Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation

1. PHILOSOPHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE TURN TO FILM

This chapter brings our earliest model of philosophy into contact with our latest: it brings Socrates to the postmoderns. Because the history of philosophy might be thought of as a long conversation, the difference between the end points is not as great as one might think, particularly if one emphasizes the dramatic and dialogical. Some scholars draw a distinction between Socrates and Plato: the former practices discursive engagement; the latter advances an abstract metaphysics and merely uses the dialogues as a vehicle to convey his ideas. From this point of view my reading is Socratic.

My opening pages refer to Plato’s Euthyphro and Republic. For a dialogue that takes up directly the nature of philosophy—and how it differs from other practices of speech—look to the Gorgias. For a sense of the drama that philosophy can be, there is no better place to begin than with the Apology and Crito.

At the postmodern end I have been particularly interested in works in legal theory. Important works of this genre include Robert Cover, “The Supreme Court Term 1982, Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” 97 Harvard Law Review 4 (1983); and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). On the critical idea that thought itself has a history that philosophy should bring to light, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1971; repr., New York: Vintage, 1982); as well as his classic studies The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1994); and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). I have tried to bring these insights to bear on the general practice of legal studies in Paul W. Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Arthur Austin, “The Postmodern Infiltration of Legal Scholarship,” 98 Michigan Law Review 1504 (2000).

The idea of philosophy as an interpretive practice, the object of which is the imaginative world of meaning, draws equally from the modern disciplines of psychoanalysis and anthropology. On the former, Freud’s works on culture are particularly useful; see, e.g., Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (1930; repr., Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010); and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (1959; repr., New York: Norton, 1990). On the latter I have been particularly influenced by the work of Clifford Geertz, including his Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

For more on the specific concept of the social imaginary, Charles Taylor’s work is essential—not just the short text Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) but, more importantly, his magisterial Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). A similar, although somewhat narrower, idea was suggested by Hannah Arendt in her description of what she thought of as that form of human activity—“action”—that is uniquely characteristic of a political life. She referred to the “in-between” world of meaning that binds people together through words and deeds as a “‘web’ of human relationships” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 182–83).

For the idea that philosophy should turn from foundational principles to a more modest enterprise of self-examination, there are sources in both the analytic and the pragmatic traditions. On the former, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), is the place to begin. On the latter, one can look to Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

The controversy over the role of narrative in historical work is well summarized in Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23, no. 1 (1984): 1–33. A more detailed discussion of the critique and defense of narrative in historical work is presented in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 95–174. For classic examples of the Annales’ approach (supra note 33), which disavows narrative, see Ferdinand Braudel’s three-volume work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper, 1972); and Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Dorset Press, 1990).

My own past work has touched on many of the themes proposed here. In particular, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) challenges the usefulness of a political theory that seeks a foundation of the state in abstract, first principles.

2. FREEDOM AND PERSUASION

There is a long debate in contemporary philosophy over the relationship of causes to reasons. This has been of particular interest to those writing in the analytic tradition. This discussion may have begun with G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention (1957; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), in which she accepts the distinction for what she calls “full-blown” cases (24). Donald Davidson argued that reasons, properly understood, are causes. See Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” Journal of Philosophy 60, no. 23 (1963): 685. For an interesting response to Davidson that emphasizes, as I do, the possible in an account of reasons, see Mark Risjord, “Reasons, Causes, and Action Explanation,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35, no. 3 (2005): 1–13.

The discussion of Kant’s effort to ground morality in reason continues in some excellent books, including Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Susan Nieman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Challenges to Kant’s moral theory, which rely on the idea that a person is always situated in a particular historical community, begin as early as Hegel. The modern challenge that pursued this sort of an argument was formulated by the communitarians. Particularly important were Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) pursued a similar sort of critique but appealed to an Aristotelian conception of moral character or what is sometimes called “virtue ethics.” See, generally, The Liberalism-Communitarianism Debate: Liberty and Community Values, ed. C. F. Delaney (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994).

Much of what I have to say about the role of narrative in the construction of individual and social identity follows paths opened by Paul Ricoeur in multiple works, including Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976); and Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). MacIntyre also has a very useful discussion of narrative in After Virtue. Like Ricoeur he argues, “Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions” (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 208). This claim is central to my approach. Although I turn from this insight to an exploration of the social imaginary, both MacIntyre and Ricoeur want to put the claim to ethical use, investigating the relationship of narrative to the human good and particularly to relationships of recognition.

Narrative has also had an important role in contemporary jurisprudence. Despite Dworkin’s substantive liberalism, his idea of the judicial opinion as a chapter in a “chain novel” points to the importance of narrative in judicial decision making. See Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (London: Fontana, 1986), 239. Narrative was also central to Robert Cover’s idea of the jurisgenerative character of every legal text. See Robert Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” 97 Harvard Law Review 4 (1983). Consideration of the multiple and changing possibilities of interpretation in law—the element of surprise alongside that of continuity—has led me to understand narrative as far less stable than MacIntyre suggests. This deep instability makes it difficult to posit normative claims based on the narrative structure of the imagination.

The ideas in this chapter of the relationship of narrative to persuasion and persuasion to action also draw on the work of Hannah Arendt, who put the idea of man as a “storyteller” at the center of her account of action. The capacity to tell a story is for her inseparable from the capacity to bring something new into the world: without the story there would be no memory of the act. To show oneself, accordingly, requires the possibility of memory, and that requires the story. See Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 184.