hedonism to desire satisfaction theories. According to desire satisfaction theories, your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied. We’ve already argued that language agents have desires. If that argument is right, then desire satisfaction theories seem to imply that language agents can have wellbeing.
According to objective list theories of wellbeing, a person’s life is good for them to the extent that it instantiates objective goods. Common components of objective list theories include friendship, art, reasoning, knowledge, and achievements. For reasons of space, we won’t address these theories in detail here. But the general moral is that once you admit that language agents possess beliefs and desires, it is hard not to grant them access to a wide range of activities that make for an objectively good life. Achievements, knowledge, artistic practices, and friendship are all caught up in the process of making plans on the basis of beliefs and desires.
Generalizing, if language agents have beliefs and desires, then most leading theories of wellbeing suggest that their desires matter morally.
We’ve argued that language agents have wellbeing. But there is a simple challenge to this proposal. First, language agents may not be phenomenally conscious — there may be nothing it feels like to be a language agent. Second, some philosophers accept:
The Consciousness Requirement. Phenomenal consciousness is necessary for having wellbeing.
The Consciousness Requirement might be motivated in either of two ways: First, it might be held that every welfare good itself requires phenomenal consciousness (this view is known as experientialism). Second, it might be held that though some welfare goods can be possessed by beings that lack phenomenal consciousness, such beings are nevertheless precluded from having wellbeing because phenomenal consciousness is necessary to have wellbeing.
We are not convinced. First, we consider it a live question whether language agents are or are not phenomenally conscious (see Chalmers for recent discussion). Much depends on what phenomenal consciousness is. Some theories of consciousness appeal to higher-order representations: you are conscious if you have appropriately structured mental states that represent other mental states. Sufficiently sophisticated language agents, and potentially many other artificial systems, will satisfy this condition. Other theories of consciousness appeal to a ‘global workspace’: an agent’s mental state is conscious when it is broadcast to a range of that agent’s cognitive systems. According to this theory, language agents will be conscious once their architecture includes representations that are broadcast widely. The memory stream of Stanford’s language agents may already satisfy this condition. If language agents are conscious, then the Consciousness Requirement does not pose a problem for our claim that they have wellbeing.
Second, we are not convinced of the Consciousness Requirement itself. We deny that consciousness is required for possessing every welfare good, and we deny that consciousness is required in order to have wellbeing.
With respect to the first issue, we build on a recent argument by Bradford, who notes that experientialism about welfare is rejected by the majority of philosophers of welfare. Cases of deception and hallucination suggest that your life can be very bad even when your experiences are very good. This has motivated desire satisfaction and objective list theories of wellbeing, which often allow that some welfare goods can be possessed independently of one’s experience. For example, desires can be satisfied, beliefs can be knowledge, and achievements can be achieved, all independently of experience.
Rejecting experientialism puts pressure on the Consciousness Requirement. If wellbeing can increase or decrease without conscious experience, why would consciousness be required for having wellbeing? After all, it seems natural to hold that the theory of wellbeing and the theory of welfare goods should fit together in a straightforward way:
Simple Connection. An individual can have wellbeing just in case it is capable of possessing one or more welfare goods.
Rejecting experientialism but maintaining Simple Connection yields a view incompatible with the Consciousness Requirement: the falsity of experientialism entails that some welfare goods can be possessed by non-conscious beings, and Simple Connection guarantees that such non-conscious beings will have wellbeing.
Advocates of the Consciousness Requirement who are not experientialists must reject Simple Connection and hold that consciousness is required to have wellbeing even if it is not required to possess particular welfare goods. We offer two arguments against this view.
First, leading theories of the nature of consciousness are implausible candidates for necessary conditions on wellbeing. For example, it is implausible that higher-order representations are required for wellbeing. Imagine an agent who has first order beliefs and desires, but does not have higher order representations. Why should this kind of agent not have wellbeing? Suppose that desire satisfaction contributes to wellbeing. Granted, since they don’t represent their beliefs and desires, they won’t themselves have opinions about whether their desires are satisfied. But the desires still are satisfied. Or consider global workspace theories of consciousness. Why should an agent’s degree of cognitive integration be relevant to whether their life can go better or worse?
Second, we think we can construct chains of cases where adding the relevant bit of consciousness would make no difference to wellbeing. Imagine an agent with the body and dispositional profile of an ordinary human being, but who is a ‘phenomenal zombie’ without any phenomenal experiences. Whether or not its desires are satisfied or its life instantiates various objective goods, defenders of the Consciousness Requirement must deny that this agent has wellbeing. But now imagine that this agent has a single persistent phenomenal experience of a homogenous white visual field. Adding consciousness to the phenomenal zombie has no intuitive effect on wellbeing: if its satisfied desires, achievements, and so forth did not contribute to its wellbeing before, the homogenous white field should make no difference. Nor is it enough for the consciousness to itself be something valuable: imagine that the phenomenal zombie always has a persistent phenomenal experience of mild pleasure. To our judgment, this should equally have no effect on whether the agent’s satisfied desires or possession of objective goods contribute to its wellbeing. Sprinkling pleasure on top of the functional profile of a human does not make the crucial difference. These observations suggest that whatever consciousness adds to wellbeing must be connected to individual welfare goods, rather than some extra condition required for wellbeing: rejecting Simple Connection is not well motivated. Thus the friend of the Consciousness Requirement cannot easily avoid the problems with experientialism by falling back on the idea that consciousness is a necessary condition for having wellbeing.
We’ve argued that there are good reasons to think that some AIs today have wellbeing. But our arguments are not conclusive. Still, we think that in the face of these arguments, it is reasonable to assign significant probability to the thesis that some AIs have wellbeing.
In the face of this moral uncertainty, how should we act? We propose extreme caution. Wellbeing is one of the core concepts of ethical theory. If AIs can have wellbeing, then they can be harmed, and this harm matters morally. Even if the probability that AIs have wellbeing is relatively low, we must think carefully before lowering the wellbeing of an AI without producing an offsetting benefit.
[Image made with DALL-E]
Some related posts:
“Philosophers on GPT-3”
“Philosophers on Next-Generation Large Language Models”
“GPT-4 and the Question of Intelligence”
“We’re Not Ready for the AI on the Horizon, But People Are Trying”
“Researchers Call for More Work on Consciousness”
“Dennett on AI: We Must Protect Ourselves Against ‘Counterfeit People’”
“Philosophy, AI, and Society Listserv”
“Talking Philosophy with Chat-GPT“
The post A Case for AI Wellbeing (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
“We shouldn’t attempt to fit ‘outreach’ or ‘engagement’ into one of the existing three categories [of research, teaching, or service]. It doesn’t fit neatly into those categories. And, more importantly, all of us should be doing it as part of our jobs, not just a few of us. We are in an all-hands-on-deck situation.”
In the following guest post, Alex Guerrero, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, argues that we should count engagement or outreach as a distinct component of the job of professor.
This is the fifth in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Posts in the summer guest series will remain pinned to the top of the page for the week in which they’re published.]
[“The Beautiful Walk” by René Magritte]
The job of a philosopher in America has been defined in relatively specific terms. These are the terms: research, teaching, and service. How much of one’s life one is expected to contribute to each, the precise percentage and weight, varies from job to job. In some, research is all that matters. In others, teaching is the thing. More rarely, a philosopher wanders deep into administration, lost in a forest of service, and emerges as a thoughtful if pesky manager and builder of things with varying degrees of value. For most of us, we are required to do all of these, more or less well, with more or less joy.
Socrates and Kongzi both might have, for once, been at a loss for words if forced to say whether they were doing research, teaching, or service. But we have contracts, faculty handbooks, promotion guidelines, and legalistic specifications of what we are required to do. None of us are employed as philosophers. We are employed as professors (lecturers, instructors). For the most part, our job is like that of other humanities professors, and unlike that of research scientists and others in STEM fields supported by grants, who do things like “buy out” of teaching and oversee research labs. For us, the job is the core three: research, teaching, and service.
Teaching is the very official role where we are in front of enrolled students, in a class that counts for credit, presenting material, devising and evaluating assignments, and figuring out ways for students to learn what we take to be important about the subject. Our teaching responsibilities are almost always defined by the number of courses taught per academic year, spread out over semesters or quarters, often specified in terms of level and number.
Research is publication. We might wish it were instead about ideas, figuring new things out, moving knowledge forward—regardless of whether that results in articles in peer-reviewed journals or books in academic presses. But we know better. You need 8 publications for tenure in B+ or better peer-reviewed journals. Or 1.5 per year on the tenure clock. Or whatever. What “counts” for research, and how much it counts, is usually clear, even if promotion requirements are rarely specified in detail. Post-tenure, although research productivity factors into further promotions and merit raises, the sense in which it is “required” becomes considerably murkier.
Service is what is required to keep up the pretense that universities and colleges are run by the faculty, rather than by a distinct managerial class. We “serve” on hiring committees, as undergraduate and graduate program administrators, on curriculum committees, on admissions committees, in organizing colloquia and events, in putting people forward and evaluating them for tenure and promotion, as chairs and vice-chairs, deans and deanlets, and on committees for every domain of human complaint and frustration—these are the core of internal, university service. We serve our departments, schools, colleges, and universities. Many of us expand beyond this to engage in service to the “profession”—running academic journals, professional associations, planning workshops and conferences, creating and supporting broad mentoring and inclusion efforts, and so on.
Most of us were just dropped into this world of research, teaching, and service. I’ve never seen anyone try to justify why these are the three parts of the job. As many have noted, they don’t fit together all that naturally. What makes one an amazing teacher might have nothing do with what makes for a groundbreaking researcher. And we almost expect that whatever makes us good at those things will make us inept at, or at least impatient with, most kinds of “service.” Our graduate training programs do very little to train us to teach, or to administer anything or manage anyone.
The explanation for the three branches seems to be a historically contingent one, with the modern college or university coming to exist with a dual-purpose mission of educating students (teaching) and advancing knowledge (research), and service comes along as a third thing essential to preserving various values relating to those first two. Specifically, the values of academic, expert peer review (for admissions, hiring, publication, research evaluation, promotion) and academic, expert curriculum and course design and implementation.
There are, of course, many ways of rethinking this basic three branch setup, and many institutions that have already reconfigured things so that people are hired into jobs where they will do just one or two of those three things. I don’t want to wade more deeply into those waters. Instead, I want to suggest that, given the pressures confronting colleges and universities, sustaining those institutions in their core dual-purpose mission of educating students and advancing knowledge requires introducing a fourth branch. I’m not sure what name for that fourth branch is best. Here are my two favorite candidates: outreach and engagement.
The basic argument for the fourth branch is simple.
Colleges and universities are supported (1) by the general public, through government funding; (2) by students and their families, through tuition and fees; and (3) by rich people, through donations. What education and what knowledge will be pursued in colleges and universities is not set in stone; it is, rather, a function of what those three groups want and demand. If we want philosophy to be part of the education and part of the knowledge that is pursued in the years to come, we need people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy. And for people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy, we need to reach out to them, engage them, make them aware of what philosophy is and why it is wonderful and valuable. Given what philosophy is, and given our contemporary situation, that task is monumental, and must be undertaken at many different levels, in many ways. No small number of us can do it on our own. Therefore, it should be a part of all of our jobs—quite literally—to do this work.
(We can substitute in almost any humanistic field for ‘philosophy’ in the above argument, with similar implications for a needed fourth branch for the rest of the humanistic fields.)
The basics of this ‘demand side’ story are familiar. Many students and parents think of college and university in terms of relatively short term, career ambitions—how will this major, this degree, this school help me get a job. Many states and nations have begun taking a similar attitude toward all higher education, thinking in terms of contribution to economic productivity. Little actual empirical investigation is involved in deciding that humanistic fields, and fields such as philosophy, in particular, don’t do well by this score. But that is a common public perception. And it is understandable. It seems plausible that a degree in business, health professions, computer science, engineering, or biomedical sciences (the five largest growth majors over the past ten years) would be a more direct route to a job than a degree in English, history, or philosophy (three of the majors that lost the most majors over the past ten years).
There are other factors that affect demand. STEM fields are intimately connected to industries and occupations outside of the academy, so that one might have encountered a person with background in that field. We no longer have the same kind of elite, quasi-aristocratic veneration of those humanistic things that every “educated” person must know. STEM spends more time in the news, as breakthroughs in tech, science, and computing get regular reporting and discussion, and result in products in our pockets and dreams on our screens. In the United States, quality exposure to literature, philosophy, and even history is rare prior to college or university, with many students not having encountered any philosophy before college, and having encountered history only as rote memorization and literature only as forced reading.
Behind the idea that colleges and universities have a dual-purpose mission of educating students and advancing knowledge is a mostly implicit idea about what education and knowledge is valuable and why. For those of us working as professors in a subject domain, we almost certainly see the domain as valuable, and can offer many different compelling reasons why it is valuable, pointing both to intrinsic or final value of the subject, and to instrumental benefits of education and knowledge in the domain. We can go on and on about personal transformation, what it means to be human, learning to think critically about what is important, becoming a democratic and cosmopolitan citizen of the world, and so forth. But for those not already in philosophy, where are they supposed to hear the good news?
It is easy to vilify the administrator class, focused on the bottom line—bottoms in seats, donations to “development” offices, legislative support for public institutions. But it is not their fault that higher education is funded as it is. It is not their fault that we, the professoriate, don’t have unbridled power to force people to study those subjects that we see as most valuable. Professors like the idea of being in control: we get to design the curriculum, plan the syllabus, pick the readings, develop the research projects, evaluate the work, decide what should be published, determine who should be admitted, hired, promoted, esteemed. This all seems right and good to us, given our knowledge and expertise. But that is not the system we have with respect to the very basic facts of higher education in most contemporary political environments. We might wish for administrators who could hold the line, fight the battle for us, make the case for the importance of philosophy and the humanities. And some of them can and do. But many operate in incredibly difficult economic and political environments. They can’t change the basic facts about whose demand matters. And they can’t even do much to affect the substance of what is in demand. They need help. And—at least given our knowledge—we are well positioned to provide it.
