Once a week I step into clammy Aerostich gear and ride seventy-five miles on beautiful country roads to Charlottesville. There I stop by the office of my friend Joe Davis, publisher of The Hedgehog Review, ideally when he is not there. Whatever book is on his desk, I take. The book you have just read is simply a record of my efforts to synthesize these takings over the last few years. It follows that whatever shortcomings this book may have are due to defects in Joe’s taste.
I have some really smart friends. But lots of people are smart. More important, I have been fortunate to know people who share a certain sensibility, a dispositional discomfort with the times that gives their intellectual inquiries a more personal inflection than is usual in the scholar.
Matt Feeney, Tal Brewer, and Bill Hasselberger generously agreed to hole up with me at a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains in 2013 to work through what I thought was a complete draft of the book (and my best liquor). The result was another seven months of work on it. One upshot of these conversations is that Kant started to emerge as the thinker I had been shadowboxing with, without being fully aware of the fact. The role that he subsequently came to play in the book—the influence over our everyday psychology that I assign to him—became a matter of some contention among us. Tal tried valiantly to disabuse me of my reading of Kant, without much success. This entailed some obstinacy on my part, as Tal was once a serious student of Kant, whereas I am not now nor have I ever been. But in reading the Groundwork, belatedly, I felt I was reading a crystallization, or rather an over-the-top parody, of the psychology of freedom I had been criticizing. That book also revealed the deep connection between our stance toward the world of things and the kind of moralism that flies the flag of the self. Kant thus made more explicit for me the conceptual link between Parts I and II of my own book. The flood of gratitude that this inspired in me toward the august East Prussian philosopher was such that I had no choice but to seat him at the head of the table and allow him to speak. Tal thinks I put a whoopee cushion under him; I think he needs no such device.
Feeney, too, is a former Kant scholar, more sympathetic to the link I try to establish between Kant and creepy children’s television. He helped me place the Groundwork in the context of Kant’s vast system. Few of the subtleties and qualifications Feeney impressed on me survived the editing process; what survived was the energy of our exchange. More generally, Feeney has for years been that one reader the existence of whom makes it possible for me to write. One has to know that there is someone whose gut is populated by the same flora, setting off similar immune reactions to the cultural biome. Our overlapping educations in the history of political thought have similarly equipped us to understand these reactions as having reasons to them, which are recoverable with some genealogical effort.
Bill helped me to see the theory of human action that is implicit in Kant’s ideal of autonomy, and to draw an explicit contrast between it and the view of action that is contained in the notion of affordances. This was key.
Daniel Doneson brought a mood of Socratic urbanity to Charlottesville, which that town sorely misses in his absence. If they were wise, the city fathers would establish an endowment for his maintenance (in the lavish style he requires), for he single-handedly made the downtown pedestrian mall a place for intellectual intrigue and the pure pleasure of conversation.
Beth Crawford was an indispensable guide to the research on embodied cognition and other currents in cognitive science that I would have been unaware of otherwise, and provided a critical sounding board for my working out of many of the ideas here. My debt to her is a large but happy one.
My erstwhile business partner John Ryland of Classified Moto was understanding when the protracted writing of this book kept me from the joint venture we had planned. Anyone looking for a custom motorcycle should look him up.
I thank Natasha Dow Schüll and Princeton University Press for permission to quote extensively from Addiction by Design.
Mike Rose of UCLA, an indispensable gadfly to our education system, gave me valuable comments on the chapter “On Being Led Out,” as did Peter Houk of MIT. (Peter also gave me two beautiful specimens of his glassblowing—fossilized bits of joint attention ideally suited to drinking Scotch out of—that I cherish.) Ty Landrum gave a response to “Attention as a Cultural Problem” when I presented it at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in 2010. Brie Gertler’s intervention brought the problem of self-knowledge into focus for me at a crucial stage, and her sincere compliments had a hugely renewing effect. The craftspeople at Taylor and Boody were very generous in tolerating my presence and answering my questions in 2007 and 2008. In particular I would like to thank John Boody, Chris Bono, Chris Peterson, Ryan Albashian, Kelly Blanton, Tom Karaffa, and Robbie Lawson, as well as the organist (and family friend) Frank Archer.
It is hard for me (and surely for the publisher) to anticipate how this book will be received. The thread of the inquiry required imposing arguments of some intricacy on readers who are often assumed to have little patience for the effort they require. Eric Chinski, my editor at FSG, provided me a luxurious space in which to let the book take the course that it did, based on his thorough comprehension of what I was trying to accomplish. I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have found this friend and benefactor in the publishing world.
Will Hammond, my editor in the UK, brought a rare level of seriousness to the project and provided countless suggestions that improved the work. My agent, Tina Bennett, has been the best sort of colleague, equal parts intellectual companion and fiduciary tigress. The enthusiasm of professionals as talented as Will and Tina provided me a reassuring point of triangulation when the book seemed too ambitious and unusual to have a chance of being read out there, in the world beyond my own head.
Upon Will’s departure from Viking UK, Daniel Crewe inherited the book and loved it as his own, and for this I am grateful.
Finally, my fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture has been a boon. Due to what I assume must be a clerical error, they have continued their support while asking nothing of me. Big thanks to James Hunter, Joe Davis, and the whole crew for making me part of their conversation, which has enriched my own thinking immeasurably.