Many of us are already involved in various efforts to broaden exposure to and engagement with philosophy. Most involved in this work aren’t doing it thinking to “increase demand” for philosophy, but it plausibly has that effect. There are obviously central enterprises: exposing children and adolescents to philosophy and serious humanities in K-12 education, for example, something that many are already doing. Writing “public facing” philosophy that appears in newspapers, broad circulation prestige venues, trade books, and so on. Creating online philosophy courses and videos and other broad access materials like podcasts. There are also more local, more intimate efforts: organizing a public philosophy week at a public library, running a philosophy club or ethics bowl team at the local high school, organizing community book groups and “meetups” to discuss philosophy, running “ask a philosopher” booths at the train station, farmers’ market, or mall. These activities bring philosophy to people outside of the academy and bring people into philosophy, giving them entry points and a better sense of what the subject is and why it is of value. They also are a lot of fun. And a ton of work to do well. And, for the most part, they are treated as outside of one’s job, falling outside of the big three: research, teaching, and service.
For those involved in this work, a common argument is that it should be included under research, teaching, or service—depending on the details. In a few places, “engagement” work is already included as part of one’s official job requirements. In more places, efforts are being made to think about how to include this work under research, or teaching, or service. I’ve spent the past year on a committee at Rutgers on a “Task Force for Community Engaged/ Publicly Engaged Scholarship,” focused on questions of definition (what is it, what counts) and evaluation (what metrics are available and appropriate, what standards should be used) of this kind of research. In serving on this committee, I’ve learned in detail about dozens of similar efforts at other institutions. In almost every case, the discussion is focused on how to credit the work being done by a small percentage of professors who are doing some “community engagement” or “public facing” work. Can it count instead of other, more traditional academic research? Can it count for teaching or service?
I want to suggest that, for those of us in the humanities, we should understand the importance of this engagement work to our core dual mission of educating students and advancing knowledge in our fields, and we should stop trying to shoehorn it into the traditional three categories. In the same way that service is required to sustain certain valuable features of how education and research is conducted, engagement is required to sustain certain valuable features of what education and research is conducted. Professorial “service” is required due to internal, contingent features of running a college or university, as something instrumentally important to enabling high quality education of students and to advancing serious research and knowledge. In the modern political and economic context most of us are in now, professorial “outreach” or “public engagement” is required due to external, contingent features of running a college or university, as something instrumentally important to enabling high quality education of students and to advancing serious research and knowledge in all academic domains that are of genuine value, including philosophy. We shouldn’t attempt to fit “outreach” or “engagement” into one of the existing three categories. It doesn’t fit neatly into those categories. And, more importantly, all of us should be doing it as part of our jobs, not just a few of us. We are in an all-hands-on-deck situation. It’s not clear that even this huge shift would be enough to save the humanities, but it affords more hope than doing nothing and just praying for favorable shifts in the demand curves.
So, the proposal is this. Add “engagement” or “outreach” as a fourth component of the job of professor, along with research, teaching, and service. The exact percentages might vary, as they already do, across institutions. One model might be 35% teaching, 35% research, 20% service, and 10% outreach. Just as with service, there would be a variety of ways of satisfying the requirement. And it might be assessed over several years, rather just in one particular year.
In addition to the familiar forms above—creating and running K-12 programs and clubs, public facing writing, online courses and spaces for public philosophy discussion, podcasts, local events and courses and reading groups at libraries and other community venues—there might be other work that would count. Creating and publicizing materials about philosophy and its intrinsic and instrumental value, developing materials to connect philosophy to prominent issues of the moment, connecting philosophy to locally popular elements of colleges and universities (such as college sports), strategically lobbying local and state political officials to help explain the value of philosophy and to think about ways in philosophy might be relevant or useful given their political agenda, developing white papers and strategic plans to encourage businesses and industries to seek out philosophy graduates and build philosophy alumni networks, even working on philosophy-related fundraising (either through or, where permitted, outside of, the development office). We need to do work at many different levels, in many different venues and spaces. New Yorker articles and popular books are important, but insufficient to reach or affect the very broad, heterogeneous communities whose interest and demand is relevant.
Just as with service (and teaching and research, for that matter), we shouldn’t expect that everyone will be equally good at or equally drawn to every aspect of outreach. And, just as with service, much of our evaluation of the work will be somewhat less precise than our evaluation of teaching or research. Norms and guidelines will need to be developed and adjusted over time. There is also the question, as with teaching and service, of how to train people to do this work well. Much of the work being done by committees like the one I’ve been on can be of help in thinking through these issues. None strike me as insurmountable.
The basic hope is that, by requiring everyone to do some outreach and engagement work, we can get many more people involved, and have a correspondingly greater effect on the broad understanding of philosophy and its value, with a hoped-for uptick in interest, support, and demand.
There are other potential side-benefits to creating the fourth branch. One is that it might mean that the public face of philosophy will be much more complex and multifaceted, so that it isn’t entirely dominated by a few prominent people who are skilled at prestige publishing or personal branding or whatever we want to call Žižek’s skillset. Another is that, as most people who have done this work will attest, engagement and outreach work provides a kind of beneficial feedback, potentially improving the quality of one’s teaching, research, and service, as one steps back from those activities and considers and attempts to communicate about their value, and to share philosophy with people who have not encountered it before. A third is that it might enable and prepare philosophers and other humanists to push back more effectively against the tendency for humanistic and normative concerns to be overrun by the march of technological, scientific, and commercial “progress” and “innovation.” And it might help the broader public see, raise, and respond to these concerns for themselves, even without any university training in the field.
There might be a worry that focusing on demand and broad interest sets up a zero-sum competition. We might do better, but that will mean some other field, perhaps with a harder case to make, will do worse. Perhaps, although I think a broad push from humanists in this regard might make a considerable difference to public understanding and public perception, even about the basic role of colleges and universities and the value of attending those institutions. Much greater, more structurally supported and organized efforts from professors in this regard might help alter the discussion and push back against the view of higher education as just some kind of pre-vocational training for those who can afford it. Most optimistically, it might alter the public funding dynamics of college and university, reasserting the ideal of affordable liberal arts, humanistic higher education for all as part of an important public component of a genuinely democratic, flourishing society.
Earlier, I mentioned that administrators are often limited in the ways in which they can help us. Here is one: help the humanists help themselves, by building a fourth branch, focused on engagement and outreach, into our jobs. In some cases, we could begin doing this somewhat informally within departments, setting up service positions focused on outreach, and then treating that work as part of service. But, in my view, it will be better to build it in more structurally, with a broader requirement for everyone, and allowing a broader array of ways in which to contribute.
If we want philosophy to survive, we need people to understand what it is and why it should survive. We can’t just rest on our historical laurels or on “get off my lawn” arguments that simply insist that no serious university can exist without a philosophy department. We might be right. But we also might just end up surrounded by unserious universities.
Other posts on public philosophy, engagement, and outreach.
The post The Fourth Branch (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
“When my younger self complained angrily in the margins with scrawls of ‘where is this going?’, he missed the sights and insights that the journey itself provided.”
A kind of philosophical innocence is the subject of the following guest post by Bradford Skow, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Skow works mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and aesthetics, and has a blog/newsletter, Mostly Aesthetics, on Substack, which I highly recommend.
This is the fourth in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Posts in the summer guest series will remain pinned to the top of the page for the week in which they’re published.]
Herbert Morris read an essay titled “Lost Innocence” at the 1975 Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium. In it, he attempted an analysis of Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence, when Eve was tempted and they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge they acquired was not, obviously, perceptual knowledge, nor did they draw some new conclusion from their evidence. It is closer to say, Morris thought, that they acquired “a different way of feeling about what had been before them all along”: “[w]hereas one had earlier felt at ease, felt a kind of natural joy, one now is cursed with an absence of joy, perhaps more, with feeling anxious and bad.” But this itself is just a first approximation, and Morris steers us toward, and then away from, several more accounts of lost innocence, until, after a pause at his preferred one, he closes with a meditation on the nature of evil, and on the morally wise people who have “not been crushed by what they have confronted, but have emerged, in ways mysterious to behold, victorious, capable, despite and because of knowledge, of affirming rather than denying life.” Life-affirmation is not an ending that the essay’s opening paragraphs point you toward. Morris announces only that the essay was stimulated by reflection on the story of Adam and Eve, and he acknowledges early on the “serpentine nature” of his reasoning.
Every age has its favored philosophical templates. Readers of this venue are doubtless familiar, either as writers, or as readers or referees, with one in common use today:
I will argue that P.
Lo, notice that I am now arguing that P.
Reminder that Modus Ponens is valid!
In conclusion, I have argued that P.
On top of all this meta-signposting, not to be neglected is the obligatory here is the plan for this paper, placed at the end of the Introduction, and skipped over by every reader. The basic unit of philosophy is taken to be the argument with numbered premises and labeled conclusion, as the proof is the basic unit of mathematics. Of course books and papers in mathematics also have definitions and explanatory insertions, nor do works of philosophy consist only of arguments—not even Spinoza’s Ethics—but everything is built around them.
At sea between college and graduate school, I pursued a self-directed course of philosophical study, and focus on the argument was the straw keeping me afloat. When chance scudded me into Peter Unger’s paper “The Problem of the Many,” therefore, it seemed scandalous. “Although,” he wrote, “I think arguments are important in philosophy, my arguments here will be only the more assertive way for me to introduce the new problem, not the only way.” What an idea, that a philosophical goal could be achieved by other means.
I am just old enough to have had passed down to me, like myths of a lost age, other templates that were once more common. After his death, various collections of Wittgenstein’s notes and lectures were published, under titles like Remarks on Suchity-Such. A tradition began in which the basic unit of philosophy was—at least in presentation—the remark, sequences of which were presented in numbered paragraphs. On the surface this practice was more collegial and less aggressive, gentlemen (remember this was decades ago) lounging in tweed coats and exchanging thoughts between puffs of their pipes, but of course in reality a seemingly-anodyne “I would like to make a few remarks” was usually a preface to something devastating, or anyway intended to be so.
Because philosophy is so old, and because the ideas of the earliest philosophers are still alive today, it can seem that finding new philosophical positions, or new arguments for existing ones, requires a gold-medal performance, while those practicing other, newer disciplines languorously pick low-hanging fruit on their lunch breaks. I sometimes joke that, because of this, a career-making philosophical achievement can now consist in something as small as drawing a distinction. Or even in erasing one: I was once present when a famous philosopher complained, to the students in his graduate seminar, that one of his undergraduates could not grasp the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, and I complained back that that student might just be a philosophical genius, seeing clearly that the alleged distinction Mr. Famous was trying to draw was not real. When Amos Tversky was a student, he chose psychology over philosophy in part because there were far fewer giants over whose shoulders one needed to see. However their eventual publications compare to Tversky’s Nobel-worthy life’s-work, I tell philosophy graduate students, they should take heart in the fact that he was a coward who could not muster the courage they have displayed.
Premise, premise, conclusion is the Freytag’s triangle of philosophy, and its de-throning in literary criticism may inspire. Jane Alison, in her book Meander, Spiral, Explode, explores a bunch of alternatives to the exposition, climax, resolution form, including the titular ones, which also makes good philosophical models. If Morris’s essay is a controlled and steady navigation by an experienced hand through a carefully surveyed territory, Arthur Danto is a great meanderer. In just the first few pages of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace he riffs on Euripidean and anti-Euripidean art, the imitation theory, and Sartre, and when my younger self complained angrily in the margins with scrawls of “where is this going?”, he missed the sights and insights that the journey itself provided.
The point is not, or not just, to have more fun, or to unleash unruly intellectual impulses that academic disciplines try to discipline. Form can be expressive in ways that matter aesthetically and even philosophically. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus sometimes achieves an austere oracular beauty that the philosophy-as-lab-report genre cannot equal and to which it cannot aspire. It is also, to some, offputtingly arrogant. To their temperament the Philosophical Investigations may be more congenial. “Bear in mind,” Kripke observed in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language,
that Philosophical Investigations is not a systematic philosophical work where conclusions, once definitively established, need not be reargued. Rather, the Investigations is written as a perpetual dialectic, where persisting worries, expressed by the voice of an imaginary interlocutor, are never definitively silenced… the same ground is covered repeatedly, from the point of view of various special cases and from different angles, with the hope that the entire process will help the reader see the problems rightly.
If for Herbert Morris the loss of moral innocence was “like the loss of peace of mind accounted for by acquiring anxiety,” the form of the Investigations—as it struck Kripke anyway, as it presented itself to him—is expressive of a loss of philosophical innocence, and the—possibly appropriate—gnawing philosophical anxiety and uncertainty that some of us cannot shake, but may hope not to be crushed by.
The post Some Remarks on Form in Philosophy (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Today we have a Guest Post from a friend of the blog, R.B. Lemberg! It’s been a long while since T.G.S. has featured a guest post, and I’ve been looking to bring in some new voices and hope to make this a semi-regular event. Enjoy!
In The Cultures of Collecting, editors Elsner and Cardinal describe the biblical Noah as the first collector. “Adam had given names to the animals, but it fell to Noah to collect them… Menaced by a Flood, one has to act swiftly. Anything overlooked will be lost forever: between including and excluding there can be no half- measures. The collection is the unique bastion against the deluge of time.” (Elsner and Cardinal 1994:1)
It took a global crisis to make me a collector of pens.
In 2020, shuttered in my room and yet overloaded with responsibilities of teaching, leadership, caregiving, and generative work, I stepped into the world of fountain pens for respite. It wasn’t my first pen venture; I learned about writing with dip pens and fountain pens in Soviet elementary school. I was a clumsy child and the pens were of poor quality; I hated every moment of it. Later, in graduate school in the US, I happily used a single Pilot Falcon. I put it aside after getting my doctorate, and switched to Pilot V5s; but something shifted during the pandemic. I think this describes many people.
Edison Menlo (top) and Kaweco Liliput (bottom).
I remember 2020 and 2021 as joyful years for pens. Everything else was ash and fear, but pens were a happy creative outlet, and many new people joined the hobby. I certainly did not think about myself as a stationery collector before the pandemic, but I found myself reading fountain pen books and blogs and watching instructional videos. In a quest after that special magic of a perfectly tuned nib touching paper, I tried a whole lot of pens. I sent a few pens to Mark Bacas for a grind. I talked about fountain pens endlessly. By the end of 2021, I figured out what I liked, and began curating.
I wasn’t collecting pens to save them from the deluge of time, and these days I’m not sure if I am a collector at all. I like to use my pens, but I also enjoy simply lining them up; I live for an aesthetically pleasing pen tray. There’s certainly a central theme to my collecting. I love Italian pens. I gravitate towards stubs and italic nibs, as well as the sometimes-maligned European mediums. The colors and textures of pens in my tray reassure me that beauty persists beyond the devastation of wars and pandemics, beyond market pressures and too-rapid technological advances. Fiddling with my pens reminds me that history is a human story. We value not just what’s the latest and fastest and flashiest; my pens promise and deliver a contemplative world.
As a curator, I am infinitely curious about other people’s practices. Over the last three years, I read blogs and talked to folks online and offline about managing fountain pen collections. Some never give anything up – once the pen enters a collection, it is there to stay, whether used frequently or not. In the story of the flood, only a single raven (and later: a single dove) ever left the Ark. Others rotate through pens, frequently buying and selling; a prime example of this approach is the fascinating UK Fountain Pens blog. Many people are somewhere in the middle - they keep most or many of their pens, and let some go. Some folks call their pens a collection, others an accumulation. I call mine the gathering. Sometimes I think my pens are alive – not just items on display, but friends who hang out with me, and help me get words down on page in a way that nurtures my soul.
Sometimes, pens leave the gathering. They’ve had enough of my party. :) Others are here to stay.
Onoto Scholar in Mandarin Yellow. I got this one from Onoto directly for a great introductory price in early 2022; the nib in it right now is a special order stub, I believe ground for Onoto by John Sorowka.
Leonardo Momento Magico in Brooks Bohemian Twilight. This one was a birthday present from Limited Pens Korea. I swapped the steel Medium it arrived with for the excellent Franklin Christoph M Sig – one of the best nib grinds I’ve tried so far (thank you, Audrey!) It is an incredibly versatile and joyful pen – I love the ink window and the fact that the nib unit unscrews for cleaning, making it excellent for shimmers.
Aurora Optima Viola with a Factory Stub. I got it for an amazing price on Fountain Pen Day. This also was subsidized by birthday moneys. I wanted to try an Aurora, and this one is superb and easily one of my favorite pens ever.
What are some of your fountain pen standouts? Do you curate, and if so, what is your approach?
R.B. Lemberg (they/them) is a queer, neurodivergent academic and writer of speculative fiction. They are the author of The Unbalancing (2022), The Four Profound Weaves (2020), and other books. You can find them on their website http://rblemberg.net, on their Instagram as @rblemberg, and on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/rblemberg
“Analytic philosophy gradually substitutes an ersatz conception of formalized ‘rigor’ in the stead of the close examination of applicational complexity.”
In the following guest post, Mark Wilson, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues that a kind of rigor that helped philosophy serve a valuable role in scientific inquiry has, in a sense, gone wild, tempting philosophers to the fruitless task of trying to understand the world from the armchair.
This is the third in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Roy Lichtenstein, “Bull Profile Series”]
In the course of attempting to correlate some recent advances in effective modeling with venerable issues in the philosophy of science in a new book (Imitation of Rigor), I realized that under the banner of “formal metaphysics,” recent analytic philosophy has forgotten many of the motivational considerations that had originally propelled the movement forward. I have also found that like-minded colleagues have been similarly puzzled by this paradoxical developmental arc. The editor of Daily Nous has kindly invited me to sketch my own diagnosis of the factors responsible for this thematic amnesia, in the hopes that these musings might inspire alternative forms of reflective appraisal.
Let us return to beginnings. Although the late nineteenth century is often characterized as a staid period intellectually, it actually served as a cauldron of radical reconceptualization within science and mathematics, in which familiar subjects became strongly invigorated through the application of unexpected conceptual adjustments. These transformative innovations were often resisted by the dogmatic metaphysicians of the time on the grounds that the innovations allegedly violated sundry a priori strictures with respect to causation, “substance” and mathematical certainty. In defensive response, physicists and mathematicians eventually determined that they could placate the “howls of the Boeotians” (Gauss) if their novel proposals were accommodated within axiomatic frameworks able to fix precisely how their novel notions should be utilized. The unproblematic “implicit definability” provided within these axiomatic containers should then alleviate any a priori doubts with respect to the coherence of the novel conceptualizations. At the same time, these same scientists realized that explicit formulation within an axiomatic framework can also serve as an effective tool for ferreting out the subtle doctrinal transitions that were tacitly responsible for the substantive crises in rigor that had bedeviled the period.
Pursuant to both objectives, in 1894 the physicist Heinrich Hertz attempted to frame a sophisticated axiomatics to mend the disconnected applicational threads that he correctly identified as compromising the effectiveness of classical mechanics in his time. Unlike his logical positivist successors, Hertz did not dismiss terminologies like “force” and “cause” out of hand as corruptly “metaphysical,” but merely suggested that they represent otherwise useful vocabularies that “have accumulated around themselves more relations than can be completely reconciled with one another” (through these penetrating diagnostic insights, Hertz emerges as the central figure within my book). As long as “force” and “cause” remain encrusted with divergent proclivities of this unacknowledged character, methodological strictures naively founded upon the armchair “intuitions” that we immediately associate with these words are likely to discourage the application of more helpful forms of conceptual innovation through their comparative unfamiliarity.
There is no doubt that parallel developments within symbolic logic sharpened these initial axiomatic inclinations in vital ways that have significantly clarified a wide range of murky conceptual issues within both mathematics and physics. However, as frequently happens with an admired tool, the value of a proposed axiomatization depends entirely upon the skills and insights of the workers who employ it. A superficially formalized housing in itself guarantees nothing. Indeed, the annals of pseudo-science are profusely populated with self-proclaimed geniuses who fancy that they can easily “out-Newton Newton” simply by costuming their ill-considered proposals within the haberdashery of axiomatic presentation (cf., Martin Gardner’s delightful Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science).
Inspired by Hertz and Hilbert, the logical empiricists subsequently decided that the inherent confusions of metaphysical thought could be eliminated once and for all by demanding that any acceptable parcel of scientific theorizing must eventually submit to “regimentation” (Quine’s term) within a first order logical framework, possibly supplemented with a few additional varieties of causal or modal appeal. As just noted, Hertz himself did not regard “force” as inherently “metaphysical” in this same manner, but simply that it comprised a potentially misleading source of intuitions to rely upon in attempting to augur the methodological requirements of an advancing science.
Over analytic philosophy’s subsequent career, these logical empiricist expectations with respect to axiomatic regimentation gradually solidified into an agglomeration of strictures upon acceptable conceptualization that have allowed philosophers to criticize rival points of view as “unscientific” through their failure to conform to favored patterns of explanatory regimentation. I have labelled these logistical predilections as the “Theory T syndrome” in other writings.
A canonical illustration is provided by the methodological gauntlet that Donald Davidson thrusts before his opponents in “Actions, Reasons and Causes”:
One way we can explain an event is by placing it in the context of its cause; cause and effect form the sort of pattern that explains the effect, in a sense of “explain” that we understand as well as any. If reason and action illustrate a different pattern of explanation, that pattern must be identified.
In my estimation, this passage supplies a classic illustration of Theory T-inspired certitude. In fact, a Hertz-like survey of mechanical practice reveals many natural applications of the term “cause” that fail to conform to Davidson’s methodological reprimands.
As a result, “regimented theory” presumptions of a confident “Theory T” character equip such critics with a formalist reentry ticket that allows armchair speculation to creep back into the philosophical arena with sparse attention to the real life complexities of effective concept employment. Once again we witness the same dependencies upon a limited range of potentially misleading examples (“Johnny’s baseball caused the window to break”), rather than vigorous attempts to unravel the entangled puzzlements that naturally attach to a confusing word like “cause,” occasioned by the same developmental processes that make “force” gather a good deal of moss as it rolls forward through its various modes of practical application. Imitation of Rigor attempts to identify some of the attendant vegetation that likewise attaches to “cause” in a bit more detail.
As a result, a methodological tactic (axiomatic encapsulation) that was originally championed in the spirit of encouraging conceptual diversity eventually develops into a schema that favors methodological complacency with respect to the real life issues of productive concept formation. In doing so, analytic philosophy gradually substitutes an ersatz conception of formalized “rigor” in the stead of the close examination of applicational complexity that distinguishes Hertz’ original investigation of “force”’s puzzling behaviors (an enterprise that I regard as a paragon of philosophical “rigor” operating at its diagnostic best). Such is the lesson from developmental history that I attempted to distill within Imitation of Rigor (whose contents have been ably summarized within a recent review by Katherine Brading in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews).
But Davidson and Quine scarcely qualified as warm friends of metaphysical endeavor. The modern adherents of “formal metaphysics” have continued to embrace most of their “Theory T” structural expectations while simultaneously rejecting positivist doubts with respect to the conceptual unacceptability of the vocabularies that we naturally employ when we wonder about how the actual composition of the external world relates to the claims that we make about it. I agree that such questions represent legitimate forms of intellectual concern, but their investigation demands a close study of the variegated conceptual instruments that we actually employ within productive science. But “formal metaphysics” typically eschews the spadework required and rests its conclusions upon Theory T -inspired portraits of scientific method.
Indeed, writers such as David Lewis and Ted Sider commonly defend their formal proposals as simply “theories within metaphysics” that organize their favored armchair intuitions in a manner in which temporary infelicities can always be pardoned as useful “idealizations” in the same provisional manner in which classical physics allegedly justifies its temporary appeals to “point masses” (another faulty dictum with respect to actual practice in my opinion).
These “Theory T” considerations alone can’t fully explicate the unabashed return to armchair speculation that is characteristic of contemporary effort within “formal metaphysics.” I have subsequently wondered whether an additional factor doesn’t trace to the particular constellation of doctrines that emerged within Hilary Putnam’s writings on “scientific realism” in the 1965-1975 period. Several supplementary themes there coalesce in an unfortunate manner.
(1) If a scientific practice has managed to obtain a non-trivial measure of practical capacity, there must be underlying externalist reasons that support these practices, in the same way that external considerations of environment and canvassing strategy help explicate why honey bees collect pollen in the patterns that they do. (This observation is sometimes called Putnam’s “no miracles argument”).
(2) Richard Boyd subsequently supplemented (1) (and Putnam accepted) with the restrictive dictum that “the terms in a mature scientific theory typically refer,” a developmental claim that strikes me as factually incorrect and supportive of the “natural kinds” doctrines that we should likewise eschew as descriptively inaccurate.
(3) Putnam further aligned his semantic themes with Saul Kripke’s contemporaneous doctrines with respect to modal logic which eventually led to the strong presumption that the “natural kinds” that science will eventually reveal will also carry with them enough “hyperintensional” ingredients to ensure that these future terminologies will find themselves able to reach coherently into whatever “possible worlds” become codified within any ultimate enclosing Theory T (whatever it may prove to be like otherwise). This predictive postulate allows present-day metaphysicians to confidently formulate their structural conclusions with little anxiety that their armchair-inspired proposals run substantive risk of becoming overturned in the scientific future.
Now I regard myself as a “scientific realist” in the vein of (1), but firmly believe that the complexities of real life scientific development should dissuade us from embracing Boyd’s simplistic prophecies with respect to the syntactic arrangements to be anticipated within any future science. Direct inspection shows that worthy forms of descriptive endeavor often derive their utilities from more sophisticated forms of data registration than thesis (2) presumes. I have recently investigated the environmental and strategic considerations that provide classical optics with its astonishing range of predictive and instrumental successes, but the true story of why the word “frequency” functions as such a useful term within these applications demands a far more complicated and nuanced “referential” story than any simple “‘frequency’ refers to X” slogan adequately captures (the same criticism applies to “structural realism” and allied doctrines).
Recent developments within so-called “multiscalar modeling” have likewise demonstrated how the bundle of seemingly “divergent relations” connected with the notion of classical “force” can be more effectively managed by embedding these localized techniques within a more capacious conceptual architecture than Theory T axiomatics anticipates. These modern tactics provide fresh exemplars of novel reconceptualizations in the spirit of the innovations that had originally impressed our philosopher/scientist forebears (Imitation of Rigor examines some of these new techniques in greater detail). I conclude that “maturity” in a science needn’t eventuate in simplistic word-to-world ties but often arrives at more complex varieties of semantic arrangement whose strategic underpinnings can usually be decoded after a considerable expenditure of straightforward scientific examination.
In any case, Putnam’s three supplementary theses, taken in conjunction with the expectations of standard “Theory T thinking” outfits armchair philosophy with a prophetic telescope that allows it to peer into an hypothesized future in which all of the irritating complexities of renormalization, asymptotics and cross-scalar homogenization will have happily vanished from view, having appeared along the way only as evanescent “Galilean idealizations” of little metaphysical import. These futuristic presumptions have convinced contemporary metaphysicians that detailed diagnoses of the sort that Hertz provided can be dismissed with an airy wave of the hand, “The complications to which you point properly belong to epistemology or the philosophy of language, whereas we are only interested in the account of worldly structure that science will eventually reach in the fullness of time.”
Through such tropisms of lofty dismissal, the accumulations of doctrine outlined in this note have facilitated a surprising reversion to armchair demands that closely resemble the constrictive requirements on viable conceptualization against which our historical forebears had originally rebelled. As a result, contemporary discussion within “metaphysics” once again finds itself flooded with a host of extraneous demands upon science with respect to “grounding,” “the best systems account of laws” and much else that doesn’t arise from the direct inspection of practice in Hertz’ admirable manner. As we noted, the scientific community of his time was greatly impressed by the realization that “fresh eyes” can be opened upon a familiar subject (such as Euclidean geometry) through the exploration of alternative sets of conceptual primitives and the manner in which unusual “extension element” supplements can forge unanticipated bridges between topics that had previously seemed disconnected. But I find little acknowledgement of these important tactical considerations within the current literature on “grounding.”
From my own perspective, I have been particularly troubled by the fact that the writers responsible for these revitalized metaphysical endeavors frequently appeal offhandedly to “the models of classical physics” without providing any cogent identification of the axiomatic body that allegedly carves out these “models.” I believe that they have unwisely presumed that “Newtonian physics” must surely exemplify some unspecified but exemplary “Theory T” that can generically illuminate, in spite of its de facto descriptive inadequacies, all of the central metaphysical morals that any future “fundamental physics” will surely instantiate. Through this unfounded confidence in their “classical intuitions,” they ignore Hertz’ warnings with respect to tricky words that “have accumulated around [themselves], more relations than can be completely reconciled amongst themselves.” But if we lose sight of Hertz’s diagnostic cautions, we are likely to return to the venerable realm of armchair expectations that might have likewise appealed to a Robert Boyle or St. Thomas Aquinas.
Discussion welcome.
The post The Rigor of Philosophy & the Complexity of the World (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Written by David Thorstad , Global Priorities Institute, Junior Research Fellow, Kellogg College
This post is based on my paper “High risk, low reward: A challenge to the astronomical value of existential risk mitigation,” forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Affairs. The full paper is available here and I have also written a blog series about this paper here.
Derek Parfit (1984) asks us to compare two scenarios. In the first, a war kills 99% of all living humans. This would be a great catastrophe – far beyond anything humanity has ever experienced. But human civilization could, and likely would, be rebuilt.
In the second scenario, a war kills 100% of all living humans. This, Parfit urges, would be a far greater catastrophe, for in this scenario the entire human civilization would cease to exist. The world would perhaps never again know science, art, mathematics or philosophy. Our projects would be forever incomplete, and our cities ground to dust. Humanity would never settle the stars. The untold multitudes of descendants we could have left behind would instead never be born.
This thought has driven many philosophers to emphasize the importance of preventing existential risks, risks of catastrophes involving “the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development” (Bostrom 2013, p. 15). For example, we might regulate weapons of mass destruction or seek to reduce what some see as a risk of extinction caused by rogue artificial intelligence.
Many philosophers think two things about existential risk. First, it is not only valuable, but astronomically valuable to do what we can to mitigate existential risk. After all, the future may hold unfathomable amounts of value, and existential risks threaten to reduce that value to naught. Call this the astronomical value thesis.
Second, increasingly many philosophers hold that humanity faces high levels of existential risk. In his bestselling book, The Precipice, Toby Ord (2020) puts the risk of existential catastrophe by 2100 at one in six: Russian roulette. Attendees at an existential risk conference at Oxford put existential risk by 2100 at nearly one in five (Sandberg and Bostrom 2008). And the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees (2003), puts the risk of civilizational collapse by 2100 at fifty-fifty: a coinflip. Let existential risk pessimism be the claim that per-century levels of existential risk are very high.
Surely the following is an obvious truth: existential risk pessimism supports the astronomical value thesis. If we know anything about risks, it is that it is more important to mitigate large risks than it is to mitigate small risks. This means that defenders of the astronomical value thesis should be pessimists, aiming to convince us that humanity’s situation is dire, and opponents should be optimists, aiming to convince us that things really are not so bad.
In my paper, I argue that every word in the previous paragraph is false. At best, existential risk pessimism has no bearing on the astronomical value thesis. Across a range of modelling assumptions, matters are worse than this: existential risk pessimism strongly reduces the value of existential risk mitigation, often strongly enough to scuttle the astronomical value thesis singlehandedly. (See end notes for examples, and see the full paper for further details).
In the full paper, I explore a range of models and argue that there is only one viable way to reconcile existential risk pessimism with the astronomical value thesis. This is the time of perils hypothesis on which levels of existential risk are high now, but will soon drop to a permanently low level if only we survive the next few perilous centuries. However, I argue, the time of perils hypothesis is unlikely to be true, so there is likely an enduring tension between existential risk pessimism and the astronomical value thesis.
This tension has important philosophical implications. First, it means that unless more is said, many parties to debates about existential risk may have been arguing on behalf of their opponents. To many, it has seemed that a good way to support the moral importance of existential risk mitigation is to make alarmist predictions about the levels of existential risk facing humanity today, and that a good way to oppose the moral importance of existential risk mitigation is to argue that existential risk is in fact much lower than alarmists claim. However, unless more is said, matters are exactly the reverse: arguing that existential risk is high strongly reduces the value of existential risk mitigation, whereas arguing that existential risk is low strongly increases the value of existential risk mitigation.
Second, there has been a wave of recent support for longtermism, the doctrine that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. When pressed to recommend concrete actions we can take to improve the long-term future of humanity, longtermists often point to existential risk mitigation. By the astronomical value thesis, longtermists hold, existential risk mitigation is very important. But this paper suggests an important qualification, since many longtermists are also pessimists about existential risk. As we have seen, existential risk pessimism may well be incompatible with the astronomical value thesis, in which case the value of existential risk mitigation may be too low to provide good support for longtermism.
The core modelling claim of the paper is that (1) at best, existential risk pessimism is irrelevant to the astronomical value thesis, and that (2) in most cases existential risk pessimism tells strongly against the astronomical value thesis. While full technical details are contained in the main paper, here are some models to illustrate claims (1) and (2).
On (1): To illustrate the best case, suppose that humanity faces a constant level of risk r per century. Suppose also that each century of existence has constant value v, if only we live to reach it. And suppose that all existential catastrophes lead to human extinction, so that no value will be realized after catastrophe. Then, it can be shown that the value of reducing in our century by some fraction f is f*v. In this model, pessimism has no bearing on the astronomical value thesis, since the starting level r of existential risk does not affect the value of existential risk mitigation. Moreover, the value of existential risk reduction is capped at v, the value of a single century of human life. Nothing to sneeze at, but hardly astronomical.
On (2): Making the model more realistic only serves to heighten the tension between pessimism and the astronomical value thesis. For example, suppose that centuries grow linearly in value over time, so that if this century has value v, the next century has value 2v, then 3v and so on. Keep the other modelling assumptions the same. Now, it can be shown that the value of reducing existential risk in our century by some fraction f is fv/r.
In this model, pessimism tells against the astronomical value thesis: if you think that existential risk is now 100 times greater than I think it is, you should be 100 times less enthusiastic about existential risk mitigation. Moreover, the value of existential risk reduction is capped at v/r. For the optimist, this quantity may be quite large, but not so for the pessimist. For example, if we estimate per-century risk r at 20%, then the value of existential risk is capped at five times the value of a single century – again, nothing to sneeze at, but not yet astronomical.
Bostrom, Nick, “Existential risk prevention as global priority,” Global Policy 4.1 (2013): 15-31.
Ord, Toby, The precipice (NY: Bloomsbury, 2020).
Parfit, Derek, Reasons and persons (Oxford: Oxford, 1984).
Rees, Martin, Our final our (NY: Basic Books, 2003).
Sandberg, Anders and Bostrom, Nick, “Global catastrophic risks survey,” Technical Report 2008-1 (2008), Future of Humanity Institute.
“If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review.”
In the following post, Toby Handfield, Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and Kevin Zollman, Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, explain why they believe the common practice of using journal rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality is bad.
This is the second in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Mel Bochner, “Counting Alternatives: The Wittgenstein Illustrations” (selections)]
Ask any philosopher about the state of publishing in academic philosophy and they will complain. Near the top of the list will be the quality of reviews (they’re poor) and rejection rates (they’re high). Indeed, philosophy does have extremely high rejection rates relative to other fields. It’s extremely hard to understand why we have such high rejection rates. Perhaps there is simply more low-quality work in philosophy than other fields. Or, perhaps, rejection rates are themselves something that philosophy journals strive to maintain. Many journals strive to publish only the very best work within their purview, and perhaps they use their rejection rates to show themselves that they are succeeding.
Like many fields, philosophy also has an implicit hierarchy of journals. Of course, people disagree at the margins, but there seems to be widespread agreement among anglophone philosophers (at least) about what counts as a top 5 or top 10 journal. Looking at some (noisy) data about rejection rates, it does appear that the most highly regarded journals have high rejection rates. So, while we complain about rejection rates, we also seem to—directly or indirectly—reward journals that reject often.
It is quite natural to use rejection rates as a kind of proxy for the quality of the journal, especially in a field like philosophy where other qualitative and quantitative measures of quality are somewhat unreliable. We think it is quite common for philosophers to use the rejection rates of journals as a proxy for paper quality when thinking about hiring, promotion, and tenure. It’s impressive when a graduate student has published in The Philosophical Review, in large part because The Philosophical Review rejects so many papers. Rejection rates featured prominently—among many other things—in the recent controversy surrounding the Journal of Political Philosophy.
We, along with co-author Julian García, argue that this might be a dangerous mistake. (This paper is forthcoming in Philosophy of Science—a journal that, we feel obligated to point out, has a high rejection rate.) Our basic argument is that as journals become implicitly or explicitly judged by their rejection rates, the quality of peer review will go down, thus making journals worse. We do so by using a formal model, but the basic idea is not hard to understand.
We start by asking a very basic question: what is it that a journal is striving to achieve? We consider two alternatives: (1) that the journal is trying to maximize the average quality of its published papers or (2) that the journal is trying to maximize its rejection rate. The journal must decide both what threshold counts as good enough for their journal and also how much effort to invest in peer review. They can always make peer review better, but it comes at a cost (something that is all too familiar).
This already shows why judging journals by rejection rates can potentially be quite harmful. If a journal is merely striving to maximize its rejection rate, it doesn’t much care who it rejects. So, it has less incentive to invest in high quality peer review than does a journal that is judged by the average quality of papers in the journal. After all, if a journal only cares about rejection rates, it doesn’t much matter if a rejected paper was good or bad.
This already is probably sufficient to give one pause, but it actually gets much worse. In that quick argument, we implicitly assumed that there was a fixed population of authors who mindlessly submitted to the journal, hoping to get lucky. However, in the real world, authors might be aware of their chance of acceptance and choose not to submit if they regard the effort as not worth the cost.
A journal editor who wants to maintain a high rejection rate now has a problem. If they are too selective, authors of bad papers might opt not to submit, and a paper that isn’t submitted can’t be rejected. If a journal very predictably rejects papers below a given standard, their rejection rates will go down because authors of less good papers will know they don’t stand a chance of being accepted. A journal editor who cares about their journal’s rejection rate will then be motivated to tolerate more error in its peer review process in order to give authors a fighting chance to be accepted. They use their unreliable peer review as a carrot to encourage authors to submit, which in turn allows the journal to keep their rejection rates high.
We consider several variations on our model to demonstrate how this result is robust to different ways that authors might be incentivized to publish in different journals. We would encourage the interested reader to look at the details in the paper.
Of course, our method is to use simplified models, and in doing so we run the risk that a simplification might be driving the results. Most concerning, in our mind, is that our model features a world with only one journal. Philosophy has multiple journals, although in some fields of philosophy a single journal might dominate the area as the premier outlet for work in that area. Future work would need to determine if this is a critical assumption, although our guess is that it is not.
Although we don’t investigate this in our paper, we think that the process we identify might also exist in other selection processes like college and graduate school admission or hiring. In the US, colleges often advertise the selectivity of their admissions process, and we suspect that they face the same perverse incentives we identify.
Whether you share our intuition about this or not, we think the process we identify is concerning. If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review. We think it is potentially problematic that journals sometimes advertise their rejection rates, lest it contribute to rejection rates being a sought after mark of prestige. Furthermore, we think it’s important that philosophy as a discipline walk back its use of rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality. To the extent that we are doing that now, it may actually serve to undermine the very thing we are hoping to achieve.
The post Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
“There need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines.”
In the following post, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Professor of Philosophy at VU Amsterdam and Professorial Fellow at Arché at the University of St. Andrews explains and makes a case for synthetic philosophy.
This is the first in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[“Abandoned Schoolhouse” by Gary Simmons]
A few years ago, the philosopher (and prolific blogger) Eric Schliesser used the term ‘synthetic philosophy’ to describe the work of Daniel Dennett and Peter Godfrey-Smith. Schliesser presented synthetic philosophy as “a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). Synthetic philosophy may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences…” Schliesser did not coin the term itself: the once influential but by now largely forgotten polymath 19th-century thinker Herbert Spencer (of ‘survival of the fittest’-fame) titled his mammoth 10-volume work covering biology, psychology, sociology and ethics System of Synthetic Philosophy.
But Schliesser can be credited for re-introducing the term to denote an approach in philosophy that has become more pervasive and widely accepted over the last two decades, namely one where philosophers engage extensively with work done in relevant (empirical) disciplines to inform their philosophical investigations and theories. Other recent examples of synthetic philosophers include Neil Levy (see his Bad Beliefs) and Kim Sterelny, who describes his book The Evolved Apprentice in the following terms: “The essay is an essay in philosophy in part because it depends primarily on the cognitive toolbox of philosophers: it is work of synthesis and argument, integrating ideas and suggestions from many different research traditions. No one science monopolizes this broad project though many contribute to it. So I exploit and depend on data, but do not provide new data” (Sterelny, 2012, p. xi). If this is a good description of synthetic philosophy, then it is fair to say that I have been (trying to be!) a synthetic philosopher for about 15 years now, so when Schliesser introduced the term, I adopted it wholeheartedly. (It is for sure much catchier than alternatives such as the cumbersome ‘empirically-informed philosophy’.)
The idea that there need not be strict disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines enjoyed some popularity in the 20th century, in particular in the tradition of ‘scientific philosophy’ initiated by Bertrand Russell and continued by the Vienna Circle and later with their ‘heirs’ in the United States such as W.V.O. Quine (who used the ambiguous term ‘naturalism’ to describe the idea of continuity between philosophy and other disciplines) and Hilary Putnam. (Much before that, over the centuries, there was for the most arguably no strict separation between philosophy and other disciplines either; Aristotle was first and foremost a biologist.) But there was also much resistance within analytic philosophy to the idea that philosophical inquiry should in any way be informed by scientific findings (see this piece that I co-wrote on the dissonant origins of analytic philosophy). This resistance is to be traced back to G.E. Moore, who insisted that moral philosophy and ethics in particular were strictly non-scientific, purely conceptual domains. It continued with the so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers’, as exemplified by the damning critique of Carnap’s notion of explication in Strawson’s piece for the Carnap Living Philosophers volume.
To motivate a strict separation between science and philosophy, a point sometimes made is that scientists are involved in the merely descriptive inquiry of telling us how things are, while philosophers are involved in conceptual and (or) normative inquiry as well, which includes looking at how things ought to be understood, and how they ought to be. If true, this point has important methodological implications, as different methods are used for different types of investigation. Methods to investigate how things are include data collection, experiments, field work, etc. Methods to investigate how things should be include conceptual analysis, ‘intuitions’, thought experiments, etc. Some decades ago, however, this presumed neat separation was challenged by the so-called experimental philosophy approach, which prompted what might described as a small methodological crisis in analytic philosophy. Could philosophy be empirical/experimental after all? The X-Phi challenge made it clear that more sustained methodological reflection was needed, and philosophers spent much of the first two decades of the 21st century discussing the ins and outs of different methods for philosophical inquiry (see Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology).
It is fair to say that scientific/synthetic philosophy ‘won’ the battle in that the Moorean rejection of engagement with empirical findings in philosophical inquiry has become much less widespread in the last decade. I speak from (anecdotal) personal experience: when I was working on the project that culminated in my monograph Formal Languages in Logic (2012), I often got remarks to the effect that it was all very interesting, but what I was doing wasn’t really philosophy. (My standard response was: well, I’m glad no one is saying that it’s all very philosophical, but not interesting.) By contrast, in later years the research that culminated in my monograph The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (2020) did not typically prompt the same kind of reaction, even though it was just as empirically oriented as my earlier work. The fact that The Dialogical Roots of Deduction won the Lakatos Award in 2022 (sorry folks, time for some shameless self-promotion!) attests to the widespread acceptance of synthetic philosophy as an approach to philosophical inquiry (though philosophers of science are, of course, from the start more amenable to the general idea of engaging with other disciplines).
In my opinion, philosophy is especially well-placed to facilitate much-needed interdisciplinary collaboration between different disciplines. It is now widely recognized that so-called ‘wicked problems’ require complementary approaches to be addressed, but each methodology has its limitations and dead angles. Experimental methods may lack ‘ecological validity’ (lab situations do not really reproduce the phenomena in the wild); quantitative methods are often not very fine-grained and may give rise to spurious correlations and ‘noise’; qualitative methods may be instances of ‘cherry-picking’ and have limited reach. Thus, what has become clear, in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic, is that triangulation of methods is essential for investigating complex problems.
It seems to me that philosophers have much to contribute to interdisciplinarity and triangulation efforts for two main reasons: philosophers are trained to engage in careful conceptual inquiry, clarifying and sharpening significant (scientific) concepts and sometimes introducing new ones (Carnapian explication, conceptual engineering); philosophers may be better able to see the forest rather than only the trees, as it were, by drawing on various scientific disciplines (as suggested in the Sterelny quote above) and noticing connections that may remain unnoticed within each specific discipline. Philosophy has much more potential for synthesis than is often recognized (even by us philosophers), and this is perfectly compatible with the centrality of analysis in analytic philosophy. (Traditionally, analysis and synthesis were viewed as two complementary rather than incompatible processes: you break things down to them put them back together again, usually in a different, more fruitful configuration.) (Note: commenting on an earlier draft of this post, Eric Schliesser remarked that my conception of synthetic philosophy differs in some important respects from his. He thinks that my conception resembles that of Kitcher’s, which he discussed in this blog post.)
True enough, there are also a number of difficulties, pitfalls and risks involved in attempting to do synthetic philosophy. For starters, the approach requires that the philosopher be conversant with various different scientific disciplines; she has to be a ‘polymath’ in some sense, which in the current scenario of scientific hyper-specialization is a formidable challenge. Secondly, there is a perennial risk of conceptual confusion/equivocation and ‘talking past each other’ for lack of a common vocabulary (a familiar problem in interdisciplinarity studies). Third, scientific studies themselves are not always reliable guides, with many important results not being replicated (see the famous ‘replication crisis’ in psychology and other disciplines).
However, while these issues are real and must be taken seriously, I submit that they should not be viewed as knock-down arguments against synthetic philosophy. (I have responses to each of them but I’m running out of space!) Sustained methodological reflection on the ins and outs of synthetic philosophy is still needed, but I hope to have established here at least that synthetic philosophy is an interesting and viable approach for philosophical inquiry.
The post A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
The concluding post from the author herself, drawing our symposium on The Ideal River to a close. Dr Joanne Yao is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. Previously, Joanne taught at Durham University and the LSE, where she completed her PhD in 2017. Joanne was also one of three editors of Millennium: Journal of International Studies for Volume 43 (2014-2015) and is currently a member of Millennium’s Board of Trustees.Her research centers on environmental history and politics, historical international relations, international hierarchies and orders, and the development of early international organizations. The Ideal River is her first book; Joanne’s next project focuses on the history of Antarctica and early outer space exploration.
One question that repeatedly comes up from readers of this book is about its disciplinary identity. On the one hand, this is one of the book’s strengths – it seems to shapeshift across disciplinary boundaries and some of the central conclusions, particularly on the desire to control nature as a marker of a Western-led (imposed) modernity, might have been arrived at from a variety of different disciplinary starting points. On the other hand, this question puzzles me since the book is self-consciously situated in International Relations which is a clear path-dependent consequence of the intellectual riverbeds my own thinking has flown through. Perhaps what they wish to know is how did someone who started her academic life with the ‘Great Debates’ of IR end up contemplating the physical and metaphysical river (especially since I might have gotten ‘here’ more quickly and eloquently from elsewhere). But like all aspects of social and political life, we don’t get to re-run the experiment, and so this book is here, with its IR-warts and all.
But aside from my own intellectually situatedness, this book is a work of IR because, alongside the three rivers, international institutions are also pivotal characters in my story. Perhaps starting from IR, this point is obvious, and I felt the harder sell was to illuminate my three rivers as worthy protagonists in a story about international order. For this, I might have neglected my other characters.
International institutions have inspired less poetry than rivers, but what I want to show is that their veneer of technocratic dullness does not mean international institutions are devoid of poetry and the imaginaries that animate our dreams and nightmares of the future. The idea that international institutions or organizations can be purely technocratic and therefore apolitical and infinitely generalizable is as lofty an ideal as a river that is perfectly straightened and a frictionless conduit for global commerce. The ideal international institution does political work in that it prevents us from seeing the deeply ideological content of Harrington’s phrase ‘engineers rule the world’. And my hope is that by pinpointing how imaginaries of specific rivers influenced moments of institution-building at three 19th century diplomatic conferences, I can make some effort towards Harrington’s challenge to show when and how geographical imaginaries work (and save them from being relegated to that positivist dustbin of ‘epiphenomena’).
The ideal river and the ideal international institution are siblings conjoined at birth, and in constructing the ideal river, we as an international society are also trying to create the ideal international institution – one model built on all past human knowledge and expertise that can ensure peace and security across the infinite variety of human societies. It is the same grand vision that rests on the same totalizing logic and the same certainty that if we are clever enough and have big enough data, we can find a model that fits. Perhaps because the river is more concrete, it is easier to see the violence the ideal river does to actual rivers (and Danewid expresses this perfectly in comparing the caging of rivers to carceral capitalism), but I think equally, we can consider how the ideal institution does violence to everyday, lived institutions that flower around us. In this way, institutions are also assemblages in the way Phull describes the river, and that we can even think of braided institutions, to borrow from Phull’s (and Wall Kimmer’s) lovely imagery where we can imagine distinctiveness and harmony both at once.
An antidote to the destructive ideal river, Carabelli suggests, is a different way of loving the river. Rather than “projecting, assuming, and directing” the river in an effort to love it through control, Carabelli pushes us to listen, observe, and learn from the actual river to practice a love freed from the need to control. We might also make the same observation about institutions – that we engage in love as control by seeing international politics as solely problems that must be fixed through increased technical expertise. What would happen if we stopped to listen, observe, and learn from the infinite varieties of collective solidarities that have always already populated the international without a desire to fix, control, and master? Perhaps this is a first step towards what the international would look like while immersed in the river.
And, as Birkvad reminds us, in resisting the ideal river and ideal international institution, we must look both ways in time. It is just as easy to idealize an imagined future of straight lines and modern efficiency as a romanticized past where the river and society are frozen in the gauzy prison of nostalgia. Rivers and institutions interact and evolve, and a controlling love over either might seek to return them to an imagined mythical past. In my recent travels, I met a geographer in New Zealand whose research also focused on the ‘ideal river’, but his project looked backwards as different actors steering current river restoration efforts clashed over what they believed to be the ideal river. This romantic yearning for return, Birkvad warns us, can paper over oppression and injustices, and prevent the river and society from flowing and evolving. The question then, is how to look forward downriver without being ensnared by a singular idealized future, and how to recognize the past upriver without being held prisoner by it.
disorderedguests
We now approach the end of our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River.
This last commentary is from Dr Ida Roland Birkvad. Ida is a Fellow in Political Theory in the Department of International Relations at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research engages with questions related to international political theory, histories of imperialism, and non-Western agency in International Relations.
She previously wrote for us on Judith Butler in Norway.
Two years after laying the foundation stone for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in 1961, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that hydroelectric dams were the ‘new temples of India, where I worship’ (Yao 2022, 205). Charting the length of the country’s postcolonial history, this infrastructural project of unprecedented scale and ambition was originally conceived of by Nehru’s deputy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, in the years immediately following independence. In 2017, more than seventy years later, the network of dams horizontally spanning over half of India’s interior landscape, following the Narmada River from the state of Madhya Pradesh to the coast of Gujarat, was finally completed.
The romantic flourishes of Nehru’s characterisation, tying rivers and their taming to the spiritual realm, constitutes my starting point for this book symposium. In the following, I place Joanne Yao’s luminous charting of the emergence of environmental politics through the erection of 19th century river commissions into conversation with Dalit and anti-caste critiques of the collusion between Romantic thought, elite politics, and Brahmanical supremacy in the context of the Sardar Sarovar Dam development. Indeed, while Yao’s The Ideal River might seemingly focus rather exclusively on the role of Enlightenment rationality in the taming of the river, I argue that her book allows us to glean the dynamic relationship, at times mutually constitutive and at times in mutual contestation, between Enlightenment thought and the role of the other intellectual movement of modern history, namely Romanticism, in environmentalist thought.
Displacing an astounding 245 villages and submerging 37,555 hectares of land, the Sardar Sarovar Dam has caused immense debate and uproar, intensifying especially from the late 1980s onwards when its erection began on a mass scale (Rao 2022). However, the grandiose nature of the size and scope of the dam was from the outset rivalled only by the resistance movement forming to stop it. Taking shape in the late 1980s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) consisted of a broad coalition of adivasis (India’s indigenous population), farmers, environmentalists, and human rights activists. Organising to both resist the expansion of the dam, as well as to mitigate the consequences for the people whose lives were disturbed and uprooted by it, the NBA constituted one of the largest political resistance movements of its time. Its tactics included rallies, marches, hunger strikes, and perhaps most spectacularly the action of jal samarpan, in which activists stood neck-deep in the river, demonstrating their willingness to drown rather than to leave their lands (ibid.).
Beyond the anti-dam efforts often spearheaded by grassroots movements led by adivasi communities, the well-known social and political activist Arundhati Roy also contributed to bringing attention to the cause. Having just won the Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy’s campaigning attracted an increasingly global audience. In the early 2000s she wrote furiously on the subject, participating in marches and rallies and famously donating her Booker prize money to the NBA. For Roy, the question of the Sardar Sarovar Dam had come to ‘represent far more than the fight for one river’ (Bose 2004, 147). Indeed, from being a struggle ‘over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish?’ (ibid.). The case of the Narmada dams, according to Roy, could ultimately provide ‘important lessons about the real costs of modernist fantasies’ (ibid.).
Roy’s efforts were controversial, also within the resistance movement itself. In a series of speeches, articles and open letters, Gail Omvedt, the prominent American-born anthropologist turned anti-caste and farmers’ activist in the western state of Maharashtra, accused both Roy and the top leadership of the NBA of having become ‘the voice of the eco-romanticists of the world’ (ibid, 150). Dams were not, according to her, an unqualified evil (Omvedt and Kapoor 1999). Indeed, opposing them on principle was socially irresponsible, ignoring the needs of the impoverished populations living along the banks of the river. In their blanket opposition to industrial development, the leadership of the NBA and their urban, middle-class spokespersons were at fault of romanticising the past, trading in reactionary tropes fearful of modernity and progress. Omvedt, who had lived in the village of Kasegaon since the 1970s, shared this view with many Dalits amongst whom she lived and worked. They all seemed to ask: how could social change happen when the movement’s leaders were always looking backward for their political ideals?
As Yao elucidates so expansively and in such breathtaking historical detail in her book, infrastructural and political projects to tame the river have marred societies for centuries. Indeed, she would probably agree with Roy that this at times Sisyphean effort does indeed constitute a fantasy of modernity, one which, as Yao writes, involved a ‘desire for neatness, predictability, finite boundaries, and a straightened sense of political purpose’ (2022, ix). Despite the scientific rationale that undergirds this fantasy, Yao insists that the intrinsic relationship between the project of taming nature and the emergence of modern environmental politics needs to be understood through its ties to what is called the second scientific revolution. Emerging in the early 19th century, this new scientific revolution proscribed a change in perception where ‘scientific progress combined with Romanticism to create a vision of nature as infinite and mysterious’ (ibid., 21). In other words, the time of the first river commissions described in The Ideal River was as much the era of Romanticism, as it was that of Enlightenment rationality. Returning to the debates over the Sardar Sarovar Dam project, Dalit critics interjected that not only did the middle class and caste privileged leaders romanticise the river, seeing it as something to be worshipped and conserved, rather than utilised and managed, but also that their anti-developmentalism was casteist. In their romantic quest to preserve ‘village life’, Roy and others effaced the hierarchies and structural oppressions existing within Indian rural communities. In the words of writer and journalist Mukul Sharma,
dominant environmental narratives in India are often infused with nostalgic and romantic accounts of traditional knowledge of water management, emphasising its community-based systems and methods. However, they overlook the fact that (…) they are embedded in deeply structured hierarchies of caste, based on control, power and dominant religious rituals, which are intermeshed in an invisible line of caste presuppositions (2017b).
A more forgiving interpretation of the movement’s romanticisation of the river and its peoples would see them as furthering a politics of strategic essentialism where the mobilisation of certain tropes might allow for a broadening of political support. Beyond the concern for activist strategy, however, the critiques elaborated above clarifies Yao’s illumination of the creative relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticist logics in contemporary environmentalist contestation. This dynamism is further underscored by the strikingly rationalist approach of Dalit and anti-caste thought which advances an overtly Enlightenment infused approach to questions of the environment and industrial modernity.
For B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, political thinker, and primary architect of the Indian constitution, modernity itself was an ethical project. Indeed, in contrast to his main political adversary, Mohandas Gandhi, who saw the village as India’s exemplary political community, Ambedkar pointed out that cities were in fact places of relative freedom for Dalits. Urban space afforded them anonymity, with the individualising effects of industrial labour standing in stark contrast to the feudal rigidities of rural economies (Teltumbde 2019). In the words of Ambedkar: ‘What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?’ (Gopal 2015).
Following these insights, we can see how Dalit thought de-naturalises the ostensibly progressive nature of key categories orienting environmentalist politics, namely the village as the ultimate harbinger of ‘local solutions’ and urban industrialisation as the definitive cause of alienation from nature. Indeed, the category of nature itself is key to these critiques. Many Dalit thinkers would claim that the idea of living in accordance with nature is in itself a casteist concept. This is because Brahmanical Hinduism’s non-dualist ontology claims the indivisible link between the physical and the moral realm. Here, caste hierarchy is rationalised as a law of nature, where the individual remains no more than a functional part of an overarching entity, namely caste society. As pointed out by Ambedkar, Hindu society is not a community but rather a collection of castes (Ambedkar 2016, 242).
In addition to his other political achievements, Ambedkar also became India’s first minister for water resources. This was particularly powerful because of the role that the access, distribution, and management of water plays in the logics and perpetuation of caste hierarchies. In his ministerial role, Ambedkar made the development of irrigation and power, including hydroelectric power, one of his key priorities. New technology and scientific discovery in these fields were according to him ‘key determinants in the struggle against the obscurantism and backwardness of caste Hinduism’ (Sharma 2017a, 150). Large dam constructions, presumably such as the Sardar Damodar Dam project, was to him necessary in order to realise ‘a modern social vision’ (ibid.).
Yao’s attention to the dynamic relationship between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, often understood to be diametrically opposed in their logics, sets her book apart from more conventional approaches in the discipline of International Relations, and indeed wider social science literatures, which elucidates more straightforward narratives of the collusion between Enlightenment rationality, imperialism, and modern environmental politics. What we learn both from The Ideal River as well as from Dalit thought is that the overplaying of the significance of the role of Enlightenment rationality in this context comes at a cost. Directing our theoretical and political critique solely against this rationale does not only produce analytical blind spots in our analysis of environmental conflict. It can also lead us to unwittingly reproduce essentialist ways of thinking. If the hydroelectric dam is considered the materialisation of only Enlightenment ideas of scientific rationality, then Romantic notions of the sanctity of nature and the unimpeachable status of ‘local communities’ start to appear as forms of anti-hegemonic resistance, rather than as constitutive parts of global relations of dispossession. These points stand, I believe, even after the insight that, in the end, the NBA’s dire projections all seemed to bear out. After its completion, the world’s second-largest concrete gravity dam by volume, encompassing more than three thousand smaller dams across the length of the Narmada River, displaced over two hundred thousand people. A disproportionate amount of the environmental and economic cost of its development fell on the poorest communities living along its banks.
Bibliography
Ambedkar, B. R. 2016. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition. Edited by S. Anand. London: Verso.
Bose, Pablo S. 2004. “Critics and Experts, Activists and Academics: Intellectuals in the Fight for Social and Ecological Justice in the Narmada Valley, India.” International Review of Social History 49.
Gopal, Vikram. 2015. “Ambedkar’s Assertion Still Rings True: What Is a Village but a Sink of Localism, a Den of Ignorance and Narrow Mindedness.” Caravan Magazine, April 2015.
Omvedt, Gail, and Ashish Kapoor. 1999. “Big Dams in India: Necessities or Threats?” Critical Asian Studies 31 (4): 45–58.
Rao, Rahul. 2022. “Statue of Impunity: Monumentalisation under Modi.” Caravan Magazine, May 2022.
Sharma, Mukul. 2017a. “Ambedkar and Environmental Thought.” In Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics.
———. 2017b. “Observing Water Day on Ambedkar’s Birthday Is a Hollow Exercise If His Legacy on Water Is Ignored.” Scroll India, April 2017.
Teltumbde, Anand. 2019. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. New Delhi: Navayana.Yao, Joanne. 2022. The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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Post #5 in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, from Dr Giulia Carabelli. Giulia is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in affect theory, nonhuman agencies, and social justice. Her current research project, Care for Plants, explores the shaping of affective and intimate relationships between humans and houseplants during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are three protagonists in The Ideal River: the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. We meet them at different times in history when they become crucial agents in the (re)making of international orders. These three rivers illustrate different yet analogous processes of intervention aimed at domesticating what escapes human control (nature) to establish order as a matter of “progress”. As Yao argues, the taming of rivers exemplifies the “fulfilment of the Enlightenment promise that humanity stood together as masters over nature”, which is rooted in an unquestioned “optimism toward international progress” (186). The Rhine is the “internal European highway”, the Danube “the connecting river from Europe to the near periphery” and the Congo “the imperial river of commerce” (10). From the outset, the book sets expectations for nonhuman actors to take centre-stage in the recounting of history and to reveal their obscured roles in the development of global (human) politics. My reflections thus aim to discuss how the book foregrounds nonhuman agencies and to advance an argument for centring care and love to appreciate the potentially disrupting roles of rivers in reshaping political imaginaries, which become more and more urgent as that optimism towards human control flails.
1. The image of the river
I start from the cover of this book; an image taken by NASA/USGS Landsat 8 depicting the Mackenzie River in Canada. From above, this river is rendered through solid shades of blues, browns, and greens. This river does not flow. Similarly, when we imagine rivers on a two-dimensional map, they appear as homogeneous streams, whose ability to connect and serve human settlements we value. Such rivers become boundaries, obstacles, or opportunities to facilitate the movement of people, goods and capital, while ignoring their much more complex life as eco-systems in a constant process of change. These static representations of rivers, so instrumental to human life and its “progress”, become protagonists of the historical conferences discussed in the book. These rivers are ideals of what a river can become when understood as precious, yet disposable, resource.
Rivers on maps are what humans have long attempted to tame, because, as Yao discusses, to exercise control over nature ultimately proves, and provides, human progress. It drives and tests advancement in technology whilst gratifying the assertion of moral superiority. Clearly, this perspective results from thinking “human” and “nature” as dramatically different whereby the former is always standing above the ‘Other’; and to tame the Other for the sake of progress. The history of global politics, as shown vividly in this book, can be framed as the history of taming rivers. This is also the history of human faith in science and technology as the desperate attempt to prove that rationality is what sets us above all other species. It is the history of “transform[ing] irrational nature and society into economically productive and morally progressive units of governance” (200).
2. To tame and to care
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor of European modernity as the impulse to “weed the social garden”, which engenders modern imperialism, scientific racism, and the Holocaust (31), Yao draws parallels between the taming of rivers and the taming of nature in the garden (Bauman 1989). The gardener becomes the emblematic figure of modernity – the one who transforms the wild into the familiar through a process of weeding. Crucially, to tame nature in the garden means to organise space according to a specific aesthetic that builds order by planting, pruning, or extirpating plants. What drives the gardener is the desire to make plants work and to become more efficient and productive. Yet, as many of us would know from having gardens or houseplants, it is by tending plants that we discover what the garden is, and what makes a garden a garden: a space we cannot fully control but that can surprise and mesmerise us.
The activity of caring for plants enables us to develop intimate relationships that are easily understandable through love. This is a love for disorder. It is a love that grows by letting go of control and accepting that the making of a garden is a collective activity where plans are shared and built with the plants. The garden is a story of compromise, conflict and love. The garden shapes us as gardeners, as much as we shape the garden to reflect our inner desires.
So how does it relate to the river?
3. On Love
What happens when we care for the plants in the garden, and to the life in the river, is that we appreciate them differently because we develop intimate and affective forms of attachment to them, which transform these nonhuman beings from objects to interlocutors. And here, I wish to focus on the tensions that love generates – between the love for order that comes from domination and the acceptance of disorder spurred by another kind of love.
As Yao highlights in her introduction, “to tame nature has not been confined to rivers and forests but also extends to ‘untamed’ elements in human society – indeed, to civilize the savage beyond the pale has long been a central aim and justification for colonial and imperial practices” (7).
I wish to connect this point on taming as a matter of civilisation with another argument made by Carolyn Ureña (2020), for instance, about colonialism and love – the coloniser/ the missionary are bound by the love for the uncivilised and it is their love that moves them to re-shape Indigenous lives to become more modern/ more rational/ more right. Thus, she concludes, love needs to be decolonised for love to be freed from desires of control. If we understand love as an affect that shapes relationality, the revolutionary potential of love exists in the possibility of love to make us realise that we cannot be in control.
To appreciate the river could become an act of love only if we switched our goals towards observing, listening, and learning rather than projecting, assuming, and directing.
If the modern love for rivers reflected the love for progress and order, which translated into a desire to tame them, how can we love rivers otherwise? Or, what makes a river a river?
4. Who is the river?
If only we immersed ourselves in the river, if we entered the water, we could see the plants, the animals, the limestone, soil runoff, sediments, minerals, and algae that colour rivers, making them blue or green or yellow and brown. The river is always changing; it moves, it transforms, and it does so relationally to the multiple human and nonhuman beings that coexist within its eco-system. Thus, to tame rivers can but be a delusion. We can only tame rivers when they are deprived of their life on flat maps.
Immersed in the river, we can create new connections that are affective, visceral, and potentially transformative. What, then, does the international look like while immersed in the river? What if, instead of drawing on rationality and science to transform the river into the ideal river, which means to cure the river from “its uselessness, laziness, and waste” (207), we could engage with the river by listening to what the river can teach us.
The book has started answering this question by accounting for Indigenous populations living with the rivers who nurture different relationships with their non-human kins. For example, for Native Americans activists at Standing Rock, the river is a nonhuman relative, who cannot be sold (214). Yao warns us from the dangers of essentialising Indigenousness “unfairly making them the bearers of responsibility for saving the destructive modern world from itself” (215), yet re-valorising Indigenous knowledge allows for important interventions in policy making. For example, the rights given to nature in Ecuador and Bolivia or those granted to the Whanganui River in New Zealand or the Ganges and the Yamuna in India (215). Although granting rights did not, especially in the case of Ecuador and Bolivia, stop extractive practices (Valladares and Boelens 2017), it remains a space where to start a conversation about “unlearn[ing] the ideational legacies of colonialism” (216) and the challenges faced when encountering the state in the process.
Crucially, the desire to tame rivers went along with the process of subjugating communities that stood by and with rivers – the “unimagined communities” that stand “on the way to progress” (208) . As the examples of the Narmada project in India and the Aswan Dam in Egypt illustrate, altering rivers destroy places “of cultural and spiritual importance and [the] communities that depend on them” (208). Yet, these colonising projects also serve as platforms to nurture river-human solidarity for mutual survival. Thus, rivers can become allies in resisting the violence of colonialism.
5. Conclusion
The nature we wish to tame is also the nature we come to love and desire. To tame nature becomes one with our love for an idealised form of nature that we wish to preserve and care for as a matter of ethics, and which becomes urgent at a time of environmental crisis.
Lesley Head (2016) discusses this as the paradox of the human in the Anthropocene;
“a time period defined by the activities and impacts of the human […] [and yet] a period that is now out of human control”. And for Head, the issue of climate catastrophe is emotional as we grief “our modern self, our view of the future as containing unlimited positive potential. We grieve a stable and pristine past” (Ojala 2017)
Thus, the importance of this book is not only in bringing attention to the historical contingencies that shaped human desires to tame rivers as part of the making of global orders. As Yao writes in the conclusion, the “climate crisis has highlighted [..] the catastrophic disconnect between the dream of Western modernity and the nightmare of ecological collapse”, which has been long in the making (219). Thus, the book should also be appreciated as a cautionary tale for imagining our future on this planet at a time when our society has become “disenchanted with the politics of climate change precisely because we are losing faith in the [promise of the] Enlightenment” (221). If we live in a time of change, one that brings more focused attention on the relational modes of worldmaking, we are then tasked with reflecting on what it means to engage with rivers, and by extension nonhuman actors, as political agents.
I conclude with a question: can our reflection on the international order ever account for the river as the river – without objectifying it but rather embracing the vitality of the river, its visions, needs and life?
disorderedguests
Day four in the Disorder symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, where we are joined by Dr Ida Danewid, who has visited with us before.
Ida is Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Her first monograph, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Ida’s research interests are in anticolonial political thought, Marxism, and intellectual history. Her work has previously appeared in Third World Quarterly, Millennium, European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue and with the Black Mediterranean Collective.
Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau… would become an island.
In The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell writes about the history of colonialism in southern Africa and its global ripples in the present. Told as a story about three families (European, African, and Indian) and spanning three generations, the novel centers around the Zambezi river and the adjacent Kariba dam that transforms the currents of the river (its “drift”) into hydropower. Originally commissioned by the British controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) in the 1950s, the dam was built at a place well known to Dr. Livingstone and countless other colonial explorers. (As Serpell notes, “This is the story of a nation—not a kingdom or people—so it begins, of course, with a white man.”) Throughout the novel, Serpell cleverly uses the dam as a symbol of empire, enclosure, and extraction. When the book finally ends, the dam has burst and flooded its surroundings. As the great Zambezi flows freely again, Victoria Falls in more than one way.
I was reminded of Serpell’s novel when I read Joanne Yao’s breathtaking new book The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped International Order. Straddling historical sociology, international theory, and environmental politics, Yao explores the relationship between empire and the control of nature, or what some scholars have recently termed hydrocolonialism. Focusing on the 19th century projects to domesticate three different rivers—the Rhine, Danube, and Congo—Yao examines how the mastery of wilderness was central to the rise and development of the modern/colonial world system. The dream of the ideal river, it here turns out, drifts straight through the heart of empire.
Yao’s immediate focus is on how and why this desire to domesticate the wild became such a central tenet of the imperial standard of civilization. She frames this as a story about the Enlightenment and its commitment to ideas of linear progress, order, rationality, and science. By following the river upstream, she demonstrates how European empires saw the “failure” to conquer, improve, and control nature as a sign of “barbarism” and, thus, as “being too close to nature.” Colonialism, Yao explains, unfolded as a project of eliminating “the barbarity of swampy disuse.” Over time, this mission would come to engulf the globe, ranging from “the floodplains of the Arno River… to the wetlands of the Danube delta and the megadams of the Indian subcontinent and American West.” This desire to master nature has remained a central tenet of coloniality, despite the formal end of empire. In the mid mid-20th century, many newly independent states in the global South chose to showcase their rising power and status precisely through the control of rivers and construction of megadams. Today, the quest for green and renewable energy forms part of yet another attempt to plunder and domesticate the wild.
While The Ideal River is not a book about capitalism—the word is only mentioned a handful of times in the text—it can nonetheless be productively read alongside the growing black radical and anti-colonial Marxist literature on property and racial capitalism. Thinkers such as Brenna Bhandar, Rob Nichols, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have shown how the rise and development of the capitalist world-system was premised on the racialized transformation of nature into inert objects that can be possessed, extracted, used, exploited, and sold for profit. The destruction of indigenous cosmologies and the violent imposition of private property relations were both central to this reorganization of land into extractable and tradeable objects. At the heart of this project was (and remains) a mode of possessive ownership—what Moreton-Robinson calls the “white possessive”—that renders both land and its inhabitants as disposable, extractable, and in need of improvement. Read alongside this body of scholarship, The Ideal River is perhaps first and foremost a story about how rivers were governed, enclosed, and turned into economic highways as part of the global extension of this “racial regime of ownership.” In the same way that “useless” deserts, savannahs, and forests were to be transformed into productive lands, so rivers were converted into frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries.
The most compelling aspect of Yao’s book is perhaps that, through its emphasis on the river as a lifeform (tellingly, the book is dedicated to the Rhine, Danube, and Congo), it offers an instructive framework for thinking beyond such modes of possessive ownership. As Yao and Serpell both remind us, enclosure (be it by prisons, borders, dams, pipelines, or other types of violent infrastructure) produces slow death. Like humans, the river cannot breathe when it is confined. By drifting with the river, in and out of capital’s desire to master and subjugate, Yao thus pushes us to imagine alternative ways of relating to the world around us, beyond enclosures, extraction, and bourgeois property relations: what some scholars and organisers increasingly refer to as abolition ecology. Mujeres Creando, a mestiza and Aymara anarcho-feminist group based in Bolivia, give voice to this worldmaking project on one of the many graffiti walls with which they’ve covered the urban landscape of La Paz:
the land is not the property of masters
the land is not individual property;
nor collective property;
the land is mother to all living creatures
Elsewhere, Glen Coulthard invites us to think about these antipropertarian dreams as a struggle that is “oriented around the question of land… not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of relationships… ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.” Another way to put this is to ask: What might it mean to become unpropertied and unownable? Perhaps the river can guide us here, because as Yao reminds us by reference to the water protectors at Standing Rock, water is kin: “She is alive. Nothing owns her.”
In her essay “Amniotechnics”, feminist Marxist Sophie Lewis makes a similar observation: all humans in history have been manufactured under water, in amniotic fluid. Pregnancy typically ends with the draining of water; and yet, even as we enter the unwet world where drowning remains an ever-present danger, humans remain overwhelmingly water. Lewis writes: water “is by far the greater part of us, yet with just the slightest change of proportion it will drown us; it is entirely dead, yet teeming with the life that can’t exist without it; it is far bigger than us and it is utterly inhuman.” In the messiness of life, where water is bound to flood, spill, and drift, amniotechnics emerges as a vision of radical kinship and communized care, for human and non-human life alike. “It is”, Lewis writes, “protecting water and protecting people from water”: a practice of immersion rather than mastery, and what we may usefully think of as abolition ecology. Water—or should we say the river—is life. Let the dam burst.
disorderedguests
The third post in our series on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, today brought to you by Dr Kiran Phull. Kiran is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research centres on the politics of global knowledge production and the rise of opinion polling. She takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of public opinion, focusing on the ways that epistemic technologies (polls, surveys, population data) create and shape the conditions for governing social and political life. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics, where she received her PhD in IR exploring the history of scientific inquiry into Middle Eastern publics and the emergence of local emancipatory methods practices.
What does it mean to know a river? In its investigation of the taming of nature in the service of the modern international order, Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River reveals how international history is coursed by rivers. Yao’s meticulous weaving of institutional and imperial histories of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo offers a view of global governance that is both novel and necessary. By underscoring the co-conspiratorial relationship between science and empire, we learn how the construction of the ideal river was sustained by imperial infrastructures acting in concert with western scientific knowledge and practices. In exploring the development and institutionalization of these complex European river commissions as the first international organizations, The Ideal River asks us to contend with the centrality of scientific knowledge in configuring modern hydrological power relations. With a focus on cartographic representations, investigative commissions, scientific measurements, and industrial techniques of control, Yao deftly traces the epistemic drive that propelled empire ever-further downstream.
A core tension explored in the book is the unsettled dualism between science and nature. Here, Yao shows how the disciplining of nature’s waterways was implicated in the architecting of a global standard of sovereign rule and political legitimacy from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the context of Europe’s colonial ambitions, to know the river was to tame and lay claim to it. This reductionist view of progress through conquest was rooted in a Baconian scientific understanding of the world that sanctioned domination over nature in the service of human development. The discursive moves that allowed for modern scientific techniques and practices “to ‘force’, ‘compel’, ‘shackle’, and ‘tame’ the river” in pursuit of civilizational superiority reshaped these waterways into conduits for political power. Through Yao’s careful study of the disciplining of the “disorderly” Rhine and civilizing of the “mighty” Danube, it becomes clear how the construction of “the ideal river” was anchored in forms of knowledge that drained the river of its agentic lifeforce.
But how can we know a river if a river is never one thing?
The hypnotic image of the meandering ancient courses of the Lower Mississippi River defies the civilizational ethos that seeks to claim, pacify, and control the river through history. Mapped and visualized by the American cartographer Harold Fisk (1944), it depicts the many lives of the Mississippi over the course of thousands of years; its changing banks, altered paths, and iterative engravings marked across the landscape. “If a map is a projection of the world”, writes Tori Bush, “Fisk acknowledged the totality of the river in time and space and the absurdity of man’s attempt to control it”. Fisk’s rendering shows the folly in claiming to know the river as a singular, essential thing.
In a similar way, The Ideal River lays bare the absurdity of Europe’s efforts to civilize the Congo basin. Tracing colonial visions of the Congo as an empty cartographic space to be filled with European practices, institutions, commerce, and values, Yao simultaneously shows that it was the unknown Congo—i.e., what could not be mapped with western epistemic authority—that remained a source of fear for Europe. At the same time, the spurious assumptions that underpinned the construction of the colonial Congo constrained the possibilities for constructing what Yao sees as a more holistic understanding of the river.
For Yao, the holistic river acknowledges its inextricable natural and social entanglements, along with the indivisibility of the human and more-than-human. In this way, the ideal river becomes more than a geographic and political imaginary. We might think of it as a hydro-assemblage of human and nonhuman actants: water, colonial governance, energy, techniques of measurement, diplomatic meetings, cartographic innovations, vessels, rationality, commercial cargo, pollution, official treaties, dams, trade routes, floods and falls, engineers and explorers, kinetic force, myths and frontiers, bound together in a complex configuration of animate power. Their fluid dynamics compel us to think of the river as multiple and ever-changing.
Reflecting on the changing nature of the river coursing through history, I was reminded of the river of my hometown. A particular viaduct that passes over the urban Don River in Toronto reads: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in”. This idea is attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 BCE), who tells us that everything in its essence is change, and that change is the only constant. The same river cannot be stepped in twice, for it is always organically in motion. Knowledge of the river is never guaranteed. The unfortunate story of the Don River, like so many others, is indeed one of change.
Once home to the Indigenous Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron Wendat communities, the Wonscotanach was captured by British settlers in a colonial landgrab that saw the river and its dependents suffer the afflictions of settler modernity. Castigated by its industrial proprietors, the river was branded both defiant and unimpressive, lacking the power-generating capacities that would render it profitable, and thus useful. As the city grew, its river died. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, the river was repeatedly reimagined as a better one by way of reengineering plans to straighten, reroute, fill, bury, or otherwise change its nature. Indeed, it was believed that the river’s true potential could only be unlocked when “the right men appeared, possessed of the intelligence, the vigour and the wealth equal to the task of bettering nature by art on a considerable scale”. In return for its perceived disobedience, the river and its accompanying valley became a site of refuse; home to pollutants, vagrants, wartime labour camps, disease, prisoners, and social outcasts. In the 1960s, the river was eclipsed by the construction of an adjacent superhighway—an arterial stretch of asphalt, concrete, industrial lighting, and the incessant din of ultra-fast traffic skirting the edge of the Don. In this way, the highway became a better river—one that serviced the urban heartspace with more speed, efficiency, and power.
Contemporary ambitions to re-vitalize and re-naturalize the ecology of the Don—to return to it the life that was taken—are again changing its shape and trajectory. But Heraclitus’ river motif bears revisiting: it is the pristine image of a river’s natural and organic flowing waters, securing everything in a state of change, that conceals the tireless pulse of human intervention driving and disturbing this flow.
Can we know a river in new ways? There’s a kind of river termed a braided river, where currents course through channels layered upon channels, creating fluvial networks of entwined waterways that form and flow independently yet as one. This energetic weaving of streams and brooks takes shape instinctively over time, inscribing the earth’s surface with the best possible combination of vectors towards a lower elevation. En route, they split, stray, and merge in ever-shifting ways, creating impermanent islands of sediment, leaving behind an ephemeral plaited pattern. The metaphor of the braided river complements Yao’s vision of a world that one day embraces the multiple ontologies of the river. Untethered from “the spell of European Enlightenment thinking” and its associated values of scientific rationality and civilizational standards, multiple forms of knowledge might coexist, converge, and diverge with an awareness of the oneness of their collective motions. Amidst the looming ecological and governance challenges of the Anthropocene, this braiding of knowledge and experience becomes a crucial step toward any possibility of collective living. This calls to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer’s poignant Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), where the possibilities of deep reciprocity between indigenous ways of knowing and scientific knowledge raise hopes for a better world, one less intent on claiming to know the world objectively, and more on relational knowing in and with the world. In challenging the epistemic disciplining of the river in modernity, The Ideal River restores an untold history to the study of global governance and international organizations, opening space for a more relational and compassionate politics. Ultimately, Yao entreats us to dim the relentless beat of modern progress “that drives us to derangement”, and to instead listen for the latent polyrhythms, contingent histories, and kaleidoscopic changes that constitute a river in motion.
disorderedguests
The Disorder of Things is back, and with a symposium too. Over the next week we’ll feature a succession of posts on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order, followed by a rejoinder from Joanne herself (the full set of posts will be available in one easy spot here). The first post is an introduction to the book and commentaries from George Lawson. George is Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University. He is a global historical sociologist who works primarily on revolutions. His most recent books are: On Revolutions: Unruly Politics in the Contemporary World (with Colin Beck, Mlada Bukovansky, Erica Chenoweth, Sharon Nepstad and Daniel Ritter) (Oxford, 2022), and Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge, 2019).
Writing from the frontline of anthropogenic climate change, in Australia, I don’t need any convincing about the co-implication of nature and politics. I live in Canberra – Australia’s ‘Bush Capital’ – a planned city in the Scottian mould, nestled amidst nature reserves, organised around an artificial lake supported by a major dam project, and home to a large number of predators, both human and otherwise. When I moved to Canberra nearly three years ago, the major (non-artificial) lake that welcomes visitors to and from Sydney, Lake George, was empty – the result of decades of low rainfall generated by human-induced climate change. Following three years of La Nina weather patterns, which has brought persistent rain that locals never tire of telling our family we brought with us from Britain, Lake George looks more like an inland sea. But not for long, it seems. Models suggest that this year will see a return to dry conditions, perhaps even a drought. So: no more Lake George.
Outside Canberra’s old Parliament House, which was replaced by a snazzy, environmentally friendly upgrade in 1988, can be found the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the oldest continuous protest site in the world. Some of the demands made by aboriginal Australian groups, including those who people the Embassy, as well as those involved in discussions around the Uluru Statement from the Heart and current debates about a First Nations Voice to Parliament, begin by acknowledging the co-implication of land, custodianship and sovereignty. Understandings of citizenship in Australia are intimately tied up with claims about the relationship between nature and political authority.
These entanglements between nature and politics are found not only in Australia, of course. As Giulia Carabelli points out in her essay in this symposium, they animate protests in North Dakota and India, have been part of legal debates in Ecuador and Bolivia, and can be found in disputes over the rights of natural objects, including rivers.
Rivers are the subject of Joanne Yao’s wonderful The Ideal River, a book that is – as each of the contributors to this symposium acknowledge – expansive in scope, richly researched and judiciously curated. But Yao’s book is not just about rivers, it is also about the wider relationship between nature and politics and, in particular, the ways in which Enlightenment understandings of science and rationality underpinned international ordering projects over the past two centuries. These projects to ‘tame nature’, Yao argues, were foundational to the construction of a standard of civilisation through which Western polities ordered relations between each other and the peoples they subjugated through imperialism and colonialism: The Rhine was the ‘internal European highway’, the Danube the ‘connecting river from Europe to the near periphery’, and the Congo ‘the imperial river of commerce’. Enlightenment principles of mastery over nature were tied to scientific techniques and ideas of progress in projects that stratified peoples and places around the world. In this way, rivers serve as the elemental source of global governance. For Yao, the taming of nature is a distinctly modern project, one bound up with ideas of mastery and ordering, power and civilisation, rationality and progress.
If rivers and forums of global governance are conjoined twins of the Enlightenment, one modern family member that receives less attention in The Ideal River is capitalism. As Ida Danewid points out in her essay, and as Yao recognises in her response, rivers were imagined as ‘frictionless highways that were to carry commerce, civilization, and Christianity to the world’s unpropertied peripheries’. Despite noting the commercial features of hydro-ordering, and their necessarily extractive, dispossessive properties, capitalism plays a muted role in Yao’s narrative. Sorting peoples into civilized and uncivilized quotients had many dimensions: racial, religious, and more. But a crucial element concerned levels of ‘development’. In Australia, for example, claims of aboriginal sovereignty were often denied on the basis that aboriginal nations were insufficiently ‘developed’ – in other words, they did not support individual property rights or sufficiently ‘advanced’ commercial practices. Here, as in other parts of the world, the standard of civilisation was organised, in significant measure, through capitalist logics – and egregiously misapplied to experiences on the ground in order to dispossess and subjugate First Nations peoples.
A further issue raised by Yao’s interlocutors arises from her interest in the distinctly modern co-location of science, nature and political authority. To contemporary eyes, Wittfogel’s notion of ‘hydraulic empires’ contains deeply problematic Eurocentric associations with ‘oriental despotism’. And rightly so. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on the age-old harnessing of water for political claims-making, and the development of scientific advances to do so. No doubt these dynamics have taken novel forms in modernity. But the binding together of science, nature, polity formation and extraction is a long-running entanglement. This raises a linked question about whether the modern standard of civilisation itself changed over time. I wonder whether the ordering of the Rhine in the early part of the 19th century was as severe as the ordering of the Danube in mid-century and, even more so, the Congo in the 1880s? During the course of the century, as modern capitalism became more extensive and ideas of ‘scientific’ racism hardened, so global hierarchies themselves shifted. Not all ordering projects sorted peoples with the same intensity or through the same logics. And not all wildernesses were considered to be equally wild.
The relationship between imaginaries and political projects forms the basis for Cameron Harrington’s contribution to the symposium. Harrington raises the question of why the ‘endless creative potential of the imagination’ became ‘narrowly expressed’ in particular political projects. After all, there was not one ‘modern imaginary’. As Ida Birkvad persuasively argues in her essay, not only was the Enlightenment not a single thing, but modernity also reconfigured a brand of romanticism that venerated nature. In this sense, ‘the time of the first river commissions described in The Ideal River was as much the era of Romanticism, as it was that of Enlightenment rationality’. Today, the sanctification of nature is often associated with protest movements, particularly those by indigenous peoples. Yet, as Birkvad notes, the romanticisation of the past can itself be a political project that maintains and reinforces existing hierarchies and exclusions. Here anti-developmentalism stands as a form of, rather than in opposition to, ordering projects that meld science, nature and political authority.
This speaks to a more complex association between nature and politics than is sometimes apparent. In her essay, Kiran Phull captures this complexity through the notion of the ‘braided river’ – an assemblage of interweaving waterways that ‘split, stray, and merge in ever-shifting ways’ and, in the process, generate a ‘plaited pattern’. This unruly, yet patterned, formation is one that resonates with contemporary concerns over the entanglement of nature and politics, constituted as it is through a complex, multi-scalar tapestry of the global, the transnational, the regional, the national, and the local. Contemporary global governance too is a dense web of overlapping administrative forums. One of the achievements of Yao’s book is to see this dense web as bound up with hydraulic infrastructures. This leaves open the question of what political projects will emerge from the various, often contradictory, imaginaries that bind together science, nature and international politics. Far from occupying spaces of ‘technocratic dullness’, Yao points – quite rightly – to their ‘poetry and imaginaries that animate our dreams and nightmares of the future’. What would happen, she asks, if we stop to ‘listen, observe, and learn from the infinite varieties of collective solidarities that have always already populated the international without a desire to fix, control, and master’? What indeed …
disorderedguests
(Note from Brad: Since I wouldn’t review this pen myself, my friend Diane asked if she could step in and tackle a product I had a direct hand in making. This is her review below. Thank you Diane!)
In early 2021, Spoke Design introduced not one but 3 fountain pens - the Icon, Axle and Axle S. All 3 designs are available in a variety of mix and match color combinations.
Right away I wanted to get at least one of these pens, but. which? I loved all 3, and it took time to narrow down the choices. Despite its cuteness, I managed to eliminate the tiny Axle S because of its cartridge-only filling system. While the Axle’s tool-like aesthetic was appealing and I liked the threaded posting, I found the Icon the most intriguing with its open 6-slotted barrel revealing a contrasting inner sleeve. Soon after the release, alternative grips including a knurled version were added for the Icon only.
For a while I held out for a pen show where I could evaluate the models in person, but over a year passed with no pen shows attended by Spoke.
I had decided that I wanted the knurled grip and sleeve in the same color, with a surprise color contrast to the cap and barrel. Of all the knurled grip colors, I liked the cyan best. That just left the choice of cap and barrel color.
I found the gunmetal or silver combination with cyan too conservative; the purple and cyan, on the other hand, seemed too gaudy.
Time passed, and the unfinished business of choosing an Icon remained. Meanwhile the colors slowly sold out and my choice was made - cobalt blue and cyan.
The pen arrived securely packed in foam-line tin within a Spoke Design logo box,. In the website photos, the Icon looks like a chunky, heavy pen. In fact it’s smaller than I expected and also at 23.6g capped, it weighs about the same as a Lamy Safari, substantially less than most of the pens I use daily. There are benefits to lighter weight and benefits to substance. The option of brass grip and insert may allow the pen to be customized to be heavier if that’s preferred.
From the top: Rotring 600 pencil; Rotring Newton; Lamy Al-Star; Spoke Icon; Diplomat Aero; Levenger L-Tech.
Fitting a new pen into my life When taking handwritten notes in meetings, I like a pen with an efficient, geometric, logical appearance; unconventional but not flamboyant. I also have a dread of a pen drying up while uncapped, so I like to use either a snap cap or a retractable. My go-tos are Rotring Newton, Diplomat Aero, Pilot Vanishing Point and Platinum Curidas, all with EF nibs. My heptagonal, F nibbed Levenger L-Tech could be a runner up here as it channels the Rotring design aesthetic; although it’s not a snap cap, it can be uncapped in less than a full turn.
For daily ephemeral work notes and sketches, I use my notetaking pen du jour, something else from rotation, plus a stub or architect with a different colored ink for accents and separators.
When flying, I value pens that don’t dry out if left unused for a while as I believe this makes them more resistant to air pressure changes and leaking. Kaweco Al-Sport, Schon DSGN pocket 6, Esterbrook Estie and Platinum 3776 have served well here; the retractables stay at home.
For home note-taking and journaling, abalone and crazy resins are welcome as well as modern flex nibs, stubs and italics.
Viewed through this lens, the Spoke Icon has the logical, geometric aesthetic that I like for the office. It wrote instantly and did not leak after 2 flights with 2 weeks of non-use over the holidays. In the months since obtaining the Icon, it has been a daily driver for work and home.
Unlike its Axle siblings, the Icon is not designed to post. At first glance the cutouts look like they are there to provide roll stop behavior. They don’t - the pen rolls easily and when placed on a desk, defensive measures are necessary.
The Icon’s barrel has an o-ring that prevents it from unscrewing on its own, and attempts to unscrew the cap don’t cause the barrel to come undone. The cap thread does not make contact with fingers while in use. One downside is that the cap has a single thread and takes over 3 full rotations to undo. While this provides for a moment of quiet meditation when uncapping the pen, it makes it a less than ideal choice for meeting notes.
There’s a special fatigue caused by writing with a slippery pen. The mental energy required to keep control of the pen is not available for the thought processes involved in writing. The first time I picked up a pen with a knurled grip, I experienced an unexpected peace and increased focus.
Until the Icon, I only had two knurled grip writing instruments - a Rotring 600 pencil and the Rotring-inspired Levenger L-Tech fountain pen. I received all 3 available grip variants with my Icon and rated each on the following factors:
Grip Comfort - 1 minimum, 5 maximum, higher is better.
Slip vs grip - 1 slippery, 5 grippy, higher is better.
The Icon’s concave grip scored 5; it is one of the most comfortable grips I have ever used. However, it scored 2 on the slip versus grip scale, being slippery both longitudinally and rotationally.
The Icon’s groove grip scored 3 for comfort and 4 for slip vs grip; longitudinal slip is gone but rotational slip remains.
The Icon’s knurled grip scored 4 for comfort, dropping a point relative to the concave, and a perfect 5 for grip.
While the Levenger L-Tech also scored 4 + 5 due to its knurled grip, both the Rotring Newton and Diplomat Aero have unforgiving straight slippery grips, scoring 2+2 = 4 each.
Retractables have their own grip comfort challenges, which I see as a necessary compromise for retractable functionality, so I won’t rate them here.
The knurled grips are clear winners in this highly subjective evaluation. The surprise is just how badly I rate two of my go-to pens in comparison.
Spoke Icon Concave Grip.
Spoke Icon Groove Grip.
The Icon uses standard cartridge / converter filling and with the barrel sleeve in place, there’s no ink window. The sleeve can be removed with the available tool in order to replace it with a different color. Removing the sleeve completely gives a view of the ink level in the converter, at the expense of the flash of contrasting color from the sleeve. It’s worth noting that the sleeve is open ended, so if the cartridge or converter were dislodged, ink could escape from the barrel. This is also a consideration for the Lamy Safari and Al-Star; I have never had it happen with either. The main downside of the knurled grip is that when filling from an ink bottle, ink may get into the knurled texture and is then hard to remove. Even when it seems to be gone, tiny amounts of ink remain and transfer to fingers when writing. There are many ways to avoid this - rinsing the grip after filling, syringe-filling the converter, filling the converter from the bottle or from a TSWBI inkwell - and I’m happy to use these methods in return for the knurled grip.
The nib is always the most important part of any pen and yet in this case, also the least important. Since the Icon takes a standard Jowo #6 nib unit, any other Jowo #6 will fit, giving access to needlepoint, stub, fine cursive italic, modern semi-flex, architect and more from a variety of sources.
The Spoke Icon is available with a standard Jowo #6 nib unit in EF, F, M and B, all engraved with the Spoke logo. I selected the Jowo #6 EF somewhat reluctantly as I already have several in other pens. I have come to think of the Jowo #6 EF as Heaven - every time I come back to it, I marvel at its precise, clean line, reliability and ease of use. But it’s Heaven by the Talking Heads - the ennui of perfection.
The Spoke Icon is everything I hoped it would be. Its clean but unconventional design suits me both at work and at home. It sparks joy when its cyan accents flash through the barrel cutouts or appear when the cap is removed. Its knurled grip allows me to focus on writing. Its nib is perfect and also easily replaced. And I can live with the 3 turns to remove the cap.
As I made arrangements to get the Icon’s nib tailored to UEF and obtain a reverse architect / engineering nib, I reflected on one of my all-time favorites - the gold fine cursive italic in the Lamy Dialog, purchased from the Pen Addict during a previous herd-thinning event.
For me, this is all that’s missing from the Spoke Icon - it would be great to be able to order a Spoke pen pre-sprinkled with Pen Addict nib magic.
(I received the Spoke Icon at no charge in return for this unbiased review.)
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